He bumps into something solid. Chalee. He looks up at her and says, “Black teeth.”
She reaches down to take the lighter. “It’s not coming after you,” she says. “A ghost would be eating you by now.” She clicks the lighter, looks over at the coat, and sees the dark train of pee leading away from it. A little surge of pity pushes her into action—she needs to do something to make him think she hasn’t noticed. “Maybe it’s a kid,” she says, and with her heart pounding triple-time in her ears, she leans down and tugs back the coat, which has fallen back into place.
Even through the dark patches of whatever has been rubbed into the skin, she can see the delicacy of bone and brow and nostril. A girl. Not much older than they are—maybe one or two years.
She smells terrible. Dirtier than dirty. Very gently, Chalee peels the coat down another few inches and sees collar bones jutting out above a garment that was white once, loose and simple and unbelievably filthy. Chalee has been dirty, too; since her family fell apart after losing their farm, she has learned what it feels like to be so dirty she wants to die, but has never been this dirty.
The girl beneath the crumpled coat opens one eye and hisses, and Chalee falls back on her rump. Then the open eye rolls up, and the gray face empties.
Chalee puts a hand, very, very lightly, on the discolored forehead and then snatches it back. “She’s so hot,” she says. “It’s a girl. She’s feels like she’s on fire and she looks like she hasn’t eaten in a month. Do you have the cell phone?”
Dok says, “I can’t use the cell phone. They’ll take it away if they know I’ve got it.”
Chalee turns to look at him. “I think she could die,” she says. “So if you use your cell phone, maybe you lose it, and if you don’t use it, maybe she dies.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He pulls a cheap prepaid phone out of his pocket. “What do we want?”
“We need someone to bring the van,” she said. “We’ll never be able to get her out of here by ourselves.”
Dialing, the boy says, “I really liked having this phone.”
Chalee waits until he looks at her, and says, “You’re a nice boy, Dok.”
NINETY MINUTES LATER, when two boys in their late teens carry the feverish girl into the shelter, they’re both scratched and bleeding, and their bundle is struggling helplessly inside the coat, rolled up like a carpet and secured tightly at the elbows and ankles with leather belts. The sounds she makes are almost too high to be heard. Chalee and Dok follow, holding their jeans up with their hands. Their heads hang down. In the doorway they see Boo, the older boy who runs the shelter, silhouetted in the hallway, his hands on his hips, his pose telling them they’re in for it.
As they near the entry with its fluorescent overheads, the big patch of urine on the front of Dok’s pants comes into dark relief. Chalee twists the top of her beltless jeans into an expert one-handed knot and throws her left arm around Dok, pulling him toward her so he’s facing her. She keeps moving, and Dok is now walking sideways, but the wet spot on his jeans is masked by Chalee’s body. Boo won’t see it.
The smile Dok gives her, with his two big rat-teeth gleaming in its center, almost melts Chalee to the floor.
4
Goop Is Uninformative
THE UNPLEASANTLY FULL bowl of breakfast goop that Rafferty has been told will bring his digestive system into harmony and, apparently, allow him to live forever, sends up thick ropes of steam that just add to the morning’s humidity. When he cooked it, he’d felt like he was doing a chemistry experiment, fascinated by its sheer, almost gelatinous, viscosity; and when it finally came to a boil, the bubbles had shouldered their way slowly to the surface and then just sat there, unpopped, like gray jellyfish. The pot in which he cooked it will be murder to clean.
Rafferty is beginning to doubt the claims of the Growing Younger Man, an acquaintance from the Expat Bar over on Patpong, who had given him the box of goop. It’s hard to see how eating cement will tune up his system or lengthen his life. But, truth be told, he doesn’t really care whether the pot will be hard to wash or, for that matter, whether he’ll live forever. Right now, he doesn’t care about much of anything.
He sighs, something he’s been doing a lot of lately, and picks up the big tablespoon he’d chosen to get the goop down more quickly.
