by Jim Algie
“Look at it this way. Many of our friends and family members aren’t even alive now. We’re lucky we survived.” Tik Lin raised the bottle up in the direction of the moon. “To you, father, mother, big sister, little brother, and all our dead friends from the village. I will always be grateful for your many favors and kindnesses.”
Every time he got drunk Tik Lin repeated the same sentimental spiel. See Ouey snatched the bottle out of his hand and drained it. “Most of the time I wish I was dead, too.”
“Big brother, I’m not going to indulge your bitterness anymore. I have to go and find a rich customer for one last fare of the night.” He staggered towards the other rickshaw-pullers.
Tik Lin was a liar, too. He was actually going to see one of the whores like he did every time he got this drunk. “What a fool…rhino horn…oh, I’m a rich Thai banker…yes, sir…please, sir…thank you, sir,” See Ouey muttered to himself. “Go to hell, sir. The Black Tiger God’s fang is much stronger than your horn.”
See Ouey squatted down on the dirt road, losing his balance and falling over sideways on his right elbow. Cockroaches skittered past him. He stood up and began stomping on them, pretending they were communists, Japanese soldiers and rich customers who’d scorned him.
Slathered in sweat, See Ouey squatted like a duck beside the metal shutters fronting a Chinese herbalist. The smell of herbs seeped from under the shutters. He drained the last drops of liquor from the bottle. Just then, one of the women, wearing a short red dress walked out of the huddle of rickshaw-pullers, arousing stares and a few wisecracks. She returned the insults and laughed.
See Ouey stared at the roundness of her breasts, like Chinese pears ripe for the licking. His mouth opened. As she came closer, her heels scraping the dirt, his eyes moved down to the darkened hollow between her legs, imagining the swallow’s nest feathered with fine black hair. When she walked past, his eyes fastened themselves to the mounds of her bottom, near enough so he saw the upside down triangle of her underwear.
His testicles began breathing.
Without wanting to, without even thinking about it, See Ouey stood up and followed her. The lane was dark and narrow. It was flanked by shop-houses. He couldn’t stop, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but creep up closer and closer behind her. The young woman’s hips held sway over him. They pulled him along like a water buffalo with a rope through its nose.
The Black Tiger God smashed her over the head with the empty bottle. She fell to her knees beside a pile of baskets stinking of garbage. Wielding the bottle like a club, he dented the back of her skull three more times. She fell on her face. He grabbed her by the hair and rolled her over on to her back. He knelt down and dropped the bottle. Then the god ripped the front of her dress open and tore off her bra.
She let out a shriek and tried to slap his face. With one hand he pinned her arms. With the other, he grabbed the gold chain around her neck and pulled it tight as a noose. The woman gurgled and wept. Her eyes bulged like a toad as he tightened his stranglehold.
After she stopped struggling, he looked at her bare breasts, massaging them with his palms, before taking the bud of her right nipple into his mouth as he slid her underwear down. Moving on top of her, he pulled the bottoms of his pyjamas down.
She screamed.
“Shut up!” he hissed.
She screamed again.
He smashed the bottle open and stabbed the serrated side into her throat. As the bottle severed her jugular vein a geyser of blood erupted.
The coppery smell and taste gave the Black Tiger God a rush of bloodlust. With his fangs, he tore off her nipple. Using the jagged end of the bottle like a phallus, he pushed it in and out, in and out, the bottle squelching as it sawed back and forth inside her sex.
Down the street a dog barked. Another dog howled.
See Ouey looked up. Then he looked down at the woman, her throat gashed open like a vagina. What happened? Where was he? Who was she? He couldn’t remember anything. One minute he was talking to Tik Lin, the next he was kneeling beside this woman, whom somebody had murdered. Why? Why would someone do that?
See Ouey picked up the gold chain and put it in his pocket. With blood drying on his face, he ran down the lane as a pack of street dogs tore at the flesh of the dying woman.
