by Tash Aw
At times it felt as though a sickness had settled over the entire state, carried downstream by the two rivers that drew all the maladies from the populated hinterland before meeting at the port and spewing them out to sea, where even the salt water was not enough to kill the infection, which then spread up and down the coast, spawning mysteriously and releasing itself back into the air. I know that’s not the way it works, I know that science wouldn’t back up that view, but that’s how it felt. There was a disease upon us, and it wasn’t going to lift.
I met Keong at the same layby as the last time, and as I drew up I thought about how swiftly habits formed. See you at the usual place, he’d texted the night before, and it was true – on just the second occasion this spot felt as if it occupied a particular position in our lives, a fixed point that linked us. I saw the tip of his cigarette glow in the early-morning gloom – it was not long after 6 a.m., and the grass was still damp with dew. ‘Motherfucker,’ he said, yawning. ‘Why am I up so early? I must be mad.’
‘Just a usual working day for me,’ I replied. ‘You want some coffee?’
‘I don’t need coffee, I need drugs.’ He stretched and let out a sharp, barking groan, as if the movement had caused him pain. ‘Just kidding. Come on, we’re taking your car.’
We drove to a new housing development in the middle of a huge stretch of scrubland not far from the highway, before the roads narrowed and led into the heart of the plantations. The houses were almost finished, rows and rows of simple two-storeys with green-tiled roofs and neat front yards – nothing special, you know the kind, you see them everywhere – but workers were still installing the windows and doors. ‘Who the hell would want to live here?’ I said. ‘We’re miles from town.’ The road hadn’t yet been surfaced, and the dust we raised was like a gauze that made the workers look like phantoms – figures emerging from a dream.
‘There’s no more space in town,’ Keong said. ‘These houses are cheap as dirt. Come back in a couple of years and I bet you’ll find a huge mall here, with cinema and bowling alley.’
He held up his hand, signalling for me to slow down as we reached a crossroads. Up ahead, a group of workers were lowering a length of pipe into a trench. Keong got out of the car and walked towards them, barking an indistinct word that made them look up. One of them straightened up and wiped his hands on his trousers, as if cleaning them in preparation for a handshake, but in the end he just wiped the sweat from his face. Keong stood with his hands on his hips, watching the men as they started shovelling mounds of earth into the trench. That was when I noticed their movements – laboured and heavy even when performing the simplest action, like sticking a shovel into a pile of earth – the red clay that seemed to become as unyielding as stone before them. Every gesture was slow, a split second’s hesitation between the start of the movement and its completion, as if they were considering whether they had the strength to complete what they had started. One man bent his knees and looked down into the hole. A pause. Then he tumbled in – an accidental fall rather than a deliberate motion. It took the help of two of the others to get him out of the pit.
I felt a twinge in my knee joints, and then in my shoulders. The memory of work. My body was recalling its years of hard physical labour, as it did from time to time when I watched workers toiling over a job. Even now, I can be having noodles at a street stall, and if I see someone lifting sacks of concrete, or taking a pickaxe to some cement, my arms and legs want to perform the same actions, even though I know they would be incapable of carrying them out. Still. I read somewhere recently about a former soccer player who kept waking up on the floor because his body was taking free kicks or something like that in the middle of the night, and the action was so violent and real that it lifted him clean off the bed. Fifty years old, covered with bruises. He never even dreamed about soccer, no longer had any interest in it. Our bodies – every fibre of every muscle, every tiny nerve – they remember what our minds forget.
When you work in the sun at jobs like that, your only thought is to complete them as soon as possible so you can have some rest in the shade, even if it’s only five minutes. Even if it’s to move on to the next job. And the next. You don’t think about how well you’re doing; you don’t have to. Someone is giving you orders, so you just obey. Your body obeys what you tell it. Your movements are swift, instinctive. Harsh, even. They are harsh because what you are engaged in is a battle – a battle to finish the job before it finishes you, a battle to gain those five, maybe ten minutes in the shade. A battle for time. There was none of that in that group of men, nor in any of the others we saw later that day. They didn’t have the strength to fight.
