CHIN OIL

by

George Guthridge

-1595-

How aware she was of the day! Oranges like lanterns above the path that wended amid Ayutthaya's lawns. Odor of mimosa, orchid, tapioca. She even could hear the beating wings of the butterflies that followed her up from the river. Never before in this life or any other, she decided, had her senses been so acute. A day to remember.

Stonemasons and women mixing mortar stopped work on the gate and moved aside, wordless, eyes downcast, as she shuffled past, awkward in her pregnancy. How confident of her love was Lord Samut, she told herself, letting her walk to her new home alone!

Her life was just as her brother, now a soldier in the king's army, had predicted when they were children. Whenever he divided up an orange, she invariably received the last piece. He would laugh and tease her, for that told her future: lucky in love.

This was not as she had imagined--releasing a Phii Tai Thang Klom ghost and being part of a nobleman's house forever. She always felt she would marry a farmer. But in many ways the turn of events transcended her childhood dreams.

Compared to the balance of the world, what Samut asked in return for all he had given her was no more than a falling leaf. She was but a northern hill woman, a Shaw Karen, and poor even by tribal standards. Unworthy even to touch his shadow. He had given her parents a fine farm. Her brother, a place of leadership in the army. And her, more than muscular lovemaking beside the river, while moths danced in moonlight. She smiled inwardly, regardless of her fear, a hand on her belly.

She had touched more than his shadow; for had he not often told her he loved her? Samutsakorn Charhala was a man of his word, a man of god, a warrior who had helped lead the armies that again freed Siam from the Burmese. She owed him everything, and he asked so little, she assured herself. Release the ghost and live, she and the child, in his house forever.

She wished she could hurry--her knees were trembling--but castle protocol, the pregnancy, and the confines of her sarong dictated small steps. She was relieved to reach the shade beneath the lamyai trees that lined the final path. It seemed to curtain off the curious.

Then she saw Samut, his attendant holding the ever-present tasseled umbrella, and her heart thudded harder. From love, not fear, she decided.

He stopped walking toward her and, sadly smiling, looked at her as he so often did, as though she were delicate as an orchid. She lowered her eyes and head, pressed her palms together, and dipped expertly at the knee despite her belly. He returned the greeting and, taking hold of her fingertips, lifted her to her full height. The setting sun gleamed against the gems of his helmet and vest, and his sarong hugged a muscular waist. God, but she loved him! When he ran his hand down her waist-length hair, she shivered. A shocked whisper went through the crowd, only to end when Samut cast a hard eye their way.

"The day draws to a close," he said softly.

Yes, my lord, she tried to reply but only nodded, afraid her voice would reveal her fear.

A hand on her elbow, he walked her toward the sharpened posts and teak lintels meant for his--their--new home. When they stopped, he seemed loath to let her go, suddenly looking awkward as an adolescent.

Daring to glance up into his downcast eyes, she saw in their sorrow the love she and her pregnancy gave him, and her courage and conviction were renewed. As she turned away, she allowed her fingertips to touch his side, the fine flesh. She descended the ladder into her new home.

At the bottom of the pit was a bed of flowers. She lay down, brought an orchid to her nose and inhaled, trying to slow her heart. The scent reminded her of oranges.

Somewhere a toucan cawed, as if announcing sunset.

She kissed the orchid, closed her eyes and pulled open the special seam in her sarong, exposing her distended navel. She felt as she had that first time Samut took her, she shifting her weight beneath him so he would enjoy her virginity without it impeding him. He was watching her now, she was sure, probably flanked by attendants with torches, but she feared looking up lest she see tears in his eyes. Might he later wish she had not witnessed his weakness? She could not abide hurting him.

Only when she heard the post against the pit did she look up. Five Burmese slaves were wrestling with it, aiming its point toward her belly, ready to free the ghost from deep within her womb, as custom commanded for a castle gate or noble house.

She raised and slightly parted her knees despite the sarong, as if better to assist the release. Petals fluttered down, and she saw Samut's hand above her, his wrist adorned with tattoos--yantra that protected him from human swords and evil spirits.

