Khao San Road is not as difficult as it was just two days before, but while he is walking to find the wat, Mike loses his way. The side streets widen and the heat and dust of the traffic make the walk unpleasant. He stops for a cigarette, watching a soccer game in a park. The boys playing are young, not yet teenagers, and they move like identical insects up and down the field. Mike can’t tell them apart, can’t pick one to follow. Total farang, he thinks.

He walks on, turning off Khao San Road at the next wide cross street, when he sees the spire of the wat. It is fine and glinting, piercing up through the smog. He sets out toward it but comes to a six-lane street that moves like a highway. Implacable tuk-tuk drivers compete with trucks for the middle lanes and the motorbikes weave and lean between them. The wat is on the other side. Mike walks along the highway.

There is nowhere to cross, but Mike sees a young man in work jeans and unlaced boots at the edge of the rushing traffic. The young man watches casually for a moment and then, with a quick first step, begins a controlled jog through the traffic. Mike stops short, sure that the young man is going to get hit as he disappears behind a bus. Mike hears squeals and blares. But then the bus passes and the man is on the other side of the highway walking easily away. Mike thinks about it but decides he is not that crazy. It’s not for farangs.

Mike has been passing in front of what he guesses are civic buildings, pale and ugly, but now, just behind him, he realizes, is the National Gallery. The building is unremarkable and unadvertised but for a small sign on door. Air-conditioning leaks from the entrance and Mike wants to get out of the heat.

In the antechamber a sleepy woman in braids behind an information counter points to a sign in English with a price. Mike has exact change because he buys everything with overlarge denominations, which is easier than sorting out the unfamiliar currency. Here, alone with the sleepy woman, he is unhurried, though, so he works out the amount and walks into the cool silence of the museum.

Arranged in the first room are rows of white and bald mannequins, taller than any of the Thai women Mike has met. They are dressed in long ball gowns, strange high couture. The fashion is bad, like wardrobe mistakes from period Hollywood movies. Some of the mannequins have enormous headdresses; others are belted with sequined patterns of birds or flowers. The colors are the palette of stained glass, muted as though overwashed. Mike thinks of St. John the Divine, back in New York, and the strange halos he saw in the dark church as a child.