“It’s funny, Krungthep in the 2010s and 2020s doesn’t seem that long ago,” says Pig.
“A handful of decades can feel like a few seconds. Do you miss it, that old city?”
“Every day, painfully. What is it that you want me to see?”
Mai already knows where they are on the timeline, but she looks at the watch on her wrist, out of habit.
“Should be soon. I can quicken the minutes, but I think it’s better just to wait a little. Come, follow me. I want to be close, when it happens.”
She grabs Pig’s hand, and they walk down the steps to the garden beside the old house. The guard on duty at the entrance booth, whom she doesn’t recognize, squats on the ground, reading a newspaper folded in one hand. He’s definitely sourced from someone’s public memories. Does he even notice her and Pig in front of him? There’s a vast difference between him, this ornamental figure inserted into the scenery, and her, a conscious, feeling entity, isn’t there? What’s alive and what’s not: there has to be an inviolate line between them, somewhere.
“Mai, let me ask you something,” says Pig, tugging her hand.
“What?”
“Will you miss me?”
“Pig, don’t be stupid, talking like that.”
“Because I’m sure I’ll miss you, whatever I’ll be then.”
“Some angelic being, I’m sure, reborn on the tenth level of the heavenly realm.”
“More like a wandering ghost. Nobody thinking to make alms or offerings for me. I’ll go hungry.”
“You’re always thinking about eating.”
“Can you blame me? It’s hard enough as it is, having to bear with my daughter-in-law’s cooking.”
“You’ll think this unfair, but I can bring up almost any one of my past meals. Guess what I’m tasting right now.”
“Don’t say Den Pochana.”
“Den Pochana when we were at university, not the replacement. That broth.”
“Now that’s a reason for me to change my mind.”
“I would love it if you did.”
Mai wishes to unsay the words. She’d promised herself: you must let Pig make up her own mind. Still, more words leap from her lips.
“Pig, I don’t want you to think that I’ll be okay when you’re gone. I really won’t. If it’s only money, let me help. I don’t care how much.”
She spent decades donning a suit of professional coolness for her job. Her self-control and discretion ranked highly among her peers in performance reviews. It was much easier then, wasn’t it? Bosses losing their tempers, the lawyers barking across the table, clients saying something awful. She held in her thoughts behind a smile that was also a fortified wall.
“Mai,” says Pig. “For once, I’ll find out something before you. Is that why you’re upset?”
“Stop kidding around. I’m not.”
“I’ve had a good, fortunate life, even with the parts that weren’t so great, and it’s hard to think it won’t last for much longer, but—I can’t explain it—I’m not afraid. Nothing comes after, or everything does. I feel all right not knowing. I’m actually more used to that, by now.”
“I’m sorry. Forget I said anything.”
“I won’t. I know you mean well. I appreciate it.”
Mai draws Pig into a tight one-arm hug. For a long while they stand there, not another word between them.
Then comes the roar, loud and horrible, as if the building has come crashing down on them. But it’s not the kind of a sound that an ear might hear, as she’s found out and as Pig, with eyes widened, is now discovering, too.
When she sees the ground darken, she whispers to Pig, “Look over there.”
Pig turns toward the driveway in front of the building’s garage. Mai guesses from the squinting that, at first, Pig must not have noticed the particular spot. She waits for her friend to look in the right spot. A human mind is adept at wonder that announces itself by taking over someone’s face.
“What’s that strange grayish area?” asks Pig. “Is it a shadow?”
They walk closer to the spot. On the gray concrete is a shape slowly getting larger and darker. Here’s an arm, then another, then legs.
“It looks like a person,” says Pig. “A small person.”
“A shadow of a child perhaps. I’ve often thought so.”
“What happened here?”
“I wish I knew. Much of the old newspaper records went with the floods.”
“Is this not from someone’s memory?”
“That’s the thing: there’s no source for this. I’ve checked. The shadow is here at this spot, part of the scan at the time, yet also not here.”
“Wait, where did it go?”
“Here and then gone.”
