by Lavie Tidhar
The logic of this does not slot quite right but soon enough the thinking part of you is thrust back to a corner, smaller than you, than half a raindrop. You try to hold onto it but it slips and drips. It is gone, it is vapor, it was never there.
You stagger out of a classroom taught by a woman with ashy hair and painted pebbles for eyes. That school’s all air-conditioned rooms and corridors polished to a shine, populated tidily by children of the rich and powerful. Yellow-headed classmates with their loudness and their big bodies close in on you. (This is not the sort of school your parents could afford.) You look for, and cannot find, dark hair. Reflections of you dwindle, so small you can thread yourself through a needle’s eye.
Was the city of your birth ever so crowded with people who looked like that?
Yes, it was. This is how things have always been, and it follows this is how things will be. This is logical, this is sensible. This is peace and progress.
Out through the school gate, part of a crowd pouring out, you hope for familiar smells of roast pork and sticky rice, for colors you recognize: an old tree with a pink sash around it to mark the spirit residing within. Tiny plates of food at the base of a utility pole, to curry favor with any small god that might live in the wires or the concrete. It does no harm to put such things out. But they are superstitions and the farangs passing by smirk. A tourist, more freckles than skin, pauses to blink at it; her spectacles give off a flicker. Photo snapped and uploading, to be laughed at and rendered into a joke. Who believes in divinities so diminutive? Yesu-Lord is large and he lives everywhere, not just in a pole or a tree. Or his ghost does. Or his father. One of them or possibly all. Nano-missionaries have been drilling you with parables and sermons but they don’t take. It is not a strength of will or integrity of self that protects you but sheer confusion.
Outside you can feel tubes in your lungs sucking and working to keep you from drowning in your own fluids. Despite the nutritional drip-feeds, hunger burns a black cinder-path through your stomach.
* * *
Words beat strident against your shell. (Cell. Angrit, full of similar words.) They’re discussing the danger of storing so much information in one place, eggs in one basket. But they haven’t so many baskets left and must make do, and after all they’re in no danger. Who will dare, except China, from whom they have hidden with perfect care? Who has the power to strike, except China, whom they will defeat and take back what’s theirs?
A memory blankets you, duvet-thick against a day too warm.
Mother has remarried and the half-and-half sibling she puts on your lap has huge Barbie eyes (did you ever play with Barbies with their blue eyes, their blonde hair?). Her new husband is much older than she is and feverishly happy that she’s given him such a beautiful baby, and everyone agrees it is beautiful. Half-and-half always are, with that kind of nose and that kind of hair, shampoo-ad perfect from infancy. The weight of the new sibling—surprising heft, surprising mass—presses down and you cannot stand up. You fight to breathe; you avoid inhaling your stepfather’s cologne, which nauseates and fails to hide the stink of his armpits.
Mother’s happiness is glass. There is cash for your grandmother’s hospitalization now, the cardiac treatments that insurance doesn’t stretch far enough to cover. You think you’ve failed. Sixteen and not making the money that would have mooted the marriage. Some of your aunts cringe and judge, but those are the ones who never did anything for Grandmother. Younger-Sister Gung, ten, makes faces at the new husband’s back.
Neither of you calls him father, not in any language.
Cut, call the chips. Camera panning elsewhere.
In a Jatujak barber’s you are with your farang friends who wear crosses gleaming silver on identical columnal throats. They are each garlanded with identical blonde hair. They don’t need a stylist. A look and a laugh, that’s all they require to make you ugly and hard. Wonderful waists, wonderful legs. An instinctive grace from a lifetime of certainty that they are exquisite. Among them you fade. Among them you lose dimension until you’re paper.
A cross is just two lines of unequal lengths intersecting: what is that next to Phra Puttachao, who has a human face, perpetually at peace? You touch your own neck and find there is a cross there too, where the loinclothed god-son-prophet bows his suffering head. Under your finger it seems to turn fleshy and your nail comes away tipped crimson.
You are—
You look at the daub of red until it dries to brown crust. You find an Internet café and take a seat. Around you: sultry air thickened by fish sauce, sweet chili dip, and deep-fried fish cakes.
No one here wears a cross. No one here has sun-spotted cheeks. The ceiling fans whirr against dust, hair, dog fur. An auntie laughs into her headset, talking to a child studying abroad. Two students argue about test results over shaved ice drenched in condensed milk and red syrup.
The computer you’ve picked boots up crankily. A CRT flickering with artifacts, mouse and keyboard caked in food-smears. In the entire café this is the sole tribute to archaism, decades out of step next to sleek machines with screens half as thick as your thumb.
Spam strains the seams of your inbox. Clicking through you delete and delete, catching junk-fragments of sentences like poetry with its pancreas hanging out, its diaphragm wrapped around a sleeve. A few messages you print out on dot-matrix paper, crackling fragility and ink barely visible. Fold. Roll into a tube. Twist.
Tug that into your collar, where it’ll rest against your pulse.
