International Speculative Fiction #4 Read online

  “Juk! Juk!”

  I’ve lost Sombun somewhere. I don’t care. I thread my way through a bevy of ramwong dancers, through men dressed as women and women dressed as men. Fireworks are going off. There’s an ancient wall, the temple boundary, crumbling... and the trail of red funnels into black night... and I’m standing on the other side of the wall now, watching Si Ui ride away in a pedicab, into the night. There’s moonlight on him. He’s saying something; even from far off I can read his lips; he’s saying it over and over: Si Ui hungry, Si Ui hungry.

  So they find her by the side of the road with her internal organs missing. And I’m there too, all the boys are, at dawn, peering down, daring each other to touch. It’s not a rape or anything, they tell us. Nothing like the other girl. Someone has seen a cowherd near the site, and he’s the one they arrest. He’s an Indian, you see. If there’s anyone the locals despise more than the Chinese, it’s the Indians. They have a saying: if you see a snake and an Indian, kill the babu.

  Later, in the market, Detective Jed is escorting the Indian to the police station, and they start pelting him with stones, and they call him a dirty Indian and a cowshit eater. They beat him up pretty badly in the jail. The country’s under martial law in those days, you know. They can beat up anyone they want. Or shoot them.

  But most people don’t really notice, or care. After all, it is paradise. To say that it is not, aloud, risks making it true. That’s why my mom will never belong to Thailand; she doesn’t understand that everything there resides in what is left unsaid.

  That afternoon I go back to the rubber orchard. He is standing patiently. There’s a bird on a branch. Si Ui is poised. Waiting. I think he is about to pounce. But I’m too excited to wait. “The girl,” I say. “The girl, she’s dead, did you know?”

  Si Ui whirls around in a murderous fury, and then, just as suddenly, he’s smiling.

  “I didn’t mean to break your concentration,” I say.

  “Girl soft,” Si Ui says. “Tender.” He laughs a little. I don’t see a vicious killer. All I see is loneliness and hunger.

  “Did you kill her?” I say.

  “Kill?” he says. “I don’t know. Si Ui hungry.” He beckons me closer. I’m not afraid of him. “Do like me,” he says. He crouches. I crouch too. He stares at the bird. And so do I. “Make like a tree now,” he says, and I say, “Yes. I’m a tree.” He’s behind me. He’s breathing down my neck. Am I the next bird? But somehow I know he won’t hurt me.

  “Now!” he shrieks. Blindly, instinctively, I grab the sparrow in both hands. I can feel the quick heart grow cold as the bones crunch. Blood and birdshit squirt into my fists. It feels exciting, you know, down there, inside me. I killed it. The shock of death is amazing, joyous. I wonder if this is what grownups feel when they do things to each other in the night.

  He laughs. “You and me,” he says, “now we same-same.”

  He shows me how to lick the warm blood as it spurts. It’s hotter than you think. It pulses, it quivers, the whole bird trembles as it yields up its spirit to me.

  And then there’s the weirdest thing. You know that hunger, the one that’s gnawed at me, like a wound that won’t close up, since we were dragged to that camp... it’s suddenly gone. In its place there’s a kind of nothing.

  The Buddhists here say that heaven itself is a kind of nothing. That the goal of all existence is to become as nothing.

  And I feel it. For all of a second or two, I feel it. “I know why you do it,” I say. “I won’t tell anyone, I swear.”

  “Si Ui knows that already.”

  Yes, he does. We have stood on common ground. We have shared communion flesh. Once a month, a Chinese priest used to come to the camp and celebrate mass with a hunk of maggoty man to, but he never made me feel one with anyone, let alone God.

  The blood bathes my lips. The liver is succulent and bursting with juices.

  Perhaps this is the first person I’ve ever loved.

  The feeling lasts a few minutes. But then comes the hunger, swooping down on me, hunger clawed and ravenous. It will never go away, not completely.

  They have called in an exorcist to pray over the railway tracks. The mother of the girl they found there has become a nun, and she stands on the gravel pathway lamenting her karma. The most recent victim has few to grieve for her. I overhear Detective Jed talking to my mother. He tells her there are two killers. The second one had her throat cut and her internal organs removed... the first one, strangulation, all different... he’s been studying these cases, these ritual killers, in American psychiatry books. And the cowherd has an alibi for the first victim.

