Three Flames

by Alan Lightman

  Vann didn’t say anything for a while. He was thinking. Or maybe he was just staring at the table. Long ago, Pich concluded that sometimes Vann was really thinking, and sometimes it just seemed as though he was thinking. He wasn’t as smart as he looked. Pich had never liked Vann. In fact, he didn’t really like any of the boys in the gang. They all acted as if they were more clever than they were.

  “Our business is over,” Vann finally said. “Now I’m going to have to get some other job. I might have to sell vegetables. Or work on a fucking farm. Have you ever done that? You ever worked on your father’s farm?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you might have to. I had a dream about working on a farm. I was squatting in the mud, picking snails out of the ditches. Can you believe that? Me picking snails.”

  “You shouldn’t dream,” said Pich. He drained his glass of rice wine and ate a piece of prahok.

  “Everybody dreams. It’s good for you.”

  “Anyway, you still have plenty of money,” said Pich. “You got twice as much as the rest of us.”

  “I spent it.”

  “Really? Ratha and Maline?”

  Vann poured himself another glass of rice wine from the bottle. “You might have to work on your father’s farm,” he said. “Maybe I’ll be working there with you.”

  “Yeah,” said Pich. He was thinking about what Grandmother Pha said. That they were royalty.

  “Maybe we should go to Thailand,” said Vann. “I don’t like this war going on. I heard of a guy who went to Thailand and was getting paid twenty thousand riels a month. What do you think?” Their two girls got off their stools and disappeared behind a curtain without explanation. Another girl was trying to wake up a man who had passed out, his face flat on the bar counter.

  “Thailand?” said Pich. “But what about Ratha and Maline?

  “Bitches. They’re not around anymore. Fuck Ratha and Maline. You and I should go to Thailand and make some money.”

  “I’m not going to Thailand,” said Pich.

  “Come on. Go to Thailand with me.”

  “What are we going to do in Thailand?” said Pich. “You don’t know shit about Thailand. I’m not going to Thailand. Why don’t you ask Dara to go to Thailand with you?”

  “Dara’s joining the army. He’s going to fight the Vietnamese. Or the Khmer Rouge. Whoever.”

  Pich was thinking about the time he and Dara lay under the tamarind tree looking at the stars and that Dara probably wanted to get himself killed. “I’ll talk him out of it.”

  “Do what you want,” said Vann. “I think he’s already gone.”

  Their two girls returned to the bar counter, barefoot, holding another bottle of rice wine. As Pich’s girl leaned over to nuzzle him, the room started to spin around his head. He stood up and sat down again. He’d let himself get drunk. “Shit,” he said to himself. He reached into his pocket. He had only thirty riels left.

  On the trip back to Praek Banan, Pich got sick. Twice he had to lean out the window of the bus to puke. When he finally got home, he couldn’t climb the ladder up to the door, so he lay down in the hammock under the house, next to the oxen. He didn’t bother taking off his clothes. The world was still spinning. Fitfully, he drifted into a drunken sleep. Once during the night, he woke up to the sound of his father pissing in the bushes. “Father,” he whispered. His father glanced over at him and went back up the ladder.

  The next morning, it was still raining hard. Pich lay in the hammock. His head pounded. He didn’t want to do anything today. He just lay in the hammock and listened to the rain. Turning, he saw that the road in front of their house was all mud. An oxcart had gotten stuck, and a man was trying to wedge rocks under its wheels. On the other side of the road, the houses on their stilts had disappeared. All he could see was a gray curtain of rain. Pich’s parents and brother were up in the house. He could hear them talking—something about the bad crop last year and how they’d better have a good one this year to pay debts. He was hungry, but he didn’t want to get out of the hammock, not when the ground underneath had turned into mud. A small river of water flowed down from the road, went under the house and out the other side. Pich inhaled a deep breath of the damp, humid air and watched a particular raindrop as it slowly slid down one of the wooden stilts of the house to the ground.

  Later, his mother came out to go to the market. As soon as she reached the ground, her feet sank in the mud and left gaping holes, which quickly filled up with water. Chann climbed down the ladder and sat on the bottom step and began stitching a torn burlap bag. They weren’t going to the fields today, he said. Tomorrow, they’d begin harvesting the cucumbers.

