The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth

by Veeraporn Nitiprapha

  V

  Fighting Fish in a Bottle of Glue

  P ran, Pran. She waved at him. It’s Charee, Pran, remember? The cheery smile, the twinkling eyes. Strangers before him, strangers behind him. Strangers all around him. But he remembered. Pran returned the greeting with a smile, an indistinct one. A scene from years ago came rushing back: when he opened the palms of his cupped hands and the firefly he had caught from the lampu tree flew away into the blue twilight, and she broke into that cheery smile, her eyes twinkling like they did now. It was a long time ago. Such a long time ago…

  The Cure’s “Pictures of You” boomed and shuddered. There was nothing in the world / That I ever wanted more / Than to feel you deep in my heart. Pran put his guitar down on the stage and picked his way through the grey cigarette smoke and flashing lights. Hey, Charee, he said, looking sheepish as he approached the corner table littered with tequila shot glasses, squeezed lemon slices, and spilt salt like stardust. Pran, she replied softly. Your hair is long. He smiled. Her hair was long too, tied back, with a velvet red rose tucked behind her ear. She was a grown woman, wearing a black sleeveless blouse, a deep-purple tiered gypsy skirt and something like one hundred necklaces.

  I never thought… / You’re doing fine? She shouted above the din. Yeah, you? / Good, good. Witches, this is Pran – Pran, Witches. The three Witches laughed, blood throbbing under their cheeks, gloriously drunk. Witch Thanya / Witch Urai / Witch Rawee. They introduced themselves. You’re a musician? Been playing here long? / Two years at this bar / I’m so happy, I thought I’d never see you again. Chareeya used the childish pronoun nu when speaking to Chalika and to him, but she never addressed them using a respectful prefix like Elder Sister or Elder Brother.

  You’re into rock music? Pran teased. Hmm. My friends are / Have you seen Lika? He asked, realising he didn’t want to hear her answer. Once in a while. I haven’t been home in a few months. And you? From her answer, he knew she already knew his answer. No, I work every night. Is Uncle Thanit fine?

  Is Uncle Thanit fine? Is Chalika fine? Is the river fine? The glare of sunshine bouncing off those calm waters from many years ago suddenly returned, so bright he had to close his eyes. When he opened them again, it was just the bright lights in the bar, heralding the hour of the shipwrecked heart – the time when the bar was closing and the night was over. My house isn’t far - walk me back, I want to catch up with you. The Witches giggled. Chareeya smiled and gestured them to stop. Pran is my best friend / Best friend… The Witches retorted in unison, as if casting a spell.

  The streets were deserted and the city was fast asleep. Chareeya led Pran to an intersection and they watched the traffic light changing colours over the vast desolation of the nocturnal cityscape. They cut into small lanes, past shophouses dating back various decades, deep into a residential quarter hidden in a tranquil spot behind rows of shops that had been busy just a few hours earlier. Turning left and right a dozen times, they reached a house with a front gate covered in overgrown trees, so dense he thought it must be an abandoned lot. Come in, she said softly and tip-toed through the tiny space between slender pheep flowers that carpeted the ground. It’s a mess – you know I love plants. I know, I know. Pran smiled in the dark but didn’t say a word. They were enveloped in a cloud of floral perfume.

  Crisscrossing the unlit garden and going through a door, they entered a room painted yellow that seemed to be filled with everything in the world. There were earrings and necklaces hung all over the walls, a postcard of the woman with bangs and a black dress painted by Modigliani, concert and movie tickets, scattered note papers, receipts for water and electricity bills. In the centre of it all was a poster of Frida Kahlo’s final work, showing a juicy slice of watermelon emblazoned with her famous line: Viva la vida.

  Books were stacked in piles on the floor, climbing up the walls. A silky pink peony stood in a green vase next to Uncle Thanit’s violin case. There were towers of CDs on the shelves, a floral-print scarf in sad purple on the back of a chair, and a ginger tabby cat snug against a shocking pink cushion printed with a peony pattern. Pran, Uncle Yellow. Uncle Yellow, Pran. She introduced the cat the same way as she had done the Witches. But Chareeya’s uncle was uninterested; he stretched wearily, cast a glance at Pran through half-closed eyes, then sat down, and looked away, gazing not at Pran but somewhere just beyond his eyes. There was no eye contact, no feline courtesy.