  I’m only half-listening to Jed, who drones on and on about famous mad killers in Europe. Like the butcher of Hanover, Jack the Ripper. How their victims were always chosen in a special way. How they killed over and over, always a certain way, a ritual. How they always got careless after a while, because part of what they were doing came from a hunger, a desperate need to be found out. How after a while they might leave clues... confide in someone... how he thought he had one of these cases on his hands, but the authorities in Bangkok weren’t buying the idea. The village of Thapsakae just wasn’t grand enough to play host to a reincarnation of Jack the Ripper.

  I listen to him, but I’ve never been to Europe, and it’s all just talk to me. I’m much more interested in the exorcist, who’s a Brahmin, in white robes, hair down to his feet, all nappy and filthy, a dozen flower garlands around his neck, and amulets tinkling all over him.

  “The killer might confide in someone,” says Jed, “someone he thinks is in no position to betray him, someone perhaps too simpleminded to understand. Remember, the killer doesn’t know he’s evil. In a sense, he really can’t help himself. He doesn’t think the way we think. To himself, he’s an innocent.”

  The exorcist enters his trance and sways and mumbles in unknown tongues. The villagers don’t believe the killer’s an innocent. They want to lynch him.

  Women washing clothes find a young girl’s hand bobbing up and down, and her head a few yards downstream. Women are panicking in the marketplace. They’re lynching Indians, Chinese, anyone alien. But not Si Ui; he’s a simpleton, after all. The village idiot is immune from persecution because every village needs an idiot.

  The exorcist gets quite a workout, capturing spirits into baskets and jars.

  Meanwhile, Si Ui has become the trusted Jek, the one who cuts the gailan in the fields and never cheats anyone of their two-saleung bundle of Chinese broccoli.

  I keep his secret. Evenings, after I’m exhausted from swimming all day with Sombun and Lek, or lazing on the back of a water buffalo, I go to the rubber orchard and catch birds as the sun sets. I’m almost as good as him now. Sometimes he says nothing, though he’ll share with me a piece of meat, cooked or uncooked; sometimes he talks up a storm. When he talks pidgin, he sounds like he’s a half-wit. When he talks Thai, it’s the same way, I think. But when he goes on and on in his Hakka dialect, he’s as lucid as they come. I think. Because I’m only getting it in patches.

  One day he says to me, “The young ones taste the best because it’s the taste of childhood. You and I, we have no childhood. Only the taste.”

  A bird flies onto his shoulder, head tilted, chirps a friendly song. Perhaps he will soon be dinner.

  Another day, Si Ui says “Children’s livers are the sweetest, they’re bursting with young life. I weep for them. They’re with me always. They’re my friends. Like you.”

  Around us, paradise is crumbling. Everyone suspects someone else. Fights are breaking out in the marketplace. One day it’s the Indians, another day the chinks, the Burmese. Hatred hangs in the air like the smell of rotten mangoes.

  And Si Ui is getting hungrier.

  My mother is working on her book now, thinking it’ll make her fortune; she waits for the mail, which gets here sometimes by train, sometimes by oxcart. She’s waiting for some letter from Simon and Schuster. It never comes, but she’s having a ball,
in her own way. She stumbles her way through the language, commits appalling solecisms, points her feet, even touches a monk one time, a total sacrilege... but they let her get away with everything. Farangs, after all, are touched by a divine madness. You can expect nothing normal from them.

  She questions every villager, pores over every clue. It never occurs to her to ask me what I know.

  We glut ourselves on papaya and curried catfish.

  “Nicholas,” my mother tells me one evening, after she’s offered me a hit of opium, her latest affectation, “this really is the Garden of Eden.”

  I don’t tell her that I’ve already met the serpent.

  Here’s how the day of reckoning happened, Corey:

  It’s mid-morning and I’m wandering aimlessly. My mother has taken the train to Bangkok with detective Jed. He’s decided that her untouchable farang-ness might get him an audience with some major official in the police department. I don’t see my friends at the river or in the marketplace. But it’s not planting season, and there’s no school. So I’m playing by myself, but you can only flip so many pebbles into the river, and tease so many water buffaloes.