"I am yours," she whispered. "Forever."

"My love." His voice, tremulous, echoed off the walls, despite the pit being rich and odorous earth rather than rock. "Dearest, deepest love."

As the last petal reached her, she tightened her lips and fists, trying to hold back, but when the slaves let go of the log and it pierced her belly, her scream was so shrill that the crowd drew back in terror. She never saw the young soldier who fought his way to the front and collapsed to his knees, crying, a section of orange cupped in his outstretched hands.

"I lied," he kept saying. "Lied!"

#

-1995-

On the roof of the world, amid a world of roofs, I awaken from Malee again calling me to Ayutthaya.

Instead of being among the graves where she and my son lie, I am once more on red tile beneath a smog-browned sun, a sea of smog around me. Smog chokes the city, suffocates sanity. Engines roar, horns blare. Cancer and cacophony. Each day, Bangkok traffic grows--and eats its own.

As it did, thanks to Laud, with my Malee and our beautiful boy.

The two-way radio crackles from the tiny platformed tent where I keep my things. I relegate my hatred to its sacred place within my heart and reach inside the tent for the mike.

"Soi Two off Sukhumvit," Sak says.

He has seen her ghost again.

"Roger that." Sak loves when I talk B-Grade Movie. "On my way."

I slip on my flip-flops, slide down the tile, grab hold of a vent pipe, spin toward the back stairs. I wish I were not camped on a sloped roof, but I was too late in the beat-the-smog game and too farang--foreigner-- to score a flat one. I could have stayed in Malee's grocery, but after the traffic took her and Bat and the monks threw me out of Phra Khu I put the place up for lease. Every Lipovitan-D or UFC's Rambuton in Syrup I sold was a bitter memory, every baht I took in a silver teardrop.

Nor could I return to the States, where Malee's nightmares began.

"Samut," she sometimes shrieked when she awakened. "Why--!"

She would lie speechless for several minutes, staring at the ceiling of our chalet but seeming to see nothing, her face and tank top wet with sweat--even though when she worked out on the Nordic Track or Soloflex she rarely perspired. I would hold her, feeling foolish at being so helpless.

So I sold my salon and we came back to Thailand, hoping her agony would end. Now she and our son are gone, the solace of chanting at Phra Khu is gone, and there is no going back--or forward. There is only death. And smog.

I trundle out my 350 from amid the others and roar from my soi--sidestreet--and onto Sukhumvit. When Malee was alive I could not steer a cycle down a deserted straightaway, much less thread through the world's worst traffic. True expertise on a motorcycle in Bangkok depends on not caring if you survive.

I see smoke before I reach the wreck. A truck laden with chicken crates, its driver probably strung out on amphetamines and overwork, has plowed into a Toyota Corolla. Several fallen crates have burst open, and burning chickens flop around. A charred body hangs head-first from the car, arms out like black wings. Three Ruam Katanyu corpse collectors in orange jumpsuits are using fire extinguishers, the car frothy with foam, the Katanyu van's red light blipping through the smoke. A policeman keeps a crowd in check while directing traffic, arms snapping precisely, whistle shrilling.

I have arrived too late.

Sak strolls, hands in pockets, from behind the truck. He is tall for a Thai, his height accented by the composure he emanates--his years as a monk. Above one pocket of his white shirt is embroidered Thai Tours; over the other, Por Teck Tueng Foundation: he alternates between taxiing tourists and collecting corpses, though for three-thousand baht he will combine the occupations and send farang home with a real vacation tale.

The Ruam Katanyu collectors work smoothly, two now loading the smoldering body into the van. Like those of us in the Por Teck Tueng Foundation, with whom they compete for bodies, neither worker wears gloves, despite the possibility of burns or being exposed to contaminated blood. A matter of pride and public scrutiny. Gloves might denote irreverence toward the dead.

"Money grubbers," I say, watching them.

"The living must make a living," Sak replies.