  There was a vintage floor lamp with a beaded fringe, and next to it a study desk with piles of papers, a wooden statuette of an African woman with sagging breasts, her face glum like that of a fish, a cat doll in a blue kimono, a couple of white river stones. And there was a photograph of her and Chalika, arms around each other’s waists like Eng and Chan, the Siamese twins, both looking at the camera with the same melancholy eyes, smiling the same lonely smile, a dark-green sea and sky behind them.

  Under the window was a peony-patterned cushion like Uncle Cat’s cushion, but bigger. Next to it was a Burmese make-up case, carved, vibrantly painted, and fashionably worn out; the mirror was missing, probably broken at some point in its life. I’ve always wanted you to listen to something. The bitter aroma of ylang-ylang, melded with that of the mok flowers, Mon rose, and the faint misty scent of the pheep tree. Schumann’s Opus 47, third movement. Chareeya smiled, a lonely smile almost identical to the one in the photograph, and the air trembled. The first time I heard it, I thought of you. She pressed the Play button and lay down in a half-reclining position beside him on the peony-print pillow. Close your eyes, Pran.

  And the raspy cello laid tender chords upon the violin as it chased the viola in the background. Pran closed his eyes and leant back against the wall. He’d never heard this piece before. It was sweet and imploring, but with something painful and nervous coursing through its melody; beautiful yet faintly atonal, it conjured up such soulful warmth and yet it was detached and indifferent. Then the piano rolled out its soft notes like a succession of slow dewdrops above her whisper. I miss you, Pran.

  Pran suddenly felt deprived of the ability to protest when the loneliness that had long been burnt into oblivion surged inside him, in a heart that had once been empty. Had she never missed him over those many years since she had left everyone just like that? Have you ever, Charee, even once, missed me? The old buried feelings resurfaced like waves, flooding his insides, as a longing so profound he never knew he had it in him came barrelling down.

  Like fingertips holding a diaphanous silk thread that flutters in the wind and slips away without a warning to be blown away forever, the beautiful melody gradually came to a sweet silence. Pran swallowed the bitter feeling and a million other emotions in his chest, and opened his eyes. Through the bruised mists of ylang-ylang he saw that the gypsy woman before him had fallen asleep. The light-purple drop-shaped earrings shone next to her eyes so that she looked like someone crying in her sleep. Uncle, the ginger cat, had moved next to his mistress and was also sleeping.

  This was it. This was the picture of her he wanted to etch into his mind forever. He wanted to remember her like this: a wandering waif, asleep whilst crying amethyst tears, her faintly glowing hand placed over her heart, in a room filled with everything in the world, in the middle of a city ruined by dreams.

  I miss you too, Charee.

  She was still sleeping with her right hand on her heart when he left in the morning, a morning unlike any other morning he had ever known. No sooner had he flung the door open than the invisible garden from the previous night burst forth in the splendid sunshine. Before him was a profusion of flowers in bloom against a background of every shade of green that existed in the world. A large pu-jormpol tree stood aloft in the middle of the garden, spreading an opulence of pink flowers like festival fireworks. The twisted body of the jik-nam rained down star-shaped flowers. The garden was filled with trees: faikham, lamduan, tabaek, asoke sapun, kalapruek, bunnag, intanin, flame and Indian rubber sprouting new leaves, red and glossy. There was also kankrao and, further in, m
ok with a few other plants whose names he didn’t know.

  Closer to the ground were the bush plants: puttarn, montha, nang yaem, kannikar, dahlia, chrysanthemum, gardenias and Mon roses boasting their lush pink flowers here and there. And “Madame Yeesoonsri”, as she had named her first Mon rose with that old-fashioned moniker and an honorific. An undergrowth of unnamed small flowers in violet, orange, pink and blue, clustered against vegetables and herbs. Various families of ferns huddled in the shadows, so dense they covered the stone pathway snaking along the alcoves before disappearing in a jungle of oddly shaped wild orchids and krachao sidaa with their dangling, beard-like roots grazing their neighbours.

