The corner outside the shophouse café is overrun. Two Brits in Chang singlets and Muay Thai shorts are shadowboxing out front, trading insults, stalling traffic. “Wot mates” and “bloody hells.”

Under the noontime sun, Ken is a throbbing mass of nerves and finding it difficult to chit-chat. Chiang Mai is unreasonably hot for Christmas. Beside him, Jackie chugs a bottle of hotel water. They haven’t been out long, but her bared shoulders are already cooked salmon filets, weeping oil. “I can’t believe you’re able to wear pants,” she repeats herself, offering the bottle, which Ken waves off. In truth, he could use a sip. “I drink and drink and don’t need to go. It’s coming out through my skin.”

He closes his eyes, attempts a few deep breaths. It’s not just the heat or the line or the bozos that’s bothering him. It’s also Jackie. Her well-intentioned but wide-eyed naivete, made obvious by her technicolor choice of dress—sandals and shorts and tank top. American gorpcore. Earlier, in their Bangkok stopover, she’d unwittingly inconvenienced his friend Jong to drive them from lunch through an hour of stop-and-go traffic to the Grand Palace, where she’d insisted on trying stale chicken skewers from a dozing vendor. Meaning to be polite, she reciprocated the wai—clapped hands and a bow—to 7-11 clerks and restaurant staff, who blinked back in confusion. She mashed the word for “thank you,” saying “swatty” instead of “sawatdee,” and used “krub” instead of “ka.” “Swatty krub!”

He’d tried to explain what to say, how to act, but she was too overwhelmed to remember. Or she got annoyed. She feared retaliation for canceling last-minute on an overpriced four-handed massage, thereby abruptly departing a dinner party that his Thai friends had hosted in their honor. She directed precaution incorrectly: to the fear of bad ice and dengue fever, rather than to questionable street foods and the overabundant UV.

Across the street, in front of the basket shop, a redheaded woman in cat-eye sunglasses and a fringed macramé skirt is vlogging. He stares. It is her. Baddie Maddie. She’s rangier than he remembers from her videos. Freckled and sun-chapped, the way surfers and cyclists are. He’d stumbled on to her vlog during the pandemic, when he was nostalgic for Thailand. Her Thai had been abysmal and her itinerary quotidian, but she uploaded new content frequently and they’d been companionably long.

He tugs at the linen shirt tied around Jackie’s waist to distract her from noticing. “Don’t you want to cover your shoulders?”

“I put on sunblock already.”

“It’s not an all-day thing. You’re supposed to reapply every ninety minutes.”

“Uh huh.” Jackie lowers her sunglasses. “Hey, isn’t that Baddie Maddie? That vlogger you subscribe to?”

He looks over. “I don’t know.”

“I guess there’s only one way to find out.”

He pulls her back by the shirt. “She’s working.” And she is—gesticulating, speaking enthusiastically into the selfie stick, though what she is actually saying is impossible to parse out over the noise of traffic. “Wouldn’t it be rude to interrupt?”

The line creeps forward, and they’re finally within the threshold of the café proper, which is completely open on two sides, and without air conditioning. Behind the counter, next to the black and white portrait of two unsmiling elders, a pink neon sign reads, ICED COFFEE KILLS BARISTA.

The barista with the thick glasses and knitted beanie looks familiar, but Ken can’t remember his name. The barista grimaces as he takes orders, changes bills. Five years earlier he’d come with his friend Bank, a drummer from Goomung, and Win, the actor. That time, there had been a slight chill in the air. There’d been no other cafes or bars on the street, no thronging masses of farangs either. The barista had been obsequious, had given them hot water in fine bone China while they waited. Ken was a nobody, but the guy had insisted he also join in for a selfie.

Blending in, being mistaken as someone important through association, he never tired of that. He liked the questions and compliments that came when he spoke Thai: Where are you from? Are you Thai? You speak so well. To which he answered with rehearsed familiarity, American but my parents immigrated from Korea. And no, I’m not so good, I’ve forgotten a lot of words.

The barista’s expression softens as the two women ahead of them start speaking Thai. He’s all smiles when they ask for hot coffees, and invites them to sit upstairs. When their drinks are ready, he unhooks the red velvet rope at the bottom of the stairs to let them through.

The stony expression reappears on the barista’s face as he returns to the counter. Jackie orders an iced latte with oat milk.

