Street Music

by Timothy Hallinan

  There’s only one other person in the room. She saw him here earlier today, when the man she wanted was in there, too, before the cop attacked her: a lanky, too-thin old man with a beaky nose and long, straight, gray-streaked hair parted just above the ear on one side and then pasted across his skull with some kind of grease, right to left, as though he hopes people will think it grew that way. His mouth pulls down on both sides, so sharply it looks like the corners are weighted somehow. A bottle of beer, obviously cold from the way it sweats, stands on the bar in front of him. But he’s not drinking, not talking, not even holding the bottle, just sitting there with his elbows on the bar and his fingertips at his temples, leaning forward and studying the bar’s wooden surface; it almost looks like he’s staring down into water or something transparent, reading a message that’s been written there. The woman moves repetitively—pull a glass from the water, shake it, wipe it dry, turn it upside down, line it up on the shelf, turn back to the sink, pull another glass from the water. She doesn’t seem to be thinking about what she’s doing, and she never glances at the man. The two of them could be on opposite sides of Bangkok, she thinks, for all the attention they pay to each other. Either they’re strangers or they know each other so well that everything has been said too many times; they’ve used each other up. The lights set high on the walls are off; there’s just the glow from a couple of the milky tubes on the ceiling above the bar, making them both look as pale and shadowless as ghosts.

  Hom gets a little sprinkling of fear-bumps on her arms, a prickle at the back of her neck. They both, especially the thin old man, really do look like—

  Breaking the rhythm of her routine, the woman places one more glass on the shelf and then stretches her arms wide, fists closed like someone who’s just waking up. She reaches deep into the sink and comes up with her hand empty, her arm glistening wet. She’s obviously pulled the plug. She wipes her arms briskly with the other end of the towel and drops it into something behind the bar, and then she leans over and raps her knuckles several times on the bar, just inches from the thin man’s beer. The man sits up, blinking like someone who’s received an unexpected slap. Then he blows out a lot of air, his cheeks belled out, and takes a survey of the room as though he’s surprised to find it empty. Hom ducks aside as his eyes near the window, and when she dares to look in again he’s up off his stool, the beer bottle upended in his mouth. The gray-haired woman watches without any apparent interest, just following his movements. When he puts the bottle on the bar, sharply enough that Hom can hear it through the glass, the gray-haired woman turns around, bends down, and comes up with another bottle, which she pops open beneath the edge of the bar. She hands it to him, grabs his empty bottle, and drops it into something that’s out of sight. Then she reaches under the bar again, and the overhead lights go off.

  And Hom is backing up as fast as she can, turning and stepping down from the curb and scurrying across the street, not so full of people now, until she’s once again in front of the bar that plays the loud music. She sits, huddled tightly, arms wrapped around her knees to make herself smaller, and finds that the men who are taking down the night market have removed a section that would have blocked her view of the door to the bar. In a moment, the door across the way opens and the woman sticks her head out, looking up and down the street as though she expects someone to run up with a gun to rob the place. When she finally comes through the doorway she’s followed by the old man, who still has the bottle in his hand, hanging loosely, as though forgotten. The woman uses three keys to secure the door as the old man stands there, looking at something invisible hanging in the air at chest-level, and then the woman turns to him and pats his cheek, as though to get his attention. He starts, obviously surprised, and his eyes come up to her. She says something, eyebrows raised in a question, and he nods a yes. She returns his nod briskly, like someone who has settled something, and they separate, the bartender going to Hom’s left, toward Silom, and the thin old man trudging slowly, even aimlessly, in the other direction. In a moment or two, though, he turns around to see the bartender go right, up Silom and out of sight, and then he comes back, walking carefully with his eyes on the sidewalk as though he’s making sure there’s nothing that might trip him, until he’s in front of the bar again. He leans back against the window and slowly slides down into a sitting position, bottle in hand and knees upraised and folded, as angular as a grasshopper’s. He passes his hand over his hair, smoothing it right to left, lowers his head so he’s looking down at himself, and leaves it there. His eyes could be closed, or he could be studying something on the pavement.

