For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question Read Free Page A

Karen seemed nice to me, too. I couldn’t have guessed then, drifting to sleep to the sound of their amiable chatter, that every last one of them was a terrorist.
     
    HTAN DAH dropped a pile of thinly sliced onions and whole garlic cloves into a wok of hot soybean oil shortly after dawn. He’d been up in the middle of the night, waiting alone in the living room for one of the World Cup matches, most of which aired at seriously inconvenient hours in Thailand. I’d been up, too, and had seen him in the chair
he’d placed a few inches in front of the little TV when I’d gotten up to go to the bathroom. “Don’t you ever sleep?” I’d asked him, but he didn’t respond, or if he did, I didn’t hear it over the broadcast.
    His coworkers had inadvertently slept through the match. Most of them were still sleeping now. I climbed out from under my mosquito net and walked softly out of my room and past a few of them sprawled on the floor of the big open one. When my feet hit the cool tiles at the bottom of the steps, I turned toward the sound and smell of searing allium.
    Htan Dah stood at the gas range, which spat oil at his baggy longsleeved shirt. It was the same thing he’d been wearing the day before, when he had strode into the living room as I tried to figure out how to blow up my air mattress, sitting on the floor with the limp plastic splayed over my knees, surrounded by guys not speaking to me. When I’d looked up into his wide, round face framed with chin-length black hair, he’d given me an amused smile and asked, “Can I help you?”
    I sat down at the picnic table in the dining room/garage, a couple of feet from where he was cooking, and we exchanged hellos. He was a little chubby, I thought, watching him in his loose clothes. He picked up and tilted the wok, concentrating harder than he needed to on the swirling herbs. Htan Dah was worried about me. As the office manager of Burma Action for the past two years, he’d heard the nighttime weeping of plenty of self-pitying philanthropists, who tended to arrive tired and instantly homesick. The last girl, a Canadian with a lot of luggage, had started sobbing almost as soon as he’d picked her up from the bus station, and couldn’t be calmed even by the hours she spent taking calls from her boyfriend back home. She’d cried for days.
    Indeed, I’d had a very sad moment last night when, after my air mattress deflated shortly after I lay down on it and my angles pressed hard into the wood floor, and I realized that the ants patrolling the grounds were trekking right through my hair, I’d actually hoped for the worst, hoped that I had contracted malaria or Japanese encephalitis
from the mosquito bites raging hot and itchy on my legs so I had a legitimate excuse to bail back to the States. That way, I wouldn’t have to be mad at myself for being too chickenshit to hack it through loneliness and less-than-ideal bathing arrangements. I’d even considered taking the bus back to Bangkok and calling my airline, betting myself that there was room on a flight out. If there wasn’t, I reasoned, I could just hang out on Khao San Road and read books. I hated Khao San Road, with its hennaed European backpackers and incessant techno and beer specials, but at least it was familiar. I’d realized then that I might start crying. But I was determined not to. Instead, I saved the tearing up for when Htan Dah put another bowl of stick soup in front of me now and asked, “How long are you staying?”
    “Six weeks,” I said, my throat tight.
    He was too shocked to notice. “Six weeks!” he hollered. “Why not four months? Or six months?”
    “Six weeks is a long time to go out of the country in America,” I said. “Besides, I was in Thailand for a month two years ago.”
    “How many times have you been here?”
    “Twice.”
    “Wow,” he said. Then, more softly, “You have traveled a lot. That’s nice.”
    He had no idea, even. “Have you traveled?”
    “No, I