He is right, of course. Mine is merely a competitor's carping; there is only one Ruam Katanyu worker I hate. I did not mean to step on the toes of Thai tradition. The two Foundations, operating since the sixties, combine Buddhist and business principles, but most corpse collectors work more for spiritual merit than for money. In a city whose few ambulances often get stalled in traffic, the collectors cruise the streets, listening to police calls--ready to help the injured but to serve the dead. Assuring that the violently dead receive proper care lessens the chance they will return as vengeful ghosts, and earns collectors indulgences to improve their next life or ease the afterlife of a deceased loved one.

My wife and son did not receive that care. After three days of red tape I found them slabbed among other mangled bodies in the morgue.

My fault.

I summon my courage. "She cause the wreck?"

"Spectators say so." Sak's voice is devoid of emotion.

"Don't tell me any more."

It is so often the same. Malee is at almost every accident along this section of Sukhumvit. Drivers are distracted by a ghost woman wrapped in blue flames, bearing a crying child. I cannot stop trembling.

I close my eyes. I am in a cocoon with Malee, legs entwined, arms around Bat. The three of us naked--safe from a world of ghosts and guilt. But then she whispers in my ear about the woman in the dreams, the one who wants to know why Samut chose her to impregnate. And kill.

The cocoon shatters like thin glass.

"Late again, Mister John?" a too-familar voice sarcastically addresses me.

I open my eyes to see Laud offer Sak a cigarette. Sak drags deeply and returns it, nodding his thanks. Tires and siren screeching, the van shrieks away--as if the dead don't have enough screaming!--and the driver manages fifty meters before being blocked in the snarl. The vehicle sits like a tortoise at a wall, pawing desperately, going nowhere.

"You should unpack your hair dryer and find woman's work," Laud says. "Leave the dead to us."

"Don't start it."

"Or you'll what . . . Mister John." A former professional kick-boxer, he eyes me insolently, his body looking muscular even in the baggy Ruam Katanyu jumpsuit.

Most of my Thai friends cannot pronounce George, so they use what to them is the closest English. Laud, fluent in half a dozen languages, uses my nickname for its derogatory value--as though I were just another john on a sex tour, come to spread indignity and AIDS in the Land of Smiles.

Yet it was he who proposed to Malee and took her virginity before informing her he was married--in a culture where few men of status are willing to marry a non-virgin, regardless of her upbringing and morals.

Bat was Laud's child.

But I was Bat's father.

The monks threw me out for wanting to learn saiyasat--black magic.

They should have expelled me because I never learned not to hate.

"You could kill me." I make sure his eyes follow mine, and I look toward the policeman. "And he would do nothing. Nor would anyone else. Just another stupid farang who picked a fight with the wrong Thai."

Laud smirks, acknowledging the truth of my words, and I have to constrain myself from putting a hand on his head--the ultimate insult to a Theravada Buddhist. Do that, and he will hit me, and I am still too cowardly for suicide. Nor would it make me an avenging ghost; I would not be among the violently dead. Suicide involves contemplation, no matter how brief, which mitigates the violence.

Except Laud would not think of his hitting me as being my suicide. For him it would be murder. Sweet. Simple.

"Would you really want me walking Sukhumvit forever?" I ask.

The smirk fades. His eyes register neither insolence nor anger. They register nothing--he seeking to be a stone wall; and I, a tortoise.

Walking beside Malee as she burns, he knows I mean.

"We had a deal," I remind him.

"You don't pay enough." He has switched from English to Thai. "I'm upping the ante."

This part of Sukhumvit is the only place where I help collect corpses. I work not for money or merit, but to be near Malee. Laud and the other Ruam Katanyu workers had agreed to stay away--for a price. The Chinese businessmen who sponsor the Foundations, and thus achieve merit without doing any collecting, approved the arrangement without knowing its real reason. In the past there were fist fights for bodies. Loss of teeth over loss of life meant loss of face. Territoriality between the two Foundations, even resulting from extortion, made good business sense.

I clench my fists at my sides. Regardless of how futile--and feudal--trying to hit Laud would be.

Sak, always the mediator, steps between us, takes the cigarette from Laud, takes a drag. Laud's arrogance visibily shrinks. He is aware of Sak's background. No one touches, much less harms, a monk. No one.

