The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth

by Veeraporn Nitiprapha

  Like a slow-motion shot in a film, Chareeya spun in a corkscrew circle. The letters had melted away into nothingness. She heard a distant sound, perhaps a song, but it was indistinct, sluggish, and drawn out like the sound from an old cassette tape. Then a flower floated towards her, so bruised and drooping she couldn’t tell what kind of flower it was. No, it wasn’t a flower. It was two jellyfish squiggling forward inch by inch in the water that was churning ever-more slowly, slowing down until it had become like mucus, so thick it could no longer move. Jellyfish Lika and Jellyfish Charee disappeared. She looked around, trying to find them, and instead found herself trapped in a channel that was wet and icky like a blue-grey glue – opaque, greasy, vomitous.

  The drawn-out sound also disappeared and all that remained was the noise of air whistling through a hollow spiral. A labyrinth, that is the labyrinth of the blind earthworm. So, she was Earthworm Charee, caught in a panic in the middle of her own labyrinth. Earthworm Charee, Earthworm Charee… She crept along the slimy channel, an inch at a time, mumbling, Earthworm Charee, eating earth, shitting earth.

  The yucky, gooey feeling and the filthy blue colour brought back her nausea. She retched and stretched her neck, but before anything came out of her mouth the spiral she was in had vanished, and the next second she was sliding down a void, plunging into a bottomless pit at great speed, cold and dark. Chareeya woke up three more times, and each time she found that she was still plunging down that interminable void – down, down, down…

  Four days after she swallowed the fistful of sleeping pills and a few other unidentifiable tablets, Chareeya woke up for the seventh time in that blue room, amid dried-up pools of her own blue-coloured vomit and the pills that Natee had scattered around the room. An evening light shone softly through the window but the black tree on the wall was a carcass, its branches drooping, blackened and charred as if it had been dead for a century. The migratory birds had migrated elsewhere and Natee wasn’t lying dead beside her, as he had promised.

  She got up and staggered around the house. In her heart, she was glad that Natee wasn’t lying dead somewhere and that he had been strong enough to abandon her again. But Uncle Yellow was nowhere to be seen either. Chareeya looked for him in the garden and, when she couldn’t find him there, she went to its deepest corner and sat down beneath the kalapruek tree that had been the cat’s favourite siesta spot. There, she waited, still drowsy from her seemingly unending dream of drowning and plunging. And, there, she began to remember.

  She remembered that the last thing she had told Pran was to forget her and, at once, a white emptiness appeared in front of her. It dazzled her for a second before a great wave of sorrow unlike anything she had ever felt before overcame her; so devastating was its power that she felt as if the earth was breaking into tiny pieces and that all of humanity would be wiped out entirely. Even the black universe that was turning the sky dark would no longer exist. Disoriented and shivering, she looked around and couldn’t fathom why the leaves were still green, the flowers were still in bloom, the butterflies still chased each other around, the wind was still sweet, and why time still ticked forward in a mirage of evanescent sunshine.

  And, still, even though she was weeping inside, Chareeya got up and went looking for Uncle Cat. She wandered ragged and brokenhearted, shouting every name she had ever used for him: Phosphorescent Eyes, Palm Sugar Candy, My Marigold, Star Fruit, Jelly Belly, Uncle Yellow, Soda Lemon, Fat Face, Young Melon, Lazy Worm, Stale Coconut Milk, Ginger Bum, Magic Pumpkin… But there was no sign of him. Along the way, she also looked for the alley that led to the building where Pran had his rooftop room. When she came upon it, an enormous man who had misjudged his own proportions while walking down the narrow lane had got stuck between the walls and blocked Chareeya’s path to the building. She circled around several times only to find the man still wedged there trying to squeeze his way forward, inch by inch, and still blocking her way.