‘Are they sick?’ I asked Keong as he got back into the car.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘Nothing’s wrong with them. Apart from being lazy bastards.’ He pulled down the sun visor so he could see the mirror, then brushed the dust from his hair and smoothed it down.
They were his men, he explained, meaning that they were working under contracts provided by him. That was how it worked, usually. A property firm or a plantation or a hotel – whatever it is – needs manpower, usually in a hurry. They can’t go out and find thirty Bangladeshi or Nepalese or Myanmar workers themselves, so they call Keong’s company, which has a bunch of people on standby. The employer pays the salaries, Keong takes a cut. The men we saw had been due to complete their work on that site nearly a month earlier, but one thing after another had got in the way, and they were still on that stupid housing estate, with no end in sight. Keong had hoped that their job would have been almost done by now, and that he could steal a few of them away to work for me, but that was impossible.
‘The clients are a big-time developer, a listed company,’ Keong said. ‘I can’t mess with them.’
‘Are you sure there’s nothing wrong with those guys? They really look sick.’
‘They’re all like that,’ he replied.
We visited a sheet-metal factory, then a processing plant in the middle of a palm-oil plantation, then another construction site – a row of small commercial units marooned on the edge of ricefields. Then another plantation, where thirty or forty workers, Bangladeshi and Indonesian, were returning to their quarters – a low concrete block with a rusty tin roof; I couldn’t see what was inside. It was nearing the end of the day, and the light was beginning to lose its brilliance, turning rich and orange above the trees. I saw the same lethargy I’d witnessed in each group of foreign workers we’d visited that day, a heaviness beyond the normal boundaries of fatigue, to the point that even breathing seemed an effort to them. Some of them stood outside, splashing themselves with water that they gathered in their cupped hands from a tap. It seemed such a feeble action, incapable of relieving the heat or cleansing their bodies of sweat. The meagre handfuls of water trickled down their torsos and stained their trousers with dark flecks, and they looked no fresher afterwards.
By this point I knew it wasn’t my imagination. All day, I’d watched closely, stood close enough to the workers to see their red glassy eyes and hear their rough breathing, as if their throats were coated with a film of fine sand. At the processing plant there had been a few women – Burmese, I think, though I couldn’t be certain – working the machinery and organising the loading of the lorries, and at first I thought, I hoped, that they were somehow immune to the weakness of the men I’d seen, that they were more resistant. But they weren’t. It was as if they had all given up and succumbed to this malady. There was a sickness in the air. In the land, the water. Everywhere.
‘You’re crazy,’ Keong said when I told him my theory. ‘You’re desperate and panicking. Your brain is deep fried.’
We stood in the yard of the workers’ quarters and watched them queue to fill plastic bottles from the tap. They sat down on the cement, sipping from the bottles without talking much. Out here, the water must come from a well, I thought. I wondered how much of the chemicals and the germs in the earth and the rivers around us had worked their
way into it. I thought of our farm, our workers – I’d had no news of them for nearly two days.
Keong was talking to the foreman, who was himself from Bangladesh. From the way Keong stood, with his hands on his hips, head slightly bowed, I knew what the man was telling him. It had been the same story all day long. There were no spare workers – man, woman or child. They were all taken. And as for the ones who had disappeared, there was no clue either. ‘Guess I should be happy that the global economy is booming,’ Keong had said earlier. His lips curled into a smile, but he didn’t laugh. Now, talking to the foreman, he seemed resigned to the silent, dead-end situation.
‘This group of people are from the same province in Bangladesh as the ones who disappeared,’ Keong said. ‘I thought they might have heard something, been in touch with them.’
I started walking back to the car. ‘What made you think they might know anything?’
‘They’ll have friends among them, maybe someone from their home village, maybe even a relative – someone will know something. They might even have been in touch. These people arrive, first thing they do is lay their hands on a phone.’
‘I have to go home now,’ I said.
‘There’s one more person we need to talk to,’ Keong said. ‘Please.’
‘Time’s up, big brother.’ I started the car and eased it out of the yard. The sky was darkening slowly now, dotted with quick-flying bats.