“Only have cow and soy,” he barks.

“I’ll have regular milk,” she says.

“And you?” the barista asks.

Ken responds in Thai—asking for a hot Americano.

“Hot or iced?”

“Hot,” he replies, this time in English, his face flushing. Had he mispronounced rohn to the point of incomprehension, or had the barista pretended not to hear him?

They are not invited upstairs. Of course not. He’d been stupid to think that ordering hot coffee could be like a secret handshake.

The two-tiered seating next to the coffee bar is jammed with Westerners. They have oily pinkish faces smeared like day-old glazed doughnuts. A slow procession of cars, motorbikes and rot daeng pickup trucks scroll by. Rusted buses expel plumes of diesel smoke. A tuk-tuk careens past, whooping backpackers pumping their arms to techno.

They stand with their drinks to the side of the bar. It seems unbelievable to him that Jackie can be this unbothered by the crowd. He tells her the story about the cups of hot water, how chilly it had been, how they’d been allowed upstairs and had sat on the balcony.

“Why didn’t you ask if we could go up there?”

He shrugs. “I didn’t want to be that kind of guy.”

“There’s no harm in asking,” she says. “All they can say is no.”

“I don’t remember if he’s the owner, or what his name is.”

Again, that exasperated face. “Do you want me to ask for you?”

He shakes his head. How can he explain that it is possible to inconvenience someone just by asking? Knowing this, isn’t it better to infer this and move on? Why force someone to reject your request?

He reaches for the paper cup of coffee—still scaldingly hot—and takes a sip, too much, burning the roof of his mouth. He swishes it around and swallows uncomfortably. When he first met Jackie, he’d liked her directness, the way she seemed to be able to bend the rules in order to get them into crowded restaurants or return things without receipts.

But that had been in Los Angeles.

Jackie’s chewing on her straw and looking down at her guidebook, annotated with color-coded bookmarks, at the entry for the Temple of the Golden Mountain.

“You want to get going?” he asks.

“Is it too far by motorbike?” She puts the book on the bar, spine-up, and does the cracking thing with her knuckles. He knows by now that it’s a request coded as a question: Can we go by car? And specifically one that is driven by someone else? He lets it hang in the air. If they’re going up to see the temple, it’s going to be on the scooter he insisted they rent, a dinky semiautomatic with a foot pedal to shift gears up and down.

When he lived in Bangkok, Ken had made countless trips to Chiang Mai. He knew how to navigate the loops, orient himself through one-ways and sois so narrow you could stretch your arms and touch cinderblock with either hand and reach places whose cover has not yet been blown by guidebooks and vloggers.

“It’s not scary. There aren’t any major roads. Everyone does it.” He tells her about the waterfalls and viewpoints along the way, the vendor selling coconut ice cream tucked between milkbread, topped with peanuts and the condensed milk she’d been eager to try. “You’ll see. Journey not the destination.”

“You’ll go slow?”

“Scooters only go slow,” he tells her. “Especially uphill.”

*

They’re still in town when traffic grinds to a halt. At first he doesn’t comprehend what exactly is going on. The slowing motorbikes ahead and the traffic cones narrowing the road. His shoes touch down on the asphalt on either side of his motorbike, which feels boaty with the weight of Jackie behind him. He’s not used to it. And then he sees the gang of uniformed cops standing by the bottleneck, blowing their whistles, waving some on, directing others to pull over. The street is one way, running parallel to the moat demarcating the historic Old City from the new, sprawling out in all directions. Alone, he might pass as local, but Jackie is without disguise, with her long limbs and the auburn hair. Shit luck. They’re chattel on the way to the slaughterhouse.

The cop motions Ken to pull his motorbike to the curb, behind three farang boys. They’re tattooed, in tank tops and neon swim trunks. They have bacne and gelled, windswept hair. They smell of body odor and coconut sun tan lotion. They’re laughing and hamming it up with each other and the cop who is ticketing them. They take a selfie, as their memento for being fleeced. Ken wants to gag.

“Let me do the talking,” he tells Jackie.

“You don’t have to talk to me like that.”

When another cop ambles over, Ken puts his hands in a wai and bows, and asks what is wrong. He uses honorifics, and points out that they’re both wearing helmets unlike the boys ahead of them. The cop smiles coyly and agrees. “Your Thai very good,” he grins. He asks to see his driver’s license, and when Ken hands it over, the cop shakes his head. He says, “California not accept. You fine.”