  After a while I decide to go and look for Sombun. We’re not close, he and I, but we’re thrown together a lot; things don’t seem right without him.

  I go to Sombun’s house; it’s a shabby place, but immaculate, a row house in the more “citified” part of the village, if you can call it that. Sombun’s mother is making chili paste, pounding the spices in a stone mortar. You can smell the sweet basil and the lemongrass in the air. And the betelnut, too; she’s chewing on the intoxicant; her teeth are stained red-black from long use.

  “Oh,” she says, “the farang boy.”

  “Where’s Sombun?”

  She’s doesn’t know quite what to make of my Thai, which has been getting better for months. “He’s not home, Little Mouse,” she says. “He went to the Jek’s house to buy broccoli. Do you want to eat?”

  “I’ve eaten, thanks, auntie,” I say, but for politeness’ sake I’m forced to nibble on bright green sali pastry.

  “He’s been gone a long time,” she said, as she pounded. “I wonder if the chink’s going to teach him to catch birds.”

  “Birds?”

  And I start to get this weird feeling. Because I’m the one who catches birds with the Chinaman, I’m the one who’s shared his past, who understands his hunger. Not just any kid.

  “Sombun told me the chink was going to show him a special trick for catching them. Something about putting yourself into a deep state of samadhi, reaching out with your mind, plucking the life-force with your mind. It sounds very spiritual, doesn’t it? I always took the chink for a moron, but maybe I’m misjudging him; Sombun seems to do a much better job,” she said. “I never liked it when they came to our village, but they do work hard.”

  Well, when I leave Sombun’s house, I’m starting to get a little mad. It’s jealousy, of course, childish jealousy; I see that now. But I don’t want to go there and disrupt their little bird-catching session. I’m not a spoilsport. I’m just going to pace up and down by the side of the klong, doing a slow burn.

  The serpent came to me! I was the only one who could see through his madness and his pain, the only one who truly knew the hunger that drove him! That’s what I’m thinking. And I go back to tossing pebbles, and I tease the gibbon chained by the temple’s gate, and I kick a water buffalo around. And, before I knew it, this twinge of jealousy has grown into a kind of rage. It’s like I was one of those birds, only in a really big cage, and I’d been flying and flying and thinking I was free, and now I’ve banged into the prison bars for the first time. I’m so mad I could burst.

  I’m playing by myself by the railway tracks when I see my mom and the detective walking out of the station. And that’s the last straw. I want to hurt someone. I want to hurt my mom for shutting me out and letting strangers into her mosquito net at night. I want to punish Jed for thinking he knows everything. I want someone to notice me.

  So that’s when I run up to them and I say, “I’m the one! He confided in me! You said he was going to give himself away to someone and it was me, it was me!”

  My mom just stares at me, but Jed becomes very quiet. “The Chinaman?” he asks me.

  I say, “He told me children’s livers are the sweetest. I think he’s after Sombun.” I don’t tell him that he’s only going to teach Sombun to catch birds, that he taught me too, that boys are safe from him because like the detective told us, we’re not the special kind of victim he seeks out. “In his house, in the rubber orchard, you’ll find everything,” I say. “Bones. He makes the feet into a stew,” I add, improvising now, because I’ve never been inside that house. “He cuts off their faces and dries them on a jerky rack. And Sombun’s with him.”

  The truth is, I’m just making trouble. I don’t believe there’s dried faces in the house or human bones. I know Sombun’s going to be safe, that Si Ui’s only teaching him how to squeeze the life force from the birds, how to blunt the ancient hunger. Him instead of me. They’re not going to find anything but dead birds.

  There’s a scream. I turn. I see Sombun’s mother with a basket of fish, coming from the market. She’s overheard me, and she cries, “The chink is killing my son!” Faster than thought, the street is full of people, screaming their anti-chink epithets and pulling out butcher knives. Jed’s calling for reinforcements. Street vendors are tightening their phakhomas around their waists.

