Windup Girl

by Bacigalupi, Paolo

  His hands are shaking as he opens his bag and pulls out his clothes. Is it old age or excitement that makes him tremble? Clean clothes. Good clothes. A rich man’s white linen suit.

  The clothes were not his, but now they are, and he has kept them safe. Safe for this opportunity, even when he desperately wanted to sell them for cash or wear them as his other clothes turned to rags. He drags the trousers up his bony legs, stepping out of his sandals and balancing one foot at a time. He begins buttoning the shirt, hurrying his fingers as a voice in his head reminds him that time is slipping away.

  “Selling those clothes? Going to parade them around until someone with meat on his bones buys them off you?”

  Hock Seng glances up—he shouldn’t need to look; he should know the voice—and yet he looks anyway. He can’t help himself. Once he was a tiger. Now he is nothing but a frightened little mouse who jumps and twitches at every hint of danger. And there it is: Ma. Standing before him, beaming. Fat and beaming. As vital as a wolf.

  Ma grins. “You look like a wire-frame mannequin at Palawan Plaza.”

  “I wouldn’t know. I can’t afford to shop there.” Hock Seng keeps putting on his clothes.

  “Those are nice enough to come from Palawan. How did you get them?”

  Hock Seng doesn’t answer.

  “Who are you fooling? Those clothes were made for a man a thousand times your size.”

  “We can’t all be fat and lucky.” Hock Seng’s voice comes out as a whisper. Did he always whisper? Was he always such a rattletrap corpse whispering and sighing at every threat? He doesn’t think so. But it’s hard for him to remember what a tiger should sound like. He tries again, steadying his voice. “We can’t all be as lucky as Ma Ping who lives on the top floors with the Dung Lord himself.” His words still come out like reeds shushing against concrete.

  “Lucky?” Ma laughs. So young. So pleased with himself. “I earn my fate. Isn’t that what you always used to tell me? That luck has nothing to do with success? That men make their own luck?” He laughs again. “And now look at you.”

  Hock Seng grits his teeth. “Better men than you have fallen.” Still the awful timid whisper.

  “And better men than you are on the rise.” Ma’s fingers dart to his wrist. They stroke a wristwatch, a fine chronograph, ancient, gold and diamonds—Rolex. From an earlier time. A different place. A different world. Hock Seng stares stupidly, like a hypnotized snake. He can’t tear his eyes away.

  Ma smiles lazily. “You like it? I found it in an antique shop near Wat Rajapradit. It seemed familiar.”

  Hock Seng’s anger rises. He starts to reply, then shakes his head and says nothing. Time is passing. He fumbles with his final buttons, pulls on the coat and runs his fingers through the last surviving strands of his lank gray hair. If he had a comb… He grimaces. It is stupid to wish. The clothes are enough. They have to be.

  Ma laughs. “Now you look like a Big Name.”

  Ignore him, says the voice inside Hock Seng’s head. Hock Seng pulls his last paltry baht out of his hemp bag—the money he saved by sleeping in the stairwells, and which has now made him so late—and shoves it into his pockets.

  “You seem rushed. Do you have an appointment somewhere?”

  Hock Seng shoves past, trying not to flinch as he squeezes around Ma’s bulk.

  Ma calls after him, laughing. “Where are you headed, Mr. Big Name? Mr. Three Prosperities! Do you have some intelligence you’d like to share with the rest of us?”

  Others look up at the shout: hungry yellow card faces, hungry yellow card mouths. Yellow card people as far as the eye can see, and all of them looking at him now. Incident survivors. Men. Women. Children. Knowing him, now. Recognizing his legend. With a change of clothing and a single shout he has risen from obscurity. Their mocking calls pour down like a monsoon rain:

  “Wei! Mr. Three Prosperities! Nice shirt!”

  “Share a smoke, Mr. Big Name!”

  “Where are you going so fast all dressed up?”

  “Getting married?”

  “Getting a tenth wife?”

  “Got a job?”

  “Mr. Big Name! Got a job for me?”

  “Where you going? Maybe we should all follow Old Multinational!”

  Hock Seng’s neck prickles. He shakes off the fear. Even if they follow it will be too late for them to take advantage. For the first time in half a year, the advantage of skills and knowledge are on his side. Now there is only time.

