International Speculative Fiction #4 Read online

  He hated cages. But his whole life was a long imprisonment... without a cage, he did not even exist.

  Listen, Corey. I’ll tell you how I met the boogieman.

  Imagine I’m eleven years old, same as you are now, running wild on a leaky ship crammed with coolies. They’re packed into the lower deck. We can’t afford the upper deck, but when they saw we were white, they waved us on up without checking our tickets. It looks more interesting down there. And the food’s got to be better. I can smell a Chinese breakfast. That oily fried bread, so crunchy on the outside, dripping with pig fat... yeah.

  It’s hot. It’s boring. Mom’s on the prowl. A job or a husband, whichever comes first. Everyone’s fleeing the communists. We’re some of the last white people to get out of China.

  Someone’s got a portable charcoal stove on the lower deck, and there’s a toothless old woman cooking congee, fanning the stove. A whiff of opium in the air blends with the rich gingery broth. Everyone down there’s clustered around the food. Except this one man. Harmless-looking. Before the Japs came, we had a gardener who looked like that. Shirtless, thin, by the railing. Stiller than a statue. And a bird on the railing. Also unmoving. The other coolies are ridiculing him, making fun of his Hakka accent, calling him simpleton.

  I watch him.

  “Look at the idiot,” the toothless woman says. “Hasn’t said a word since we left Swatow.”

  The man has his arms stretched out, his hands cupped. Frozen. Concentrated. I suddenly realize I’ve snuck down the steps myself, pushed through all the Chinese around the cooking pot, and I’m halfway there. Mesmerized. The man is stalking the bird, the boy stalking the man. I try not to breathe as I creep up.

  He pounces. Wrings the bird’s neck... in one swift liquid movement, a twist of the wrist, and he’s already plucking the feathers with the other hand, ignoring the death-spasms. And I’m real close now. I can smell him. Mud and sweat. Behind him, the open sea. On the deck, the feathers, a bloody snowfall.

  He bites off the head and I hear the skull crunch.

  I scream. He whirls. I try to cover it up with a childish giggle.

  He speaks in a monotone. Slowly. Sounding out each syllable, but he seems to have picked up a little pidgin. “Little white boy. You go upstairs. No belong here.”

  “I go where I want. They don’t care.”

  He offers me a raw wing.

  “Boy hungry?”

  “Man hungry?”

  I fish in my pocket, find half a liverwurst sandwich. I hold it out to him. He shakes his head. We both laugh a little. We’ve both known this hunger that consumes you; the agony of China is in our bones.

  I say, “Me and Mom are going to Siam. On account of my dad getting killed by the Japs and we can’t live in Shanghai anymore. We were in a camp and everything.” He stares blankly and so I bark in Japanese, like the guards used to. And he goes crazy.

  He mutters to himself in Hakka which I don’t understand that well, but it’s something like, “Don’t look ‘em in the eye. They chop off your head. You stare at the ground, they leave you alone.” He is chewing away at raw bird flesh the whole time. He adds in English, “Si Ui no like Japan man.”

  “Makes two of us,” I say.

  I’ve seen too much. Before the internment camp, there was Nanking. Mom was gonna do an article about the atrocities. I saw them. You think a two-year-old doesn’t see anything? She carried me on her back the whole time, papoose-style.

  When you’ve seen a river clogged with corpses, when you’ve looked at piles of human heads, and human livers roasting on spits, and women raped and set on fire, well, Santa and the Tooth Fairy just don’t cut it. I pretended about the Tooth Fairy, though, for a long time. Because, in the camp, the ladies would pool their resources to bribe Mr. Tooth Fairy Sakamoto for a little piece of fish.

  “I’m Nicholas,” I say.

  “Si Ui.” I don’t know if it’s his name or something in Hakka.

  I hear my mother calling from the upper deck. I turn from the strange man, the raw bird’s blood trailing from his lips. “Gotta go.” I turn to him, pointing at my chest, and I say, “Nicholas.”

  Even the upper deck is cramped. It’s hotter than Shanghai, hotter even than the internment camp. We share a cabin with two Catholic priests who let us hide out there after suspecting we didn’t have tickets.