Early sunlight peeks over his shoulder at an acute, inquisitive angle, having slipped past the edge of the sliding glass door that opens onto the balcony. The door faces southeast, so the sun is taking its morning bow off to the left, its light and heat hitting Rafferty in the back as he sits at the breakfast counter. The bright light brings into relief a bit of dried something-or-other on the spoon. Rafferty tilts the spoon to see the smudge more clearly, and the spoon’s concave surface gathers and focuses the sunlight and beams the flare straight into Rafferty’s left eye.
And instantly he’s there again, ankle-deep in floodwater, squinting against the ravenous brightness of the burning house, seeing both stories reflected upside-down in the water’s black rippled surface, seeing the relatively dark rectangle of the doorway and the brutalized child running toward it and through it, straight into the flames. He feels himself leap forward yet again, hoping to do the impossible and splash through the water to catch her, but the house seems to inhale massively, sucking her even further in, and then there’s a rush of air and light and heat and sound, and the next thing he knows he’s on his back as flaming pieces of the house drift down around him, hissing as they hit the water.
It’s been seven weeks since that night, and he still can’t find a way around his conviction that he set into motion the chain of events that resulted in that little girl running through that doorway. He’s helpless against the memory. The guilt is always just one layer of life away, much the same way the hundreds of thousands of dollars he took from the house are one layer of fabric away from the everyday appearance of things, stuffed into the upholstery of the sofa and the chairs and folded into the pockets of clothes in the closets. Haskell Murphy, the girl’s father, is dead, but the evil that flowed from him when he was alive still surrounds Rafferty, pooled and rippling like the water that had reflected the exploding house.
The sun on his back has become unpleasantly hot, so he shifts to the stool to his left and lets it stream past him, into the kitchen.
He sticks the spoon into the goop, with a little more force than necessary. It stands at attention, glinting in the sunlight. Another sigh fills his chest, seemingly on its own, and then escapes.
He can hear Rose in the bedroom, talking to her mother at the extraordinary speed used by women who know each other really well, talking and listening at the same time. Rafferty’s been watching his list of fundamental differences between men and women dwindle over the years, but nothing has knocked this one off the page. Most men can’t talk like that, period.
There’s a silence, and he thinks Rose may have hung up, but after a moment she starts to talk again. He hears the word dream several times, the words frightened and river. She goes on for more than a minute and then falls silent, so she and her mother have moved into a new—and, for them, unusual—rhythm.
Another thing that’s unusual. Rose had asked for the phone along with her Nescafé. She normally needs a full cup of coffee to push her way past grunting. But today, a few gulps down, she’s rattling away like a tree full of parrots. For a moment, he’s tempted to claim some credit. He’d acquitted himself reasonably well last night, he thought, for a man who had been awakened by someone simply stopping his heart with an icy foot. But he knows better. Sex may make Rose purr briefly, but she moved on to the rest of her life the moment she fell asleep. He’s the one who painstakingly added the experience, like a bright feather, to his imaginary totem.
He sighs again.
The goop’s fragrance stalks him, a little bit like damp paper that might house mice, and he tugs the spoon out, watching half of the stuff pull free of the bowl with a sucking noise. The surface trembles slightly, in a r
ubbery fashion. If you compressed it into a ball, he thinks, you could drop it off the edge of the balcony and see how many stories it bounces back up.
“Eeeeewwww,” Miaow says, coming past him into the kitchen with beads of water on her forehead and the bridge of her nose. They catch the sunlight and sparkle. Her white, short-sleeve blouse and blue school uniform skirt have been ironed until they squealed. She gives the bowl and the upraised spoon a censorious glance. “What’s that?” ’
He interrupts his sigh on the inhale, gives her a smile that feels plausible, and pulls himself into the present. “Good morning, Miaow.”
“Okay, okay, good morning. What is it?”
“It’s my goop.”
“Andrew would say that goop is uninformative.” She pops the refrigerator door open and looks in, with the expression of someone who’s getting her first glimpse of the landscape of Mars. Rafferty knows how she feels; Rose constantly rearranges the refrigerator, moving every single thing in it to a new and more counter-intuitive place.
“And if Andrew were here,” Rafferty says, fighting his first mouthful, “I’d tell him it’s oatmeal-quinoa-bran goop.”
