The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth

by Veeraporn Nitiprapha

  Thank you Pran, Chareeya mumbled when they reached the house. She lowered her head to hide her teary, swollen red eyes. He hesitated and the fear he had felt a long time ago returned when she didn’t ask him to stay as he had been hoping she would. Looking inside, he saw a white butterfly circling a lamp, casting flickering shadows around the room. He knew she wanted him to leave so she could lie down and weep. Pran gave up hoping and set off but, just halfway along the path, he turned and retraced his steps. In the dim light, beneath a window just an arm’s distance away, Pran saw Chareeya slumped on the peony-patterned cushion, crying over the sad story she hadn’t told him.

  Pran slowly sat down in the shadows as the journey of tears continued on the other side of the wall. Stung, exhausted, heavy hearted, he could smell the gentle fragrance of pomelo flowers emerging from the memory of those long-gone days before their separation, before the collapse of his dreams, before he had buried everything under the ruins and left. Now he couldn’t stop the torrent of timeworn memories, the ones he had never allowed himself to register in his heart, which suddenly came back to him: the shimmering reflection of the city, wet and gleaming in the first light of day; its scent; its slow-moving inhabitants, so slow they could read each other’s minds without speaking; the mute glow of cigarettes that appeared at twilight; a frisky wind blowing through a setting sun; and the memory of Lika, the ever-lovely Lika, and the little girl, wild-haired and running after a cloud until it disappeared. He wondered: what has happened?

  What has happened to the girl whose smile revealed all of her teeth? What has happened to the explorer who indefatigably surveyed the santol orchards of her neighbourhood every day without fail? And the tears that fell to the rhythm of the flickering shadows made Pran wonder, too, what has happened to me? He wondered, ironically, what has life left me with? Waking up every day in a world full of strangers only to close his eyes again in the solitary night, forgetting and crushing his own dreams in order to replace them with cheap ready-made ones, and clinging onto endlessly forgettable minutes only to disintegrate slowly into numbness. Only this?

  When dawn cast its vague outlines, Pran could no longer hear the weeping from the woman on the other side of the wall. There was no more white butterfly and no flickering shadows, just a glowing lamp that competed with the glaring sun and appeared like a white hole in the wall. Pran got up, saw that she was asleep, holding the cat, and then retraced his steps through the awakening garden. All the while he imagined his own room crawling with the spiderweb of solitude and the tangle of anxiety that would wrap him up inside its chilly cocoon.

  Come Monday, Chareeya cooked him another epic lunch, as if that tearful episode had never happened. Again, it was a feast of international cuisines: Greek-style grilled mackerel with a splash of lemon, Kashmiri chicken korma with crushed cashew nuts, Catalan herbal rice, Afghan fattoush salad with pita bread sprinkled with a mysterious violet powder, and rounding off with panna cotta topped with a dusting of vanilla and masala tea brewed with young lemongrass.

  She was completely cheerful, not mentioning a word about the night she had wept all the way home from the bar, or the previous incident when she had appeared to be tussling with a stranger – a man or a woman? – at the door of her house. And Pran didn’t tell her about the imprint of her lips he had stolen as a souvenir, or how it had come flying into his grey-coloured dreams, the details of which he could no longer recall. He didn’t tell her about the night he spent on the other side of the wall, beneath her window, when the flickering shadows had danced all night.

  The afternoon passed pleasantly. They each read their books. They played with the cat. They lounged around in the placid sun. They talked of trivial things, closed their eyes, listened to music, then watched the day disappear. They said goodbye drinking sangria, tangy as the kind served at temple fairs. Twilight drew a blue curtain behind them as the Mon rose shed its petals and the puttarn flower folded its dark-red petals over itself.

  A lazy, mundane afternoon, and many years later Pran would still wonder why he couldn’t forget it. He couldn’t forget the tender touch of the wind blowing through the garden, the wry aroma of nang yaem flowers, or her sad, slim fingers loosely wrapped around her knees when she played him “End of Love, End of Happiness” by Mantana Morakul, or the bright halo shining through the leaves that illuminated her face like a mirage of liquid as it struck her eyes.