  He jogs through Bangkok’s morning press as bicycles and cycle rickshaws and spring-wound scooters stream past. Sweat drenches him. It soaks his good shirt, damps even his jacket. He takes it off and slings it over an arm. His gray hair clings to his egg-bald liver-spotted skull, waterlogged. He pauses every other block to walk and recover his breath as his shins begin to ache and his breath comes in gasps and his old man’s heart hammers in his chest.

  He should spend his baht on a cycle rickshaw but he can’t make himself do it. He is late. But perhaps he is too late? And if he is too late, the extra baht will be wasted and he will starve tonight. But then, what good is a suit soaked with sweat?

  Clothes make the man, he told his sons; the first impression is the most important. Start well, and you start ahead. Of course you can win someone with your skills and your knowledge but people are animals first. Look good. Smell good. Satisfy their first senses. Then when they are well-disposed toward you, make your proposal.

  Isn’t that why he beat Second Son when he came home with a red tattoo of a tiger on his shoulder, as though he was some calorie gangster? Isn’t that why he paid a tooth doctor to twist even his daughters’ teeth with cultured bamboo and rubber curves from Singapore so that they were as straight as razors?

  And isn’t that why the Green Headbands in Malaya hated us Chinese? Because we looked so good? Because we looked so rich? Because we spoke so well and worked so hard when they were lazy and we sweated every day?

  Hock Seng watches a pack of spring-wound scooters flit past, all of them Thai-Chinese manufactured. Such clever fast things—a megajoule kink-spring and a flywheel, pedals and friction brakes to regather kinetic energy. And all their factories owned one hundred percent by Chiu Chow Chinese. And yet no Chiu Chow blood runs in the gutters of this country. These Chiu Chow Chinese are loved, despite the fact that they came to the Thai Kingdom as farang.

  If we had assimilated in Malaya like the Chiu Chow did here, would we have survived?

  Hock Seng shakes his head at the thought. It would have been impossible. His clan would have had to convert to Islam as well, and forsake all their ancestors in Hell. It would have been impossible. Perhaps it was his people’s karma to be destroyed. To stand tall and dominate the cities of Penang and Malacca and all the western coast of the Malayan Peninsula for a brief while, and then to die.

  Clothes make the man. Or kill him. Hock Seng understands this, finally. A white tailored suit from Hwang Brothers is nothing so much as a target. An antique piece of gold mechanization swinging on your wrist is nothing if not bait. Hock Seng wonders if his sons’ perfect teeth still lie in the ashes of Three Prosperities’ warehouses, if their lovely time pieces now attract sharks and crabs in the holds of his scuttled clipper ships.

  He should have known. Should have seen the rising tide of bloodthirsty subsects and intensifying nationalism. Just as the man he followed two months ago should have known that fine clothes were no protection. A man in good clothes, a yellow card to boot, should have known that he was nothing but a bit of bloodied bait before a Komodo lizard. At least the stupid melon didn’t bleed on his fancy clothes when the white shirts were done with him. That one had no habit of survival. He forgot that he was no longer a Big Name.

  But Hock Seng is learning. As he once learned tides and depth charts, markets and bio-engineered plagues, profit maximization and how to balance the dragon’s gate, he now learns from the devil cats who molt and fade from sight, who flee their hunters at the first sign of danger.
He learns from the crows and kites who live so well on scavenge. These are the animals he must emulate. He must discard the reflexes of a tiger. There are no tigers except in zoos. A tiger is always hunted and killed. But a small animal, a scavenging animal, has a chance to strip the bones of a tiger and walk away with the last Hwang Brothers suit that will ever cross the border from Malaya. With the Hwang clan all dead and the Hwang patterns all burned, nothing is left except memories and antiques, and one scavenging old man who knows the power and the peril of good appearance.

  An empty cycle rickshaw coasts past. The rickshaw man looks back at Hock Seng, eyes questioning, attracted by the Hwang Brothers fabrics that flap off Hock Seng’s skinny frame. Hock Seng raises a tentative hand. The cycle rickshaw slows.

  Is it a good risk? To spend his last security so frivolously?

