The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth

by Veeraporn Nitiprapha

  She got up and walked over slowly, stopping in front of him. The curtains fluttered, as if trying to reach out and hold her back. Pran moved like he was going to say something but he didn’t know what to say and all he could do was stare into her eyes, frantically searching for Chareeya somewhere behind that fissure. Then she raised her index and middle fingers together and touched them lightly to his lips, again signalling him not to say a word, or transporting the ghost of a kiss from her lips to his. In that cold moment, which seemed to stretch out forever, she whispered – Forget me – through the unceasing wind, through the sound of water dripping from his body onto the floor, through the perfume of frangipani flowers rising faintly above the aroma of rain, through the thick, wet, dull air.

  The flock of birds anxiously hopped up and down along the branches of the black tree, shaking off the fragile petals and stripping the tree bare. Then they flew around tumultuously, brushing against the walls like a storm of ashes and circling Natee, who lay with his knees still bent, amidst the bedlam. At that moment, Pran understood that he didn’t really know anything. He didn’t know who Natee was, where he had come from, how he had lived his life, and how desperate he must have been to have to come and lie down here curled up like this so that a bullet could rip through his heart in the middle of a storm. He also didn’t know how Chareeya had fought through life, how far she had wandered in her solitude, what she did during those long, dark nights, who she had beside her to take care of her and pull her back. And he didn’t know what had happened during all that time when he had yet to exist in her life – all those years when he hadn’t even existed.

  Slowly, Pran closed his eyes. Something was breaking inside him. In a flash it had shattered and the pieces fell into emptiness. But he was surprised not to feel anything, nothing at all. In that befuddling moment he thought back to the delicate smell of the kanom chan wrapped in banana leaf, and the other desserts Chalika had packed for him just a few hours earlier. He also thought back to her forlorn smile as she waved at him when his bus was leaving the terminal.

  In his mind, he saw an image of pond skaters gliding over the reflection of the sun melting on the water’s surface, but he couldn’t tell if it was an image he had seen the evening of the day before when he had been sitting by the river with Chalika, or if it was a memory from some other time. In the next second, he saw the image of a thunderstorm crashing down upon the city as he was going along an elevated road and he thought about how Bangkok was so beautiful in the rain. Then came the image of the empty chair at the dining table where Chareeya usually sat, and this time he couldn’t understand why it didn’t make him angry like it had done before.

  Cut to: the black rectangle of his window in the room cobwebbed by loneliness, with Uncle Jang’s wistful poetry, the sea of flowers below, and many other things that had nothing to do whatsoever with the moment, or with Chareeya, or with either of them. Unimportant details that had never crossed his mind came flashing through his head: a scarecrow wiggling its fingers in a blaze of sunshine, the sugar-spun candies shaped like fish that his father had given him at some temple fair, a hamburger that tasted like old newspapers, diamond glitter shining from eyelashes and shimmering like a halo, the fiery petals of flame tree flowers falling like shards of glass in the twilight, a girl who made a promise in the morning light. These varied images passed through his mind, one after another.

  When he opened his eyes again he saw a closed door before him. Pran put his hands on the plank of humid wood, feeling a violent stab of pain piercing him. He mumbled something but, no, maybe he didn’t feel anything or say anything, or maybe he didn’t remember feeling or saying anything. He couldn’t remember how long he stood there, or when he walked away, or where he went, or what he did afterwards.

  Not yet, though, it would be a long time before he walked out that door, a long time before he broke free from the spell of that last whisper, and a long time before he became aware with startling clarity that it was him, not her, who had not returned to the surface of the river that distant afternoon when they had met as children. He was the one who had sunk deeper and deeper, inescapably caught in an eddy of misery, lost and alone in that cold and soundless water, with only a glimmer of warm sunshine, somewhere farther away.

