by Lavie Tidhar
“No!”
I snatched my hand away.
Minisare stared, gaunt in the firelight, her beauty in chains.
“But it’s important,” she whispered. She took my hand.
My eyes grew hotter and hotter, until the tears came. She didn’t notice. She kept on tapping, insistent, my palm the drum’s belly, my fingers its liver and heart.
* * *
Do you know what the world looks like through the D.C.’s eyeglass?
I do. It’s a blurred place; you can’t tell the real things from the shadows.
People call you the Old Man of the Wood. You were a carver, once, but life in the mines made you bitter, and now you live alone. Still, I know you’ve heard of Minisare. Stories like hers travel everywhere, noisy and eager as the drone of the diggers. Stories like hers fall over the world like rain. Minisare, the girl who cooked iron. The girl who could carry a young tree. Big stories, and all of them true. But the small stories are also true. There’s the story of how I went to the Site every day to deliver the D.C.’s lunch. The story of how he gave me a chit as a tip, and I grasped that soft scrap of paper and shouted out as the cook had taught me: “Thank you Commissioner Sir!” The story of how he seized me in the bedroom one cold morning, his enormous thumbs making my hipbones crack.
This story is also true. My head struck the wall, knocking down two frames. The D.C.’s wife stared up from one of them, pale, trussed in cotton up to her chin. The D.C. muttered. He didn’t touch me twice. I twisted and scrambled, I dashed from the room on all fours. Out on the road, I tore off the cotton dress.
I ran. I ran through the cutting grass without feeling anything. When I jumped in the river all the tiny cuts on my legs sang out in pain. I sank to the bottom, through water brown and clotted like a huge fungus. Then I kicked my way to the surface and came out gasping.
House of Gbudwe, house of my grandfathers, strangers are eating oil there. That’s a true story, too. What comes up from under the ground of the Site, but oil? Stones, you say; but the D.C. wants them, the D.C. eats them like groundnuts. They are as delicious as oil in the world beyond the glass.
The D.C. eats children. I learned this for myself.
Here is a truth for you: I stole the D.C.’s eyeglass, but the D.C. stole my sister. When I came up from under the river I ran sobbing into the forest, fleeing toward Minisare, craving her strength. The branches of her clearing rang with sound. Children bounced up and down on the bags she’d sewn, each blast of air adding heat to the fire. My sister stood beyond the flames, blurred by the heat as if by tears, and her arm bulged black as she struck a piece of iron.
“Minisare!” I cried.
She did not answer me. A leather mask hid her face, a visor pulled over her eyes like a heavy scab.
“Minisare!”
I ran to her, and then I saw what she had made, out there in the forest. I saw the iron. I saw the beast.
The creature moved. It shook. Its bowels rumbled. It had no eyes. Its whole body bristled with claws of every size. They were made of old knives, hoes, ragged sheets of iron, sharpened sticks. Its bloated hind parts breathed an obscene white wind.
“Minisare,” I breathed. And my sister shook her head. She shook her head at me. She motioned me away with one iron-ringed arm. She had no time to spare. The beast absorbed all of her attention: this beast that stank of smoke, of the D.C., of the Site. My hand tingled, as if she were drumming on it, and I thought of the way she tapped without listening to my words, without seeing my tears. I knew then that her strength was no longer for me, but for something else. She had gone through the glass and left me here, on the other side.
* * *
That night Ture came to me in a dream.
He was strutting around the Site with his belly stuck out. His elephant-skin bag hung heavy on his shoulder. I crawled on the ground, hiding under a banana-leaf, and whispered: “Ture!”
“Oho!” he grinned. “Pai-te, are you there?”
“Ture, it isn’t safe here!” I whispered, shrinking under the leaf in terror as machines buzzed overhead. “The D.C. will find you and put you in prison!”
His smile was so wide it cracked his face like an egg. “Ha! Ha!” he roared, slapping his skinny thighs.
Just then a little dog trotted by, almost under his feet, and he stumbled over it. The dog gave a yelp of pain.
