by Jim Algie
It was a show of bravado to cover up the fact that he didn’t want to shoot any more riots, because it was futile. The same atrocities and uprisings kept repeating again and again. All the work he’d done, and all the risks he’d taken, had been in vain; none of those photos had changed anything.
Or had they?
Since there hadn’t been any more military massacres in Thailand after the last crisis, maybe, in some small way, his photos had made a difference. It was hard to say, just as it was hard to admit that he’d lost his nerve and now he was losing the plot completely… but I’m no piker. I’ll be back here tonight to take another shot.
No matter where Kendall went that afternoon, the old Chinese man with the lumpy face and the grey widow’s peak kept shadowing him. Even when he ducked into an old theatre that had separate ticket booths for men and women to catch a Hong Kong action movie called The Kung-Fu Scholar, the guy sat down about six seats to his right. Halfway through the movie, off Kendall went to a bar. He’d just ordered a Tiger Beer when the old bloke walked in, pretended not to see him, and sat down at another table.
Later in the afternoon—the light was good now, mellow, soft focus—the photographer walked around an old British fort overlooking the city’s seaside, where a cannon scabbed with rust served as a fertility shrine for Chinese women who sat astride it and hurled oranges into the water. Reading the sign about that ritual made him smirk… you Chinese Sheilas can straddle my cannon whenever you want.
Someone began laughing. Kendall looked over at the Eurasian black vulture sitting on the fort’s wall, beside the old Chinese bugger scowling at him, like he knew what Kendall had been thinking about and disapproved. “Oi! Piss off and stop following me,” the photographer yelled.
But rice-porridge face stood there shaking his head sadly. “How can you not remember me, Kendall?”
The photographer turned and strode away, trying to recall who the man was, but he honestly couldn’t remember.
By twilight he was back in the Hainan Chicken and Rice Restoran, his gaze shifting between the metal grill of the shop-house across the street, and a couple of young Australian men having a loud, drunken conversation at another table. Kendall was tempted to join them. He could use the company of some countrymen right now to remember who he’d once been, not the washed up, jaded cynic he’d become.
So he rehearsed his opening lines. “Hey there, how ya goin’?” Then he’d point at the cigarettes on their table. “Can I bludge a gasper, mate?” But he didn’t use so much of that Aussie slang anymore. Had he been away from home for such a long time that he now had to rehearse lines in order to have a conversation with his own people? And the more he listened to them slagging off Aborigines, “Fuckin’ Abos are all mad piss farts,” and going on about Aussie rules football, the less he wanted anything to do with them… why don’t these Okkers go home and shear some sheep? They’re the kind of bigots I left home to avoid.
Across the street he saw that arm robed in dark purple reach through the metal grill and beckon to him, but it was too dark to see if there was a hand or a body attached to it.
It might be a trap, but it might also be a Muslim woman who really needed his help. Ten years ago he’d turned his back on someone in peril; he wasn’t going to do it again. Maybe, when he’d finally righted this wrong, he could become his old self again, because he hadn’t always been like this… now what was it I said to that mama-san in Cambodia who offered me a teenage girl’s virginity for a hundred bucks? “Call me a hopeful romantic if you will, but the first time should be for love… and every time after that.”
He also had to prove to himself that he could still shoot a potentially dangerous story. If he didn’t send some new photos to his agency in New York soon, he was not only going to be out of money, but out of the loop completely.
Peering through the locked grill of that dark shop-house revealed nothing. He couldn’t hear any sounds or voices either.
Around the corner, at the shrine to the Taoist God of Hell, there were dozens of supplicants praying and making offerings as candles burned and incense wafted. The lights flickering across the eyes of the pigs’ heads gave them a semblance of life. He thought about taking some photos, but remembering what had happened at the shrine this afternoon, he couldn’t bring himself to take his camera out.
Behind the dark shop-house was an empty, dirt parking lot rutted with tire tracks. The back door was slightly ajar. He opened it slowly, the rusty hinges complaining, and listened. No voices, no sounds came from within. But in the distance he could hear the trebly music and vocals of a Chinese opera.