  XXIV

  Cats Don’t Cry

  T he rain stopped and Chareeya remained seated on the mattress hugging her knees. She stared vacantly at the Mon rose petals among other flowers scattered across the floor and had been doing so without thinking, saying, or feeling anything for the past couple of hours – ever since Pran’s footsteps had faded into the sound of the rain.

  Natee was kneeling on the floor busily sorting dull-blue sleeping pills into two piles of equal quantity and muttering to himself. Chareeya wished he would stop repeating that sentimental mumbo jumbo before she changed her mind. I never got how we had to end up like this. All my life, I’ve never loved anyone else, no one but you. The other women were just… Just what? With a profound agony that cut through her like a knife, Chareeya stuffed a fistful of pills into her mouth before Natee could finish his sentence. Washing them down with water, she picked up stray pills that had fallen over the bed and put them into her mouth. Then she flopped down on the mattress, motionless.

  Natee looked up at her, slack jawed and deeply confused. No, a life’s final scene should have something more than this – pain, devastation, agony, rancour, passion, heartache, burning anguish, or whatever. But Chareeya was… It was too simple and death wasn’t supposed to be so perfunctory. She had stuffed those pills into her mouth and lain down, stock-still, just like when she had run into a wall and fallen back in a perfectly straight line.

  It did actually feel like running into a wall and falling back in a straight line – that’s more like it. Chareeya let herself sink into the mattress, exhaled carefully and closed her eyes. She thought of the man who had stuck with her and walked beside her in the dark, someone as silent as a shadow, always watching her and always existing just at the edges of her peripheral vision, and all she had to do was turn her head a few degrees to find him there. Since their childhood, he had lain down beside her in the Himaphan Forest and taught her to see with her heart in a world where everyone sees with their eyes. He had waded into the thicket of night to cut down a banana stalk and make her a floating basket when hers had capsized in the river. He had taken her on a quest to find a fountain with a brooding swan, without ever complaining. He who had collected her tears on his heart, and whose life had been devastated alongside hers.

  And she thought about her sister stuck inside a million cheap romance novels whose streams of stories had caught her in a whirlpool too rapid and byzantine to escape from. I will be reborn as your sister again, Lika, my dearest Lika, my twin. Then she thought about the Most Beautiful Suicide photograph; that black-and-white picture of a woman who had jumped from the Empire State building in the 1940s. The woman was exquisite, glamorously dressed, and must have turned the heads of many men as she glided down the street towards the building before she took that leap and flew down with her eyes closed, hitting a car and creating a dent in its shiny roof that filled with shards of glass reflecting the morning sunlight. And that made Chareeya realise that she was still in her old at-home clothes, looking unglamorous, with frazzled hair. And if someone took her photo it would have to be called the Ugliest Suicide. And yet her head was light, so light she couldn’t muster the desire to get up and do anything more.

  Then she thought about her blossoming garden, now blurry in her mind’s eye, and she knew that it had bloomed just for her. Its fragrance would fade under the distressing aroma of sadness. Would the new owner take care to water and pamper the plants as she had done? And then she thought of her sister again: Lika, I’m sorry… Then the chubby face of Uncle Cat flashed before her. And then all the images fell apart. Eyes blurred by water, the Mon rose shedding its petals, I’m sorry Lika, I want… A desolate rose… Chareeya opened her eyes and looked at the wall. Nate
e was still muttering on about something. He had been talking incessantly all afternoon – talk, talk, talk until the birds on the black tree had become weary and had stuck their heads under their wings to shield themselves from the sound of his voice.

  The birds… / What birds? / Those swallows, there / Where? Chareeya was perplexed. There, those birds, the migratory birds on the tree… Natee turned to look at the wall: What birds? He couldn’t see anything. And she felt as if water had welled up and submerged her feet, cold as polar ice, surging over her in waves, drenching her, and creeping up inch by inch. She stretched out her hand to touch the face with which she had once been so deeply in love, but her hand grew crooked and stiff before her eyes, and Natee melted away into the background of her last memory of a star in the sky and the icy water overwhelmed her as she sank and sank into the darkness.

