For the Dead

by Timothy Hallinan

  This can’t be happening again.

  He takes a quick, panicked survey of the bus.

  It amazes him that no one is looking at him. Not that anyone ever does look at him, but he feels like he’s sitting in the center of a red, whirling vortex of anxiety. The whole bus should be staring at him.

  Well, one person is staring at him—the one who just got on and went past him without a glance—but she looks out the window the moment he meets her eyes.

  That’s the drill.

  Maybe, he thinks desperately, returning to the problem of the too-light backpack, just maybe it’s not true. Maybe it’s a graphic novel that’s missing, or something else—anything else—that would equal that weight. The hope that blossoms in his chest flickers bravely as he opens the bag, and goes out the moment he looks inside.

  His graphic novel, his spiral notebook, his science text, his bright tin pencil packet (three years too young for him, but it was a gift from his father), the neat little zippered package containing his insulin and the hypodermic he uses to inject it. His calculator, since he tends to quantify things, such as the weight of his iPhone. His wallet, wrapped with a bright red rubber band, still containing the 6,300 baht he started the day with.

  Everything except the only thing that really matters. His iPhone. The iPhone 5 with every possible app. The twenty-thousand baht iPhone his father bought him three weeks earlier to replace the twenty-thousand baht iPhone Andrew had lost only three weeks after his father gave him that one. Six weeks, two phones, forty thousand baht. Add six thousand more for apps. Forty-six thousand baht.

  He is so dead.

  He pulls off his rimless glasses—less conspicuous at school—and wipes them on the bottom of his neatly pressed long-sleeve white shirt. His glasses, when he puts them back on, are smeared with soap that didn’t rinse out of his shirt. The bus seems to have filled with fog.

  Now he’s wet beneath the arms, too. He thinks about the soap on his glasses and probably saturated in his shirt and imagines suds forming beneath his arms. He’ll not only be that weird Viet kid, he’ll be that weird Viet kid whose underarms foam.

  His father will not replace this phone. He’s going to turn its loss into what he calls a “life lesson.” Andrew hates life lessons, but even so, he feels a sneaking admiration for his father. Andrew’s father is a hard-ass in the great Vietnamese tradition. What other country in the world has defeated the French, the Americans, the Cambodians, and the Chinese?

  Only Vietnam. The country of hard-asses.

  Andrew supposes that makes him a potential hard-ass, too, but at this stage of his development, he’s a five-foot, one-inch, forty-three-kilo wisp of smoke with wet, soapy underarms and a big head. Andrew has researched his physical development, as he has everything that interests him, and he’s lagging behind the growth curve.

  Dead. He’s dead. He’ll be home at three and dead by four.

  He looks around the bus, which is full of kids from the international school where he met Miaow, and decides that his death is a sufficiently serious issue for him to break Rule Number One. He puts everything neatly back into his bag as his heart pounds in his ears, gets up, and bends forward so he can slide his palms over the cushion of the seat. To the bus at large, he says, “This one has a bad spring. It stuck me,” his voice squeaking on the word stuck in a way that makes him want to kick himself. He wobbles his way down the swaying center aisle until he can ease into the empty seat beside Miaow, who stares at him with the stone face that means, What do you think you’re doing?

  “Okay if I sit here?” Andrew asks. “The other one has a bad spring.”

  “It stuck him,” a girl two rows up says derisively, and there’s a ripple of laughter. Miaow’s cheeks are flaming. She says, under her breath but with a fierce energy, “This better be good.”

  “I lost my phone.”

  The tone of his voice brings her gaze around.

  “I must have left it on the bench. After I called you. The bus came, and I guess I got up—”

  “Go back and get it.” The girl who’d sneered about the spring is looking back at them, and Miaow gives her the Street Eyes that had driven off much bigger kids than she, back when she lived on the sidewalk. The girl whips her head around, but she says something to the girl sitting next to her and Miaow’s eyelids drop halfway and she tries to burn a hole in the back of the girl’s head.