Kendall flicked on his cigarette lighter and entered the kitchen.
It was filthy: full of newspaper scraps, empty beer bottles, broken glass, battered cupboards, and a refrigerator with the door open. He flicked a light switch, but there was no electricity.
Holding the lighter up in front of him, its yellow-crested, blue-bottomed flame wavering, Kendall walked through the kitchen, his army boots crunching broken glass. The lighter was burning his thumb, so he released the switch, and the darkness buried him alive. Listening so hard that he could feel his eyes taking on an Asian slant, trying not to breathe too loudly, Kendall stood there with his heart stammering, sweat trickling down his wrists.
Holding the lighter up in front of him again, he walked down the hall past filthy walls spider-webbed with cracks. The front room, just as garbage strewn as the kitchen, was dimly illuminated by a red light similar to the one he used in his dark room.
Flash. A figure robed and masked in dark purple walking towards him, quicksilver light shooting out of its eye slits.
Flash. The figure pulled the cowl back from its face to reveal the Thai teenager with the pulverised nose, except now he looked like a photographic negative: white eyes and hair, black skin and lips.
Flash. The Sumatran headhunter floated above him, and he, too, looked like a life-size, 3-D negative.
Fear, like a hangman’s noose, tightened around Kendall’s throat.
Flash. Flash. Flash. Flash.
The teenager in front of him, the old Chinese man with the lumpy face to his right, and the headhunter floating down on his stomach from the ceiling, all closed in on Kendall while he backed up, squinting into the barrage of flashbulbs. A pair of furry hands wrapped themselves around his neck and he turned around, eyes widening in shock as he saw that it was a big, black and white kangaroo, the same one he’d photographed when he was twelve. The ‘roo, which was several feet taller than him, reared back on its tail, bringing its huge feet up as another flash turned it into a living X-ray of white bones and jaws, pumping gray lungs, and a black pulsating heart.
The ‘roo kicked Kendall in the chest with its big feet and sent him flying across the room. He landed hard on his tailbone first, then his elbows. Wheezing like an asthma-attack victim—he couldn’t catch his breath, he was going to choke to death—Kendall finally pushed himself up on his aching elbows and wheezed a few accordion-sounding notes from his lungs… fuckin’ hell.
In the bombardment of flashes, he saw a lovely young Asian woman borne aloft by the 3-D X-rays of two Eurasian black vultures melded with her feet, their skeletal wings slowly flapping. Tresses of black hair covered her breasts. Rolls of film were wrapped around her waist and thighs. But her face and bare limbs glowed like she was the man on the moon’s mistress.
It was the same woman who had haunted him this afternoon, the one whom he now remembered photographing—a Vietnamese sex slave held captive in a Malay brothel… Xao. Her name is Xao.
“You exploited me,” she said, “and exposed my shame for everyone to see.”
Kendall sat up. “But, but… I wanted to help you. I gave you money and I never touched you. Remember? Remember? All I wanted was to help you…”
“Nobody came to help me. And when the owner of the brothel saw your published photos, he was so angry that he beat me to death with the leg of a broken chair.” As she spoke, bruises blacke
ned her face and buried her eyes; wounds blossomed across her arms and legs.
“You took my photos, too,” said the Chinese man through sneering white lips that revealed black teeth, “when I was dying of AIDS in that temple.” Dark lesions opened on his cheeks and forehead like a time-lapse film of flowers blooming. “Xao, my dear, he doesn’t care about us.”
“I know,” she said. “He’s a vulture, not a man.”
Their cutting laugher wounded him. “You’re wrong,” he protested. “I do care. It’s the world that doesn’t care. And how can you expect me to remember every picture I’ve ever taken?”
“Remove his clothes,” she said. “I want him to feel what it’s like to be exposed and photographed.”
The other three negatives tore Kendall’s clothes off, then his underwear, their flashbulb eyes popping constantly. He squirmed and wriggled, but they held him down.