The weeks are rubber bands, pulled twang-taut then loosened by a hand caring nothing for clocks and calendars. You relive job interviews and rush hours that are indeterminable. You recede to history lectures that pass by in eye-blinks. You’re now working at an advertising firm under a white boss, who wears t-shirts and jeans to work even though everyone else is in business casual, who puts his feet on the table even though he knows it offends.
His secretary is his girlfriend and she hates you. Thai girls are out to steal her man, she thinks, and when she looks at you the spots in her cheeks brighten—like rashes, like chickenpox—and she keeps postponing the pay raise that should’ve been yours six months ago. You’ve attempted to explain she has nothing to fear but it is no good. The gulf between Thai and farang is too large for the common quality of woman to bridge.
When she hears about this your fiancée laughs and laughs. She wears a man’s shirt and belted trousers, she has cropped hair and a voice rich for singing, all her earcuffs are avian and all her rings reptilian. You wouldn’t trade her for the entire world.
Two years together and she leaves you for a man, having let her hair grow out and having put on a skirt. You find yourself a boyfriend. It’s just as well, for under the grace of Christ certain acts are forbidden; under his grace certain acts will send you to burn.
It is getting hard to tell what happened and what didn’t. You want to make it real, that coil of paper. It is not. Nothing is.
* * *
News is supposed to report truth.
On TV the prime minister is shaking hands with a blue-eyed man, who is President of the United States. His wife is First Lady, which drives you to question why the man is not First Lord. A rousing speech concerning an alliance against China, a partnership of equals, a fight against nonspecific tyranny. Tonight everyone will dream of this broadcast, struck and inspired by its righteousness. This is how to overwrite the intent grid. A disease, and you the vector.
Your heart feels absent, as though it has been exhumed and made to beat behind someone else’s sternum. Sternum. Were you in med school or is that just mathayom-thon biology?
There’s a showing of Anna and The King after work and the theater is packed, a reminder that these days the palace is a relic and mortuary; the last queen was exiled when the Americans brought you absolute democracy and rewrote the constitution, which is good, which is right. Monarchy was holding your country back, as were the shrines which have been replaced by churches. The new prime mini
ster is America-approved, and that’s best of all.
On the wall the film plays out, fast-forwarding in spasms, slowing down to linger on certain shots: contrast the demure farang lady and the faintly repulsive monarch. Characters meant to be Thai speak your language terribly. You find this odd, then you don’t.
Beside you someone reaches over and clasps your wrist. A tiny owl glitters at her earlobe, a miniature crocodile at her thumb. You remember with a jolt buying her both. You remember wearing accessories that match, and holding onto each other in a theme park crowd.
When the movie finishes you leave together. In the parking lot, under a scorching sun, you ask, “Who are you?”
She nudges an abandoned trolley full of dirty plastic bags. It rolls down the ramp, where it judders against an empty stroller. Crash. “What do you mean?”
“Aom wouldn’t do that.” You are amazed you can speak with your own voice. The chips must be busy. Or maybe they are done with you, now that you’ve paved a way into the engines for them, now that you drift in your tank broken and limp.
The one who wears your fiancée like a badly fitted suit becomes your mother at sixty-five, twice divorced and haggard at the edges. “There’s not much time.”
You look at her. The hum of the nano-missionaries, which has become white noise, rumbles. Passages from the bible concerning sinners and punishment, a salt pillar looking back. “There isn’t any time left. It’s already finished. It’s done.”
“Not yet.” This time it is your sister. Gung at six months along, gravid and radiant. She tilts her head and smiles, leans into you and whispers a trojan into your ear.
* * *
You are—
I am.
* * *
Alertness snapping in her with such force that it bows her spine. A visceral waking that returns flesh to the bones of her ghost, mind to the husk of her corpse.
Corpse is what she is. The first she does is accept that; the second is to remember that Aom didn't leave her, not for anyone. In the absence of everything else, in the presence of amniotic fluids and electric currents in her jugular, selfishness is her final bastion.
The abduction wasn't accident. It was sacrifice. An easy step to take when all with meaning has already been lost. Easy to be a patriot, that way, if it can be called patriotism when what she does is courting survival.
Between excited chatter over the concluding phase, they put her under, casual as drowning a small animal. But the trojan compartmentalizes and this time she flows with it, a swimmer with rather than against, in control. She splits: the shadow-theater puppet in its two dimensions, and a ghost hovering at its shoulder to watch and edit decisions. The remote protocols they've installed with needles and scalpels have quieted to an ignorable buzz.
You—
I am, I am, I am. Outside she must have lost motor control. In here she flexes and tenses and knows her strength, honed and muscular. This is where she needs to be. They have protections, but those are useless when she’s already inside.
It is too late to fix the distortions they’ve inflicted on Krungthep; afterwards someone else will do that, tending each node one by one in the tunnels, under the safety she has purchased with everything.
She tries not to resent, tries not to regret.
The machines they’ve linked to her are the bare essentials, equipment to monitor vital signs, a server on which the control protocols are hosted. It is the latter that she will attack.
Poured into her with the sanctity of an incantation, the trojan has been precisely crafted. Without a vector it would have been useless. With her in place, anything is possible.