  Not wanting him to see her watching him, she puts the bag over her shoulder and begins to rise as he sits, but he’s obviously lost in his thoughts or stranded in an empty moment, so she stays where she is and studies him. His head is tilted downward at such a steep angle that she can see a patch of bare scalp at the crown of his head, behind the long plastered strands of hair. He probably doesn’t know he has it, she thinks, and without being conscious of it she reaches up and runs exploring fingers over her own head, still reassuringly covered in stiff, graying hair. For a moment, it seems that there’s a kind of thread running from him to her, but then a man and a young woman walk between them and the thread is broken. The notion vanishes. There they are, just the two of them, each of them old and alone, sitting on opposite sides of a road that could be a million miles wide. Nothing connects them. He doesn’t know she exists.

  Still, she stays put. He seems as abandoned as a collapsing house. She knows what it is to lose everyone she ever loved. He should be a grandfather or even a great-grandfather with his children’s children around him, giving him a sort of immortality, a resemblance or a tone of voice passed from one person to another, the way, back in the village, she had seen fathers’ eyes in their sons’. A footprint in time that would last longer than the old man would. Instead, here they are, the two of them: dead ends.

  For a moment, that warm house with the dirt floor surrounds her again, but a blink chases it away. So she rises with a grunt and a wince against the pain in her leg and the stiffness that’s patiently accumulated in her knees, and she heads up Patpong One, away from Silom, toward the cross street that leads to Patpong Two, heading for Surawong and then the Rama IV Road to the park. Turning toward Patpong Two will take her in the wrong direction—to her right, although the park is to her left—but she does it anyway: it’s become a habit now, whenever she feels someone might be watching her. Try not to leave a trail. Take routes that allow you to double back without seeming to look behind you. At this point in her life she has no walls, no door she can lock behind her.

  When she reaches the corner she glances back. The thin old man is still sitting, his knees jackknifed up and his arms crossed over them. He looks like he might sit there until the bar opens in the morning. The bottle dangles from one finger jammed into its neck. His eyes seem to be closed, but then he leans his head back and brings the empty hand up to scour his face, and she sees that he’s wide-eyed and looking at nothing. It’s the attitude of someone who is very, very tired, someone who is no longer waiting for anything, someone who probably feels—as she does—surrounded by nothing. For an instant she has an impulse to go back and talk to him, ask how he is, but then she remembers what she looks like now, who she is now, and without thinking about it she reaches inside the big dress to pat the paper-wrapped tablets in her pocket.

  One. Two. Three. Smoke or swallow? One or two? She can almost feel it already. Her joy at the sheer fact of possessing them drives the old man from her mind and she lumbers off down the street to make her dogleg toward the park, her heart pounding in anticipation of the moment, not too long after she’s taken the first one, when the terrifying whisperers, the demons who always visit her first, give way at last to the street music.

  Interlude

  NOCTURNES

  8

  Green Screen

  Later in his lif
e, whenever Rafferty looks back on the events that followed his fight with Campeau, they seem like part of a long, dim night sequence filmed in “green screen,” the magical technique that allows actors to put down their donuts or their crossword puzzles or their organic kale smoothies, walk eight or ten steps, and dodge nonexistent meteorites or fight invisible dinosaurs without messing up their hair. In his memory, all the things he saw too late or failed to anticipate had been looming right behind him on that screen—not always something terrifying, but something important that he’d missed, something invisible to him, something that might have changed the course of events, and he could see it only in hindsight, when the special effects were all in place.

  And, in fact, when he forces himself to think about that time, he realizes that much of what happened then—both to him and to others—had happened at night.

  Rose wakes up in almost total darkness. Automatically, in a new habit that already seems lifelong, she holds her breath until she hears the baby exhale, and then she slowly extends her arm to let her fingers brush the little fence of couch cushions that Fon built to surround him so Rose can’t accidentally roll over on him and because he seems happier when he’s enclosed by softness. He’s content to be in the crib when he’s awake and has some attention, but he won’t sleep there. She curls her fingers into a soft fist to get her nails, clipped shorter than they’ve ever been, out of the way, and moves her hand, a fraction of an inch at a time, until she touches the warm, soft skin of his cheek and the finespun flaxen hair he was born with, absolutely straight, standing at vertical attention atop his head as though his toe were in a socket. Poke had laughed the first time he saw the baby and then stopped abruptly, afraid he’d committed some un-fatherlike sin until she started to laugh, too. She feels, a little sadly, that it was one of the closest moments they’d shared since she and the baby came home.

