by Jim Algie
During the dozens of interviews Yves had done with survivors, their worst moment in the water came when, “I couldn’t see where I was. The water was too cloudy. There was no visibility. I couldn’t tell up from down or right from left. That’s when I really started to panic.”
Losing their bearings while spinning around in a whirlpool had left many survivors with skewed recollections or memories smudged with mud and blurred by dizziness. The first Thai paramedic Yves spoke to in the district hospital in Takuapa asked him had happened. “I don’t know. It all happened so fast that… I’m not really sure.”
The paramedic said, “That’s the thing I hear the most after any accident. ‘It all happened so fast.’”
All these years later and Yves was still grappling with a situation where acts of heroism could be suicide and attempts at self-preservation the only rational response.
But one thing was clear. Wade was correct when he said he had to get back on the horse that threw him, which meant going back into the ocean for the first time since that Boxing Day.
Yves put White Fang in the basket of his motorcycle. The vicious “little monk” had come to enjoy their midnight rides, mostly because it allowed him to pursue his favorite pastime other than sleeping: maiming and killing any and all creatures smaller than him. As he drove, the headlight attracted all sorts of insects. Fang reared up on his back legs to bat them out of the air, casting a panther-huge shadow across the road that clawed at the treetops.
On the way, Yves passed through the town where the Tsunami Victim Identification Center stood. It had closed down, but the graveyard attached to it, containing some three-hundred and eighty unidentified corpses, was still open. Down the highway, lit by orange sodium lights, past another intersection where gaudy billboards advertised temple fairs, pop concerts, and sales on cement, he turned into a two-lane road that wound past two fishing trawlers sitting in the middle of a dirt lot. Washed some two kilometers from shore, the several-ton vessels had been left high and dry as memorials. Past them, kissing the coastline, lay the park and museum dedicated to the dead. Relatives and friends had decorated the long, wave-shaped tunnel with photos of the deceased and floral tributes. Because of the sunlight, many of the photos and most of the epitaphs had faded. As with the bad photocopies of the missing Yves had seen in the Phuket airport, the effect was eerie (it made the victims look like decomposing ghosts) and because it mirrored a darker truth (they were fading from everyone’s memories too).
The exhibits in the museum either showcased the scientific facts behinds the tsunami or paid homage to bluebloods, politicians, monks and high-society figures who, by all appearances in the press clippings, had done more than anyone to alleviate the suffering caused by the disaster. Not a single image showed Dr. Pornthip or her team of volunteers who had slaved away for forty-five days straight, and for free, at Wat Yanyao to identify more than five thousand bodies.
The last time he’d been in there, six months ago, Yves had signed the guestbook with a line from one of his favorite books, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano : “It’s amazing how the human spirit blossoms in the shadow of the abattoir.” Then he added his own tag-line: “Or in my case that spirit wilts and perishes.”
Signs beside the road showing a stick figure running up a hill with a series of waves behind him read: “Tsunami Hazard Zone. In case of earthquake go to high ground or inland.” These blue and white had become a common sight all over the Andaman coast of southern Thailand.
He carried Fang to the middle of the beach rutted with footprints, where he set him down on the sand. “Stick around here. Don’t go wandering around the pine trees over there because there might be pythons around.” Oblivious as usual to his pet’s requests, the stubborn prick headed straight for the screw pines.
Yves had timed his visit well. High tide was churning the ocean, and the breeze was ruffling the water, as whitecaps rolled towards the shore like thousands of hungry mouths flecked with spittle. Tentatively at first, he waded in. The water was cold. His feet sunk into the mud and he walked in slow motion, up to his knees, his crotch, his navel, in water thick and heavy as black mercury.
He was shoulder deep when something grabbed his legs. He kicked out but nothing was there. Something pushed him from behind. He groped in the water but nothing was behind him either. He turned around and tried to swim back to shore, but something pushed him back. It was though an invisible barrier had sealed him off.
He paddled and paddled but could not make any progress. The phantom force field, as if mocking his pitiful efforts, now began pushing him out to sea. The more he struggled the more forcefully it shoved him. He would not be able to keep up this up for much longer. His muscles were on fire. His arms felt waterlogged, as if they weighed thirty kilos each. Now hundreds of meters from shore, he was choking on saltwater and panting for breath.
His mind swam with images: Yai’s face a demoniac mask of blood and wounds, Watermelon dismembered by the roots of a mangrove tree, then a montage of all the photos he’d taken and given artsy names to protect him from the horrible truth that he was really shooting slices of forensic pornography: “The semiotics of the sandman”; “Deconstructionism is not humanism”; “Still life with coconut shells”; “Three limbs in search of a body.”
