He sighed, staring out the window.
“Why don’t I talk to Mya?”
He turned in his chair.
“That’d be good. Talk to Mya.”
He ducked down and then dropped to the floor, his hands over his head as if under attack. Calvino lifted him back into the chair. Rob flinched as he glanced at the wall again, recoiling as if he struck by a round. He clenched his teeth, raising his fist toward the wall.
“Fuck you! I’m not afraid.”
“I don’t see anyone,” said Calvino.
“But he’ll be back.”
The dogs of fear pulled on the muscles of Rob’s face like a dogsled, twisting it.
“You still have your gun?” Rob asked.
Calvino nodded.
“Do you still have yours?”
Rob held up his hand in the shape of a gun, slowly raising it until his forefinger pointed at his temple. He dropped his thumb like the gun’s hammer.
“Bang!” said Rob.
“Reload and keep cool. I’ll be back.”
“That’s what everyone always says.”
Calvino opened the door.
“I’m going to Mya’s bookstore. Want anything to read?”
“A book about dreams. The one Mya said she was going to write.”
The Irrawaddy Bookstore had been doing business on 42nd Street between Maha Bandoola Road and Merchant, around the corner from the Strand Hotel, for as long as anyone could remember. It was an institution. And like all institu-tions it had a history of grand heights and abysmal lows.
Calvino found the shop nestled like a chipped antique cup in the palm of a withered hand. The old colonial-style building, with shops on the ground floor and living quarters above, had decayed into squalor. The neighborhood survived on life support, living off memories of a glorious past. Looking at the street, Calvino could foresee that foreigner developers would soon stand on the pavement, figuring a way to buy up the buildings for renovation and resale, or better yet, to tear them down and put up chrome and glass high-rises with names like Imperial Suites and Empire Tower.
In one corner of the bookshop’s front window, a small hand-printed sign was taped to the glass with the message “Irrawaddy Bookstore. Est. 1934.” He looked up at the balcony and pulled on a thin rope that hung down to the top of the door. Improvised doorbells with pulley ropes hung from the balconies of most buildings in the neighborhood.
“We’re closed,” a voice shouted down a moment later.
Calvino backed away from the building and looked up in the dark. A light came on in an upper window. It was followed by a second light. He saw people sitting on their balconies in the next building. In fact, most of the balconies had people sitting on chairs, talking and watching the street. The hot evening had driven them outside.
Calvino cupped his hands and shouted, “Mya, it’s Vincent. Can we talk for a few minutes?”
The Black Cat leaned over the railing, making out Calvino’s form among the shadows.
“How did you find me?” She laughed at her own question. “But that’s what you do. Find people who are missing. I’ll come down.”
A couple of minutes later the Black Cat stood framed in the door, braless in a white spaghetti-strap top over tight jeans, faded at the knees, and knee-length black leather boots. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She looked younger without the makeup and eye shadow.
“I guess you want to come inside,” she said.
“I won’t take much of your time.”
She gestured for him to enter the ground floor, where the bookstore operated. She walked to the wall and flipped on the lights, which flickered before settling into a dim yellow glow that showered the bookcases along the walls. The curtains in the front window had been left pulled back. Outside, Calvino saw an old woman looking at books displayed in the window. She smiled and nodded at him and walked on. Others came and stared. None of them smiled or stopped for long to look at the books. They were more interested that the bookstore had lights on at this time of night.
The Black Cat’s boots clopped on the wooden floor-boards. She disappeared behind the impressive teak counter. An old cash register sat on top, its vintage keys ringed with faded gold. She sat on a stool. He imagined her grandfather had sat on the same stool in his day.
“You’ve talked to Rob,” she said, thumbing a cigarette out of a pack.
“You shouldn’t have given him the acid.”
Sitting motionlessly, she lit the cigarette. She studied him while exhaling smoke from her nostrils.
“Why would you think I’d do that? Because I’m in the entertainment business?”
“Because he asked you to,” he said. “And you thought it might do him good. A trip is a cheap ticket away from reality.”
