April is the hottest month. The water festival, which proclaims the coming of the long monsoon, has come and gone; we’re well into May, and it’s still the hottest month. When our story begins I’m a hot little boy, sweating as I labor in a hot airless shed, because the corrugated iron walls keep the hot air in and there’s not even an electric fan.
I’m an orphan, of course. To play this role, the tall old man once told me, you either have to be an orphan or at the very least grow up with surrogates, suspecting the whole time that you have a different parentage, perhaps divine. Usually, you had been given a dire prediction when you were born—you were going to kill your father and marry your mother, or you were going to bring about the downfall of the entire empire, so your loving parents, after shedding many a tear, wrapped you in a swaddling cloth and abandoned you by the mountainside, or floated you downstream in a reed boat. In my case, they leave you on the doorstep of Sacred Heart with a basket, a blanket, and a dagger.
Then, when you came of age, you’d learn who you really were, draw a sword from a stone, and go off to find your father’s castle, marrying princesses, slaying dragons, and saving the universe along the way before attaining your rightful place on the throne.
When the old man told me all this, I smiled a little, because you should never offend an older person, but I didn’t see how it applied to me.
Until—
* * *
The orphanage is run by the brothers, but they respect our culture, so early each morning they send us to the temple next door where a young monk named Phra Athit tells us the story of Buddha. After lunch, we learn about Jesus. We walk by the Hindu shrine, which is catty-corner from the Buddhist temple, and we always make a quick obeisance to Ganesha, the elephant god who lives there, just in case—although the brothers sort of lump in Hinduism under Buddhism, so we don’t get three daily doses of religion.
Father Duvalier explained it thus, one day: “The Catholic Church is like a great big ocean liner taking you to heaven. Now, there are all these rickety little boats that could get you there, too. All your little pagan religions, not to mention the Protestants, but they’re more like bamboo rafts lashed together with twine. Now wouldn’t you rather be on the ocean liner than the rickety boat? Of course, it’s up to you. That’s what we call free will. Now, hands up who wants to take the big ship.”
The hands went up rather unenthusiastically. Video night the previous week had been Titanic.
We also learn English, because, as Father Duvalier has told us many times, English is the key that will release us from the slum. Thai, he tells us, may be the language of love, that’s true, but it’s also the language of hierarchy and class and subjugation; English, which only has one word for “I” and one word for “you,” is the great leveler, and with English any of us urchins could end up as a CEO in one of those glittering high-rises. With Thai, we’ll be cleaning toilets in that selfsame high-rise.
It’s a nice theory, but I never heard of any CEO in Bangkok who came from a slum, though if they did come from one, they probably weren’t talking.
My name is Krit, but the brothers call me Kris. This is because they don’t know that in Thai, when there’s an s on the end of a word, it’s pronounced as a t. You’d think that was obvious, but to them it’s not. Nothing is obvious to them. (The Jesuits are the worst.) The fathers are all farangs, but though their skin is white (or in some cases pink) they all think they know everything about us Thais. The brothers are a mix of farang and Thai.
Father Duvalier, the head of the whole place, has explained to me the meaning of my name: it’s a magical knife, he said, wielded by mythological heroes. Well, it’s more a dagger or dirk, sort of, and it’s all twisty. I was about to ask him for more details, but there was immediately a clamor in the classroom.
“What about my name, Father?”
“And mine?”
So, Father Du—that’s a little Thai joke: du means strict, bad-tempered, ready to punish, and in fact Father Du beat us less often than any of the others, and often strayed from the subject completely—so, Father Duvalier spent a few minutes telling us the meanings of each of our names. But I knew mine was special because he’d named me himself. That’s because I was abandoned on the doorstep in a basket, so I didn’t come with a name already attached. Most of the others did.
This classroom I’m talking about, it’s still there; it’s more of a shed, really, and the desks and chairs are castoffs from a rather posh boarding school that a lot of children of politicians and CEOs go to. They’re always upgrading their school desks, to our benefit.
