He limps to the intersection favoring his bad knee, catches sight of another rickshaw. He flags the driver. The man glances behind to see if he is threatened by competition, then angles toward Hock Seng with a lackadaisical pedal, allowing the slight slope of the street to let him coast.

"Faster!" Hock Seng shouts. "Kuai yidian, you dog fucker!"

The man ignores the abuse, lets his cycle coast to a stop. "You called me, Khun?"

Hock Seng climbs in and waves down the alley. "I have passengers for you, if you'll hurry up."

The man grunts and steers down the narrow way. The cycle's chain clicks sedately. Hock Seng grits his teeth. "Double pay. Quickly, quickly!" He motions the man onward.

The man leans on his pedals marginally more aggressively, but still he shambles like a megodont. Ahead, Mai appears. For a moment Hock Seng is afraid that she will be stupid and bring out the bodies before the rickshaw arrives, but Kit is nowhere in sight. It is only when the rickshaw comes close that she slips back inside and drags the first incoherent worker into view.

The rickshaw man shies at the body, but Hock Seng leans over his shoulder and hisses, "Triple pay." He grabs Kit and wrestles him into the rickshaw's seat before the man can protest. Mai disappears back inside.

The cycle-rickshaw man eyes Kit. "What's wrong with him?"

"He's a drunk," Hock Seng says. "He and his friend. If the boss catches them, they're fired."

"He doesn't look drunk."

"You're mistaken."

"No. That one looks like-"

Hock Seng stares at the man. "The white shirts will cast their net over you as surely as they will me. He is on your seat, in your breathing presence."

The rickshaw man's eyes widen. He draws back. Hock Seng nods confirmation, holding the man's gaze. "There's no point in making a complaint now. I say they are drunk. Triple pay to you, when you return."

Mai reappears with the second worker and Hock Seng helps lever him into the seat. He ushers Mai into the rickshaw with the men. "Hospitals," he says. And then he leans close. "But different hospitals, yes?"

Mai nods sharply.

"Good. Clever girl." Hock Seng steps back. "Go on then! Go! Beat it!"

The rickshaw man sets off, pedalling much faster than before. Hock Seng watches them ride away, the heads of the three passengers and the rickshaw man, rattling and bouncing as the bike's wheels chatter over cobbles. He grimaces. Four again. A bad number for certain. He pushes paranoia away, wondering if he is even capable of strategizing these days. An old man who jumps at shadows.

Would he be better off if Mai and Kit and Srimuang were feeding red-fin plaa in the murky waters of the Chao Phraya River? If they were just a collection of anonymous parts bobbing amongst the roiling bodies of hungry carp, would he not be safer?

Four. Sz. Death.

His skin crawls at the proximity of sickness. He rubs his hands unconsciously against his trousers. He'll have to bathe. Rub down with a chlorine bleach scrub and hope it does the job. The rickshaw man turns out of sight, carrying his diseased cargo. Hock Seng heads back inside, to the factory floor where the lines rattle with test runs and voices call out to one another in morning greeting.

Please let it be coincidence, he prays. Please don't let it be the line.

17

How many nights has he gone without sleep? One night? Ten nights? Ten thousand? Jaidee cannot remember anymore. Moons have passed awake and suns have passed in dream and everything is counting, numbers spinning out in a steady accumulation of days and hopes dashed. Propitiations and offerings unanswered. Fortune tellers with their predictions. Generals with their assurances. Tomorrow. Three days, for certain. There are indications of a softening, whispers of a woman's whereabouts.

Patience.

Jai yen.

Cool heart.

Nothing.

Apologies and humiliations in the newspapers. A personal criticism, by his own hand. More false admissions of greed and corruption. 200,000 baht that he cannot repay. Editorials and condemnations in the whisper sheets. Stories spread by his enemies that he spent stolen money on whores, on a private stock of U-Tex rice against famines, that he squirrelled it away for personal benefit. The Tiger was nothing more than another corrupt white shirt.

Fines are meted out. The last of his property confiscated. The family home burned, a funeral pyre, while his mother-in-law wails and his sons, already stripped of his name, watch somnolent.

It has been decided that he will not serve his penance in a nearby monastery. Instead he will be banished to the forests of Phra Kritipong where ivory beetle has turned the land into waste and where blister rust rewrites waft across the border from Burma. Banished to the wastelands to contemplate the damma. His eyebrows are shaved, his head is a simple pate. If he happens to return from his penance alive, he looks forward to a lifetime of guarding yellow cards in their internments down in the south: the lowest work, for the lowest white shirt.

And yet still no word of Chaya.

Is she alive? Is she dead? Was it Trade? Was it another? A jao por, incensed at Jaidee's audacity? Was it someone within the Environment Ministry? Bhirom-bhakdi, irritated at Jaidee's disregard for protocol? Was it meant as a kidnapping, or murder? Did she die fighting to get free? Is she still in that concrete room of the photograph, somewhere in the city, sweating in an abandoned tower, waiting for him to rescue her? Does her corpse feed cheshires in an alley? Does she float in the Chao Phraya, food now for the Boddhi Carp rev 2.3 that the Ministry has bred with such success? He has nothing but questions. He shouts into the well, but no echo returns.

And so now he sits in a barren monk's kuti on the temple grounds of Wat Bowonniwet, waiting to hear whether Phra Kritipong's monastery will actually accept the task of reforming him. He wears the white of a novice. He will not wear orange. Not ever. He is not a monk. He does a special penance. His eyes follow rusty water stains on the wall, the blooms of mold and rot.

On one wall, a bo tree is painted, the Buddha sitting beneath it as he seeks enlightenment.

Suffering. All is suffering. Jaidee stares at the bo tree. Just another relic of history. The Ministry has artificially preserved a few, ones that didn't burst to kindling under the internal pressure of the ivory beetles breeding, the beetles burrowing and hatching in the tangled trunks of the bo until they burst forth, flying, and spread to their next victim and their next and their next…

All is transient. Even bo trees cannot last.

Jaidee touches his eyebrows, fingering the pale half-moons above his eyes where hair once stood. He still hasn't gotten used to his shaven state. Everything changes. He stares up at the bo tree and the Buddha.

I was asleep. All along, I was asleep and never understood.

But now, as he stares at the relic bo tree, something shifts.

Nothing lasts forever. A kuti is a cell. This cell is a prison. He sits in a prison, while the ones who took Chaya live and drink and whore and laugh. Nothing is permanent. This is the central teaching of the Buddha. Not a career, not an institution, not a wife, not a tree… All is change; change is the only truth.

He stretches a hand toward the painting and traces the flaking paint, wondering if the man who painted it used a real living bo tree as model, if he was lucky enough to live when they lived, or if he modeled it from a photo. Copied from a copy.

In a thousand years will they even know that bo trees existed? Will Niwat and Surat's great-grandchildren know that there were other fig trees, also all gone? Will they know that there were many many trees and that they were of many types? Not just a Gates teak, and a generipped PurCal banana, but many, many others as well?