Thursday, December 11, 2014

I never want to go to Thailand

The minivan pulled up to a roundabout outside the resort and my family piled out - there were 10 of us, a rag tag assortment of cousins and aunts and uncles, plus me and my sister.  My parents were already here somewhere, having taken a flight to Pukhet earlier in the week.

A team of bellboys stood in a line.  As each one was introduced, he would run to the back of the van and add a suitcase to the growing collection on the baggage cart. I wondered if we were supposed to tip them, and how much.  I wasn't prepared, having failed to exchange currency at the airport, and it stressed me out to be waited on, by an army no less.

I glanced over at my sister, Alison, lounging at the back of the group, in a plaid red minidress, sandals, hair long and sleek down her back.  She'd been to Thailand half a dozen times, as well as numerous places in Mexico, South America, eastern Europe, western Europe, Australia, Japan.  At this point I believed the only continents she'd failed to at least set foot on were Africa and Greenland.

Ali tended to travel by learning the language and arriving with only a loose itinerary.  I imagined her moving through a country like a ninja, engaging on the fly in complex negotiations for out of the way accomodations.

The rest of the family swirled around me, in tourist shorts and walking shoes, looking rumpled and sweaty and definitely not capable of conversing in the local language.

We were instructed to board a small electric shuttle which took us literally half a block, then we were herded onto a smooth wooden platform, that began whisking us down a canyon.  It began like a mobile sidewalk at the airport but as we picked up speed the surface came apart in discrete squares.  My sister and I were at the front of the group so we ended up alone on the first section, with just the baggage cart, separated from the rest of the family.

It all happened so fast that I barely had time to register that there were no safety rails and no discernible steering or brakes.  The canyon got deeper, the drop off the side more formidable. 

We slid smoothly to a stop and waited, suspended over train tracks.  About a hundred yards to the left, children splashed in a giant rock water pool, their squeals echoing faintly off the canyon walls.  Another hundred yards ahead the canyon dead-ended and the tracks led to the wide loading dock of an immense complex.

My sister was at the very front edge of the platform, when it suddenly lurched forward.  She stumbled and I had only enough time to begin the "what if, oh shit" thought before she was off the side, the platform sliding past her body, hundreds of feet below, lying unnaturally arranged and still.  The red dress framed her like a mannequin.

I screamed, "stop," but the platform sped ahead to the loading dock without unloading, then continued briskly through gleaming white corridors, like a gurney ride, and I was crying now, hyperventilating, would have been screaming but couldn't catch enough air, huge hysterical sobs, in that cartoonish way all movie moms receive the news of their son's death at war, and I felt simultaneously like my chest had been crushed, and I was drowning and it hurt so much, just kept getting worse, my mind racing through flashes of the stumbling, her body on the ground, did I try to reach out as she fell, what if I just reached out now, could I still save her

I woke, heart hammering, breathing hard, the light on,  I am in bed.  I'm in bed.  It's 4am.  It was a dream.  Take a breath.  Just a dream.

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