by Jim Algie
“Is that the waterslide?”
Yai knelt down with his knees on the sand so his eyes were on the same level as hers and shook his head. “We have to run away now. Your parents are waiting for you. Can you walk?”
She put her weight on her right foot and cringed.
“Okay, climb on my back.”
With her arms around his neck, Yai ran across the beach towards the line of resorts and the road that lay beyond them. Every few seconds he looked over his shoulder. In the distance, when he first saw it, the wave had appeared to be almost frozen or moving at a very slow speed. As it came closer he realized that it was moving as quickly as a herd of stampeding horses, hooves thundering.
Yai could not outrun it. The only thing he could do was shinny up a palm tree, the girl’s hysterical cries drowned out by the water washing over them.
YVES WAS TRYING to rescue his laptop when the wave punched through the window of his bungalow and slammed him against the wall. Within a few seconds the water was up to his throat, then it was over his head and he was spinning around in a whirlpool.
He swam to the surface, gasping for breath and grabbed on to a foam pillow. The water was rising so quickly he did not know what to do. If it kept coming up at this speed he would drown. If he tried to swim out through the window he might get caught in the debris and drown.
Yves dipped his head beneath the surface to check the visibility but the water was too turbid to make out anything except a grey swirl of particles.
For now the only saving grace was that the bungalow had a high, triangulated, Thai-style roof.
Couldn’t he think of any famous last words? A verse from Poe or Blake on mortality? Even a single line from Sylvia Plath? No, the only words on his lips were holy shit as he plucked one of his wife’s hairclips from the water. A strand of her red hair was caught inside it. This was his only talisman now. He held it to his lips and murmured her name, like a deathbed prayer to a higher power.
NOTHING HAD prepared Watermelon for this level of savagery, delivered with such inhuman indifference; not the sodomy with the golf clubs and the punch that broke her nose, not the boxer who had fist-fucked her, or the Japanese sadist who’d bound, muzzled and beaten her with a length of garden hose, nor even the half dozen Arabs who had taken turns with her (“Twelve fucks for the price of one,” the ringleader said). None of those ordeals came close to this, even if the sense of helplessness, of crying and pleading for mercy that never came, was exactly the same.
This was like a dozen, like fifty, like a hundred rapists all having their way with her at once. They were opening new orifices all over her thighs and across her chest then filling them with spears and torches. They were shoving their fists down her throat and ejaculating blood all over her face. They were drowning her in the salt-water of a billion tears, pulling her hair back so she could grab a wheezing breath and then plunging it back under the surface.
She screamed into the teeth and the rabid mouth of the tsunami, but she could not hear herself above the water. She pleaded with the Water Goddess to either save or take her life, just like a hundred thousand other people were praying right now: to Shiva and Allah, to Jesus and the Buddha, to famous monks and elemental spirits. For there are no atheists in the midst of a natural disaster; everybody prays to someone.
Whether by luck, chance or divine intervention, an inflatable doll of Winnie the Pooh floated past her. She grabbed on to the grinning bear and clung to it like a life preserver.
When the great mass of roiling brown water finally retreated, it tried to pull everything back into the sea with i—cars and bodies, furniture and drowned livestock. With her broken, splayed fingers (the shock and adrenaline had numbed the pain for now), she paddled her way into the tangled roots of a mangrove tree, where she took shelter in a memory of her mother rocking her back and forth in a bamboo cradle tied to the stilts propping up the family home.
For a long time afterwards it would seem like the tsunami had dragged the best parts of her back into the sea with it, leaving behind a broken doll washed up on the beach after a summer vacation and left to rot beside chunks of sun-bleached driftwood and plastic water bottles half buried in the sand.
THE WATER HAD come up to Yai’s waist and he was starting to slide down the knobby coconut palm. To make his balancing act even more precarious, the girl had wrapped her thighs around his throat and had his hair gripped in both of her hands.
