The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth

by Veeraporn Nitiprapha

  Forgetting is hard but, in the end, anyone can forget, no matter how momentous, affectionate, or painful the memory. Pran once heard a story about a woman who let a piglet suckle her breast to compel the animal to forget its own mother and thus save it from starvation. He heard a story about a man who was plagued by implacable rancour and who eventually died of amnesia, having forgotten everything, including the wrath in his own heart. He heard a joke about a woman who had screamed the house down with the pain of giving birth, shouting that she would never let herself get pregnant ever again, only to forget her vow and her pain and her fear and bear five or six more children in breathless succession.

  Forgetfulness is a wonderful defence mechanism. Humankind would have long become extinct were it not for our ability to forget: to forget how pathetic and contemptible we are to have been born alone and naked on this cruel earth, born without claws, tusks, or strength. We would have been long gone had it not been for our ability to disremember, to banish from our hearts the fact that to simply exist is agony and tribulation in itself, to erase from our heads who we are, what we’ve had to feel happy or sad about, or that we ever had anything to remember.

  One thousand, nine hundred and sixty-three days into his journey, Pran finally forgot Chareeya. Though he would have to roam for another one thousand or so days in order to forget who he was, and to forget all that he had done, felt, laughed or cried about, and how much he had loved a woman whom he had already forgotten.

  One morning, he woke up and all his memories from before the journey had vanished. What remained were only bits and pieces, torn fragments, like how he used to travel up and down the country when he was a child, which was what he was doing now. But, no matter how hard he tried to extract it from his receding well of remembering, he could never recall why a boy that age would have to travel so much. It was all a bit foggy; he vaguely recalled growing up in a large family with several aunts and uncles but sometimes he was confused as to whether he had actually been raised in a pink house full of women. That, and yet no other details came to him. He couldn’t remember where he had come from, when he had started learning to play the guitar, who his friends were; only that he might have had an older or younger brother. When he forced himself to remember, sadness compelled him to stop. There was something painful there, a scar so deep that he was certain he had forced himself to forget it.

  He could remember his father, the man who walked with his head down, back stooped, shoulders slightly curved, one hand always hidden in the pocket of his trousers. And his mother… She was, well, he wasn’t sure, the woman he remembered was a little too old, too strict… No, not strict; indifferent and contemptuous. Then there was a sister, probably a younger sister, beautiful and radiating a sweet scent like some kind of dessert. It was strange that when her image flashed up, everything around her was frozen, motionless, and it was as if he was looking at a still photograph and she was the sole, animated object at its centre. The worst thing about his memory of this sister was the guilt he felt – it constricted his chest and stifled him, made it hard to breathe, and made him want to cry.

  Many times, his memories bubbled up, triggered by familiar details. Once, he sat on the banks of the Ping River from noon till night, gazing at the meandering water that superimposed itself upon his ragged memory of another river. As hard as he tried to remember which river it was, he couldn’t recall its name. He only saw a river that brimmed with limpid water flowing languidly in the balmy sunshine of the cool season; on its surface hovered a thin layer of mist and its bends were carpeted with blooming rafts of water hyacinth. And there was the pale scent of smoke mixed with an evening fragrance that smelled unlike any other place on earth, and Pran was assaulted by a deep longing though he couldn’t quite place what it was that he was longing for.

  And there were many times when he was ambushed by a succession of images that popped up in random order: a field basked in soft sunlight, a Mon rose squandering its petals, a pond skater gliding across the water’s surface, fireflies flickering and flying away in a blue twilight. Sometimes the images came in unexpected sequences: a red praduu tree seemingly blurred by rain, an orange fish struggling to swim inside a tiny glass box, a log at the bottom of a river illuminated by shimmering sunlight, curtains curling and billowing like the tentacles of an octopus, traffic lights switching colours in the melancholic darkness of a deserted city street.

  In the fog that obscured everything, in the overlapping layers of images, there was one thing that remained clear in Pran’s mind, and it became clearer with each passing day: it was the feeling that he had to keep wandering in order to find someone whose identity he couldn’t recall. He could feel the person’s presence even though he couldn’t quite picture their face. He knew only that the person lived in a yellow house, and that he could recall all the details of that house.

