Only: the sounds she makes, the shadow puppet epic her syllables throw against the scrim of her father’s face. Kraft shrugs off the standing wave of sleep. He shakes himself like a dog shivering from the surf. The dialect’s five tones reach him from a listening post inside his cochlea. He watches the old man absorb his daughter’s condemnation. The judgment is just one more isolated blow in the familiar serial assault, this week’s flood, famine, or mass genocide writ small. What has become second nature cannot shock. The pitch-language report of his baby’s fate is already an old friend, an ancient poem trotted out again around the expiring fire.
The girl’s recommencing hell is just a footnote of an appendix in this wallpaper roll register of continuous death. The girl will go the way of her mother? She’ll join her brothers and sisters, the small army of offspring that was to protect the professional healer in his final infirmity? So she too will vanish, like country, land, crops, animals, favorite sticks of furniture. The family bo tree consists entirely of dead descendants and ancestors, the still- and the unborn and those dragged horribly back to birth. Life exists for no other reason than to dull the persistence of the living, to deaden them by degrees each time another of its branches is lopped back, slashed and burned.
The father holds out the backs of his hands for obscure study. He shrugs absolvingly: These things happen. It’s a professional gesture, the move of the accredited Mawkhan. He knows, already, what the Cycle has in mind for his daughter’s errant vital stuff, and he asks only to facilitate it.
He asks only one thing, a thing his polyglot international girl would be powerless to translate, even into her own tongue. Yet Kraft somehow intuits this simplest request, recovers it. The other medical man would like to do a brief procedure of his own, and then he will put the leg—the femoral incursion, his life’s life’s blood, his little girl—into the hands of the current dominant culture. One technique, then leave things to the state of the healing art.
Parent and child exchange a few hurried necessities in their private language. Kraft—coming to, coming back, his brain, numbed by several sleepless years of Human Service, condensing around the lost range of the five pitches—finds he can follow them. Not the content; individual words blow past him in a blur. But the shape, the inflected sense, insinuates itself, snuggles up willy-nilly under his arm, embraces him, shouting, “Ricky!” The words lie just next to a language he once spoke, one he can force up now only in ungrammatical museum shards.
But fluency, like all childhood diseases, carries a germ of the first contagion. He concentrates on the swift word flow until one phonetic swirl breaks over him: farang. The foreigner. The albino. You, my friend; they’re talking about you. And this word, shared over so many regions from Morocco to beyond Mandalay, the common term for otherness, springs him loose. The thing that defies his spastic grasp wanders back into him, intact.
And now he needs to—how do you say?—say something about it. He blurts out, interrupting the blood pair in their emergency preparation. With no particular program more pressing than this first urgency, he starts to sing:
Chahng, chahng, chahng, chahng, chahng,
Nang kuay hen chahng rue prow?
(Tell me, little one: Have you ever seen an elephant?)
Wisat jerks up, his placidity scattered. Although his daughter told him she has exchanged a few nonwhite words with this farang, she has said nothing about his possession by spirits. The old man cannot figure out from what world this outburst comes.
“It’s Thai, Pa,” his daughter prompts in the same language, calling him by one of the few terms shared in root as widely as “foreigner.”
Of course it is. What else could it be, here on the far, shadowed side of the world, in this city of a thousand languages, half of them invented here?
“The elephant is a great creature, and not very light at all,” Father Wisat sings, changing tongues as easily as he used to for clients on the far side of his river valley border.
This version is slightly different from the one the once-Ricky remembers. But the tune is the same, and the line scans.
“His nose is really long,” Kraft rhymes the man. “It’s frequently called a trunk.”
Both men giggle at the overlap of their outside knowledge. They finish the song together, while the girl for whom they ostensibly sing looks on, smiling painfully, knowing that the grown-ups can’t trouble themselves so long as they are thus occupied.