“We can go?”

“Fine is three hundred baht,” he explains, holding up three fingers.

The amount is nothing—nine dollars. Still, Ken asks for a discount in Thai.

The cop shakes his head, laughing. “This is not night market. Three hundred is discount. Otherwise you go station and pay one thousand.”

Ken gestures at the tourists on the crumbling ramparts, ignoring the signs to stay off. “What is the fine for walking on the walls?”

The cop shrugs, says something in Thai that Ken can’t catch but understands as “not my job.”

The injustice stings. His head feels like it’s fusing with his helmet. He swallows as he pulls out his wallet and hands over the money, avoiding eye contact. Just ten fucking dollars. But he can’t shake the feeling that he’s a fool of a tourist. Lumped in with the others.

At the final intersection before the university and the winding road running up into the hills, Ken feels constricted by Jackie’s arms, which are wrapped around his stomach, which she favors over the handlebars to either side of the rear seat.

“What just happened earlier?” she says. “With the policeman. Did you have to bribe him?”

“We could have gone to the station and paid double what he was asking.”

“I’m not blaming you,” she says, before adding, “I thought you said you were getting an international license.”

“I don’t get to work from home.” Dimly, he’s aware that he should leave it there. “And I don’t think I would’ve been pulled over if I were alone.”

Jackie shifts behind him, causing the motorbike to sway between his feet. The collective growl of idling motorbikes massed around them feels distant, underwater. If only they’d been louder, to garble his utterances beyond comprehension.

Jackie unwraps her arms from his waist, and when the light changes, she places her hands on the handlebars to either side of her seat.

*

At the lookout point, he parks next to an old man scooping ice cream out of a metal drum welded to the side of his motorbike. Jackie’s no longer interested in dessert. She walks off in a dazed post-treadmill way. Her shoulders are slumped and she holds her scuffed blue helmet limply by the chin strap. He buys the ice cream sandwich anyway, along with a bottle of water, and goes to the veranda where she slumps forward with her arms on the rail. Above, the unvariegated clouds have moved in like a flat roller of gray paint, cloaking the sun. A dense haze hangs over Chiang Mai below. In the past, the elevation would have provided a reprieve; today the change is slight. The air is tinged with smoke.

He sets the bottle of iced water against Jackie’s neck. She doesn’t flinch. He leans over the railing and makes a face at her. A slight smile forms on her own face, but her eyes look unfocused and elsewhere. She takes the bottle, and presses it against her forehead. He apologizes for the view, says it’s not usually like this. She says she wouldn’t know any better.

The viewing platform isn’t too crowded, and it’s mostly Thais—trim young couples eating their ice cream sandwiches and drinking Cokes out of clear plastic bags filled with crushed ice. They are wearing pants and fashionable light jackets looking inured to the sticky heat. Next to them, a Thai woman with a parasol tries various poses while her boyfriend dutifully clicks away with his camera, then—at her insistence—switches to another lens. Her delicate bone structure and twiglike arms reminds him of a model he’d dated when he lived in Bangkok. The ice cream is melting into the milkbread and starting to disintegrate in his hand. He takes a bite and deposits the remainder into the trash bin.

“I’m sorry for snapping earlier, about the police. They don’t get paid a living wage. They even have to buy their own guns. But they should pick on the obnoxious backpackers. The ones who are in your face.”

“Like me. I’m in your face,” she says.

“I’d say you’re one of the good ones.”

“And what makes you the authority on that?”

“I used to live here.”

She pats him on the head. “Used to, mister. Past tense.”

*

Midway on the naga-flanked staircase up to the temple, Jackie is approached by a young girl holding a bouquet of lotus flowers. Jackie asks how much, and the child says fifty baht.

“That’s way too much,” Ken blurts.

Smiling, Jackie trades a hundred-baht bill for a white flower. The child takes the money to the wrinkly-faced woman sitting cross-legged, and as the woman pulls out a small purse, Jackie says, “No change.” The woman and child bow deeply. Ken can see that they’re Hill Tribers or Burmese migrants. The woman, her face crenelated and weathered, is decades too old to be the mother.

“You could have bought that for ten baht at the entrance. You got ripped off.”