  It was an old one-storey house painted yellow, like a sunflower. The rooms inside were also painted yellow and crammed with objects. There was a blue bedroom, sparse, with nothing in it except… Birds. He didn’t know why but small black birds that had lost their way always seemed to end up in that room. At the back, there was a vintage bathtub with bottles of scented oils lined up along its edges. And then there was the smell. He could remember the mournful smell that permeated the rooms – a seductive, mellow, gentle fragrance. And it was a house that didn’t have any mirrors.

  At first Pran assumed it was the house by that river of longing, but he couldn’t match anything between the two images. It was also strange that he felt the house belonged in a mythical forest teeming with blossoms, and with butterflies and birds fluttering through the air in rows. Then there was a chubby cat with short legs, though no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t remember the colour of its fur. The house exuded a feeling unlike any other house he could remember: a feeling that nothing else in the whole world mattered and that everything else was insignificant, a feeling that once he was there he wouldn’t have to go anywhere else, a feeling that he was home. Yet he knew it wasn’t his home. Pran had tried to think about his own home before, several times, but he always emerged empty-handed from the void of his recollection; it was a clean slate, as if in the entirety of his life he had never had a home.

  On some nights he dreamt about a partially obscured face and a woman’s light-brown eye with a grey shadow slashed across its iris. That one eye was so lonely, so fathomless, that he would sob in his sleep and wake up in the mornings with a soaking wet pillow.

  Pran had no way of knowing, while walking through a serene valley in Chiang Rai one morning, that the journey he was about to resume would be his last. It was cold in the vale, tucked within the shadow of the mountains, faint sunshine glittered over the slowly evaporating mist and orange blossoms exhaled a refreshing scent that wafted upon the wind. Pran thought that he wouldn’t mind returning to this place one day. He was almost thirty-two years old and had covered nearly every inch of this small country, where one would hit a border after a day’s travelling. It was only a matter of time before he found himself retracing his footsteps and coming back to where he had once been. Maybe… Maybe there were times when he might even have abandoned his search for that woman whose identity he couldn’t recall, who must be living somewhere, perhaps with someone.

  For a moment, he recalled the light-brown eyes of a Mon* woman he had met at the morning market. Her eyes, her smile… A smile he had never thought existed in the world, a smile that lit up her face the moment their eyes met, a smile that came from a deeper part of her. Maybe… Amused by his own fantasies, he quickly shook them out of his head.

  Vaguely, he recalled that someone had once smiled at him just like that, once upon a time. The frayed memories still bubbled in his mind, like shadows of feelings – battered, blurred, beaten. Sometimes there were images so indistinct they seemed like splinters of memories within memories that flashed through him and vapourised like dewdrops exposed to the glow of the sun. They left behind a feeling like the realisa
tion of losing something precious; a feeling of vertigo, a void in the depth of his heart, followed by something that resembled pain, though he couldn’t place where exactly it hurt.

  A slope led him down a snaking narrow road with an expanse of orange orchards on one side and the world on the other. A large swathe of wild cane grass swayed and sparkled at a bend further along, and beyond there was a creek hidden in a hollow. Pran was slightly sad that he would never have another chance to stroll alongside that creek in the evening and, within his gloomy-blue memory of that creek, he heard the sound of a cello raining down gently.

  He looked around trying to locate the source of the sound, only to find that it wasn’t coming from anywhere. The notes were beseeching, pleading, but the aching melody was also warm, consoling yet somehow desolate and detached. Pran held his breath. He had heard that melody before, but from where? Then the sound of a piano rolled out like water, one drop at a time, dripping, dripping, dripping over the sound of someone whispering: Close your eyes, Pran.

  He closed his eyes and continued walking slowly, letting the exquisite melody guide him as if in flight, weightless, floating, slaloming, just like… Like something he had once felt when he was with someone, once upon a time, someone he still couldn’t remember; a memory so tenuous and delicate it was like holding the tip of a silk thread as it fluttered, twisted and threatened to slip away in a breeze and into oblivion.