By song’s end, Kraft can talk, really talk again, after half a life deprived of words. He can say anything either part of him needs. And the Laotians’ Thai is equal to his own. Can this instant recovery of speech mean that the Farsi is still in there, the Urdu, the Arabic prayers? He and his new near-neighbor speak of nothing—of geography and kinships and favorite fruits you cannot get on this side, even in the most exotic Angel City bazaar. Of places you cannot find your way back to, even with the best of maps.
“Dee,” Wisat pronounces, sounding to Kraft’s ears like a near-native. “Dee maak. Excellent! We have nothing to worry about then.”
“How so?” Kraft asks, finding the words without pause. “What is good?”
“It’s good that you come from somewhere else. Like us, only, maybe you stayed dry during the voyage? Maybe you made it over in one hop?” His epithelial folds glint at Kraft; the relatively favored are always fair game. Kraft wonders how old the man is. Granted, he has this twelve-year-old kid. But he is a hundred and forty-four at the youngest.
He should correct the man. He should announce: I’m not from somewhere else. I come from here. Only I left at an early age. Then came back, then left, then . . . He would explain, only the chronology eludes him, and he cannot say exactly where he is from.
Wisat, oblivious, elaborates. “The trouble with Americans is they think everything begins and ends here, this time. No return, no earth. Imagine: no ancestors! How can one live? It must be terrible. Even their smallest action dies right after the deed is done!”
“A nation of oversteerers,” Kraft mumbles in English. The phrase would not translate, even if he had the words. It is intelligible only to those with no beginnings or ends but their own. No time around but this one.
Wisat declares that no one who thinks deeds are their own consequences should be allowed to saw into the spirit house of another’s marrow. They should be outlawed from healing, not so much for the sake of the patient’s karma as for the surgeon’s.
Kraft drifts from the argument. Just the perfume in these clipped syllables returns him to a moment when each sound and scent queueing for experience, when all the sensory boutique whispered of preknowledge, when the new seemed full of nearby, culminating explanation. First etudes, Handel or Haydn, the Hagia Sophia, jasmine, burned peanuts, gong wong yai, black-market currency exchanges, handworked bullwhips, iguanodon skeletons, a swing south: these, the multiplicity, the range, surrendered to culpable adulthood. Faintly familiar already, nodes on the scheme of things already inside you. Now they are back, insisting you’ve been here before, calling out both question and command: Remember? Remember. Little one, have you ever seen an elephant?
Commotion calls Kraft back, a noise in the street. A ghetto-blasted popping sound issues over the crunching glass, the assorted squealings, the general yell of background noise. Even before its envelope parts from the white sound waterfall, every dog within a two-mile perimeter of Carver begins baying. Exactly why the grunts used to slip in and poison these beasts in advance.
Crazed cacophony, but quotidian enough that Kraft would not even cringe except for what happens to the girl. Violently, she repeats her stage swan dive. As the trigger sound becomes audible to humans, a quick-quick-quick scimitar subdividing the aqueous air, she throws herself at her father, shouting a single word, the surname of dread.
Her movement is more astonishing given that, below the waist, she is little more than two moist streamers of crepe paper. She reverts in fear to her native tongue. Wisat must translate now, baring his remaining te
eth in parental embarrassment.
“Dragonflies.”
Kraft hears it home in, a small rotor-blade flotilla, Plummer on the helplessly receiving end. Then it hits him: How old is this bean sprout? He checks the chart, verifies that she was not even born until years after the last Huey was swept from the continent’s edge. Even granting that her war was the lingering one, dragging on in unpublished secret, beyond the limits of American attention span: Dragonflies? If the gunships were even around past the child’s birth, who was flying and maintaining them? And to what ends, in that pathetic, valueless valley, except to drive out this old medicine man, annul his wife, excise all his offspring but the one remaining infant, and scar this one permanently with a monstrous metal mother’s quick-quick call, a Lorenzian imprint gone mad?