  Natee still found it hard to believe it could be this sudden. He wanted to witness life’s final scene in all its meaningfulness, with all its enduring sentimentalism and touching sensibilities – not something as abrupt and radical as this. But Chareeya had fallen asleep before he had even managed to do anything. He ran his hand over her hair, feeling as heartbroken as when Romeo saw Juliet dying: I’m following you, Charee. But, then, he changed his mind as he remembered a more lugubrious scene: Please, hold me one last time… Yes, that was the one. A sudden surge of sorrow flooded his heart until his cheeks were bathed in tears. He held her in his arms, tightened his embrace, and touched his face against her forehead.

  Wait for me, Charee. Wait for me, dearest. Natee was sobbing faintly and no sooner had he opened his mouth to repeat that he loved her than he realised how cold she was, how death had crept in to occupy every inch of her body. It startled him and he almost pushed her back onto the mattress. But then he calmed himself and slowly laid her down. Her face was ashen, beads of sweat had formed at her hairline, the edges of her lips were starting to turn green, and her body was trembling. He lifted her cold arm and let it fall, lifted it and let it fall, lifted it and let it fall. He stared at her slender hands now horrifyingly stiffened and gnarled, before shaking her lightly. Charee, Charee… She didn’t respond. Natee put his ear to her chest and heard mournful music, so soft it was almost inaudible. He straightened up and looked around to locate the source of the sound but saw nothing. When he lowered his ear to her heart again, the music was gone.

  Suddenly, those scenes from Japanese horror movies came back to him. Fear gripped him, assaulting him so recklessly that he became panic-stricken. Thrashing his arms around, he knocked over the piles of sleeping pills as he scrambled back to his feet and lurched forward into the centre of the room. His body tensed and he regarded Chareeya with confusion. A million feelings rushed through his mind: a riot of sorrow, terror, anger, bafflement, despair, loneliness, worry, disorientation, repugnance, contempt, condescension, contradiction, fear, desire, yearning, love.

  Love, that was it: love. Natee knew he loved her like he had never loved or would ever love anyone else, not in this life and for sure not in the next one either. I love you, Charee, I love… Natee murmured, tears welling up in his eyes. The thought of having to continue living without her was so painful that he almost changed his mind and took the pills; just a mouthful, then he would lie down and embrace her, go to sleep with her, be with her. He had wanted to live with her since the first day they met. And he still wanted to live with her now. He couldn’t understand why it hadn’t been possible, why there had been so many unsolvable problems, so many hassles, and such unnecessary ones at that.

  Charee, we’ll never be apart again, my dear. We’ll be together forever, in the eternity of our deaths. At the mention of death, his body shivered involuntarily and it became worse when he glanced at her gnarled fingers, bent at a horrifying angle. Now it was those scary scenes from Korean films that flashed through his mind. Charee, no, you shouldn’t have… Charee… He dithered. He looked at the pills scattered across the floor and then rallied his courage to turn and look at Chareeya again. Her body was quivering, and the spasms were more frequent and intense than before; her eyes pulsated frenetically beneath half-opened eyelids, her lips were purplish now, and a globule of foaming salvia had formed at the corner of her mouth.

  Aaaaahhh… Natee let out a fearful moan and fled from the room. But he had hardly taken two steps when he had to stop in his tracks. Uncle Cat sat like a sentinel, blocking his escape route. The cat’s tiny pink tongue stuck out of its ugly plump mouth; it was in the process of licking its front paw and the limb remained hanging mid-air as it turned to stare at Natee with its large green eyes, irises dilated to the widest possible aperture.

  Natee was imagining a scene with the police when Chareeya’s body was discovered the next day, or a few days later, and how they would trace it all back to him one way or another – how incredible the Thai police were! If they interrogated him, he would insist he knew nothing, that he and Chareeya had just been having a testy on-again-off-again relationship for years. No one saw what happened in that room anyway, except the stupid cat – the sole eyewitness to the case. Natee wasted no time. He lunged at Uncle Yellow, who let out a startled meow, scooped the cat up against his waist and left.

