by Jim Algie
Immediately, Yai put his hands together, bowed his head in prayer, and said to the Serpent Lord: “Thank you for your teaching and letting me return from the spirit world. All I want to do now is retire from the snake show, stop drinking and go back to my village to help my mother with farming. I hope the soldier is okay too and that you won’t make me into a snake in my next life.”
Yai opened his eyes and saw that the Marine was staring at him. Afraid that he was going to make fun of him, Yai looked back at the jungle where the late afternoon sun peeked between the trees.
“Hey, don’t get all embarrassed and shit. It’s cool. I believe in God too, and I respect your religion. But who were ya prayin’ to anyhow? The Buddha?”
“No, Phaya Nak, the big snake at temple.”
“Phaya Nak, huh? Yeah, I gotta remember that name. He’s beautiful. Ya know somethin’, I’d like to get a tattoo of him right around my bicep here, jus’ above the skull with the switchblade in its teeth and jus’ below Marilyn.”
An image of the Serpent Lord underneath a woman whose skirt was billowing out around her? Even thinking about it was blasphemous. But if that was what he wanted then he would have to answer to Phaya Nak one day. It wasn’t for Yai to intervene.
“But is he some kinda god or what?”
“He is king of all snakes and my teacher.”
Another series of chills raced each other up and down the snake-handler’s spine, his vision clouded over, and the Serpent Lord ripped his soul from his body again. This time, Yai was a tiny snake wrapped around Phaya Nak’s great crested head. Together, they flew across the sky, spearing through castles of cloudbanks at the speed of a jet, before nose-diving towards the earth. For a moment, Yai was overwhelmed by that familiar, double-edged feeling of happy misery (happy to be coming home again, but miserable that he was still broke, unmarried and childless) that he always felt when returning to his village, until he saw the parched and cracked earth. Not a plank or plough of the village where he’d grown up remained. There was no water, no rice paddies, no houses, people or animals. These badlands, which contained the country’s biggest dinosaur graveyard, had become a wasteland. The only flashes of color came from the sashes tied around the termite mounds where his mother said the descendants of the Serpent Lord dwelled, and where Yai and his boyhood friends would go out hunting for king cobras which took refuge there during the rainy season.
Scraps of discarded cotton from his mother’s loom tied around the barren termite mounds were all that remained of his old life and village.
When the Serpent Lord returned him to his body this time, Yai put his head down in his hands, feeling dizzy. What did Phaya Nak want to teach him now? That returning home was useless?
Of course it was. None of the young people stayed in these villages anymore. They didn’t want to lead a backbreaking life of eternal debt as rice farmers. There was no money and no face in that.
Everybody looked down on them as country bumpkins and the government never did anything to help them. All of his brothers and sisters and old friends and classmates had left the village long ago to work as taxi drivers, factory workers and prostitutes in Bangkok.
So if he couldn’t return home, and he couldn’t work at the Phuket Snake Farm anymore, what was he supposed to do?
Yai stared at the two-lane highway that looked like a long grey serpent, twisting around mountains, flattening out as it slithered past palm oil and rubber tree plantations, winding around ocean view points, making it impossible to tell what was ahead of them or what was behind and, when the golden flying snake came whizzing through the pickup truck, glancing off the sailor’s shoulder and making him lose his grip on the handrail as the sudden acceleration of the driver coming out of a switchback sent the American tumbling headfirst onto the tarmac, who could really say if it was just bad luck or an accident or karma, and what did it matter anyway? Yai would always claim, when it happened so cobra-quick that all he, the only eye-witness, could do was make a wild grab for the sailor’s T-shirt and wind up snatching the silver cross from his neck and, long after Yai had returned to the Snake Farm, still wearing the cross (“A tribute to my dead American friend,” he told the pretty young white tourists) and was doing a new army-style act with the golden flying snake that survived the encounter, he told people that maybe the poor ol’ farm boy had thrown himself out the back of the pickup truck or maybe they were both confused by the venom and the antivenin or—and Yai always stuck to his story no matter how drunk he was—that of course he hadn’t kick-boxed the American in retaliation for the losses of face in the bar and the snake pit, as one of the sailor’s friends had claimed (though he was drunk too and the cops were skeptical that he’d seen much in the side-door mirror). So when the tourists and bargirls and locals had gotten bored of hearing him retell the story, the snake-handler always wound it up with the one thing in his slithery world that he could pin down: “People are a lot like snakes. They’re very fast and tricky, and you can never predict how harmless or dangerous they might turn out to be.”