"How much?" Sak asks.

"More than your Foundation can afford."

"You didn't care about her when she was alive," I tell him. "Why now?"

Laud narrows his eyes toward me. "Because I care that you care."

The admission is more frightening than his physical prowess. Despite seeming carefree and priding themselves on being the world's most humble hosts, Thai men are extremely macho. For him to reveal emotions, especially to a foreigner, shows how deeply I offended him.

"Fucking farang. She'd have been my second wife if you hadn't showed up. "

He is wrong. Thai culture officially no longer recognizes multiple marriage. And Malee--never.

"No amount of money will keep me out of Sukhumvit," he adds. "Bat . . . is mine."

After quietly appraising him, Sak says, "We'll give you chin oil to stay away."

"Big deal. I can get it by the mason jar, if I want."

"This isn't some over-the-counter crap," I tell him in a hard voice.

"You think I don't have connections . . . farang?"

We eye one another, each waiting for the other to make a move.

"We can get chin oil from a golden child," Sak says.

"Sure you can. And in the next life I'll be king."

"You come with us when we extract it," Sak says. "Come--we'll give it to you--and then you leave this section of Sukhumvit alone. Forever."

Laud is suddenly silent. Even the traffic noise seems to still.

#

Though its properties vary with the age and condition of the corpse from which it is extracted, chin oil is colorless and odorless, so viscuous it feels gelatinous, so slow to dilute in another liquid it would never work for spiking drinks quickly. Carefully administered, a drop can turn someone into a love slave. An overdose causes insanity.

I used to think Malee was a love slave. Or just plain crazy.

"Samut!" she'd shriek, and I would hold her until her semi-catatonia broke. She would tell me nothing, nothing.

"You wouldn't understand," she'd sob.

Only once, the morning after we received word that Laud was suing for custody of Bat, did she talk about the nightmares--and then in broken sentences imbued with bitterness.

"Royalty used to create Phii Tai Thang Klom--the most ferocious ghosts of the violently dead. That happens when . . . when a woman's spirit combines with her child's. The nobles would impale pregnant women under tower and palace posts . . . protect the place forever. . . .

"The Burmese sacked Ayutthaya, but Samut drove them out. The capital had to be rebuilt. . . . many pregnant women were sacificed. . . .

". . . I was among them."

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry--I was still too Western to understand--but when she spoke again I had my first real taste of terror.

"I'm still impaled!" she cried. "After all these lifetimes!" She shook the papers at me. "Samut's back too--but meaner, uglier."

Perhaps she was crazy. Perhaps I am. Or perhaps what is crazy is a Western world that believes earthly existence ceases with death.

Is it crazy that Thais see ghosts as natural phenomena? Or that an American wracked with grief would spend every waking moment trying to be near his dead wife and son?

No less crazy than my attempting to figure out how to destroy Laudiwisi Charhala without killing him and risk having his ghost join Malee's among the violently dead. He who, upon our return to Thailand, secretly sent her word to visit him. They would negotiate about the child.

The night of the fiery wreck.

He had never seen the boy he fathered, nor did he care to.

Cared only that he lost a woman to a farang. A hairdresser, no less.

#

Each spade of sacred soil Sak and I unearth in the cemetary is heavy with hate. Buddhists believe in 136 hells. I wish I could send Laud to all of them.

It is a moonless night; Sak and I wear headlamps. Laud scoffs when we offer one. As if his soul is such tempered steel that he sees in the dark.

"Arrogance and ingots," Sak mutters.

Laud is not listening, intent as he is on watching us dig. The graves are shallow, for the burials are temporary. Buddhist cemeteries are filled with the violently dead who might arise and kill others the same way they themselves died. The bodies are interred only until the evil spirit dissipates and relatives are safe to have the body cremated.

Sometimes the dead can be persuaded to release small amounts of essential oil through their chin.

We have come to conjure the spirit of the rarest of corpses: a dead child whose spirit is still trapped in the body and whose dessicated flesh has turned golden. The corpse's chin oil is literally worth its weight in gold.

