We, the Survivors

by Tash Aw

  She’s wrong!

  So you don’t agree on crime. Is that a reason to split up?

  It’s not just that. It’s everything. Her whole politics. She’s a corporate lawyer, right, so I know she’s a capitalist, but I didn’t expect her to turn out to be so damned conservative. All she thinks about is making money. She had a small Honda when I met her, now she has a huge Audi 4x4. What next, a Bentley? I joked. She said, Mmm, maybe in a couple of years’ time.

  What’s wrong with making money? Your family are well-off too, aren’t they?

  We’re not rich, but yeah, we’re OK. That’s precisely why I’m trying to do more interesting things with my life. Useful things. Her parents are so stinking rich. Why does she need more? What makes me sad is that she wasn’t always like that. I remember the first time I saw her. She was sitting alone reading a trashy novel in the Hungarian Pastry Shop. In New York. We were both studying there. She was smiling to herself as she read, and shaking her head, as if she was reading the funniest thing in the world, and I thought, Now that is someone I could live with my whole life. She was fun, she loved to laugh. It wasn’t that long ago. Now we sit on the sofa and discuss mortgage rates all evening.

  She’s just trying to provide you with security for the future. If you don’t have a nice house, how can you feel safe?

  You know the worst thing of all? She supports the government. Doesn’t see why I went on the anti-corruption march, said it was a waste of time. Actually laughed at me and my friends, as if we were kids. Yeah, just go and pretend to be revolutionaries, if it makes you feel better. You’re crazy if you think you’ll change anything. I felt like leaving the apartment and slamming the door and never seeing her again.

  She stares at her cup of water, but doesn’t drink. She keeps her head lowered, and I think, Maybe she’s crying.

  Do you love her?

  How can I live with someone who votes for this corrupt government?

  That’s not what I asked. I said, do you love her?

  She keeps looking at her cup, but still doesn’t take a sip. When she finally lifts her head to look at me she sighs heavily.

  She’s called Alex. Actually her real name is Intan Alexandra Sulaiman, but all her friends call her Alex.

  December 30th

  Last night I woke up with a jolt. One moment I was in a deep sleep, the next I was fully awake. My head was still on the pillow, my entire body as it had been in the minutes and hours before that rupture, but suddenly I was as alert and clear-eyed as I am right now, sitting here talking to you. It was a crack of thunder that woke me up. A single streak of lightning that came out of nowhere and split the night neatly in two. I don’t know what the weather’s been like in your part of town – sometimes when it’s raining heavily here, it’s as dry as the Sahara where you are. Thirty miles away, but everything can be different where you live. Out here, the skies have been heavy for days now, full of the sort of thick low cloud that usually announces downpours that last for days, even weeks – only we haven’t had any rain at all. Every morning I keep thinking, Better not go out today, the rain will be too heavy and there won’t be any buses. Every evening I smell the moisture in the air and expect to hear the drumming of rain on the roof in the night, but in the end nothing happens. Just a lightless blue-grey sky full of swollen, twisted clouds, like strange ripe fruit about to burst.

  Then, last night, that single, sharp crack of thunder, like an oil drum splitting in two. My eyes flicked open. I waited for the next burst of lightning. That’s it, I thought, here comes the rain at last. But still nothing. I lay awake for a while, not even blinking, just listening, waiting, even when enough time had passed for me to know that there would be no deluge after all. Thunder in a dry sky – that was all it had been. As I drifted back to sleep I wondered whether I’d simply dreamed it; that maybe the sharpness of the lightning strike, the loud booming of the thunder – all that had occurred in my mind, and nowhere else. I get caught in this state sometimes, trapped between two worlds, not knowing if I’m fully awake and present in one, or if I’ve actually passed into another. Sleeping, running, raining, burning. Sometimes it’s all the same to me, I can’t discern the difference, can’t shake myself into a state of clarity and divide my days into distinct portions with lists of things to do. It’s worse since I came out of prison, but to tell the truth I’ve always been a bit like that, even when I was small. Look at the sky. It’s the same as yesterday and all the days before. This morning the alarm clock told me it was seven-thirty, but it was so dark I didn’t feel as if night had properly ended.

