Of course he got it, why wouldn’t he? But not like this… Don’t do this, Charee, don’t do this. Chareeya struggled against his embrace; jerking, heaving, jumping, screeching the same phrase over and over again with untamed anger. And Pran just tightened his hold on her. She resisted, tensed, kicked, slapped, punched, shoved, and again: Life has betrayed me! Life has betrayed me! She kept yelling until her voice began to fade and her body grew limp in his arms as she sobbed. Slowly, Pran eased her down onto the mattress on the floor so she could keep crying as tragically as she wanted to, crying and crying upon his heart.
The bedroom was painted deep blue. It had no other furniture except for a mattress the same colour as the room. Spread over one of the walls was the outline of a black tree with branches that sprawled across the entire space and which shed one leaf for every teardrop that fell from Chareeya’s eyes. The other walls were bare, dappled only by the faint grey shadows of the trees swaying outside, flickering in layers. A light blue curtain that hung from the ceiling and draped to the floor billowed languidly. The scent of ylang-ylang flowers drifting into the room was mixed with the misty scent of pheep. In the centre of the open doorway sat the amber-coloured cat with his head lowered and his body silhouetted against the glowing backdrop of the room that contained everything in the world. The invisible butterfly had stopped blinking its grey shadow, leaving only the shadow of a skinny black cat stretching out across the floor.
Pran let the long night creep past him, punctuated by the sound of tears dripping onto his heart and “Life has betrayed me!” echoing in his consciousness. Has life ever spared anyone from betrayal? Chareeya, why did you think I wouldn’t understand how you feel? Don’t you know what I’ve been through? To be born into someone else’s wretched world, to wake up from one nightmare only to find myself in another, more nightmarish one, to hack my way through disenchantment day in day out without knowing why I’m doing it, to wander into the anonymous embrace of a stranger, to get lost in a wilderness I shouldn’t have strayed into – and all of it just so I could forget myself for a short while. You have no idea what I’ve gone through, and what I’ve lost along the way.
He recalled the day three years ago when he experimented with that hellish powder – the day Kurt Cobain died – just because he wanted to know what it was exactly that had taken away his brothers. It gave him a feeling of profound sadness and desolation, plunged him down without him meaning it to. Then, it transported him to a plain of ecstasy more powerful than any he had ever experienced before, such ecstasy was frightening because something so damn good must be wrong, must be a lie. He had to take five sleeping pills to shield himself from that illusory happiness – illusory, at least, in the context of his own life. When he woke up two days later, he dragged his junkie friend to Tham Krabok, the temple where monks treat drug addicts by making them vomit their guts out, and he stayed there to take part in the vomit-fest with his friend, going slightly mad and pulling himself out of an addiction he didn’t have, detoxifying veins that had no toxins but at least cleansing his memory and intimidating himself into never trying it again.
In this broken world, Charee, happiness wasn’t meant for us. Everything that you’ve dreamt of, everything that you’ve done, that you are, that you see, understand, strive for, seek out, everything that we’ve been through, the price that we’ve paid, the death after death of our hearts, the dreams that keep falling apart, the loneliness that can’t be cured, this maddening feeling… Everything. Why wouldn’t I get it, Charee? Why wouldn’t I understand how life could betray you?
At the darkest hour, just before dawn broke, and when not a single tear was left inside her body, Chareeya stopped crying. And the black tree stopped shedding its leaves, now that not a single one was left on its branches. Pran had a damp patch on his shirt around his chest, and his heart was leaden, lopsided, beating irregularly and slowly sinking, deeper and deeper, like a shipwreck descending into an ocean of tears, so black and lonely, so unbearable that Pran had to bite his own lips until they bled. He shut his eyes tightly and his voice was hoarse when he whispered, I love you, Charee.
The silence carried his words and passed them around the room, one following another, until the minute the last star disappeared from the sky and Chareeya slowly propped herself up and leaned over to kiss him. It was a sad kiss and it wiped away all the other kisses he had had during his entire life, releasing him from the cobweb of loneliness by taking him in her embrace, an embrace so cold it gave off heat. And she made love to him in the glimmer of the day’s first light, achingly and tenderly, as the garden quivered to life, like an oasis in the desert.