  “Which way?” Jed asks, and suddenly I’m at the head of an army, racing full tilt toward the rubber orchard, along the neon green of the young rice paddies, beside the canals teeming with catfish, through thickets of banana trees, around the walls of the old temple, through the fields of gailan... and this too feeds my hunger. It’s ugly. He’s a Chinaman. He’s the village idiot. He’s different. He’s an alien. Anything is possible.

  We’re converging on the gailan field now. They’re waving sticks. Harvesting sickles. Fishknives. They’re shouting, “Kill the chink, kill the chink.” Sombun’s mother is shrieking and wailing, and Detective Jed has his gun out. Tae Pak, the village rich man, is vainly trying to stop the mob from trampling his broccoli. The army is unstoppable. And I’m their leader, I brought them here with my little lie. Even my mother is finally in awe.

  I push through the bamboo thicket and we’re standing in the clearing in the rubber orchard now. They’re screaming for the Jek’s blood. And I’m screaming with them.

  Si Ui is nowhere to be found. They’re beating on the ground now, slicing it with their scythes, smashing their clubs against the trees. Sombun’s mother is hysterical. The other women have caught her mood, and they’re all screaming now, because someone is holding up a sandal... Sombun’s.

  ...a little Chinese boy hiding in a closet...

  The image flashes again. I must go up into the house. I steal away, sneak up the steps, respectfully removing my sandals at the veranda, and I slip into the house.

  A kerosene lamp burns. Light and shadows dance. There is a low wooden platform for a bed, a mosquito net, a woven rush mat for sleeping; off in a corner, there is a closet.

  Birds everywhere. Dead birds pinned to the walls. Birds’ heads piled up on plates. Blood spatters on the floorplanks. Feathers wafting. On a charcoal stove in one corner, there’s a wok with some hot oil and garlic, and sizzling in that oil is a heart, too big to be the heart of a bird...

  My eyes get used to the darkness. I see human bones in a pail. I see a young girl’s head in a jar, the skull sawn open, half the brain gone. I see a bowl of pickled eyes.

  I’m not afraid. These are familiar sights. This horror is a spectral echo of Nanking, nothing more.

  “Si Ui,” I whisper. “I lied to them. I know you didn’t do anything to Sombun. You’re one of the killers who does the same thing over and over. You don’t eat boys. I know I’ve always been safe with you. I’ve always trusted you.”

  I hear someone crying. The whimp
er of a child.

  “Hungry,” says the voice. “Hungry.”

  A voice from behind the closet door...

  The door opens. Si Ui is there, huddled, bone-thin, his phakomah about his loins, weeping, rocking.

  Noises now. Angry voices. They’re clambering up the steps. They’re breaking down the wall planks. Light streams in.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper. I see fire flicker in his eyes, then drain away as the mob sweeps into the room.

  My grandson was hungry, too. When he said he could eat the world, he wasn’t kidding. After the second decaf frappuccino, there was Italian ice in the Oriental’s coffee shop, and then, riding back on the Skytrain to join the chauffeur who had conveniently parked at the Sogo mall, there was a box of Smarties. Corey’s mother always told me to watch the sugar, and she had plenty of Ritalin in stock—no prescription needed here—but it was always my pleasure to defy my daughter-in-law and leave her to deal with the consequences.

  Corey ran wild in the skytrain station, whooping up the staircases, yelling at old ladies. No one minded. Kids are indulged in Babylon East; little blond boys are too cute to do wrong. For some, this noisy, polluted, chaotic city is still a kind of paradise.

  My day of revelations ended at my son’s townhouse in Sukhumvit, where maids and nannies fussed over little Corey and undressed him and got him in his Pokémon pajamas as I drained a glass of Beaujolais. My son was rarely home; the taco chain consumed all his time. My daughter-in-law was a social butterfly; she had already gone out for the evening, all pearls and Thai silk. So it fell to me to go into my grandson’s room and to kiss him goodnight and goodbye.

  Corey’s bedroom was little piece of America, with its Phantom Menace drapes and its Playstation. But on a high niche, an image of the Buddha looked down; a decaying garland still perfumed the air with a whiff of jasmine. The air conditioning was chilly; the Bangkok of the rich is a cold city; the more conspicuous the consumption, the lower the thermostat setting. I shivered, even as I missed Manhattan in January.