  That evening, she went looking for Pran at the Bleeding Heart. His bandmates told her he had come in a few days ago and left a note saying he would never be back. He had also passed on his belongings to his friends: an art book of romantic sculptures by Camille Claudel, a pair of leather trousers, some concert T-shirts, a pair of boots, an electric guitar shaped like a paper plane, a jigsaw puzzle of some galaxy adrift in the lightless universe, a stack of vinyl records.

  Those were all the treasures he owned and that he had taken from his rooftop room when he said goodbye to Uncle Jang, landlord and specialist in the toxicology of love, who could tell just by looking into the young man’s eyes that his soul had been crushed. And yet the old man couldn’t find the right words to resuscitate a heart that was about to give up. All he could do was hold Pran’s hands in his own trembling hands for a long time before releasing him on his way. Uncle Jang died eleven months later, after lighting a charcoal stove next to his bed one chilly night and falling asleep in his lonely, windowless room. He died not because of the pain or bitterness caused by the solitude that had been with him all his life, but because he was done with the excruciatingly long wait for his present life to end so that a new one could begin.

  Knowing that Pran would not return to the house by the river, Chareeya – channelling the same unrelenting mania as her mother – packed her things and went looking for him. Without saying goodbye to Chalika or the three Witches or anyone else, she left carrying a single record of the heart-pounding symphony that had once set her on a course to pursue endless love only to tear her away from him. I will find you before you forget me, she vowed with all the strength in her heart, confident that she would find him again just as she had so many times before.

  And such is fate: there were many times when they would be on trains that were passing each other in the opposite direction, unable to see each other in the row of blank faces glimpsed through the train window; many times when she would inquire at a bar or a restaurant about a mysterious, silent musician only to be told that he had just quit a few days earlier; many times when she would sit down on the same bench he had just got up from at a train station; many times when he would sit down at the same table in a restaurant she had just left; many times when both of them would look up at the same star from the opposite side of a river, unable to see each other in the shadows; and many times when they would walk quietly as they used to do, only at the opposite ends of a street thronged with people, and miss each other in the heaving humanity and lost tribes of globetrotters.

  In the drizzle, she lamented, Where can I find you, Pran? And he said, Rantau Panjang, as he purchased a ticket at a station. When Pran mumbled to himself on a starless night, How are you doing, Charee? She said, I’m fine, smiling at a porter who had helped carry her small bag as she walked away. When she mentioned in passing to a stranger in the next seat, It’s hot today, Pran said, Have some water, to a worker who looked like he was going to faint from the heat. And when he asked the stars before going to sleep, To forget – is that all you’re asking of me? Chareeya whispered to the wind, Don’t forget me, please, don’t ever forget me.

  On the night when the whole world was celebrating the arrival of the third millennium, Chareeya checked into a room in a small guesthouse where Pran lay asleep in the next room dreaming of a woman with a fissure in one eye. Through the night, they listened to each other’s footsteps hopelessly searching for something they would never find. Several months later, when Pran pushed open the door of a bookstore, he laid his hand on the invisible handprint Chareeya had left behind just a few minutes earlier. But such is fate: the lines on their palms ran in parallel and stretched out into eternity without ever overlapping.

  Chareeya no longer cried the way she had cried since she was sixteen; whether it was for Thana, Chanon, Natee, for the lovelorn odes in her father’s love letters, or even for Pran, or for herself once she had lost him. Her heart had become parched, desiccated, and she felt thirsty all the time. No matter how much she drank, her throat remained dry and she found herself unabl
e to cry.

  Having spent one thousand days wandering around looking for Pran, brushing past him without ever bumping into him, Chareeya felt Pran’s presence the way she felt the freshness of laundry that has just been brought in from the sunshine. Unable to explain to herself why she couldn’t find him, Chareeya became convinced that their separation had been predetermined by past sins she had committed as a child; that time she had fished a string of toads’ eggs stuck together like black pearls from a ditch and pretended they were black jelly or when her impish impulses drove her to interrupt mating toads, disuniting them from their acts of love and sending them on their separate ways. Resigned to the consequences of her own karma and to the conviction that Pran would forget her before she could find him, Chareeya decided to return home.