Ture’s eyes widened. “Ah!” he said, delighted. “Music!” He took his feathered hat out of his elephant-skin bag and put it on his head. Then he began to leap and trip over the dog, always finding his footing at the last moment, and when the dog cried out he sang with it in a high voice:
I am he who looks up
I look down, all men die.
Ture has stumbled-o,
Ture is dancing!
As Ture danced, the D.C. strode toward us, his eyeglass tight in his eye, and a fire came out of it and scorched the earth all around him. I screamed to warn Ture, but Ture only laughed more uproariously than ever and cried: “Do you think I’m afraid of my friend the D.C.? I’ve taught him all he knows!” And he sang:
House of Gbudwe, house of my grandfathers,
Strangers are eating oil there.
Then he stopped dancing and looked at me sadly. The D.C. stood beside him. And Minisare in her rough jewelry came and stood on the other side, and all three looked down at me with eyes like salt.
“Once,” said Ture, “you fought with your sister. You were very young, and you bit her finger. Is that blood in you still, or have you spat it out?”
“I don’t know,” I sobbed.
Ture beamed. “Music!” he cried, adjusting the set of his hat. And then he kicked sand in my eyes and woke me up.
* * *
The next Sunday evening I took my mother’s digging stick and went behind the house to the termite mound. I broke off two branches, one from the dakpa tree, the other from the kpoyo tree. I dug two holes in the mound with the digging stick and put one branch in each. The sky was pale red, the ants drowsy in the cold grass.
“Dakpa,” I said. “Dakpa I keep my sister. If I keep my sister, eat dakpa. Kpoyo I lose my sister. If I lose my sister, eat kpoyo.”
I went to help my mother with the evening meal. Children laughed somewhere, at someone else’s place, and the piping sound came toward us in broken pieces. A sound like a whistle to call the birds. In the morning, when it was just daylight, I woke up and crept out to the termite mound. The termites had been listening to the future, and they had eaten some of both branches. I took the two branches out and measured them on the ground. I thought the dakpa branch was shorter. I still think the dakpa branch was shorter. I woke my mother and told her: “Minisare must be married.”
* * *
We came for her two weeks later.
My mother had agreed at once that we must find Minisare a husband. “Haven’t I been saying so?” she cried. My father was uncertain: he worried that her madness was too well known, and no one would take her. “That’s why we must do it now,” I countered, “before it gets worse.” He hung his head, then shrugged, and that day he began to look for a groom. And he found one: the man who now strode beside my mother, snapping off twigs when they touched him. A noisy crowd followed: relatives, neighbors, friends and trading partners, and then the hangers-on looking for Sunday excitement and hoping to smell food.
I knew, you see, that she would not hear me if I went alone.
My mother gasped and clutched my arm as we entered the clearing. “Don’t be afraid,” I told her, tense as wood. The groom looked startled, the strange scene piercing the layers of drunkenness he wore like a cloak. Minisare’s fire was ashes today, the stones of her forge a ruin. Only her familiar, the clawed beast, gave off heat. Minisare was flinging charcoal into its anus. The children helping her cheered and skittered toward the crowd when they saw their elders.
“Look!” crowed a little boy. “Look what we made!”
The noise of the crowd swelled to a groan. My fathe
r stepped forward, his face gray. His crooked back gleamed with sweat. “Minisare,” he said sternly. “Minisare, come with us. We have brought you a husband.”
A foolish plan. I see this now. But I believed the termites, who had eaten dakpa, who had said I would keep my sister.
Minisare pushed up her leather visor and flashed her spirit-eye. Then she tore the beast’s skin wide, stepped into its body and closed the skin up again.
People were running, screaming.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” my mother sobbed. “It’s too late, it’s too late now to save her.”
She shrank to the ground. Minisare’s groom shambled away in panic, crashing into trees, fleeing his demon-bride. And I stood lost, the air thickening around me, until my father seized my arm.
“They’ve gone to fetch the soldiers,” he panted.
When I didn’t move, he slapped me. “Run, Pai-te.”
When I still didn’t move, he ran away without me. The children had scaled the trees, their cries snagged in the branches.