  When a grocery pick-up truck – a mobile supermarket carrying an assortment of vegetables, chillies, cucumbers, cabbages, oranges, string beans, dried fish, flip-flops, chequered scarves, lottery tickets, toothpaste, super glue, plastic buckets, clay jars, detergents, northern sausages, fermented beans, cough syrup, and everything in the entire world – came rumbling down the winding road, zigzagging past the bend with the cane grass, Pran didn’t feel a thing as it hit him. The driver, distracted as he was reaching down and groping for the phone he had dropped but instead grabbing a toad that had hitched a ride and putting the slimy creature to his ear, had screamed in panic as his vehicle hit something though he wasn’t sure what it was because Pran’s body was so light, so weightless.

  He flew into the air, suspended for a moment, before descending in featherweight slow-motion and landing gently on the field of cane grass by the road. His landing sent up a cloud of purple-grey pollen that shimmered in the air, then was dispersed, blown away, dissolving like a dream in the mellow breeze, at the same time as Pran’s body sank slowly into the abyss of Schumann’s Opus 47 and into Chareeya’s whisper: I miss you, Pran.

  Suddenly the charred ruins of the loneliness that had long disappeared from his heart returned like a bolt of lightning, filling up the void at the very core of his soul. Prone on his back, Pran watched in confusion as specks of cane grass pollen flew around his body into the sky, twinkling, glistening, iridescent like a nebula being born right before his eyes. In that fragile second, he saw her again, or for the first time, with such immaculate lucidity it was as if she had never been forgotten. He saw her standing in the middle of a blossoming garden, soaking wet in the bright sunshine, in front of a sunflower-yellow house, and she was watching him with her sad and profoundly lonely eyes.

  Millions of memories returned in torrents and crashed inside him as if he was waking from a dream. Each minute he had lost now inundated his mind: a memory of the moon and the stars moving across the sky while she whispered, That star, that’s my star; of her rolling on the floor with happy laughter when she told him she loved him for the first time under the last light of the stars; of her crying over the death of an onion; of her crying amethyst tears in her sleep in a room that contained everything in the world; of her seated on the ground weeding out nut grass next to a ginger cat, with a carpet of Mon rose petals spread out behind them; of a windowless room he had rented from an old man called Uncle Jang; of a boy with sad eyes who had gotten lost in the twilight. And at the precise moment when his heart finally collapsed, she turned towards him, so slowly, an aureole of sunlight dripping into her eyes, and he saw that fissure slashed across her eye.

  Hi, Charee… Pran’s whisper was raspy. So this is his sister, his family, his best friend, his woman, his home, the only beautiful thing he ever had in his life. By design or by fate he had finally met her again. Not since he swam in the womb of the mother he had never known had Pran felt such true tranquility, such unruffled, safe, still, and fulfilling peace. Pran smiled. It was his most tender smile; the same smile he had smiled at her under the flame tree years ago. Then he gently drew in his breath as the glistening particles of pollen that floated across the sky melted away, darkened, waned, and one by one were swallowed up by a darkness that came down like ash.

  I miss you too, Charee.

  XXVII

  Swansong

  C hareeya found herself walking along a narrow rust-coloured road that extended forever in either direction. On both sides, fields of grass rippled in the wind and stretched out to the horizons, like the road itself. The sky was overcast, painted the colour of plums. The clouds were in turmoil and rain drizzled down in a fine curtain. Cold and wet, Chareeya looked down and saw that she wasn’t wearing any shoes. Still, she kept walking, not knowing where she was headed. Then she heard a child laugh. She stopped, looked around her, but saw no one. After that, she didn’t hear anything else but the sound of the wind whistling through the grass.

  Turning around again she found herself lying on the bed in her room, surrounded by a blanket of darkness. The whistling had gone, but the fragrance of rain coming off the wet dirt road in her dream lingered in the room. As she was about to doze off, she heard that laugh again. Chareeya got up and went to the window. Dawn was about to break in a gauzy blue glow. In that spectral fog she saw Chalika seated under Mother’s old pikul tree, a child curled up on her lap.

