Mike pulled his covers up over his head and tensed his small body. Then he got out of bed and went across the hall too. He saw Lyle there, lying on the floor with his ear to the bottom of the door. Their parents were really yelling now and their voices seemed very loud in the hallway. Mike lay next to his brother and tried to listen too, but Lyle pushed him away. Go to bed, Lyle said, in the way their parents often ordered.

Mike wouldn’t go. They began to tussle but froze when they heard the argument stop. Their parents had heard them. Lyle grabbed Mike and they ran back to their beds. Their parents opened the door but didn’t catch them.

Mike waited until his older brother fell asleep and then went and listened at his parents’ door again. He couldn’t tell what they were talking about, but he heard Analect’s name. After that night he was always a little suspicious of Analect, although he could not say why, exactly.

5

The hotel is white with a revolving door. It is jammed in among the hostels on Khao San Road. As he is checking in, Mike overhears a paunchy Brit describing the hotel to his wife as “the best place to see Bangkok from the street.” Mike doubts that. His room is on the third floor, small, with a shower and satellite television. A baseball game is on when he walks in. He looks out the window down the length of Khao San Road, vibrating in the heat.

Across the street from the hotel is a row of cafés. They are all different, Italian, Thai, American, and so on, but they are really all the same, like everything else on Khao San Road. Mike figures that every backpacker in Southeast Asia starts and ends here. He sits down at the closest café and orders a beer, and a backpacker kid, twirling his dreadlocks around his ringed thumbs at the next table, asks him how it’s going and joins him.

“Fine,” says Mike, “how about you?”

“Good except the cops are fucking everywhere,” says Dreads.

Mike hasn’t seen any cops except those directing traffic.

“You just get here?” asks Dreads. Mike tells him yes and then Dreads gives him three minutes on the wonders of Thailand. Getting high on the beaches, riding the elephants up north, getting high on the elephant rides, dancing in the clubs. This is exactly what Analect said would happen. It is easy for Mike to talk to this kid, who keeps bragging about the club he is going to later, like any middle-class stoner from back home, but somehow transformed by heat and distance into a legitimate denizen of this strange locale. Mike thinks it’s as though someone dropped a tropical urban bomb on the mall he slouched through every day.

“Want to come get fucked up?” he asks Mike.