Yai had heard that people in life-threatening situations see their entire lives flash before their eyes, like a film strip of images and memories whizzing past. But the only thought running through his mind was an old fantasy that he’d first imagined back at the Snake Farm on Phuket: his triumphant homecoming, when he rode that Harley Davidson into his village with his pretty blonde wife on the back. All his family, friends and neighbors emerged from the shade beneath their houses to admire him, all thinking the same thing, “Yai has finally made something of himself. He’s got money, a good job, and a beautiful wife.”
But that would never happen. He’d never be anything more than what he was now: a bartender, a drug dealer, and a servant of rich tourists who mostly treated him like a second-class citizen from a Third World country.
Long before the wave came he was already broken, already finished.
But the girl was still young. She still had a chance.
With his last reserves of strength and self-loathing he pushed her towards the cluster of coconuts at the top of the tree.
LESS THAN HALF a meter from the ceiling of Yves’s bungalow, the water stopped rising. Within a few minutes, it began draining.
The joy of still being alive, of setting foot on land again and taking in deep breaths of air, of seeing a sun of white gold and a blue sky, overwhelmed him for a few minutes and provided a buffer zone against the devastation.
All the resorts and bars and restaurants on the beach looked they’d been flattened by a blitzkrieg. Only the foundations were still visible. Everything else had been reduced to rubble. Yves’s bungalow was the only one in sight that was still standing.
Not a single person, animal, bird—or even an insect—was in eye-shot. It was like Armageddon had come and gone and he was the last man standing.
Picking his way through the rubble of collapsed walls, legless deck chairs, overturned umbrellas and refrigerators bleeding soft drinks, Yves thought, “This is a great story. Maybe the best I’ve ever stumbled across.” How quickly his gratitude for being spared had sunk and the old egotism risen to the surface. Immediately he rebuked himself. “Don’t be a selfish prick. Look around for survivors and find Zara and Stephan.”
Walking anywhere meant navigating an obstacle course. Nails stuck out of planks. Chunks of glass sharp as shark teeth glinted in the sunlight. Pools of water and sand sucked at his bare feet.
From somewhere he could not see, he heard a child calling out. He looked around at the piles of rubble. He didn’t see anyone. Was she buried alive in the debris?
“Up here.”
He looked up at the coconut palm with the crooked trunk. Sitting on the cluster of green coconuts, like an angel atop a Christmas tree, was a little blond girl. She waved at him. How did she get up there?
Beneath the tree, partially hidden from Yves’s view by a sign that read “Dance the Night Away at New Year’s Eve Party,” knelt one of the waiters from the Seabreeze Cocktail Lounge beside a man stretched out on the wet sand. Few things disturbed Yves like seeing another man crying. Under normal circumstances, he would have pretended not to see him and walked in the opposite direction, but the two of them and the little girl on top of the tree were the only people on the beach.
The waiter was still in his uniform of brown slacks and a beige shirt. His name tag said Winai. He was probably in his early twenties but the tsunami had turned him into a toddler throwing a temper tantrum. In between spasms of tears and digging up handfuls of wet sand that he flung at the sea, he kept babbling in three or four different languages
. Yves could only pick out a few words, “My friend Yai he good man. He take care bar very good. Before he working Phuket long time.”
But the man sprawled on the sand beside him could not be Yai. He didn’t look anything like him, the most obvious difference being that this man did not have a face. Instead he was wearing some kind of demoniac mask from a supernatural festival. Daubed with crimson paint, the mask was punctured with holes where the eyes and nose should be.
Yves rubbed some greasy sweat from his forehead and puzzled over the mask. Today was Boxing Day. There weren’t any festivals on. There wasn’t, as far as he could remember, supposed to be a costume party at the resort.
So why was he wearing a Halloween mask?
Where had the wave come from?
What happened to Zara and Stephan?
Who was the little girl in the tree?
Yves bolted for the main road. He ran past artificial Christmas trees dripping with seaweed, leapt over a fallen motorcycle which had been torn in half, dodged around a pair of legs sticking out of a collapsed doorway and goggled at the sight of a Royal Thai Navy gun-boat washed up at the base of a limestone cliff a kilometer from shore.
Even running as fast as he could, his sandals spitting out sand, he still couldn’t leave behind all the scenes of carnage and all the question marks lodged in his brain like thorns, because there was no longer a road winding through the town, there was no longer a beach community here at all.