  Chalika had hardly eaten in the past few months and had become so small that Chareeya was confused as to whether or not her sister had reverted to a ten-year-old self. Like Mother, Chalika hardly said a word to anybody and spoke only silent words to the echoing whispers inside her head.

  It was the third Monday that Pran hadn’t show up when Chalika’s desserts had started to lose their sweetness, becoming rough, coarse and devoid of fragrance. Even her legendary kanom chan became too gummy to chew. Her syrup tasted of tears and was sometimes even bitter, much to everyone’s bemusement. The clairvoyance of a romantic heroine had told her that Pran had another woman in his heart. When he disappeared, and since Chareeya had also disappeared, Chalika was certain she knew who that woman was. When there was no news from either of them, the clairvoyance of that romantic heroine told her that neither her lover nor her sister would ever return.

  Chalika closed her shop, stopped making desserts, abandoned the novels, never left the house, never spoke to anyone, never mentioned Pran or Chareeya, and did nothing during the day except sleep. At night, she paced around in the dark, her arms outstretched, groping and searching, clumsily wandering amidst the shadows that stood silently in the nooks and crannies of the house. One day she started telling everyone that she had a child, a lovely seven-year-old boy who came to play with her during the night.

  When Chareeya returned home, she didn’t tell her sister what had happened between her and Pran, or between her and Natee, on that storm-ravaged night, or about her nomadic wandering that had followed. And Chalika didn’t ask her sister and didn’t utter a single word about herself, or about the sweets that had become bitter, or the nights of blind groping, or all the things she knew – all the things she had deciphered through the sixth sense that belonged only to the heroine of a romance novel. The only thing she told Chareeya about was her child; the boy she had had without ever getting pregnant, the boy who would remain seven years old forever.

  Silence continued to occupy the house, along with the profusion of weeds that had sprouted from the fountain and encroached upon the surroundings, from the gate to the metropolis of mice. The dining room was misted up with crystallised tears that kept appearing and that would reappear, shiny and sparkling, right after they had been swept away. The living room was littered with decaying vinyl records; done in by humidity and time, they sometimes emitted a shrill, unmusical noise, even though no one had touched them. A flock of shadows had migrated into the house, too, an unstoppable influx that eventually shrouded the place in perpetual gloom, as if it was always just about to rain.

  Nual, along with the children and grandchildren in her ever-expanding family, had moved out to live in a house not far from the house where her three husbands now lived; the trio had moved in together some time ago, having put their combined efforts into renting a large plot of land and setting up an orchard to grow Vietnamese guava. They still took turns visiting Nual, who had left the house by the river after Chalika stopped making sweets so that she would have time to look after her enormous family. And yet Nual still came to clean, do the laundry and cook for Chalika every day or every couple of days, never asking to be paid.

  XXVI

  The Adopted Piglet and the Man who Murdered his Own Shadow

  F orget me, forget me, forget me, she said repeatedly, her voice rising above images that moved backwards and were fading away: the verdant paddy fields that Pran had once found so enchanting, a black night sky in which a crescent moon dangled, luminous beads of rain clinging onto a window pane. Forget you, just like that? Is that all you want me to do? It’s a walk in the park, how hard could it be? I could forget everything, I could obliterate myself, or the whole world, whatever – I could do it for you, my dearest Chareeya, if that’s what you want.

  And, so, once again, he found himself a perpetual passenger on a train, a wanderer always on the move. Hair cropped short to his skull, carrying as few belongings as possible, Pran travelled without purpose or destination, and only now was he able to understand why his father had never stopped moving all those years ago – not only did he want to go to places untouched by old memories, he also tried to avoid creating any new ones because he knew how some skeletons just couldn’t be buried. If even a hint of warmth began to form, even if it was just a tiny bit, it might trigger the heat of the past and smother his heart once more.

