Gerda tugs at my hand until I let her go. Freed from the world of language and adults, she climbs up and over the swollen black tubes, sliding down sideways. She looks intent and does not laugh.
Her mother in a straw hat and sunglasses makes a thin, watery sunset smile.
Gerda and I go wading. All those islands shelter the bay, so the waves roll onto the shore child-sized, as warm and gentle as caresses. Gerda holds onto my hand and looks down at them, scowling in silence.
Alongside the beach is a grounded airliner, its wings cut away and neatly laid beside it. I take the kids there, and the boys run around inside it, screaming. Outside, Gerda and I look at the aircraft's spirit house. Someone witty has given the shrine tiny white wings.
The surrounding hills still have their forests; cumulonimbus clouds towering over them like clenched fists.
In the evening, thunder comes.
I look out from our high window and see flashes of light in the darkness. We live in one whole floor of my casino hotel. Each of the boys has his own suite. The end rooms have balconies, three of them, that run all across the front of the building with room enough for sofas and dining tables. We hang tubes full of pink sugar water for hummingbirds. In the mornings, the potted plants buzz with bees, and balls of seed lure the sarika bird that comes to sing its sweetest song.
In these last days, the gambling action is frenetic: Chinese, Thai, Korean, and Malays, they play baccarat mostly, but some prefer the one-armed bandits.
At the tables of my casino, elegant young women, handsome young men, and a couple of other genders besides, sit upright ready to deal, looking as alert and frightened as rabbits, especially if their table is empty. They are paid a percentage of the take. Some of them sleep with customers too, but they're good kids; they always send the money home. Do good, get good, we in Cambodia used to say. Now we say, twee akrow meen lay: Do bad, have money.
My casino is straight. My wheels turn true. No guns, says my sign. No animals, no children. Innocence must be protected. No cigarettes or powders. Those last two are marked by a skull-and-crossbones.
We have security but the powders don't show up on any scan, so some of my customers come here to die. Most weekends, we find one, a body slumped over the table.
I guess some of them think it's good to go out on a high. The Chinese are particularly susceptible. They love the theater of gambling, the tough-guy stance, the dance of the cigarette, the nudge of the eyebrow. You get dealt a good hand, you smile, you take one last sip of Courvoisier, then one sniff. You Go Down for good.
It's another way for the winner to take all. For me, they are just a mess to clear up, another reason to keep the kids away.
Upstairs, we've finished eating and we can hear the shushing of the sea.
"Daddy,” Sampul asks me and the word thrums across my heart. “Why are we all leaving?"
"We're being invaded."
So far, this has been a strange and beautiful dream, full of Buddhist monks in orange robes lined up at the one-armed bandits. But now it goes like a stupid kids’ TV show, except that in my dream, I'm living it, it's real. As I speak, I can feel my own sad, damp breath.
"Aliens are coming,” I say and kiss him. “They are bringing many, many ships. We can see them now, at the edge of the solar system. They'll be here in less than two years."
He sighs and looks perturbed.
In this disrupted country two-thirds of everything is a delight, two-thirds of everything iron nastiness. The numbers don't add up, but it's true.
"How do we know they're bad?” he asks, his face puffy.
"Because the government says so and the government wouldn't lie."
His breath goes icy. “This government would."
"Not all governments, not all of them all together."
"So. Are we going to leave?"
He means leave again. They left Denmark to come here, and they are all of them sick of leaving.
"Yes, but we'll all Go together, okay?"
Rith glowers at me from the sofa. “It's all the fault of people like you."
"I made the aliens?” I think smiling at him will make him see he is being silly.
He rolls his eyes. “There's the comet?” he asks like I've forgotten something and shakes his head.
"Oh, the comet, yes, I forgot about the comet, there's a comet coming too. And global warming and big new diseases."
He tuts. “The aliens sent the comet. If we'd had a space program we could meet them halfway and fight there. We could of had people living in Mars, to survive."
"Why wouldn't the aliens invade Mars too?"