“This is kind of frightening. If you weren’t here with me, I would run.”
“There’s nothing to be afraid of. It was only a child’s shadow.”
“A child lying here, not moving. Whatever happened couldn’t have been good.”
“I suspect that, too. Even so, I can’t help but come back here to watch this shadow appear and disappear.”
“Like a ghost.”
“In your world maybe, but there are no ghosts here.”
“What do you think it is?”
“I suppose that it’s an error or artifact that the system never detected. I also think that it might be memory, just not human memory. I admit, I find it strangely comforting. That’s why I wanted to show you, because I know what you’re going to decide.”
“Wait, wait. Who’s doing the remembering?”
“Here. This building, this ground.”
“They can do that?”
“I wish I had a better explanation, but I think that maybe yes, they do, even when we don’t. Places remember us.”
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
Make a fist, spin and spin. Mai can’t help but mouth the song when it sounds again, unprompted, tinny on the conical speakers hung high on metal poles. She spreads her arms and then touches her shoulders, as the song tells her to do. She’s there at the morning assembly with Pig and the other children, all in their uniform of white blouses and blue pleated skirts and those drab Velcro shoes. Her arms and hands, like the others, circulate about her, the instructions by now unnecessary. She thinks of their history exam later, having spent the night memorizing the names of old kings and queens, generals and noblemen, the Greek consul and Japanese mercenaries and French priests. When she finally went to bed she slept soundly, while in her dreams head-wrapped Burmese marched quietly across the porous mountains and fang-infested forests, and soon she was watching the doing of those men: the smoke-eaten old capital in Ayutthaya, its glowing pagodas dripping melted gold into steaming puddles, flashes of swords where steel had yet stained, and through a terrified sparrow’s eyes, surging above its intended flight to escape the heat, she saw the spread of the land, the tall wicks of orange where thatched roofs spewed starry embers and the ashen villages and blackened stubs of men, women, and children curled still on the charred earth. When Pig, in the middle of the calisthenics routine, nudges her at the elbow and asks what questions she thinks the teacher will ask, her arms continue with their movement, stretching out, fanning air, and then her palms extend flat, pushing water. She’s young, her leaf-sized feet slapping water behind Khun Nee’s encouraging shouts. She’s older, her long legs like oars. She smells the chlorine, familiar in the sun-warmed water she’s spitting out, her head turned for a quick breath before sinking again to face the deepening blue of the pool, where she feels she could swim forever, across the length of seas, over wavy kelp and side-walking crabs, over reefs and schools of comical fish, the creatures larger the darker and farther out she swims, so that she’s soaring across leviathans and mile-long serpents and the yellow-green phosphorescence bursting from their fi
ns, and then there are larger creatures, so endlessly massive that it would take the span of her whole life to swim a width of their hair, and as the purple hues blacken above the city, her ears again detecting its enormity waking to night, the car horns and street babble outside the walls, the lawn lights buzzing on, the choir of cicadas under grassy shrubs and security guards by the car park leaping to kick around a takraw ball between shifts, she surfaces to walk up the sloping wet sand, stepping through the cold foamy surf on this beach, where an older Pig has shown up. “Am I interrupting your swim?” Pig asks. So good to see an old friend, yet always so sad, too. A different view opens. The silhouette of the Empire State Building looms in the far distance, in First New York. Glass towers surround her, reflecting the afternoon’s incandescent blue. She bends down, and it’s to pick up her grandchild, who has scampered across the balcony to collapse against her knees.
“Don’t hurt your grandmother,” Phee says to her son from behind the potted rosebushes, kneeling on a blue tarp where she has laid out crumbling mounds of black dirt.
“Neil’s grown so much since last I saw him. A month or two ago, was it?”
“Well, you’re busy, I’m busy.”
“I want to come by more, if that’s okay with you.”
“Whenever you want, Mother.”
“It will be good to spend as much time as possible with him before I afterbody. And with you, of course. I imagine things will be very different next year.”
“You can always delay it later.”