  The moment the palm of her hand senses the child’s warmth, even before her fingers find the skin and the erect, startlingly soft bristle of hair, she has an overwhelming sense of reconnection, as though she’s found a bit of herself. But then she’s all business again, verifying that her child is sleeping on his back, as all the women say he should.

  No, not a bit of herself, not anymore, but someone new, complicated, and demanding, right there beside her as though she had dreamed him into being. And now it—he—is actually present, warm and solid and within reach, breathing into the darkness and seeing—what? The faces of the women who have surrounded him almost since he was born? The bright pool of daylight that edges its way through the room’s sole window, partly blocked by the air conditioner Rafferty put there? Or the warm darkness from the time before all that, time marked and divided by her breathing and the beating of her heart, the darkness in which the child had floated until he emerged, squalling angrily at the interruption of his long meditation, into this noisy, stop-and-start world?

  Maybe, she thinks, maybe at this age, when he’s still so new, he dreams about some past life. There must be a week or two before past lives disappear completely, shouldered aside by the details of the new world into which he’s been born.

  It would have been a blameless life, she hopes, a life that sent him into this one with a comfortable stockpile of good karma. Although, to be candid with herself, she’s never been able to visualize a truly blameless life except, perhaps, for the Buddha, a very few priests, and children who died in infancy. She energetically leaps past that thought and settles for a life that was good on balance, a life in which others, at least at times, had meant more than oneself, hard as that is to imagine. She certainly hasn’t lived that way.

  Running through the list of people she knows, she can only think of one who fits the description, and that’s Fon. And even for Fon, this is a new phase; back in the old days in the bars she’d been nicknamed thī̀ peid k¯hwad, “the bottle opener,” because of her skill at prying customers away from their regular girls, most frequently during the regular’s turn on the stage. Late one night, not long before Rose met Rafferty, a woman had looked across the room from the stage to see Fon waltzing toward the exit with her arm around one of the dancer’s repeat customers. In the time it took to blink, the dancer had taken a flying leap into the middle of the customers, zigzagged to the bar, and gone after Fon with the first thing she could grab—a cocktail fork—which she sank into Fon’s shoulder before the larger brawl broke out between the cliques of women who coexisted so uneasily in the bar. When it was over, the wayward man was clucking maternally and using a wad of paper napkins to apply pressure to Fon’s shoulder as they left together, and the woman who’d stabbed her was in the dark, malodorous bathroom holding an ice cube to a split lower lip.

  I lived that way, she thinks, feeling the warmth of her child’s breath on her hand. I stole customers from girls I didn’t like. I lied to the men. What karma have I accumulated?

  She adjusts the little valley of cushions, just to be doing something, and suddenly remembers where the cushions came from.

  Poor Poke. The couch was lumpy even with cushions.

  It must be late. No women are chatting in the other room, keeping Poke awake. (Poor Poke.) No muted back-and-forth in strange accents seeps in from Miaow’s room. She’s never seen Miaow work this hard. The girl had been almost obsessed when she played Ariel in The Tempest, fixated on understanding every word the character said and every thought behind it so that she could speak the lines as though she’d thought of them at just that moment, while all the other actors seemed to be reciting something that had been chiseled into an ancient tablet half a mile away. Julie, the girl she’d played in Small Town, had been easier: Julie hadn’t seen one-fiftieth as much of life as Miaow had, but she’d only been a little older and she had a soft heart, like the one Miaow tries so hard to hide. Also, the English that Julie spoke was a lot like the English Miaow had learned from Poke.

  And, of course, Julie fell in love during the play, which was something that had been happening to Miaow at the time. With, naturally, Edward, who played Julie’s naive and somewhat dull boyfriend, Ned. Poke is worried that Edward might turn out to be like his awful, womanizing father, but Rose, who learned the hard way how to judge males, knows better: Edward is like Ned, sweet all the way through and a little bit dull, and she’s pretty sure he’s falling, or has fallen, in love with Miaow.