His voice goes smaller, he hunches even tighter over his game. “If we'd gone into space, we would of been immortal."
My father was a drunk who left us; my mother died; I took care of my sisters. The regime made us move out of our shacks by the river to the countryside where there was no water, so that the generals could build their big hotels. We survived. I never saw a movie about aliens, I never had this dream of getting away to outer space. My dream was to become a man.
I look out over the Cambodian night, and fire and light dance about the sky like dragons at play. There's a hissing sound. Wealth tumbles down in the form of rain.
Sampul is the youngest son and is a tough little guy. He thumps Rith, who's fifteen years old, and both of them gang up on gangly Tharum. But tough-guy Sampul suddenly curls up next to me on the sofa as if he's returning to the egg.
The thunder's grief looks like rage. I sit and listen to the rain. Rith plays on, his headphones churning with the sound of stereophonic war.
Everything dies, even suns; even the universe dies and comes back. We already are immortal.
Without us, the country people will finally have Cambodia back. The walled gardens will turn to vines. The water buffalo will wallow; the rustics will still keep the fields green with rice, as steam engines chortle past, puffing out gasps of cloud. Sampul once asked me if the trains made rain.
And if there are aliens, maybe they will treasure it, the Earth.
I may want to stay, but Agnete is determined to Go. She has already lost one husband to this nonsense. She will not lose anything else, certainly not her children. Anyway, it was all part of the deal.
I slip into bed next to her. “You're very good with them,” she says and kisses my shoulder. “I knew you would be. Your people are so kind to children."
"You don't tell me that you love me,” I say.
"Give it time,” she says, finally.
* * * *
That night lightning strikes the spirit house that shelters our neak ta. The house's tiny golden spire is charred.
Gerda and I come down in the morning to give the spirit his bananas, and when she sees the ruin, her eyes boggle and she starts to scream and howl.
Agnete comes downstairs, and hugs and pets her, and says in English, “Oh, the pretty little house is broken."
Agnete cannot possibly understand how catastrophic this is, or how baffling. The neak ta is the spirit of the hotel who protects us or rejects us. What does it mean when the sky itself strikes it? Does it mean the neak ta is angry and has deserted us? Does it mean the gods want us gone and have destroyed our protector?
Gerda stares in terror, and I am sure then that though she is wordless, Gerda has a Khmer soul.
Agnete looks at me over Gerda's shoulder, and I'm wondering why she is being so disconnected when she says, “The papers have come through."
That means we will sail to Singapore within the week.
I've already sold the casino. There is no one I trust. I go downstairs and hand over the keys to all my guns to Sreang, who I know will stay on as security at least for a while.
That night after the children are asleep, Agnete and I have the most terrifying argument. She throws things; she hits me; she thinks I'm saying that I want to desert them; I cannot make her listen or understand.
"Neak ta? Neak ta, what are you saying?"
"I'm s
aying I think we should go by road."
"We don't have time! There's the date, there's the booking! What are you trying to do?” She is panicked, desperate; her mouth ringed with thin strings of muscle, her neck straining.
I have to go and find a monk. I give him a huge sum of money to earn merit, and I ask him to chant for us. I ask him to bless our luggage and at a distance bless the boat that we will sail in. I swallow fear like thin, sour spit. I order ahead, food for Pchum Ben, so that he can eat it, and act as mediary so that I can feed my dead. I look at him. He smiles. He is a man without guns without modernity without family to help him. For just a moment I envy him.
I await disaster, sure that the loss of our neak ta bodes great ill; I fear that the boat will be swamped at sea.
But I'm wrong.
Dolphins swim ahead of our prow, leaping out of the water. We trawl behind us for fish and haul up tuna, turbot, sea snakes and turtles. I can assure you that flying fish really do fly—they soar over our heads at night, right across the boat like giant mosquitoes.
No one gets seasick; there are no storms; we navigate directly. It is as though the sea has made peace with us. Let them be, we have lost them, they are going.