  [Rubs eyes; pauses; stares into space.]

  * * *

  I almost didn’t recognise Uzzal when he walked out of the Tokyo Hotel. I’d been waiting for him for more than an hour, watching the back entrance that led into the side street where there was hardly any traffic. I’d parked my car just across the street, where I was sure to spot him – yet I still almost missed him. He’d changed out of his hotel uniform and was wearing long camouflage shorts and a Liverpool football shirt, the kind of clothes you might expect a local to wear, not a foreign worker.

  It was very hot that day, and even with the car windows fully wound down there was very little air, and I was sweating heavily. The drains that lined the side street were clogged with rubbish – the usual tangle of biscuit tins and plastic bags and broken branches. It wasn’t surprising that people got sick, I thought. Once the rain started it would only take a week of heavy downpours for all the trash to accumulate in a great heap that would block the deep monsoon drains, and then the town would be flooded. I could see it so clearly: the street in front of me disappearing slowly under a rising tide of floodwater, bits of driftwood and plastic floating in the muddy filth, bacteria spreading everywhere. The awnings of the makeshift food stalls huddled against the sides of the buildings would be sagging limply into the water. I’d sit there watching it, trapped in my car, and after a while, even with the doors and windows closed, I’d notice water seeping in through tiny cracks, maybe even through the undercarriage of the car itself. Was that even possible? In any case, eventually I’d feel the car begin to shift, feel the weightlessness of it as the water carried me away in its stream, along with the other bits of rubbish.

  It was then that I noticed someone walking swiftly from the back entrance of the hotel to a row of scooters parked nearby, and it was only once he’d started to put on his helmet that I realised it was Uzzal. I started to get out of my car, but the lights of his scooter were already on, and a puff of exhaust billowed out from the engine as he drew away. I got back in the car and began to follow him, not caring whether he saw me or not. It was the opposite of all those cop films you see on Astro, where Aaron Kwok or Andy Lau is always trying not to be noticed as they trail someone in an SUV, but their target always sees them anyway, and they end up in a high-speed chase. I wanted Uzzal to spot me, but he didn’t, he just rode through the traffic at a steady pace, not slow but not fast either, sometimes speeding up and disappearing between lorries, at other times waiting patiently at traffic lights.

  I got closer to him as the traffic thinned out beyond Taman Kelana, and just as we were approaching the Sementa area he turned off into an industrial area separated from the main road by a monsoon drain and a row of small trees so covered in road dust that they were more grey than green. It was a place I’d driven past often but never paid any attention to. A lot of the small factories and go-downs there had ceased to operate over the years, and it was hard to tell which were still in business and which were abandoned. The port business isn’t what it used to be, and now that so much work is done by computers, there isn’t any need for a lot of things we used to take for granted. One of the factories facing the highway had a sign that showed paper, pencils, wastepaper bins, but the place had long since closed down, shrouded by trees whose branches and vines hung so thickly they would soon hide the building from view entirely.

  Uzzal drew to a halt outside a long, high fence of r
ed-painted corrugated iron topped with two strands of rusty barbed wire. It looked as if it was protecting a small industrial unit – behind it I could see a flat-topped concrete roof, but I could also make out lines of washing. I pulled up alongside him just as he was pushing his scooter through the gate of the compound. When he looked at me, his eyes were clear and slightly wet, irritated from having ridden through the dust on the road. He didn’t recognise me at first, but then he said, ‘I already told you, I can’t help.’

  ‘Please,’ I said. ‘I’ve got nothing to do with Keong. I don’t even know the man.’ I don’t know him. As I was saying these words, they didn’t seem like a lie, they seemed to form a truth so perfect and deep that I myself was convinced I’d never set eyes on Keong. Maybe it was my dreamlife speaking, my desire never to have known him. In that other life – the one that was safe and decent and true – Keong had never been a friend. ‘I have a family. A job. I’m in trouble.’

