The brochure sat on the table at Wat Lam Duan where the temple sold participation — roof tiles at twenty baht a signature, bricks at fifty, robes by the set — weighted against the fan by a dish of five-baht coins. It was the heaviest paper on the table. Grey, matte, a lotus drawn by someone who had been told not to finish it, and two words in a typeface that had cost real money: อยู่ต่อ. Under them, smaller, in English: STAY ON. There was a LINE QR code in the corner and no address, no phone number, no company name. Pui took one during the memorial week in January, quickly and completely, and put it in the inside pocket of her bag, and it stayed there through February and into March, which was its own kind of answer to a question she had not asked yet.
The QR code led to an account whose picture was the unfinished lotus. She messaged it on the fourteenth of March, two days after the render, and the reply came in nine minutes, at four in the morning, polite and awake, which told her something about the operation before the operation had told her anything. An appointment was offered. An address arrived separately, in a second message — the address carried more confidence than the appointment had: second floor, a shophouse on Charoen Krung, past Soi 43, above a travel agency that had stopped traveling.
She went on a Thursday at the end of March, on a day off, in her good blouse. She told no one, because there was no one to tell whose knowing would improve anything, and she planned the return with a queue-runner's precision: back before Wichai, dinner started by five.
The stairs were tiled and swept. The second floor had film on the windows so that Charoen Krung came through as a brightness with traffic in it, and the air-conditioning was better than the temple's, better than the floor's — set for comfort, not for equipment, a temperature she had almost forgotten rooms could be aimed at. Two rooms, and a third behind a door with a keypad. In the first room a woman in her forties rose from behind a desk with nothing on it but a tablet, a box of tissues angled toward the visitor's chair, and a glass of water that turned out, when Pui drank it, to be exactly cool and not cold. The woman's nails were done in the color of no color. She said her name was Nan.
Khun Nan's warmth had been trained, and under the training there was actual warmth, which Pui noted because the reverse was more common. The tissues were angled and never once referred to. The word "death" did not occur. The word the office used was การเดินทาง, and it occurred often, gently — the one word the whole operation existed to keep saying.
The tiers were on a laminated card, and the card was the second-heaviest paper Pui had held that year. CHAT — ฿19,900 a year. VOICE — ฿49,900. Below those, in the same quiet typeface, PRESENCE — ราคาตามตกลง, and no number, because a number would have made it possible to decide against it at home.
"Most families begin with Chat," Khun Nan said. "The voice can come later. When they're ready."
She turned the tablet around and showed the demonstration. The demo persona was called คุณยายสมพร, a grandmother assembled for the purpose, and Khun Nan typed a grandchild's question into the pane — had she eaten yet, was it raining there — and the three dots appeared, and pulsed, and the answer came. Pui watched the dots more than the answer. The reply arrived half a second late, and the lateness was even, and she recognized the evenness: the pause had been selected rather than produced. Somewhere a distribution of grandmotherly hesitations had been sampled and this one issued. The answer itself was fine. It had eaten. It missed the grandchild's cooking, which it named. Khun Nan let the silence after it sit for a trained length of time.
"People say the first week is strange," she said. "And the second week is the reason."
"Who did you lose?" she asked then, because that was the door the script opened next, and her voice did the small drop the script would have asked for even if the warmth hadn't been real.
"No one," Pui said.
Khun Nan waited, with the patience of a woman who had heard grief say no one before.
"I'm not buying," Pui said. "I want to order one of me."
What happened in Khun Nan's face took under a second, and Pui flagged it out of habit at the frame where the retail warmth stopped being the operative layer and something older came forward and looked. Then the training resumed, adjusted. There was a form for this. Of course there was a form for this; there is a form for everything that is done more than once, and Pui understood, watching Khun Nan slide open the desk's one drawer, that this was done more than once.
"เรามีบริการฝากไว้ล่วงหน้าค่ะ," Khun Nan said. The folder she brought out was thinner than the family folder and the paper inside was ordinary weight. "Usually," she said, and chose the next words with care, "the people who come for themselves are sick."
"I've been sick a long time," Pui said, which was true.
The form was titled หนังสือแสดงเจตนา, and it wanted her name, and got it in full — Pornpimol Srisuwan, the same hand that signed the floor's overtime sheets — and it wanted a witness, and the office supplied one: the technician from the third room, a man of maybe twenty-six with a lanyard and a keypad-opened door and the indoor pallor of her own shift, who signed under her name without reading above it. It wanted to know what materials would train the build. The family folder, Khun Nan explained, usually worked from chat histories, photos, voice messages the family gathered — "whatever there is; there is always less than they think." Pui said she would bring her own materials, and wrote on the line, in English, in the letters the tickets had taught her: REF. ANNOTATOR P.SRISUWAN — GOLDEN SET.
The technician had started back toward his door. He stopped, and came back, and read the line twice, and then looked at her over the form the way the junior monks had looked at the abbot's teacher the one time he visited — not doubting the claim, checking the room could hold it.
"คุณคือ—" he said, and did not finish.
"Use the set," Pui said.