  Night doesn’t get any cooler, and the priests snore. I’m down to a pair of shorts and I still can’t sleep. So I slip away. It’s easy. Nobody cares. Millions of people have been dying and I’m just some skinny kid on the wrong side of the ocean. Me and my mom have been adrift for as long as I can remember.

  The ship groans and clanks. I take the steep metal stairwell down to the coolies’ level. I’m wondering about the birdcatcher. Down below, the smells are a lot more comforting. The smell of sweat and soy-stained clothing masks the odor of the sea. The charcoal stove is still burning. The old woman is simmering some stew. Maybe something magical... a bit of snake’s blood to revive someone’s limp dick... crushed tiger bones, powdered rhinoceros horn, to heal pretty much anything. People are starving, but you can still get those kinds of ingredients. I’m eleven, and I already know too much.

  They are sleeping every which way, but it’s easy for me to step over them even in the dark. The camp was even more crowded than this, and a misstep could get you hurt. There’s a little bit of light from the little clay stove.

  I don’t know what I’m looking for. Just to be alone, I guess. I can be more alone in a crowd of Chinese than up there. Mom says things will be better in Siam. I don’t know.

  I’ve threaded my way past all of them. And I’m leaning against the railing. There isn’t much moonlight. It’s probably past midnight but the metal is still hot. There’s a warm wind, though, and it dries away my sweat. China’s too far away to see, and I can’t even imagine Boston anymore.

  He pounces.

  Leather hands rasp my shoulders. Strong hands. Not big, but I can’t squirm out of their grip. The hands twirl me around and I’m looking inti Si Ui’s eyes. The moonlight is in them. I’m scared. I don’t know why, really, all I’d have to do is scream and they’ll pull him off me. But I can’t get the scream out.

  I look into his eyes and I see fire. A burning village. Maybe it’s just the opium haze that clings to this deck, making me feel all weird inside, seeing things. And the sounds. I think it must be the whispering of the sea, but it’s not, it’s voices. Hungry, you little chink? And those leering, bucktoothed faces. Like comic book Japs. Barking. The fire blazes. And then, abruptly, it dissolves. And there’s a kid standing in the smoky ruins. Me. And I’m holding out a liverwurst sandwich. Am I really than skinny, that pathetic? But the vision fades. And Si Ui’s eyes become empty. Soulless.

  “Si Ui catch anything,” he says. “See, catch bird, catch boy. All same.” And smiles, a curiously captivating smile.

  “As long as you don’t eat me,” I say.

  “Si Ui never eat Nicholas,” he says. “Nicholas friend.”

  Friend? In the burning wasteland of China, an angel holding out a liverwurst sandwich? It makes me smile. And suddenly angry. The anger hits me so suddenly I don’t even have time to figure out what it is. It’s the war, the maggots in the millet, the commandant kicking me across the yard, but more than that it’s my mom, clinging to her journalist fantasies while I dug for earthworms, letting my dad walk out to his death. I’m crying and the birdcatcher is stroking my cheek, saying, “You no cry now. Soon go back America. No one cry there.” And it’s the first time some has touched me with some kind of tenderness in, in, in, I dunno, since before the invasion. Because mom doesn’t hug, she kind of encircles, and her arms are like the bars of a cage.

  So, I’m thinking this will be my last glimpse of Si Ui. It’s in the harbor at Klong Toei. You know, where Anna landed in The King and I. And where Joseph Conrad landed in Youth.

  So all these coolies, and all these trapped Americans and Europeans, they’r
e all stampeding down the gangplank, with cargo being hoisted, workmen trundling, fleets of those bicycle pedicabs called samlors, itinerant merchants with bales of silk and fruits that seem to have hair or claws, and then there’s the smell that socks you in the face, gasoline and jasmine and decay and incense. Pungent salt squid drying on racks. The ever-present fish sauce, blending with the odor of fresh papaya and pineapple and coconut and human sweat.

  And my mother’s off and running, with me barely keeping up, chasing after some waxed-mustache British doctor guy with one of those accents you think’s a joke until you realize that’s really how they talk.

  So I’m just carried along by the mob.