II. Meditations on Death Row
THE CELLS IN THE JAIL reminded See Ouey of the cargo hold in the belly of the boat he and Tik Lin had sailed on to Thailand. The hold was dark and dank, too, poisoned with the eye-watering stench of sweat and urine, rats and roaches scuttling everywhere. In a way, death row was better: no swells or storms to turn his stomach inside out. In another way, it was far worse: See Ouey was astonished to find out that he’d become the biggest mass murderer in Thai history.
“Watch your back, cannibal,” one of the guards told him, “because you’re going to get eaten alive in here. That’s why they nicknamed this prison the ‘Big Tiger.’”
Wearing leg-irons like all the other inmates, See Ouey sat in a corner of the cell with four other Chinese men, near a hole in the floor for a toilet. He always kept his back against the wall to watch the other convicts.
The only relief from the constant threats and the boredom was playing mahjong with bottle caps. Between games, See Ouey and the other Chinese men passed their days complaining about the prison, the guards, the lousy food, their unfair death-sentences, pulling rickshaws, the communists, the Japanese soldiers—one complaint after another. The other men had been convicted of murdering the local owner of a Thai fishing trawler who had refused to pay them their wages after four months at sea.
None of them complained as bitterly as See Ouey. He had not killed three men, one woman and four children. The police had made him a scapegoat. All he could remember was the Black Tiger God consuming the fat man and the prostitute, pawning the gold necklace and getting drunk with Tik Lin, who berated him in the back of his rickshaw one night. “I can’t believe you sent those letters to your wife warning her about how bad life was here and that she shouldn’t come unless she wanted to work on Green Lantern Lane.”
“I thought it was better to be honest.”
“You’re not honest. You’re just stupid and naïve. No wonder our wives found other men. I also can’t believe you trusted that man to actually send the money to your wife.”
“He was my friend. He was from Hainan. So I trusted him.”
“He’s an opium addict and you can never trust them.”
“Is he?”
“Look at him! You could stand him up in a field to scare the birds away.”
See Ouey remembered their argument, but he didn’t recall killing Tik Lin and eating his liver, like the police said. He also didn’t recall murdering the pawnbroker who wrote the letters for him and promised to send the money to his wife. Those killings were not his fault. He was drunk and the Black Tiger God was hungry. That was all.
A rat landed in See Ouey’s lap. He leapt to his feet, squealing. Some of the inmates laughed. One of them yelled, “Hey Chink, I thought you were hungry.” See Ouey snatched up the rat and bit off its head. He spat the head at the inmate who had yelled at him. He bared his teeth and snarled at the dozen other inmates in his cell. Then he threw the rat on the floor and leapt up and down like a monkey, chattering gibberish, until the guards restrained him.
One of the inmates said, “Better leave him alone. The fucking cannibal is crazy.”
See Ouey’s ploy paid off. The other inmates, even the guards, thought he was insane. From a distance, they still taunted him in the prison yard, where the death-row convicts were only allowed an hour a day of sunlight, but they wouldn’t come near him.
That would prolong his life a little. It would not save him from the executioner. The inmates on death row lived with the constant threat of their sentences being executed without any warning whatsoever. There were no appeals and no reprieves, no chances to contact or meet with their friends and families. The guards came for them late in the aft
ernoon. Within twenty minutes they were dead. One convict in the cell next to him had heard a rumor that he was next and slashed his wrists open. The guards took him to the doctor to stitch up the wounds. Then he was executed.
After two months in prison, See Ouey dreamed of a wandering monk he’d once given food and shelter to in his shack by the orchard of dragon fruit on Hainan. The monk reminded him of an old saying he’d first heard his mother use, “Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.”
That was true. For too long See Ouey had cursed the darkness. Now he would light a candle. The monk had shown him how to meditate. At the back of the cell, lit by a single light bulb protected by wire mesh, See Ouey sat cross-legged, his eyes closed, counting to seven as he slowly inhaled. While exhaling he counted backwards. He acknowledged the voices he heard, the smell of bodily wastes, the memories lighting up then dimming, the stabs of hunger. He acknowledged all of these thoughts and sensations. Then he tried to let them go.