Everything had been scattered helter-skelter like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle thrown to the wind by a race of giants.
And in the days, months, years to come, as the survivors tried to put their lives back together and struggled to make sense of this senseless catastrophe, they would all be struck at different times by the terrible knowledge that the pieces they were looking for, like all the bodies washed out to sea or pulped by the pestles of trees and concrete pillars in the mortar of the earth, would never be found.
THE BIGGEST GOVERNMENT hospital was some fifty kilometers away in the provincial capital of Takuapa. By noon every bed was taken, and the waiting room and corridors were full of the injured on stretchers, in wheelchairs and sitting on plastic chairs in a lobotomized daze.
Yves sat in a corner of the waiting room, switching between the foreign news channels. Every hour the body count rose. At first it was only a few hundred, then a couple of thousand, but as more reports flooded in the death toll climbed steeply. On the BBC, the font read in big letters “ASIAN QUAKE.” Underneath that, in smaller letters, it said, “Area from Indonesia to Africa affected.”
An anchorwoman with a Christmas tree behind her looked grim “Good evening. More than 11,000 people are thought to have been killed in southern Asia after an undersea earthquake off the coast of Sumatra triggered enormous waves across the Indian Ocean. The quake measured 8.9 on the Richter scale, the biggest in the world for forty years.”
Maps with arrows showed the number of fatalities around Sumatra (3,000), the Maldives (20), Sri Lanka (500) and Thailand (300), in between jerky, amateur video clips replaying the same scenes of waves washing over beach resorts and sweeping people and cars away.
“Let’s get the latest from southern India. The BBC’s Mathrew Grant joins us on the line from Madras. Mathew, what is the latest you have on the casualty figures there?”
“The latest figures from Tamil Nadu are 1,700 people have been killed,” said a voice over top of another amateur video clip of an old man in bathing trunks being carried away two young men, and a white woman in a bikini being lifted onto a helicopter.”
“We’ve had reports about the number of bodies being washed up on the shore. How are they coping with this?”
“I was down on the beach here, and it was a chaotic and tense atmosphere. People are struggling to understand what’s happened. It’s just an incredible shock.”
It sounded to Yves like the situation in India and Sri Lanka and Indonesia was much the same as in Thailand: bedlam as unusual. He wrote the phrase down in his notebook, but he could not concentrate on writing anything more. He was too nervous, the hospital far too noisy.
The news reports disturbed him, but not on an emotional level where he wanted to be disturbed. They disturbed him because of the reliance on body counts, statistics, and scientific data. In straining for objectivity—and this would happen over and over again in most of the news coverage—they had lost sight of their humanity.
He kept waiting for his wife to hobble into the waiting room with an injured leg—and there he’d be, ready for a tearful reunion and a healing hug. He kept waiting for Stephan to stroll in, remarkably unscathed as always, a man who had been immune to boyhood injuries on the hockey rink, who walked away from spectacular wipeouts on the ski hill and never so much as sprained an ankle. For once, Stephan, a pathological exaggerator, would not have to invent any more tall tales, like the one about the female cop, who was trying to arrest him for drunk driving, but who supposedly let him off and then slept with him the very next night. “She told me she has never experienced four climaxes, what the French call ‘little deaths,’ in one night. By the last time she was screaming louder than a police siren and I was whispering a stanza by Baudelaire in her ear. Is there a finer erotic poem than ‘Head of Hair’?
“Languorous Asia, scorching Africa/A whole world, distant, naked, nearly dead/Lives in your depths O forest of perfume/While other spirits sail on symphonies/Mine, my beloved, swims along your scent.’”
Yves had always been stunned by his ability to commit entire poems to memory and then recite them with the passion and conviction of a preacher doing a Sunday sermon.
Behind his back, their mutual friends, brother writers and fellow professors, would mock him. “He is the bard of bullshit,” was a typical slur. Yves would always come to his defense. “No, he’s got an incredible imagination, and he makes no distinction between his poetry and his personal life. He wants them both to be just as dramatic. What’s the difference? The fantasy is every bit as revealing of his character as the reality.”