Father Du is a high-profile father. He goes to social events, has an internet newsletter, and collects money from America. He’s got a framed photograph of himself with the queen on his wall. He’s written a couple of books about us, and they’re not even that patronizing. In his own way, he does love us; that’s why the orphanage isn’t some soulless hole of horror with savage beatings and child abuse. Oh, it’s grim, but we could be sleeping on the street, sniffing glue, and selling ourselves to tourists.
On the evening that my story starts, we’ve done the Buddhism thing, and we’ve done the Jesus thing; it’s afternoon now, so many of the boys are off working. You may say, oh, it’s child labor, oh, it’s exploitation, but it’s not like that: as long as it’s not selling amphetamines, the brothers like us to have a sense of our own self-worth, our own money, even if it’s just a twenty-baht note after a hard day’s slog.
I’m in the classroom alone. And it’s hot. That’s where I started, isn’t it? It’s May and it hasn’t rained yet. I’m collecting all the schoolbooks, arranging them in piles. I’m not a good reader, so I arrange them in stacks according to color. I’ve been doing that for years, and now everybody is used to my system. It’s such a hot day that the air itself is sweating. Through the foul air that blows in from the stagnant canal, you can get a whiff of jasmine and incense from the temple. There’s also a strong scent of bananas. That’s because we’ve been collecting bananas from everyone in the slum. We’re all going to offer a platter of bananas to Ganesha tomorrow, which is Wednesday, which is sacred to Ganesha, because my friend P’Waen has had a dream that he’s going to win the lottery, and in his dream, there were a lot of mice, and everyone knows that Ganesha is the patron of all rodents.
The sun is going to set soon, and a tall old man stands in the doorway. I know before I see or hear him: I don’t know how I know, but there he is.
“Krit,” he says to me. When I look up, I am immediately surprised, because, although he is a farang, he knows how to say my name properly.
“Are you the new teacher?”
“Well, yes.” He comes into the shed and I see that he’s really tall; he stoops. I think he’s old, but really he doesn’t look old, he just has oldness somehow clinging to him. It’s in his eyes. When he speaks to me, he does speak Thai, not badly either; he says the words funny, but he uses very sophisticated ones, like the ones you hear on TV soaps.
“Krit,” he says, “I am Mr. Leopold Strange, the new English teacher. I’m here in Thailand because I’m fleeing an unsavory past. Maybe you can imagine what that might be.”
“Yes, I can,” I say. “When a farang shows up in Bangkok with an unsavory past, it usually means only one thing.” I think about Gary Glitter, the English pop star, indicted in Cambodia for chasing the girls. “Should I worry about you?”
“Why, yes, Kris, you should.”
I start to get nervous. I stop putting the books into piles and I look Mr. Strange straight in the eye. “I know a thing or two,” I say, “and I don’t think you’re telling me everything.”
“That’s true,” he says. Then, he tells me what I’ve told you: there are the facts, and there is the truth.
“The facts: I’m a washed-up writer of mediocre fantasy novels from England. Actually they’re probably very good novels, they always got good reviews, but when it comes to sales, I was no J. K. Rowling, or I wouldn’t be here. A
nd okay, there was a scandal: I got a little too intimate with one of my readers. I should have known better. You know how pushy fans can be? No, I suppose you don’t. But now, I am persona non grata. After the exposé in the Sun—oh, it was all lies, but who cares?—I couldn’t have published a book if my name was Stephen King. So what could I do? Teach English in the third world, and that’s where I’ve been: Colombia, Sri Lanka, and now here. But you know as well as I do that those are only the facts . . . they’re not the truth.”
“How is it that I know?”
“Because that’s why I’ve come for you.”
Sitting there in that dingy room with the stifling sweating air, I suddenly know there’s more than one kind of truth, and that some people are more than they seem to be. I know that Mr. Strange and I belong to another kind of people, that we see things differently, and that we know things to be true that other people can only guess or have theories about.
And I find myself telling him the things he was going to tell me: “You’re some kind of guardian, some kind of . . . I don’t know what it’s called . . . some kind of avatar. And um, well, there’s a mission, and you’ve come to me because I’ve got . . . um . . . superpowers?”
