The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth

by Veeraporn Nitiprapha

  My dad’s the man. I don’t need anything else, Pran, my dad is so fucking cool, Paradorn whispered over the moaning from the other side of the wall. He said he’d work abroad for a while longer, a year and a half max, to save up enough to come back to Bangkok for good and open a bar… Bar Paradorn. And you’ll be in my band. You’ll come live with us. You’ll be my brother. Pran smiled in the dark, his mind wandering back to the time when a girl had wanted to take him home to be her brother but the memory was transient and the image vanished, leaving only a bitter aftertaste.

  The rugged moaning continued all night long and, when morning finally came, Pran wasn’t convinced she would really leave. She stared at Patra at length, as if wanting to register every detail of every thought inside his head. She lifted her hand to touch his face ever-so lightly, just like when she had invited him into her amorous sanctum. Then she broke into a smile, warm and bright, like something shining from the abyss of life, and walked away.

  And she vanished into a crowd of heaving humanity, into a world full of strangers.

  XIV

  The Dancer in the Drizzle

  N o one remembered exactly when that café had been opened or when it had been closed down and left derelict but every day, as Chareeya walked past on the other side of the road on her way to work, she would glance over at the place. And each time she saw the doors shuttered and silent under the sign, which read in pinkish grey longhand lettering “Café Rosarin”.

  One day, a few alleys further down, when she was waiting for the rain to stop even though she had already been soaked, Chareeya saw the sign being blown off by the storm; it almost hit a boy who was playing with a yoyo under the same shelter as her. For several days it was left on the footpath, blocking the way of pedestrians, before someone finally decided they had had enough and pushed it up against an electricity pole. Once the sign was gone, Chareeya stopped looking at the shuttered café. When an optics store later replaced it, she forgot all about the former existence of Café Rosarin.

  A few days after the sign was left by the electricity post, an old man dragged it away, scraping it along the hard surface of the road. When he got home, he carried it upstairs to his bedroom, moved it about until it fit the space, and used it as a screen to shield himself from the sound of his wife’s snoring; his wife who had slept on the other side of the room and who had been dead for two years. But after a few days the old man removed the sign and dumped it on the rubbish tip because he couldn’t bear the attacks of sorrow he felt as he was about to fall asleep without hearing the sound of his wife’s breathing.

  The sign was trashed, worthless, until a motorcycle taxi driver and his six friends hauled it off and spent an entire day turning it into a bench. First, they removed the lettering for “Café” and then they modified the remainder to create a back rest for the bench, with the word “Rosarin” in elegant longhand spanning the width of their ad hoc piece of furniture. Thus, their motorcycle taxi depot became known as the Rosarin depot and the nameless alley next to it was christened Rosarin Lane. Less than a year later, the depot moved to another spot not too far away that was closer to the network of sub-lanes and shortcuts leading to the main road teeming with traffic. Because the new depot lacked space, the Rosarin bench was left where it was, rusty and disintegrating into dust just days before the municipality installed an official sign – a solemn navy blue metal plaque with the words “Rosarin Lane” inside a gold frame, so stately that a rumour spread about Rosarin having been a member of the royal family who had once owned the land in that area.

  But no sooner had the rumour started than others condemned it to oblivion. A woman who lived somewhere in the lane and who was eight-months pregnant slipped and fell down the stairs to her death at the same time as newspapers reported the death of another pregnant woman who had hanged herself from some kind of tree on some street somewhere as vengeance against her unfaithful husband. These deaths led to a rumour that spread far and wide about another pregnant woman called Rosarin who, heartbroken, had hanged herself from a tree in an abandoned lot in the alley to get back at her husband, inspiring the municipality to name the place Rosarin Lane as a morbid monument to her love.