We work carefully but quickly, knowing that if injury or insanity results from someone's toying with chin oil, the offender is reborn five hundred times as a mad dog. And being caught tampering with Ayutthaya grounds means punishment in this life.

We begin uncovering the golden boy--dead three months. As Laud stoops, my headlamp reflects his greedy eyes. Quivering with rage, I grip the shovel to keep from ramming it into his throat.

Earthly evil first coalesces in the lower extremities, so we leave the golden boy's bottom half buried. We sit him up and, after deeply bowing in a wai several times, palms pressed together and touching the forehead, we use sacred string to tie him to the aged post that marks his grave.

As we peel off the wax death mask, Laud gasps. The infant's features are crimped, the skin so golden that he looks like an idol onto which penitents press squares of gold leaf, traditional in Buddhist temples.

"He's . . . beautiful," Laud says, fumbling an amulet from his shirt and clutching it so tightly he seems about to break its chain.

"He should be," I say. "He's my son."

Laud's face is momentarily blank. Then he moves closer, eyes filling with anger. "You bastard. You dug up my boy!"

He hits me, his hand a blur, and the next thing I know I am on my back on the ground, my T-shirt and the corpse spattered with blood. Sak is holding Laud away from me and saying, "Surely it is Buddha's will that the body never decomposed. Maybe the boy is to have great value for you in death because he was taken so early from you in life."

"Only some faggot farang would dig up my boy." But Laud has shifted his weight backward, his desire for golden-boy chin oil too strong for him to kill me.

"Let's continue," Sak says. "Before the police find us and we all end up in jail."

Laud adjusts his shirt and points toward me. "Later. After you rebury him."

It is not the first time Sak and I have unearthed Bat, and this time we do not intend to return him to the ground. But Laud doesn't know that.

"Get on with it," Laud says. "Let's get the hell out of here."

I wipe my nose, sniff back the blood, and use a toucan's feather to brush dirt from the boy's face, careful not to let my fingers touch the skin. Sak and I circumscribe a holy circle with a second string. He motions for Laud to join us. Laud hesitantly steps inside the circle and stands looking around as if in a cloistered room. Sak and I arrange our things: Candle of Victory, eight drawings depicting holy Pali text--each set equidistant around the string--and the wide-brimmed collecting vial.

We sit crosslegged. Sak and I shine our headlamps through the darkness to make sure we are alone, and then Sak begins to chant softly. The words rise into the night like willow wisps. The dead child seems to watch through his wrinkled, golden lids.

Halfway through the recitation, Sak's features cloud with frustration. Without opening his eyes he holds out a hand toward Laud.

"Give me the amulet," he says. "It interferes with communication."

Reluctantly Laud hands him the triangular stone and chain.

Sak kisses the stone and throws it over his shoulder into the night. Laud lurches up, scanning the darkness to see where it lands. I laugh inwardly--my rage a bomb no one will defuse.

I glance from the boy, to Malee's grave beyond, then to Sak. Do it!

Bat's body slumps forward, the forehead touching Sak's. Sak's hand trembles as he lights the Candle of Victory. Laud moves forward to help, but I gesture him away.

Bat's hands levitate from his sides and he grips Sak's elbows.

Now I struggle to keep from helping when I shouldn't. Sak and I never anticipated really conjuring the child.

Sak accepts the spirit's presence. His trembling lessens, and he maneuvers the vial and lit candle beneath Bat's chin.

As Sak chants, clear liquid drools from the chin into the test tube. I look at Laud; his eyes betray his greed. Sak shifts position, as if to block Laud from disturbing the process. The drool becomes a small but steady stream.

The oil dies to a dribble, then stops, and Sak hands me the vial, which I cork. Laud grabs it.

Sak moves his head away from Bat's, places the candle beneath the boy's hands to release the grip, and the arms fall. Only the strength of the string holds up the body.

"We'll finish here," I tell Laud. "Go."

He eyes me suspiciously. "You see he gets taken care of. Properly."

"Of course."

"I wouldn't want someone . . ."

