We’re at the end of the temple that’s closest to the Hindu shrine; these last pavilions, and the mortuary, lean against a thin stucco wall that separates the Buddhists from the Hindus.
As we get closer and closer to the storeroom, I get more and more nervous; I’m starting to hear other voices, faint voices, and they’re all saying: <
We’re at the door of the storeroom! It creaks open! It’s a double door, and when both doors swing all the way out the whiff of incense and rotting jasmine leaves and the perfume they douse the bodies in comes rushing out and almost knocks me over . . . then the voices are clamoring, demanding my attention, trying to get me to do something and I don’t know what I have to do . . .
Just at that moment, Waen manages to buy three tickets with 919 final digits. “We’re out of here,” he says to me, and grabs my arm. We’re aiming to make a dash for the railings, squeeze our thin bodies through, and sprint across the courtyard round to the back door of the orphanage.
But they’re pressing me into the storeroom, and a lady is handing out pomegranate leaves at the door (if you don’t hold a pomegranate leaf when you’re visiting a roomful of dead people, you’re liable to be sucked into the limbo of the dead yourself); I have a twig thrust in my hand and the crowd sort of jostles me so I stumble over the threshold. Then, I’m standing in a corridor lined with shelves, three levels high, and the coffins are stacked on the shelves, plain ones, ornate ones, gold ones, wooden ones, each one with a little minishrine to the deceased in front of it, and a photograph, and decaying garlands, and flickering candles, and incense that makes me woozy from the whiff of it . . . and the crowd is propelling me farther and farther into the room but the corridor doesn’t end, it’s just coffin after coffin, receding to infinity, and always the voices, tugging at me, and now I feel ghostly hands, too, touching me, ruffling my hair, pulling at my T-shirt, and I’m fainting and fainting and—
Now what?
I’m falling into the floor. And the floor itself is dissolving. The dead people are pulling me down . . . I clutch the pomegranate twig, then it’s as if something grabs me by the hair and I’m somersaulting up now, being hauled up through the ceiling by the hair and no one has even noticed . . .
* * *
Stillness. My eyes are closed. The clamor of the dead has died away. I’m sitting on something soft, fleshy. Slowly, I open my eyes. First, I see a pair of feet. They’re big. I mean, my entire field of vision is these feet, and they are blue.
I look up. The stars are out. I seem to be in the courtyard, the one I was trying to run away to. I see a pair of eyes. Piercing eyes, with irises that are yellow, like sunlight. And they’re big. I mean, the eyes are like two suns, and the face fills the whole sky. Or it seems that way. When I realize that I am actually sitting on the palm of a giant hand, a blue hand, I panic.
Soft laughter fills the air.
This laughter is like the ringing of the great big temple bells, and like the sound of the wind when the monsoon is about to burst.
I’m panicking even more now, because the hand is rising into the air and I’m clinging to the index finger which wears a ring that has a diamond bigger than my head.
Then, I see the lips, and the teeth.
This is it. Sucked in by ghosts and devoured by a monster before my thirteenth birthday.
“Oh, Kris,” the whole sky seems to say, “you do have a quaint way of seeing the world.”
I look up and I look down. This is no King Kong peering down at a scantily clad creature he can crush in the palm of his hand, this is no monster. This is human, a man, a deep-blue man, who is so tall that he seems to fill the entire world. And he calls me Kris, but not with a farang accent. It’s more Indian, actually.
“What’s going on?” I shout. “Did you eat all the bananas?”
The laughter again. It’s a comforting laughter, but I have the feeling that this same laughter could topple mountains if it were just one or two decibels louder.
“No, not the bananas. That would have been Ganesha.”
“But Mr. Strange ate a whole tray of them—”
“Exactly so.”
“But—”
“Listen, Kris. About the dead. Get used to it. They’re harmless. They can’t hurt you; they really are dead, you know. Those voices are just faint echoes of what they were, or might have been. Sometimes, they can tell you something useful, but most of the time, it’s just hot air.”