  ‘I can’t do anything for you,’ he said, propping his scooter against a wall. There were other people in the yard, men and women washing clothes in plastic buckets. Two children stood on the steps of the building, framed by the doorway, ready to disappear inside at the slightest sign of trouble. The older one – seven or eight, with enough life behind her to recognise danger – stared at me with the closed look of someone who did not welcome strangers; the kind of expression she had no doubt encountered all her life on the faces of the people who looked at her as she walked in the street, to the extent that she had absorbed it herself, and it was now fixed on her own features. Don’t come any closer. Go away. That was what her young face said. She had one arm around the shoulders of her sister, who must have been a couple of years younger at least, not yet closed off to the world, though that would come soon.

  I had once been those children, standing on the threshold of our house, watching people approach and judging the danger they posed to us. Debt collectors, people from the village, distant relatives from out of town. At first I was caught between fascination and fear, but later I became suspicious of everything. I suppose there must have been a time when I feared nothing and was enthralled by the newness of all people and all things, but I can’t remember that time.

  I explained my situation to Uzzal without needing to add or exaggerate. I told him I would be sacked and my wife would leave me, and I would be alone again. I would have to start from scratch like a young man of twenty, only the body I lived in now was not a twenty-year-old’s, and it might not be capable of creating a new life for me. That was why I was scared. Already, my body would often not obey my commands; my thoughts and my actions were diverging. Even if I wanted to work at a job digging trenches and ponds at a fish farm somewhere else in the country, my body would refuse to do it. If I had to go back to sharing a room with two other guys in a low-cost flat two hours from where I worked, my body would rebel, it wouldn’t be able to take any rest on the thin mattress on the floor after a day in the sun.

  ‘Now that you work as a waiter in a hotel, can you imagine doing an eighteen-hour shift in a factory again?’ I asked.

  Uzzal looked at his children, and went up the steps to greet them. He took the smaller one in his arms and picked her up. The older one leaned lightly against him. She still hadn’t shifted her hard-eyed gaze from me. Uzzal turned to go into the house, and beckoned me to join him inside. Beyond the initial gloom the concrete space was lit by a brilliant square of light that fell from a hole cut in the roof. Around us, in a large room that must once have housed light machinery, there were plastic chairs and makeshift beds spread out on the floor. In one corner, a sort of kitchen built from plywood boxes arranged against the wall, a small stove and a row of three gas canisters.

  ‘If those explode,’ I said, ‘you’ll be in heaven before you know what’s happened.’

  He lit the stove and began to heat the kettle. ‘How do you know it won’t be hell?’

  The children went out into the yard to play. They’d arranged some sticks on the broken concrete, and were hopping over them in a pattern that I couldn’t figure out. They spoke in a language I didn’t understand, but once in a while, amid the warm swirl of their chatter I heard a few Malay words, as striking as trees poking out from the water at high tide. Satu, dua, tigaaaaaa. I looked around the concrete box that Uzzal and his family had made their home, and I thought, It’s dry and safe, and that’s something.

  More than just the three of them lived there, that much was clear. There were bags of clothes and pairs of rubber sandals everywhere. But where were they? He must have had a wife, and maybe cousins from his village in Bangladesh, or friends he’d grown up with. I didn’t ask, and he didn’t volunteer any information. With migrant workers, you learn not to ask questions about their families – you steer clear of the topic, because you don’t want to hear the explanations. How did you end up in this country? What happened to your parents? Where is your wife? How did your husband die? You know that the stories are always going to be the same – you’ve heard them before, read about them in the newspapers – and if you don’t have the stomach to hear them again, you learn not to ask questions.

  He gave me some tea in a steel mug. It was hot and slightly bitter.

  ‘You should stop your search,’ he said. ‘The people you’re looking for – they can’t work.’

  ‘We can arrange permits,’ I said. ‘We can bribe the police, it’ll be OK.’

