It was only after the movie, when I had put on the 45 of the Royal Anthem and everyone had stood up to pay homage to the Sacred Majesty of the King, that I noticed something wrong with my brother. For one thing, he did not rise in respect, even though he was ordinarily the most devout of people. He sat bunched up in a comer of the dubbing booth, with his eyes darting from side to side like window wipers.
I watched him anxiously but dared not move until the Royal Anthem had finished playing.
Then, tentatively, I tapped him on the shoulder. “Phii Lek,” I said, “it’s time we went home.”
He turned on me and snarled…then he fell on the floor and began dragging himself forward in a very strange manner, propelling himself with his chin and elbows along the woven-rush matting at our feet.
Mary said, “Is that something worth reporting on?” and began scribbling wildly in her notebook.
“Phii Lek,” I said to my brother in terms of utmost respect, for I thought he might be punishing me for some imagined grievance, “are you ill?” Suddenly I thought I had it figured out. “If you’re playing ‘putting on the anthropologists,’ Elder Sibling, I don’t think this one’s going to be taken in.”
“You are part of a rebel alliance, and a traitor!” my brother intoned—in English—in a harsh, unearthly voice. “Take her away!”
“That’s… my God, that’s James Earl Jones’s voice,” Mary said, forgetting in her confusion to speak Thai. “That’s from the movie we just saw.”
“What are we going to do?” I said, panicking. My older brother was crawling around at my feet, making me feel distinctly uncomfortable because of the elevation of my head over the head of a person of higher status, so I dropped down on my hands and knees so as to maintain my head at the properly respectful level. Meanwhile, he was wriggling around on his belly.
Amid all this, Mary’s notebook and pens clattered to the floor and she began to scream.
At that moment, my grandmother entered the booth and stared about wildly. I attempted, from my prone position, to perform the appropriate wai, but Phii Lek was rolling around and making peculiar hissing noises. Mary started to stutter, “Khun yaai, I don’t what happened, they just suddenly started acting this way—”
“Don’t you khun yaai me,” grandmother snapped. “I’m no kin to any foreigners, thank you!” She surveyed the spectacle before her with mounting horror. “Oh, my terrible karma!” she cried. “Demons have transformed my grandsons into dogs!”
* * * *
On the street, there were crowds everywhere. I could hear people babbling all about mysterious lights in the sky…portents and celestial signs. Someone said something about the spectacle outside being more impressive than the Star Wars effects inside the theater. Apparently the main pagoda of the temple had seemed on fire for a few minutes and they’d called in a fire-fighting squad from the next town. “Who’d have thought of it?” my grandmother was complaining. “A demon visits Prasongburi—and makes straight for my own grandson!”
When we got to the shop—Mary still tagging behind and furiously taking notes on our social customs—the situation was even worse. The skirmish between my father and mothers had crescendoed to an all-out war.
“That’s why I came to fetch you, children,” my grandmother said. “Maybe you can referee this boxing match.” A hefty celadon pot came whistling through the air and shattered on the overhead electric fan. We scurried for cover…all except my brother, who obliviously crawled about on his hands and knees, occasionally spouting lines from Star Wars.
Shrieking, Mary ran after the pot-shards. “My god, that thing’s eight hundred years old—”
“Bah! I faked it last week,” my grandmother said, forcing the farang woman to gape in mingled horror and admiration.
“All right, all right,” my father said, fleeing from the back room with my mothers in hot pursuit. “I won’t marry her…but I want a little more kindness out of the two of you…oh, my terrible karma.”
He tripped over my brother and went sprawling to the floor. “What’s wrong with him?”
“You fool!” my grandmother said. “Your own son has become possessed by demons…and it’s all because of your sexual excesses.”
My father stopped and stared at my brother. Then, murmuring a brief prayer to the Lord Buddha, he retired cowering behind the shop counter. “What must I do?”
