by Jim Algie
As he had now seen hundreds of times over, after a corpse sat in the water for a week, it was so bloated and misshapen that, on first inspection, it was hard to tell if it was male or female, Asian or Caucasian. What forensic scientists refer to as “skin slippage” makes facial features unrecognizable. Hence, most of the corpses had to be identified through DNA, dental records, or tattoos. A mole on her neck would not be visible three weeks after she’d drowned.
The mounting sense of hopelessness he felt, reading over these pleas for help when it was already too late, reached its pit of despair when he read the words scrawled in capital letters at the bottom of the poster: “I LOVE THIS PERSON. PLEASE HELP!”
Finally, after shooting hundreds of photos and writing thousands of words, here in this almost deserted airport, late at night, surrounded by the paper ghosts of the missing, the dead, and those whose bodies would never be found, Yves had to hang his head and weep for the first time since Boxing Day.
TO CUT THROUGH the mountains of rubble and find anyone buried alive, the Thai authorities brought in elephants to serve as bulldozers. The grey Goliaths were soon pressed into service as corpse carriers; the rescue workers strapped bodies wrapped in white bandages to their tusks so the beasts could forklift them out of the overgrown jungle.
Those scenes, surreal at first, quickly became commonplace for the volunteers working around Khao Lak, which had become the biggest cemetery in all the tsunami-struck parts of Thailand.
Throughout the end of 2004 and into the early parts of the next year, the weather did not mourn the dead with showers and skies carved from headstone granite. All along the coast of the Andaman Sea, it remained eerily beautiful, the sun beaming, with only a few scraps of cloud that reminded Yves of torn tissues in a widow’s hand.
The two of them were rounding a cape on day three of the experimental art photography shoot when Wade spotted a Thai cop in his brown uniform stealing something from a dead woman lying beside a coconut palm. For a guy who was so short and stout, Wade moved with incredible speed, barreling across the sand to tackle the cop as he tried to flee. By the time Yves ran up beside them, panting for breath, Wade was sitting on the cop’s back trying to handcuff him with his own cuffs. His face red from rage and the heat, Wade looked at up and said, “Of all the lowdown things I seen in my life, this weasel takes the cake.”
Yves panted, “Listen, man, I think you’ve got this backwards. You can’t bust a cop. He’s the one who’s supposed to be making the arrests.”
“You seen this scumbag stealing from the lady same as I did. I mean, come the fuck on, stealing from the dead? I got a good mind to whale on this guy.” Wade’s collarbone was trying to poke its way out of his skin.
“Do not hit him, whatever you do. The cops will put death warrants on our heads.”
“He’s squirming a lot but I can’t tell what he’s sayin’. Can you translate?”
“Umm, I think it’s something like, ‘Get off my back, you monitor lizard.’”
“Tell him I’m making a citizen’s arrest and I’m gonna haul his grave-robbing butt off to jail.”
“Wade, listen, there are probably about thirty million Thai people who would applaud you for trying to arrest a corrupt cop, and a few hundred thousand who would want to see you given the highest civilian honor if you could actually put him in jail. But the reality is that this guy will have his cop friends hunt you down and get you deported, or worse, maybe a lot worse, like dead worse. Understand?”
“You betcha, but somebody’s gotta stand up to these crooks and call a weasel a fuckin’ weasel. What’s he saying now?”
“Let’s see. ‘I will open an umbrella in your mother’s ass, you monitor lizard.’”
“Nah, he ain’t sayin’ that. Come on. Be serious.”
It took ten minutes of arguing with Wade, while the cop ate sand, to convince him to take the cuffs off. Even so, Wade demanded restitution. He made the rogue give a respectful Thai wai to the corpse and put the wristwatch and bracelet back on her. Then he confiscated all the bullets from his gun.
