by Sean Wallace
The next time they were alone they talked about going to school in Yala, about family. One of Maneerat’s sisters had the habit of playing the same song over and over, and that’d drive her a little mad or out of the house shared between too many – grandparents, an uncle, several aunts and in-laws. Growing up, she’d had to share everything, including her mother’s affection. School for her had ended at sixteen; the state took care of tuition fees, but she couldn’t attend classes and work at the same time.
They did not talk about the weight or texture of a gun. They did not talk about the sound it would make, fireworks-clap, that would fill their ears and be the last thing they heard instead of each other’s voice.
When the blindfold was ripped off she could not tell if it was day, night or some nebulous moment between. She blinked up at a strange woman, Indian and muscular, who knelt limned in slatted light, pale yellow bars across her face and Velcro vest as she cut through the bindings. “Khun Kwankaew sent me,” she said softly. Next she freed Maneerat, and Nathamol’s throat tightened when she saw how much caked blood there was, how many bruises. The Indian woman pressed a black bead into Nathamol’s ear; immediately her skull filled with a buzz of chatter and pounding footfalls.
The woman led them to the fire exit, pointed up, and shut the heavy door between them. She had, Nathamol registered belatedly, a gun.
The stairs stretched on interminably. First they ran, taking two steps at a time, until they couldn’t. Nathamol’s lungs threshed and her legs trembled, but she kept on. Bearing some of Maneerat’s weight, she kept on.
On the roof the sun was rising. Up so high Guanim’s shield was just a gloss between eye and sky; Nathamol saw jagged blades of light, clouds, and a distance she’d forgotten existed. The world had become so narrow, the horizon so small.
They found a shade and eased each other down onto cool concrete. Maneerat cradled her broken hand, soft. “I’m sorry I didn’t speak up. Because I knew.”
“About what?” Her voice rasped paper dry. There were tears in her, but she felt curiously serene, deep in a still well.
“Four years ago I was paid to join an experiment. Did some tests, answered questions, had my head monitored. Funny, I thought at the time, everyone else was a bargirl, a rent boy, that sort of thing . . . The girl in charge, a student really, said it was easier to synchronize frequencies under a common intent.”
“Som,” she breathed. “You were one of her subjects.” Was that how Kwankaew had found them and sent help – had the Americans passed checkpoints where Thanakit’s protocol had been installed? She hadn’t thought that possible; she hadn’t thought of anything at all.
“When I heard farangs started dropping dead, like their brains just shorted out, I thought, Am I going to hell, will I be reborn a pig or a roach? Then I stopped caring. I figured they’d be in an even worse place.”
Nathamol slit her eyes against the light. It was bright here, and she imagined she could see more than the jaundice yellow of fallout, that there were rose and lotus tinting the clouds. “If you’d said that,” she said softly, “I think she’d have killed us both. But this way she kept me alive. In case I would give her something more, something useful.”
Maneerat sighed into her neck. “Ying. You’re too forgiving.”
“Because I want to be. When we’re safe . . . do you want to meet my family? I’ll tell them you’re a co-worker. You’ll like my sister.”
A hand with torn fingernails cupped her cheek carefully. “Will there be a ring at the end of it?”
“As many rings as you like.”
They lapsed into silence, watching the dawn. Nathamol listened to the bead in her ear, bursts of gunfire and stretches of silence.
The fire door opened, almost soundlessly, creaking just once. Samantha stepped through, bloodied and panting. Her left hand clenched around the grip of a pistol.
There was no hiding. The two of them sat in plain sight, and the farang did not waste time; she leveled the pistol, took aim.
A gunshot was just as shattering as Nathamol had imagined, louder than movies had made them out to be, the sound solidifying and settling by her eardrums.
The bead crackled. Kwankaew’s voice, muted by the ringing in her skull: “I’m glad you are safe.”