  There was a time when he sent clipper fleets across the ocean to Chennai with great stinking loads of durians because he guessed that the Indians had not had time to plant resistant crop strains before the new blister rust mutations swept over them. A time when he bought black tea and sandalwood from the river men on the chance that he could sell it in the South. Now he can’t decide if he should ride or walk. What a pale man he has become! Sometimes he wonders if he is actually a hungry ghost, trapped between worlds and unable to escape one way or the other.

  The cycle rickshaw coasts ahead, the rider’s blue jersey shimmering in the tropic sun, waiting for a decision. Hock Seng waves him away. The rickshaw man stands on his pedals, sandals flapping against calloused heels and accelerates.

  Panic seizes Hock Seng. He raises his hand again, chases after the rickshaw. “Wait!” His voice comes out as a whisper.

  The rickshaw slips into traffic, joining bicycles and the massive shambling shapes of elephantine megodonts. Hock Seng lets his hand fall, obscurely grateful that the rickshaw man hasn’t heard, that the decision of spending his last baht has been made by some force larger than himself.

  All around him, the morning press flows. Hundreds of children in their sailor suit uniforms stream through school gates. Saffron-robed monks stroll under the shade of wide black umbrellas. A man with a conical bamboo hat watches him and then mutters quietly to his friend. They both study him. A trickle of fear runs up Hock Seng’s spine.

  They are all around him, as they were in Malacca. In his own mind, he calls them foreigners, farang. And yet it is he who is the foreigner here. The creature that doesn’t belong. And they know it. The women hanging sarongs on the wires of their balconies, the men sitting barefoot while they drink sugared coffee. The fish sellers and curry men. They all know it, and Hock Seng can barely control his terror.

  Bangkok is not Malacca, he tells himself. Bangkok is not Penang. We have no wives, or gold wristwatches with diamonds, or clipper fleets to steal anymore. Ask the snakeheads who abandoned me in the leech jungles of the border. They have all my wealth. I have nothing. I am no tiger. I am safe.

  For a few seconds he believes it. But then a teak-skinned boy chops the top off a coconut with a rusty machete and offers it to Hock Seng with a smile and it’s all Hock Seng can do not to scream and run.

  Bangkok is not Malacca. They will not burn your warehouses or slash your clerks into chunks of shark bait. He wipes sweat off his face. Perhaps he should have waited to wear the suit. It draws too much attention. There are too many people looking at him. Better to fade like a devil cat and slink across the city in safe anonymity, instead of strutting around like a peacock.

  Slowly the streets change from palm-lined boulevards to the open wastelands of the new foreigner’s quarter. Hock Seng hurries toward the river, heading deeper into the manufacturing empire of white farang.

  Gweilo, yang guizi, farang. So many words in so many languages for these translucent-skinned sweating monkeys. Two generations ago when the petroleum ran out and the gweilo factories shut down, everyone assumed they were gone for good. And now they are back. The monsters of the past returned, with new toys and new technologies. The nightmares his mother threatened him with, invading Asiatic coasts. Demons truly; never dead.

  And he goes to worship them: the ilk of AgriGen and PurCal with their monopolies on U-Tex rice and TotalNutrient Wheat; the blood-brothers of the bioengineers who generipped devil cats from storybook inspiration and set them loose in the world to breed and breed and breed; the sponsors of the Intellectual Property Police who used to board his clipper fleets in search of IP infringements, hunting like wolves for unstamped calories and generipped grains as though their engineered plagues of cibiscosis and blister rust weren’t enough to keep their profits high…

  Ahead of him, a crowd has formed. Hock Seng frowns. He starts to run, then forces himself back to a walk. Better not to waste his calories, now. A line has already formed in front of the foreign devil Tennyson Brothers’ factory. It stretches almost a li, snaking around the corner, past the bicycle gear logo in the wrought-iron gate of Sukhumvit Research Corporation, past the intertwined dragons of PurCal East Asia, and past Mishimoto & Co., the clever Japanese fluid dynamics company that Hock Seng once sourced his clipper designs from.

  Mishimoto is full of windup import workers, they say. Full of illegal generipped bodies that walk and talk and totter about in their herky-jerky way—and take rice from real men’s bowls. Creatures with as many as eight arms like the Hindu gods, creatures with no legs so they cannot run away, creatures with eyes as large as teacups which can only see a bare few feet ahead of them but inspect everything with enormous magnified curiosity. But no one can see inside, and if the Environment Ministry’s white shirts know, then the clever Japanese are paying them well to ignore their crimes against biology and religion. It is perhaps the only thing a good Buddhist and a good Muslim and even the farang Grahamite Christians can agree on: windups have no souls.