“So they say.”
“When I left him, he still hadn’t escaped.”
“Rob gets depressed a lot.”
Calvino let it go and made a point of looking at the books displayed on a table below the window. There was a strange collection of titles—Legal Ethics, Elder Law 3rd Ed., Immigration Law 4th Ed., Regulated Industries 4th Ed. Several biographies. And a series called “For Everyone” with volumes on Einstein, Chekhov and Tagore.
“No Henry Miller? No George Orwell?”
“They’re on order,” she said.
“Something’s bothering me,” he said. “Your brother was in prison. You couldn’t get together four grand plus to spring him, but you bought your grandfather’s old bookstore. I must be missing something. Bar girls pull this stunt in Bangkok. ‘Brother in trouble. Give me money.’ But she’s got a house, a condo and a Honda Accord she’s not telling you about.”
“No money changed hands for the building,” said Mya.
“Someone gave you this building?”
“Someone gave it back.”
She saw him pull a doubtful face.
“It’s like this. After 1988 my family backed the wrong side. The wrong side is always the one that loses. Our side lost. So my mother put the title of the building in my aunt’s name.”
“Your aunt backed the winning side,” said Calvino.
The Black Cat nodded.
“It’s taken a while for your aunt to give it back,” said Calvino.
“One condition was for my brother to get out of prison. My aunt said that would be a sign, meaning the time would be right to return our property. My mother agreed that, without the auspicious sign, transferring back the deed could spell disaster. Winners never want to be losers. They don’t want to deal with losers. Or think about them. She waited until we could show we were also winners. We all waited. My brother is out of prison and my aunt returned the deed.”
“You’re not going back to Bangkok,” said Calvino. “You’ve told Rob.”
She nodded. “I told him.”
“No more Monkey Nose? No more 50th Street Bar? You plan to pull on your boots, sit on your grandfather’s stool and sell books?”
“I told Rob he can go back to Bangkok. No one is going to hurt him.”
“Has Somchai Rungsukal put that in writing?”
“Rob told you about Somchai? Why am I not surprised?”
She removed the braid holding her ponytail in place, letting hair fall down over her shoulders.
“It was Somchai’s men who jumped Rob in Chinatown. Did you set him up?”
She butted out her cigarette, shaking her head.
“No, I had no idea that was going to happen.”
“What did you think was going to happen?”
“It was a mistake.”
“It didn’t play out the way you’d planned? Maybe Somchai told you that he only wanted to smooth things over. No hard feelings. But you had some doubts, and that’s why you asked me to come around to meet Rob. For protection. Backup in case, as you say, you made a mistake.”
She brushed her hair back from her face, never taking her eyes off Calvino, who’d picked up the Chekhov bio. He leafed through a few pages be
fore putting it down, waiting for her to say something. Now that he’d laid his cards on the table, she saw a winning hand. She held a busted flush.
“I have a feeling you’re making the same mistake again,” said Calvino. “You’ve worked out a deal. How does that work, when Somchai wants him dead?”
“It works because Somchai’s a businessman. Rob dead will cause him a lot of trouble he doesn’t want. He’s got that message. Letting him live makes him a lot of money. And he’s got that message, too. Men like him choose money over trouble.”
Calvino thought about what she’d said. It had the ring of truth. Guys like Somchai had much the same wiring. He lived like Udom inside a world where violence and the threat of it served a business purpose. Businesses need stability in the illicit world as well as the licit one. Men in that world stayed alive by paying attention and respect to someone bigger than them, more violent, more ruthless and connected. That was the best path, the one less likely to lead to a sheer drop from a cliff.
“What is Somchai afraid of?” asked Calvino. “That Udom’s going to visit him in his dreams?”
“In a way, yes. Dreams explain choices.”
“Henry Miller walked into your dreams and said, ‘Hey baby, put on your dancing shoes.’ You’re getting back your bookstore, and Rob Osborne walks away a free and clear man,” said Calvino.