FLASHPOINTS IN ASIA
For Vicki Hazou
Gunfire exploded, screams singed the air, and the crowd surged backwards to escape the soldiers’ shooting spree.
Kendall ducked down but continued snapping frame after frame, his flash shooting out quicksilver light, even as terrified faces came into sharp focus only to become dark smudges in his viewfinder, even as the fleeing demonstrators jostled him on both sides and someone yelled in his ear, “Go! Go!” and grabbed the shoulder of his army jacket, trying to pull him back.
He shook his arm free and shouted, “Cheers, but I’m workin’, mate.” Then he gestured with his head. “Off you go.”
In a crouch, he crept towards the soldiers. The closer he got to them, the louder the gunfire became. Each shot made him blink. More demonstrators ran past him screaming something in Thai that he couldn’t understand. Two other men, their arms draped around a third man’s shoulders, dragged him along between them as he wailed and wept.
Further down Bangkok’s Ratchadamnoen Avenue, the dark hulk of a tank rumbled towards him. Behind it, flames shot up from a city bus and writhed in the humid breeze. No time to attach his zoom lens; another perfect shot wasted.
Kendall turned back to the soldiers—only twenty or thirty meters in front of him—who were lined up in front of Democracy Monument, its four pillars lit with yellow lights. The gunfire was sporadic now.
Kendall knelt down to take close-ups of the bodies strewn across the road, checking the red digital light meter in the upper right-hand corner of his viewfinder. The shutter snapped as the gears whirred.
Flash. A dead Thai woman staring up at him.
Flash. A bloody hand clutching a mobile phone.
Flash. A teenager’s face, his nose pulverized by a bullet.
Flash. A flip-flop lying on its side in a slick of moon-silver blood.
Sitting on his haunches, Kendall looked up to see one of the soldiers running towards him, shouting.
A hand grabbed his wrist and he looked down to see the teenage boy with the bloody face, moaning, “Help me. Help me.” Then he looked back at the soldier running towards them.
Kendall had to save his Nikon and film. But he needed at least one good shot of a soldier. So he backed up, knelt down, and…
Flash. In the foreground was the teenager (his nose like a black hole in the middle of his face) lying on the ground with one arm reaching up towards the center of the frame; behind him was the soldier, his gun pointed straight at the camera.
As Kendall ran, he put the lens cap on, looked over his shoulder and saw the soldier bring the butt of his machine-gun down on the boy’s head.
The crack of that teenager’s skull being split open had pursued him through the rainforests of Sumatra when he was on the trail of some headhunters, across the beaches of Bali (a surfboard under his arm), down the street that ran past the Military Veteran’s Hospital in Phnom Penh, and deep into the Burmese j
ungle, when he was travelling with a band of Karen rebels. And still, some ten years after the mass slaughter of demonstrators protesting against a military junta which had overthrown a democratically elected government, the crack kept echoing in his mind like a rifle shot in a cave as he sat in the little Hainan Chicken and Rice Restoran in Penang, Malaysia, smoking a hand-rolled Drum cigarette and sipping a sweet iced coffee. And the memories of that night, which now seemed more like a black-and-white mirage, kept repeating too, with one exception: he’d never taken a photo of a beautiful and dead young Asian woman looking up at the camera, her eyes half-lidded, her mouth slightly open, tresses of hair caressing her cheeks, as if she’d been murdered in the death-like throes of an orgasm.
So where had that image come from?