‘Ah Hock,’ Keong said, ‘I can sort this out. Those missing workers are out there. Some bastard is hiding them, and we have to find them.’
‘My wife will be home. I have to go.’
‘Just one drink,’ he said. ‘It’s important.’
* * *
In the bar of the Tokyo Hotel, which was also the lobby – since it wasn’t, and still isn’t, a big or elegant place – there was the usual mix of travelling salesmen, a couple of Korean businessmen and a small group of tourists from mainland China, their heavy northern accents audible from the other side of the room, cutting through all the noise in the lobby, which on that night felt like a sealed box to me. Maybe it was the hard, polished floor, that kind of shiny fake-marble that you see in fancy places, or at least places that wish they were fancy, or maybe it was the long day out in the countryside, with little noise apart from the monotone of Keong’s voice and the wind rushing in through the lowered windows whenever he smoked a cigarette. Whatever the reason, the noise seemed amplified beyond what humankind could naturally produce. The little ping of the lift doors as they opened startled me with its brightness, the ringing of the phone at the reception desk was as shrill as a fire alarm. I needed to open all the windows, I thought – that would make the sounds feel normal and real once more. Or maybe I was falling ill, my body being claimed by the same sickness I’d witnessed earlier, out there in the countryside.
‘Who the hell would want to travel across Asia and do business in a shithole like this?’ Keong said, pointing at the Korean businessmen. He’d been silent for the final stretch of the drive, except to give me directions on how to reach the hotel, and now, slumped into an armchair, he seemed as drained of energy as I was. A shithole like this. I didn’t know if he meant the hotel, or the town, or the whole goddamn country, but I didn’t ask. I reached for my beer, which was turning warm, and after just one sip I put it down – it tasted bitter and unappealing, and I watched the beads of condensation collect on the glass and slowly drip down to the table, where they formed a little puddle.
A Filipina singer – announced on a poster in the lobby as The One and Only Sarita – was setting up her act for the evening with her accompanist, a young man wearing a tuxedo about three sizes too big for him, testing the sound system by playing short little melodies on the keyboard. A long screech from the speakers as he adjusted them, followed by a low growl that seemed to be made by a primeval beast, like the roar in a horror movie when the unknown monster makes its appearance. I covered my ears. Testing, one, two, the singer said into the microphone when the speakers had settled. Hello everyone, now is this working? More whining, this time from the mike. Sorryyy.
‘Where the hell is he?’ Keong said, looking around. He dialled a number on his phone and held it to his ear. He took a long gulp of his beer, tilting his head backwards. I watched his Adam’s apple move in his throat – a small lump that seemed unnaturally hard and jagged, rolling back and forth as if it was a living thing. Its liveliness disgusted me.
My throat was dry from thirst and dust after our long day. I wanted some water, but lacked the energy to put my hand up and catch the attention of a waiter. In any case, there was no one around – the man running the bar, who had brought our drinks earlier, was now doubling up as a receptionist on the front desk. For a few minutes my vision began to tremble, to feel unreliable, as if I couldn’t judge how far away people were, or how quickly they moved across the room, or what each human action was intended to do. That man over there, leaning forward in his chair to get closer to his female companion – was he about to strike her, or speak to her? The hotel manager, hurrying towards the exit – running to pursue someone, or to escape something? I was dehydrated, I told myself. I wasn’t falling sick, I was just dehydrated. I should have drunk some more of my beer, but the thought of it revolted me.
The singer and the keyboard player returned to the stage to begin their act. The One and Only Sarita was saying something, but the mike was too close to her mouth and I couldn’t make out the words, only the sense of energy that she communicated, which made me feel even more tired. She started singing – ‘Hero’, by Mariah Carey. My head was spinning. I couldn’t figure anything out. She clutched her hand and raised it slightly, letting it float upwards, away from her body – what did that mean? I looked over at Keong. He was mumbling the words, or at least what he thought were the words, but which came out in a low, off-key string of sound that didn’t match the singer’s timing.
