Munny looked down from the platform as the train arrived and saw the flashing police lights below. Something had happened at the station to change things, and Munny had played a part in that process. He felt giddy, and he felt sad and guilty, too. In his school a French priest, who had been sent by his order as a form of punishment to teach in the countryside, had reminded his class on their first day that Cambodia had once been a French colony. The priest told them that meant the French had once owned their country. The priest had one book he rated one level below the Bible, and it was Voltaire’s Candide. He told Munny’s class that Voltaire was one of the great philosophers of all time, saying, “Forget about righting the wrongs and the sorrows and heartache of the world. Withdraw to your garden, tend it, and erect a wall between your tiny corner that shuts you away from the wars, disease, hates and tragedies on the other side of your wall.”
At the border, when Chamey had wrapped her arms around Munny, she had reminded him of what the old priest had taught him. As the train doors closed, Munny stood looking out at the platform, thinking about the faces in the crowd, the image he’d drawn and the look on Chamey and Sovann’s faces as he’d walked back to the van that would take him to Bangkok again. He was a long way from his garden gate.
TWENTY-SEVEN
“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”
—George Orwell, 1984
THERE WAS NO number on the door or the frame. Had Palm expected to find the number “101,” that iconic number made infamous by a single book? George Winston had had his attitude readjusted in Room 101. “1984”—Palm knew that was more than a number, too. But real interrogation rooms were never like the ones in books, at least in the books Palm had read. He had no idea if Fah and Oak had been taken to the same room before him. He’d been here before. He assumed that the camp complex had other such rooms. He imagined that this one was just one among many other, similar rooms along a long corridor.
The walls in the room were bare, as was the room itself except for three wooden chairs. Two soldiers, whose uniforms bore no nametags or rank markings, had escorted Palm to the room and told him to sit in the middle chair. They said nothing, and having finished their job, left and closed the door behind them. He stared at the blank surroundings and at the other chairs. Perhaps it was a setting for musical chairs, where a guard would remove them one by one until the room was totally bare—except for the moment Palm seemed to be the sole player. The strange solitude didn’t ruin the suspense of the game but only deepened Palm’s sense of mystery.
His mind started to wander. His thoughts flew like moths to his parents, his sister and his two brothers, and then to Fah, Oak and Munny and the graphics they’d spray-painted on the walls of the room above the barbershop. He wondered now, more than ever, who had sent the photo projection app. What did he or she look like? Was the person Thai? Why had he and the others been chosen? None of the thought fragments stayed for long; they were more like disconnected images coming and going on their own timing. Was it the intention of the interrogators to get him to think too much? To get him to remember the first time he’d been in the room, when there had been a single chair? He saw in his mind Fah and Oak being led through the door to occupy the other two chairs. The image vanished.
He stood up from the chair and sat down again in the one on his left. A little act of protest, he thought. Sanity was finding meaning in such small gestures. It told him he had choices, even if it was just moving from one chair to another. Blinds covered a bank of windows against the east wall, but crack in them allowed some sunlight to spill onto the floor. He guessed it was mid-afternoon. A long fluorescent light on the ceiling made the room a sickly yellow like the body of a hepatitis patient. He turned his head to the other side and then shifted in his chair. A calendar hung on one wall. It was turned to the month May, the month of the coup, and no one had bothered to flip the pages over as time passed. Time had stopped in May. He thought of Somkit, an activist from Korat who was one of the people who shared his room at the camp. “Good luck is being run over on your way out of a brothel, and bad luck is being run over on your way to the brothel. I was on my way out when they invited me to the camp. How about you?” Having walked out of a barbershop, Palm decided his capture had bad luck written all over it.
Before Palm’s interrogators appeared, another soldier entered to blindfold him and handcuff his arms behind the chair. He came and went without saying a word. A few moments later Palm heard voices and his interrogators entered the room. They didn’t introduce themselves. One of officers spoke with a slight Isan accent.
“I haven’t done anything, older brother,” Palm said to him in Isan dialect.
The officer slapped him across the face with an open hand.
“Speak Thai,” he said.
His tone had the high-pitched foghorn sound of bad luck moving at a hundred and fifty kilometers an hour.
Palm figured that the officer was under intense pressure to prove his loyalty, and speaking Isan in the interrogation room might be viewed as subversive. He’d had to slap Palm to prove himself.
“You will answer our questions, is that understood?”
Palm nodded. This was his sixth interrogation. The times varied from six in the morning to midnight. There was no pattern. He guessed the standard psych ops books must have taught interrogators ways to maintain the prisoner’s insecurity, cause him psychological stress and make him vigilant for the physical punishment that was coming. The possibility of violence filled the empty room.
“Fah says you wrote the term paper. Is that true?”
“We all wrote it.”
“Are you saying Fah’s lying? Why would she lie?”
The interrogator removed Palm’s blindfold.