Chareeya was woken by the gibbering cries of a flock of birds she had never seen before. She looked up and saw the silhouettes of small swallows lined up neatly on the branches of the black tree on the wall. Tiny young leaves had sprouted, replacing those that had fallen in droves the previous night alongside her tears. The sullen blue room turned ultramarine in the daylight as golden sunshine filtered through the curtain. Pran had woken up before her and was watching the birds on the wall in bewilderment. He wrapped Chareeya’s naked body in his own nakedness, making her feel even more naked, like a sac of air – transparent, itinerant, floating ever onwards.
Swallows, she whispered. Pran blinked. They’ve migrated from somewhere / From where? / I don’t know, from someone’s frozen dream, maybe…? Pran smiled and pulled her closer to him. It was only now that he understood why, all his life, he had been unable to love anyone. Maybe it’s my frozen dream from the past, Pran. He searched her eyes. They were forlorn as always but had no tears in them.
As if nothing had happened between them: I’ll cook something for you. And it made Pran laugh. Chareeya kissed him lightly on his chin, wrapped a blanket around herself, got up, and pulled the curtain open before leaving the room. Pran sat up and followed her with his eyes, then turned to look out the window. A sea of blossoms rippled in the sun. He, too, felt weightless, floating. In his mind he saw a mirage of the melting sun hovering above a surface of mist, with a few pond skaters gliding across and a dragonfly flitting past. He didn’t understand why that image came to him at that moment; couldn’t recall if it was a scene he had recently witnessed or just a distant reflection from another moment in his life.
Chareeya returned with a dish of bruschetta, with tomatoes and cheese, and black coffee. Her hair was mussed up and she was still wrapped in the blue blanket, tucked in around her chest and dragging along behind her like those minimalist fashion models that were in vogue. Together, they lay down and ate breakfast on the mattress, exchanging playful glances as if they were having a telepathic conversation amidst the whistling wind and glistening sunlight before making love to each other again, and again.
When Pran woke up late in the afternoon, Uncle the cat, who had snuck in and was lying on a corner of the mattress, woke up too. He yawned and then crouched, looking up at the birds on the wall with great interest. They were still perched on the branches, their twittering had softened, and some had folded their heads beneath their wings. Chareeya cooked Persian-style fried rice with dill and boiled fish with tomatoes and basil leaves, Vietnamese-style, plus apple salad with celery, sprinkled with almonds. She played Opus 47 and told him she loved him eighteen times while he ate tiramisu and drank Irish coffee fragrant with a hint of whisky.
Pran had to muster all his willpower to stop himself from leading her back into the blue room and making love to her again, but he needed even more willpower than that to free himself from the bondage of her embrace in order to go to work. He lurched off into the blinding illumination, full of strangers, before running through the dark to fall back into her embrace a few hours later. Chareeya had prepared chicken samosas and raw mango with tamarind syrup; a three-a.m. meal that passed languidly on the mattress, in the same way as their breakfast had earlier. Putting the plates away, they chased each other around, wrestled, bear-hugged, teased and tickled and laughed until they were exhausted. Then, th
ey pulled the curtain back and lay down together. Under the starlight, they made love again, and again.
Because they had grown up together, Chareeya and Pran kept playing and having fun like children who refused to mature. Even the physical act of making love was like a game to them, one without rules – uncomplicated, unceremonious, but tender, profound, passionate, and, occasionally, like lovers trapped in the middle of a war. In between their tight timetable of near-endless lovemaking, Chareeya squeezed in short slots of time to cook with the craving of a final-stage cancer patient. She was hungry all the time and she ate with the voracity of a fish that was about to spawn. At any given moment, there was bound to be a pot with something bubbling inside it or some kind of animal being grilled or roasted on a charcoal stove.