His wives came marching out behind him. Elder Mother hastened to succor Phii Lek. Younger Mother took in the situation and said, “I haven’t seen anyone this possessed since my cousin Phii Daeng spent the night in a graveyard trying to get a vision of a winning lottery ticket number.”
“It’s all your fault,” Phi Lek’s mother said, turning wrathfully on my father. “You’re all too eager to douse your staff of passion, and now my grandson has been turned into a monster!” The logic of this accusation escaped me, but my father seemed convinced.
“I’ll go and buat phra for three months,” he said, affecting a tone of deep piety. “I’ll cut my hair off tomorrow and enter the nearest monastery. That ought to do the trick. Oh, my son, my son, what have I done?”
“Well,” my grandmother said, “a little abstinence should do you good. I always thought you were unwise not to enter the monkhood at twenty like an obedient son should…cursing me to be reborn on Earth instead of spending my next life in heaven as I ought, considering how I’ve worked my fingers to the bone for you! It’s about time, that’s what I say. A twenty-year-old belongs in a temple, not in the village scouts killing communists. Time for that when you’ve done your filial duty…well, twenty-five years late is better than nothing.”
Seeing himself trapped between several painful alternatives, my father bowed his head, raised his palms in a gesture of respect, and said, “All right, khun mae yaai, if that’s what you want.”
* * * *
When my father and the elder females of the family had left to pack his things, I was left with my older brother and with the bizarre American woman, in the antique shop in the middle of the night. They had taken the truck back to the village (which now boasted a good half-dozen motor vehicles, one of them ours) and we were stranded. In the heat of their argument and my father’s repentance, they seemed to have forgotten all about us.
It was at that moment that my brother chose to snap out of whatever it was that possessed him.
Calmly he rose from the floor, wiped a few foamflecks from his mouth with his sleeve, and sat down on the stool behind the counter. It took him a minute or two to recognize us, and then he said, “Well, well, Ai Noi! I gave the family quite a scare, didn’t I?”
I was even more frightened now than I had been before. I knew very well that night is the time of spirits, and I was completely convinced that some spirit or another had taken hold of Phii Lek, though I was unsure about the part about my father being punished for his roving eyes and hands. I said, “Yes, Khun Phii, it was the most astonishing performance I’ve ever seen. Indeed, a bit too astonishing, if you don’t mind your Humble Younger Sibling saying so. I mean, do you think they really appreciated it? If you ask me, you were just fiddling for waterbuffaloes.”
“The most amazing thing is this…they weren’t even after me!” He pointed at Mary. “They’re in the wrong brain! It was her they wanted. But we all look alike to them. And I was imitating a woman’s voice when they were trying to get a fix on the psychic transference. So they made an error of a few decimal places, and—poof!—here I am!”
“Pen baa pai laew!” I whispered to Mary Mason.
“I heard that!” my brother riposted. “But I am not mad. I am quite, quite sane, and I have been taken over by a manus tang dao.”
“What’s that?” Mary asked me.
“A being from another star.”
“Far frigging out! An extraterrestrial!” she said in English. I didn’t understand a word of it; I thought it must be some kind of anthropology jargon.
“Look, I can’t talk long, but…you see, the
y’re after Mary. One of them is trying to send a message to America…something to do with the Khmer ruins…some kind of artifact…to another of these creatures who is walking around in the body of a professor at UCLA. This farang woman seemed ideal; she could journey back without causing any suspicion. But, you see, we all look alike to them, and—”
“Well, can’t you tell whatever it is to stop inhabiting your body and transfer itself to—?”
“Hell, no!” Mary said, and started to back away. “Native customs are all very well, but this is a bit more than I bargained for.”
“Psychic transference too difficult…additional expenditure of energy impractical at present stage…but message must get through…” Suddenly he clawed at his throat for a few moments, and then fell writhing to the floor in another fit. “Can’t get used to this gravity,” he moaned. “Legs instead of pseudopods—and the contents of the stomach make me sick—there’s at least fifty whole undigested chilies down here—oh, I’m going to puke—”
“By Buddha, Dharma and Sang-kha!” I cried. “Quick, Mary, help me with him. Give me something to catch his vomit.”