Unwrapping the film stock around her waist, which exposed more black lacerations and a chair leg wedged in her sex, Xao slowly descended on bony wings fanning out from her beaked feet. She wrapped the rolls of film around Kendall’s arms, pinning them to his chest, before pressing her fingers and nails, hot and sharp as tattoo-shop needles, into the images. Now she wrapped more rolls around his face and legs so he looked like a film-strip mummy, branded with a photo gallery of his own images.
Around then, Kendall fainted….
When he woke up he was lying on a dark street surrounded by corpses: corpses with limbs splayed, mouths open, hands empty; they had all died in the middle of some thought, some action, some conversation they would never complete. That was always the saddest part of death, the phone call never made, the thought never articulated, the promise never fulfilled, and now it was all too late.
From the depths of unconsciousness, Kendall swam up to the surface, dizzy and gasping for breath, not ready to believe that he was back in Bangkok and that his camera was still around his neck. He pushed himself up on his elbows and looked around. All he could see were dead bodies and some soldiers standing by Democracy Monument, its four pillars lit with yellow lights.
Further down 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
His T-shirt was covered with syrupy blood but it was impossible to tell whether it was his own or some of the victims’. Otherwise, he didn’t seem to be injured.
The soldiers were about twenty to thirty meters away. Kendall crawled towards them on his elbows, trying to keep his head down. He checked wrists for pulses. Even though their flesh was still warm, all the people around him were dead. One corpse had a mobile phone still clutched in his hand. Beside his bare feet was a flip-flop overturned in a slick of blood as dark and thick as petrol. Kendall could not remember if he’d taken these photos already or not.
As he crawled closer to the monument he saw that each pillar had a fountain, illuminated by yellow lights, which was crowned with the head of what looked like an elephant with a serpent sticking out of its mouth. Somebody grabbed his wrist and he looked down to see the teenage boy with the bloody face, moaning, “Help me. Help me.” Then he looked over 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… then he remembered the vision he’d just had of winning the World Press Photo Award, and the Chinese God of Hell, and the darkroom where all his negatives had come back to haunt him.
The photographer put the lens cap back on his camera and dragged the boy to his feet. With his arm around the boy’s shoulder, and the boy’s arm around his waist, he tried to pull him to safety. But the teenager’s right leg kept buckling under him and they kept stumbling. Kendall looked over his shoulder. The soldier, his weapon pointed at their backs, was gaining ground quickly. In Thai, he yelled something at them that must’ve been, “Stop or I’ll shoot!” for the boy stopped dead in his tracks and Kendall tripped over him, scraping his knees on the pavement… good-o, kid, now we’re both in the shit.
Kendall stood up and turned around. The soldier leveled his weapon at Kendall’s chest. The barrel’s mouth was as black as the eye socket of a skull. The photographer held up both of his hands and said, “Nak khao farang [foreign journalist].” The soldier, whose face was in shadows, pointed his gun at the boy’s chest. Kendall looked over at the kid. He couldn’t be more than fifteen. With the cheap clothes he was wearing and his dark skin, Kendall reckoned he was a rice farmer’s son, probably slaving away for twelve hours a day in one of the city’s sweatshops.
Off to the right of Democracy Monument, another group of soldiers was approaching them, weapons drawn. After a brief conversation, the soldier grabbed the boy’s arm and motioned with his gun for Kendall to leave. If he left now, he knew they’d take the boy off and shoot him; he was an easy target, a casualty who would never make the news. Other foreign correspondents in Bangkok had told him about a previous coup, after which the corpses of civilians were dropped from army helicopters over the mountainous jungle in the Golden Triangle near Burma. That would be this kid’s fate, too, if he did not intervene.
Kendall put his arm around the boy’s shoulder; the muscles in his back were twitching with fear. The kid put his arm around Kendall’s waist. The way he tried to push his face into the hollow beneath the photographer’s armpit made him think of a frightened child, seeking his father’s protection. And that was a lie that just might work.