“Well, be careful,” Miaow says, pulling out a can of caffeinated Diet Coke. “Eat too much of that stuff and you’ll be pooping roofing material.”
“Miaow,” Rose says, coming in wearing Rafferty’s newest T-shirt and a pair of white shorts from her infinite supply. Her hair, which falls to her waist when left to its own devices, is coiled up in an improbable structure that’s secured with two yellow pencils. “If we have to talk about poop,” she says, in Thai, “we don’t do it while we’re eating.”
Miaow says, also in Thai, “Have you seen his breakfast?”
“No, and I won’t.” Rose turns on the burner beneath her hot-water pot and unscrews the lid on her army-battalion size jar of Nescafé, then licks her index finger and touches it to the side of the teapot, pulling back when she hears it sizzle. “Don’t you want your orange?”
“Who can find it?” Miaow says.
“In the fruit drawer.”
Rafferty says, in English, “We have a fruit drawer?”
“In the refrigerator.” She’s spooning Nescafé powder into her mug. “At the bottom.”
“I thought that was for your hair conditioner.”
“I’ve got a new one that doesn’t have so much papaya in it.”
“It wouldn’t have spoiled anyway,” Miaow says. She chooses an orange, turns her palm to the ceiling, and lets the orange roll down her arm, then straightens her elbow to flip it into the air and catches it without even looking at it.
“I have a refrigerator,” Rose says placidly, pouring water into the mug, “and I will put what I want in it.” To Rafferty she says, “How can you eat that?”
“I can’t,” Rafferty says, getting up. “But I’m afraid to put it down the sink.”
“See what I mean?” Miaow says in her perfect school-English. “If it’ll gum up the pipes in the building, think what it’ll do to your, you know.” She’s tossing pieces of orange peel underhand at the sink and hitting every shot. Rafferty is inhaling the sharp orange fragrance and feeling relatively light-hearted for the first time since he got up when Rose says, “Miaow, why do you look so tired?”
Miaow looks as stricken as someone getting bad news from a doctor. “I do?”
“You’ve got circles under your eyes.” Rose blows on her coffee. “Why?”
“I, uh, I woke up last night?”
“Everybody woke up last night,” Rafferty says, and Rose laughs hard enough to blow a slop of coffee over the rim of her cup.
Miaow says suspiciously, “Why is that funny?”
“What woke you up?” Rafferty asks, feeling a pinch of guilt; he’s been so wrapped up in what happened to another child that he’s barely noticed his own.
“Who cares?” Miaow says, in the beginning stages of a retreat he’s come to recognize over the past year. “I woke up, that’s all.”
“Is something wrong at school?” Rose says. “Do you have a problem?”
“No,” Miaow says, her voice sliding up two full tones. “I just woke up, okay?”
“Is one of your teachers—”
“Stop asking me—”
“Or the play?” Rose asks. “Are you going to be in—”
Miaow bangs the side of her Coke can on the refrigerator door and the cola slops on her wrist. “No, I am not going to be in the play.” She wipes her wrist on her skirt. “I don’t want to be in the play, it’s a stupid play. Listen, why can’t I ever decide what we’ll talk about in the morning? How come I’m always supposed to stand here while you question me? I woke up, so what? Leave me alone.”
“All we want to know—” Rafferty says.
“Is everything,” Miaow says. “Everything everything everything. Where I go, what I do, who I talk to. You know, I took care of myself for years. So listen, I woke up because there was a ghost in my room, chewing on my feet, I woke up because I murdered somebody and I have a guilty conscience, I woke up because I woke up, is that okay with you?”
Rose says, “Did you have a bad dream?”
“I’m finished,” Miaow says. She tosses the rest of her orange into the sink. She’s stalking past Rafferty when something buzzes in her pocket and the long, final, orchestral chord from “A Day in the Life” sounds. She pulls her phone out and runs through the living room and up the hallway to her own room.
“The Beatles?” Rafferty says. “How retro. Gee, I wonder who it could possibly be.”
Rose sips her coffee, lowers the cup, and says, with absolute certainty, “She had a bad dream.”
“Bad something, anyway,” Rafferty says. “How’s your mom?”
