International Speculative Fiction #4 Page 5

  The usual pigs and chickens are running around in the space under the house, but the stairway up to the veranda is packed with people, kids mostly, and they’re all gazing upward. The object of their devotion is a television set, the images on it ghostly, the sound staticky and in Thai in any case... but I recognize the show... it’s I Love Lucy. And I’m just staring and staring. Sombun pushes me up the steps. I barely remember to remove my sandals and step in the trough at the bottom of the steps to wash the river-mud off my feet. It’s really true. I can’t understand a word of it but it’s still funny. The kids are laughing along with the laugh track.

  Well... that’s when I see Si Ui. I point at him. I try to attract his attention, but he too, sitting cross-legged on the veranda, is riveted to the screen. And when I try to whisper to Sombun that hey, I know this guy, what a weird coincidence, Sombun just whispers back, “jek, jek,” which I know is a putdown word for a Chinaman.

  “I know him,” I whisper. “He catches birds. And eats them. Alive.” I try to attract Si Ui’s attention. But he won’t look at me. He’s too busy staring at Lucille Ball. I’m a little bit afraid to look at him directly, scared of what his eyes might disclose, our shared and brutal past.

  Lek, whose nickname just means “Tiny,” shudders.

  “Jek, jek,” Sombun says. The laugh track kicks in.

  Everything has changed now that I know he’s here. On my reed mat, under the mosquito nets every night, I toss and turn, and I see things. I don’t think they’re dreams. I think it’s like the time I looked into Si Ui’s eyes and saw the fire. I see a Chinese boy running through a field of dead people. It’s sort of all in black and white and he’s screaming and behind him a village is burning.

  At first it’s the Chinese boy but somehow it’s me too, and I’m running, with my bare feet squishing into dead men’s bowels, running over a sea of blood and shit. And I run right into someone’s arms. Hard. The comic-book Japanese villain face. A human heart, still beating, in his hand.

  “Hungry, you little chink?” he says.

  Little chink. Little jek.

  Intestines are writhing up out of disemboweled bodies like snakes. I saw a lot of disemboweled Japs. Their officers did it in groups, quietly, stony-faced. The honorable thing to do.

  I’m screaming myself awake. And then, from the veranda maybe, I hear the tap of my mom’s battered typewriter, an old Hermes she bought in the Sunday market in Bangkok for a hundred baht.

  I crawl out of bed. It’s already dawn.

  “Hi, Mom,” I say, as I breeze past her, an old phakomah wrapped around my loins.

  “Wow. It talks.”

  “Mom, I’m going over to Sombun’s house to play.”

  “You’re getting the hang of the place, I take it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Pick up some food, Nicholas.”

  “Okay.” Around here, a dollar will feed me and her three square meals. But it won’t take away the other hunger.

  Another lazy day of running myself ragged, gorging on papaya and coconut milk, another day in paradise.

  It’s time to meet the serpent, I decide.

  Sombun tells me someone’s been killed, and we sneak over to the police station. Si Ui is there, sitting at a desk, staring at a wall. I think he’s just doing some kind of alien registration thing. He has a Thai interpreter, the same toothless woman I saw on the boat. And a policeman is writing stuff down in a ledger.

  There’s a woman sitting on a bench, rocking back and forth. She’s talking to everyone in sight. Even me and Sombun.

  Sombun whispers, “That woman Daeng. Daughter die.”

  Daeng mumbles, “My daughter. By the railway tracks. All she was doing was running down the street for an ice coffee. Oh, my terrible karma.” She collars a passing inspector. “Help me. My daughter. Strangled, raped.”

  “That inspector Jed,” Sombun whispered to me. “Head of the whole place.”

  Inspector Jed is being polite, compassionate and efficient at the same time. I like him. My mom should hang out with people like that instead of the losers who are just looking for a quick lay.

  The woman continues muttering to herself. “Nit, nit, nit, nit, nit,” she says. That must be the girl’s name. They all have nicknames like that. Nit means “tiny,” too, like Lek. “Dead, strangled,” she says. “And this town is supposed to be heaven on earth. The sea, the palm trees, the sun always bright. This town has a dark heart.”