Deep in meditation, his breath rising and falling like the sea, he questioned the nature of his anger. What did these words like “rickshaw Chink” really mean? A rickshaw was made out of wood, tires, an axle, seats, and many other things. It was complicated. It was connected to a lot of different things.
Was See Ouey a Chink? There were millions of people in China, all of them different. It was absurd to call them all by the same name.
See Ouey decided that the noises people made with their mouths meant as little as the wind, or children babbling to themselves. From now on, he would speak only when necessary, choosing his words carefully.
Memories kept disturbing his peace of mind. Tik Lin said, “Did you hear about the empress who had a life-size phallus carved out of jade for her personal use?”
“No, I wonder how much that would cost.”
Tik Lin cocked an eyebrow. “New or used?”
A smile spread across See Ouey’s face. He’d been unfair to his old friend. Sure, Tik Lin was a loudmouth and a braggart, quick-tempered and obsessed with sex, but he loved to make people laugh. Tik Lin liked to remind him that he was too serious, that he didn’t see the funny side of life. And he was right about See Ouey’s bad memory, his poor judgment of other people, and his selfish bitterness—
See Ouey jumped up and down on Tik Lin’s chest, breaking his ribs, crushing his lungs.
Remembering that murder, he opened his eyes. No, no, no. He massaged his forehead with his hands to wipe away the memories. He concentrated on his breathing again. But he couldn’t escape the truth. The Black Tiger God had not done that to Tik Lin. See Ouey had. The Black Tiger God hadn’t killed or eaten or raped anyone. See Ouey had done these things. There was no one else to blame. Not the alcohol or the opium, the Japanese or the communists, the poverty or the discrimination.
But the four children? He only remembered throwing the pawn-broker’s son against a wall to make him stop crying. He didn’t remembering devouring the boy’s liver.
How did that happen? The last few days of his freedom returned to him through the murky, fish-bowl haze of a week-long debauch, alternating days of alcohol with ten-pipe sessions in different opium dens. He remembered pawning the gold necklace. He remembered the argument with Tik Lin, but what night was that? The third or fourth night? The fifth?
His legs went numb. He unfolded them and rubbed his calves. The chains around his ankles chafed at all the blisters weeping pus.
He remembered lying in the opium den on the wooden bed, beside one of the hard, square pillows the owners used to discourage customers from staying too long, when the woman he’d killed looked down on him, her red dress in tatters, a mirror covering the breast he’d savaged. The mirror was emblazoned with an image of the Black Tiger God holding a blade in its mouth. But the mirror reflected See Ouey’s eyes and teeth. She held up her hands, two more mirrors glued to her palms, like he was an evil spirit she wanted to banish. Each of them reflected the same image of the Black Tiger God but with See Ouey’s eyes and mouth. He tried to close his eyes but couldn’t. He tried to move his head, but that was impossible too.
See Ouey crawled across a battlefield, shells rippling the mud under his belly. See Ouey wormed his way across the floor of the opium den, broken mirrors made out of teeth cutting his hands, the shards spotted with blood, falling down stairs, the street outside, Tik Lin laughing, the moon another mirror image of See Ouey and the Black Tiger God, the corpse of a water buffalo with only one horn trapped inside a cloud, he ran and stumbled, fell and ran, the crazy plan to turn himself in, he’d get a reward if he showed them the murder weapon and told them about the Black Tiger God, they’d send him back to Hainan, he’d be reunited with his wife and Tik Lin...
Stop! He was panting and sweating now. Bottle caps clicked on the floor. An inmate paced the cell, his leg irons clanking while he muttered and laughed to himself: another man gone mad on death row.
See Ouey closed his eyes. He drew in each breath for seven beats, counting backwards as he exhaled. He couldn’t attach himself to these memories anymore. The memories were shackles that chained him to the past. Admitting to his guilt, acknowledging his remorse, was enough.