  As if knowing it was being watched, the child turned and serenely met Chareeya’s gaze. Its mouth moved and it smiled at her tenderly. Chareeya left the window in such a hurry that she didn’t return the smile, running through a mob of shadows that seemed to be waiting for Chalika. Under the pikul tree, in the twinkling of dewdrops that reflected the light of the metropolis, as the black shadows of mice shot past, Chareeya thought she could see Mother. But, as she got closer, it was indeed Chalika she had seen from the window. Lika, sitting by herself. Lika, Chareeya whispered and saw the last stars being blinked away from her sister’s mournful eyes. Lika, that boy… Is he your son?

  Chalika didn’t answer and kept staring into the murky blankness in front of her as if she couldn’t hear Chareeya. Lika, my dear, please talk to me. Lika, I’m sorry, please talk to me. Instead, Chalika shooed away the four people who had been shouting about the same thing over and over again in her head all night long; they had resumed their argument, even louder than before, now arguing over who should stop talking first. Seconds passed and they quietened down. Then, Chalika turned to her sister: No, Charee, he’s not my son. She got up and smiled faintly, He’s your son.

  There was no starlight left in Chalika’s eyes when Chareeya looked into them for the last time. Before she could say anything, Chalika whispered, Let’s go, Madame Chan, I’m sleepy. And she placed her arm on Chareeya’s shoulders, awkwardly. Madame Eng, Chareeya smiled a bright smile and wrapped her arm tightly around her sister’s waist. Together, just like they did in the old days, the two sisters started walking, one step at a time, Madame Eng and Madame Chan, the conjoined twins, together again. And all of a sudden, time ceased to exist and in that febrile second everything that had been deposited at the depths of their streams of memory floated up as if none of it had ever been forgotten.

  All of it, coming up from everywhere: from under the pikul tree that shed its flowers unceasingly; from the wafting scent of pomelo flowers that once tormented Pran during his lonely nights, a long time ago; from the dazzling starlight that had been burned onto the eyes of their parents, forever; from the broken music, a melody cracked and splintered, that echoed in the living room; from the val
ley of the fuchsia storks where the tiny laughter of two girls floated above the bends in the river; from tabaybuya, that abandoned melody and forgotten song. All of it, coming from everywhere right up until the moment Chalika lay down on her bed and… Slept.

  Slept and dreamt that she was walking on the same rust-coloured dirt road that Chareeya had just been on, under the same overcast, plum-coloured sky, between the expanses of fields of grass rippling in the wind. Suddenly, she heard a child laugh. She stopped, turned around to look, but saw no one. Then, when she turned around again, Chalika saw a boy born from the solitary seed of a dream standing before her, on a road the colour of rust, between fields of grass rippling in the wind, under a plum-coloured sky, in a fine mist of rain, and she took his hand and they walked away together, barefoot, on that road that stretched towards eternity, without ever waking up again.

  Chareeya resumed her horticultural mania. She soon buried the metropolis of mice along with the crystallised tears left behind by Mother and Chalika that had shone inexhaustibly from beneath the pikul tree. Within a few months, the house by the river was enveloped within the bloom of a magical garden just like the yellow house had been, and there were still trees on the waiting list since there was no longer enough space in that city of broken dreams. The bitter aroma of ylang-ylang flowers and frangipani sometimes wafted through the property even though neither tree was planted there. And Chareeya also had in store pu-rahong that she had grafted from the very first pu-rahong tree she had seen in her life; the one outside the school from which she hadn’t graduated.

  Then, she summoned someone to come and fix the dried-up fountain and plant pygmy roses around the sculpture of the moody swan, which she had spent nineteen days scrubbing into mint condition. She painted the entire house a pale sunflower yellow, hoping a dim hope that Pran might recognise it if he happened to pass by. She stopped listening to music and threw away those heart-pounding symphonies that had once driven her into a wild world, along with Uncle Thanit’s other broken vinyls, because there wasn’t any music in existence that could bring Pran back. And she never set foot in the kitchen again, because there was nothing that could quench the thirst she felt deep inside her heart.