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Thirty-nine
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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
House of Sighs Thirty-five
THIRTY-FIVEAiden didn’t tell Danny about that stabbing sensation.Not then.He kept this information to himself and crawled into bed fifteen minutes later, shame-faced, clutching the novel he’d been attempting to get through since arriving in Thailand. Not that he was reading it, mind you. His thoughts were a jumble of diagnoses and rationalizations.If it’s a urinary tract infection, I’ll bloody scream.Wait ’til tomorrow. It could be a one-off kind of thing. That happens.What if it’s a kidney stone?Mate, just stop.Aiden placed the book down on the bedside table and rolled over to spoon Danny, who was still playing on his phone with his back to him. “Tell me how much I should be worrying about you,” Aiden whispered. “Please, just tell me.”The phone clicked off.“I’m j-just guh-going through a r-rough patch is all.” Danny’s stutter, as was always the case post-beer, was less pronounced.“I want to keep you safe.”“I know. I ap-preciate it.” A gecko sounded from somewhe
House of Sighs Thirty-four
THIRTY-FOURJuly 19, 2018“Sir, you have tested positive to chlamydia,” said the nurse on the phone.Aiden imagined her face glancing up from her clipboard, the curve of her cheek catching the afternoon light seeping through the windows of the sexual health clinic he’d been sitting in eight days earlier, a place the doctor at the hospital referred him to, ‘just in case it’s not a UTI’. Aiden couldn’t tell if the woman on the phone was the same person who had run the procedure, although she sounded familiar.Green eyes. A deadpan tone.He sat back in his office chair, the imitation leather creaking. Aiden blinked, leaned forward again, volume dropping. “I don’t really know how that could be.”“Excuse me, sir? I don’t—”“I mean, are you sure?”Aiden laughed.“Sure? Yes, sir.”“Right then.”“Treatment is easy. I’ll prescribe you a course of antibiotics. Take two pills a day for three weeks. It’s a bigger course because you have tested positive in your penis and in your throat.
House of Sighs Thirty-three
THIRTY-THREEDanny, too, was in transit.He took a swig from a water bottle that didn’t contain water.Fiery gin. Its safe warmth.The tuk-tuk pulled up by the curb, engine purring. Danny stepped onto the street. Hot sunshine against his neck. Nausea thrummed as he paid the driver. He didn’t bother with the change, nor did he care that he’d been overcharged. The cart puttered away, merged with traffic rocketing by at three times its pace, motorcycles swarming, some toting four people to a seat. That was Thailand for you, he thought and almost immediately forgot.He spun around and faced Wat Pho, the Buddhist temple complex in the Phra Nakhon District on Rattanakosin Island, just south of the Grand Palace. Danny had come here on his first trip to Bangkok over twenty years ago, and dressed now in a pair of culturally appropriate trousers, he entered the grounds again, this time at the age of forty-two.Pigeons took to the air. Twirling feathers. Stray dogs lounged in the shadows of
House of Sighs Thirty-two
THIRTY-TWODanny explored the temple grounds. He hadn’t eaten in the end.The old woman’s licorice-scented words followed him down every avenue, into every gold-gilded tabernacle.Eat the part that hurts.His nausea returned as he looped around to stand before the reclining Buddha, surrounded by twenty tourists taking photographs, a tangle of selfie-sticks and shawls given to them at the front gate to cover the parts of their bodies considered undignified to reveal in such a place. Languages volleyed back and forth.Snapping camera lenses.Wailing children.They’re like seagulls, Danny thought with a dash of contemptuousness. Their feathers bristled against him as he tried to wiggle free, beaks stabbing. Not around him. At him. He couldn’t tell if it was the gin or the heat or the fact that he was a wreck of his former self, but something was wrong.The temple began to revolve. Colors greased together. Earbuds slipped free and squawks and bell chimes slipped through. The air tu
House of Sighs Thirty-one
THIRTY-ONE“No! No! No! No!” screamed the stranger.Danny’s unfocussed eyes bounced from face to face. They were crowded over him. A woman fanned him with a map. Another person offered water from a plastic drink bottle. He noticed his reflection distorted and pale in the curve of their sunglasses as they bent to help. Anxiety twisted, chest tightening.“No,” shouted the stranger again, this time slapping Danny’s hand away.“G-get o-ooooff m-me,” he said. “DON’T.”Danny glanced at his fingers almost by accident, still reeling from having been touched in such a way by someone he didn’t know, and saw the bloody gum of torn skin under his nails. He stopped, still as the city that no longer was. In that part of him where the light flickered to reveal smiles before, there now issued a second spark, only the light was blue this time. Cold, and burning.The light was pain.Danny had been scratching at his scars.
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