“Look at me. Oak tells us the same thing. The paper was your idea. They went along with you. They say you were the ringleader. Why do you deny it? I thought you’d be proud.”
Palm’s eyes followed his interrogator’s arms and hands, which moved like large cats covering the floor. The other officer leaned against a wall, opening a crack in the blinds and looking out. He seemed bored. Asking the same questions over and over was numbing for them, too, Palm thought. As before, neither of his interrogators wore nametags or bars or stars. Nameless and rankless, they worked in teams, never staying still. They walked around the room as if they owned it and he was an intruder who had better come up with the goods or something bad would happen.
They blindfolded him again and left. After a while a new shift came in and started from the beginning. An interrogator only had so much juice. Rotating them in and out of the room helped them keep up routine—blindfold, then no blindfold, questions, a slap, the smell of cigarette smoke and silence, followed by a new shift. It was a nightmare sequence that promised to destroy his will to resist.
The strangest part was that although the interrogators appeared to improvise their questions, nothing could be further from the truth. They were actors performing scripted roles. Interrogations balanced a number of elements with a fine precision—terror, fear, empathy, disbelief, support and threats. Always, at the end, came an interrogator’s rapid volley of threats of violence. The words bubbled, heavy and bloated, floating like cartoon panels overhead, waiting to explode. It was like a tennis champion rushing the net to put the ball away. It was not safe to resist, they were saying. He should understand that there was no limit to what they could do to him. The violence escalated gradually, sending another message: co-operate and the pain will vanish. They warned him each time that they were nearing the end of their patience, that he was pushing them and they didn’t like being pushed. If he refused to answer their questions, they would have no choice but to go to the next step.
Then the interrogators shifted their attention to the professor who had turned the students in. Or were they only pretending interest in the professor, to throw Palm off balance? They could have lied. In an interrogation room, the line between lies and truth dissolves. Palm had no
evidence other than his interrogators’ words that the professor had fingered them. In the first session he had asked one of the interrogators why one of his university professors would denounce him as a traitor. The interrogator had smiled, suggesting he’d been prepared for that question.
“You are from Isan,” he said, launching into the standard humiliation. “You are a kwai, you are red, you love the corrupt people, and you do not love the land of our birth. Your professor is a good man. He did his duty as a citizen.”
Being called kwai, a water buffalo, was standard-issue disdain, and it was why Palm had joined Fah and Oak in the first place. Water buffaloes don’t fight back. They wander through the muddy field to graze. Palm sought the courage to fight back, to prove they were wrong to judge him. From the first session he promised himself to take a stand, to show them he was made of better stuff. By the third or fourth interrogation he was questioning himself. By the sixth session he understood how fragile his ideals were. The interrogation seemed to be designed to show him how futile, dangerous and silly abstractions about democracy and freedom were inside an interrogation room. How could abstractions or ideals protect a man when he is handcuffed and blindfolded? Such a man is less than a water buffalo, and this lesson was their objective. He looked at the eyes of the interrogator, who waited for his response. The man’s pupils were dilated as if he took pleasure in his work. Palm looked straight ahead and said nothing.
“Fah and Oak have co-operated. They’ve taken their name off the paper. That leaves you, Palm. Alone. Your friends are going home. What about you? Don’t you want to go home?”
On one level he refused to believe the interrogator, but on another level the words played to deep-seated doubts. He felt the unease of inner conflict as his mind raced from one end to the other like a child in a game of tag. “You’re it,” he thought as the interrogator circled his chair. None of the interrogators had mentioned Munny. If Oak and Fah had defected, they’d have given Munny up. The interrogators would be questioning him now about Munny’s artwork. All the questions were about the paper and why their cell phones had been erased.
The drill, the treatment, varied little from one interrogator to another, as if they were all clones of the same person. At the end of time, they’d still be mouthing those same words, which floated over the room like bubbles, speech balloons, with one popping and another coming into existence.
One of the interrogators reapplied Palm’s handcuffs and blindfold.
“You should prepare yourself,” he said and left the room.
“Prepare for what?” Palm asked, as his imagination ran wild.
But the interrogators had gone. They had left him alone in the room to think.
The silence faded as Palm heard noises from beyond the walls of his room, murmurs and shouts coming from other rooms. Weeping. Banging. The unseen world of sound fed his imagination with a library of images from old TV shows and movies—horror stories, mysteries, thrillers. Interrogators knew how to start the reel inside a person’s head and let the mind do its own takedown into imagination. Palm felt the sweat under the blindfold as his mind raced through the possibilities.
He had come to Bangkok for university. His Isan heritage was as visible as one of Munny’s tattoos. He wasn’t one of them, and he saw that message in their eyes. He had an unmistakable face from the Northeast, one he could never change, any more than he would ever be taken for a Thai-Chinese. His look was as distinctive as a signature. He hated them, and he hated himself. They had filled him with hate.
