God's Fool by Mark Slouka

in the country, said nothing. Everything shamed him now.
    That afternoon, in the Temple of Gautama, surrounded by the menagerie of imaginary creatures the royal sculptors had released from the wood, we were shown the Emerald Buddha. Speaking in tones adjusted to the silence, our guide informed us we could approach the altar.
    Nearly transparent, the Buddha’s skin appeared thin as a soap bubble one moment, solid as stone the next. Contained and apart, settled deep in the heart of things, he seemed to give off a cool heat, an eternal, measured radiance. For two thousand years, I remember thinking, he had been watching the lives of men wax and wane. A hundred generations had passed before him. Children had grown old and died and others had taken their place and grown old in turn. Ten thousand voices, a million dreams, each particular to the dreamer—gone. And though each of them, in passing, had taken a part of the world with them, the Buddha remained unchanged, undiminished.
    And for a moment, standing there beside my brother, staring into that light that now seemed to pulse, gently, like a heart at rest, I thought that if only I could remember this, absorb into myself some part of this vast, oceanic acceptance of the world and its ways, nothing would ever touch me again. And I would be happy.
    Quite possibly I was right. But I never managed it. I spent my days as my nature demanded, thrown this way and that, too close to life. Acceptance, I came to believe, was for statues and monsters and gods. I gave up trying to see anything larger than a man. My brother never did.

IV.
    We returned to Meklong laden with gifts, our pockets filled with the money we had made selling eggs in the vast marketplace outside the palace; my brother, typically, had refused to leave Bangkok without carrying out his plan. Everything we made, everything we were given—with the single exception of a miniature jade Buddha, no larger than my thumb, that would remain with us the rest of our lives and that sits, even now, in its niche in the wall above our bed—we turned into ducks. By the river near our houseboat we built a huge fenced enclosure with a pond, filled it with quacking and feathers. Twice a week we poled down the river to the Gulf of Siam to catch shellfish with which to feed our flock. They grew fat as Chaucer’s friars and set themselves to begetting long lines of offspring that followed them about the yard like miniature quacking trains.
    Within a few months of our return from the capital, we had begun to prosper. We hired Ha Lung, the man who had given us work after our father’s death, to help us haul the vats of salt and clay, and to bring our goods to market. With his short bandy legs and boxer’s crouch, Ha Lung worked like an ox. Unlike some of the other villagers, who resented our good fortune and mumbled jealously among themselves, he seemed untroubled by the way the tables had turned or by the fact that he should find himself working for mere boys; if it ever occurred to him that wewere only a year older than the son and daughter he had lost to the cholera, he never said a word. A widower now, living with the one child—a daughter—who had survived, he seemed cheerful enough but rarely spoke during the long hours we worked alongside one another, plastering eggs or hauling crates. Only one time, I remember, did he stop in the middle of the path to the river. It was early in the morning. We had had a good week. The air smelled of grass and mud; the shadows seemed painted on the green water. On the boats, tied side by side, the crates were already piled thigh-deep.
    As we came up behind him, carrying our load, my brother asked him what was the matter. “Your father would have been pleased,” he said, without turning to us, and suddenly the back of his bristly head blurred and ran, then cleared. “He would have been pleased,” he said again, and walked on.
    Day by day and week by week, the miracle of our visit to the royal