  Suddenly, Si Ui looks up. Stares at her. As though remembering something. Daeng is sobbing. And the policeman who’s been interviewing him says, “Watch yourself, chink. Everyone smiles here. Food falls from the trees. If a little girl’s murdered, they’ll file it away; they won’t try to find out who did it. Because this is a perfect place, and no one gets murdered. We all love each other here... you little jek.”

  Si Ui has this weird look in his eye. Mesmerized. My mother looks that way sometimes... when a man catches her eye and she’s zeroing in for the kill. The woman’s mumbling that she’s going to go be a nun now, she has nothing left to live for.

  “Watch your back, jek,” says the policeman. He’s trying, I realize, to help this man, who he probably thinks is some kind of village idiot type. “Someone’ll murder you just for being a stupid little chink. And no one will bother to find out who did it.”

  “Si Ui hungry,” says Si Ui.

  I realize that I speak his language, and my friends do not.

  “Si Ui!” I call out to him.

  He freezes in his tracks, and slowly turns, and I look into his eyes for the second time, and I know that it was no illusion before.

  Somehow we’ve seen through each other’s eyes.

  I am a misfit kid in a picture-perfect town with a dark heart, but I understand what he’s saying, because though I look all different I come from where he comes from. I’ve experienced what it’s like to be Chinese. You can torture them and kill them by millions, like the Japs did, and still they endure. They just shake it off. They’ve outlasted everyone so far. And will till the end of time. Right now in Siam they’re the coolies and the laborers, and soon they’re going to end up owning the whole country. They endure. I saw their severed heads piled up like battlements, and the river choked with their corpses, and they outlasted it all.

  These Thai kids will never understand.

  “Si Ui hungry!’ the man cries.

  That afternoon I slip away from my friends at the river and I go to the gailan field where I know he works. He never acknowledges my presence, but later he strides further and further from the house of his rich patron, towards a more densely wooded area past the fields. It’s all banana trees, the little bananas that have seeds in them, you chew the whole banana and spit out the seeds, rat-tat-tat, like a machine gun. There’s bamboo, too, and the jasmine bushes that grow wild, and mango trees. Si Ui doesn’t talk to me, doesn’t look back, but somehow I know I’m supposed to follow him.

  And I do.

  Through the thicket, into a private clearing, the ground overgrown with weeds, the whole thing surrounded by vegetation, and in the middle of it a tumbledown house, the thatch unpatched in places, the stilts decaying and carved with old graffiti. The steps are lined with wooden cages. There’s birdshit all over the decking, over the wooden railings, even around the foot trough. Birds are chattering from the cages, from the air around us. The sun has been searing and sweat is running down my face, my chest, soaking my phakhomah.

  We don’t go up into the house. Instead, Si Ui leads me past it, toward a clump of rubber trees. He doesn’t talk, just keeps beckoning me, the curious way they have of beckoning, palm pointing toward the ground.

  I feel dizzy. He’s standing there. Swaying a little. Then he makes a little clucking, chattering sound, barely opening his lips. The birds are gathering. He seems to know their language. They’re answering him. The chirping around us grows to a screeching cacophony. Above, they’re circling. They’re blocking out the sun and it’s suddenly
chilly. I’m scared now. But I don’t dare say anything. In the camp, if you said anything, they always hurt you. Si Ui keeps beckoning me: nearer, come nearer. And I creep up. The birds are shrieking. And now they’re swooping down, landing, gathering at Si Ui’s feet, their heads moving to and fro in a regular rhythm, like they’re listening to... a heartbeat. Si Ui’s heartbeat. My own.

  An image flashes into my head. A little Chinese boy hiding in a closet... listening to footsteps... breathing nervously.

  He’s poised. Like a snake, coiled up, ready to pounce. And then, without warning, he drops to a crouch, pulls a bird out of the sea of birds, puts it to his lips, snaps its neck with his teeth, and the blood just spurts, all over his bare skin, over the homespun wrapped around his loins, an impossible crimson. And he smiles. And throws me the bird.

  I recoil. He laughs again when I let the dead bird slip through my fingers. Pounces again and gets me another.

  “Birds are easy to trap,” he says to me in Chinese, “easy as children, sometimes; you just have to know their language.” He rips one open, pulls out a slippery liver. “You don’t like them raw, I know,” he says, “but come, little brother, we’ll make a fire.”