That question sets off a dozen others in Kraft’s head, questions that should have occurred to him long before. How did these two reach here anyway, rural refuges of permanent war? How could they have gotten out, met the exit fees? Whom could they have paid? They had no possible means of escape. Therefore, Kraft concludes, they cannot possibly be here.
The girl cowers from a conditioning she could not have picked up firsthand. Acquired chopper terror, learned from old footage, her father’s accounts, or daily proximity to heavenly herbicide recipients. There are enough of them, in this city filled with escapees from all the burning jungles this city has torched. She lives alongside Hmong who cannot lift a fork without family consultation. She goes to school with the grandchildren of Nisei internees. She eats with Asians who have never seen real peppers. She studies with Asians who cannot find China in an encyclopedia. She plays with the children of potassium flashes, several hundred thousand let in over a few-year span. Half-children of fathers who thought they’d never be found. Mothers who never stopped searching. Asians who blew free of their necropolis home, smuggled out for the market’s going fee or shipped to Oahu and Guam in empty American caskets, surviving by impersonating death. Asians who came here long before the first European, before the invention of the word “Asia.” Asians who will never have the slightest grasp on what passes for sanity here on this side of the rim. She might have contracted the sky-burn terror from any one of them.
Kraft looks away from her panicked embrace, so as not to humiliate the child even more. He picks up the top book on her study stack, placed conspicuously for his benefit over the Let’s Learn About Stars and Planets! and the Electricity and You. A slender pastel paperback called Through the Looking Glass: it takes him until the invocation to remember that he bought it for her, in a luckless attempt to get the girl to read beneath her level, below herself.
Child of the pure, unclouded brow
And dreaming eyes of wonder!
Though time be fleet, and I and thou
Are half a life asunder,
Thy lowing smile will surely hail
The love-gift of a fairy tale.
It takes him until sestet’s end to remember the place he bought it, the city, the day, the woman he was with, the woman’s name, why he has avoided her. Too close for memory. Memory lies half a life asunder now, in Krung Thep, that other City of Angels where he was the resident immigrant.
A gnarled hand grips his, covers it as it flips pages. Wisat, pointing to the slight volume, chuckles. Addressing the farang in the old imperial language of occupation, he says, “Vous êtes un bon homme.”
Kraft looks up. The girl is back, hiding her sheepish face. In the five tones, the most musical language ever invented to say human things, Kraft sings to her, “We’re going to have to take your whole leg off. And it may not be enough.”
Father and daughter look surprised that he makes the pronouncement public. They give him the look of the medically indigent, the look of those who know wider beginnings and ends.
Wisat asks Joy something in an undertone Kraft cannot catch. The girl fishes about in her school supplies bag, emblazoned this year with Japanese crime-fighting robots that change into F-15s. The satchel is full of flat-ended number twos, edible paste, and carefully preserved if worthlessly smushy steel protractors. She extracts a flash of silver that she passes to her dad.
He in turn hands it to Kraft with the verbal gift-giving formula of a land belonging to neither of them. Kraft takes the present, mumbling the thank-you phrase once second nature, yet never his. At first, he mistakes the gift for a small Buddha. It is, in fact, a metal, Western-winged trinket.
“What is this?” he asks, his skin going voltaic.
But Kraft already knows what the thing is. It is the necklace angel hanging around the surplice in the sole portrait he possesses of his choirboy father.
“It’s a good-luck . . . a good-luck . . .”
“Charm?” To wear while he cuts away her parts, so that things might go well with them on their way from her hip socket to the incinerator.
She flashes her eager thanks for the term and copies it industriously into her notebook.
“Where did it come from?”
Once again, dismay at this doctor’s New World need to make questions overt. Joy shrugs. It came from the place all good-luck charms come from. She points vaguely at the roof, where the emergency medical dragonflies have just landed.
“It fell out of the sky.”