Although the shot of the teenager and the soldier had won him the World Press Photo Award, made him a heap of money, and got him a contract with a New York photo agency, he had to wonder if all the waking nightmares were worth it. No matter how many times he tried to deny it, the fact was inescapable; if he hadn’t alerted the soldiers with his flashbulb, that teenager might not have died.
He glanced over at the glass case on the counter at the front of the restaurant, where several plucked chickens hung from hooks pierced through their necks. Across Chulia Road was a Chinese shop selling stacks of rattan furniture. Just down from it was Lim White Ant Service & General Pest Exterminators. Between them was an empty shop with a metal grill pulled across the entrance. Behind the grill, a figure clad in a dark purple robe and cowl suddenly appeared. It looked almost like a Muslim woman wearing a burqa. An arm, also clad in dark purple, reached through the grill and beckoned to him, but there didn’t seem to be a hand at the end of it. Was she calling for help or warning him to stay away?
By the time a black-and-yellow bus with the words “Bas Sekolah” written on the side had driven across his field of vision, the person was gone.
Kendall reckoned he’d better go and investigate. Maybe there was a story here—his first one in six months.
He slung his camera bag over his shoulder and told the cook and cashier at the counter, “That was the best boiled chicken breast and rice I’ve ever had in Asia. Would you mind writing down the recipe? My father back in Australia loves making Asian tucker, so I try to send him a fair few recipes from real chefs.” The cook wrote down the recipe, Kendall said, “Cheers,” and gave him a little tip.
For a few minutes, he stood on the opposite side of the street, watching the metal grill of the three-floor, Chinese-style shop-house. The windows on the second and third floors were also dark. On the red tiled roof sat a Eurasian black vulture. He’d seen this bird before. But where? It was part of a déjà vu he couldn’t quite place.
Kendall didn’t like the harsh noonday sunlight, but the bird, with its black feathers, bluish grey head and long hooked beak, was beautiful.
Two young Indian women with nose-rings and brilliant saris came down the street. Kendall smiled at them and said, “G’day, ladies.” Neither of them even looked at him… so I’m the sexual pariah of Malaysia, am I? He looked down at his dirty army pants, the pockets bulging with rolls of film and lenses, and at his old T-shirt and scarecrow arms… you’re looking like a right dag, Ken. They probably think you’re an AIDS patient.
As he stared at their wide, swiveling hips, his mouth opened a little, but before he could even come up with the foreplay of an erotic daydream, he remembered a photo editor in Hong Kong telling him he should go to India and do a story about all the women being set on fire by their husbands because their dowries weren’t big enough. The photo editor had told him these murders were officially listed as “cooking accidents”… now that’s barbecuing Indian style. Throw another bride on the barbie, mate. That’s sick, mate. You’ve really become sick and jaded, haven’t you?
As the gangly photographer walked across the street, the vulture laughed at him. Despite the sweltering heat and laser-like sun, a cold tongue licked his spine. Kendall looked up at the bird, framing the shot and setting the exposure in his mind; it was silent now, almost motionless.
Squinting and keeping well back from the grill for fear that arm without a hand would reach out and grab him, he peered into the shop: it was as black as the eye socket of a skull in there.
“Hello… hello.”
And now a little louder: “Hello. D’ya need help?”
He moved closer so his face was just behind the metal grill, but he still couldn’t see or hear anything.
Thinking he’d try the back door, Kendall walked down the street past an Indian restaurant with an open shop front (where the customers ate curries with their hands from banana leaves), an old wooden Chinese pharmacy that reeked of medicinal herbs, and a little stand where an Indian man wearing a checked cloth around his waist poured tea from one glass held above his head into another glass held at waist level in order to cool it down. He then repeated the process over and over again, never spilling a drop. Kendall stopped to watch him… now here’s the kind of photos I should be taking, in-flight magazine rubbish. But where’s the fun in that?
The vendor saw him watching. “Hello, my friend. How many feet of tea do you want? It’s our joke in Malaysia.”
That was the tax added to the cost of being an expat and a foreign correspondent in Asia (possibly anywhere, he imagined); never knowing for certain if the locals were being sincerely friendly or congenially mercenary. To be polite, Kendall laughed along with him and said, “Cheers, but I’m strictly on a beer diet.”