But there was one last thing he had to do before escaping from the prison. He asked one of the Hainanese inmates to write a letter to his wife for him. While the other prisoners slept in rows, packed together as tightly as matchsticks on the bottom of a box, See Ouey and his friend sat together in a puddle of light the color of urine. The heat was such that his friend could only pen a few characters at a time before the sweat from his wrist began to smudge the words.
Slowly and carefully, See Ouey dictated the letter.
“I suppose I could say I love you, but I’m beyond love now. I suppose I could say that I hate myself for doing all these horrible things, but I’m beyond hatred too. At this point, I am almost beyond everything. My biggest problem was my hunger. I was always starving for food, money, love, respect, affection, revenge and many other things. But the more I consumed the hungrier I became and the emptier I felt. It was like feasting on famine. So I was never satisfied.
“My new hunger is much more substantial. I’m trying to attain what that monk called the ‘supra-mundane state.’ Do you remember when he stayed with us? He told me about how monks practice something called ‘meditations on death’ by sitting in front of a corpse. There are two hundred dead men down here crammed into a dozen cells. I’m meditating on their breathing corpses and the death of my physical self, which has nothing to do with my mind or karma.”
He thought about signing it, “Your Little Mouse,” but that was no longer accurate. After considering it for a moment, he told the other inmate to sign the letter from “Nobody.”
For the next few days, weeks, months, eons, See Ouey only stopped meditating to drink a little water. He ate little food, he didn’t speak, he refused to leave the cell, and he rarely slept. In his mind he conjured up a candle flame and held it there. The flame grew to the size of a lotus blossom that became Nobody’s head. The light burned away his hunger, his desires and the darkness around him, so he finally saw the fate awaiting him. It was incredible. It was beyond anything he could have ever imagined.
When the guards came to take him to the execution chamber, they were astonished to find he was in such a good mood, saying goodbye to all the other prisoners, wishing them well, promising them they would all meet again one day. The two guards handcuffed him. Inhale…exhale. On either side of Nobody, their arms interlinked with his, the guards walked him through death row, past two different doors and into a small room that held little except for filing cabinets, a wooden table and a ceiling fan. Inhale…exhale. They took his fingerprints and checked them against their records.
One of them asked, “Are you See Ouey Sae Ugan?”
“No, he died in prison. I have no name, but you can call me ‘Nobody’ if you wish.”
The guard offered him a final meal.
“Thanks, but I’m on a diet, and frankly the
food in here is terrible.” Nobody smiled at them.
“Would you like a cigarette?”
“No, thanks.” Nobody cocked an eyebrow. “I’ve heard that tobacco can kill you.”
The guards looked at each other. When they saw him smile, all three of them began laughing.
By making these jokes and smiling at them, Nobody wanted to show the guards that he did not bear any malice towards them. It was not their fault they were this ignorant and famished for justice that did not exist. No one knew better than him that there is no such thing as justice. It’s another meaningless noise people make with their mouths; it means no more than “Chink” or a birdcall.
The guards took him into another room and made him kneel before a monk with a shaven head, an age-speckled face and a saffron robe. The monk asked him if he wanted a blessing. Nobody smiled and looked up at him. “That’s very kind of you, but I met a wandering monk in Hainan who told me that real Buddhism has nothing to do with rituals or blessings. In my own way, I’m a religious man, too.”
See Ouey sneered at the monk and snapped, “Don’t you dare look at me with that self-righteous smile on your face. You can’t kill me. None of you can. Mark my words, I’m coming back to haunt all of you. I’m your bad conscience and I’m your worst goddamn nightmare!”
The guards dragged him to his feet. See Ouey spat on the monk’s robes. His eyes darting from the guards back to the monk, he shouted, “All of you are a pack of stupid, vicious dogs. You’re thieves, liars and hypocrites. You can all go to hell. When I come back I’m going to kill all your children, your wives, your relatives—”
A guard punched him in the stomach. See Ouey doubled over and fell to his knees. The blow forced him to concentrate on his breathing again. Inhale… exhale. Inhale… exhale.
Even now, so close to the end, and after months of meditation practice, he could not control his ego, his anger and his insatiable appetite for revenge.