It takes Rose a moment to respond, a moment she spends gazing down at the surface of her coffee. But then, without looking at him, she says, “Fine.” The silence stretches out, and she continues to avoid his eyes. “Just fine.”
“THE BUS IS coming,” Andrew says, his voice breaking on the word bus. “You should be downstairs in six—no, seven—minutes.”
“Thanks, Andrew,” Miaow says, trying to sound grateful. He’s done this every morning for a couple of weeks, calling or texting the moment he sees the bus for their international school shimmer its way through the smog toward his stop, about two kilometers away. She never knows what to say, so she says again the only thing she can think of. “I’ll be down there.”
“Good,” Andrew says. There’s a silence on the line, as there is every morning. “Well. See you.”
“Right,” she says, but he’s disconnected. She drops the phone onto the foot of her bed and looks at it as though it might show her a picture of what Andrew’s doing, or better still, thinking. It doesn’t, so she goes into the bathroom and goes up on tiptoe to study her face in the mirror over the sink. She sees the drops of water on her face and smears them over her skin with her palms, then looks at her eyes. Sure enough. Circles.
And, on her left cheek, a sort of toxic blotch that she can’t not call a blemish. By noon, she thinks, it’ll be as big as a toadstool.
And she’s too dark. The skin-lightening cream she keeps hidden from Rose isn’t doing anything. She’s still too short and too squat and too dark, and now she’s got a zit and circles under her eyes, too, like—like a drug addict, but not as interesting. She tilts her head back a bit and lets her eyelids droop, hoping for a kind of elegant wastedness, but all she sees is a dopey-looking dark-skinned girl with circles under her eyes. And a zit.
She has no mystery. She’ll never be pretty. If she was going to be pretty, she thinks, it would have started to show by now.
And then there’s her hair. The uneven chop that was so daring six months ago now looks like everybody. Three or four times a day, she recognizes herself from behind on the sidewalk. The red dye she’s been using looks like rust. She’s rusty, she’s drab, she has circles under her eyes. Short, dark, ordinary. She could dye her hair purple and tie it in
sailor knots and she’d still be short, dark, and ordinary.
She sees again the child from her dream, the filthy child, and she literally shakes her head to clear the image from her mind.
Lately she’s been listening to an American band called Fun, and a line from one of their songs suddenly pops into her mind: We all float before we sink.
She waves the thought away, a bit anxiously, licks her finger, and draws a wet X across her reflection. Look at Rose, so beautiful, so effortless, so certain of everything. Look at Poke, so—so whatever Poke is. Surprising, she thinks. Poke is surprising and Rose is perfect.
Why wouldn’t they push her bed into the street?
RAFFERTY IS RUNNING water into the bowlful of goop, trying to dissolve it so it won’t back up the plumbing for the entire apartment house, when two arms suddenly go around him and squeeze, and his bowl clatters into the sink, and then he hears footsteps and turns to see Miaow vanish around the corner at a sprint.
“You should see your face,” Rose says. “Mr. Tough Guy.” She sizes him up for a moment and then nods, as though settling something to her own satisfaction. “You were born to be a father.”
5
One Hundred Twelve Grams
THE BACKPACK FEELS too light.
The bus shoulders its way into a turn as Andrew Nguyen, his stomach suddenly cramped and knotted, hoists the bag again. It’s not only too light, it’s precisely too light. Not by a kilo, not by a half-kilo.
By a much lighter, much more lethal weight. One hundred twelve grams—about four ounces—too light.
Andrew is small for thirteen, narrow-shouldered, with a thin, fragile neck supporting a head that looks like he borrowed it from a bigger boy. Lately, he’s been combing his straight black hair forward, feathering it in imitation of a nineteen-year-old American pop singer who changed the way he combs his hair some time ago without notifying Andrew, stranding him once again in the familiar territory between what he thinks is cool and what the world thinks is cool. And, of course, his father, who says Andrew looks like a girl and who doesn’t think anything is cool. At the thought of his father, Andrew immediately feels beads of sweat form beneath the still-unfamiliar shawl of hair on his forehead. His glasses have begun to steam up. One hundred twelve grams.
For the Dead Page 3