  “You buy bird, little boy?” I look up. It’s a wall of sparrows, each one in a cramped wooden cage. Rows and rows of cages, stacked up from the concrete high as a man, more cages hanging from wires, stuffed into the branch-crooks of a mango tree. I see others buying the birds for a few coins, releasing them into the air.

  “Why are they doing that?”

  “Good for your karma. Buy bird, set bird free, shorten your suffering in your next life.”

  “Swell,” I say.

  Further off, the vendor’s boy is catching them, coaxing them back into cages. That’s got to be wrong, I’m thinking as the boy comes back with ten little cages hanging on each arm. The birds haven’t gotten far. They can barely fly. Answering my unspoken thought, the bird seller says, “Oh, we clip wings. Must make living too, you know.”

  That’s when I hear a sound like the thunder of a thousand wings. I think I must be dreaming. I look up. The crowd has parted. And there’s a skinny little shirtless man standing in the clearing, his arms spread wide like a Jesus statue, only you can barely see a square inch of him because he’s all covered in sparrows. They’re perched all over his arms like they’re telegraph wires or something, and squatting on his head, and clinging to his baggy homespun shorts with their claws. And the birds are all chattering at once, drowning out the cacophony of the mob.

  Si Ui looks at me. And in his eyes I see... bars. Bars of light, maybe. Prison bars. The man’s trying to tell me something. I’m trapped.

  The crowd that parted all of sudden comes together and he’s gone. I wonder if I’m the only one who saw. I wonder if it’s just another aftereffect of the opium that clogged the walkways on the ship.

  But it’s too late to wonder; my mom has found me, she’s got me by the arm and she’s yanking me back into the stream of people. And in the next few weeks I don’t think about Si Ui at all. Until he shows up, just like that, in a village called Thapsakae.

  After the museum, I took Corey to Baskin-Robbins and popped into Starbucks next door for a frappuccino. Visiting the boogieman is a draining thing. I wanted to let him down easy. But Corey didn’t want to let go right away.

  “Can we take a boat ride or something?” he said. “You know I never get to come to this part of town.” It’s true. The traffic in Bangkok is so bad that they sell little car toilets so you can go while you’re stuck at a red light for an hour. This side of town, Thonburi, the old capital, is a lot more like the past. But no one bothers to come. The traffic, they say, always the traffic.

  We left the car by a local pier, hailed a river taxi, just told him to go, anywhere, told him we wanted to ride around. Overpaid him. It served me right for being me, an old white guy in baggy slacks, with a facing-backwards-Yankees-hat-toting blond kid in tow.

  When you leave the river behind, there’s a network of canals, called klongs, that used to be the arteries and capillaries of the old city. In Bangkok proper, they’ve all been filled in. But not here. The further from the main waterway we floated, the further back in time. Now the klongs were fragrant with jasmine, with stilted houses rearing up behind thickets of banana and bamboo. And I was remembering more.

  Rain jars by the landing docks... lizards basking in the sun... young boys leaping into the water.

  “The water was a lot clearer,” I told my grandson. “And the swimmers weren’t wearing those little trunks... they were naked.” Recently, fearing to offend the sensibilities of tourists, the Thai government made a fuss about little boys skinny-dipping along the tourist riverboat routes. But the river is so polluted now, one wonders what difference it makes.

  They were bobbing up and down around the boat. Shouting in fractured English. Wanting a lick of Corey’s Baskin-Robbins. When Corey spoke to them in Thai, they swam away. Tourists who speak the language aren’t tourists anymore.

  “You used to do that, huh, grandpa?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I like the Sports Club better. The water’s clean. And they make a mean chicken sandwich at the poolside bar.”

  I only went to the sports club once in my life. A week after we landed in Bangkok, a week of sleeping in a pew at a missionary church, a week wringing out the same clothes and ironing them over and over.

  “I never thought much of the Sports Club,” I said.

  “Oh, grandpa, you’re such a prole.” One of his father’s words, I thought, smiling.

  “Well, I did grow up in Red China,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “So what was it like, the Sports Club?”

  ...a little piece of England in the midst of all this tropical stuff. The horse races. Cricket. My mother has a rendezvous with the doctor, the one she’s been flirting with on the ship. They have tea and crumpets. They talk about the Bangkok Chinatown riots, and about money. I am reading a battered EC comic that I found in the reading room.

