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?
Will they understand that we were not fast enough or smart enough to save them all? That we had to make choices?
The Grahamites who preach on the streets of Bangkok all talk of their Holy Bible and its stories of salvation. Their stories of Noah Bodhisattva, who saved all the animals and trees and flowers on his great bamboo raft and helped them cross the waters, all the broken pieces of the world piled atop his raft while he hunted for land. But there is no Noah Bodhisattva now.