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Forty-four
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House of Sighs Forty-three
FORTY-THREEThey were in bed together that afternoon, still wearing their work shirts, trousers intertwined on the carpet. Aiden spooned Danny this time. He exhaled, soft tummy pressing against his partner’s spine. Summer sun on his back from the window as he studied the rear of Danny’s head—heat from behind, chill in front—wondering what it must be like to exist within it.That thought retreated, a little afraid.Squeezed. “Endolphins,” Aiden said, coy and cutesy. Their old joke. A play on endorphins, the rush their touch once evoked. No laugh this time.A thick sludge of hush.“I’ve got something to tell you,” Aiden said. Lips against Danny’s neck now, stubble scratching skin. “Well, something I want to run by you, more like it.”“Y-yeah?”“I’ve been offered a posting. An embassy consulate position.”“O-o-o-okay.”Danny’s stutter was awful today. He hated seeing him trip over words that used to come with ease. It was hard to listen to and even harder to watch, sentences turn
House of Sighs Forty-two
FORTY-TWOApril 2, 2018A cloudless day. Towns resembled spilled salt on a checkered tablecloth of green and ochre. It was beautiful down there through the Boeing’s window, and it didn’t seem real, and as they flew over the gulf into the great wide blue, it was soon all of it gone.The journey to Thailand began, fates sealed air-tight as their breaths within the plane.Spilled salt, as Aiden’s mother used to say, brought with it bad luck. Later, when their lives came unsewn, he would hate himself for not heeding such warnings sooner.Aiden flicked through the old movies on offer, settling on It’s A Wonderful Life. He’d never seen it before and didn’t realize it was a Christmas story until it began. He sat through the whole thing though, almost in defiance. It was an okay flick, sentimental and very, very white. He did, however, enjoy the scene where Jimmy Stewart offered to lasso the moon for the girl he was crushing on, the ultimate gift. Yeah, that made him smile. Given the chan
House of Sighs PART TWO - Forty-one
FORTY-ONEJune 1, 2018Baskets of fruit and meat in the hulls of canoes, manned by proprietors tapping wares with fresh Baht notes, shouted, ‘First sale of the day!’ They did this because tried-and-maybe-true tradition implied it brought good luck. In places like these, where the skillful prospered and the lazy went hungry, good luck was a currency that mattered.Men and women, buyers and sellers both, contorted themselves to reach for that perfect durian, to shoo away flies. Tourists laid down their earnings after a volley of intense and often inappropriate bartering. Back, forth, back, forth, relent, feast.This was Damnoen Saduak, the famous floating market west of Bangkok, a spattering of colors spanning the river’s girth from bank to bank.Or to be more precise, this was a photograph of those markets, one clipped and mounted within a nice bamboo frame, purchased by the Australian government with taxpayer coin. The remnants of the price tag could
House of Sighs Forty
FORTYDanny marched through Bangkok’s crooked street-veins like a bubble of oxygen seeking out a heart to stop, listening to a playlist on his phone as he went. He wasn’t moved by what he saw and gained pleasure only in those moments when the world tripped into rhythm with one of his songs. These little synchronicities turned everything Technicolor. Streets came to life, clouds parted. Now there were smiles on the faces passing him by, food smells that cut through the humid sewer fog.These moments didn’t last.Either the world shrugged off the song or the song shrugged off the world, and then all that Technicolor bled to black and white again, leaving Danny to settle into his strides and walk those uneven streets alone, dodging cars and tuk-tuks, sky spitting. He didn’t know where he was going or why he’d left the apartment in the first place. He never did.Dogs scurried between buildings, each minute of their lives spent fearful of beatings. Food scraps everywhere. Meat-stripped
House of Sighs Thirty-nine
THIRTY-NINEAiden came home to find their apartment empty. This would happen many times over in the months to come.“Babe?”A faint echo off the walls.The dial tone as he called, and called, and called.Aiden sat on the edge of the bed he shared with a man he’d dragged across the world because he thought ‘getting away’ might be healing. Sure, healing may very well be a part of what was happening here, but he couldn’t help questioning why it had to hurt so damn much along the way.Danny’s suit was laid out on the mattress, a shadow freed of its master.
House of Sighs Thirty-eight
THIRTY-EIGHTJuly 3, 2018“You’ve lost weight,” Aiden said.“Yeah.”“Must be all those long walks.”“M-maybe,” Danny replied, staring at his food. He scooped Pad Thai into his mouth with chopsticks, their wooden ends clicking. This sound—crab claws, carrion-feeders—made Aiden’s skin crawl.Silence again within the apartment, while outside Bangkok exploded with evening activity. There was always a festival of some sort happening, or night markets with a multitude of foods to try, temples to explore.Yet here they sat at their table for two.Aiden held his fork a little harder than he needed to; he’d never mastered chopsticks. Knuckles rolled white, bones rising through the skin.I want to throttle some sense into him.Look where we are, Aiden longed to scream.There are people all over the world who would kill to be here.He did no such thing, of course. Danny would only withdraw if confronted. This was their emotional tango now: one step forward, two steps back, and if the
House of Sighs Thirty-seven
THIRTY-SEVENAiden bolted upright, shock slamming him awake. It was still dark in their bedroom, the ceiling fan whipping the air. Danny screamed in his sleep.“Wake up, babe,” Aiden said, rolling over to touch his partner’s back. He stilled his hand instead. Heat beamed off Danny’s pale flesh through the weave of his cotton shirt. Feverish. Sickly. The sheets were wet with perspiration.“Stop!” Aiden cried, not sure what to do. He couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d woken in the night to find himself spooning a crocodile. Danny thrashed the mattress, beating at it in blind swipes. Jaws clenched so tight the grinding of teeth could be heard above the shrieks.“Jesus fucking Christ.”This couldn’t go on.Aiden ignored the thoughts ricocheting through his mind as to whether night terrors were like a sleepwalker’s trek—and if they were, was premature waking a bad idea?—and shook his partner as hard as he could. Danny flipped over, scream cut short, and snatched Aiden by the ne
House of Sighs Thirty-six
THIRTY-SIXJuly 11, 2018“What in the buggery is going on over there?” asked Danny’s mother. She leaned close enough to the camera for her face to fill the entire Skype screen, which sometimes froze and kaleidoscoped into squares. “You’ve lost so much weight!”“It’s t-t-the he-heat, Mum.”“Humidity’s a killer over here, Bev,” Aiden added. “All you do is sweat day in, day out.”“Don’t go getting heatstroke, boys,” Danny’s father said, fighting for airtime. “It happened to me once on Chinaman’s Beach. Thought my head was going to explode. I came over all shivery, too. It knocks you about, for sure.”“I’m b-b-be-being s-safe,” Danny said, the last annunciation coming out pained. His words were more barbed than usual today, not that Aiden blamed him. There was something about these two old people that churned their anxieties. It was odd, too, Aiden thought, that he considered them as being more advanced in years than they were. Something about the way they fussed and contorted their
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