Everywhere people were crashing away through the undergrowth, and the shadows of the great flying-machines closed over us, and all the trees rattled their arms, and the side of Minisare’s monster split like a wound, and Minisare leaned out and shouted: “Pai-te, run! They’re going to start firing!”
She saw that I wasn’t moving. She put a leg out of the monster’s side.
Death striped the forest, clots of molten blood.
When her foot touched the ground, something leapt up in my throat.
“No!” I shouted, waving frantically. “No! Just go! I’m all right!”
My pulse beat under my jaw, so strong it almost made me sob, a voice singing: Door in the clouds, open-o! I knew that voice: it was Minisare’s blood talking to me, the blood I had swallowed long ago and forgotten.
“Go!” I shouted.
By this time, there was too much noise for her to hear me. But she understood. Show me a child who can’t read lips.
She looked at me from her creature’s side, her eyes human now, lonely and radiant. Then she closed the skin, and the beast spun its claws and sank into the ground.
* * *
Dakpa I keep my sister, kpoyo I lose my sister.
That is how heroes are made. At night mothers say: “I’ll tell you of Minisare, who stole a lamp from heaven.” They whisper into their husbands’ hair: “Wait until Minisare returns.” They say she’s gone underground, across the lines, to unite the clans. They say she’s stamping the dust somewhere, her iron anklets jangling, her face masked, and everywhere she steps a puff of smoke flies up. Each smoke-cloud puts out teeth. Someday the mines will collapse, and Minisare will burst from the ruins with an army of iron dogs.
And that is also how villains are made. I sat quiet under my mother’s shouts as she ordered me to go back to the D.C.’s house. When she ran out of breath I curled up on my mat, Minisare’s unfinished mat. I stroked the strands of unwoven straw as my mother mourned by the fire. “Minisare was like me,” she often tells me now: “You are your father’s child.” I don’t mind these words. I know that grief is all my mother has in the place where Minisare used to be, and that all the love she had for Minisare must now be lavished on this grief which she carries about like a stillborn child. Also, she’s telling the truth about my sister for the first time. The neighbors comfort her while she weeps and tells the truth. Minisare was everything, everything worth having on this earth: defiance, honor, dawn, tomorrow. She was the rain.
And Ture, traitor, thief, where is he? He’s hiding behind this story, trying to coax it toward him. He wants to make it his own. Or no, he’s not here, he went out of the tale at the same moment as my sister, the moment our history became too small to tempt him. For Ture has no interest in the small. He stumbles over them, sings along with their cries and then moves on. Some people say that he’s living with the D.C., that the two of them drink from the same bottle, that the D.C. hides him and uses his power. This may be true. Foolish, clever Ture has always delighted in fire, in iron, in risk, in grand schemes leading to glory or despair. His language is song, not story. He is dancing in the mines and among the flying-machines. He will not remember me.
But I stole the D.C.’s eyeglass. I have that. Wherever my sister is, she’s warm, she has light to keep demons and leopards away, she’s not afraid. And I’ll do more. I have done more. I went to the witch-woman of the lake and squirmed under the thatch of her sinking roof and asked her to teach me drum. The darkness smelled of snails and her hand was as stiff and rough as a hunk of dried fish when I tapped out the rhythm Minisare taught me. A gurgle came out of the gloom: the witch-woman was laughing. She knotted her fingers in my hair and pulled me to her and told me secrets.
I dream of learning more, of teaching others. I dream of you, old man. They say you made drums in secret, in the old days. I dream you’ll make me a drum. I dream of a clearing on a dark night, and the drum-voice spreading out, crossing the line between the clans.
Ask the termites. They never lie. Come, give me your hand, and I’ll prove it to you. I’ll pass you the words my sister drummed into my hand. Forgive me, the drum-beats say. Do you feel it? That’s a true story, too, a small story that’s slowly growing bigger: I keep my sister.
Wait while I play you the rest of her message, a gift without weight or outline, invisible until you make it happen, like fire.