From a place that seemed both within and outside him – the waves played havoc and billiards with all the hisses and whispers of the sea – Kendall shouted, “Never swim against a rip, mate. Let it pull you out, then swim back.”
So that was it. A riptide.
Sure enough, it did pull him out several hundred more meters before he could begin making the long swim back to shore.
Strafed by moonlight, the pebbly sand on the beach looked like the cremated remains of millions of people, and a cemetery for mollusks and other sea creatures that was millions of years old. On his knees and elbows, he crawled out of the water and onto the sand, hallucinating about the first creature which had ever made this journey and a Rene Magritte painting of a creature that was half man from the waist down and half fish from the waist up.
Would the beach have looked any different when dinosaurs stomped the earth some one hundred million years ago? Out here little had changed. All the great civilizations of Rome and Greece had passed and this beachscape remained the same. The Italian Renaissance waxed and waned. The British Empire came and went. All the great advancements of medicine and technology had not altered it at all.
The tsunami had come as a reminder that human life, in a universe some 3.4 billion years old, is but a blink in eternity’s eye. Doomed to extinction and much more fragile than these granite boulders and screw pines, the human being is cursed with a shorter lifespan than even the leatherback turtles nesting and mating farther down the beach.
Against these overwhelming odds and forces, the miniscule creature continued its pitiful and miraculous journey, crawling and crawling, elbows scraping the sand, gasping for breath.
No friends, family members or lovers awaited him to celebrate his survival. No gods or spirits appeared to proffer miracles and offer salvation. On this ancient beach, he was all alone, except for hermit crabs skittering to and fro, cicadas pulsating shrilly, sand flies alighting on his arms and, walking towards him, a white cat with crooked fangs and a bobtail, whose eyes flashed green in the moonlight.
AS A BOY, DURING a summer spent at the family cabin beside a lake north of Montreal, Yves had stumbled across the bones of a small animal scattered beside a silver birch tree. The tree’s roots, as well as wild flowers and weeds, had grown through and around those lovely bones. In the beast’s yellowing jaws was an old pinecone turned brittle and brown.
So it went with the lives and memories of all his lost lovers and late friends, which had become intertwined with his. He did not need to see or talk to Zara to hold a conversation with her in his mind. She would have found that line funny, “I am but an empty vessel for the gods, ghosts and demons to inhabit and speak through.” Nothing amused
her like artists behaving pompously. In truth, he’d had a hard time keeping a straight face when repeating it. Yet he was serious and he was skeptical and he was waxing satirical all at the same time. Zara understood that like no one else he’d ever met.
He would never talk to her or Stephan again, but he no longer despised them. To forgive was fine, but to forget would be folly of the stupidest kind, and only encourage the possibility of future treacheries.
He did not need to see Yai or Watermelon to hold them close in his memory. They would always be a part of him.
None of this was much solace, but under the circumstances it was the best he could do. There would never be any final sense of “closure” (the word most often repeated about the victims’ loved ones in the wake of the tsunami and 9/11), because there would never be an end to the memories or the guilt. Time only heals physical injuries. It cannot do that much for emotional maladies, except bring a little distance, a little more perspective, and a sighing sense of resignation.
The only closure he could hope for was finishing the book and closing that chapter of his life.
His friends were dead. He was alive. What else could he do?
He’d done everything he could think of to communicate with them. He’d tried “automatic writing” to conjure up tales and legends about them, to contact them in the Great Beyond. He had tried to continue their lives in his book. He’d consulted a “ghost doctor” and smoked that wicked concoction. Finally, in desperation, he had tried to induce a near-death experience, like Kendall had once told him about after he was shot during a riot on the streets of Bangkok.
None of Yves’s efforts had given him any tangible, unassailable proof of life after death. But there had been more than a few hints. Tonight, when he’d been floundering against that riptide, Kendall appeared to have shouted in his ear not spoken in his memory. He could not remember ever discussing riptides with him. Of course, it was possible that they had talked about them and he’d forgotten about it. Then, at the eleventh hour, when he needed it most, his brain had dredged up that scrap of information. It was possible, yes, but it was equally possible that the voice had come from somewhere else—where, he could not say. The Thai shaman had told him that the membrane between this world and other planes of existence was very thin. In a desperate situation like that, it may have been torn open for just long enough for Kendall to throw him that lifeline.
ON ANY LEVEL, personal or spiritual, scientific or philosophical, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to sum up the complexity and far-reaching ramifications of a catastrophe that stole or damaged so many lives, and whose shocks were felt as far away as Somalia and Alaska.
