by Knox, Tom
At the station, Jake took out his little camera. He still had this precious new camera with the precious photos. He had lost his sister’s photo, but now he had new photos. The slight sense of resurgent possibility elevated his mood once again. Get the story. Pin down the past. Defeat the world, just for once. Be a real photographer. Yes, he could still do that.
At a newsstand in the station Jake picked up a copy of the Bangkok Post; he was surrounded by Thai workers reading manga. Half interested, half anxious, he flicked the pages as Chemda bought the tickets.
But he soon stopped flicking pages.
The Post had an article about him and Chemda. UN worker missing from Phnom Penh … granddaughter of Sovirom Sen, noted Chinese-Cambodian businessman … photojournalist linked to the disappearance….
The article was very small, and tucked away, and neutral in tone: it didn’t accuse Jake of anything, but it did mention the reward for Chemda’s return, and the mere fact that the article was printed in the most important Thai English-language newspaper brought the rest of Jake’s unease surging back. Who might try and claim that reward? And how?
The afternoon hours ticked by until the night train’s departure. Jake drank bottled water and cans of cold Japanese coffee and sat nervously on a station bench, next to Chemda, both of them trying to be inconspicuous. He telephoned Tyrone.
Tyrone told him to shut the fuck up and stop being so “minty” when Jake tried to say thank you, you saved my life. Tyrone listened to the epic story of their escape from Siem Reap, and swore and even chuckled, and his good humor helped dispel the darkness, just a little.
Tyrone asked: “So you’re going to Bangkok?”
“Yes.”
“To find Barnier. You don’t give up, do you?”
“Not after all this, Ty, no, I don’t. You said I had a good story and I’m on it. I want it. And Chemda wants the truth. What happened to her family. But we need somewhere to stay, incredibly discreet. Near this guy’s apartment, in Nana. You know Bangkok. Any ideas?”
“Yes … The Sukhumvit Crown, Soi 8, you can only find it if you go the wrong way down Soi 6.”
“Anything else? Any other advice?”
“Stop walking across lakes filled with corpses.”
“Ty. Please God. Ty!”
“You should buy new sim cards for you and Chemda, now you are in Thailand … use True, no, DTAC, just give a few people the numbers. Use the phones sparingly.”
“Thanks.”
“Mai pen rai. Stay in touch. And remember, you are still in serious shit. People will come after you in Bangkok. They won’t do it openly, but they will try. Be very, very, very, very fucking careful.”
As instructed, Jake went straight to the nearest convenience store, at the front of the station, and bought new sim cards for himself and Chemda; they swapped numbers, he texted the number to Tyrone. He sat down on the bench again. Waiting. Passengers came and went, eating fishball noodles at the fishball noodle stalls. Amputee beggars lifted their stumpy arms, pincering plastic cups of loose change. Commuters yawned. Policemen patrolled. Their train was ready. They climbed on the carriage.
They had bought first-class berths mainly because first-class berths had a tiny shower. The shower was risibly small but Jake didn’t care: as the train rumbled out of town he stepped straight in and rinsed away all the mud of the Butcher’s Lake, and all the grease from Pol Pot’s house, and all the dust from Preah Kahn, where Sonisoy was taken. He only wished he could sluice away the terrifying memory of kneeling there, in the dirt, by a shrine to the ghost of an atheist dictator, waiting for a man to casually smash his brain through his mouth with a rusty iron bar.
Crack.
Chemda was already fast asleep in the bottom bunk. She had held his hand as she fell asleep, but now the hand was limp and unconscious, and he folded it onto her breast, and he climbed the bunk-bed steps to slide between his own crisp, clean white cotton sheets. The sensation was unfathomably blissful.
The train was rattling through the dark Isaan countryside. The comforting rattle of a train, ta chakkating over the points, soon lullabyed Jake into sleep.
Most of his sleep was undisturbed. He woke just once, when they pulled into a hick little station with moonlit palm trees, at about five a. m. Hushed voices muttered outside in the tropical stillness. Jake sweated in the airlocked compartment. Who was that? Outside? Someone quietly passed down the train corridor, seeking a berth, whispering. He waited, tensed with fear. But nothing happened. Chemda’s unconscious breathing was regular and low.
