Fools’ River

Chapter 1French or Swiss The blinds are drawn the way they’ve been drawn forever, with the inside edges of the slats tilted upward to block his view of the sky and the fall of sunlight through the window, which means he has no idea what time it is. Not that knowing would do him any good.      He had a watch once, a gold one, French or Swiss or something like that, European, but he hasn’t seen it since he got here.      Wherever here is.      Why are the blinds angled that way? The woman who pretends to be a nurse said it was to keep the sun from shining into his eyes and waking him up in the morning. When he asked her to open them so he could see the sky, she’d ducked her head and said, “Mmm-hmmm,” the way she always does when she means no. Her uniform has an old stain, the color of tea and shaped like a flying bird, over her right breast, and the surgical mask she always wears is smeared with dark lipstick on both sides, as though she puts it on without looking at it. Usually the edges of the red imprint curve up in a kind of smile. It’s the same mask and the same uniform day after day after day. She wears the nurse’s cap at an angle he supposes is meant to be jaunty, so far to one side that it requires a glittering little fence of bobby pins to keep it in place.      He hasn’t seen her face since he woke up in this bed, although he saw it several times before, even knew her name, or at any rate a name she used. But now it’s the mask, the lipstick, the cap, the “Mmm-hmmm”s. So in addition to trying to track the time of day, he’s been worrying about what the mask might mean.      She hasn’t opened the blinds. Still, a few days ago—four? six?—he’d noticed that the room gets a little brighter during the day, and he’s pretty sure that it would get dimmer if his room were on the sunrise side of the hospital. So there, his mind is still working. Despite all the shit they’re pumping into him.      Except, he thinks, he might have realized it twice. Or even three times. It’s hard to keep track. But the most recent time the thought had presented itself, he’d marked it mentally, the way he used to do when he was in business and drowning in information; he tied it to something everyday. The client with the pointed nose was Mr. Byrd; the office suite was 321, the final countdown in that awful, unforgettable song. It always worked. So this time he chose “Sunday,” putting all the energy he could summon into chalking it on the wall in his mind. Sunday. Sun day. The sun brightens as the day goes on: Sunday.      So now he knows she lied to him about the blinds; if the sunlight ever reached his bed, it would be in the early evening, just before it set. And there’s one other thing that she’s not aware he knows. There’s water outside. For a few hours every day, probably when the sun is highest, the ceiling just above the window ripples. It’s got to be the sun, reflected off water and bouncing up through the angled blinds.      A klong, maybe? Bangkok is full of them, a fractal tangle of waterways, mostly brown and usually sluggish, with a thick skin of casual sewage despite recent cleanup campaigns, afloat on water from the Chao Phraya, the river that splits the city in two, like the center of a giant blighted butterfly: the river its spine, its wings the filthy city through which the klongs meander. So knowing that there’s a klong out there—if there is—doesn’t help much. Hell, it could be a swimming pool.      His nose itches. Now that he can’t reach it, it always itches. The woman who’s not a nurse cuffed both his hands to the frame of the hospital bed the day he tried to remove the IV drip. He’d guessed that whatever mixtures of dope they were giving him, they were in the drip. So he’d crimped the tube and then given it a yank, but it had set off some kind of alarm, and she’d come in with the doctor right behind her. The doctor, who was the size of a house, enormous for a Thai, had the cuffs in his hand. That was early on the day—he’s almost certain it was the same day—that he woke up, maybe eight hours later, with a cast on his left leg. Hard as he tries, and he hasn’t got much else to do, he can’t remember breaking it.      She put in a new drip an hour or so ago, her mask upside down today so the corners of the red lip print angle down. The room seems to be changing size: bigger, smaller, bigger, smaller. His eyes close.      What was it about Sunday?