  Once he was home he paced around in a panic, sitting down then standing up, nauseous, feverish, disconcerted, and when he couldn’t bear it any longer, he called a taxi to take him back to Chareeya’s house. Halfway there, he changed his mind and returned home again to sit out the rest of the night in hot-cold terror. The next day he bought every newspaper at the newsstand, and the day after that too. He poured through every column of newsprint looking for a report about a woman’s mysterious death. But there was nothing, not even anything about a woman who had survived a suicide attempt. So does no one kill themselves over love these days?

  Several weeks later, Natee gathered his courage and returned to Chareeya’s yellow house. He arrived wearing dark glasses, a cap that covered half his face, and stood hesitantly trying to catch a glimpse of something but all he could see was a “For Sale” sign stuck on the door. A few months later, the yellow house and its blossoming garden were gone, replaced by a high-rise condominium. Natee went back to live with Pimpaka, the woman who had always lived only for him, and tried to forget Chareeya, the woman who had died for him. In those first few years, he still teared up and wept when he thought back to what had happened that day but, as time passed, his gifted imagination comforted him with a scenario: she hadn’t died, at least not to his knowledge, and she now lived happily somewhere, perhaps with Pran, who had come to her rescue at the last minute, just like in the movies. Or, if not with Pran, then with some other lucky man who had entered her life after that episode.

  Uncle Yellow continued to live with him and became old, tired, bored and soundless as both cat and man prowled the corners of the house, until one morning eight years later when he vanished in that way that all cats do as they refuse to let lowly humans watch them return to their true planets. So no one knew if Uncle Yellow ever missed his human niece, or if he had ever cried.

  XXV

  The Birds have Fled the Blackened Tree

  C hareeya was jolted awake, gasping for air above the water. Then she sank back into sleep, before waking up and falling asleep again. She woke up one more time drifting on the blue, ice-cold currents that rolled furiously, wave upon wave, in a storm-tossed sea. The black tree on the wall was entirely submerged and, still, the water kept rising; the birds had already fled its branches. The waves sloshed Chareeya against the wall and dragged her back, then more waves rolled in from the other side of the room and hurled her against the wall, over and over again, until the bile-churning nausea in her stomach became unbearable. Right afterwards, the water reached the ceiling and the waves stopped rolling. Then, everything was tranquil as Chareeya slowly began to sink and sink…

  She struggled, thrashed about and tried to reach the surface though she had no understanding of why she should even try. Unable to stop it, she vomited, like a
goldfish spraying pellets of food from its tiny mouth. But it wasn’t food that came out, it was letters. Last nigh t I dre amt abou t yo u. Chareeya looked in astonishment at the jumble of words stubbornly clinging to broken sentences, before they spread out and floated like a stream. I ha v e to get b ack t o yo u, in li fe o r in de ath.

  She waved her hands around in front of her, looking to the left, right, and then left again before she threw up again: Fo r s uch a l ong tim e all we c oul d do wa s th ink abo ut e ach o ther. And again: P lease do n’t she d a ny te a rs fo r o ur l ove. She found herself undulating in the beautiful handwriting, drifting and dissolving like an ink drop in water.

  Eve ry da y wit h ev ery b rea th I m iss yo u Rosa rin I’m s o a n guis hed li k e I a m bu rn ing in hel l I d on’t u n der st an d wh y we ha ve to p ut up w ith th is ag on y R os ar in f r th e ti i w us li k t bit t s ee Ri n on a

  Chareeya looked around trying to comprehend words that were no longer words. She felt the water spiralling, counter-clockwise, faster and faster, until she couldn’t steady herself and was thrown into the eye of the whirlpool spinning around the room. But then the water gradually condensed, thickening like dough that had been kneaded until it was gluey, and the stickier it became the more slowly it spun, slower and ever slower…