Thirty minutes passed. Then Fah, blindfolded and handcuffed, was brought into the room by two female soldiers, who seated her next to Palm. Oak, also handcuffed, his blindfold pushing back his long, flowing hair, followed a few minutes later. He stumbled and cursed. The others recognized Oak’s voice as he was pushed into the last empty chair.
“Are you okay?” Palm asked him.
“Fine,” whispered Oak.
“Shut the fuck up! Silence!”
Palm recognized the interrogator’s voice. He remembered it from a day earlier. His blindfold had been removed on that day, and he was allowed to see the officer who ordered the others around in a firm voice. One of the military officers from earlier was also back, the one who spoke with an Isan accent.
“You have one more chance to tell the truth before we take you away.”
“Are you going to shoot us?” asked Oak.
“If you disappeared, who would ever know?” the officer said.
“I told you the truth,” said Fah.
“If you don’t believe us, then by all means shoot us for writing a term paper that even you said had one or two valid points,” said Palm, speaking to the officer in the Isan dialect. “They’ll always think you’re a watermelon soldier, no matter how many Isan people you slap. Just like me, older brother, you are trapped and can only pretend to be free.”
“You should go back home,” said the officer.
“You’re probably right,” said Palm. “There’s no place for me here.”
The officer nodded for the interrogators to remove the blindfolds and handcuffs.
“Before we release you, all three of you will sign a document saying that you came here on your own, were treated well and will not engage in any social media until further notice from us. Do you understand?”
Three heads nodded. They just wanted out and had no choice about the conditions. The time for arguing had passed. They signed the documents, passing the pen down the row. An officer collected the documents and checked the signatures. He then left the room, and the other officers followed. The three were alone together for the first time since being arrested.
“Are they really going to let us go?” asked Oak.
“Shut up,” said Fah.
She made a point of lifting her eyes to the top of the door. A small camera monitored the room.
“When was the last time you ate?” asked Palm.
“Can’t remember,” said Oak.
“Wait,” said Fah.
Their confinement at the camp had become cramped. There weren’t enough beds. New people arrived day and night. A steady stream of people, famous and anonymous, came through the door, and the sleeping spaces got smaller and smaller as students, activists, politicians, teachers and entertainers were shoved in.
At first Fah, Oak and Palm had thought they’d be interrogated together. But the interrogators had wanted to pick them off one by one, throw them head first into the Prisoner’s Dilemma, find a winner and move on. From that first day the interrogators had pounced on inconsistencies in their stories and lied about the intentions and actions of the others. None of it had worked. Information the students had found on the Internet had prepared them for such strategies. They were each aware after the first interrogation that the military had nothing on them but the term paper, and that the interrogators’ ignorance of the graphics would remain unless one of them caved in and told them about the art project and Munny.
All three of them had stuck to the cover story that their group had formed as a study group. The goal had been simply to work on a group assignment for a university class. They had researched, written and rewritten the paper together and handed in the finished assignment on time to their professor. What had they done wrong? What crime had they committed? “Why did you delete the apps and files from your cell phones,” they had been asked, to which they’d responded, “How is that a crime?”
The soldiers said the students had had an “intention,” and that was what mattered. Until they changed their intention, they wouldn’t be let go. That standoff had lasted until the moment that the students at the Chitlom BTS station had magically held up their cell phones to project anti-coup art for all to see, creating quiet chaos near a sacred shrine. Similar reports had come in from more than a dozen sites around the city. Students, taxi drivers, vendors, office workers and farmers had been rounded up with their cell phones, but no trace of the software that had enabled the protest could be found o
n the devices.
In interrogation centers there was always a top boss with the highest level of authority on-site, who lorded it over his subordinate, who in turn ruled over his own fiefdom, all the way to the bottom of the ladder. Except for the top boss, everyone had a boss to worry about. Policy adjustments filtered through the system, orders were handed down, meetings and briefings were held to inform the ranks of their duties: what to look for and what lengths they could go to, to obtain information.
A day after the first of the cell phone flashers had arrived at the detention camp, a new order had pulsed through the chain of command, and that had changed things for Fah and her friends. A big boss had decided that in the greater scheme of things, writing a term paper with anti-coup sentiments wasn’t so serious, given what had just happened. It was only a university paper. They’d used no social media in sharing their dissent. Papers and assignments written by students in universities, for the moment, would have a lower priority, he said. “The bad apples are online.” He told his second in command: “If we decided to detain every student who wrote about politics, we’d be housing more students than the universities. It would demoralize the soldiers to have so many young people locked up for writing offenses.” Also, the foreign press was hammering them for human rights violations. All that pain for so little gain, he concluded. Public displays of dissent, like that art splashed all over the Chitlom BTS Station, was hitting the country like an unstoppable freight train. Those protest messages of resistance had to be stopped. They could pull a switch and blame the subversive term paper on the farang ghostwriter. That would solve that problem.
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