  When Hock Seng bought Mishimoto’s clipper ships so long ago, he didn’t care. Now he wonders if behind their high gates, windup monstrosities labor while yellow cards stand outside and beg.

  Hock Seng trudges down the line. Policemen with clubs and spring guns patrol the hopefuls, making jokes about farang who wish to work for farang. Heat beats down, merciless on the men lined up before the gate.

  “Wah! You look like a pretty bird with those clothes.”

  Hock Seng starts. Li Shen and Hu Laoshi and Lao Xia stand in the line, clustered together. A trio of old men as pathetic as himself. Hu waves a newly rolled cigarette in invitation, motioning him to join them. Hock Seng nearly shakes at the sight of the tobacco, but forces himself to refuse it. Three times Hu offers, and finally Hock Seng allows himself to accept, grateful that Hu is in earnest, and wondering where Hu has found this sudden wealth. But then, Hu has a little more strength than the rest of them. A cart man earns more if he works as fast as Hu.

  Hock Seng wipes the sweat off his brow. “A lot of applicants.”

  They all laugh at Hock Seng’s dismay.

  Hu lights the cigarette for Hock Seng. “You thought you knew a secret, maybe?”

  Hock Seng shrugs and draws deeply, passes the cigarette to Lao Xia. “A rumor. Potato God said his elder brother’s son had a promotion. I thought there might be a niche down below, in the slot the nephew left behind.”

  Hu grins. “That’s where I heard it, too. ‘Eee. He’ll be rich. Manage fifteen clerks. Eee! He’ll be rich.’ I thought I might be one of the fifteen.”

  “At least the rumor was true,” Lao Xia says. “And not just Potato God’s nephew promoted, either.” He scratches the back of his head, a convulsive movement like a dog fighting fleas. Fa’ gan‘s gray fringe stains the crooks of his elbows and peeps from the sweaty pockets behind his ears where his hair has receded. He sometimes jokes about it: nothing a little money can’t fix. A good joke. But today he is scratching and the skin behind his ears is cracked and raw. He notices everyone watching and yanks his hand down. He grimaces and passes the cigarette to Li Shen.

  “How many positions?” Hock Seng asks.

&n
bsp; “Three. Three clerks.”

  Hock Seng grimaces. “My lucky number.”

  Li Shen peers down the line with his bottle-thick glasses. “Too many of us, I think, even if your lucky number is 555.”

  Lao Xia laughs. “Amongst the four of us, there are already too many.” He taps the man standing in line just ahead of them. “Uncle. What was your profession before?”

  The stranger looks back, surprised. He was a distinguished gentleman, once, by his scholar’s collar, by his fine leather shoes now scarred and blackened with scavenged charcoal. “I taught physics.”

  Lao Xia nods. “You see? We’re all overqualified. I oversaw a rubber plantation. Our own professor has degrees in fluid dynamics and materials design. Hu was a fine doctor. And then there is our friend of the Three Prosperities. Not a trading company at all. More like a multi-national.” He tastes the words. Says them again, “Multi-national.” A strange, powerful, seductive sound.

  Hock Seng ducks his head, embarrassed. “You’re too kind.”

  “Fang pi.” Hu takes a drag on his cigarette, keeps it moving. “You were the richest of us all. And now here we are, old men scrambling for young men’s jobs. Every one of us ten thousand times overqualified.”

  The man behind them interjects, “I was executive legal council for Standard & Commerce.”

  Lao Xia makes a face. “Who cares, dog fucker? You’re nothing now.”

  The banking lawyer turns away, affronted. Lao Xia grins, sucks hard on the hand-rolled cigarette and passes it again to Hock Seng. Hu nudges Hock Seng’s elbow as he starts to take a puff. “Look! There goes old Ma.”

  Hock Seng looks over, exhales smoke sharply. For a moment he thinks Ma has followed him, but no. It is just coincidence. They are in the farang factory district. Ma works for the foreign devils, balancing their books. A kink-spring company. Springlife. Yes, Springlife. It is natural that Ma should be here, comfortably riding to work behind a sweating cycle-rickshaw man.