In pidgin Thai, Kendall said to the soldier, whose gun was trained on him again. “He my son. My wife Thai lady… his mother. We live Australia.”
The soldier barked something at the kid that Kendall didn’t understand. The boy replied in a quavering whisper that was equally incomprehensible except for one word: paw (father).
Now the soldier looked down at Kendall’s camera, motioning for him to hand it over. Kendall took it off and gave it to him. The soldier shot a quick glance over his shoulder at the other troops approaching him. Then he held the camera over his head so they could see it and smashed it on the ground at Kendall’s feet. The sight of his old friend’s innards spilling out and his glass eye broken on the street deflated him like air seeping from a punctured tire.
With a sneer in his voice, the soldier said, “You go!”
His superiors might well overturn the order, so Kendall quickly dragged the kid towards a side street where they should be safe. That stupid bastard had forgotten to check his pockets. There were four or five rolls of film in them. No prize-winners but a few money-makers. All the best shots had been on that last roll.
With the giddy sense of comic relief that sometimes overcame him in danger zones, when the guns stopped shooting and the mortar shells stopped booming, Kendall began laughing to himself… I just lost the World Press Photo Award but somehow gained a teenage son and a ghostly wife. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.
As they lurched towards a brightly lit Chinese shrine where pigs’ heads and bottles of beer had been laid out on an altar for the God of Hell and his minions, Kendall realized that the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts was on in Thailand, too.
Beside the shrine stood an old Chinese man with a lumpy face like rice porridge. Next to him, sitting atop the altar, poised like a bird of prey about to take flight, was Xao. Seeing them dragged an electric razor up the back of his neck.
This was the man from the AIDS hospice? And the bird was a Vietnamese sex slave from some Malay brothel? But he’d never photographed either of them. So what had he just been seeing? Instead of seeing his life flash before his eyes, as people often reported in near-death experiences, had he just seen his future unspooling in front of him?
Xao and the Chinese man were both smiling at him. Slowly, their teeth darkened and their eyes turned silver.
Shooting glances over his shoulder at the two negatives, Kendall and the boy lurched past the altar like they were in a three-legged race.
Only when they
were halfway down the street did he slow their pace. The street was deserted. Orange streetlights gave everything a hellish tint and an eerie calm prevailed. The only motion came from bats circling a streetlight like protons and electrons buzzing around a nucleus.
Kendall checked into a guesthouse and paid for two rooms. He sent the kid upstairs while he sat on a plastic stool in the dark restaurant knocking back a big bottle of Singha Beer.
How quickly that image of the bats circling the orange street-lights had changed into a black and white memory that was an out-of-focus blur in his mind. No amount of concentrating could sharpen that image and give it more substance.
There was nothing supernatural about this dilemma. It was one of the problems he associated with getting older and traveling more: the accumulation of memories, experiences, fantasies, dreams and scenarios he’d shot or glimpsed had formed these montages in his mind, so that a reminiscence of getting kicked in the chest by a kangaroo when he was ten could cut to a wildlife documentary about Eurasian black vultures that faded into a still life of a Vietnamese woman he’d once photographed and fantasized about fucking—her hair reminded him of the vulture’s feathers—whose hatred of the Khmer then dissolved into a scene from a Cambodian military hospital where armless soldiers waved their stumps around.
Once, five or six years ago, he’d been on a visa run to Penang and he’d seen the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts: the altars with pigs’ heads and bottles of Guinness, the blue-faced, yellow-eyed God of Hell, the stages where Chinese opera troupes and young female singers in hot pants performed at night for both the crowds and the ghosts. That was certain. He could remember those scenes well enough, especially that family standing beside the road burning a heap of gold and silver paper, “Hell Banknotes,” paper houses and clothes, mobile phones and luxury sedans made out of cardboard. The father told him these burnt offerings were for the dead to use in the afterlife, and so they wouldn’t cause harm to the living.
