30
She hadn’t intended to go back to the park. What she had intended to do was to fold the money as tightly as possible, wedge it beneath her innermost layer of clothing, choose a direction at random, and walk until daylight. For the second time, it seems to her, she is walking through the night to a new life.
Maybe this new life, which she isn’t even trying to envision beyond the notion of a long bath and a real bed, will be the one that works, the one that will let her live like a human being again.
He had been a surprise, the man who Miaow lived with now. Except for the men in the massage parlor, she’d never really talked with a farang for any length of time. Most of the men whom she met on the table were sad and kind of lost in spite of their money and their passports and their white skin, people who had everything except some notion about what to do with it. They climbed the stairs and went into the room not even knowing who would be waiting there, as though the massage tables and the girls were interchangeable, one pretty much like the others. They came in, they either chatted easily or talked in nervous fits and starts, or stayed silent while she did what they wanted her to do, and then they tipped her, most of them, and left. Not many of them requested her again, even though they all asked her what her name was the first time. She made up a non-Thai name she thought they would remember, Star, but while most of the other girls had customers coming back and asking for them by name, few asked for her.
For the first month or two, she’d slept on the table where she worked; she didn’t have the heart to move into the place she’d chosen for Miaow and her. She rarely even went down the stairs to the street, except to buy pills—in part because she was worried about running into her husband—until it became obvious to everyone that she wasn’t going to be one of the parlor’s top attractions, pretty though she was, and they told her she could keep working there but she’d have to find another place to stay. That turned out to be several steps down from the place where Kanda had been so sweet to her, a tiny, filthy room that she shared with an absolutely gigantic and fearless rat that she called Daw. “I’m home, Daw,” she’d announce when she came in, and it wouldn’t even run for its hole at the base of the wall. When she left in the morning, she put out a bowl of water and told him she hoped he’d have a good day.
After most of a year they fired her because (if she’s being honest with herself) the pills, especially the pain pills, got out of hand again and she started showing up late or not at all, and some customers complained about her. Several of them said she was obviously using drugs. Without the money she’d been earning she’d had to give up the little room and Daw, too. She’d grown fond of Daw, but come on, she’d asked herself, who takes a rat with her? And anyway, he had a good deal where he was: regular crumbs on the floor, cozy hole in the wall, no cats. She hoped the next person who lived in the room would be kind to him.
The human Daw had gone home to his mother’s house, she had learned in a letter from her sister, and had found a new wife. Hom’s only reaction when she read the letter was to wish the new one better luck than she had enjoyed. Between the mother-in-law and Daw’s pills, she would need it.
She hasn’t thought about Daw in years.
Three or four years after she’d lost Miaow, she saw one of the kids from the gang who had taken her in, and he said that Miaow had been loaned to one of the adult gangs who put kids on the sidewalk to sell things to tourists. He’d told Hom which sidewalks, but by then she was sleeping on the streets, mostly under bridges, just as Daw had said they would. Her memory had begun to stutter and the world had gotten foggier and foggier. There was no way she could take care of a child. She could barely take care of herself. Miaow was probably better off on her own. And it struck her, just then, that her memory had been better since the boy in Patpong told her that he’d seen Miaow and that she apparently had a family. She thinks, Maybe I just needed something worth remembering. Instantly, she has a picture of herself, scrubbed clean and pill-free, meeting her daughter again: some tears, a hug, some kind of promise for the future. In that instant she makes a decision. She reaches into her shirt pocket, takes out the fold of paper with the pills in it. Then she drops them to the pavement and grinds them to powder under her heel.
She looks around. Where is she? Oh, right, she’s here. Pretty much where she’d decided not to go.
It’s got to be almost 1 a.m. What she should do, she thinks again, trying to convince herself, is turn around and go in the other direction, any other direction, just keep the park at her back until she can vanish into some poor area of Bangkok miles from here.
But look where she is. At the same time that she’s been commanding herself to disappear from Patpong—from this whole part of the city—another voice has been arguing that the Sour Man has no idea where she sleeps; she’s only seen him in Patpong, and that applies, too, to the boy who brought her to the Sour Man’s attention. Even if they know, or guess, that she sleeps in Lumphini some nights, Lumphini is big.
And she’s only going to be there a minute or two. In, dig, out. She needs to do this.
Looking around, she decides that she can take advantage of the fact that she and the farang, in going from ATM to ATM, had strayed far from her usual route. She decides to circle even farther around the park and come in from a completely new direction. In a matter of minutes its relative darkness looms up in front of her. There’s a bit of broken fence, low enough for her to climb, nearby. She’s been looking behind her all evening, ever since she and the farang set off for the ice cream place. No one seems to be following. She grabs a deep breath and walks quickly to the sagging fence and then into the trees. She sticks to the trees wherever she can, avoiding the open spaces, keeping well back from the edge of the lake. She stumbles a couple of times; she knows every obstacle and awkward step on her usual route, but this isn’t that path, and she swears sharply once as she almost goes down.
One minute. That’s all she needs, one minute at most, and she’ll be gone, as though the world swallowed her up.
The phone in her pocket vibrates.
It hasn’t buzzed since they left the first ATM. But it’s buzzing now. What does that mean?
Instantly, she envisions the Sour Man pacing the dark Patpong sidewalk between Silom and Surawong, swearing with every step, waiting for her. He must be furious by now.
The image energizes her. Get this errand done and get out of here. She moves faster now, not quite so worried about silence, and within a few minutes she’s on the gentle rise where the boy’s tree stands, looking down on the place where she sleeps.