I know that word “avatar” because in Buddhism school, the young monks also tell us stories about gods and demons, and how they often come down to Earth as avatars, to fight their cosmic battles in our world. I always loved those stories, but I never dreamed I would actually be in one.
“And how do you know all this?” asks Mr. Strange.
“I just know!”
“And what language have we been speaking?”
At this, I am struck dumb. Haven’t we just been having a normal conversation? He’s been using a lot of long words that I didn’t think I knew. And everything seems, I don’t know, vivid. But wait—did my lips move?
Did his?
“I think that’s enough excitement for one day, Krit,” says Mr. Strange. “Stay behind after class tomorrow, and we’ll talk missions and superpowers.”
It is at that moment that I notice he’s eating all the bananas. Not peeling them, mind you, but scarfing them whole, positively inhaling them.
“Mr. Strange, those bananas are for Ganesha!”
“So?” he says. “It’s already Wednesday in New Zealand.”
* * *
It seems as though I look away for just one second, and when I look back he’s gone. I run to the doorway, but all I see is a trail of dust. Who is he, really? Can he fly? Is it true that he’s been speaking directly into my mind, showing me things that words can’t possibly express? It’s all too weird for me. I go back to cleaning the shed, and then, since it’s just about suppertime, I traipse on down to the refectory, where the other boys are already starting to gather, arriving by twos and threes from their jobs or from their football practice. The boys have a team which they have, perhaps overreaching a bit, christened Man U. You might think that they were fans of Manchester United, but the boys of Sacred Heart actually favor Liverpool, on the whole; it’s just that the two loudest jocks in the school happened to be named Man and Yu. (Or did they get those nicknames from playing football all the time and being pretty much attached at the hip?)
Next week, they are playing against an extremely snooty private boys’ boarding school. The snooty school’s board believes that having these games will make them appear to be “one with the people.” The brothers, on the other hand, believe that by allowing such games, they are giving us opportunities to socialize with our betters, and might somehow become better ourselves because of the experience. This may not be a very Christian viewpoint, but it’s pretty typical of the brothers. As for what the boys think . . . well, no one asks.
I’m waiting for my friend P’Waen, who is called Waen because he wears glasses. He is not nearsighted. He found the glasses on a seat on the Skytrain one day. Because they were on the seat, no one sat there, even though the car was crammed. He seized the opportunity. It’s the only time a little nobody like him was ever able to actually sit down on the Skytrain, so he wears the glasses for luck. He can only see without them.
I call him P’ because he is like my older brother and it’s respectful. I call everyone in the orphanage who is older than me P’, but the other kids think it’s quaint and pretentious. If you are reading this and you don’t speak Thai, this word is pronounced like the word for urine.
By the time I’m through, you’ll understand how I got so good at English.
Let me get back to the refectory. It’s a fancy word for a canvas awning spread over a concrete yard, with old plumbing pipes holding it up. There are some wooden trestle tables, and there is a big window into the kitchen, where Auntie Daeng cooks our slop in gigantic pots. The morning slop is rice soup with some ground pork floating in it and plenty of coriander and scallions; the lunch slop is usually noodles with fish balls and bean sprouts; the evening slop varies according to what Auntie was able to get cheaply in the market, but there’s always rice and two side dishes: mystery-meat curry and fried mystery vegetable (extra salty).
Tomorrow, Mr. Strange is going to use the word “Dickensian” to refer to the eating arrangements in the orphanage, and I actually know what that word means because last year, the brothers showed Oliver on movie night. We all wondered why Oliver wanted to escape a perfectly comfy institution and enter a life of crime, but farangs see the world differently than we do. Now, one day a month, thanks to an American philanthropist, we get hamburgers and ice cream. Of course, Oliver didn’t get that. But he lived in England, which is a dismal place where people don’t even have rice to eat.