  ‘It’s not a question of law, it’s a question of reality. They’re sick, they’re too weak to work. It’s useless.’

  I was thirsty, but the tea was too strong for me to drink. ‘Are you sure?’

  He nodded. Their journey had been harsh, he explained, harsher than usual; most of them hadn’t arrived in good shape. They’d taken a boat from southern Myanmar, from a place called Sittwe, not far from where he himself had grown up. From there they’d taken the usual sea route to southern Thailand, cutting in from the Andaman Islands and heading to the point where Thailand narrowed into Malaysia. It wasn’t such a long trip, and conditions were good at that time of the year, between monsoons, the waves gentle. He’d done almost the same trip some time before, from further up the coast towards Chittagong, in fact, so he knew how long it would take.

  But something went wrong, the boat got lost, they ran out of water days before they reached shore, and people died – he wasn’t sure how many. All it takes is for one or two people on board to die and it changes the way you feel on the boat, changes the way you feel about the days, months and years ahead of you. Even if your body holds up, your spirit wishes you were dead. Drifting on the sea, you feel you’ve died too. The friends you lose take something away from you as their bodies are thrown overboard, and that something – what is it? No one knows – that something never comes back.

  Once they’d reached land, they were held in jungle camps in southern Thailand, recovering enough strength for the journey across the border. One or two bodies – of people who’d died after they landed – were buried in the jungle. This happened often. When Uzzal was in one of those camps he had to dig a grave for a seventeen-year-old boy he’d met on the boat who’d dreamed of becoming a carpenter. Why a carpenter? Uzzal never found out. The boy had got sick with dysentery, and died of dehydration. As Uzzal was digging his grave, he kept thinking, This could be me. If I die, someone else will be digging my grave, and I’ll be buried here, in the soil of a country I don’t know, before I even have a chance of getting to know it. My body will nourish the earth of this new land, I will give myself to it after all, just not in the way I expected. (The Chinese have a saying, I wanted to tell him right at that moment, but I didn’t. Falling leaves return to nourish the tree’s roots. Do you know it? All things go back to their source. Wander far and wide, but you’ll always return home. That is the natural way of things, that is how we expect life to turn out, and maybe it does for some. But not for most.)

  They were smuggled in lorries across the border, all the way down into southern Perak, a
nd now they were in the area, moving from one makeshift camp to another. Uzzal’s so-called boss, the one Keong was looking for, was trying to find them medication, but it’s hard to get help for people who aren’t supposed to be in the country. That’s what Uzzal had heard – that many of this group of workers were sick and dying. It didn’t sound good. Not so long ago he might have stepped in, tried to do something to help them, maybe house them with families that were already established in the country, people who could nurse them, give them the shelter and comfort that was more healing than any medication. But these weren’t the sort of people he knew. They were Rohingya. Do you know what that means? They were refugees, they lived in a war zone, they were being driven from their homes, they would have been weak and injured even before they set off on their journey. When you come from a place like that, it’s not just your body that suffers, your brain is fried too, and Uzzal didn’t know how to help people like that. The smugglers don’t care who they bring in, they just count the numbers. As long as they fill the boats, they’re happy. A man or a woman – they’re just a body. That’s what Uzzal’s boss said one day, but Uzzal already knew it, he’d known it since the day he left Bangladesh. He knew because he’d once been that body himself.

  That was when he decided he wouldn’t be part of this business any more, and that was why he couldn’t help me. He had a job now, a proper one. He’d got his papers, and in a few years he hoped to get a passport. He couldn’t get involved in this kind of work, he had to leave it all behind.

  ‘What am I supposed to do?’ I said. My voice sounded suddenly too loud; it reverberated in the concrete room. I wanted to shake him by the shoulders, scream at him. What did he think – that he could leave it all behind just like that, and forget all about it?

  ‘It’s not my problem,’ he said, finishing his tea. We were still standing in the middle of the room, and he looked at me for a few seconds before taking my mug from me. ‘I have to make dinner for my kids now.’