We are Cambodians. We are good at sleeping in hammocks and just talking. We trade jokes and insults and innuendo, sometimes in verse, and we play music, cards, and bah angkunh, a game of nuts. Gerda joins in the game and I can see the other kids let her win. She squeals with delight, and reaches down between the slats to find a nut that has fallen through.
All the passengers hug and help take care of the children. We cook on little stoves, frying in woks. Albatrosses rest on our rigging. Gerda still won't speak, so I cuddle her all night long, murmuring. Kynom ch'mooah Channarith. Oun ch'mooah ay?
I am your new father.
Once in the night, something huge in the water vents, just beside us. The stars themselves seem to have come back like the fish, so distant and high, cold and pure. No wonder we are greedy for them, just as we are greedy for diamonds. If we could, we would strip-mine the universe, but instead we strip-mine ourselves.
* * * *
We land at Sentosa. Its resort beaches are now swallowed by the sea, but its slopes sprout temporary, cantilevered accommodation. The sides of the buildings spread downward like sheltering batwings behind the plastic quays that walk us directly to the hillside.
Singapore's latest growth industry.
The living dead about to be entombed, we march from the boats along the top of pontoons. Bobbing and smooth-surfaced, the quays are treacherous. We slip and catch each other before we fall. There are no old people among us, but we all walk as if aged, stiff-kneed and unbalanced.
But I am relieved; the island still burgeons with trees. We take a jungle path, through humid stillness, to the north shore, where we face the Lion City.
Singapore towers over the harbor. Its giant versions of Angkor Wat blaze with sunlight like daggers; its zigzag shoreline is ringed round with four hundred clippers amid a white forest of wind turbines. Up the sides of Mt. Fraser cluster the houses of rustics, made of wood and propped against the slope on stilts.
It had been raining during the day. I'd feared a storm, but now the sky is clear, gold and purple with even a touch of green. All along the line where trees give way to salt grasses, like stars going for a swim, fireflies shine.
Gerda's eyes widen. She smiles and holds out a hand. I whisper the Khmer words for firefly: ampil ampayk.
We're booked into one of the batwings. Only wild riches can buy a hotel room in Sentosa. A bottle of water is expensive enough.
Once inside, Agnete's spirits improve, even sitting on folding metal beds with a hanging blanket for a partition. Her eyes glisten. She sits Gerda and Sampul on the knees of her crossed legs. “They have beautiful shopping malls Down There,” she says. “And Rith, technik, all the latest. Big screens. Billion billion pixels."
"They don't call them pixels anymore, Mom."
That night, Gerda starts to cry. Nothing can stop her. She wails and wails. Our friends from the boat turn over on their beds and groan. Two of the women sit with Agnete and offer sympathy. “Oh poor thing, she is ill."
No, I think, she is broken-hearted. She writhes and twists in Agnete's lap. Without words for it, I know why she is crying.
Agnete looks like she's been punched in the face; she didn't sleep well on the boat.
I say, “Darling, let me take her outside. You sleep."
I coax Gerda up into my arms, but she fights me like a cat. Sssh sssh, Angel, sssh. But she's not to be fooled. Somehow she senses what this is. I walk out of the refugee shelter and onto the dock that sighs underfoot. I'm standing there, holding her, looking up at the ghost of Singapore, listening to the whoop of the turbines overhead, hearing the slopping sound of water against the quay. I know that Gerda cannot be consoled.
Agnete thinks our people are kind because we smile. But we can also be cruel. It was cruel of Gerda's father to leave her, knowing what might happen after he was gone. It was cruel to want to be missed that badly.
On the north shore, I can still see the towers defined only by their bioluminescence, in leopard-spot growths of blue, or gold-green, otherwise lost in a mist of human manufacture, smoke, and steam.
The skyscrapers are deserted now, unusable, for who can climb seventy stories? How strange they look; what drove us to make them? Why all across the world did we reach up so high? As if to escape the Earth, distance ourselves from the ground, and make a shiny new artifice of the world.