  “It won’t be there,” Andrew says miserably.

  “You don’t know that,” Miaow says. She’s whispering intently, her eyes raking the bus. “But it’s definitely not going to be there seven hours from now.” She gets up. “Let’s go.”

  Andrew says, “You mean—not go to school?”

  “What scares you more, Andrew,” she demands, “losing another phone or being late for school?”

  Andrew goes scarlet. He looks down the aisle, and Miaow knows he’s dreading the walk, with everyone looking at him. And she knows just how he feels. But …

  “I’ll go, too,” she says, and begins the trek, reaching out to snap her index finger against the ear of the girl who made fun of Andrew. The girl squeals, and Miaow hears Andrew behind her, saying, “Excuse me, excuse me,” and she wants to turn and kick him in the shins. She’s doing this for him, calling attention to herself and pissing the whole bus off for him. How dare he apologize? It feels like a betrayal.

  But there isn’t time to think about that because the bus driver is saying, “Back in your seat.”

  Miaow says, “I have to throw up.”

  “Not in here. Wait.” The driver, a dark man who’s an obvious transplant from the country and who’s always been nice to her, signals and fights his way to the curb. The door has opened and Miaow is partway down the stairs when the bus driver says, “Hey. Where are you going?”

  Without looking back, Miaow says, “We’re going to throw up together.”

  IT ISN’T THERE. They’ve searched the bench, under it, and around it. No iPhone.

  Now Andrew looks like he really might throw up. He collapses on the bench, puts his elbows on his knees, and lets his head droop into his palms.

  Miaow sits beside him. She knows how awful his father can be, but at the same time, she has an obscure urge to slap him. Little rich kid, lost his fancy phone. Within a block there are probably two or three kids with nothing to eat. She says, “How often do they call you?”

  He says to his hands, “Huh?”

  “Your parents. How often do they call you?”

  “Not much.”

  “Once a day, four times a day? Twice a week?”

  He looks at her. He’s comfortable with numbers. “Twice a week, on average.”

  “So if your Dad sees you with the right phone, you’ll be okay as long as they don’t call.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “And we’ll figure out something about your SIM card later. I mean why your old number isn’t working.”

  “Miaow,” Andrew says patiently, “they’re not going to wonder about my SIM card. They’ll wonder about my phone.”

  “How much money do you have?”

  “Six thousand three hundred baht.”

  Miaow touches her front pocket and says, “I’ve got some, too. Might be enough.”

  “Twenty thousand,” Andrew says. “That’s how much is enough.”

  “We’re going to make a deal,” Miaow says. “Let’s go.”

  Following her, Andrew says, as though the words are in a new language, “A deal?”

  “NOT IN SCHOOL, huh?” The taxi driver has been checking them in the mirror since they climbed in.

  “We’re on a field trip,” Miaow says, seeing, out of the corner of her eye, Andrew’s head snap around, feeling his wide-open eyes. It’s just possible, she thinks, that Andrew may never have told a lie.

  “Yeah?” the driver says. “A field trip? Where to?”

  “Our class is, uh, putting together a—a map of Bangkok’s used-stuff neighborhoods, you know, the places you can g
et used whatever. We’re looking for phones.”

  “Good idea for taxi drivers,” the driver said. “I can’t tell you how many times somebody climbs in, says, ‘Where can I buy a used this or that?’ How would I know? If I give you my email address, will you send me a copy?”

  “Sure.” She leans forward. “Up in here,” she says. “Anywhere you can stop.”

  “This is Indians,” the driver says. “What do they sell?’

  Opening the door, Miaow says, “Whatever you want.”

  “WHERE ARE WE going?” Andrew had lagged behind to get the driver’s email address on a card, which he solemnly hands to Miaow. She drops it to the pavement, and he immediately picks it up. “You shouldn’t litter.”

  “They’re up here somewhere. There were four last time I came.”