  And that urban legend would also have faded from memory had it not been for Aunt Linjee. She was a middle-aged woman who had been trying to sell a plot of land in that lane for years. When nobody showed any interest in the land, she decided to seek help from a shaman who advised her to make an offering of meat, sweets, red flowers and red incense to the area’s guardian spirits in order to unlock the hindrances to her commercial enterprises. Another woman, walking past Aunt Linjee’s red roses and vibrant offerings placed under a tamarind tree, assumed with great confidence that they were put there for the spirit of the woman called Rosarin – the source of that great romantic myth that had ended with a nylon rope. The following day, the woman put her own offerings and red roses under the tree while pleading with the ghost of Rosarin to help fulfill her romantic wishes, completely unaware of the irony that Rosarin herself had been helpless in her own endeavours and ended up in a noose. Soon passers-by saw the offerings and added their own, on and on until the spot became a shrine littered with roses and propitiatory objects.

  When a woman who made an offering believed that her wishes had been granted, she repaid Rosarin by building a wooden spirit house at the spot without asking anyone’s permission. And so, the holy aura of Rosarin bore physical proof – the spirit house was tangible evidence of her reputation and attracted an endless stream of worshippers. Aunt Linjee, still unable to sell her plot of land, saw the waves of believers arriving and decided to seek help from the shaman again. Consulting the oracular powers of the sun, the moon and Mars, the shaman came to the conclusion that it was impossible to chase away the believers and that, instead, Aunt Linjee should extend a warm welcome to the other lovesick spirits that had come to reside at the shrine along with its original inhabitant. That way, her lucky star might rise.

  Aunt Linjee built a shack and recruited some homeless people in the area to work as cleaners at the shrine. But because she was stingy, she didn’t want to pay them from her own pocket so she set up a donation box. Alas, she underestimated the sheer number of loveless women in the world and, as they kept coming to the shrine, the donation box filled up in no time prompting her to replace it with a bigger one, and then a bigger one, and, finally, the very biggest one she could find. And, still, she had to empty it every two days to put the money in the bank. From her original plan to live the rest of her life off money from the sale of her land, Aunt Linjee dreamt up a megalomaniac scheme to canvass for a large amount of donation money so that she could spend it on making merit as an investment in her afterlife.

  As Chareeya was busy planting trees in her enchanted garden without any idea of what was going on elsewhere, Aunt Linjee hired workmen to build a permanent shrine in the style of modern Thai architecture. Then she hired an acquaintance to draw a picture of a woman – Make her look sad and beautiful, she instructed – and hung the drawing on the wall along with a one-page sob story about a pregnant woman defeated by love who had hanged herself from the tamarind tree. She dismantled the original shrine, which had become unstable from the weight of the desire to be loved that had been dumped upon it by worshippers. On the day Chareeya picked up a badly injured yellow cat from a bus stop and adopted him as her uncle, Aunt Linjee put up a red sign, twice as big as the one for the café, with which this story began. The sign read “Goddess Rosarin Shrine”.

  A few days after the official opening of the shrine, a van carrying a television crew punctured a tyre at the entrance to the lane. The crew had been on their way to film an episode about a singer’s love scandal, but the accident made them miss their appointment and, as a substitute, they did an episode on Goddess Rosarin. Unexpectedly, it was an overnight sensation. The story of the lovelorn goddess became an instant hit. Every channel had to produce a scoop on the subject to draw ratings, and they milked it: there was the
horror story about a pregnant woman seen dangling her legs from the branch of a tamarind tree on the night of a full moon; a drama series recounting the acrimonious love story of (Goddess) Rosarin; a testimony by a woman whose wishes had been granted nineteen consecutive times; tips on a technique for worshipping at the shrine with Valentine’s Day flowers; the economical habits of Aunt Linjee, the charitable woman who owned the land on which the shrine stood; even a food programme recommending dishes from Somwang Grilled Chicken, which had opened a major branch across the road.

