By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea.

The ancient Chao Phraya’s currents were the same and yet everything else about it had become vastly different, as had he in the decades since he had first come to Bangkok. The ferry made its way slowly past hotels and sky-high apartment buildings, making him think of all the changes in his own life since that first moment, just after he had left Viet Nam, raw with anger over the loss of a war and forever scarred by the death of a woman he had truly loved. A woman who had just as truly loved him. Yes, that was different. Yeu, as Van would have put it, not thuong. An unending, lifetime love.

The simpler, cleaner journey that the river had taken before the tall buildings and the factories had come to Bangkok was now forever gone. And so was the volatile but nonetheless simple life that he himself had led. Gone, the time of good and bad, right and wrong that drowned itself in blood, leaving lost visions of life and death but mostly death and more death. In its place, the enemies and allies that his returning years had squeezed together until there simply was no difference, leaving only friends. Gone, the innocence that had forever died with Mai, the marriage and babies that did not happen. In its place, surrounding him, the promises that took one turn around the track and always came back as lies.

He missed the river’s unpolluted beauty, in the days when the klongs that fed into it were open and healthy, dotted with fleets of small boats and floating markets rather than covered over with concrete and turned into sewers. He missed the simple thatch homes that once lined its banks and the time when smiling women could lean over from their houseboats and dip their cook pans into it without coming up with a bowlful of mud and disease. He missed it all, as deeply as he missed what life might have brought him had fate dealt him a different hand.

Or maybe it was just the thought that Van had split, even though he knew that running away was her own best shot. And the knowledge that before the evening ended he himself might end up dead.