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Masters, never trust me. Listen: each day

is a Negro boy, chained, slogging out of the waves,

panting, gripping the sum of his captain, the head,

ripped off, the blood purpling down, the red

hair flossed between the knuckles, swinging it

before him like judgment, saying to the mist,

then not, then quietly only to himself, This is what

I’ll do to you, what you dream I do, sir, if you like it.

“YOU COME WITH ME NOW,” Uma madam says one day, after breakfast. She has come prepared. A male guard comes forward and grabs my arm. 

“Where?” I say, wrenching free. He lets go. “Stop it! I need to talk to Gobind about the appeals.” 

“You walk or he will drag you,” says Uma madam in reply. 

Back in my cell, I gather my sleeping mat, my other salwar kameez, slip my feet into the rubber slippers, then look around for anything else that is mine. Nothing is.

Uma madam pulls my dupatta off my neck. When I grab at it, she clicks her tongue. “What use is modesty for you anymore?” she says. 

We walk down the corridor, the three of us, and a few women look up from inside their cells. The corridor is so dim they are no more than movement, shapes, smells, a belch. Perhaps sensing my fear, Uma madam finds it in her heart to explain. “You can’t have a dupatta in this place where you are going. Not allowed. What if you decide to hang yourself, what then? It has happened before.” After a pause, she says, “Nobody’s coming to see you, don’t worry about looking nice.” 

Uma madam unlocks a door at the far end of the corridor, which opens onto a staircase I have never seen. Though the day is dry and sunny, there is a puddle of water on the top step.
 
“Go down,” she says. 

When I don’t move, she insists, “Go! Don’t look so afraid, we don’t keep tigers down there.” 

I climb down, my slippers slapping the steps.

The movie is entertaining and intriguing. At four points during it I rotate my eyes to observe Rebecca. The monitor is mirrored on her glasses and behind them her eyes are very wide. Although I am a more experienced programmer, I am certain her ideas on the movie are more complex than mine.

“You see my grandson over there.” Justin’s father humps his chin in Graham’s direction without taking his eyes off Seth. “You don’t want him to see what the inside of your skull looks like, do you?”

“You’d never do that,” Seth says. “I could walk right up to that rifle and stick my finger in it and you’d never do a thing.”

“Come on and try.”

“You’re so full of it.”

Then his father swings the barrel left and fires. The crack of the gunshot is followed by the chime of glass shattering, falling from the red pickup, its left headlight destroyed.

For a moment Seth stares at his truck. “You’ll fucking pay for that,” he says.

I realize then that Wichu knows. Of course he knows. He was here, at this temple, outside of the pavilion with his mother, when Khamron got drafted years ago. He was here when the wealthier boys got taken out of the line. He was here when those same boys came back an hour later, took their places at the end of the lottery line, and—when their turns came—drew black card after black card after black card. Wichu had told me all about it the night of his brother’s draft. Although I had only half listened to him at the time, the memory of his voice comes back to me now in all its anger.

“Draft Day” from SIGHTSEEING © 2005 by Rattawaut Lapcharoensap; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.

At my desk, with my pen, pencil, markers, ruler, and thick white paper, I was in command. And when I drew the superhero who was my alter-ego, I gave him—i.e., myself—what in all my shyness I didn’t have: a girlfriend. She was as pretty as my limited skills could make her. Her name was Laura.