Outside, on tree branches that caught the sun, carcasses dangled: dried fish, beef, black pudding, fermented sausages, Yunnan-style sour pork. In the kitchen was a riot of fresh and dried food, or the half-fresh-half-dried kind, piled up in every corner until there was barely room to walk. When space became scarce, she colonised a corner of the living room – the room that contained everything in the world – and it came to resemble a scientific laboratory with its floor and shelves lined with biological specimens meticulously housed in glass jars of various sizes, preserved in oil, vinegar or lime mixed with salt containing: sun-dried tomatoes, mandrake roots, German pork trotters, horseshoe crab, pickled cucumbers, Chinese black olives, rugby beans, sea urchins, Asian spider flowers, kimchi, even anchovies she had travelled all the way to Samut Sakhon to buy and then salted herself. There were other flora and fauna but Pran decided to let their names and origins remain a mystery, and he refrained from asking her about them.
The garden was blooming more luxuriantly than it ever had. The flowers competed to blossom and barely left any room for new leaves to sprout. Chareeya had to prune the plants every morning so that the branches didn’t take over the pathway and block them from getting out. The bedroom was chock-full of flowers to relieve the burden of a garden near breaking point from the phenomenal profusion of petals. There were flowers in vases and in glasses, floating in bowls, or, when there were no more vessels left, they carpeted the floor. Even the black tree on the wall, the branches of which had been full of leaves, began to flower; fragile flowers that were dark grey at the stem and faded away into the blue wall. Chareeya was waiting breathlessly for the black tree to bear fruit so she could plant its seeds on the room’s three remaining walls.
When Pran told her about his rooftop room and how he had spied on her every morning as she made her rounds of the blossoming garden, Chareeya burst out laughing. She felt as naked as she had felt on their first night together. Some evenings, they would go out and look up at the rooftop room or at the black rectangle of the window, and Chareeya would picture him sitting all alone up there in a cocoon of shadow. But Pran never saw himself up in that room, on the contrary, he saw himself and Chareeya as tiny figures amid a sea of flowers in the blue twilight, sipping sangria as zesty as the kind served at temple fairs, with a ginger cat prowling around them. He saw them together, as if he was still up on the rooftop looking down.
Pran still played at the bar every night and the thought of making his own music again came back to him. He also planned to brush up his sculpting skills. Chareeya, too, still worked at the shop for a few hours every day, and as a tour guide for French tourists when she had time. He never saw her cry again; no more tears for Thana, Chanon, Natee, or for the grief-stricken longing in her father’s love letters. Even so, Chareeya refused to let Pran terminate the lease on his rented room and move in with her. She also insisted that Pran go back to the house by the river every Monday.
Charee, I have to tell Lika… About us / No / I have to / No, Pran, you don’t have to / Charee / Pran / I don’t want to lie to Lika again / Then you don’t have to be with me / It’s not like that / It is like that / I want to be with you, not with Lika, you know that / No, I don’t. Chareeya, no longer wanting to talk to him, turned around and disappeared behind the house where she was roasting a suckling pig.
Inside, the swallows fluttered and flew around the blue room.
XXIII
Black Flames
C haree, I need to talk to you. She was staring absent-mindedly at a Mon rose in a glass shedding its petals onto the floor. Slowly, she turned to look at him through the fissure in her eye. Natee looked gaunt, unhealthy, like an alcoholic, and older than his real age. His eyes were dim, sickly red and pained. You have no idea how hard I tried. I never wanted it to be like this between us. I miss you, Charee, I miss you.
How long had he been gone? One month, two, three, four? For how many months had Chareeya longed for his return? For how many months had she prayed for him not to return? She closed her eyes and pity swept into her heart; Natee, too, was broken. Both of us are broken, trespassing upon the lives of strangers. We lived together like friends, me and Pimpaka – I told you to give me some time. When she’s strong enough to be on her own without relying on me, I’ll leave her. I never loved her. I love you. I love only you – you know that, he murmured, head bowed.
And you don’t love that man, Pran, or whatever he’s called. Charee, you don’t love him. You never loved him. His voice had begun to quiver. You love me. Only we know what love is, real love – only we know how deep it is. We’ve been through so much together, how could you leave me just like this? The birds on the branch shifted nervously. Seeing Chareeya’s sad, slim hands glowing in the grey-black afternoon brought tears to Natee’s eyes. I can’t live without you, Charee, it hurts. It hurts like a bullet ripping through my heart, all the time.