She’d never been in a helicopter. There’d been plane rides, but this was different. The motion of flight vibrated through seat and window, making her teeth chatter: a thin shell separating her from emptiness and terminal velocity. She thought of calm days in riverside temples. She thought of making krathong in art-and-craft classes. Things that weren’t like now, things that lay distant and separate from what her life had become; from what had happened. In her lap, Maneerat slept, having curled small and fetal, her breath a warmth feathering Nathamol’s skin.
Between Kwankaew’s hands the gun lay quiescent, bearing no traces of killing, no echo of its desperate noise. “I’d been looking for that woman,” she said, ragged as though she’d been running. “Almost as good at hiding as she was with a sniper rifle.”
“She killed Som.”
“Yes.” The gun returned to its holster and she wanted to ask, When did you learn to shoot? “Let me look at you.”
A first-aid box. Alcohol-blued swabs scraped away the grime; her fingers were splinted, wrapped in gauze. Kwankaew put the supplies back with astonishing tidiness. They didn’t speak again until they had touched down on the Grand Hyatt, until they were kneeling before the first Chaomae Guanim under halogen bulbs green and blue. Each lit an incense stick, an offering of light and prayer trickling into the goddess-engine, into the network that drank it in synaptic pulses.
Kwankaew got up last, and when she stood she was clutching the engagement rings, which glittered crimson. “I had no right to pressure you into working with me, Ying. You shouldn’t have gotten involved; you shouldn’t have been marked. None of this is right.”
Standing in Maneerat’s arm, all Nathamol could think of was this: this fitting together, like puzzle pieces fallen out of different boxes but which by chance had met, interlocked. “No, but we talked about this. You wanted Som’s subjects.”
Maneerat inclined her head. “Working with you seems the safest, and Ying thinks with my data you might be able to extend the shielding. Do other useful things.”
“I could. Understand, Khun Maneerat, you’ll be risking your life.”
Nathamol smiled painfully. Her other hurts had receded to a distance. “Bua and I know that. But the Americans will be coming back, and if we don’t do anything, we’ll probably be dead anyway.”
Kwankaew loosened her hands, looking down at the welts her own nails had raised in her palms. “What if I ask you to help turn Som’s machines into weapons?”
They shared a glance, a nod. “Yes,” Nathamol said.
“Then let me show you something.” She opened the same small book Nathamol had seen before, and from it extracted three grainy stills. Aerial shots of armored vehicles nosing at wrecked power plants. “These are recent, taken outside Kuala Lumpur.”
“They’re coming, then.” Maneerat’s voice was calm, but her hold had tightened around Nathamol.
“A question of whom, Beijing or us, and they’re by far better defended.” The photographs were slipped back into the book. “When the Americans come this time, we’ll be ready.”
Nathamol did not know if they would be; she didn’t see, even, how they could be. They left the first Chaomae Guanim, walking close, hand in hand. Around them the goddesses hummed, a grid five hundred and ninety-nine strong. A divinity brought first to protect, and now perhaps to fight, for Krungthep. A divinity Rinnapha had given her life to invoke.
And now it was their turn.
Smoke City
Christopher Barzak
One night, I woke to the sound of my mother’s voice, as I did when I was a child. The words were familiar to my ear, they matched the voice that formed them, but it was not until I had opened my eyes to the dark of my room and my
husband’s snoring that I remembered the words were calling me away from my warm bed and the steady breathing of my children, both asleep in their own rooms across the hall. “Because I could not stop for death,” my mother used to tell me, “he kindly stopped for me.” They were Dickinson’s words, of course, not my mother’s, but she said them as if they were hers, and because of that, they were hers, and because of that, they are now mine, passed down with every other object my mother gave me before I left for what I hoped would be a better world. “Here, take this candy dish.” Her hands pushing the red knobbed glass into my hands. “Here, take this sweater.” Her hands folding it, a made thing, pulled together by her hands, so that I could lift it and lay it on the seat as my car pulled me away. Her hand lifted into the air above her cloud of white hair behind me. The smoke of that other city enveloping her, putting it behind me, trying to put it behind me, until I had the words in my mouth again, like a bit, and then the way opened up beneath me, a fissure through which I slipped, down through the bed sheets, no matter how I grasped at them, down through the mattress, down through the floorboards, down, down, down, through the mud and earth and gravel, leaving my snoring husband and my steadily breathing children above, in that better place, until I was floating, once more, along the swiftly flowing current of the Fourth River.