  “Well, if you don’t mind going native,” the doctor says, “there’s a clinic, down south a bit; pay wouldn’t be much, and you’ll have to live with the benighted buggers, but I daresay you’ll cope.”

  “Oh, I’ll go native,” Mom says, “as long as I can keep writing. I’ll do anything for that. I’d give you a blowjob if that’s what it takes.”

  “Heavens,” says the doctor. “More tea?”

  And so, a month later, we come to a fishing village nestled in the western crook of the Gulf of Siam, and I swear it’s paradise. There’s a village school taught by monks, and a little clinic where Mom works, dressing wounds, jabbing penicillin into people’s buttocks; I think she’s working on a novel. That doctor she was flirting with got her this job because she speaks Chinese and the village is full of Chinese immigrants, smuggled across the sea, looking for some measure of freedom.

  Thapsakae... it rhymes with Tupperware... it’s always warm, but never stifling like in Bangkok... always a breeze from the unseen sea, shaking the ripe coconuts from the trees... a town of stilted dwellings, a tiny main street with storefront row houses, fields of neon green rice as far as the eye can see, lazy water buffalo wallowing, and always the canals running alongside the half-paved road, women beating their wet laundry with rocks in the dawn, boys diving in the noonday heat... the second day I’m there, I meet these kids, Lek and Sombun. They’re my age. I can’t understand a word they’re saying at first. I’m watching them, leaning against a dragon-glazed rain jar, as they shuck their school uniforms and leap in. They’re laughing a lot, splashing, one time they’re throwing a catfish back and forth like it’s some kind of volleyball, but they’re like fishes themselves, silvery brown sleek things chattering in a singsong language. And I’m alone, like I was at the camp, flinging stones into the water. Except I’m not scared like I was there. There’s no time I have to be home. I can reach into just about any thicket and pluck out something good to eat: bananas, mangoes, little pink sour-apples. My shorts are all torn (I still only have one pair) and my shirt is stained with the juices of exotic fruits, and I let my hair grow as long as I want.

  Today I’m thinking of the birds.

  You buy a bird to free yourself from the cage of karma. You free the bird, but its wings are clipped and he’s inside another cage, a cage circumscribed by the fact that he can’t fly far. And the boy that catches him is in another cage, apprenticed to that vendor, unable to fly free. Cages within cages withi
n cages. I’ve been in a cage before; one time in the camp they hung me up in one in the commandant’s office and told me to sing.

  Here, I don’t feel caged at all.

  The Thai kids have noticed me and they pop up from the depths right next to me, staring curiously. They’re not hostile. I don’t know what they’re saying, but I know I’m soon going to absorb this musical language. Meanwhile, they’re splashing me, daring me to dive in, and in the end I throw off these filthy clothes and I’m in the water and it’s clear and warm and full of fish. And we’re laughing and chasing each other. And they do know a few words of English; they’ve picked it up in that village school, where the monks have been ramming a weird antiquated English phrasebook down their throats.

  But later, after we dry off in the sun and they try to show me how to ride a water buffalo, later we sneak across the gailan field and I see him again. The Birdcatcher, I mean. Gailan is a Chinese vegetable like broccoli only without the bushy part. The Chinese immigrants grow it here. They all work for this one rich Chinese man named Tae Pak, the one who had the refugees shipped to this town as cheap labor.

  “You want to watch TV?” Sombun asks me.

  I haven’t had much of a chance to see TV. He takes me by the lead and pulls me along, with Lek behind him, giggling. Night has fallen. It happens really suddenly in the tropics, boom and it’s dark. In the distance, past a wall of bamboo trees, we see glimmering lights. Tae Pak has electricity. Not that many private homes have. Mom and I use kerosene lamps at night. I’ve never been to his house, but I know we’re going there. Villagers are zeroing in on the house now, walking sure-footedly in the moonlight. The stench of night-blooming jasmine is almost choking in the compound. A little shrine to the Mother of Mercy stands by the entrance, and ahead we see what passes for a mansion here: the wooden stilts and the thatched roof with the pointed eaves, like everyone else’s house, but spread out over three sides of a quadrangle, and in the center a ruined pagoda whose origin no one remembers.