The train pulled out. At length he fell asleep again and this time he dreamed—he dreamed of someone hitting his head and his head being smashed off his body, and then somehow he was looking down at his own head fallen to the ground and the head rolled over, and it was his mother’s head, smeared with violet lipstick. The eyes opened.
Jake woke with a jolt. Their compartment was bright with morning sun, and skyscrapers and motorways paraded past the uncurtained window. Chemda was awake and dressed.
“We’re here. Bangkok.”
She leaned over and kissed him.
His returning kisses were slurred, reluctant. The dream had been so vivid; why did he keep seeing this image, the disembodied head?
“Chemda.” He wanted to confess, to share, to divide his anguish. He’d had enough of lonely wondering. And he had been through so much with this girl, why not tell her?
He felt he was falling in love with her. He had no idea what falling in love meant or felt like, but if it was something like this, then he was happy to call it love, so yes, he was falling in love with Chemda Tek. But love meant he had to be truthful. He wanted to be truthful.
“Chem, I keep having these dreams. Sometimes daydreams. Nightmares, just idiotic nightmares, but they are persistent, this image I see.”
He told her. About the head, the floating heads, his mother’s face.
As his story unfolded he watched her expression turn from curiosity to concern—to piercing anxiety.
“The krasue,” she said. “What you are seeing is, as far as I can tell, the krasue.”
She explained further, quietly.
“A krasue is a malign spirit, cannibalistic, ah, bloodsucking. It appears mainly at night. It manifests itself as a woman, usually young and beautiful, with…” Chemda winced. “With her internal organs hanging down from the neck. Because she has no body. So she floats, with her spine and her organs trailing behind.”
“OK.” Jake swallowed hard. “And what does she do? This demon?”
“The krasue preys on pregnant women. It uses…” She sighed. “She uses an extended tongue to catch the fetus, by, ah, probing inside, up the vulva and inside the womb to devour the fetus. This causes diseases during pregnancy. Or so many Southeast Asians believe.”
“Sorry?”
“Jake.” She held his hand tight. “I know you don’t believe this stuff, and it sounds like a cartoon, but this really is an iconic demon, all across my part of the world. The legend comes from ancient Hindu India but it is deeply rooted in Cambodia, and Cambodian voodoo. The Filipinos have their own version, the Manananngal; the Balinese have the Leyak. Some call her the arp.”
“What about Angkor? I saw something like this in Angkor. A sculpture on the wall.”
“In Angkor they are called kinarees. Female spirits. But it is basically another krasue. They are everywhere. This icon is everywhere. There are legends and prayers about krasue, spells and stories. Even horror films.”
He stared at her. She looked at him. The train stopped, they had arrived. They had to disembark.
Chemda said, “The thing I don’t understand is … this is my culture. Not yours. This is not your culture. So why are you dreaming of an Asian demon?”
31
“Boris vyı˘ ti!”
Yakulovich was stabbing at the orangutan with the cattle prod, poking like some effete and feeble swordsman. But the shocks were strong: Julia—in her desperation—could fe
el them herself, faintly conducted into her body through the writhing muscles of the ape, frazzles of pain and pungent fear. She struggled under the gross, surging weight, pushing at the leathery skin.
“Teper’, Boris v vashu kletku!”
The orangutan began to cringe and shirk the blows; another shock from the prod dislodged the ape completely and sent him loping into the cage, which Yakulovich shut, and locked, with fumbling hands.
For a moment Julia lay numbed and flat on the slimy concrete; but then she seized herself and sat up. She was bruised but unharmed, terrified but unviolated—the orangutan had got no further than her arms and thighs. But the ape had ravished her sense of herself: she could never forget this. The electric prickle of the cattle prod.
She stood. Swaying a little. But she stood. Brushing dirt from her long skirt and her top. Brushing and brushing. Yearning to shower. To wash the hot musky smell of the primate’s fur from herself—and from her clothes. No, she would burn the clothes. The way she burned her clothes after Sarnia.