  When he started out on the road, Pran hardly had any savings and didn’t think he would be able to sustain this vagabond lifestyle. But, after a while, he learned that a person could live on much less than he had previously thought. He ate whatever he had and got by however he could. When there was nowhere to sleep he took shelter in a temple, when he ran out of money he found work, and when he had enough money he set out travelling again. Work, too, wasn’t that hard to find if one wasn’t choosy, and Pran wasn’t interested in choosing anything anymore; he accepted whatever was on offer, from manual labour to singing gigs. Soon, he found that he was more content digging holes, picking fruit, doing farm labour or construction work, waiting tables or washing dishes, than playing music as he had done for most of his life.

  Outside of Bangkok and some major provincial capitals, people weren’t into rock music. They preferred country music, which he had nothing against and which in fact had a few numbers that were dear to his heart. Or they liked protest songs, which had a force-fed, anguished self-righteousness that irritated him, though he could at least tolerate them. What he despised most was folk music, with its instant job opportunities for any musician who showed up alone with a guitar and started crooning syrupy love songs basked in sunshine and cool breezes. Romantic songs laced with idealism disgusted him and made his stomach churn. Either you love me or you don’t, it’s as simple as the fact that the sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening, and there’s nothing that should make your eyes well up with sentimentalism because we just feel what we feel. He didn’t see the difference between idealism and prejudice – they were both just myths contained within myths.

  Being constantly on the move unsettled Pran’s temporal sensitivity, and sometimes he thought he had been on the road for a few days when he was actually circumnavigating the country for a third time – might as well, since time had lost its meaning anyway. Everything just came and went in passing, leaving no trace, leaving no cherished keepsakes and nothing to chase away from his heart. From one town to the next, he kept going. Sometimes he picked a popular destination he had known before: Pha Ngan Island, Chiang Mai, or Udon. Most of the time, he just got to a train station and picked out a nice-sounding place name: Songkhalia, Yotaka, Rantau Panjang, or exotic villages like Ban Amrit, Pa Sao, Prang Kali. Or he just closed his eyes and tossed a coin. Or he followed whatever whim was tugging at his heart in that moment. Anywhere but Bangkok or Nakhon Chai Si – anywhere else was all the same for him.

  He stayed a few days in each place, maybe slightly longer, and whenever he began to feel a hint of familiarity – when he could tell north from south or knew who was doing what in the area or which restaurant was good and which was bad – he would set off again. The exceptions were those few times when he overheard a band playing cool music, Radiohead or Catherine Wheel, or one time when he got to
jam with a band in Chiang Mai, which gave him a painful urge to make music again. Or another couple times when he met a woman who was so sweet and captivating that he almost abandoned his itinerant wandering and fantasised like a madman about settling down forever. He even hoped that he might be able to give himself another chance at learning how to love. But all of it only reminded him that what he was really looking for was that yellow house, and for Chareeya inside every woman that he met along the way. And, through all of it, he came to the realisation that, no, he hadn’t forgotten her.

  In a world with nothing worth remembering, he couldn’t imagine how he would be able to forget her as he had intended to. Then he met a British man who had travelled the world and who had come to install an electric fence around a bear enclosure at a zoo. He explained to Pran that after a bear touches the fence and feels the shock several times, instinct warns it off the danger. Even when the fence is removed, the animal never wanders anywhere near the parameter again.

  So Pran found himself a needle and every time he thought about Chareeya he pricked the tip of his finger repeatedly. In the beginning, his finger stung so much that he couldn’t play the guitar. On some nights, when the unbearable longing waylaid him, he scratched his chest with the needle leaving long, blood-encrusted marks. And, before too long, whenever his mind drifted to Chareeya, he instinctively felt pain at the tip of his finger without having to prick it with the needle. Eventually, the pain was triggered pre-emptively even before he started thinking about her, and he would find something to do in order to distract himself and prevent the image of Chareeya flashing across his mind. As the intervals between his thoughts of her grew longer, so his memory of her became more nebulous and unclear.