She flips a port open, and waits.
* * *
Five, eight, some age in the between. You’ve given yourself an electric shock courtesy of a finger too curious, a power outlet too close to the ground. Wail in your mother’s arm; let the tears flow. She smells expensive. You stop when you see that Mother is a woman with light brown hair, pointed nose, and pale eyes. Modernly dressed, hair parted just so, Hollywood tidy. She moves cinematically, poised for cameras.
The virus-dreams have reached childhood.
Sunday and they dress you for church, in ribbons and little-girl frock, all pastels. Temples are flattened to grainy pictures and stained postcards trampled underfoot, peeking out over the fraying edges of carpeting, hiding under calendars that tell the year in Anno Domini. Five hundred and forty-three behind the real one.
Among the pews you huddle as the man in black gives sermon, his voice the beehive chorus of the nano-missionaries. You squeeze your hand into the child’s fingers and pinch her cross until it bleeds onto the marble, spotting her tiny footsteps red. When no one is looking you break the cross into two, then four. When no one is looking you use a little marker to scribble Thai onto signs when you can, even if it doesn’t take on surface that’s gloss and metal, even if the marker is too faint. You wear the tip to a dry nub even so.
Under the not-mother’s absent gaze you cut a green mango to slices, mix your own chili salt, and eat it in place of pudding and peanut-butter sandwich. These gestures do nothing. You know that. But it comforts you to spend these grains of freedom you’ve sieved like gold out of the muck, and you miss the taste nearly as strongly as you miss the dead.
The end is soon. It’ll be the end for you, too.
* * *
Security tautens and loosens in these last days according to the pitch of collective nerves. She ascertains that she’s in a ruined hospital in Palangkaraya, basement level, far from home. It chills her until she remembers the distance is irrelevant, that come success or failure she will never leave this place. What remains of her will not survive being disconnected from the tank.
All is anatta. Sangkarn is transient. She needs to let go. Panic rises anyway, even though she’s so detached from flesh that she should be beyond this choking terror, above this mindless fear of the grave.
Eavesdropping on them calms her in stages. The farangs are happy to be done, happy to—soon—be home. The shattered city unsettles them and, fingers tight over their crosses, they joke about Indonesian boogeymen, le-ak flitting at night with entrails streaming like tassels on a kite. They discuss taking Jakarta, one more strategic gain against China. China, China. The word preoccupies them the way oxygen preoccupies lungs; the rest is peripheral, mattering insofar as to how it might provide advantage in the coming war. There will be one. They intend to press the issue. They will regain their pride.
She unpacks the trojan as they watch the cinematography they’ve made of her life, the disease they’ve made of her puppet-self.
* * *
I am.
A leap from the precipice of metal and flesh, a weightless somersault in free fall and you’re inside. Impactless you land on your feet. Ghosts don’t make splashes and you orient without having to try. This is what happens when they hold the door wide and invite you in.
There are nodes where they’ve latched parasitic to Krungthep’s dream-grid and you know every one, for each link was made through your brain. You carry a schematic on your forearms, on the inside of your elbows, the way patients carry injection scars.
In churches you turn altar cloths from cream to red, the color of blood and nation. In Baiyoke Tower, you change the locks on doors and wedge elevators open. You pull keys out of your mouth and leave them in particular cars, and in schools you replace the language of textbooks. At construction sites you push with a fingertip and scaffolds crumble, wreathing you in cement dust. You visit certain embassies and edit the flags and emblems, minute tricks. Symbols are all there is to the mesh.
While your puppet-self fulfills her part you wander Krungthep one last time, exerting the sinews of memory. A chedi’s curve, the green spikes of a durian at market, half of Pridi Panomyong’s face from the monument at your campus. The pieces of city their programs have rubbed out.
The launch wrenches at you, for you are everything—disease and vector—and it almost sweeps you a
way, shattering you in pieces and distributing them across the grid: that will complete the infection, finalize the murder.
Traffic has always been potentially two-way. They had to leave it so to operate and manipulate you. Now you tear that path into a wound, and what flies free is not their erasing of Krungthep, their unraveling of the dream-grid. It is their future laid bare. A hemorrhage of classified data and logistics, maps of where they’re strong and where they’re weak—the weapons they have, the weapons they don’t have; what survives of their country and what does not. There will be no war for them to win.
They shut everything down: too late. That opening was all anyone needed, and at the other end there are waiting hands on machines which reel in and gather the data you’ve unspooled. Data that can be used to keep Krungthep alive. Data that can be sold, for that’s the game everyone must play, now.
You imagine farang men yanking out cords, slamming down on circuit breakers with fists suddenly sweat-wet. You imagine them howling, animal panic.
The casket opens; the liquids buoying you pour out in a briny flood and the puppet of your skin sags on knees that no longer work. They tear it out, to end your dreams of home and bring you death.
There is light, and you laugh.
Forests of the Night
Gabriel Murray
“I’ve always thought there was something quintessentially Oriental,” said the Captain’s friend Burroughs, “about the tiger. Don’t you think, Captain?”