  Dizzied by the horticultural riches, as if he was progressing through the dream of a stranger, Pran stepped cautiously into the smothering fragrance of innumerable flowers condensed through morning dew. He proceeded slowly along the shapeless stone path in rays of dappled sunlight, which occasionally shot through the overhanging leaves like burning stars. Through a light breeze, past birds, butterflies, and insects buzzing, it took Pran several minutes to realise he was lost. It took him another long while of aimless wandering in that labyrinth of aromas before he found the front gate. The intoxicating feeling remained with him as he made his way back through the narrow lanes along which he had come with Chareeya the previous night.

  Pran failed to notice that he had missed a turn, or maybe a few turns, or even more, and soon he found himself retracing his steps in an alleyway he remembered having just passed moments before. As he was about to ask for directions from an old man standing in front of a corner shophouse, he saw a “For Rent” sign behind him. Instead of asking the way out, he asked the old man about the rental. Trudging up a dimly lit four-storey building choked with the smell of the past and discarded objects, Pran emerged at a rooftop lodging, not too small but not especially big. The rent was cheap and the open space triggered his old penchant for the clay works he had been obsessed with at school. What appealed to him most, however, was that there was no one else in the building except Uncle Jang, the old landlord.

  Maybe, he thought… Maybe. Not so far from the window through which he was looking, the enchanted garden basked in the jubilation of morning sunshine. The thought of those red star-shaped flowers suddenly provoked self-pity: he thought about the tiny flat in a rundown apartment block where he was staying, his room sandwiched between that of a couple who hurled insults at each other by day and made noisy love, like cats, by night, and that of a bald, obese salesman who went around promoting a wonderful invention that was an iron, an oven, a kettle, a hair dryer, a rat-repellant laser, a radio, as well as an alarm clock – all rolled into one. The salesman looked for even the slightest excuse to knock on Pran’s door so he could brag about his sexual adventures, his irresistible charm, his opulent manhood and the prowess in carnal athleticism with which he tormented every woman and whore in the country.

  And there was the woman in the flat across the hall who kept asking Pran to fix her television, though it was never broken, and who took every opportunity to gossip about their neighbours in the first flat to the last, up to the floor above and including many he didn’t even know existed, before concluding with an homage to the fossils of her lost romance. I was so in love with him, Pran, the woman stressed the word “love” in every scene of every chapter of the romantic epic she narrated. Pran was certain he had listened to her story no fewer than one hundred times.

  Then there were others who slammed doors, started commotions, spewed curses. There was the simultaneous screaming of the same soap opera blasted out from every television set in every flat, creating a surround-sound system of extravagant theatricality that spread its dominance endlessly. There was spoiled food left to rot on plates and in rubbish bags oozing sludge outside the doors. And there was the cold loneliness that wrapped around him like a spiderweb when he woke up each day.

  Unlike Chalika who became a sworn reader of romance novels when she was barely ten, and unlike Chareeya who wanted to be something new every day – an explorer of ancient ruins along the Nakhon Chai Si River or the High Priestess of a newly invented feline cult, forgetting that the previous day she had committed herself to becoming a tap dancer after seeing one in an American film – unlike the two sisters, Pran had never really known what he wanted to be.

  When he looked at himself again, he saw a long-haired guy in a crummy T-shirt and torn jeans who played bass in a four-piece indie band, usually to a small group of loyal fans that took turns watching them perform at a small rock bar called the Bleeding Heart. Yet that half-cooked adolescent dream had given him nothing but the unbearable weariness of having to repeat the same rock numbers over and over again and of watching his own bleeding heart crash, through melancholic cigarette smoke, into the depths of sticky sex – awkward, slow and soundless, like two Siamese fighting fish grappling each other in a bottle of glue.

  It usually took nothing more than a casual acquaintance, some unreal coincidences, and the pale smiles of women who often hid half their faces in shadow. That was enough for Pran to surrender his heart at the end of a night. Some nights, he would let strangers he had never seen before lead him into bedrooms he had never been to before where he would perform the part of casual lover for one night, two at the most. Through the bodies of so many women he now realised, at the age of twenty-six, that the entwining of naked bodies and the coupling of hollow desire could only take him as far as not having to wake up alone on his own taut, unslept-in bed.