Many of the volunteers and survivors described the post-wave melee in bipolar terms: the best and the worst of humanity they’d ever seen. The worst stooped to plucking gold fillings from cadavers’ mouths with pliers and the best sought to eradicate all barriers of race, religion, class and economics. In the supply lines that formed outside the government offices, hospitals and clinics, high-society Thai women worked elbow to elbow with Burmese maids and Cambodian fishermen, who passed packages of water bottles and instant soup to teenaged backpackers from the West who handed them off to wealthy tourists from Asia and Europe.
Doctors and nurses and medical technicians from all over the world flew in to help out for free. Teams of volunteer divers combed the seabed for corpses, picked up trash and uncovered coral reefs. (The Irish dive-master who headed up that ad hoc crew found all of his framed family photos, which had been washed into the sea when the wave hit his dive shop on Koh Phi Phi.) Thai university students, who spoke English, Chinese, French, Japanese and other languages, helped to translate for new arrivals searching for friends and family members. Donations flooded in from across the globe. Musicians staged benefit concerts. Local and international celebrities arrived to lend their household names to the cause and pose for photos while handing out supplies and visiting the injured in hospitals.
It was one of the most incredible outpourings of compassion and goodwill any of them had ever seen. Wade and Yves heard the same comment, “If we had this level of cooperation every day, most of the world’s problems could be solved in a couple of years,” and variations on the same question, “Why does it take a tragedy of this magnitude to bring people together for a common good?” again and again.
THE GRISLIEST VOLUNTEER work was carried out at Wat Yanyao in the district capital of Takuapa, where Dr Pornthip and her forensics team were in the midst of identifying several thousand corpses. Besides all the monks, soldiers, cops, translators, journalists, families searching for loved ones and friends looking for friends, milling around, the members of different Disaster Victim Identification Units from a dozen different countries had also set up command centers under awnings beside the century-old temple with its fanciful mosaics of Buddhist iconography and its single-smokestack crematorium.
Wade and Yves were on the crew unloading the cadavers, wrapped in white gauze body bags, from the backs of trucks, to lay them out in the temple grounds so they could be identified by friends and family members. The forensic teams sprayed the bodies with fungicide and put pellets of dry ice on them so they wouldn’t decompose too quickly. As the ice melted, an eerie mist drifted over the dead. Worst of all was the stench of rot mingling with seawater, which speared through nose plugs and closed eyelids to lodge itself in the back of the brain, where it lay dormant for years, waiting for a chance encounter with a seafood market or sex on a tropical night to cause flashbacks of rips appearing in that veil of dry ice, showing blackened limbs sticking up at grotesque angles like dead trees in a petrified forest and chickens pecking out the eyes of corpses.
Most of the volunteers wore white rubber outfits, surgeon’s masks, rubber gloves and boots. Creeping from corpse to corpse, Yves knelt down to inspect them. Each had been tagged with a “DVI Body Number” by a Thai soldier. At this point, seven day days after the tsunami, he had to steel himself for the sight of his wife and Stephan. He just hoped that they didn’t look too banged up. For a woman of Zara’s statuesque beauty, who prided herself so much on her great looks, the final insult would be ending up like these other victims: their genitals swollen like balloons, their faces purpled and blackened, their chests torn open to reveal internal organs and the spaghetti of intestinal tracts.
Was this Stephan? The long blond hair looked familiar, but the face, if you could call it that, consisted of a mouth left agape by a final scream that revealed a picket fence of broken teeth and a flattened nose. Both eyeballs hung from their sockets by threads of f
lesh.
Yves lowered his face until it was no more than a few centimeters above him. The tongue wriggled and the dead man moaned, “Yves… Yves.”
He ran over to where Dr Pornthip was standing. “Hey doctor, doctor. Listen, I know this sounds crazy, but that man over there isn’t dead. I swear he’s not dead. He just moaned something that sounded like my name.”
The wild-haired forensic scientist, dressed all in black as usual, smiled sympathetically. “I know it sounds like that, but it’s the gases escaping from the body. Sometimes they move the vocal cords, so the bodies appear to be speaking. It’s normal.”
Normal or not, Yves was too spooked to go anywhere near those bodies for the time being.
