by Ellen Datlow
In her bedroom she extracted one of her many iPods from the tangle of wires and listened to System of a Down, as loud as she could. It helped her sleep. The sound of nu-metal guitars seemed to come roaring out of her own heart.
She was woken up in the sun-drenched morning by the sound of her doorbell many floors down. She heard the housekeeper Jorani call and the door open. Sith hesitated over choice of jeans and top. By the time she got downstairs she found the driver and the housemaid joking with Dara, giving him tea.
Like the sunshine, Dara seemed to disperse ghosts.
“Hi,” he said. “It’s my day off. I thought we could go on a motorcycle ride to the country.”
But not to the country. Couldn’t they just spend the day in Soriya? No, said Dara, there’s lots of other places to see in Phnom Penh.
He drove her, twisting through back streets. How did the city get so poor? How did it get so dirty?
They went to a new and modern shop for CDs that was run by a record label. Dara knew all the cool new music, most of it influenced by Khmer-Americans returning from Long Beach and Compton: Sdey, Phnom Penh Bad Boys, Khmer Kid.
Sith bought twenty CDs.
They went to the National Museum and saw the beautiful Buddha-like head of King Jayavarman VII. Dara without thinking ducked and held up his hands in prayer. They had dinner in a French restaurant with candles and wine, and it was just like in a karaoke video, a boy, a girl, and her money all going out together. They saw the show at Sovanna Phum, and there was a wonderful dance piece with sampled 1940s music from an old French movie, with traditional Khmer choreography.
Sith went home, her heart singing, Dara, Dara, Dara.
In the bedroom, a mobile phone began to ring, over and over. Call 1 said the screen, but gave no name or number, so the person was not on Sith’s list of contacts.
She turned off the phone. It kept ringing. That’s when she knew for certain.
She hid the phone in a pillow in the spare bedroom and put another pillow on top of it and then closed the door.
All forty-two of her mobile phones started to ring. They rang from inside closets, or from the bathroom where she had forgotten them. They rang from the roof terrace and even from inside a shoe under her bed.
“I am a very stubborn girl!” she shouted at the spirits. “You do not scare me.”
She turned up her iPod and finally slept.
As soon as the sun was up, she roused her driver, slumped deep in his hammock.
“Come on, we’re going to Soriya Market,” she said.
The driver looked up at her dazed, then remembered to smile and lower his head in respect.
His face fell when she showed up in the garage with all forty-two of her mobile phones in one black bag.
It was too early for Soriya Market to open. They drove in circles with sunrise blazing directly into their eyes. On the streets, men pushed carts like beasts of burden, or carried cascades of belts into the old Central Market. The old market was domed, art deco, the color of vomit, French. Sith never shopped there.
“Maybe you should go visit your mom,” said the driver. “You know, she loves you. Families are there for when you are in trouble.”
Sith’s mother lived in Thailand and they never spoke. Her mother’s family kept asking for favors: money, introductions, or help with getting a job. Sith didn’t speak to them any longer.
“My family is only trouble.”
The driver shut up and drove.
Finally Soriya opened. Sith went straight to Dara’s shop and dumped all the phones on the blue countertop. “Can you take these back?”
“We only do exchanges. I can give a new phone for an old one.” Dara looked thoughtful. “Don’t worry. Leave them here with me, I’ll go sell them to a guy in the old market, and give you your money tomorrow.” He smiled in approval. “This is very sensible.”
He passed one phone back, the one with video and e-mail. “This is the best one, keep this.”
Dara was so competent. Sith wanted to sink down onto him like a pillow and stay there. She sat in the shop all day, watching him work. One of the guys from the games shop upstairs asked, “Who is this beautiful girl?”
Dara answered proudly, “My girlfriend.”
Dara drove her back on the Dream and at the door to her house, he chuckled. “I don’t want to go.” She pressed a finger against his naughty lips, and smiled and spun back inside from happiness.
She was in the ground-floor garage. She heard something like a rat scuttle. In her bag, the telephone rang. Who were these people to importune her, even if they were dead? She wrenched the mobile phone out of her bag and pushed the green button and put the phone to her ear. She waited. There was a sound like wind.
A child spoke to her, his voice clogged as if he was crying. “They tied my thumbs together.”
Sith demanded. “How did you get my number?”
“I’m all alone!”
“Then ring somebody else. Someone in your family.”
“All my family are dead. I don’t know where I am. My name is . . .”
Sith clicked the phone off. She opened the trunk of the car and tossed the phone inside it. Being telephoned by ghosts was so . . . unmodern. How could Cambodia become a number one country if its cell phone network was haunted?