  “You ought to get up,” said Chann. “Lazy shit.” He picked up a stick and slapped Pich on the leg. That insult couldn’t go without a response. Pich got out of the hammock and found a stick of his own. Soon the boys were out on the road, thrusting at each other with their sticks as they’d done when they were kids. The rain was coming down hard. Their clothes were sopping wet, their legs covered with mud halfway up to their knees. With each step, the mud gripped their feet like hands holding on. They took off their shirts. The rain against Pich’s chest felt like little fingers jabbing his skin. Back and forth they swiped at each other. Chann lunged forward and poked Pich’s chest with his stick. Then he retreated. Pich advanced and struck his brother’s arm. He looked toward their house. It had vanished like the other houses, inside the cave of the rain. He could hear the man with the stuck oxcart shouting at his ox but couldn’t see him. Now the rain felt good on Pich’s body. He felt as if he were in a cool dream. A mansion of water enveloped him. He was walking through mansions of water. Then he was floating. He lunged again. Somewhere, he heard a scream. It was Chann’s scream. Through the curtains of water, he saw Chann fling up his hand to his good eye. Blood streamed down his face and mixed with the rain.

  Pich rode in the bus with his parents and brother to the hospital in Phnom Penh. Since the accident, no one had said a word to him. It was as if he had disappeared in the rain. How had it happened? He went over the moment again and again in his mind. He could see them there in the rain lunging at each other. He could feel the rain in his mind. On the bus, he sat in the seat behind Chann, his hand on his brother’s shoulder the entire two-hour trip. His mother didn’t stop sobbing. Once, she turned around and looked right through him.

  The next day, Pich’s father said to him, “The devil is in you. You were born with the devil. We always knew.”

  For the next several days, no one spoke to him. I didn’t mean to, he said over and over. No one spoke to him.

  His parents watched silently as he began packing his clothes. He wanted to say something to Chann. What could he say? He touched his brother’s arm. Chann flinched. Then Pich left. He moved in with his cousin Bona on the other side of the village. I didn’t mean to do it, he told Bona. Bona nodded.

  In a week, Chann began coming out of the family house. He went down the ladder slowly and gingerly, on his rear end, one rung at a time. He wore a white bandana around his forehead, covering both eyes. On the ground, he took small steps and held on to his father’s shoulder. Sometimes his mother led him through the village, holding his hand. Sometimes it was Sna, the fruit seller. Whenever Pich approached, Chann’s helpers waved him away.

  Chann could no longer work on the farm. He started helping Sna in his stall at the market. Pich saw him there, taking rambutans out of a burlap bag and arranging them for buyers, each a bright red ball with spiny threads. Chann sat on a stool. He would reach into the burlap bag and bring out a cluster of rambutans. Then he would break them off at the stem one by one, feel around for the table and the other rambutans, and place the new ones next to them. He did the same thing over and over again. Pich watched from the tire seller’s stall. He was obsessed with witnessing the destruction he’d caused. He wanted to wallow in the destruction, feel it cut through his body.

  He had nothing to do now. He had no job and no mon
ey. He was living off his cousin. Most mornings, he would just sit outside Phirum’s restaurant or watch the sellers set up their stalls in the market, then walk along the muddy main road past the pagoda, past the salt seller’s house, and end up near his family home. He’d stand across the way for a few minutes, not sure why he was there. Maybe he should join the army. He looked across at his house, waiting for someone to appear.

  One night, Pich dreamed that he was in a field full of water buffalo. It was after sundown, but he could see everything clearly. The water buffalo stood in a line by a flooded rice field, hundreds of them. He walked down the line and one by one slit their throats with a kitchen knife. Black blood sprayed from the cuts. Each butchered animal fell sideways into the flooded field with a splash. When he woke from the dream, it was still night. He looked up from his sleeping mat and saw that the walls of Bona’s house were moving toward each other, and the kerosene lamp was casting the shadow of the Buddha on the palm-leaf roof, and the shadow was twitching this way and that. The walls of the room were coming closer and closer until they were only two meters away on all sides of him and they were still coming at him, about to crush him, and he couldn’t breathe. He was sucking in big heaves of air but he still couldn’t breathe.