  Even those who suffered from having too many lovers started coming to worship the Goddess. In barely a year, Aunt Linjee brought in ten million baht more than the original sale price she had put on her land. She also had mountains of cash coming in every day from donations. The motorcycle depot had to return to its original spot because the drivers could earn more from transporting lovesick passengers than from the busy traffic on the main road. They made more than enough to buy a new table made from rain-tree wood, freshly painted, with a chequerboard inlaid at its centre and a zinc roof overhead. Not one of the drivers dared tell a version of Goddess Rosarin’s origin story that was different to the one posted on the wall.

  One evening, when Chareeya happened to see “The Cursed Love of Goddess Rosarin” on television while at a roadside restaurant, her heart didn’t skip a beat. She had no way of connecting the Goddess with the shuttered café that, for a time, she had walked past every day, or with the woman whose name appeared a thousand times in the bristling, yellowed letters that her father had written and that she had to cradle in her hands like babies when she read them – that name, which had unconsciously triggered something inside her and had made her turn to look at the sign above the café to begin with.

  The Rosarin of the love letters never owned any land, neither was she ever pregnant nor was she a goddess. And she didn’t hang herself. The only similarity she shared with the Rosarin in the made-up legend was that she had been roundly defeated by love. As a child, her family had called her Rose, short for Rosarin; a detail that echoed with the narrative of roses upheld by the worshippers. She came from a wealthy family and had been a graceful traditional dancer trained at a famous school. She had also been her mother’s favourite daughter.

  When she was nineteen, Rosarin was chosen by her school to dance at a reception for a conference of maths teachers. There, she met Tos, Chareeya’s father. After a friendly conversation, Teacher Tos asked Rosarin to take him sightseeing around Bangkok the following day. By the end of that brief afternoon, they had become lovers. Chareeya’s father returned home and wrote to her every day for a year and, when there was a vacancy at his school for the position of traditional dance teacher, he asked her to take the job and move to Nakhon Chai Si. He rented the small blue house and promised her with a single rose every day that he would divorce his wife and marry her.

  It didn’t take long for Rosarin’s family to get wind of their favourite daughter living with a married man. Her mother vowed to denounce her if she didn’t end the relationship and return home. Rosarin chose him. And when his wife caught him with his mistress on the day Chareeya was born and threatened to kill herself three years later, he asked Rosarin to wait. I promise you, Rosarin, in life or in death, I’ll come back to you.

  Rosarin didn’t cry, not even once, and for six years she waited for him. She spent the prime of her life alone in that blue house, her sole consolation the letters he secretly wrote to her every few days. In the last year, his letters stopped without explanation. Nothing had arrived at her door for months until she had almost forgotten him when he showed up, old and skinny as if the longing in his heart had aged him thirty years. As they were together in the bed where he had once admired her beauty every afternoon over half a decade ago, Rosarin was assaulted by something unexpected: a smell.

  The smell rose like a vapour from his body, so wrecked and weakened that it could no longer dispose of its own waste, of the dregs of medicine and the bitterness of life. It was a stench as miserable as that found in the communal wards of a state hospital; reeking, pungent, overpowering, and so alien that Rosarin couldn’t bear it and had to get up in the middle of their lovemaking and rush over to the window to breathe. As she stood watching the distant river, she strove to recall what he had told her in those days gone-by, and what came to her mind were the melodramatic messages he had poured into his letters: I miss you with every breath, Rosarin. It’s so painful, it’s like I am burning in hell. I don’t understand how I could have dragged us into the abyss of this agony.

  You know, I always believed you’d come back… Rosarin left the sentence dangling, smiled a sad smile, and before she could carry on speaking – but I thought it was over between us a long time ago, I just didn’t realise it until this moment – she turned around and found him dead. Naked, eyes rolling, hair over his forehead, mouth slightly gaping. There was a scar she had never seen before under his ribcage, from where the doctor had confiscated half his liver but left the cancer to spread. He lay there on the bed and for a long while Rosarin couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Then she realised she had no clothes on and it struck her that, if hadn’t she got up, he would have died right there in the middle of their lovemaking.