Out of the sky: of course. The place from which all charms fall. The first word, the formula invocation, the once-upon, anomalous and abandoned, comes back to him. Now he can give her the missing bit of her fallen angel, the key. More than your lifetime before you were born, he owes her, his half of the child hostage swap, a boy your age fell out of the same blue.
That was how he always arrived. And left the same way, a year or two later, when his father went on to another part of what was then still called the developing world. They followed Foreign Service’s Coriolis, their country’s crusaderism with a human face. One day the boy fell from the sky and landed in the City of Angels, capital of the Land of the Free.
His first snatch of Free speech—from an armed, khaki passport-controller in the improvised airport—was more melodious than any song he’d ever heard. He would have asked the officer to chant the phrase again, had he known how. No need; the whole city was pitched in a singing school of spoken tones.
He had lived in cities that had been sacked a dozen times before the City of Angels had built its first wall. Yet this seemed the most ancient place he had ever seen, the least concerned with the passage of time. It was built in a bend of a senile river meandering down to the South China Sea in switchbacks as lazy as the sutures in a baby’s skull. The city perched on this floodplain like a water strider, a floating reed mat that had rooted into an island. What roads there were had been canals until a few years before.
Planless, Krung Thep sprawled away from the river, its watery network spreading like ant trails through sugar. The house his father took them to fronted on a vegetated street and backed onto a canal served by water taxis and buses. Like every other building in the city, the house bobbed on shallow piles.
The walled compound of his new home contained the same servants’ quarters, outdoor laundry, rain jar full of mosquito larvae, and copse of rotting aromatic fruit trees he had grown up knowing. But it had one distinctly local touch. Where the shard-tipped wall adjoined the canal, under a tree of wax-pink, edible Liberty Bells sat a tiny house. Doll-sized, its piers supported a triple-tiered, sharply gabled roof in orange and green ceramic. Flame finials shot out from each apex, gracing the encrusted eaves.
Ricky asked the cook, his confidant, about this tiny domicile. In a patois that became his bootstrap into Free, Som told him it housed all the essences that had been displaced when the big house was built. The boy liked to leave jasmine and burning joss sticks by the diminutive front door, an act between veneration and apology.
The floating city consisted of countless life-size, real-world spirit houses. Banks, arcades, bars, Turkish baths, whorehouses, markets, polo clubs, slums, schools, embassies, and dark mazes of hovel stalls all
proliferated unzoned. Yet there was only one decisive industry in the Free capital: propitiation.
The city existed to build monasteries. The bulk of Free will had been channeled into them. There was one just up the street from the compound, and one a hundred meters down the canal. One stood across from Ricky’s international school. An enormous temple complex, a walled city within the city, occupied the bow-bend of the river, the kernel of the old town. Most of the three hundred monasteries, from sprawling communities to single sheds, were classical in style: bell-shaped stupas flanked colonnaded halls with terraced roofs flamed in finials and topped with tapering spires.
The city was on a centuries-long project to convert itself into an immense way house for the spirit world’s indigent. Even those desperately poor without drinking water—two million Angel inhabitants lived and died by milliliters—contributed to building. A week’s income went to replace a roof tile, signed on the underside before being slipped into position. Free heaven, the boy learned, was not a place but release from place, an escape of the turns of the Wheel. A celestial New York, a mendicant Tokyo, an incorporeal Paris, the City of Angels constructed itself in an architecture beyond desire.
The neighborhoods forgoing enlightenment ran in two-story, poured concrete shanties. Shops at ground level were topped by a combination office, warehouse, and family living cube. In these shops the boy learned to bargain. Even a hundred grams of candy had a concealed price that had to be discovered jointly by vendor and customer. Ricky could fake shock at suggested retail, feign indifference over an item he burned for more than all the pocket change in existence. He perfected the art of walking away, then turning at the right, world-weary moment to suggest, in the most resigned tonal speech, a compromise. Shopkeepers baited him with inflated prices, just to see this miserable excuse for an albino roll out his repertoire.
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