Everyone who was involved with the tsunami and its aftermath had imposed some kind of “meaning” on it to advance their own agendas and state their priorities. The religious extremists saw it as a warning sign of an imminent apocalypse or a display of God’s wrath. The hedonists twisted it to serve their party line: life is short so enjoy it while you can. The environmentalists used it as a platform to harp on about coastal erosion, coral bleaching and how the disappearing mangrove forests had served as breakwaters to protect some communities. Scientists produced graphs and charts to show the shifting tectonic plates in the earth’s crust and spoke of the need to better educate the public. Wildlife conservationists pointed out that a herd of elephants working on the island of Koh Phi Phi had stampeded to higher ground, thereby saving dozens of tourists riding on their backs. Anthropologists made similar claims about the Moken, an indigenous tribe of sea gypsies, who knew the receding water foretold disaster and helped tourists to evacuate in the nick of time. Politicians and bureaucrats gave press conferences about disaster relief management and the plans they had drawn up to install early warning systems. Local and international celebrities, posing for photographs while handing out supplies and visiting patients in the hospital, used it to promote themselves and their humanitarian work. The members of the mass media interviewed and parroted all of the different parties, their pretenses of objectivity shattered by who got the most airtime or quotes in a particular story.
Everyone had a point, Yves conceded, that was also beside the point.
Late at night in the almost deserted airport on Phuket, staring at the faces of the missing, now presumed dead, who stared back at him from photocopies bleached by fluorescent light, the only “sense” he could ascribe to an otherwise senseless tragedy was this:
In the end, it wasn’t all that important what any of the deceased did for a living, what kind of cars they drove or what grades they got in school. Whether they were accountants or police-women, travel agents or investment bankers, most were easily replaced in their workaday lives, as we all are when our time comes, which could not be said for the pivotal parts they played in any number of domestic scenarios as wives and sons, sisters, lovers, aunts, nephews, fathers. Their absences would be most sharply felt during family reunions on national holidays, at birthday parties in living rooms and at anniversary dinners in fancy restaurants lit by candles and smiles floating in the darkness, and during the photo sessions following graduation ceremonies when the missing person popped up in everyone’s mind but not inside the frames of any photographs.
All the dead had been loved and that was their greatest legacy. It was why their lives mattered and why their deaths would be mourned by their loved ones for many years to come.
Long after the politicians and scientists, the hedonists and fundamentalists, the bureaucrats and scholars, the celebrities, environ-mentalists, and reporters, had all had their say, most of it forgotten. And long after the ceremonies starring diplomats standing by coffins draped with flags while national anthems played, and monks chanting on a beach as illuminated balloons were launched into the night sky to give lost souls a Thai-Buddhist sendoff, had dimmed in everyone’s memory, the only epitaph he could come up with for Watermelon, Yai, and Kendall, Astrid, Sophia, and many others, was six words scrawled in black ink and desperation at the bottom of a ghostly photocopy: “I love this person. Please help!”
END
The Tuttle Story
“Books to Span the East and West”
Many people are surprised to learn that the world’s largest publisher of books on Asia had its humble beginnings in the tiny American state of Vermont. The company’s founder, Charles E. Tuttle, belonged to a New England family steeped in publishing.
Tuttle’s father was a noted antiquarian dealer in Rutland, Vermont. Young Charles honed his knowledge of the trade working in the family bookstore, and later in the rare books section of Columbia University Library. His passion for beautiful books—old and new—never wavered throughout his long career as a bookseller and publisher.
After graduating from Harvard, Tuttle enlisted in the military and in 1945 was sent to Tokyo to work on General Douglas MacArthur’s staff. He was tasked with helping to revive the Japanese publishing industry, which had been utterly devastated by the war. After his tour of duty was completed, he left the military, married a talented and beautiful singer, Reiko Chiba, and in 1948 began several successful business ventures.
To his astonishment, Tuttle discovered that postwar Tokyo was actually a book-lover’s paradise. He befriended dealers in the Kanda district and began supplying rare Japanese editions to American libraries. He also imported American books to sell to the thousands of GIs stationed in Japan. By 1949, Tuttle’s business was thriving, and he opened Tokyo’s very first English-language bookstore in the Takashimaya Department Store in Ginza, to great success. Two years later, he began publishing books to fulfill the growing interest of foreigners in all things Asian.
Though a westerner, Tuttle was hugely instrumental in bringing a knowledge of Japan and Asia to a world hungry for information about the East. By the time of his death in 1993, he had published over 6,000 books on Asian culture, history and art—a legacy honored by Emperor Hirohito in 1983 with the “Order of the Sacred Treasure,” the highest honor Japan can bestow upon a non-Japanes
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The Tuttle company today maintains an active backlist of some 1,500 titles, many of which have been continuously in print since the 1950s and 1960s—a great testament to Charles Tuttle’s skill as a publisher. More than 60 years after its founding, Tuttle Publishing is more active today than at any time in its history, still inspired by Charles Tuttle’s core mission—to publish fine books to span the East and West and provide a greater understanding of each.