  Many times one of those women would return the following night, and the following. Then, sooner or later: Do you love me? Pran would find himself at his wit’s end trying to explain how desirable she was, how he felt privileged to have spent the night with her, and how he would never feel sad if he woke up seeing her face every morning for the rest of his life. But no, sorry, love was an entirely different story.

  And the woman would chase him out of the room, so she could cry a little before going off to work. Pran would set out on some dark and narrow backstreet, picking up random sounds that escaped from shuttered doors: bad news from a television, someone sighing, an alarm clock screeching, wind whooshing along the alley, someone thrashing about in a dream. Sometimes he would hear the sound of another woman, in another room, crying a little before she went to work.

  Until one day he woke up and decided not to let himself drift into another hopelessly sweet and thorny embrace ever again. He chose a regime of loneliness. Those women had a lot to cry about, and Pran gave up trying to explain the inexplicable. Everyone he loved had disappeared, all the family he had now lay in ruins. He didn’t want to become attached to anyone that he would have to lose again. Let loneliness wrap around him like a shroud until the last days of his life. After all, it was just a bitter aftertaste in the mouth, just a stab of cold wind through the heart, just a feeling.

  But at that moment and without warning, the sea of flowers swelled and wafted its gentle perfume. The ginger cat that had followed him out now took up a position in front of the house, and the woman was still asleep in the room that was filled with everything in the world, the room that was just a few steps away, the room that he could see from where he was.

  That afternoon, Pran moved all his belongings and settled into the rooftop rental. He slept for a while, without dreaming, amid a faint aroma of Mon roses carried on the breeze from Chareeya’s garden.

  VI

  The Emerald Spider

  I t must have been the year Mother died, or sometime later, not long after Chareeya decided to pursue the career of a great explorer and patrol the orchards – which by then belonged to the neighbours – to collect samples of rocks, minerals, archaeological relics, fossilised monsters and unclassifiable insects of the Nakhon Chai Si River, putting them in an empty jam jar slung around her neck with a plastic magnifying glass borrowed from Grandma Jerd next door, her expeditions beginning at dawn when the garden was still wet with dew… It must have been around that time that Chareeya foun
d the spider in the pomelo tree.

  The spider was the size of a match head, deep green like a jewel beetle. Its legs were an inch-and-a-half long, and its bum was lemon-yellow and flashed a strange sparkle. Chareeya tried to trap it in the jam jar but it bamboozled her by leaping from one pomelo tree to another, on and on, traversing the garden all morning, before plopping into the house in the late afternoon.

  In Chareeya’s mind she could see the National Explorer Award, so confident was the girl of the momentous entomological contribution she would be making through the discovery of this emerald arachnid with its diamond bum. For the very first time, the kingdom of insects would reveal its secrets in a spider with a jewel organ, and her finding would probably draw scholars from a thousand other disciplines to come and unearth the ancient city buried beneath the riverbanks, which might or might not be connected to the existence of this unusual species.

  Confused by the tangle of her own imagination, Chareeya set out in hot pursuit of the spider. She leapt up the stairs two steps at a time, convinced that the insect would lead her to its mysterious lair, the secret entrance to which must be somewhere inside her own house. The girl ran, holding the jam jar, arm arched at a sixty-degree angle according to instructions she had read in a textbook. Once upstairs, her target sensed imminent danger and altered its course by suddenly making a big leap into the bathroom and bolting into a corner.

  It was then that Chareeya caught sight of something unusual through the magnifying glass. The innermost wooden plank of the bathroom floor jutted out a quarter of a centimetre higher than the rest. She pried it open without much effort and found a narrow recess that didn’t seem big enough to store anything. Yet there was something there: a blue tin box with pictures of a heart tied with a red ribbon and luscious-looking chocolates on its lid. She opened it. The box was packed with blank papers. Rummaging through them she found handwritten notes at the bottom, as well as a pen and a couple of envelopes.