The sound of a distant ocean tide rang in his ears. He stopped and slowly turned. The roar of the Sukhumvit Road traffic had fooled him into thinking for a moment that he was at the beach. The attack in Cowboy had left him bloodied and disoriented. His head hadn’t stopped ringing like a phone lost inside a house, with no way to find it, no way to turn it off. Mistaking traffic noise for the pounding sea worried him. He sighed and adjusted his arm inside the sling. Below the elbow, his arm was the color of a day-old burrito. He backtracked a couple of steps and squatted down on his haunches to look at a five-baht coin. He turned it over between the finger and thumb of his good hand and then, slipping it into his pocket, slowly rose to his feet. “This is going to be my lucky day,” he said. Then he reminded himself that yesterday was supposed to have been his lucky day too, according his horoscope. Some days were luckier than others. He remembered what Calvino had once told him, “The future used to be Bangkok, until it moved on to some other place that was luckier.”