  Another night, he dreamed that he was digging a wide and deep hole in the ground near the pagoda. Again, it was dark. His shovel hit something at the bottom of the hole. It was bone. It was a skull. Somehow, the skull was familiar. At that moment, his grandmother Pha appeared. She’d definitely put on weight. But she wore the same ratty krama around her neck as when he saw her on the west hill. She looked at him standing in the hole. Her face glowed silver in the moonlight. My little Pich, she said. Did you mean to do it? I don’t know, he answered. Everyone else knows, she said. Pha reached out and placed her hand lightly on his shoulder, and he began crying. Little Pich, she said. He couldn’t stop crying.

  He remembered the dream in the morning as he sat eating rice and egg with his cousin. “You look tired,” said Bona. “I haven’t been sleeping well,” said Pich. “Mosquitoes,” said his cousin. “I’ll get a net for you.” “I’m all right,” said Pich. “You can’t be all right,” said Bona. His cousin began washing a bowl with a tin can of rainwater. The water ran into a bucket. “You can work with me selling rice,” said his cousin. “Mr. Dinh comes once a week with his truck to buy rice. As long as the cadres don’t attack him on the road from Praek Chrey. You can help me round up the rice from the farmers.” Pich nodded. He looked out the window at a procession of monks passing by in their saffron robes and yellow umbrellas.

  That night, Pich walked to his family house and climbed up the ladder. He stood in the doorway. He could see on the table little packages of mango and sticky rice. Damp clothes hung from a string stretching diagonally across the room. His mother and father and brother were eating rice and dried fish. When his parents saw him standing there, they stopped eating. “The devil is not coming to this house ever again,” said Pich’s father. Suddenly, Pich didn’t know what to do with his hands. They didn’t feel like his hands. He put them in his pockets, then let them drop by his side, then put them in his pockets again. He stood there a moment. Then he left.

  He didn’t return to his family home until years later, when his parents were dead.

  SREYPOV

  (2015)

  I.

  When rice shoots turn brown,

  Our bellies are emptied—

  The Buddha has frowned,

  And he loves us no more.

  Mekh. Sky. That was the name she gave to her journal, written in blue ink on the first page. And underneath, her name, Eng Sreypov. Youngest daughter of Eng Pich and Srun Ryna. Embossed on the journal’s cover was a luminous image of a Western woman with flowing gold hair, aglow with bright petals of flowers, and a child’s face nestled in that hair. The journal had been a gift from a city cousin of Sreypov’s mother, Ryna, who then gave it to Sreypov a few months after she turned thirteen. She was the only one of her friends who kept a journal. Those pale blank pages, into which she wrote poems as well as private thoughts, she cherished like her breath. She had begun writing poetry after her ninth-grade teacher required the students to memorize parts of the Reamker, recited in the burning mornings before the young scholars went home for lunch. Titles of some of the poems: “Blood Monsoon,” “Twilight,” “Starvation,” “A Visit to the End of the World,” “Mother Sleep,” “Walking Through Night Trees.” A newspaper devoted to Cambodian youth, Samleng Yuvachan, ran a competition for rural students and published several of Sreypov’s poems.

  From the beginning, it was a journal of both sadness and joy. The first page, written by the light of a kerosene lamp in the females’ area behind the hanging sheet: “10 March 2011. Sister Thida came back a week ago. Mae and I waited in Praek Khmau two hours for her bus. I’m so happy she’s back. I can’t even remember what she looked like when she left. She’s so skinny now. When I hug her, I can feel her bones. Mae is giving her coconut milk every day and sleeps with her. She hardly says anything. Also, she’s afraid to leave the house. I told her that when Mae dies, I will take care of her. When I said that, she started crying. She doesn’t even look at Father. I know that he did a terrible thing to her. It is a shame of the family.”