And there are the stars. They have always shone; they shine now just like they would shine on the deck of a starship, no nearer. There is the warm sea that gave us birth. There are the trees that turn sunlight into sugar for all of us to feed on.
Then overhead, giant starfish in the sky. I am at a loss, choy mae! What on Earth is that? They glow in layers, orange red green. Trailing after them in order come giant butterflies glowing blue and purple.Gerda coughs into silence and stares upward.
Cable cars. Cable cars strung from Mt. Fraser, to the shore and on to Sentosa, glowing with decorative bioluminescence.
Ampil ampayk, I say again and for just a moment, Gerda is still.
I don't want to go. I want to stay here.
Then Gerda roars again, sounding like my heart.
The sound threatens to shred her throat. The sound is inconsolable. I rock her, shush her, kiss her, but nothing brings her peace.
You too, Gerda, I think. You want to stay too, don't you? We are two of a kind.
For a moment, I want to run away together, Gerda and me, get across the straits to Johor Bahu, hide in the untended wilds of old palm-oil plantations.
But now we have no money to buy food or water.
I go still as the night whispers its suggestion.
I will not be cruel like her father. I can go into that warm sea and spread myself among the fishes to swim forever. And I can take you with me, Gerda.
We can be still, and disappear into the Earth.
I hold her out as if offering her to the warm birthsea. And finally, Gerda sleeps, and I ask myself, will I do it? Can I take us back? Both of us?
Agnete touches my arm. “Oh, you got her to sleep! Thank you so much.” Her hand first on my shoulder, then around Gerda, taking her from me, and I can't stop myself tugging back, and there is something alarmed, confused around her eyes. Then she gives her head a quick little shake, dismissing it.
I would rather be loved for my manliness than for my goodness. But I suppose it's better than nothing and I know I will not escape. I know we will all Go Down.
* * * *
The next day we march, numb and driven by something we do not understand.
For breakfast, we have Chinese porridge with roasted soya, nuts, spices, and egg. Our last day is brilliantly sunny. There are too many of us to all take the cable car. Economy class, we are given an intelligent trolley to guide us, carrying our luggage or our children. It
whines along the bridge from Sentosa, giving us relentless tourist information about Raffles, independence in 1965, the Singapore miracle, the coolies who came as slaves but stayed to contribute so much to Singapore's success.
The bridge takes us past an artificial island full of cargo, cranes, and wagons, and on the main shore by the quays is a squash of a market with noodle stalls, fish stalls, and stalls full of knives or dried lizards. Our route takes us up Mt. Fraser, through the trees. The monkeys pursue us, plucking bags of bananas from our hands, clambering up on our carts, trying to open our parcels. Rith throws rocks at them.
The dawn light falls in rays through the trees as if the Buddha himself was overhead, shedding radiance. Gerda toddles next to me, her hand in mine. Suddenly she stoops over and holds something up. It is a scarab beetle, its shell a shimmering turquoise green, but ants are crawling out of it. I blow them away. “Oh, that is a treasure, Gerda. You hold onto it, okay?"
There will be nothing like it where we are going.
Then, looking something like a railway station, there is the Singapore terminal dug into the rock of the outcropping. It yawns wide open, to funnel us inside. The concrete is softened by a screen of branches sweeping along its face—very tasteful and traditional, I think, until I touch them and find that they are made of moldform.
This is Singapore, so everything is perfectly done. Pamper yourself, a sign says in ten different languages. Breathe in an Air of Luxury.
Beautiful concierges in blue-gray uniforms greet us. One of them asks, “Is this the Sonn family?” Her face is so pretty, like Gerda's will be one day, a face of all nations, smiling and full of hope that something good can be done.
"I'm here to help you with check-in, and make sure you are comfortable and happy.” She bends down and looks into Gerda's eyes but something in them makes her falter; the concierge's smile seems to trip and stumble.
Nightmarishly, her lip gloss suddenly smears up and across her face, like a wound. It feels as though Gerda has somehow cut her.
FSF, October-November 2009 Page 13