A man emerged from a door in the far corner of the room, behind the bar, dressed in black trousers and a white shirt with a bow tie. A waiter. I put up my hand, but he didn’t see me. I should have, could have, simply stood up, but my legs felt as uncertain and unreliable as the rest of me, so I remained in my seat, waving at him. Keong looked up. ‘There he is, the bastard.’ He put his hand on my arm to stop me from waving. Without knowing why, I let my hand fall. I’m thirsty, I wanted to say. I need some water. I need to go home.
The waiter walked slowly towards us, and just as with the other people, I was unable to figure out his intentions. He looked around – nervously, it seemed to me, but why?
‘Water,’ I said when he arrived at our table. ‘I need to drink something.’ He wore a badge that displayed his name – Uzzal.
‘You didn’t answer your phone,’ Keong said, glancing at him briefly, and speaking as if addressing someone else. ‘I need help.’
Uzzal spoke softly, in Malay that was heavy with a foreign accent – Bangladeshi, I guessed – but fluent, or at least fluent enough to make it clear that he’d been in the country for a long time. He was at work, he said. How could he answer his phone while he was at work? He would meet us in a couple of hours, when the last of the customers had gone and he could close the bar. He looked at Keong and said, ‘You shouldn’t come here next time.’
‘We were thirsty,’ Keong replied. ‘We wanted a drink.’
‘I’ll bring you something,’ Uzzal said. ‘But you’ll have to pay, otherwise my boss will be suspicious.’
Keong shrugged.
Sarita was singing ‘I Will Always Love You’, and Keong seemed less tired now. The beer had made his cheeks go slightly red, and his eyes moist, which gave him the look of someone who’d just emerged from a hot shower, quietly revived. Uzzal came back a few minutes later with another Carlsberg for Keong and a bottle of water for me. Although I’m now sure I couldn’t have done so, in my memory I drank it in one long gulp. I can’t remember ever having been as thirsty as I was in the Tokyo Hotel that night – not before or after.
Uzzal was Keong’s fixer in Klang. A fixer’s fixer. Someone with his ear to the ground. A foreign worker who’d made good. Keong didn’t know how long exactly he’d been in the country, but it must have been at least eight or ten years, possibly more. Keong had met him while Uzzal was working at a cement factory in the area – just another foreign worker, one of a team of fifteen, twenty. But this one guy stood out because of his clothes, which always looked laundered and pressed, and gave the impression that he was different from the others, when in fact he was just the same. He was the only one of the lot who smiled, enough to make people think he was happy doing his job, so of course he got promoted, and every time Keong came back to the factory to check up on the workforce, he noticed Uzzal wearing sharp clothes, organising the people under him as if he’d been doing it all his life. It was strange, Keong had thought: he behaved as both their commander and their comrade. Which is to say, he was one of them, but also not one of them.
‘Put it this way,’ Keong said. ‘Are you friends with the Indonesians who work for you at the fish farm?’
‘We get along.’
‘But are you friends? Do you take your lunch with them, exchange stories about your wives and kids – that sort of shit?’
‘No.’
‘See? They don’t really like you. Whenever you have a boss, you have an enemy. But not with this guy.’
Watching Uzzal at work, Keong had realised that he was good with his fellow workers, he could get them to do things that the bosses couldn’t – he never threatened them, but coaxed them. He joked with them. Delivered stern warnings quietly, out of earshot of the others. This guy is smart, I can use him some day, Keong thought. He knew that Uzzal would soon find a way to get himself the right papers and a regular job. Sometimes you’d get that feeling with a migrant. You don’t know exactly why or how they’re going to break free and make a life for themselves in this country, you just get a sense it’s going to happen – maybe because they’re a bit more desperate than the others, maybe they’ve got a few more IQ points than their friends. Who knows. He also thought, This guy knows how to hustle. Sure enough, when Keong called at the factory the following year to deliver another team of workers, Uzzal was no longer there. Found himself a wife, his colleagues said. A local. He’d quit his job and was working in a restaurant somewhere in town. It was easy finding him – he’d answered his phone within a few seconds of Keong calling.