When I rose up, gasping for air, and blinked the water from my eyes, I saw the familiar cavern lit by lanterns that lined the walls, orange fires burning behind smoked glass. And, not far downstream, his shadow stood along the water’s edge, a lantern held out over the slug and tow of the current, waiting, as he was always waiting for me, there, in that place beneath the three rivers, there in the Fourth River’s tunnel that leads to Smoke City.
It was time again, I understood, to attend to my obligations.
History always exacts a price from those who have climbed out to live in the world above. There is never a way to fully outrun our beginnings. And here was mine, and he was mine here. I smiled, happy to see him again, the sharp bones of his face gold-leafed by the light of his lantern.
He put out his hand to fish me from the river, and pulled me up to stand beside him. “It is good to see you again, wife,” he said, and I wrapped my arms around him.
“It is good to smell you again, husband,” I said, my face pressed against his thick chest. They are large down here, the men of Smoke City. Their labor makes them into giants.
We walked along the Fourth River’s edge, our hands linked between us, until we came to the mouth of the tunnel, where the city tipped into sight below, cupped as it is within the hands of a valley, strung together by the many bridges crossing the rivers that wind round its perimeter. The smoke obscured all but the dark mirrored glass of city towers, which gleamed by the light of the mill-fired skies down in the financial district, where the captains sit around long, polished tables throughout the hours and commit their business.
It did not take the fumes long to find me, the scent of the mills and the sweaty, grease-faced laborers, so that when my husband pulled me toward the carriage at the top of the Incline Passage, a moment passed in which my heart flickered like the flame climbing the wick of his lantern. I inhaled sharply, trying to catch my breath. Already what nostalgia for home I possessed had begun to evaporate as I began to remember, to piece together what I had worked so hard to obscure.
I hesitated at the door of the Incline carriage, looking back at the cavern opening, where the Fourth River spilled over the edge, down into the valley, but my husband placed two fingers on my chin and turned my face back up to his. “We must go now,” he said, and I nodded at his eyes like chips of coal, his mustached upper lip, the sweat on his brow, as if he were working, even now, as in the mill, among the glowing rolls of steel.
The Incline rattled into gear, and soon we were creaking down the valley wall, rickety-click, the chains lowering us to the bottom, slowly, slowly. I watched out the window as the city grew close and the smoke began to thicken, holding a hand over my mouth and nose. An Incline car on the track opposite passed us, taking a man and a woman up to the Fourth River overlook. She, like me, peered out her window, a hand covering her mouth and nose as they ascended the tracks. We stared at each other, but it was she who first broke our gaze to look up at the opening to the cavern with great expectations, almost a panicked smile on her face, teeth gritted, willing herself upward. She was on her return journey, I could tell. I had worn that face myself. She had spent a long year here, and was glad to be leaving.
They are long here, the years in Smoke City, even though they are finished within the passing of a night.
At the bottom, my husband handed me down from the Incline car, then up again into our carriage, which was waiting by the curb, the horses nickering and snorting in the dark. Then off he sent us, jostling down the cobbled lane, with one flick of his wrist and a strong word.
Down many wide and narrow streets we rode, some mud, some brick, some stone, passing through the long rows of narrow workers’ houses, all lined up and lean like soldiers, until we arrived at our own, in the Lost Neighborhood, down in Junction Hollow, where Eliza, the furnace, blocks the view of the river with her black bulk and her belching smoke. They are all female, always. They have unassuming names like Jeanette, Edith, Carrie. All night long, every night, they fill the sky with their fires.
Outside, on the front stoop of our narrow house, my children from the last time were waiting, arms folded over their skinny chests or hanging limply at their sides. When I stepped down from the carriage onto the street, they ran down the stairs, their arms thrown wide, the word “Mother!” spilling from their eager mouths.