  Or when she turned to look at him and he noticed, for the first time, a fissure running across her left eye.

  XIII

  The Lightning Storm

  S ilence seized the house under its command once again. No one played music in the living room for the simple reason that every song reminded them of Chareeya. For similar reasons, the monthly excursion was discontinued. Though Uncle Thanit still went to Bangkok once or twice a month to buy vegetable seeds and antique fabric, Chalika always found an excuse not to go along. She was repelled by the idea that Charee was somewhere in that loud, mad city, and that her sister didn’t want to see her again. Pran still worked the vegetable plots by the river, but also found excuses not to stay for dinner. Looking for Chareeya in her usual chair at the dining table only made him angry. Then, a young man around his age moved into the house next door.

  It was a house that jutted out over the water like Pran’s home, and the two houses were separated by a small alley. It had been so long since anyone had lived there that he couldn’t remember the previous inhabitants. But, one night, he saw a red glow seeping through a half-opened window and it reminded him of the Pink Houses his father used to take him to. The glow kept luring his gaze towards the house. Several days passed, and the new tenant showed himself. The young man had long hair, dark skin, a beautiful face. He stood on the porch surrounded by water, his sad eyes looking at Pran. Hey. Short, curt, a foreign accent. He cocked his head by way of greeting, and a friendship began.

  Paradorn lived alone in the house. He didn’t go to school. And, like Pran, he was motherless. His father was a rock musician who played at bars in Berlin and sent him money for his expenses. At a time when Pran’s heart was full of questions he had no answers to, the house devoid of adults came to feel like the warmest place in the world – a shabby world where people had all the answers and never asked any questions.

  Paradorn’s house didn’t have much furniture. It was spacious, sparse, and contained only a collection of unusual objects that Pran had never seen before: a chair made from a car seat covered in flame-patterned red leather, a mug that looked like a woman’s breast, a leopard-print rug, a skull-shaped ashtray, a century-old candelabra that doubled as a wine rack, an electric guitar that looked like a paper aeroplane, and some sort of percussion instrument that looked like a gourd and was filled with sand. A bongo – there’s an ocean inside it, Paradorn said, slowly flipping the gourd up and down. Besides the blue-grey expanse of water that Pran had seen in the distance when he was a child on the train, the only other time he had seen the sea was when he went on a trip with Uncle Thanit, Chalika and Chareeya. He would later spend hours listening to the ocean trapped inside that little gourd.

  In addition to the collection of odd items, Paradorn’s house had an eccentric pet: a large Oscar fish called Susie, or Sexy Sue as she was more commonly known to the boys, with an orange stripe that resembled a sunset in winter, a morose face, lips perpetually puckered as if she was complaining while swimming back and forth in the wretchedness of that small tank barely large enough to contain her. She had to be fed with live creatures; crickets, geckos, little frogs, or cockroaches. And this sent Pran and Paradorn on daily hunting expeditions in the field behind the house. The boys would return with their catch and watch the horrifying spectacle of the poor prey being snapped up in those powerful jaws.

  What attracted Pran most, however, was the vinyl. To be precise, it was a treasure trove of vinyl records, lined up against the walls and piled on the floor; the only items in Paradorn’s house that were similar to those in Chareeya’s. Listen
and you’ll understand, Paradorn said, as he put a set of headphones over Pran’s head, cocking his head and smiling mischievously. Suddenly, Pran was bowled over by a heavy mass of sound and his inner being was never the same again. Something grafted itself inside him, an extension of the music Chareeya had left behind: the wailing guitar, the ferocious drumbeats, the thick, gruff bass lines, every sonic atom assaulting him simultaneously, preceding the primal scream of an unhappy young man – a scream that sounded the same as the one he had bottled up inside himself, a loud numbing anger trapped in a body with no way of escape, forsaken and nomadic, a scream that had found no outlet in Chareeya’s classical soundwaves.