“No, I’d like to just go through with it. Who knows what will happen if I wait longer?”
“Who knows.”
Phee’s worried. The technology’s too new. There are no long-term studies. Why is her mother rushing to jettison the world she has?
“What are you doing to those poor roses?” Mai asks.
“I’m mixing this new fertilizer into the soil. Mrs. Hernandez said that I should try it. You should see her Eau de Nil varieties.”
“Hope it works well for them. I’ve come to learn in a roundabout fashion that every flower blooms in its own odd way.”
It’s summer. The balcony tiles singe the balls of her feet. She picks up her grandson, who lets out a protesting whimper, and carries him over to Phee. His fine black hair, almost umber in this light, brushes the tip of her nose. She smells the shampoo from the morning bath in his little tub and the dried talc on his neck. She hasn’t let herself lock up this memory. If she could, she would tell Pig, in the wherever, that this alone is worth every doubt. Those doubts would disappear, for her, and so would the term afterlife. There is only life, and there is meaningfulness inside it that can never be destroyed or again created. Any physical thing can be recorded—the micro-details of appearance, the sound something makes, its motions and conditions, in whatever encoded distillation of its original—but no one else is going to feel the way she does for this boy at this moment. They say that not long from now, whenever that is, it will be possible for ten thousand years to pass here and only minutes out there. No matter, the machines must someday crumble into rusty mounds and water will leave the earth. This joy within her will always be true.
“You’ll bring him to see me often.”
“Yes, yes, I promise. We’ll go see you every week.”
With her free hand, Mai reaches out to grab a small bud dangling at the end of a stem. It looks like an unripened fig, with fine bristles on its green cover, a sliver of blue peeking from within.
“These are going to be so beautiful. I know it.”
RETURN
My Dearest Andrew,
If you should ever find yourself stricken with disease in the tropics, dispense with any shame for wailing as would a babe left in the woods.
I’m fortunate not to have been so abandoned. My worst night, Miss Crawford stayed by my side to repeatedly apply mustard poultices for the immense pain in my abdomen, and when I could, I swallowed copious amounts of saline solution and castor oil, so that its purgative effects might help to eject the morbid matter that had invaded my bowels. Cloudy fluids smelling of bile and salt poured from me into earthen bowls, which Miss Crawford emptied after each administration. I had earlier requested that she sheathe me with a wool blanket recovered from the reverend’s trunk. It had been wrung, by my instructions, in a hot bath and was then wrapped around my body so that it enshrouded me from head to tremoring limb, with the hope that it would draw blood to the capillaries and improve my circulation. On my sleeping mat, I simmered, drenched in sweat. At times, I found myself laboring to breathe, every draw of air a kick of sawdust in my chest, in contradiction to the wetness everywhere else. The pain in my abdomen always found haste in its return, and my insides felt as if they had been stuffed with sharp gravel. Poor Miss Lisle, poor Reverend, I fully understood the horror of their suffering. I waited for the moment that would be my last, when I would surely join them.
Nevertheless, even as my body failed me, my most instinctive faculties refused the same fate. Like a deer that had found itself cornered by wolves, I fought to persist. I spotted a crooked nail on the ceiling and clung to it with my eyes. I made myself believe that I would immediately perish if I looked away for a mere second. I did not look away. I kept my eyes open. I took in the surface of that rusty nail, which to a man of infinitesimal size must have seemed an endless red desert, pocked by vast craters where moisture had nibbled away the iron.
I know this because, as I fixed my sight on the nail, I became that man in miniature. Although my body had been lain supine underneath that nail, I was also making my passage across its pitiless landscape, tormented by the unceasing stillness of that world. It was quiet, with the exception of faint noises emanating from somewhere in the distance. It was song, I recognized, and I moved toward it. I couldn’t gauge how far I had to go. I simply followed this most peculiar sound.