“If I don’t feel ripped off, doesn’t that mean I’m not?”

“That’s worse, arguably. I get that you want to support them. But there’s a thing called child labor?” He tells her what he’s read, how they’re connected to a vast gang network, that the girl should be at school, but Jackie strides ahead, doesn’t respond—doesn’t say anything. “I just want you not to be taken advantage of.”

“What’s that word you like to use—arbitrage?” She twirls the flower between two fingers, then brings it to her nose and takes a whiff. Her eyes close as she smiles. “Don’t you come here because you can exploit how cheap everything is?”

“I think that’s kind of reductive. And that’s not the point of that flower,” he says.

“If you want to tell me how I’ve transgressed, please go on.”

“Never mind.”

Her brow crinkles as she mulls over his assertion. “You say that but you can’t let things go. So why don’t we get it out of the way now?”

He sighs. He explains that they’re temple offerings, that you aren’t supposed to give them as offerings if you smell them.

She nods curtly, then ascends the stairs, quicker now, like she’s trying to put space between them.

“I’m not trying to make you feel bad,” he shouts up at her.

He remembers something else, too, and his face flushes. On his first visit to Chiang Mai, over a decade prior, a street urchin outside a temple had tugged on his shirt and asked, “Flower mister?” And he’d responded in Thai that he didn’t have a girlfriend. The boy’s momentary confusion had curved into a knowing grin and then to howling laughter, and he’d said, “For Buddha mister, not for some bitch.”

At the top, there’s a metal sign with an arrow that reads FOREIGNERS THIS WAY. Alone, on previous trips, he’d ignored the sign, proud of his ability to meld in with Thai friends.

“See I don’t mind paying for this kind of thing,” he says. “It’s reasonable because I’m here for sightseeing and not religious reasons. And there’s the matter of upkeep…”

Jackie pays at the cashier; says she’s going to change into the pants she rented and will find him after. He does a loop through the outer terrace, passing by stubby breadfruit trees with their serrated leaves and peripheral shrines, including one of a white elephant statue foisting a miniature golden stupa on its back. He tries to read the description of the statue in Thai, and gives up after working his way through the first handful of stylized characters, consoling himself with the complexity of religious words and their preponderance of obsolete characters. He scans the English explanation below, which describes the white elephant as having fallen dead here centuries ago, inspiring the building of the temple. He’d been to countless temples over the years, but his knowledge of Buddhism remained pathetic.

He takes off his shoes and enters the inner courtyard with the massive stupa in the center. The overcast sky gives it a tarnished look. Pious locals bowing and making chants are outnumbered by gawkers and picture takers. A blunt-nosed Slavic man with white chest hairs holds out his phone with one arm and does a slow spin, clocking a stocky Chinese man wearing a shirt with palm trees and text reading YOU ARE HERE. The Slav grunts an apology, then does a re-do. Everyone nearby moves away to avoid being whacked. A woman in a frilly wedding dress holds a bouquet of lotuses next to her beau, while their photographer crouches and shouts out instructions in Chinese.

“Excuse me,” says an elderly man whose security uniform hangs off him loosely. “No taking wedding photo here.”

The photographer raises an arm in acknowledgment, but keeps snapping away. Ken takes a picture with his phone, then steps in between the photographer and the couple. No one pays any attention to Ken’s actions besides the Slavic man, who—perhaps misunderstanding—gives him a thumbs up. The photographer waits, perhaps hoping for Ken to move. He doesn’t. Finally, he stands up and smiles sheepishly. He says something to the couple, and they follow him to the exit. Ken tries to catch the guard’s attention, expecting something—a knowing smile?—but the old man’s face is impassive and he’s already shuffling toward another tourist with his arm draped around the statue of a cross-legged monk, mugging for a selfie.

Ken uploads the picture of the marriage couple to the app with the Thai word for bird shit.

A raindrop. Then a few more. And then suddenly it’s coming down hard, and everyone is bumping and scrambling, crowding the awnings of the inner sanctum, or rushing out the stairs. He takes cover and calls Jackie, then texts. She doesn’t pick up.

Resigned to getting wet, he takes the stairs down to the outer courtyard, finds his shoes, and does a slow loop, past smaller shrines and the hanging temple bells. He wanders over to the lookout point and no one is there, just a mangy dog shaking off the rain.

He stops under the cover scraggly tree and tries Jackie again. It’s no use.

