บททั้งหมดของ House of Sighs: บทที่ 111 - บทที่ 120

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

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

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

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

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.