  Pran taught himself to play the guitar and discovered another way to free the sounds trapped inside him. The instrument became an alternative to words, which for him had always been scarce, and though it sounded more like a madman’s squeal than music, it eased the inexorable rage inside him and stopped it from exploding. He began to hang out at Paradorn’s house late into the night, sometimes on into the following morning, walking his fingers along the taut strings while listening to that endless inventory of vinyl records, one by one, from classic rock to punk, from big-name guitarists to modern rockers unknown to most, from Rare Earth and Led Zeppelin to King Crimson and U2, the Cure and the Sex Pistols.

  Every month or two, Patra, Paradorn’s father, came home. He would only stay a few days. During that time, he would coach his son, and naturally Pran, on guitar technique. Patra was in his early thirties, good-looking, skinny, his hair hanging down his back, and he wore tight leather pants even on the hottest days. He came across as a cool gangster type and it was clear that he was the kind of guy who would never let anyone mess with him. Having been a father since he was fifteen meant that Patra was more like a brother to Paradorn, and he didn’t treat Paradorn like a father would treat his son – they bantered, hung out, tussled and fake-fought like children all day long.

  For Pran, Patra gradually replaced Uncle Thanit. There was a kind of warmth in his personality, almost like Uncle Thanit, but rawer and more thrilling; a rock version to the classical cool. He was also full of stories, but they were stories from a different world, an anarchic world characterised by extremes, obsessions, intoxication and music. A world in which no one bowed to anything, not even to God. A world summed up in that arrogant motto, “Live fast, die young.”

  People are assholes, remember. They pick and choose who they want to pretend to be good with, and they’re too chicken to show how shitty they really are. We can’t choose how we were born but, remember, we can always choose how to live our lives. Promise me, never let any prick treat you like shit – unless you wanna die like a mangy dog under their feet. In that heat and in that fury, Pran found a new family – Patra was his father, Paradorn his brother. And it was the first time he had the courage to dream, dreaming he would be like Patra when he grew up.

  Dad is saving up to come back and open a bar. Bar Paradorn, wicked huh? / Very / He told me to tell you so you can get ready. He likes you a lot. He wants us to form a band, and he said you know classical music, that you have good ears, and you’ll go far. Besides learning to play the guitar, Pran also learned to play truant, to smoke and drink, to get stoned. And yet he lurched through his final exams at high school. Once Uncle Thanit gave up on his pesticide-free vegetable farm, Pran spent all his time at Paradorn’s place. There, the boys wrote songs and practiced late into the night. They started looking for a drummer, and maybe another guitarist. They even had the name ready: Broken Rainbow. “Broken Rainbow of Bar Paradorn” – what a sweet dream! At that point, Pran was certain that he wanted to study art but school had to wait because his grandmother’s health was failing and she was always ill with one thing or another.

  When Chareeya returned not long after breaking up with Thana, Pran nurtured a secret hope that things would go back to being the way they used to be, that they would again live together as a happy family; listening to music, biking around, rowing the boat out in the afternoons, hearing the tale of the king who fell into an eternal sleep in a sea of mercury, lying down in the back of a battered pick-up truck and gazing at the stars as they travelled imperceptibly across the sky; listening to her tell him, Look, that’s my star, and falling asleep without crying, without dreaming a dream that would be forgotten when he opened his eyes.

  Patra woke Paradorn and Pran at first light for a trip to Bangkok. They wandered around the Chattuchak weekend market all day, then headed to Khao San Road to find a guesthouse. After putting their things away, they went out for a dinner of hamburgers that tasted like wet newspaper topped with sweet ketchup and washed it down with coffee that tasted like bland, burnt tamarind seeds. They passed the time watching a large portion of the world’s young population that had come from the four corners of the globe just to walk back and forth along this narrow street. At nightfall, they returned to their guest house, took a nap, woke up, showered, and went out again.