He did not hear anything about Zara and Stephan until a few days later when one of the high-society Thai ladies bringing medical supplies to the temple loaned him her cell phone to call an old friend in Montreal. Outside of his new inner circle, consisting solely of fellow survivors and volunteers, he had spoken to no one except his mom and brother. Even with his family it had been a struggle, for his experiences were so far beyond anything he had ever experienced, or even imagined, he could not begin to describe what he’d been through. The intensity of the waves, the sense of helplessness, of being a baby again but with the brain of an adult, did not make for polite conversation or easy explanations. Putting too much emphasis on the dangerous elements sounded like boasting, when his survival owed more to luck than manly bravado. How to explain the fact that he was in the only bungalow out of forty or fifty in that resort which stood up to the waves and did not collapse? Why did the water stop flooding the bungalow only about ten centimeters before it reached the roof?
He didn’t know. He couldn’t explain it. Some of the other Thais volunteering at the temple attributed their survival to the power of their amulets. One local businessman said, “This monk on my necklace has very strong magic.” But the only “amulet” Yves had possessed was his wife’s hairclip, a few of her red tresses caught in its plastic teeth. He kept it in his pocket for a lucky charm, the same as he’d kept a rabbit’s foot when he was a boy.
Standing in the shade cast by the temple’s ornate eaves, lotus-shaped bells hanging from them and tinkling in the breeze, Yves fingered the hairclip as he tried to speak to an old friend who had suddenly become a distant stranger. The crackling connection only accounted for half the distance between them.
“Thank God you’re still alive,” said David.
“I don’t know what God has to do with it. Can’t say I’ve had any religious experiences down here except for meeting a few saintly volunteers. But the missionaries are pouring in now with bibles and scouring the area for lost souls. Trust them to hit people up when they’re at their weakest and looking for answers.”
“I meant it as a figure of speech not an ontological statement.”
“Sorry. I don’t know what to say. All I do know is that I’m very very lucky to still be here. So I feel like I owe it to the deceased and their relatives to stick around and help out. I just wish I knew what happened to Zara and Stephan. I’ve been searching for them for days now and asking around and nothing. Have you heard anything?”
“Yes, and I’m delighted to be the bearer of good tidings and not Charon ferrying the dead souls to the other side of the river Styx.” David paused dramatically, allowing his eloquence and drama school training to impress. “I talked to them on the phone yesterday.”
Yves threw his arm in the air and smiled. “Yes! That’s great! It’s a miracle. It’s exactly what I wanted to hear. Where are they?”
“They got airlifted to a hospital in Bangkok. They’re banged up a little, but their injuries are not life threatening.”
“They’re in Bangkok already? Why didn’t they wait around for me?”
“I would imagine that they didn’t know where to find you. From the TV footage I’ve seen, everything looks like a complete and utter shambles down there. Do you have electricity and running water?”
“Yes, we’ve always had electricity and running water, but if you watch the news networks showing the same footage over and over again, you’d think all of Southeast Asia is a disaster area.”
“Yves, I know this is probably not the best time to discuss such a delicate subject, not that there ever would be a good time…” David laughed nervously.
“What delicate subject?” Yves was listening to the static of his only connection to his homeland with such intensity that he did not see another refrigerated truck full of bodies drive past him. “What’s going on, man? What are you talking about?”
“I had been meaning to bring this up earlier and so did a few of our other old comrades in art. But, well, since there is no easy way to say this, I won’t throw up any more obfuscations. Zara and Stephan have been having an affair for the past year or so, and they’re planning on moving in together soon and making their relationship official.”
Yves was too dumbfounded to speak.
“Are you still there? Come in, come in…”
“An affair? Moving in together? What the fuck are you talking about?” When David did not answer, he continued. “This is outrageous. This can’t be true. It’s impossible. It’s not possible, do you hear me?”
“Things happen, situations change.”
“Things happen, situations change? We’ve been together on and off for more than eleven years now. This is not a thing that’s happened or a situation that’s changed. This is tantamount to a Judas kiss, the worst possible betrayal imaginable. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Sure, but don’t shoot the messenger is all I’m saying.”