The reasonable explanation is that her phone has died. He is constantly recharging Jackie’s phone for her—plugging it in their apartment, in his car, his portable power bank. But. There had been the time they’d had a fight about money over sushi, and she’d left the restaurant without telling him. She’d paid then left. In retrospect it had captured Jackie perfectly: the careless way she spent money without considering his own tighter circumstances, her tendency toward avoidance. She’d promised, after that dinner, not to pull a stunt like that again. He shivers. The humidity has vacated. Is it possible that she has reneged, gone down the mountain without him? He continues walking, no longer avoiding puddles, dazed by this gnawing possibility. Everything is blurry and unfocused, colors blurring into colors like an early aughts screensaver. He feels a pricking sensation on his scalp, a tingly resentment at this uncertainty.

“There you are,” Jackie says, “I was looking for you.”

He moves to hug her. “I thought your phone might have died.”

“It did,” she said, squirming out from him. “And I have food poisoning.”

“Oh shit.”

“Literally,” she says, smile-grimacing, one hand clutching her stomach. She looks pale and exhausted. “I’m ready to go.”

They start making their way back down the slickened naga stairs. The spindly trees provide scant cover. He holds her shoulder awkwardly. Her body is hard and limp at the same time.

“Do you want to go back in a taxi?”

“Normally that would be preferable, yeah,” she says looking up, “But I might have an accident.”

On the way down the mountain, she holds onto the rear handlebars even after he insists that it’s okay to hold him by the waist. Twice after she taps him on the shoulder and points to the side, he pulls off while Jackie squats in the weeds, pale ass visible between wet stalks. The journey seems to stretch on endlessly, and so does the lacerating rainfall. In town, they stop again at a street market, a bar. Back at their hotel, which only has valet parking—the sleepy attendant’s eyes grow wide when they park under the carport. He ushers them inside while his associate takes the bike to a staff parking area, out of view.

A polished young woman in traditional silks brings out towels and rebukes them lightly for venturing in such conditions. “Sir, maybe a driver better than motorbike?”

He nudges Jackie. He wants her to see his sheepish contrition. But she just shuffles toward the elevators, clutching her stomach and moaning softly.

*

At dawn, restless, he walks to the Mae Ping River and watches fishermen cast lines, while cauliflower clouds pinken from the rising sun. He takes a picture and posts it, then deletes it. The photo he’d posted of the wedding couple had only received one comment—from an old Thai acquaintance, correcting a misspelling. He thinks of this post objectively—what it says of the poster—and what seems obvious is its stink of approval seeking. He deletes it. Then decides to delete the app altogether.

When he returns to the room, the curtains are still drawn and the light is murky. He sits on the bed and studies Jackie, who is half asleep. He strokes her tousled hair and examines her face, filmy like lube smeared on glass. She twists and turns and breathes loudly with her mouth open. Her tongue lolls around. Her breath is hot and putrid. “You don’t understand,” she whispers, as if she’s still in the middle of a dream.

“Yes,” he answers, chastened. Then: “What do you mean?” She is silent. He kisses her on the forehand and says sorry. He wants her to feel better, and for that betterness to be extended to him, to them together. He will do better, he says, his voice wavering. “Attitude shapes belief.” Where had he read that? One of Jackie’s business leadership books?

She doesn’t answer. Or she does by rolling over. The place she was, imprinted and damp.

Later: she wakes to go to the bathroom.

When she emerges, he asks her how she’s doing.

“How do you think?”

“Do you want to go to the hospital?”

She shakes her head.

“I’ll get you medicine.”

The weather is erratic. The street outside the hotel floods repeatedly. Uniformed staff use wide straw brushes sold by roadside vendors, to whisk away pooling water, which re-pools after every stroke. They replace buckets strategically placed in breezeways where the water is leaking. Slop! goes buckets dumped out on the asphalt outside. Tiny jing jok geckos sit in clusters on walls, then skitter off, leaving pelleted turds. Bluish tokay geckos call out from hidden eaves. To-kay! To-kay! To-kay!

When the rain pauses, Ken goes to the pharmacy. My girlfriend has diarrhea, he says in Thai to the pharmacist. The words are fleet in his mouth. They come out sing-song, with tonal perfection. The pharmacist nods gravely, understanding everything. She is pretty, with straight black hair, a heart-shaped face, and a lovely neck.