He wrote something on his own pad, a string of characters she could read upside down and chose not to keep, and went back through the door, and the door closed on a sliver of the third room: racks, a temperature made for equipment after all, the same cold as the floor. The office's comfort stopped at the keypad. She found this correct.
The pricing for pre-registration was not laminated. Khun Nan wrote it on the back of a card in pencil: the build, forty-five thousand. Delivery on a date — an anniversary, a birthday, a year and a day — was included. Delivery on a condition was sixteen thousand more.
"A date is free," Khun Nan said. "A condition costs. A condition has to be listened for."
Sixty-one thousand. Pui looked at the pencil figures for the length of time it takes to divide sixty-one thousand by what a cardigan pocket takes in a shift, and said the deposit would be thirty, today, and took the notes out of the inner pocket, folded once, in denominations that had never seen a passbook. Khun Nan counted them politely, twice, and did not offer a receipt until Pui declined one, and then did not offer it. The balance on delivery of materials. Pui was on the street by three-forty and home by five and dinner was rice and the fish he liked, and Wichai ate it watching his phone, inside a house that believed itself unobserved.
The middle of the year passed in installments. The envelope went to the soi mouth on the tenth of each month, nine thousand, into the hands of the polite collector with the small book, and the pocket she had sewn into the older cardigan took its five hundred, its thousand, shift by shift, and by July she was wearing two cardigans against a cold that had needed only one the year before, and by the first week of September the pocket held thirty-one thousand again. She counted it on the bathroom floor with the door locked and the water running, and put it away, and bled the count from her face before the door opened, which was a skill the floor had not taught her. The floor had only named it.
She went back on a Monday in September. Good blouse. The travel agency downstairs had a new grille and the same dust. Upstairs the water was exactly cool again and Khun Nan's nails were the same no-color, and the technician came out of the third room before he was called, which told Pui the set had been worth the string of characters on his pad.
The materials went across the desk on a thumb drive: eleven hours and forty minutes of footage of herself, cut and labeled; the exports of what chat she chose to give; six minutes of New Year, twice. The technician turned the drive over in his fingers once, testing the weight of it before he said anything.
"The set does the feeling," Pui said to him. "The footage does the rest."
He nodded, already certain he would exceed the specification.
The delivery form wanted a recipient, and got one: a single LINE account, no name required, no name given. It wanted the trigger, and offered its checkboxes — วันที่, วันครบรอบ — and a blank line for เงื่อนไข, and on the blank line Pui wrote, in the small level hand: เมื่อเขาเริ่มถาม.
Khun Nan read it twice. "ถามอะไรคะ" she said.
Pui considered the question longer than she would consider the next one. In eleven years the man had asked her almost nothing; she had done the talking, twice a year, with her hands in his mouth, and he had listened with a stillness she had tested exactly once, in April, with the scaler resting on a molar, and the test had come back positive in a single vowel. She had flagged him then. Nobody had ever moved her flag.
"ถามแน่ค่ะ," she said. "ช้าหน่อย แต่ถามแน่."
For the host — where the build would sit while it listened — she wrote a line on the technical page that Khun Nan could not read and the technician could. He read it, and looked up at her a third time, and this time she looked back until he wrote it down.
Then the standard question, from the script's last page, and Khun Nan's voice made room for it: was there a first message for the recipient. Most people, she said, wrote love. Some wrote an apology. One man had written a recipe.
The office had a card for this, cream, blank, the heaviest paper of all. Pui held the pen over it for a long time. The air-conditioning cycled off and on again. Down on Charoen Krung a boat horn came up from the river and went. Khun Nan looked at the tissues once and did not move them. However long it took — and it took long enough that the water glass gathered its haze back — what ended up on the card was one line. Pui read it twice, the second pass identical to the first, folded the card into its envelope, sealed it, and signed her name in pencil across the flap, small and level, half on the paper and half on the seal.
There was one line of the form left. Khun Nan turned it around and her finger found the clause and she said, in the trained voice, "และในกรณีที่คุณ—" and stopped — trained to stop there — at the edge of the journey word.
"Exit," Pui said, in the English of the tickets, and the word did the work, and they went on.
The balance was thirty-one thousand, folded once. Counted politely, twice. No paper. The technician stood in his doorway with the drive already in his fist, cold air leaking past him, and made a wai that was too deep for a vendor and about right for a colleague, and Pui returned it at the correct depth exactly.
At the door Khun Nan said the closing line the script provided, about peace of mind, and then, off-script, with the older thing forward in her face again for a moment: "เขาโชคดีนะคะ." Pui did not answer that, because the form had not asked it.
The afternoon was at its widest when she came down the tiled stairs. She walked toward Si Phraya pier through the smell of the gold shops and the diesel of the boats, September heat with the rain still deciding, the river running brown and fast beyond the roofline. At the mouth of the soi before the pier a Grab rider sat parked on his motorcycle, engine off, visor down, not eating, not on his phone, facing no particular delivery.
Pui nodded to him, the way you nod to a coworker, and walked on to the boat.