The director was actually weeping as he gazed her way—weeping like a child, sobbing like a doll designed to cry.
“What can I say—I am so sorry, Miss Kerrigan.” His sense of disgrace was obvious, he even lost conrol of his previously immaculate English: “Miss, sorry, mne ochen’ zhal, etogo nikogda ne sluchalos ran’she! I sorry. Vy dolzhny byt gormonal’nye. Opyat’ ya proshu proshcheniya—”
“Whatever,” said Julia. “You stupid man. You…”
These curses dwindled to nothing. What was the point? Julia had seen and done enough. The orangutan was hunched at the far end of his cage, his long arms curved over his face. The eyes were big and sad and thoughtless.
She had to get out, now. Julia had everything she required from the Sukhumi Institute for Primate Pathology. All the information it could ever provide; maybe even some vital clues.
But now she urgently needed to bathe.
Walking to the gate, and then to the top of the hill, she scanned the bleak Sukhumi streets. She was searching for a hopeful sign between the drooping palm trees. Looking for something saying Hotel.
For once, she lucked out. Hotel Ritsa. Its light was flickering in the drizzle half a kilometer down the hill, beside the arthritic tramlines, toward the coast.
Julia ran down, dragging her reluctant bag, and checked straight in. The reception area was dusty and careworn. The elevator was probably dangerous. The sheets in the bedroom were nylon. The showerhead belched spurts of lukewarm water. It felt mildly paradisiacal.
She showered, long and hard, and then crept into bed, and drank her bottle of duty-free Georgian wine—using the bathroom toothbrush mug—and then she slept, in the nirvana of scratchy nylon, for many hours. And then she woke, and went down to a hotel breakfast of processed pink ham slices with pickled eggs.
When she came back to her room, she showered once more: one final cleansing. But this time, when she stepped onto the bathroom tiles, to dry her hair, she lingered at the mirror, and she gazed: appalled—and intrigued.
Her pale arms and thighs were liberally covered in bruises, purple handprints made by the orangutan. The bruises showed where the beast had grasped her, and groped her, fiercely clutching at her flesh. The bruises were dark and livid.
A tingle unsettled her as she stared at these contusions. The tingle of an idea. The fingers were all there: the fingers of the animal’s hands, guiltless, brutal, different, undaunted. Guiltless as the boys who attacked her in Sarnia.
Then she thought of the Hands of Gargas: their poignancy, their sense of remorse. Human hands, so very old. And full of a strange regret.
Julia smiled at herself.
Yes? Yes maybe. Perhaps she had it. The key. The code. The glimpse of a glorious solution.
She had it.
Refreshed, revived, and filled with excitement, she sat down at her laptop. And she worked, hard, putting these pieces together. The cave art. The trepanations. Guilt and conscience. The guiltless animality of the orangutan. The guiltless savagery of men reduced to animals in the back of a VW van.
Yes! The idea positively thrilled her. She was using the past. She was turning the past into something purposeful, something directed. She was also aware, somehow, that she was masking—denying and subverting—all the accumulated horrors, with thinking. But she didn’t care. Because she was getting ever closer to the truth.
It took her many hours; it took her several days. To break the monotony and refresh her mind, during these days, she took breaks to make phone calls on her cell phone, which miraculously worked; and to send e-mail from a small, dingy café that served Abkhazian tea with saucers of gooseberry jam.
Most of her calls were to Michigan, or to Alex, and full of lies. I’m fine, don’t worry about me. She knew they would only tell her to come home; of course there was no way she was going home, not when she was this close to the Truth.
Nearly all of her e-mails were to Marcel Barnier. He, apparently, was the link. The next link. He was maybe the only man who could tell her if she was actually correct.
He didn’t reply. Not once.
Julia wasn’t surprised. She sat and sipped her gooseberry-flavored tea, and she surmised that Barnier was avoiding the world. All these Western scientists and intellectuals, these Marxists who once visited Cambodia, must surely by now have realized what was happening to them: that they were all dying. Even the most isolated and friendless would have seen at least one or two news reports, especially of the spectacular later killings in France.