After supper, we all have to wear our orphanage regulation pajamas, which consist of blue shorts with an elastic waistband, and a white T-shirt with the logo of the orphanage, which is a red heart, like a valentine. We’re told that it is not in fact a valentine, but the Sacred Heart of Jesus. So, supper is our last chance to look different from each other. It’s hard enough with the same extra-short haircuts, but we all try.
The footballers are wearing a variety of football shirts from different teams, donated by kids from one of the British schools. When I see P’Waen, he’s very smartly dressed for an orphan, with an actual shirt with a collar which he has found time to iron, and long pants. I’m impressed. I run up to him because I want to tell him about Mr. Strange scarfing the bananas, but he starts talking before I can.
“Sneak out with me tonight! You have to!”
“Why tonight?”
“Because you have to, that’s why. It’s my dream, you know, the lottery, the mice—”
“Look, P’Waen, something happened to the bananas. I’m sorry, I couldn’t stop it in time—”
“You don’t understand. I already have the number! I found it, you know, in the tree.”
There is a big, ancient tree just beyond the refectory awning: they say it’s a magic tree. The brothers say it’s superstition, but well, look who’s talking—pieces of bread that turn into human flesh without anyone even noticing, regular as clockwork every Sunday—if you can swallow that, and believe me, the brothers do swallow it . . .
Everyone is piling up to the window to grab their food, but Waen is so excited he doesn’t even want to eat. He grabs me by the arm and steers me toward the tree, while I’m more inclined to gravitate toward the mystery meat (today it’s in green curry, tomorrow it will be red, yellow the day after). But okay, I follow. Every old and twisted-looking tree in Thailand houses a spirit. This one must, because even though it’s on a Catholic property, someone has been hanging garlands on the branches, winding colored ribbons around the trunk, and burning incense sticks nearby. I see the red, burnt-up stalks of the joss sticks poking out of nooks in the tree, and there’s little scraps of yellow wax, too, from the candles people burn here when no one is looking.
“Feel, feel!” He kneels, and so do I; Waen takes my hand and holds it against the bark, a certain crevice, and tells me to rub.
I don’t feel anyth
ing.
But I hear—inside my head—919. I say it aloud and he shushes me. “Quiet, quiet, it’s our secret!”
Then there’s a thundering voice: “No whispering in the refectory!”
It’s one of the Thai brothers, Brother Poo (oh yes, that means crab, do you think his parents knew what it means in English?); he’s walking grimly up and down the perimeter of the covered area, wielding a ruler to quell us unruly boys with. He even uses it. I see one of the soccer boys shaking his right hand ruefully. The farang brothers hardly ever hit us, though they threaten more. I think it’s because, even if you have to pass some kind of heartlessness exam to become a brother, the warmth and easygoing culture of Thailand sort of corrupts them.
I don’t particularly want to feel the sting of that metal ruler on my hand, so I go and get my rice and curry, as does Waen. We sit down at the farthest possible end of one of the tables so we can go on talking.
“Waen,” I say, “I didn’t actually feel that number in the bark of the magic tree.”
“Of course you did, Krit!” he says. “You said it right out loud.”
“But it wasn’t in the tree. I think I . . . I somehow heard you.”
“But I didn’t say anything.”
“But . . . it’s like you did.”
Right then and there, a chill grabs hold of me. It’s more freezing than an upper-class shopping mall. Because now, I suddenly divine what the tall old man meant. How do you know all this? His lips hadn’t moved! I heard Waen speak to me, louder than if he’d really been talking. Which means I was able to hear inside of him. This is scary. My instinct tells me not to say anything.
Anyway, I listen some more, watching P’Waen’s lips, and it doesn’t happen again. On the other hand, he’s jabbering away and maybe that drowns out what he’s thinking. He’s saying, “Listen, Krit, since I found out about this number I’ve been trying to buy a lottery ticket all day and I can’t find nine-one-nine anywhere. But tonight, there’s a major funeral over at the temple. They’re bound to have lottery tickets. You’ve got to sneak out with me. If I go alone, I’ll get caught, but somehow you never do.”
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 Page 6