“That’s it? Ignore them?”
“It’s hard, I know. The dead so want to stay attached. But when you answer back, they just stay longer in the world, and they have these long journeys to make, new wombs to seed, new lives to live. Of course, sometimes you’re going to need their help.”
“I am?”
In the last few minutes, I have gradually become aware of something extraordinary. I am sitting on somebody’s hand, looking down at this little world of mine, and seeing, beyond it, the frantic, neon-strewn skyline of Bangkok, looking up into the face of some kind of supernatural being, and I’m not scared. It appears to be the most natural thing in the world.
I realize that this moment has been in my life all along, and that everything I’ve ever lived through has been a big setup for this conversation. It’s the mystery of my birth, the secret identity, all that stuff.
“Quite exciting, isn’t it?” say the giant lips. I catch a glimpse of a lapis uvula, its gold flecks glittering, and a tongue that rolls like a tsunami. I don’t quite know what to say. Obviously he reads my mind.
But I read minds too. Isn’t that what I’ve learned today?
And the dead talk to me, though I haven’t yet learned how to answer.
“You’re going to have to learn control. You’ve got an inkling now of who you are and what you can do. You’re going to have to do it responsibly, too. It’s a tough job, saving the universe. There aren’t many who could even try.”
“The universe?” Now, that startles me.
“You will have to learn about microcosms and macrocosms,” he says. “A galaxy in a grain of sand and all that. And, you will have to learn that changing everything sometimes means changing one single heart.”
“I see,” I say, not seeing.
The laugh again. “I’ve whetted your appetite, I hope,” he says. “In a moment, I’m going to put you back down. In your dorm room, safe and sound. I shouldn’t really manifest like this, you know. It’s telling the story out of sequence. You should really only see me at the end. But you will soon learn that I’m playful. And listen to my banana-scarfing son; he’s one, too.”
“One what?”
“Be serious for a minute. Know that at any given time, there are only seven mortals in the world who can look me in the eye like this and live. These seven mortals have a mission. They keep the universe on track. Now, some of you are famous. I’m sure you’ve heard of Jesus, Buddha, Mother Teresa, and people like that. Mozart, too, and Einstein. You haven’t heard of them, but blame that on Thailand’s ethnocentric school curriculum. But others aren’t so obvious. Take you, for instance. Don’t be cocky, I’m not saying you’re Jesus. That would drive Father Duvalier up the wall for sure. I’m just saying that you’re here on a mission, and if you fail, everything collapses.”
“What’s the mission?”
“It unfolds as you go along. Goodbye now.”
He starts to lower me to the ground. I tell him, “Not so fast . . . you haven’t told me who you are.”
Laughter again . . . this time, it seems that the whole sky is laughing. There’s thunder and lightning, too. He says, “I am the uncreated one. I am Nataraja, he who dances the cosmos into being in the dawn and smashes it into smithereens at sunset and reshapes it the next morning. I am Ishvara, the very essence of things. I am Agni, the fire that lives in your soul. I am the universal Atman.” He’s like Father Duvalier when he wants to avoid the issue, like when you try to get him to answer a question about sex. Or li
ke when the royal family comes on the evening news, and the news anchor goes into a string of fancified, polysyllabic, incomprehensible royal Thai, which nobody can understand.
“Yes, but who are you?”
I must be an idiot. I just don’t get it.
“Do I have to spell it out?”
“I’m just a dumb twelve-year-old kid, remember? Just tell me.”
“I’m God.”
* * *
I come to in my bed. It’s barely dawn, but the bustle has started. My dorm sleeps forty boys in double bunks lined up end to end, five deep, eight across, with a single aisle just fifty centimeters wide. Almost everyone is already up, and I can hear water splashing from the communal bathroom. So I’ve missed the big crunch. I’ve been told that 5:45 a.m. in our dorm is very much like trying to get down the aisle of an airplane.