“Will this do?” she said, pulling down something from the shelf. Distractedly I motioned her to put it up to his mouth.
Only when he had begun regurgitating into the bowl did I realize what she’d done. “You imbecile!” I said. “That’s a genuine Ming spittoon!”
“I thought they were all fakes,” she said, holding up my brother as he slowly turned green.
“We do have some genuine items here,” I said disdainfully, “for those who can tell the difference.”
“You mean, for Thai collectors,” she said, hurt.
“Well, what can you expect?” I said, becoming furious. “You come here, you dig up all our ancient treasures, violate the chastity of our women—”
“Look who’s talking!” Mary said gently. “Male chauvinist pig,” she added in English.
“Let’s not fight,” I said. “He seems better now…what are we going to do with him?”
“Here. Help me drag him to the back room.”
We lifted him up and laid him down on the couch.
We looked at each other in the close, humid, mosquito-infested room. Suddenly, providentially almost, the air-conditioning kicked on. “I’ve been trying to get it to work all day,” I whispered.
“Does this mean—”
“Yes! Soon it will cool enough to—”
She kissed me on the lips. By morning I had “arrived” in America several delicious times, and Mary was telephoning the hotel in Ban Kraduk so she could get her things moved into my father’s house.
* * * *
The next morning, over dinner, I tried to explain it all to my elders. On the one hand there was this farang woman sitting on the floor, clumsily rolling rice balls with one hand and attempting to address my mothers as khun mae, much to their discomfiture; on the other there was the mystery of my brother, who was now confined to his room and refused to eat anything with any chilies in it.
“It’s your weird Western ways,” my grandmother said, eyeing my latest conquest critically. “No chilies indeed! He’ll be demanding hamburgers next.”
“It’s nothing to do with Western ways,” I said.
“It’s a manus tang dao,” Mary said, proudly displaying her latest lexical gem, “and it’s trying to get a message to America, and there’s some kind of artifact in the ruins that they need, and they travel by some kind of psychic transference—”
“You Americans are crazy!” my grandmother said, spitting out her betelnut so she could take a few mouthfuls of curried fish. “Any fool can see the boy’s possessed. I remember my great-uncle had fits like this when he promised a donation of five hundred baht to the Sacred Pillar of the City and then reneged on his offer. My parents had to pay off the Brahmins—with interest!—before the curse was lifted. Oh, my karma, my karma!”
“Shouldn’t we call in some scientists, or something? A psychiatrist?” Mary said.
“Nothing of the sort!” said my grandmother. “If we can’t take care of this in the home, we’ll not take care of it at all. No one’s going to say my grandson is crazy. Possessed, maybe…everyone can sympathize with that…but crazy, never! The family honor is at stake.”
“Well, what should we do?” I said helplessly. As the junior member of the family, I had no say in the matter at all. I was annoyed at Mary for mentioning psychiatrists, but I reminded myself that she was, after all, a barbarian, even though she could speak a human tongue after a fashion.
“We’ll wait,” grandmother said, “and see whether your father’s penance will do the trick. If not…well, our stars are bad, that’s all.”
* * * *
During the weeks to come, my brother became increasingly odd. He would enter the house without even removing his sandals, let alone washing his feet. When my Uncle Eed came to dinner one night, my brother actually pointed his left foot at our honored uncle’s head. I would be most surprised if Uncle Eed ever came to dinner again after such unforgivable rudeness. I was forced to go into town every evening to dub the movies, which I did in so lackluster a manner that our usual audience began walking the two hours to Ban Kraduk for their entertainment. My heart sank when a passing visitor to the shop told me that the Ban Kraduk cinema had actually installed a projection sound-system and could show talkies…not only the foreign films, with sound and subtitles, but the new domestic talkies…so you could actually find out what great actors like Mitr and Petchara sounded like! I knew we’d never compete with that. I knew the days of live movie dubbing were numbered. Maybe I could go to Bangkok and get a job with Channel Seven, dubbing Leave it to Beaver and Charlie’s Angels. But Bangkok was just about as distant as another galaxy, and I could imagine the fun those city people would have with my hick northern accent.