She stormed up into the salon. On top of a table, the $1,500, no-mess dog stared at her from out of his packaging. Sith clumped up the stairs onto the roof terrace to sleep as far away as she could from everything in the house.
She woke up in the dark, to hear thumping from downstairs.
The sound was metallic and hollow, as if someone were locked in the car. Sith turned on her iPod. Something was making the sound of the music skip. She fought the tangle of wires, and wrenched out another player, a Xen, but it too skipped, burping the sound of speaking voices into the middle of the music.
Had she heard a ripping sound? She pulled out the earphones, and heard something climbing the stairs.
A sound of light, uneven lolloping. She thought of crippled children. Frost settled over her like a heavy blanket and she could not move.
The robot dog came whirring up onto the terrace. It paused at the top of the stairs, its camera nose pointing at her to see, its useless eyes glowing cherry red.
The robot dog said in a warm, friendly voice, “My name is Phalla. I tried to buy my sister medicine and they killed me for it.”
Sith tried to say, “Go away,” but her throat wouldn’t open.
The dog tilted its head. “No one even knows I’m dead. What will you do for all the people who are not mourned?”
Laughter blurted out of her, and Sith saw it rise up as cold vapor into the air.
“We have no one to invite us to the feast,” said the dog.
Sith giggled in terror. “Nothing. I can do nothing!” she said, shaking her head.
“You laugh?” The dog gathered itself and jumped up into the hammock with her. It turned and lifted up its clear plastic tail and laid a genuine turd alongside Sith. Short brown hair was wound up in it, a scalp actually, and a single flat white human tooth smiled out of it.
Sith squawked and overturned both herself and the dog out of the hammock and onto the floor. The dog pushed its nose up against hers and began to sing an old-fashioned children’s song about birds.
Something heavy huffed its way up the stairwell toward her. Sith shivered with cold on the floor and could not move. The dog went on singing in a high, sweet voice. A large shadow loomed out over the top of the staircase, and Sith gargled, swallowing laughter, trying to speak.
“There was thumping in the car and no one in it,” said the driver.
Sith sagged toward the floor with relief. “The ghosts,” she said. “They’re back.” She thrust herself to her feet. “We’re getting out now. Ring the Hilton. Find out if they have rooms.”
She kicked the toy dog down the stairs ahead of her. “We’re moving now!”
Together they all loade
d the car, shaking. Once again, the house was left to ghosts. As they drove, the mobile phone rang over and over inside the trunk.
The new Hilton (which does not exist) rose up by the river across from the Department for Cults and Religious Affairs. Tall and marbled and pristine, it had crystal chandeliers and fountains, and wood and brass handles in the elevators.
In the middle of the night only the Bridal Suite was still available, but it had an extra parental chamber where the driver and his wife could sleep. High on the twenty-first floor, the night sparkled with lights and everything was hushed, as far away from Cambodia as it was possible to get.
Things were quiet after that, for a while.
Every day she and Dara went to movies, or went to a restaurant. They went shopping. She slipped him money and he bought himself a beautiful suit. He said, over a hamburger at Lucky7, “I’ve told my mother that I’ve met a girl.”
Sith smiled and thought: and I bet you told her that I’m rich.
“I’ve decided to live in the Hilton,” she told him.
Maybe we could live in the Hilton. A pretty smile could hint at that.
The rainy season ended. The last of the monsoons rose up dark gray with a froth of white cloud on top, looking exactly like a giant wave about to break.
Dry cooler air arrived.
After work was over Dara convinced her to go for a walk along the river in front of the Royal Palace. He went to the men’s room to change into a new luxury suit and Sith thought: he’s beginning to imagine life with all that money.
As they walked along the river, exposed to all those people, Sith shook inside. There were teenage boys everywhere. Some of them were in rags, which was reassuring, but some of them were very well dressed indeed, the sons of Impunity who could do anything. Sith swerved suddenly to avoid even seeing them. But Dara in his new beige suit looked like one of them, and the generals’ sons nodded to him with quizzical eyebrows, perhaps wondering who he was.
In front of the palace, a pavilion reached out over the water. Next to it a traditional orchestra bashed and wailed out something old-fashioned. Hundreds of people crowded around a tiny wat. Dara shook Sith’s wrist and they stood up to see.
People held up bundles of lotus flowers and incense in prayer. They threw the bundles into the wat. Monks immediately shoveled the joss sticks and flowers out of the back.
Behind the wat, children wearing T-shirts and shorts black with filth rootled through the dead flowers, the smoldering incense, and old coconut shells.
Sith asked, “Why do they do that?”
“You are so innocent!” chuckled Dara and shook his head. The evening was blue and gold. Sith had time to think that she did not want to go back to a hotel and that the only place she really felt happy was next to Dara. All around that thought was something dark and tangled.