I rub my eyes. I can only half-recall last night at first; in fact, I’m sure it’s some improbable dream. Then, I see P’Waen standing in the door waving a sheet of newsprint.
“No, no, no, no, no!” he’s shouting, and hitting the nearest bedpost with a clenched fist.
Pulling on a shirt, I spring down from the top bunk. “How could I have been so stupid?” he says.
I want to tell him about my encounter with godhead, about the voices from the coffins, about plucking magic numbers from his head, but no, Waen’s one-track mind can’t hold anything but his disappointment.
“What’s wrong?” I ask him.
“What’s wrong? What’s wrong? Look at this! Third prize, split twelve ways . . . thirty thousand baht . . .”
He sticks the paper in my face and I see the number 919 in huge, bold print.
“Congratulations!” I say. “What are you screaming about?”
He turns the sheet of paper right-side up.
“If I’d been standing on the left instead of the right,” he says, “I’d have used my other hand to feel the bark. The number was written sideways! I’d have known it was six-one-six. I’m such an idiot!”
He takes the lottery tickets from his shirt pocket and he’s about to rip them up when I catch his hand. I’ve noticed something a bit odd. The numbers . . . the figures . . . they seem to be wavering, shimmering.
“Give me those tickets.”
I clasp them between my folded hands, as though I were praying with them. I wonder what it would be like if last night’s vision were true, if I was, in fact, one of seven specially gifted human beings sent to the world of men on some divine mission . . .
“What are you going to do?” says Waen. “Change the numbers?”
I unfold my palms.
“You’re double-stupid,” I said. “The tickets were upside down when you bought them.”
Because the serial numbers now end in 616.
I hand the tickets back. “You’d better go for your whacks,” I say.
“Come with me,” says P’Waen. “Make sure I don’t cry.”
* * *
Waen has put on two pairs of undershorts and he is wearing his thickest pair of pants. It is silly of him, because Father Duvalier never enjoys hurting us. He just knows that it wouldn’t be a proper orphanage without a bit of tyranny and abuse. Wouldn’t be Catholic without its share of repression and guilt.
So, we’re standing in Father Du’s office, which has wooden walls and a crucifix and, of course, the all-important framed photograph of himself with Her Majesty the Queen. There is a rattan bookcase with battered missals and a bible in Thai, which he’s desperately been trying to slog through for as long as I’ve known him (all my life).
He sits behind his desk and says, “My boys, what brings you to me now? You haven’t signed up for catechism, and that’s not until eleven. Perhaps you have something to confess?”
Waen says, “Krit had nothing to do with it. He’s just volunteered to be here with me.”
“To make sure you take your punishment like a man.”
Waen nods.
“Well, what’s it to be this morning? Sneaking a handful of the host for a midnight snack? You’re not, by any chance, responsible for the mustache on the statue of the blessed St. Catherine?” Father Du looks at Waen. “It’s more serious, then. Impure thoughts, perhaps. Maybe you even . . .” he furrows his brow. “Touched yourself?” No answer. He thinks for a while longer and then says, “I’ve got it! You went out after bedtime!”
Waen nods again.
“Then it’s very curious indeed,” said Father Duvalier, not looking P’Waen in the eye, but fingering a little malachite rosary that hangs from his belt, “because it wouldn’t be normal for a boy who sneaked out after bedtime to report to me in the morning for six whacks.”
“I won the lottery,” says Waen, “and I need you to go and sign for the money.”
“Aha!” says the father. “You’d suffer one of my notorious scourgings for the sake of a few hundred baht?”
“Thirty thousand,” P’Waen blurts out.
“He meant well,” I say quickly.
“Yes . . .” Waen’s mind is racing to find something that sounds noble. “I wanted to do something for my dorm mates. I wanted . . . um, yes, I wanted to give them all a day by the sea. Do you know, most of them have never seen the ocean? We’re a country surrounded by water, and yet—”
And Father Duvalier begins to laugh. This isn’t the divine laughter of God; it’s an earthy guffaw that makes his jowls bounce around like the dewlaps of a bulldog. “So, so, so!” he splutters. “Your entire act of mischief was motivated by altruism!”