Around the corner were three, ten-foot-tall joss sticks with the heads of red, yellow, blue and lime dragons at the bottom, their tails curling up towards the smoking wicks, which perfumed the air with the sweet scent of sandalwood incense. Behind the joss sticks was a Chinese shrine. Sitting on the altar before some monstrous deity were pigs’ heads, bottles of Guinness beer, trays of sweets, and bowls of rice with chopsticks and spoons beside them.
Kendall asked an old Chinese man, who had a lumpy face like rice porridge and eyes that had long since lost their luster for life, about the shrine.
The man cast a quick, disapproving gaze over Kendall’s old army clothes and mesh T-shirt. He looked back at the altar. “It’s for the God of Hell. This is Chinese ghost month.”
Now Kendall really had to wonder what he’d seen behind that grill.
“Aw yeah,” said the photographer in a nasally voice that sounded like a Brit with a bad cold. “I read something about that. At the beginning of the seventh lunar month the gates of the underworld open and the spirits of the dead come back to earth. So these offerings are for the ghosts?”
“For the God of Hell and his helpers. Tonight will be offerings for ghosts, and puppet shows and Chinese operas for people and ghosts to enjoy. You can only make offerings for spirits at night because that is when they come.”
Kendall thanked him and the man asked him for the time.
“Sorry, mate, but I never wear a watch. Nothing sadder than watching the time passing I reckon. That’s why I love photos so much. You can freeze time and save the moment for ever.”
Kendall looked back at the God of Hell. The details and colors rivaled anything he’d seen in the Tibetan scroll paintings he collected: a bouquet of red, pink and yellow flowers crowned a head-dress of fanciful lions and tigers; the deity’s malicious face was dark blue; his eyes were yellow; and a long bloody tongue lolled out of his mouth between orange streaks of flame.
This could be the next development in Kendall’s career. No more black-and-white images of soldiers and corpses, earthquakes and crime scenes. With this series of photos he’d try to do something more colorful and mystical, something more artistic that would be exhibited in galleries and published in a book. He was sick of photo editors ruining his pictures by cropping them, or choosing the weakest ones and then running them beside an ad for expensive shoes, like they’d done with his series of AIDS patients on their deathbeds in a Buddhist temple in Thailand.
&
nbsp; For these new shots he wanted to experiment with a technique called “cross processing.” So he loaded the camera with 200 ASA color slide film and pushed it two stops to 800 ASA. Later, he would develop the rolls as if they were regular print film and the result would be sharp, color-saturated images with high contrasts.
As Kendall framed the God of Hell in his viewfinder, an Asian headhunter wearing a necklace of pig’s teeth and holding one of his “trophies” aloft slowly formed in front of the camera’s eye like a black-and-white photo in a tray of developer, hazy at first, but slowly coming into focus. It was the same shot he’d taken in Sumatra, but now it was moving, now the headhunter was alive and glaring at him with the God of Hell’s yellow eyes… fuckin’ hell.
Kendall pulled the camera away from his eyes and the image disappeared. He stared at the Nikon as if it were haunted, shook it, then looked through the viewfinder again and saw a Cambodian soldier with a ragged uniform and a face full of shrapnel floating above the shrine, waving the stumps of his arms around.
Kendall put the camera back in his bag. He’d never taken a shot like that… it’s combat fatigue, Ken. You’ve seen too many atrocities. Well, so did Don McCullin. Must be why he called his book of photos Living with Ghosts. But I’ll call mine Flashpoints in Asia.
The cell phone in his pocket vibrated. A photo editor in Singapore told him there were more riots on the streets of Jakarta, and his newspaper needed a photographer to go there ASAP. He began giving him a list of shots to take.
Kendall interrupted him. “I don’t work like that. I have to keep my compositions loose and my shots spontaneous—and nobody tells me what to shoot. If you’ll let me take the pictures I want and give me five-hundred US a day, plus expenses, then I’ll go.”
The editor sighed and Kendall hung up on him… silly bugger.