Dara suggested with affection that they should get married. It was as if Sith had her answer ready. “No, absolutely not,” she said at once. “How can you ask that? There is not even anyone for you to ask! Have you spoken to your family about me? Has your family made any checks about my background?”
Which was what she really wanted to know.
Dara shook his head. “I have explained that you are an orphan, but they are not concerned with that. We are modest people. They will be happy if I am happy.”
“Of course they won’t be! Of course they will need to do checks.”
Sith scowled. She saw her way to sudden advantage. “At least they must consult fortunetellers. They are not fools. I can help them. Ask them the names of the fortunetellers they trust.”
Dara smiled shyly. “We have no money.”
“I will give them money and you can tell them that you pay.”
Dara’s eyes searched her face. “I don’t want that.”
“How will we know if it is a good marriage? And your poor mother, how can you ask her to make a decision like this without information? So. You ask your family for the names of good professionals they trust, and I will pay them, and I will go to Prime Minister Hun Sen’s own personal fortuneteller, and we can compare results.”
Thus she established again both her propriety and her status.
In an old romance, the parents would not approve of the match and the fortuneteller would say that the marriage was ill-omened. Sith left nothing to romance.
She offered the family’s fortunetellers whatever they wanted—a car, a farm—and in return demanded a written copy of their judgment. All of them agreed that the portents for the marriage were especially auspicious.
Then she secured an appointment with the Prime Minister’s fortuneteller.
Hun Sen’s Kru Taey was a lady in a black business suit. She had long fingernails like talons, but they were perfectly manicured and frosted white.
She was the kind of fortuneteller who is possessed by someone else’s spirit. She sat at a desk and looked at Sith as unblinking as a fish, both her hands steepled together. After the most basic of hellos, she said, “Dollars only. Twenty-five thousand. I need to buy my son an apartment.”
“That’s a very high fee,” said Sith.
“It’s not a fee. It is a consideration for giving you the answer you want. My fee is another twenty-five thousand dollars.”
They negotiated. Sith liked the Kru Taey’s manner. It confirmed everything Sith believed about life.
The fee was reduced somewhat but not the consideration.
“Payment upfront now,” the Kru Taey said. She wouldn’t take a check. Like only the very best restaurants she accepted foreign credit cards. Sith’s Swiss card worked immediately. It had unlimited credit in case she had to leave the country in a hurry.
The Kru Taey said, “I will tell the boy’s family that the marriage will be particularly fortunate.”
Sith realized that she had not yet said anything about a boy, his family, or a marriage.
The Kru Taey smiled. “I know you are not interested in your real fortune. But to be kind, I will tell you unpaid that this marriage really is particularly well favored. All the other fortunetellers would have said the same thing without being bribed.”
The Kru Taey’s eyes glinted in the most unpleasant way. “So you needn’t have bought them farms or paid me an extra twenty-five thousand dollars.”
She looked down at her perfect fingernails. “You will be very happy indeed. But not before your entire life is overturned.”
The back of Sith’s arms prickled as if from cold. She should have been angry but she could feel herself smiling. Why?
And why waste politeness on the old witch? Sith turned to go without saying good-bye.
“Oh, and about your other problem,” said the woman.
Sith turned back and waited.
“Enemies,” said the Kru Taey, “can turn out to be friends.”
Sith sighed. “What are you talking about?”
The Kru Taey’s smile was as wide as a tiger-trap. “The million people your father killed.”
Sith went hard. “Not a million,” she said. “Somewhere between two hundred and fifty and five hundred thousand.”
“Enough,” smiled the Kru Taey. “My father was one of them.” She smiled for a moment longer. “I will be sure to tell the Prime Minister that you visited me.”
Sith snorted as if in scorn. “I will tell him myself.”
But she ran back to her car.
That night, Sith looked down on all the lights like diamonds. She settled onto the giant mattress and turned on her iPod.
Someone started to yell at her. She pulled out the earpieces and jumped to the window. It wouldn’t open. She shook it and wrenched its frame until it reluctantly slid an inch and she threw the iPod out of the twenty-first-floor window.
She woke up late the next morning, to hear the sound of the TV. She opened up the double doors into the salon and saw Jorani, pressed against the wall.
“The TV . . . ,” Jorani said, her eyes wide with terror.
The driver waited by h
is packed bags. He stood up, looking as mournful as a bloodhound.
On the widescreen TV there was what looked like a pop music karaoke video. Except that the music was very old-fashioned. Why would a pop video show a starving man eating raw maize in a field? He glanced over his shoulder in terror as he ate. The glowing singalong words were the song that the dog had sung at the top of the stairs. The starving man looked up at Sith and corn mash rolled out of his mouth.