He knows she will ask him the question and she does. The literal translation is: “Are you person Thai?”

He tells her he is not, that he’d simply lived here for some time, years ago, that now he is only a tourist. He could keep the conversation going if he wanted to. She is scentless and sterile, like the shop itself, filled with packaged ointments and creams, brightened artificially by the fluorescent lights and tiled white floor.

The rain has resumed but he rushes back, riding the motorbike down waterlogged sois, lifting his legs in certain sections to avoid soaking his sandaled feet. He stirs orange electrolyte packets in the hotel’s bottled water. When she rouses, he makes her take sips along with the activated charcoal and antibiotics. He kisses her damp forehead. When she is feeling better, he will apologize. Acknowledge that he’d been an ass. Assign blame—to work, his strained finances, which bothered him because she’d offered to pay more. That for the rest of their trip, they will do anything she wants. All the places circled in her guidebook. Elephant sanctuaries. Orphanage. The Queen Sirikit Botanical Garden. The long-necked hilltribes. Yoga classes and ass-crack-of-dawn hikes. He’ll return the motorbike early and book them a driver at the front desk.

The following morning, he goes to the breakfast buffet and prepares a tray with congee and a cut fruit: mango and papaya and lychees and starfruit. The papaya is overripe and sickeningly pungent, it weeps sticky liquid. He remembers the Tsai Ming-liang film they’d watched together, the one with Taipei in drought and the abundant watermelons. The curtains are pulled to the side, and daylight floods in. Jackie is not in bed. The shower is running. He tries the bathroom door, but it is locked.

When she emerges, she is wearing the hotel bathrobe. It surprises him, how gaunt she appears. He moves to hug her.

“I feel constricted,” she says.

He loosens his grip, smells her neck and kisses her cheek. His mind is already thinking ahead, Jackie splayed out on the bed, her legs over his shoulders. He tugs on her bathrobe and she pulls his hand away.

“But I’m feeling better,” she says.

“I’m glad.” He tries not to fixate on his punctured fantasy. She thanks him for the food, which she devours quickly. She’s still ravenous—she wants pad Thai.

“I know you told me it’s a corny thing to eat and everything, but I can’t help what I want.”

“Of course,” he says. “It’s your vacation and you can eat and do whatever you’d like.” He offers to pick it up, but she wants to go out, get some air.

“You don’t have to come if you don’t want to,” she says.

“Do you want me to come?”

“It’s up to you.”

Her face is blandly neutral. Still he goes. Things aren’t irreparable. They don’t talk much on the way there. The rain has stopped and the sun has pulverized the moisture. The closest thing, he thinks, to breathing underwater. He’s glad to be wearing his shorts. “Look, I’m wearing shorts,” he exclaims. She gives a half-hearted smile.

At the restaurant, the smell of the oil and the tamarind paste is overpowering. Rivulets of sweat run down his neck; his shirt is clinging to his chest and back. Their conversation is stilted. They speculate on what it is that made her sick. The heat. What else she wants to do in Chiang Mai.

After a long silence, Jackie says, “I used to think that self-consciousness was the same thing as self-awareness, but they’re not at all.”

“I don’t get it.”

To that she simply smiles, faintly. An echo of the smile in their hotel room. It’s no come hither.

“Tell me,” he insists. “I promise I won’t be offended.”

“Not everyone lives their life collecting grievances to get even later on.”

“I know,” he says reflexively, though he doesn’t.

“Okay.”

He feels a strangling sensation in his throat. An aggrieved sharpness, like bile.

*

He rides fast and without purpose in the Old City, then to the sprawling university campus to the northwest. He walks along the lake, passing teenagers and uniformed university students and Chinese couples cosplaying students. He pays to go to the zoo and looks at the flamingoes, hippos, and a solitary sad-looking panda slumped in the corner of a dingy enclosure. He goes to the forest temple and walks through the tunnels lit with hundreds of candles. Perhaps the police have made enough money; there are no checkpoints today. Inconveniently, he thinks. To prove to himself that he can let things go. He is killing time, he is killing the rest of the gasoline in the bike, just as it had come—empty.

He returns the bike, even though it’s a few days early, and walks to the famous Khao Soi shop that his friend Lumyai had brought him to, years before Thailand’s tourism board had bankrolled Michelin inspectors to dole out awards in the country. The prices are too steep for many locals now.