“Do unto others,” P’Waen begins, but he can’t finish . . . he never listens in religion class.
“As you would be done by,” I mutter, hoping that Father Du doesn’t realize that the sentence is being finished by someone else, which has the unfortunate effect of causing the director of the orphanage to look closely at me for the first time, studying my face very carefully.
“You know, Kris,” he says, “I can’t figure out your role in all this. In fact, I can’t figure you out, period. Why would you aid and abet . . . wait. More fundamentally, why is it that I can read your friend Waen like an open book, but you, you strange little boy, you look at me and you can put up this shield, and I can’t see what’s going on in your mind at all?”
I don’t answer him. Because I’m thinking about it myself. What Father Du is talking about is somehow connected with hearing the ghostly voices from the coffins. I know how to receive these voices, and I know how to block others from hearing my own. I’ve made a roomful of people go suddenly quiet just by thinking about it, and I’ve turned printed digits upside down on a lottery ticket. In the last twenty-four hours, I’ve completely lost track of who I’m supposed to be. I’m at sea.
“Well,” says Father Duvalier, “I will tell you what I have concluded. First, you are to be commended for your generosity, Waen, in donating the money to give your friends a day at the beach. For that, I will remit you six strokes of the cane. However, you lied when you said that you were motivated by love for your fellow orphans, for which I’m afraid I’m obliged to whack you an extra six times. The sneaking out at night is the regulation six, so that leaves six. All right?”
“That . . . seems fair, Father,” Waen says, gulping.
“As for you, Kris, I’m going to give you four whacks on principle. You did something wrong, I’m sure. Even if you didn’t do it last night, I’m sure there’s some crime you’ve committed that I haven’t punished you for.”
That’s a bit much. I mean, of course I did sneak out, but didn’t Waen carefully not snitch?
“However, before I administer this punishment,” says Father Duvalier, “I have something else to say. I refuse to have you squander this money on a trip to the beach. It will go directly into a fund so that you can start college in five years’ time, assuming, Waen, that you are able to pass the entrance exam.” I am going to protest that we are now going to get beaten for no real reason at all, but he goes on, “However, I am touched by your statemen
t that many of the boys have never seen the sea. The orphanage will therefore use its discretionary fund and we will all go next Saturday.”
This logic, as you can see, was convoluted, but everything adds up neatly. It is Jesuit logic, of course. In the end, he doesn’t hit us very hard, although he does make Waen take off his extra underwear.
* * *
Thus it happens that when we enter the refectory for lunch we are greeted by a huge cheer, and Pek runs up to us and pecks us both on both cheeks, which is embarrassing but typical of him. Everyone knows that we’ve willingly borne the lash so the whole gang can go to the beach on Saturday.
And when we go up to the window to get our food, we both have something extra: chocolate ice cream. Even though it’s not hamburger day. Auntie Daeng grins when she ladles it out, and I realize that the staff are going to get to go to the beach as well. Despite my burning butt, which is even hotter than the sweltering Bangkok sun, it is turning out to be a good day, if I don’t think too much about the supernatural.
Of course, there is English class.
The classroom where I first met Mr. Strange is now filled to the brim with sweaty boys; we’ve turned on the electric fan, but it hardly makes a difference. Our beautiful desks, donated by the international school, were not intended to seat three apiece, but there’s a lot of us and not a lot of room. Man and Yu are trying to beat up Pek, which he quite enjoys, but P’Fat is rescuing him by tickling the soccer boys into oblivion. It’s rowdy.
When Leopold Strange enters the room, it becomes oddly, unnaturally cool. The blast of cold actually makes the boys shut up, and they all turn around to look at him. The air also smells sweet, like banana syrup.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 Page 8