Years ago, every upcountry girl who worked a bar dreamt of owning a mini-mart. The saddest part of poor people’s dreams was how modest, how threadbare, they were. Dreams woven into a garment that easily fell apart.
“You’re making fun of this. You shouldn’t.”
To the Burmese dreams weren’t a laughing matter. She was right; he wasn’t taking it seriously. Dreams as a social currency. It wasn’t something he’d encountered before—searching for reality inside magical and imaginary worlds, dense and filled with possibility. When he talked with the Burmese in the real world, they dragged their dream scripts with them, using them to direct their actions. He hadn’t decided yet how to deal with Burmese dream sharers and dream merchants. The Burmese, once they started in on their dreams, gave off the “uncanny valley” vibration—that disturbing feeling that someone or something stumbled upon in the real world isn’t quite fully human or slightly more human than it should be.
Calvino looked at Mya, smoking, dreamy-eyed, watching him as he stood across from her. She saw that he hadn’t quite reached the point of deciding what to do next. Most foreigners who entered into the modulated reality of Burmese dreams found it repulsive and ran for the exit.
“Tell me about your dream,” said Calvino.
If stepping into that imaginary world was what was needed to learn Rob’s future, he was willing to pay the small price.
“What you need to know is the dream of my aunt, my mother’s elder sister.”
“And afterwards, you’ll tell me yours.”
She shook her head, leaning forward, one elbow against the cash register.
“Not my dream. My mother’s dream comes next. The one she had on the same night as my aunt,” said Mya. “They came together in each other’s dreams.”
When a woman says her mother and her aunt literally shared a dream, there was only one response: “How did that happen, exactly?”
He thought about Rob dropping acid to reach his own dream state, where visions of the impossible flickered like puppet shadows on a brick wall, firing up all of his senses and remaking the world.
“It started with a barking dog,” the Black Cat said with a Cheshire Cat grin.
A golden retriever howled in the middle of the night. It wasn’t the normal sound of a dog playing or greeting its master. The dog stood guard at the gate. Not long after, a neighbor’s small terrier joined in with a tenor howl. Soon the whole neighborhood of dogs bayed in a chorus as if the ghosts of All Souls’ Day had misread the calendar.
The incident with the barking, yapping and howling dogs occurred at two in the morning on the third day after the cremation ceremony of Mya’s grandfather. On that day five monks arrived at the house, walking in single file. They stood at the front gate at five in the morning, waiting for an invitation to enter the compound. On the fourth day, Mya’s mother forgot to provide a meal for the dead. It had been so hectic, with the monks and all, and she’d been tired, exhausted by grief. Up to that day her five-year-old daughter, Mya, had also left food before a photograph of her grandfather, but that day she hadn’t.
Three monks came to Mya’s mother in a dream and told her she’d forgotten to leave a food offering. No one had looked after her father’s spirit, and he came into her dream to say that he was hungry. She saw her father in a vision, inside the crawl space between dreaming and conscious-ness. He was sitting with her mother in the bookstore, behind the cash register, smoking a cigar. He had a book open on the counter. He read and smoked just as she remembered him doing, when she was a young girl and she and her sister let their father read to them each afternoon after school.
The bookshop exploded in a blaze of colored feathers. A goddess riding on the back of a peacock settled down next to her father. When the goddess opened her bag, she extracted two fish, a goldfish and a catfish, a female and male.
The goldfish talked to her from inside the well. The catfish had died. Holding the dead fish in a pot and raising it to a monk in the sky, she looked to the sea. There she saw crocodiles and dragons, and another monk who’d been alive from the time of Buddha. He held a fan and stood watching the horizon. A group of yogis walked down the road to the temple. She dreamt of a dragon goddess in lace, her hands in a wai, and on her head was an entangled mass of green snails.
She shared her dream with her daughter and sister over morning tea. She decided to save money to contribute toward paint for the new stupa. And she fasted and prayed, working the prayer beads as she chanted. She donated money for the prayers so that merit would be sent to her father. She lighted candles in front of his photograph. Three days a week she ate no meat.