When night arrived and I could no longer see the nail, my journey did not pause. I continued in darkness. Instead of rusty dunes, I was now crossing through black space sometimes interrupted by gossamerlike ribbons of light that, farther upon my trek, I came to recognize as streets lined by faint contours of edifices and doorways, and at times, moving forms that resembled, if only for a second, human shapes. Gradually, I realized that this devil’s scenery was alarmingly familiar because I had walked it before, during my stay in New York, before leaving for the Orient.
Do you recall my telling of those visits to the Bowery? Can you conjure the scenes I then described or drew for you—the desperate leisure-making of debauched souls in damp saloons and the wriggling of bodies in the perfumed parlors of bordellos? Do you remember my pride at having resisted their invitations to degenerate leisures? The truth is that I did more than pass through that temptatious scenery. I drowned in Babylonia’s drink and pleasured in flesh many times, yet I saw myself separate from the men who fell. I feel compelled now to tell you this, with apologies for having made you believe otherwise. I almost missed my opportunity to reveal my truer face and for you to see me as He does.
Have no fear for me, brother, if you still believe me worthy of your love and trust. My disease has since lifted. I can again sit upright at my desk. I can eat and drink by my own strength and even make brief visits to patients. The best of it, the cooks accommodate my requests without rancor.
I am told that the carts no longer have need to come around. The streets of Bangkok are returned to the living and slaughterhouses are enlivened again with the bleats of doomed creatures.
A letter from the Society arrived yesterday. With the loss of the reverend, and considering the progress of past efforts, the board thought it best to dissolve the mission. I have been offered my choice of postings in China.
I shall decline it. You will find me here in Siam.
After my recent ordeal, you must think my decision folly. Would it not be easier and far more prudent to return to Troy to join Father�
�s practice, or to seek another fellowship at the medical college? Yes, it would be. And I realize that what remains of Father’s and Mother’s years will diminish each day, and that among our friends, my name will be mentioned with shaken heads. I suspect I will soon become but a shadow occasionally recalled, perhaps a memory discarded altogether.
And yet I know my decision to be the right one. I’ve been thinking of when I knew it so. I could say it was after that harrowing night passed, when I opened my eyes not to a red desert but to a bluing dawn, and the familiar shrieking of parrots in the trees made me aware of where I’d returned, but it was not then. And it was not when I saw Miss Crawford enter my room, and I could guess from the radiant joy on her face, and the tears in those kind eyes, that I had regained some visible vitality. I did not have any extraordinary vision. I was not visited by angels. Yet the godly I did see, as I lay in my room.
In my most dire state, I came upon a grand house atop a hill in the rusty desert. I knew, by some intuition, that the song I’d been hearing had come from here. I thought it to be Gransden Hall, yet I could not be certain. Every aspect of the house was at the same time familiar and strange. There were wooden chairs on the porch that I didn’t recognize, yet it seemed natural that they should be there. A glimpse through the window revealed dark wood furniture in the style of our parlor, I was sure. The scene felt welcoming, and I did not want to question why I had failed to identify our home with confidence. Does it make sense that I could feel utterly lost and, in the same heartbeat, delighted by my return somewhere?
I entered through a side door near the kitchen hearth and wandered, room to room. It appeared that I had arrived on the occasion of a banquet. There was commotion in the house—the sound of hurried footsteps upstairs and the bumping of jars in the pantry—and then my ears registered laughter from the parlor. Someone was telling a story, and I imagined it was either Father or Uncle Merton regaling the room with the usual tales from their time in the western territories. I heard a child playing in the hall, and I was seized by joy, from not having seen our little sister for a very long time. It was unapparent to me then that it had been decades, and I did not question that she had lived. Yet, as I roamed through the house, I was met by no one. There was only the house, as pristine and glorious as ever, with the furnishings and floors unmarred by any dust, as if they had been cleaned and tidied that very morning. I was upstairs in the midst of my search, frustrated by the belief that everyone, even Mother, was playing some cruel trick on me, when I heard the rising notes of a piano through the floor slats, and I immediately rushed down to see if Annabeth was practicing from her songbooks or if the devil himself was fingering the keys.
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