  Pran couldn’t help it: he swaggered. The effect of being with the handsome father and son in their cool clothes was irresistible. Paradorn had lent him a David Bowie concert T-shirt and Doc Martens. Everywhere they walked, heads turned while girls giggled and pointed. They smiled at the trio, primarily at Patra and Paradorn but the spillover was enough for Pran. He was almost eighteen then but, having grown up in a small town with only a handful of female friends – Chalika, Chareeya and a few plain girls at school – meant that he had no experience in the flirting game. The honeyed looks and inviting smiles sent his way from female strangers made him duck in embarrassment, while Paradorn, who was only six months older, was adept at returning the smiles, with his teasing eyes and slightly raised eyebrows. But, still, this kind of thing was probably down to genetic inheritance, something Pran lacked in his DNA.

  On the other hand, the men on the street didn’t seem too pleased and kept glaring at them as if looking for a fight. But they looked away the moment Patra shot them back a look that said, “I’ll bust your balls, asshole.” On the way to Khao San Road, Patra had worn a simple T-shirt and jeans. Now, on their night-time prowl, he was decked out in full rocker regalia like those guys on the cover of a rock album. He had on a sleeveless, low-cut V-neck top, extremely tight black leather pants, silver accessories gleaming here and there, long, cross-shaped earrings, two or maybe three necklaces, large bangles, and fringed leather arm straps. His hair cascaded down his back and his eyes were painted with black shadows.

  Below his T-shirt, on his exposed belly, Patra sported an emerald-green tattoo with three spirals coiling out of a central image, a heart. It’s a Celtic symbol, means wind, Patra told Pran, who was staring at it. “Pran” also means wind, free like the wind – that’s what my heart is like, Patra smiled and tapped his tattoo twice with his fist. And your heart too, Pran, your heart is like the wind. Remember that. At that point in his life, Pran had no idea how hard it could be for a person, or how far they would have to go to become free, or how many people there were who would never ever be free. But it wouldn’t be long before he found out.

  The bar called Soldier of Love was a brightly illuminated red box, packed with human beings, strobe lighting, cigarette smoke and loudspeakers. Everywhere he looked he saw only loudspeakers, row upon row, blocking every wall. It was a Sunday night jam session at which guest musicians jammed with a resident band. As soon as Patra’s name was announced, the crowd roared. It was clear he had a strong following. Hair flying as he jumped on the fog-covered stage, Patra thrashed out U2’s forceful anguish like a firebird in the midst of an electric storm: I was broken, bent out of shape. I was naked in the clothes you made. Lips were dry, throat like rust. You gave me shelter from the heat and the dust. No more water in the well. No more water, water. Angel… Angel or devil. I was thirsty. And you wet my lips. It was the first time Pran had seen Patra perform live. He sang hard and worked the guitar even harder, so passionately, so feverishly that Pran didn’t dare blink for fear of missing something. Paradorn wat
ched and smiled his crooked smile, one eyebrow raised, elbowing Pran every five seconds. Look, man, look at my dad. He’s the devil.

  The wall of loudspeakers thundered and roared. Deep bass lines rumbled every cell in Pran’s body and he felt weightless as the crowd rocked their heads euphorically. Women screamed like lunatics when Patra’s voice climbed to a velvety falsetto, as he howled and jumped and sliced the air with his arm in a circular movement – that Springsteen move. And they kept screaming at the top of their lungs, as if their lives had been drained out of their bodies, when they saw Patra standing still, panting, beads of sweat trickling over the tattoo on his chest, wet hair like a ragged curtain covering half his face in a staccato of bar-room lights.

  Before that night of fire was over, Pran saw Patra exchanging glances with the most beautiful woman in the world during all that heavy breathing and that curtain of cigarette smoke and that final roar of the night’s last song. They looked at each other without saying a word. She lifted her finger and touched his cheek lightly. Patra exploded in laughter, like a child. She stifled his laugh by pulling his head towards hers and kissing him, a tender and drawn-out kiss as if they were long lost lovers who had just been reunited. When the hour of heartache arrived and the lights came back on, Patra reluctantly detached himself from the most beautiful woman in the world and took her back with him. That night, in the next room, Pran and Paradorn lay listening to her endless purring.