  He takes a deep sniff of garlic and marigolds. The people in this warren of alleyways are dark-skinned. “What are?”

  “Phones, Andrew. Remember phones?”

  “They sell phones here?”

  “Used ones.”

  “You mean stolen?”

  “Probably. Some of them, probably.”

  Andrew looks around uncertainly, his eyes slowing at a tiny booth that sells carved wood ornamented with tiny bits of mirror. “How do you even know about a place like this?”

  “I spent a lot of time wandering around Bangkok,” Miaow says without thinking, and then slams her mouth shut and feels her eyes open wide in panic, but Andrew has come almost even with her, looking interested, and she smoothes her expression.

  “You did?” he says. “When?”

  “Well, not me, really,” she improvises. Andrew knows nothing—no one at school knows anything, and they can’t be allowed to know anything—about the fact that she was once a street child and a beggar, the lowest caste of all. The filthy child. “I mean, Poke.”

  “Poke wanders around?”

  “Yes. Absolutely. All the time. Wander, wander. And he loses his phone every week.”

  “But how does he know about this place?”

  “Oh,” she says, “you know.”

  “I don’t know,” Andrew says, hauling her to a stop. “That’s why I asked.”

  The ping of irritation she feels at not being allowed to evade the question is soothed by her recognition that this is one of the things she … likes about him. She does an instant edit on the sentence, deleting the word loves, which had shoved its way in uninvited. Yes, it’s one of the things she likes about him. He thinks in order and in specifics, unlike Poke and Rose and, well, her. Talking with Andrew has a soothing predictability, while a conversation among the members of her family is like a game of Whack-a-Mole: you never know what will pop up, or from which direction.

  Up here—right or left? Left.

  Since she was abandoned on the sidewalk at the age of two or maybe three, one of Miaow’s priorities has been to impose order on the world. When she first lived with Poke and Rose she lined her shoes up every night on the edge of the carpet and allowed a space of exactly three fingers between the hangers in her closet. She ate—she still eats—food in the same order at every meal and resists vigorously the potential anarchy of unfamiliar dishes. Conversation with Andrew is reassuringly orderly, like eating in a restaurant where they’ve only got hamburgers and fries, and nobody’s going to ambush you with polenta.

  They turn a corner: more alley, buildings three or four stories high on each side with stalls in front of them, big umbrellas to shade the goods on the folding tables. Women in saris, the occasional man in a turban. It doesn’t feel much like Bangkok.

  “Poke’s a writer,” she says as an answer finally shows up. “It’s his job to know stuff like that.”

  “I never see him write,” Andrew says. He’s glancing around and he looks apprehensive. A child of the diplomatic corps, he moves in a small circle: home, school, the embassy, the homes of a few approved friends. When he shops, Miaow knows, it’s in one of the city’s many immaculate, air-conditioned malls, nothing like this pungent maze of vendors.

  “Me neither, lately,” Miaow says. “He came into some money a couple of months ago, and he’s been taking it easy.”

  “How much money?”

  She tries not to grit her teeth. Appreciate him, she needs to appreciate him. When she’d tried to explain to Poke the way Andrew thought things through, he’d told her there were two kinds of smart people, people whose minds were like a river and people whose minds were like a net.

  “A lot,” she says. Anticipating the next question, she answers with a lie. “He earned it writing, okay?” In an effort to change the subject, she says, “Poke says you think like a river and he thinks like a net.”

  Andrew lags to watch a woman in a turquoise sari cooking strips of meat over a grill. “What does that mean?”

  “People who think like a river,” she says, taking his upper arm and dragging him left, into a narrower alley, “go from A to D by way of B and C. They think the world is organized one two three, this and then that and then that. People who think like a net believe that everything is connected to everything else, and they might go straight from A to L and then bounce off P before they get to D.”

  Andrew’s lower lip emerges. “It sounds like pachinko. Random and disorderly, with a lot of wasted motion.”

  “It’s just a different approach,” she says, feeling defensive.