It’s well past lunchtime but the line is still long, snaking down a quiet residential lane, next to a wooden house with chickens pecking in the yard and a hair salon which also provides a same-day laundry service. He waits precisely because his sneering impulse is to leave. There’s no shade, but the sun is hidden behind clouds and the temperature is bearable. Ahead of him, a group of Chinese youths chatter away. Ken feels his annoyance spiking and considers leaving. How had he become so miserable?

He pulls out his phone in search of a distraction. He re-downloads the app he’d deleted. He scrolls thoughtlessly through photos and videos of friends, acquaintances, exes, and other beautiful people, posing on yachts and luxury hotel pools and rooftop lounges, interspersed between advertisements for plastic surgery clinics and wasabi-flavored seaweed snacks. Friends celebrating an anniversary. Friends mugging for gym selfies. Friends’ dogs.

Would any of these people notice if he left the country without saying goodbye? He doubts it. He’d fallen out of touch with classmates from college and graduate school, ex co-workers. But he’d clung onto these friends in part because he was nostalgic for that time when he’d met them, when he was young and life seemed full of promise and adventure. It seems silly, his insistence on coming back when it is impossible to rewind time.

He scans the crowd. Everyone is with someone or several others. He texts Jackie to see if she wants to join him. He’s relieved when she texts back and says yes.

She arrives when he is near the head of the queue, where there’s a clear view of workers preparing noodles, pouring oily orange broth, and topping bowls with friend shallots, crispy egg noodles, and pickled mustard greens. He tries his best to feign cheeriness. He asks about the pool and she tells him that she drank three coconuts and talked to a divorced British woman who was on her eat, pray, love tour.

Besides the length of the line, Ken notices other changes. The trilingual signage – Thai, English, and Chinese. The many uniformed workers flitting about. The inside seating area is glassed-in and air-conditioned. New tile flooring replacing what used to be grotty spackled cement. No matter, he thinks.

When they’re seated, they’re given the English menus. They’re asked what they want in English and he responds in English. Jackie cocks her head slightly and he shrugs. The noodles are still as good as he remembers.

When they step outside, there’s even more people on the street. People who aren’t in line for the noodles, but a hand pushed cart selling ice cream. Baddie Maddie. She’s dressed like a Thai aunty in a wide brimmed hat and apron, and is scooping ice cream for a customer, who is Thai but dressed like a Western backpacker. The skit is a role reversal—Maddie is speaking Thai in that wheedling and cajoling way that demonstrates mastery, hamming up the hard sell to the skeptical faux-tourist.

After they finish their bit, Maddie continues scooping up ice cream and takes selfies while the other woman takes payment. There are many selfies.

“You want to try the ice cream?” Ken asks.

“Seriously?”

“I’m curious how she mastered Thai so quickly. It’s impressive.”

When it’s their turn for the ice cream, Maddie asks them what their names are and where they’re from. She’s smiley and disarming. “I haven’t been to Los Angeles, but I hear there are decent Thai restaurants over there.”

“Ken used to live here too,” Jackie says. “His Thai is also really great.”

Used to, he remembers Jackie saying. Past tense. “Not anymore,” he says. “And I probably thought it was better than it really was.”

“I’m sure it’ll come back if you want it to,” Maddie says.

They say their goodbyes. Jackie wants to walk back. They’re still far from the Old City when the pressure in the air changes. It rains and rains. They take cover under the awning of a dental clinic. None of his rideshare requests are accepted. And then a driver accepts, a young guy, based on his profile, with spiky hair. This guy blows up his phone with messages in Thai script, a modern simplified kind that is difficult to parse. He reads slowly, vocalizing in his mind. Where are you going? Then there are characters and words he doesn’t understand. The man pings again and again, rapid-fire, with question marks. Sheepishly, he hits translate. The man will drive them for one thousand baht. Cash only. More question marks.

“Isn’t that too much?” Jackie asks.

“Or we can get our teeth whitened. Maybe the rain will let up by then.”

They peer into the clinic. It’s pristine inside. There are no patients in the waiting room. They have a good laugh. “Why couldn’t this be a massage place instead?” Jackie says.

Ken tells her to wait, then dashes across the street to the ATM outside the 7-11. He withdraws the money, wet and penitent.