The next night, she dreamt of a nat who’d been in the room beside the garage, next to the window in the back. The nat wore lots of jewelry. The spirit was a man around forty years old, but she couldn’t see his face in the shadows. People from the spiritual world waited for her. She gave merit for them, waiting for them to come. For three days she didn’t tell anyone. She was too scared. For three nights she was too afraid to get up at night. On the third day she told her sister. Now they were both frightened. The dragon goddess was her guardian angel, and whenever she was insecure or had a problem, she called her name and asked for help.
She didn’t know the way of replying to someone inside this invisible world. Suffering and in great sorrow, she wandered in a world without form, looking for her father for another three days and not finding him.
She wanted to cleanse her body of meat. She sought purity.
She had a string with 108 beads. No, it was actually 111 beads. Each one as black as pure evil, but when she rotated the beads quickly, she found they turned white like an elephant’s tusks, pure as ivory. She showed the beads to her sister, even though she knew she must be humble and unassuming. It looks like your father’s work, a monk said. The sister’s son, Yadanar Khin, smoked a cigarette at the piano. She heard the music rise but she couldn’t smell the smoke. The sister’s husband in his general’s uniform stood with the remote pointed at the TV, watching a pirated tape of a reality show.
The sister watched as her father stared at her husband in front of the TV. Her marriage to a soldier had been a huge disappointment. He had left the bookstore to Mya’s mother. A statement affixed to the will had said, “Your husband will find you many buildings. The bookstore and house are to belong to your sister.” But when the troubles came in 1988, the deed was signed over. It had been a victory for her. The father had come to tell her the trouble was long past. She must return the property.
Mya’s mother had also seen their father in her dream. He’d told her that the blood of the Buddha family will co
me together, not in this life, but in the bloodline carried by the nats. People will gather around and form a community. They would never go to hell. They would be spared the fate of mortals eaten by worms. Instead they’d live in nirvana.
The sister collected eight leaves from the grounds of the Shwedagon Pagoda. They were best collected on a Saturday. As her father instructed in the dream, she then put them under the mattress and slept over them every night. One day she called Mya’s mother for the first time in many years. It was at six o’clock, to say she must see her immediately. On the way to her house, her driver, an Indian, hit a crazy monk who wandered into the road. She left the car and phoned her son Yadanar, who came in a sports car and took her to see Mya’s mother. They discussed the meaning of the dream. They phoned a monk and asked for advice. That night the sister placed fresh leaves under the mattress. The next morning she found two dead cockroaches there.
The house was broom clean, spotless. There was no way the insects could have crawled into the bedroom from the garden. They must have hidden in the leaves placed under the mattress. On a Thursday a monk came to her house and asked her, “Are you okay?” He knew that she wasn’t. That was why he had come.
She told him about the dream, her sister’s dream and the accident. The monk said that he had stopped them from being hurt in the accident. He’d had a vision as it happened and intervened. And he told her that we must all die; even the Buddha had to die. Before we die, though, we must be useful to people who are lost. He also said that the father had sent a message about unfinished business with a sister and that the elder sister would know what was intended by that message. Mya’s mother had kept faith all of these years that her elder sister would tell her when she received the sign.
The morning her sister arrived with Yadanar, Mya’s mother knew that her sister would bring the title deed. Yadanar waited until the two sisters were deep into discussions about the dreams, and then he gestured for Mya to meet him in the garden. It was in the garden that Yadanar said he had a plan to tour with his band and wanted her to join as a singer. He pressed her, saying the house deed could easily be reclaimed. His father had the power to do anything. She should know that. She asked if he could fix a problem her boyfriend was having. Naturally, Yadanar asked what kind of problem, and she told him about how Somchai had come around to the club in Bangkok. He always came with three or four friends, and they had got to know each other. It turned out he was doing business in Rangoon and wanted to let Rob in on a good opportunity to make money.
Missing In Rangoon Page 26