The boy is not there, as far as she can tell, and neither is anyone else. Quickly, now: she lifts the hem of her skirts in her right hand and hurries down the slope, fishing with her left hand for the digging spoon in the Louie bag.
At the bush, she sees her extra plastic sheet, folded tightly and wadded beneath the bush’s lowest branches, right where she left it, and a rectangle of white that turns out to be the take-out bag from the Isaan restaurant that she had left for the boy with the furious eyes. She takes three paces toward a small round stone she had half buried there, however long ago it was, drops to her knees and sticks the spoon into the earth, and the phone buzzes again.
She drops the spoon and is fumbling for the phone, thinking about throwing it as far as she can, when a man says, “You’re not taking calls?” and then something that has to be a boot hits the center of her back and she sprawls forward, the spoon flying from her hand.
The Sour Man says, “Burying something?”
She’s flat on her stomach with one side of her face on the cold, wet grass.
He says, “Get up.”
She finds her way to her hands and knees and then she feels again the flare of pain from her ear that announces that he’s clamped it between his fingernails. “Up,” he says, tugging her ear sharply enough to make her whimper. “Up, up, up.”
Instead, she rolls to the right, feeling the flesh in her ear tearing, and then, with no plan in mind, she crawls away from him as fast as she can. When she gets unsteadily to her feet, he is a couple of meters away, looking at her in a way that seems half-amused and almost affectionate. Small as he is, he terrifies her. He steps toward her, but she backs up, and he shakes his head as though to note that she hasn’t learned anything yet. Standing where she dropped the spoon, he slides a boot over the earth and bends down to look, and it feels like her heart has stopped. But then he shakes his head and straightens to bring his eyes back to her. “Well,” he says, “if you buried anything here, it was a long time ago, so you’ve still got what I want. Give it to me.”
“He didn’t give me anything.”
“Why were you hiding?”
“I wasn’t hiding.” There’s a warm, feathery touch at the side of her neck, and she knows it’s her own blood.
“You didn’t call me. You didn’t answer my call. You were hiding. Where is it?”
“I don’t have any—”
In two long steps, he’s on her, and he punches her in the face, and then she’s down, flat on her back, the world rippling through tears, and when she sniffs she tastes blood at the back of her throat.
“Not one word,” he says, standing over her. “The bag.”
She peels the bag off her shoulder and, still lying on her back, holds it up to him. He starts to rifle through it, giving it his attention, and she thinks, Roll away and then get up, but he’s standing on her skirt, and he feels the tug and says, “Uh-uh.”
He pulls things out of the purse and drops them at his feet. When it’s empty he turns it upside down to shake it, and suddenly, there’s a long, silvery knife in his hand and he slits the bag open—the knife, she thinks, must be very sharp—and he pulls the lining out and then tosses the whole thing aside. He says, “Take off your clothes.”
She says, “I’ll scream.”
“Make one sound, and I’ll cut your throat. Where’s the money?”
“He didn’t give me any.”
“You had your phone off for hours. What were you doing, singing him lullabies?”
“He didn’t give me—”
“If that’s true, you can get dressed again. Up, up. Get out of those rags.” He backs away.
To get up, she has to roll to her hands and knees, where she waits, head hanging down, feeling as though she’ll pass out if she stands. She wobbles to her feet and holds the pose, waiting to see whether she’s going to fall, and then, with his eyes on her, she pulls the outer skirt up and over her head, keenly aware of the stiff little rectangle of folded bills in the waistband of her underpants. She begins to ball up the skirt so she can toss it to him, but he says, “Shake it out. Four or five times. Shake it hard.”
She does as she’s told.
“Throw it over there, to your right, I don’t want it near me. Now the next layer. Where do you find these rags?”
It’s a blouse. Beneath that is another blouse, and beneath that is her bra. When she’s standing there, the bare skin of her belly and back prickling with goose-flesh in the night air, he says, “Pants.”
As she unbuttons the pants she finds her mind gliding away from him, gliding away from this moment, and she thinks, I’ll never see Miaow again, I’ll never be anyone she would want to—And then a kind of warmth comes over her, floods through her, actually, and she almost smiles. So easy.
“Get them off,” he says. He waves the knife at her, just a reminder, a little back-and-forth. She thinks about how sharp it is. It glints, catching some stray beam of light that has infiltrated the trees, and suddenly she’s seeing the glint of the sun off the hood of Hyukk-Hyukk’s awful car, seeing him smiling at her in the rearview mirror, and she thinks, That was the last time things could have gone right for me.
“Hurry up,” he says.
“I’m doing it as fast as I can,” she says, peeling the pants down. She kicks them over to him, trying to keep her eyes on him, waiting for her chance, and almost going over backward. Nothing left now but the bra and the underpants with the money in them. As he bends to pick up the pants the certainty blooms in her; she thinks Now and screams something, anything, and he straightens quickly, the knife pointed directly at her, and she takes a fast step and launches herself toward the gleam of the knife. She feels it when it enters her abdomen, but it’s more like a punch than a cut, and she thinks, Sharp edge is down, and grabs his shoulders and pulls herself up, and then, for the first time, she experiences the knife as a cutting object making a deep, lengthening slice in her body. She has to let go of him because she doesn’t seem to have control of her arms anymore, but she knows that the cut is deep enough and long enough, and she closes her eyes as she slides down his slender body, suddenly slick with blood, all the way to the ground, where she folds herself as small as she can, suddenly seeing a bright rectangle of light, a rearview mirror, with a boy smiling at her, and then it’s gone and she just waits for it—whatever it is—to take her.