  The baby makes a whispering sound like wet paper tearing, which she knows is his way of snoring. If he’s snoring, she thinks, he’s probably out for at least a few minutes. Moving in slow motion, she slides to the edge of the bed and brings herself to a sitting position with her feet on the floor. Then she holds herself very still and listens for a count of ten. Nothing, and she thinks the baby might have floated up toward consciousness, but then she hears it again, that tearing of soft paper. Feeling like she’s moving underwater, she gets to her feet.

  The apartment is so quiet she can hear her heartbeat, but there’s a faint ribbon of light beneath the door. Not from the living room; that would be much brighter. It must be from the lights over the kitchen counter, at the room’s far end. After one more glance at the bed—dark as the room is, she can see the baby’s shape as though it emits its own pale light—she goes to the door and quietly, just in case Rafferty is actually asleep, she turns the knob.

  The world: blindingly bright and so hot she can feel the air hum. The sky is an unmarked, clean-swept blue, but there are no shadows. It’s as though the sun has dissolved into the sky and turned the whole blue ceiling into a burning source of light. Light from all sides, heat from above and below, radiating from the city’s walls and the paving on the sidewalk.

  And yes, there’s a sidewalk. There is always a sidewalk. And this one is just another sidewalk that might be passing through the center of a nothing, a nothing that’s hot and bright, and she’s sweating, she’s dirty, she’s itchy with fleas and bedbugs, and there’s a hole in her shoe. She can smell herself. She reeks, and she’s out o
f breath. The world is the sidewalk, and the sidewalk is still and empty except for the girl far, far in front of her, the girl she’s trying to catch up with. Miaow is running, and the other girl is walking as though she has all the time in the world. Wherever she’s going, it will wait for her, and no matter how fast Miaow runs she’ll never catch up.

  The girl wears white clothes: a brilliantly white long-sleeve shirt, untucked above loose-fitting, beautifully creased white trousers and spotless white shoes, clothes that have never been soaked with perspiration, that have never brushed up against dirt, clothes that make Miaow think about boats, although she’s never been on a boat. Her clothes are so white Miaow has to squint when she looks at them. So white they hurt her eyes.

  Miaow is already running, hard enough to be short of breath, but she’s not catching up. The girl in white doesn’t seem to be hurrying; she walks at a pace idle enough, casual enough, to suggest that she owns the world she’s passing through.

  The sole of Miaow’s right shoe, the one with the hole in it, detaches itself where it supports her toes and begins to flap. It makes a sound like someone clapping, one, two, three, a kind of sarcastic applause. The heat that’s been baked into the pavement burns her bare toes, and she has to suppress the desire to hop on the other foot. If she doesn’t run, she’ll never catch the . . .

  Far ahead, the girl slows and turns her head. Looking for something.

  Miaow grabs a breath that feels like the air is on fire, forces it down, and shouts something that’s supposed to be wait, but the only sound she can produce is a kind of strangled gargle. When she inhales to call out again, she sees the other girl, whose profile Miaow has glimpsed for only a second, turn away and begin to move again. Miaow tries once more to run, but now she seems to be in waist-deep water, churning heavily and slowly through nothing that she can see, but every step forward is more difficult than the last. Still, she has begun to close the gap—she’s close enough now to see the sheen of the other girl’s immaculate, blunt-cut black hair, the hair Miaow has always wanted, swaying with every step the girl takes, brushing the white cloth of her shirt at precisely the right length—and then the girl turns a corner Miaow hadn’t seen, one that seems to have opened up out of nothing. Somehow the corner is farther away than the girl had been when she disappeared into it, and even though Miaow pushes herself to the limit, by the time she rounds it, the girl is gone. When she does round it, she sees it’s not really a corner at all, it’s a blind alley, a setback of three or four meters that ends abruptly in a high, gray building, the first thing she’s seen that doesn’t seem too bright. It’s the restful hue of pigeon feathers, smooth as polished stone and windowless, and there are columns on either side of the huge, triple-wide door, which is slowly swinging closed. Through the narrowing gap she sees a drift of color, a pink as pale as a blush, the swish of soft fabric, and then the door is closed. She hears laughter.