  “Like a bad movie.” He turns his head slowly, taking in his surroundings, obviously uncomfortable with what he sees. “Are there really phones here?”

  “Just a little farther.”

  He looks at his watch. “Because we’re going to be in trouble if the school calls our parents.”

  “I’ll phone Mrs. Shin and tell her that I got sick on the bus but I’m okay now and we’ll be there in a little bit.”

  “You can really think things up,” he says.

  “It’s hard work,” she says, almost snapping. “And I’m doing it for you.”

  “Right.”

  They trot on for a few seconds. They’re in a section of alleyway that’s mostly snack food on skewers and flatbreads cooked over open coals. Here and there Miaow sees a glass display case that’s been hauled into the alley, full of small electronics—music players, earphones, GPS units—so she knows they’re going in the right direction.

  He says, “What about stupid people?”

  “What about stupid people?”

  “What does your father—what does Poke—say about stupid people?”

  “He says stupid people’s minds are like a big chest of drawers where the drawers change places all the time. Before they can get from A to C they have to search for B, and it’s never where they think they put it.”

  “Huh.” He stops, and she stops with him. He blinks several times, inhales, then exhales, and then says, “I need to talk to you about something.”

  She looks at him, at his flushed cheeks, and a little worm of anxiety wriggles in her gut. “About?”

  “The, umm, the play.”

  The shift in topic catches her off-guard. They’d met in the school’s production of The Tempest, but Miaow hasn’t thought much about this year’s production. “The play?’

  “You know, Small Town,” he says with the weighty patience of someone who’s been forced to state the obvious. “Are you going to try out?”

  “No,” she says. “It’s a stupid play, a bunch of white people in a boring little town, not doing anything. There are no wizards or shipwrecks. Nobody in it is as cool as Ariel.”

  He’s looking at his feet. “I guess not,” he says. He looks devastated.

  Miaow strikes off down an alley to the left, and she hears his feet scuff as he catches up. He says, “But I like the things Julie says about, you know, dying and saying goodbye.”

  “You like the things Julie says?”

  “Sure,” he says. “You know.” He raises both arms, palms up, and declaims: “One last look, please? Goodbye, all of you. Everyone I liked and didn’t
like, the people I loved and the ones I fought with—over what? Nothing. The things I cried over. They were tiny. Everything was tiny, and big at the same time. Everything looks so small and ordinary from here and it lasts such a short time, and we make so much of it, and it’s all so beautiful. Are we wrong to think it’s ordinary, or are we wrong to think it’s beautiful?” He blinks uncertainly, seeing her watching him open-mouthed, and concludes, “But that’s right, isn’t it? It wasn’t until now that I saw how beautiful it is. Oh, for a chance to do it again, seeing it all this time. I’d see more of it that way, wouldn’t I? Wouldn’t I?”

  Miaow says, “You learned it.”

  His cheeks two red hotspots, his eyes looking everywhere except at her, he says, “You could play Julie.”

  “Never,” she says bitterly. “It’ll be someone tall. It’ll be Siri.” Siri Lindstrom, the school’s acknowledged beauty, played Miranda, the part all the girls had wanted, in The Tempest.

  “But Siri can’t act,” Andrew says, and Miaow’s heart suddenly wells up. “She’s beautiful,” he adds as her heart shrinks back to normal size, “but she can barely walk without biting her tongue. O brave new world,” he parrots in a flat, uninflected treble voice, “that has such creatures in it.”

  “Oh, Ferdinand, Ferdinand,” Miaow says in the same piping tone. She’s laughing, and Andrew joins in, making sure he doesn’t laugh longer than she does. She sobers and looks around, getting her bearings, and tugs on his shirt to tow him behind her. “Mrs. Shin’s not going to choose a short Julie.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that.”

  “Well, so have I, and it’s not going to happen.”

  “Listen,” he says, stopping yet again. She stops beside him, slightly surprised. He’s rarely this assertive with her. He seems surprised, too. “The school, you know?”