  On a later page of Mekh, shortly after her sixteenth birthday: “17 May 2014: Sometimes, I can see the insides of my body. There’s a solar system in there, with a sun and a moon and planets whirling around. I think it must have come from a previous life. Possibly I was a star before I became a human. I know that I am different from other people. I can feel light. Definitely. It’s a tingle on my skin. I can also feel dark. When I feel dark, I am kind of excited, but scared. My stomach gets heavy.”

  It was at the age of ten that Sreypov began going outside at night to lie on her back in the rice fields and look up at the stars. At the time, the family had just endured two straight seasons of diseased crops, with barely two or three eggs to eat per week, and Thida had gone off to Phnom Penh to work in a garment factory. She didn’t come back for three years. In those bad times, Sreypov’s parents were always arguing over money, so she began slipping out of the house after dinner and walking to the neighboring fields, where she could find peace. Even at age ten, Sreypov liked to be by herself. At first, Ryna worried about the child’s safety and tried to stop the nocturnal excursions. “I’ll be careful, Mae,” Sreypov would reply without slowing, and she’d continue down the ladder to the dirt road. Outside, she’d pass Mr. Noeum’s house, with the bushy weeds growing in front and the broken moto, then Mr. Em’s ghost-inhabited house on the other side of the road, Mr. Ly’s house, Mr. Sen’s house with a clothesline strung across his front yard, Makara and Sayon’s house with the wire chicken coop in the back—all the houses glowing with kerosene lamps and an occasional electric light.

  The men were all farmers except for Mr. Ly, who bought cheap motos from Vietnam and sold them in Praek Banan and the surrounding villages. Mr. Ly was the most prosperous man in the village. Some people wondered why he didn’t move to Phnom Penh. Others said that he liked being a big fish in a small pond. One year, Sreypov helped Mrs. Ly with her shopping when she was ill, and Sreypov still received little gifts of fruit from her at the Khmer New Year. Every night, Mr. and Mrs. Ly’s house was brightly lit with a string of electric lights, run off a big gasoline generator. The machine sounded like three moto engines going at once. When Mr. Ly’s generator was cranking, nobody in the village could sleep, and all the oxen under the houses shifted and snorted. On her way to the night fields, Sreypov would put her hands over her ears when she passed Mr. Ly’s house. She’d wind around the moon shadows of pigs and cow poops in the dark road, then on to Mr. Bayon’s dry goods store, where there were usually some teenaged boys sitting outside smoking and playing cards by the light of a kerosene lamp. That’s where she left the main road and headed south toward Mr. Hang’s fields. In another kilometer, she couldn’t hear Mr. Ly’s generator or any s
ounds from the village. It was pure quiet, and pure dark. For the first month, she just stood there for a half hour, happy in the silence. Then she began lying down in a dry spot and looking up.

  It was another world up in the night sky. After a few minutes, Sreypov would feel herself falling into that world. How far did it go? she wondered.

  Lying there, she lost track of the animal sounds in the fields, she lost track of her body, she lost track of time. She just was. She saw patterns in the stars, not the ones she’d learned in school, but other patterns: trees and ships and crowns that princesses wore. Did each star know that it was part of a pattern? It must. And yet each star was alone, like her, a single point in the world. The stars were bright little eyes looking at her, the tiny spokes of light coming down to exactly the spot where she lay in Mr. Hang’s fields and tingling her skin. She felt comforted by them, so quiet and confident and still. Yes, it was a stillness. The night sky was the mind of the Buddha. And it seemed that the vast expanse of time, going back to before her parents were born and before her grandparents were born and back and back through the generations that she never would know, and then going forward in time to when her parents would be dead, and she would be dead, on and on into the future—all of that unending strand of time seemed compressed to a dot. That single dot contained everything that was and everything that would be. She was that dot.

  When Sreypov came out of the trance, sounds would appear in her mind. Eventually, the sounds turned into words, which later turned into poems.

  “Why do you go out there at night, mi-oun?” her mother asked. “Once upon a time I was a star,” said Sreypov. Ryna nodded and gave her daughter a kiss. “You are beautiful like a star.” Then Sreypov would read Ryna her latest poem while her mother listened with closed eyes. “I want to be a poet,” said Sreypov. “Like Krom Ngoy.” “You will be,” said Ryna. “You are the fire in this family. You are the fire.”