Thai dinner

I order the spicy salad set. It’s the same meal that wakes me up in the middle of the night because I’m chewing my pillow in hopes that it might transform into it. It’s spicy papaya salad, minced spicy chicken salad, grilled chicken, and sticky rice. And I nod when the waitress raises a brittle eyebrow—brittle like insect legs and stray threads, but united in the thick vein of an eyebrow pencil—yes. Yes. It’s all for me. And make it spicy. Turn me into a Freon-infested aluminum can on an April day in Bangkok. Please don’t farang-ify it for me. I need to bleed out this craving. The dishes come, steeping in their watery spices like a fever sweat on bedsheets, small exclamations of chilies scattered over them like burst capillaries. White papaya in its manicured strands, thin thin thin like nerve endings and dendrites. And the chicken is ground into sandy mush and covered entirely with mint leaves, like foliage disguising a sinkhole. And so I begin the spicy salad laps. And they proceed according to the strict instructions that I have received. And the fork is used to shovel the food onto the spoon, as stabbing at food is barbaric in a place full of orchids and immaculate pavement and pink taxis. First the papaya salad, with its crunchy, sopping fibers and small surprises of peanuts. Then the chicken salad, with its harsh dimples of onions, fragments of chives, and an aftertaste of searing heat that takes exactly three seconds to register. Then the grilled chicken, then the one bite of cabbage, followed by the one bite of that green vegetable that looks like a string bean but tastes like broccoli. It all ends with a handful of sticky rice, which gleefully allows itself to be contemplated by tongue and palate and fingertip and cheek before opting to not define its taste (Sweet? Spicy? Sour? Bland?). Instead it opts to soak up the remains of other tastes and hoist them onto its broad, white shoulders like a war hero carrying the wounded as it retreats into the acidic aftermath of my belly. Sticky rice must never be eaten with utensils. Never never never. It is pulled in a chunk like gooey cotton candy. And I swallow and pause and take a breath and think there’s no way that just happened and so I do the lap again. And my mouth starts burning like the way your lungs feel after a coughing fit and I’m suddenly feeling so lucky. And I don’t want to say goodbye to this. Not now, not now. So I do the lap again. And everything is chopped so finely that I start thinking about hands. Hands that chop and mince and fry and pick and pour and hug and insert themselves into whatever orifice will have them as a guest. And I wonder about the hands that made this meal. In Thailand, many hands help themselves to many dishes, serving up a mouthful at a time and constantly teetering in the balancing act of tastebuds as they become lacquered in more and more spices. You can’t have TWO bites of cabbage or more than one spoonful of papaya salad on any particular lap. That is not how it is done here. But there are not many hands here. Just mine. My hands with their new freckles because the sun is so harsh. My hands with their blue, bulging veins because I didn’t drink enough water, and that big divot near the wrist that keeps growing because I keep losing weight. And the last bite of sticky rice clears the burning from my mouth and softens the groan in my stomach. Check bin, ka. Kap khun ka.