So if Julia wanted someone to confirm her theory, Marcel Barnier was the only one, because he was the only one left—yet he wasn’t replying. Perhaps, therefore, she should just go there? And see him? It had worked before. Yes, perhaps she would go there, when she had broken open the intellectual puzzle.
And on the third day she did it, she cracked it: she had her theory. Standing back from her laptop, which she was using in the hotel lobby, as the cleaners made their daily yet farcically halfhearted attempts to clean her room of forty years of Soviet grime, Julia almost gloated. It was just three pages of thoughts. But it was the truth. Or at least her version of the truth, a truth that had been entombed in the past for decades and, in some senses, centuries.
It was the Gospel of the Ice Age. It was the Spiritual Confession of Mankind, written on cave walls thirty thousand years ago.
Julia had, for the first time in her life, completed something: finished a journey, made that amazing discovery; she had restored an extraordinary thesis to the world. The fifteen-year-old girl still inside her, the girl who almost wept at the terrible Hands of Gargas, was exultant, and gloating, and almost happy, despite it all, because of it all. She smiled quietly to herself.
“Spasibo.” Julia accepted the bill from the lobby waiter for her canned, sweetened orange juice. Then she got up, walked across the tram-clanging boulevard to the Internet café, and booked the next flight from Adler to Moscow, and then from Moscow to Bangkok. She had just enough cash left in her savings for a few more flights and cheap hotels. She was going to use this money, the last penny if necessary, to see Barnier, whether he wanted to see her or not. This was her life, her moment. After this nothing seemed to matter; if she ran out of cash, who cared? Not her, not anymore.
A Valium let her sleep on the plane to Moscow, a Xanax let her sleep on the plane from Moscow to Bangkok. She needed energy for this confrontation: she was spiraling into the black hole of the truth, where destruction and oblivion lurked, where the killer herself might be headed—but the risk felt almost good, she was unmoored now, floating on the tidal bore, surfing her success to the mouth of the river. Gloriously free.
Maybe the gravity in all this was her own pride, dragging her to danger. But she was proud. As the Thai Airways plane landed at Bangkok she woke from a dream of herself receiving a prize for a great discovery. The man giving her the prize was her father. Then Rouvier. Then Alex. Her mother was apparently locked out of the Nordic hall. The walls o
f the hall were covered with paintings of huge cats.
“Sawadeekap! Thai Airways would like to thank you…”
She stirred herself: stashing her new clothes in the holdall, grabbing her laptop, filing out of the plane and exiting customs. The heat outside the airport was welcome, a wet cocoon of humidity. After the chilly, stale dankness of Sukhumi, this rich tropical Siamese closeness was better.
A cab? She got a taxi from Suvarnabhumi Airport, into the city.
Julia stared across the elevated highway at the myriad skyscrapers as they sped into town: Bangkok, it seemed, was another lusty and furious Asian megalopolis, with wild high-rises and huge elevated freeways and vast adverts for Japanese cars and English-language schools and South Korean TVs.
And Bangkok also had the answer to everything. Perhaps.
“You say Soi Sick?” The cabbie was talking. “Soi Sick, Sukhumvit? Near Sukhumvit?”
“Yes. I think so. Soi, er yes, Soi Six.”
She mumbled to a stop. What if the address on the card wasn’t correct?
She had no choice.
“Sorry, sorry, lady, I pay money.”
The cabdriver was handing over cash at a tollbooth, but when the gate opened they merely inched ahead: they’d hit the real urban traffic, the cholesterol of Asian prosperity. The cab stopped again and started again, slowed and stopped. The endless traffic massed, and moved, and slowed, like an organic process, peristalsis.
She gazed across the city. Again. Flashes of distant lightning zagged silently between the skyscrapers and the imperious Hitachi adverts: a storm over the Gulf of Thailand.
Then at last the traffic parted and the taxi swooped left and over a disused railway track, and now they were in the florid and gristly urbanity of central Bangkok, with the street-side kebab stalls, the upmarket European shops, the amputees lying outside British pubs, sushi bars, Bookazine outlets, French restaurants, and enormous marble megahotels squeezed between Bangladeshi tailors and Chinese jewelry shops.