“I’m not going to shoot the messenger. I’m going to shoot both of them. In Bangkok, me and my old friend Mick, do you know how many hit-men we used to know? Do you know how easy it would be to get both of them killed? All it would cost is about a thousand bucks a head. That’s it.” When David said nothing, he continued, “Thanks for telling me. Take care.”
Yves threw Zara’s hairclip at the rows of bodies.
He borrowed Wade’s motorcycle without asking him and drove down the coast in search of the only person on the planet he wanted to see right now.
The old fisherman who’d lost seventeen relatives was sitting in much the same place as when they’d first encountered him: squatting like a duck in the shadow of a beached fishing trawler. Either he didn’t recognize Yves, or recognized him and didn’t care, or maybe he’d gone mad already, because he launched into exactly the same spiel that he’d first given them. Maybe he kept repeating it because he couldn’t believe it himself, just as Yves could not believe that Stephan and Zara had been having an affair and were now planning on moving in together. Pointing at the beachhead, the fishermen said, “There used to be a village here, a school, my home and family, a pier, our fishing boats. Where have they all gone?”
Yves told him in Thai, “I don’t know but I understand how you feel. My old life is gone too… gone with the wave.”
Both of them were straining and squinting so hard to see what wasn’t there anymore that they failed to notice that the water had also wiped the slate clean. It was a time of endings to be sure, but it was also an era of new beginnings.
SERPENTS SLITHERED ACROSS the moonlit window of his hotel room. This had to be a sign. It had to mean that he was near, that he was listening, maybe even waiting to be reborn again.
“I’m sorry I was so slow getting to you.”
Through the screen came a whisper of wind. Or was it a voice? A soft voice calling from the other side of sleep and death.
“I’m sorry but I had to try and find my wife and an old friend first.”
What was the voice whispering now? “It’s okay. I forgive you.” Was that it?
“Thanks for understanding. But there’s something I’m curious about. What’s it like on the other side?”
The wind died down. The serpents turned into tree branches waving at the window.
“Are yo
u in a better place at least? Is it okay over there? Do you think we can meet again on the other side or in the next life?”
The silence that pressed in on him was vast as the night and as infinite as death.
As the fatality count surpassed the two hundred thousand mark, conversations like this, between the living and the drowned, between relatives and the dearly departed, echoed around the world in a hundred different languages: through cathedrals and mosques, at Hindu shrines and Taoist temples, through Western funeral homes and Chinese cemeteries on hillsides, in dreams of happy reunions in heavenly places and nightmares clouded by the diesel fumes of long-tail boats pulling strings of cadavers behind them, like freshly netted mermaids and shrimp-men.
WHEN KENDALL FIRST BEGAN working as a staff photographer at a daily newspaper in Sydney he got all the most boring assignments: contract signings, Christmas parades, product launches, and ribbon-cutting ceremonies for new shopping malls and office towers.
The senior editors and veteran reporters at the paper snubbed him. Most of them were gruff alcoholics, rough as guts, who went out drinking every night after they’d “put the paper to bed” and nursed their hangovers the next day with endless cups of coffee and cigarettes. In the smoking room, they bantered about the stories they were writing or editing and the latest newsflashes from the wire services while Kendall sat there leafing through that day’s paper. By eavesdropping on them and keeping his mouth shut, he tried to learn what he could. From all their bitter asides, “The cops are worse than the fucking criminals these days”; “give me more cunt and less culture in the features section”; “here’s the headline of the year we can’t run, after that French bloke escaped from custody in New York, Bernie called it ‘Frog Legs It’”; “the only difference between op/ed pieces and fairy tales is that some kids still believe in fairy tales”; mostly what he picked up was a strain of cynicism that ran so deep it became the bloodline and the pulse of the news industry to him. He could hear it in the hum of the printing presses, read it between the lines in every story, and feel it rippling through the newsroom in all those craggy, smokers’ laughs.