  Slumped beneath the window, Rosarin laughed and continued laughing without pause for an hour. And she still let out another long and irrepressible laugh as she carpeted his coffin with the many thousands of letters he had written her over the years. She hired a driver to help lift his body on top of them and drive the coffin to his house. After that, Rosarin packed a few belongings and caught the last bus to Bangkok, where she found that her status as a severed member of her family was irreparable. Her mother had died a few months earlier and the family blamed her for the death. They ganged up against her and forbade her from setting foot in the family home again. And her old friends had all scattered in different directions.

  From then on, Rosarin lived alone and supported herself by dancing at birthday parties, weddings, house blessing ceremonies, shrines where worshippers wanted to please the deities, restaurants and even cremation rites. When she grew older she used her savings to open Café Rosarin on that street corner not far from the CD shop where Chareeya worked. Throughout her life she had been a quiet woman who hardly spoke or socialised but, when she turned thirty-eight, Rosarin suddenly started talking all the time – to herself. Her soliloquy was delivered in high volume and she blurted it out wherever she was, not caring about the way people looked at her.

  At forty, she began talking to Chareeya’s dead father as if he was standing before her, invisible. What have I done to you for you to do this to me? Or, Well? You said you’d come back to me so why did you fucking die? Shouting at the top of her lungs with eyes bulging and arms flailing in all directions, she scared off the customers and finally the café had to close down; that was about a year before Chareeya walked past it for the first time.

  From that time on, Rosarin’s isolation from the world became absolute. She never ventured out and kept talking loudly to herself about the past, like an undying echo in a sealed room, as if she wanted to make sure that Chareeya’s father, hovering somewhere at the edges of her life, could hear her clearly. Even with the constant shouting no one took any notice when her voice stopped coming from the house, or when she disappeared from sight. One day, the neighbours were disturbed by a rotten smell and broke into the premises. They didn’t find anything except for a large dead rat lying in the middle of a house in shambles with the several thousand letters that Chareeya’s father had written and that Chareeya’s mother had burned to ashes a dozen years ago – letters that Rosarin had memorised by heart and written out again for her own perusal.

  A long time after that, Chareeya saw Rosarin with her own eyes when she was looking out from a bus window and noticed a strange woman dancing gracefully on a traffic island in the shimmering drizzle, shouting at a dead man as she moved along. Chareeya watched her in wonder and smiled at her for the bri
ef second that their eyes met. And, still, many years later when she was irredeemably cast adrift amongst petals of Mon roses, when the image of Rosarin in the rain resurfaced in her mind amidst a million other images she had collected throughout her life, Chareeya was never able to see the tangled webs of connection between herself and the dancer in the drizzle.

  XV

  The Boy of the Night

  F our forty-eight a.m., the entire neighbourhood was woken by a scream; the awful howling of a beast in anger, or great pain, belted out at intervals as if it was competing with the sound of the rain. Pran leapt up from his mattress and ran outside. The howling stopped, and then started again. Streetlights illuminated vertical raindrops like a million nails shooting down from the blood-red sky, and there was the hazy form of a figure dragging itself slowly along the road. Pran saw Patra, naked from the waist up, his legs about to give out, screaming that maddening scream. He was holding something in his arms: Paradorn.

  Rain splashed on his face as Pran ran towards him and held out his arms to help support the body that was about slip from its father’s embrace. But Patra jerked away and lost his balance. He fell to the ground but still held his son tightly as he wailed, Pran, it’s my fault – I did it. Pran trembled though he didn’t feel cold, not at all. I did this to him! Patra looked down at his son and sobbed.

  I gave it to him. I gave it to him with my own hands, he said, looking up at Pran with eyes haunted by despair. His wailing was hoarse, croaky, hopeless. Pran, I killed my son. Lightning flashed and Pran started trembling again. I gave him the powder – I injected the fucking stuff into him. I gave it to him and I lay down beside him, Pran. I lay down beside him all night… Patra screamed that beastly scream again.