  He waves his hand, dismisses the birds; all at once they’re gone and the air is steaming again. In the heat, we make a bonfire and grill the birds’ livers over it. He has become, I guess, my friend. Because he’s become all talkative. “I didn’t rape her,” he says.

  Then he talks about fleeing through the rice fields. There’s a war going on around him. I guess he’s my age in his story, but in Chinese they don’t use past or future, everything happens in a kind of abstract now-time. I don’t understand his dialect that well, but what he says matches the waking dreams I’ve had tossing and turning under that mosquito net. There was a Japanese soldier. He seemed kinder than the others. They were roasting something over a fire. He was handing Si Ui a morsel. A piece of liver.

  Hungry, little chink?

  Hungry. I understand hungry.

  Human liver.

  In Asia they believe that everything that will ever happen has already happened. Is that what Si Ui is doing with me, forging a karmic chain with his own childhood, the Japanese soldier?

  There’s so much I want to ask him, but I can’t form the thoughts, especially not in Chinese. I’m young, Corey. I’m not thinking karmic cycles. What are you trying to ask me?

  “I thought Si Ui ate children’s livers,” said Corey. “Not some dumb old birds’.”

  We were still on the klong, turning back now toward civilization; on either side of us were crumbling temples, old houses with pointed eaves, each one with its little totemic spirit house by the front gate, pouring sweet incense into the air, the air itself dripping with humidity. But ahead, just beyond a turn in the klong, a series of eighty-story condos reared up over the banana trees.

  “Yes, he did,” I said, “and we’ll get to that part, in time. Don’t be impatient.”

  “Grandpa, Si Ui ate children’s livers. Just like Dracula bit women in the neck. Well like, it’s the main part of the story. How long are you gonna make me wait?”

  “So you know more than you told me before. About the maid trying to scare you one time, when you were five.”

  “Well, yeah, grandpa, I saw the miniseries. It never mentioned you.”

  “I’m part of the secret history, Corey.”

  “Cool.” He contemplated his Pokémon, but decided not to go back to monster trapping. “When we get back to the Bangkok side, can I get another caramel frappuccino at Starbucks?”

  “Decaf,” I said.

  That evening I go back to the house and find Mom in bed with Jed, the police detective. Suddenly, I don’t like Jed anymore.

  She barely looks up at me; Jed is pounding away and oblivious to it all; I don’t know if Mom really knows I’m there, or just a shadow flitting beyond the mosquito netting. I know why she’s doing it; she’ll say that it’s all about getting information for this great novel she’s planning to write, or research for a major magazine article, but the truth is that it’s about survival; it’s no different from that concentration camp.

  I think she finally does realize I’m there; she mouths the words “I’m sorry” and then turns back to her work. At that moment, I hear someone tapping at the entrance, and I crawl over the squeaky floor-planks, Siamese style (children learn to move around on their knees so that their head isn’t accidentally higher than someone of higher rank) to see Sombun on the step.

  “Can you come out?” he says. “There’s a ngaan wat.”

  I don’t know what that is, but I don’t want to stay in the house. So I throw on a shirt and go with him. I soon find out that a ngaan wat is a temple fair, sort of a cross between a carnival and a church bazaar and a theatrical night out.

  Even from a mile or two away we hear the music, the tinkling of marimbas and the thud of drums, the wail of the Javanese oboe. By the time we get there, the air is drenched with the fragrance of pickled guava, peanut pork skewers, and green papaya tossed in fish sauce. A makeshift dance floor has been spread over the muddy ground and there are dancers with rhinestone court costumes and pagoda hats, their hands bent back at an impossible angle. There’s a Chinese opera troupe like I’ve seen in Shanghai, glittering costumes, masks painted on the faces in garish colors, boys dressed as monkeys leaping to and fro; the Thai and the Chinese striving to outdo each other in noise and brilliance. And on a grill, being tended by a fat woman, pigeons are barbecuing, each one on a mini-spear of steel.

  And I’m reminded of the open fire and the sizzling of half-plucked feathers. “You got money?” Sombun says. He thinks that all farangs are rich. I fish in my pocket and pull out a few saleungs, and we stuff ourselves with pan-fried roti swimming in sweet condensed milk. The thick juice is dripping from our lips. This really is paradise. The music, the mingled scents, the warm wind. Then I see Si Ui. There aren’t any birds nearby, not unless you count the pigeons charring on the grill. Si Ui is muttering to himself, but I understand Chinese and he’s saying, over and over again, “Si Ui hungry, Si Ui hungry.” He says it in a little voice and it’s almost like baby talk.