She closed her eyes, thinking she had heard that sentence before somewhere – in a novel or maybe a movie – and thinking how it had made her laugh when she first heard it. Nobody could ever know what it feels like to have a bullet ripping through their heart; no one, not even the dead. But, though Natee was repeating a platitude he had borrowed from someone else, never before had he been so wounded, and never before had he felt so worthless and desperate as when he spoke those words to her. It completely eluded him how he had reached this point, or when it was that things had descended into a calamity he couldn’t control.
I can’t live like this – I can’t, Charee, Natee mumbled against the rain that had begun to pour down around them. Chareeya still hadn’t said a word. He had said things like this many times before, and not only had he told her how he might die, he had come back and then left her again a hundred times. How many times can a person stand the pain of being abandoned? The heavy scent of rain made her remember Chalika’s “special days” from their childhood. Whenever Chalika had seen sunlight shining softly through a fine curtain of rain with a rainbow arching over the sky, she would tell Chareeya to open her mouth so she could catch the rainwater coming down through the rainbow. It’s rainbow syrup, her sister had whispered, as if telling her one of the world’s most wondrous secrets. And the rain was, in fact, strangely sweet and perfumed.
Dear Lika, there wasn’t any way out. We were wandering in a blackness that kept stretching out into another blackness, on and on forever. No matter how hard we tried or how much we pushed, life still betrayed us. There were no special days, no syrup, no rainbows. There was only Madame Eng and Madame Chan, the Siamese Twins of Solitude. Don’t you agree, Lika, this is the sole legacy we’ve inherited from Father? We were doubled over backwards inside ourselves, torn to pieces, and both of us were cast adrift along our own lonely paths. Lika, tell me, please, what should I do?
Why don’t we just die together and end it all, Charee? You and me we love each other more than anyone else in this world ever could. But we can’t be together and we can’t be apart from each other either. Why, Charee, why? She opened her eyes. Natee’s devastating lament compelled her to lower her head and stare at her own sad, slim hands tangled together in a knot on her lap, as if they were afraid of being separated from each other. Can’t be together, can’t be apart. Sudden
ly, an achingly sad ode from Father’s letters flashed through her mind:
…Rosarin, those afternoons are drifting further away from me, fading everyday. All that’s left is me hanging on, trying to hold on to anything that will save me from going mad. Why didn’t we just die together then, Rosarin? Wouldn’t it have been better to die together than to endure this endless longing? Death can’t be as excruciating as the torment of having to live without you.
The pale memory of rainbow syrup surged in her mouth, sour and sweetish. All that was left in her head was an echo chamber of Natee’s words: Can’t be together, can’t be apart, why don’t we just die together and end it all. Right, why don’t we just die? Death can’t be as excruciating as the torment of having to live… Without Pran.
As soon as Pran pushed open the door to the blue room, a gust of wind swept in from the window, hit him in the face, and blew past him. The first thing he saw was the blue curtain that hung floor-to-ceiling in six strands like the restless tentacles of an octopus, fluttering, agitated, and panicked. Next, he saw Chareeya sitting on the mattress, pale and blank, her hair chaotically tousled by the wind like burning black flames. Then, he saw Natee lying in a fetal position next to her, his hands tucked between his knees like a child, though his face had an expression of fatigue like that of an old woman, frowning, lips tightly pursed, and in so much pain that he looked as if a bullet was ripping through his heart.
Chareeya slowly turned to face him. Her eyes met his, and she raised her index and middle fingers to touch her lips, signaling him not to say a word, or imprinting the ghost of a kiss, or perhaps blowing him a kiss like she always used to do before he left for work. Her hair was still aflame beneath the trembling curtain. There was the sound of water dripping onto wood at hypnotic intervals, almost imperceptible, like on those many nights when her teardrops had fallen onto his heart. Pran realised, then, that he was still soaking wet from the relentless rain pouring outside. When he had left the river that morning, the sky had been bright blue and there was no sign of rain, none at all.
The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth Page 17