They had grown since I’d last seen them. They had grown so much that none of them had retained the names I’d given them at birth. Shauna, the youngest, had become Anis. Alexander was Shoeshine. Paul, the oldest, said to simply call him Ayu. “Quite lovely,” I said to Anis. “Very good then,” I told Shoeshine. And to Ayu, I said nothing, only nodded, showing the respect due an imagination that had turned so particularly into itself during my absence. He had a glint in his eyes. He reminded me of myself a little, willing to cast off anything we’d been told.
When we went through the door, the scent of boiled cabbage and potatoes filled the front room. They had cooked dinner for me, and quite proudly Anis and Shoeshine took hold of either elbow and led me to the scratched and corner-worn table, where we sat and shared their offering, not saying anything when our eyes met one another’s. It was not from shame, our silence, but from an understanding that to express too much joy at my homecoming would be absurd. We knew that soon they would have no names at all, and I would never again see them.
We sipped our potato soup and finely chewed our noodles and cabbage.
Later, after the children had gone to bed, my husband led me up the creaking stairs to our own room, where we made love, fitting into one another on the gritty, soot-stained sheets. Old friends, always. Afterward, his arms wrapped around my sweaty stomach, holding me to him from behind, he said, “I die a little more each time you are away.”
I did not reply immediately, but stared out the grimy window at the rooftops across the street. A crow had perched on the sill of the window opposite, casting about for the glint of something, anything, in the dark streets below. It cawed at me, as if it had noticed me staring, and ruffled its feathers. Finally, without turning to my husband, I said, “We all die,” and closed my eyes to the night.
The days in the city of my birth are differentiated from the nights by small degrees of shade and color. The street lamps continue burning during the day, since the sun cannot reach beyond the smoke that moves through the valley like a storm that will never abate. So it always appears to be night, and you can only tell it is day by the sound of shift whistles and church bells ringing the hours, announcing when it is time to return to work or to kneel and pray.
No growing things grew in Smoke City, due to the lack of sunlight. On no stoops or windowsills did a fern or a flow
er add their shapes and colors to the square and rectangular stone backdrops of the workers’ houses. Only fine dusty coatings of soot, in which children drew pictures with the tips of their fingers, and upon which adults would occasionally scrawl strange messages:
Do Not Believe Anything They Tell You.
Your Rewards Await You In Heaven.
It Is Better That Others Possess What I Need But Do Not Understand.
I walked my children down the road, past these cryptic depictions of stick men and women on the sides of houses and words whose meanings I could not fathom, until we came to the gates of the furnace Eliza, whose stacks sent thick plumes of smoke into the air. There, holding the hands of my two youngest, I knelt down in the street to meet their faces. “You must do what you are told,” I instructed them, my heart squeezing even as I said the words. “You must work very hard, and never be of trouble to anyone, understand?”
The little ones, Anis and Shoeshine, nodded. They had all been prepared for this day over the short years of their lives. But Ayu, my oldest, narrowed his eyes to a squint and folded his arms over his chest, as if he understood more than I was saying. Those eyes were mine looking back at me, calling me a liar. “Do you understand, Ayu?” I asked him directly, to stop him from making that look. When he refused to answer, I asked, “Paul, do you understand me?” and he looked down at his feet, the head of a flower wilting.
I stood again, took up their small hands again, and led them to Eliza’s gates, the top of which was decorated with a flourish of coiled barbed wire. A small, square window in the door opened as we stood waiting, and a man’s eye looked out at us. “Are they ready?” he said.
I nodded.
The window snapped shut, then the gate doors began to separate, widening as they opened. Inside, we could see many people working, sparks flying, carts of coal going back and forth, the rumble of the mill distorting the voices of the workers. The man who had opened the gate window came from around the corner to greet us. He was small, stocky, with oily skin and a round face. He smiled, but I could not manage to be anything but straight-faced and stoic. He held his hands out to the little ones, who went to him, giving him their hands as they’d been instructed, and my heart filled my mouth, suffocating me, so that I fell to my knees and buried my face in my hands.