Pai-te, it says. Yes, it says my name, my actual name.
Watch your step, it says. I’m coming back for you.
Vector
Benjanun Sriduangkaew
You. Are.
(A weapon. A virus. A commandment from God.)
The stage is your skull, the script someone else’s, and they are about to win.
Here’s a wall. You are the battering ram against an amassed weight of a million shrines nestled in the crook of ancient trees, in the corners between skyscrapers, the solidity of Chaomae Guanim and Phramae Thoranee: for this is your land and yours is a land of many faiths.
The viral chorus is vicious and through you it is a tidal wave breaking upon the shore of your history, of a country shaped like an axe. Flash-narratives howl through your lips, biblical verses and names, stories of killing and fire. You understand none of it, but the virus needs a host—a mind that touches and is touched by Krungthep’s subconscious grid—and so you've been chosen, with a bit of chloroform to your face and a counterfeit ambulance where you lay able to see but not to think. Neon glare in your eyes and men wearing surgical masks. Farang men with their cadaver skin and their eyes blue-gray-green.
Fear, panic. You try to remember them, but they've frayed into abstractions under the shadows of anesthetics.
The chips urge you forward and you heave against a network with mantras and prayers for bone, dreams and desires for muscle. These are what protect Krungthep and these are what they want you to destroy, with their falsity of Yesu, with visions of stained glass and cathedrals, and alien insertion of tasteless wafers into pale thin mouths. Find the cracks. Fill them up with false data, false dreams. Yours is a land that does not open its arms to churches; yours is a land that once escaped Farangset and Angrit flags through the cleverness of its kings. About time they fix that.
This is how to rewrite a country’s past, and when a past is gone it is easy to replace the present with convenience. Belief moves will, and will moves nations. No screens needed, no competition with other channels. Poured straight into the intent grid this stabs the subconscious, direct as a syringe to the vein.
Holes in your skin oozing pus. Blood in your mouth lining teeth and bruised gums. No pain anywhere, because your nervous system has been deliberately broken and put back together wrong. You try to think of something other than this, other than the ports they've made in your arms and between your vertebrae, other than the cold metal jacked into you to dictate your heart and measure your synapses.
You dream of ghost dances and processions to pray for rain, a black cat yowlin
g in a wicker cage slung between villagers’ shoulders. You dream of leaving offerings, fruits and sweets and glasses of cream soda to divinities you can understand.
* * *
There was a war between China and America, and it left the world a series of deserts, the sky a pane of broken glass.
Krungthep has clawed out survival from the aftermath’s bedrock under the engines which process intent into power, and power into a shelter that makes Krungthep possible. It is expanded and strengthened year by year; it can be turned, with the right adjustment, into a weapon. From shield to sword. From sword to gun. The woman who created this system died young to a sniper. She’s celebrated now, her name a byword for martyrdom and progress. No daughter of Prathet Thai, and few sons either, have done more.
Second phase of infection. It returns you to a time where you wear a body in place of plastic, in place of the coffin in which you’ve been interred. In this present there are no temples or mosques in the city, by the rivers or punctuating the soi. Only churches with their naked Yesu, their clothed altars that mean nothing to you, their abjection before a fancy whose appeal you cannot understand.
In the streets billboards and signs shine neon Angrit, foreign brands, foreign elegance. No Thai anywhere, for why should a language exist that’s spoken by less than a hundred million, next to one spoken worldwide? Where’s the efficiency in so many letters in the alphabet, and vowels and consonants? Twenty-six is all anyone needs. The chips bombard you with linguistic algorithms and statistics. In a world of Angrit, Thai is unnecessary.
Listen. Your sister’s speaking faultless Angrit in the style of foreign news anchors. The cousin from overseas won’t have to pinch his face and look away and sigh at everyone’s pronunciations, everyone’s misspellings. No more shame. Everyone will be perfectly equal, rid of that embarrassing accent. Forget the tongue you’ve spoken since birth. Childish toys are to be put away; sick things are to be put down. (Observe those phrasal verbs, the ambiguities. The qualities of away and down can both mean death.)