One night about two weeks later, Mary and I were awakened by my brother, moaning from the mosquito net next to ours. I went across.
“Oh, there you are,” Phii Lek said. “I’ve been trying to attract your attention for hours.”
“I was busy,” I said, and my brother leered knowingly. “Are you all right? Are you recovered?”
“Not exactly,” he said. “But I’m, well, off-duty. The alien’ll come back any minute, though, so I can’t talk long.” He paused. “Maybe that girlfriend of yours should hear this,” he said. At that moment Mary crept in beside us, and we crouched together under the netting. The electric fan made the nets billow like ghosts.
“You have to take me to that archaeological dig of yours,” he said. “There’s an artifact…it’s got some kind of encoded information…you have to take it back to Professor Ubermuth at UCLA—”
“I’ve heard of him!” Mary whispered. “He’s in a loony bin. Apparently he became convinced he was an extraterre—oh, Jesus!” she said in English.
“He is one,” Phii Lek said. “So am I. There are hundreds of us on this planet. But my controlling alien’s resting right now. Look, Ai Noi, I want you to go down to the kitchen and get me as many chili peppers as you can find. On the manus tang dao’s home planet the food is about as bland as rice soup.”
I hurried to obey. When I got back, he wolfed down the peppers until he started weeping from the influx of spiciness. Suspiciously I said, “If you’re really an alien, what about spaceships?”
“Spaceships…we do have them, but they are drones, taking millennia to reach the center of the galaxy. We ourselves travel by tachyon psychic transference. But the device is being sent by drone.”
“Device?”
“From the excavation! Haven’t you been listening? It’s got to be dug up and secretly taken to America and…I’m not sure what or why, but I get the feeling there’s danger if we don’t make our rendezvous. Something to do with upsetting the tachyon fields.”
“I see,” I said, humoring him.
“You know what I look like on the home planet, up there? I look like a giant mangdaa.”
&nbs
p; “What’s that?” said Mary.
“It’s sort of a giant cockroach,” I said. “We use its wings to flavor some kinds of curry.”
“Yech!” she squealed. “Eating insects. Gross!”
“What do you mean? You’ve been enjoying it all week, and you’ve never complained about eating insects,” I said. She started to turn slightly bluish. A farang’s complexion, when he or she is about to be sick, is one of the few truly indescribable hues on the face of this earth.
“Help me…” Phii Lek said. “The sooner this artifact is unearthed and loaded onto the drone, the sooner I’ll be released from this—oh, no, it’s coming back!” Frantically he gobbled down several more chilies. But it was too late. They came right back up again, and he was scampering around the room on all fours and emitting pigeonlike cooing noises.
“Come to think of it,” I said, “he is acting rather like a cockroach, isn’t he?”
* * * *
A week later our home was invaded by nine monks. My mothers had been cooking all the previous day, and when I came into the main living room they had already been chanting for about an hour, their bass voices droning from behind huge prayer fans. The house was fragrant with jasmine and incense.
I prostrated myself along with the other members of the family. My brother was there too, wriggling around on his belly; his hands were tied up with a sacred rope which ran all the way around the house and through the folded palms of each of the monks. Among them was my father, who looked rather self-conscious and didn’t seem to know all the words of the chants yet…now and then he seemed to be opening his mouth at random, like a goldfish.
“This isn’t going to work,” I whispered to my grandmother, who was kneeling in the phraphrieb position with her palms folded, her face frozen in an expression of beatific piety. “Mary and I have found out what the problem is, and it’s not possession.”
“Buddhang sarnang gacchami,” the monks intoned in unison.
Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction Page 477