He could relate to Stephan’s desire to be a man of action, not a bookworm and introspective slug. By drinking, womanizing and playing thrill sports, Stephan could still be a man’s man and a poet too, following in a long line of literary degenerates and Hemmingway surrogates.
After surviving and inventing so many different scrapes with mortality, like falling through the ice of a lake while out cross-country skiing and almost drowning, or getting into a knife fight with a man whose wife he was having an affair with, Stephan would always say, “I cannot be killed by conventional weapons.”
The tsunami would certainly qualify as an unconventional way to die. Until a few hours ago, most of the world had never even heard this Japanese word before. Only now, after geologists and bureaucrats were giving interviews on TV, lending scientific heft and credence to a story that was flimsy with any hard evidence or facts, did the world learn about the underwater earthquake. On the BBC, Dr Roger Clarkson of the British Geological Survey said, over top of animated waves rolling across the screen, “You can’t tell when an earthquake like this will strike. At sea the waves can reach speeds of 400 miles per hour, but they’re only a meter high. As they approach the shore they slow down but rise to ten meters or more.”
Whenever somebody else limped in to the waiting room or was wheeled in on a gurney or pushed in a wheelchair, Yves steeled himself for the inevitable. Both Zara and Stephan would be bloodied and bandaged, possibly incapacitated by injuries that were life-threatening, maybe dismembered or even dead. Perhaps they were fine, nothing more than a few abrasions and bruises. But the endless see-sawing between hope and fear had created a friction that was chafing his nerves and grinding him down with exhaustion. His eyelids drooped. His vision got blurry. His shoulders sagged. He needed to rest, to find a bed.
After hours of waiting and dozing off, watching the news channels show the same footage of debris circling in whirlpools and widows weeping over dead babies, whi
le the body count grew, Watermelon’s fiancé walked in. It didn’t matter that they’d only met a couple of times and didn’t know each other very well. The normal rules of engagement had been cast aside as the survivors developed the sort of camaraderie reserved for soldiers who’d survived a major battle.
Wade (short, squat and wearing a baseball cap) walked over and gave him a bear hug. “Hey buddy, how ya doin’? Great to see ya in one piece.”
“Yeah, you too. Where is Watermelon?”
“I was hopin’ you could tell me. How’s your old lady?”
“Missing in action.”
“And that Quebecois guy who wrapped the sports car around the power pole?”
“Also MIA. You remember Yai, the bartender from the other night? He’s missing too. Most of the mobile networks and phone lines are down. I hate to think what’s gonna happen if the power goes out and the water supplies dry up.”
“Don’t worry. The Thais’ll take care of it, eh? They’re good people. I’m sure our old ladies and buds will turn up sooner or later. We ain’t up Shit Creek without a paddle just yet.” Wade took off his baseball cap to wipe the sweat from his forehead and bald head. “So let’s say a prayer for the missing, stop fuckin’ around, and see if we can lend a helping hand around here.”
Wade looked around the waiting room, meeting everyone’s eye and smiling at them in a reassuring way. He said “hello” in Thai and smiled at all the doctors and nurses passing by, too. “Okay,” he said. “Follow me.” He walked down the corridor, ducking into all the rooms, exchanging smiles and greetings with any of the patients who were still conscious and any of their friends or relatives standing by their bedsides. It didn’t matter to him what their races or ages were. With the old Chinese lady who could not speak English and was playing solitaire on her dinner tray, he taught her a couple of card tricks that made her smile. With the young girl from San Diego whose right leg had been severely gashed and whose parents were still missing, Wade sat down on her bed and looked at the bandaged leg. He said, “Don’t worry about that none. You’re gonna grow up and still be a beautiful woman one day.” She smiled and blushed. “You know what, Rosalyn? I’ll bet you like horses, don’cha? Yep, that’s what I thought. I love ‘em, too. So I got a little present for you right here.” Wade took a card out of his wallet with pictures of mountains, horses and ski hills. He handed it to her. “Up in Jasper at the resort where I work we got lotsa different horses for trail riding. Once we find your parents and you get better, then we’re all gonna go trail riding together. How does that sound?”