  We wander over to the Chinese opera troupe. They’re doing something about monkeys invading heaven and stealing the apples of the gods. All these kids are somersaulting, tumbling, cartwheeling, and climbing up onto each other’s shoulders. There’s a little girl, nine or ten maybe, and she’s watching the show. And Si Ui is watching her. And I’m watching him.

  I’ve seen her before, know her from that night we squatted on the veranda staring at American TV shows. Was Si Ui watching her even then? I tried to remember. Couldn’t be sure. Her name’s Juk.

  Those Chinese cymbals, with their annoying “boing-boing-boing” sound, are clashing. A man is intoning in a weird singsong. The monkeys are leaping. Suddenly I see, in Si Ui’s face, the same expression I saw on the ship. He’s utterly still inside, utterly quiet, beyond feeling. The war did that to him. I know. Just like it made my Mom into a whore, and me into... I don’t know... a bird without a nesting place... a lost boy.

  And then I get this... irrational feeling. That the little girl is a bird, chirping to herself, hopping along the ground, not noticing the stalker.

  So many people here. So much jangling, so much laughter. The town’s dilapidated pagodas sparkle with reflected colors, like stone Christmas trees. Chinese opera rings in my ears, I look away, when I look back they are gone... Sombun is preoccupied now, playing with a two-saleung top that he just bought. Somehow feel impelled to follow. To stalk the stalker.

  I duck behind a fruit stand and then I see a golden deer. It’s a toy, on four wheels, pulled along a string. I can’t help following it with my eyes as it darts between hampers full of rambutans and pomelos.

  The deer darts toward the cupped hands of the little girl. I see her disappear into the crowd, but then I see Si Ui’s face too; you can’t mistake the cold fire in his eyes.

  S
he follows the toy. Si Ui pulls. I follow, too, not really knowing why it’s so fascinating. The toy deer weaves through the ocean of feet. Bare feet of monks and novices, their saffron robes skimming the mud. Feet in rubber flip-flops, in the wooden sandals the Jek call kiah. I hear a voice: Juk, Juk! And I know there’s someone else looking for the girl, too. It’s a weird quartet, each one in the sequence known only to the next one. I can see Si Ui now, his head bobbing up and down in the throng because he’s a little taller than the average Thai even though he’s so skinny. He’s intent. Concentrated. He seems to be on wheels himself, he glides through the crowd like the toy deer does. The woman’s voice, calling for Juk, is faint and distant; she hears it, I’m sure, but she’s ignoring her mother or her big sister. I only hear it because my senses are sharp now, it’s like the rest of the temple fair’s all out of focus now, all blurry, and there’s just the four of us. I see the woman now, it must be a mother or aunt, too old for a sister, collaring a roti vendor and asking if he’s seen the child. The vendor shakes his head, laughs. And suddenly we’re all next to the pigeon barbecue, and if the woman was only looking in the right place she’d see the little girl, giggling as she clambers through the forest of legs, as the toy zigzags over the dirt aisles. And now the deer has been yanked right up to Si Ui’s feet. And the girl crawls all the way after it, seizes it, laughs, looks solemnly up at the face of the Chinaman—

  “It’s him! It’s the chink!” Sombun is pointing, laughing. I’d forgotten he was even with me.

  Si Ui is startled. His concentration snaps. He lashes out. There’s a blind rage in his eyes. Dead pigeons are flying everywhere.

  “Hungry!” he screams in Chinese. “Si Ui hungry!”

  He turns. There is a cloth stall nearby. Suddenly he and the girl are gone amid a flurry of billowing sarongs. And I follow.

  Incense in the air, stinging my eyes. A shaman gets possessed in a side aisle, his followers hushed. A flash of red. A red sarong, embroidered with gold, a year’s wages, twisting through the crowd. I follow. I see the girl’s terrified eyes. I see Si Ui with the red cloth wrapped around his arms, around the girl. I see something glistening, a knife maybe. And no one sees. No one but me.