"Cutting into your monopoly?"

"Especially not you," he says. "Not anyone."

"Wouldn't think of it. But there'll be no second time for you, either."

"Makes it all the more valuable." He lifts the vial into the glow of my headlamp, lips pursed in satisfaction. "I fucked the living shit out of her, you know," he says in English. "The night she died."

"The hell you did. She was on her way to your place."

Countering his ugliness makes me feel ugly, fills me with revulsion and greater guilt. There was a time, Malee once told me, when Laud was quick with pak wan--sweet mouth . . . flattery. But his interest in her was lust, not love. Now, jealousy has displaced the lust.

"Well, I would have fucked her, had she arrived." His face and voice have not changed expression. "We both know that . . . farang."

"She had Bat with her. With him there she wouldn't have touched you no matter what you offered. She would have given him up first."

But why, I ask myself, had I not realized where she was going? I had seen the papers too many times not to know.

Laud snorts. "So you've got it all figured. You take me for a fool." He holds the vial tauntingly in front of me. "I know why you're giving me this. It's not a bribe. You wanted me here. You wanted this to possess me once I leave the circle."

He steps outside the string and uncorks the vial.

I envision a vapor swirling up and choking his neck like a python, but I know the oil is a low-power variety Sak purchased from the Tiger Monk shop in Thonburi--the extraction from Bat merely parlor magic.

"I could drink it," Laud threatens, "and it wouldn't affect me. I'm protected!"

He recorks the vial and pulls up his sleeve. The intricate geometry of his newest protective yantra tattoos is crusted with scab.

"Took out a little insurance, asshole. Just in case you really were digging up a golden boy."

Ever since my training at Phra Khu, I am calm, logical, articulate when I am angriest. I smile a lot.

"And we knew you'd get new yantras," I say in a measured voice, "and that you always use that artist on Soi Si Bamphen. They say his tattoos can stop a knife. I've seen him test it."

"This is one of his finest designs." Laud is admiring his wrist. "Shows my power, affording someone like him."

"He can be bribed, I'm told."

"Everyone has a price. How do you think I get him to give me his best?"

"I paid him to use the needles I gave him" I say. "Infected needles."

For a moment we stare silently at each other. Then he blanches.

"I knew that something as power-charged as a golden child would assure your visiting the tattoo artist." I smile. "Killing you would put you with Malee in the afterlife. But not if you died by suicide--or sickness."

His kick snaps beneath my head and I feel my shoulders wrench as I hit the ground. He leans over, hawks deeply, drools spit into my eyes.

"You think you've infected me? I'll return the favor. Some guys I know go both ways, my friend--and they're not nice people. What you farang call 'rough trade.' They may not be infected--but they'll make sure you end up that way. We'll die together, Mister John."

"I'm not . . . gay," I gasp.

"You will be when they're through with you."

Backing away, he looks around tensely, as wary of the golden boy as of the possibility of my having a gun. He is at the edge of the circle of light and Sak has turned his back to him, busy replacing the wax mask onto Bat's face, when he slowly lifts the vial again and studies it.

Glowering even deeper than before, he strides toward the post, shoves Sak aside, and grabs the mask.

Bat's features are now streaked with discolor rather than being evenly golden-sheened. One of my finer efforts: gold-highlighted evening foundation followed by Shiseido bronzing gel, topped with bronze shimmer facial powder.

Laud wipes his fingers across Bat's cheeks, revealing charred skin, and slaps the mask back down. He crosses to me and kneels, eyes on fire. "I sell this shit," he sticks the tube against my nose, "and people find out it's not what I claim it is, I lose face. Not to mention my bankroll."

Stooping, Sak gently puts a hand on Laud's shoulder.

Laud jabs with an elbow. As Sak drops, clutching his guts, groaning, Laud grips my T-shirt collar and pulls my head up. "Just what did you hope to prove!"

"That I can get to you . . . somehow . . . no matter what . . . you do."

"Not if you're nuts, you won't. Not if you're a goddamn basket case."

He jams the test tube into my mouth. I sputter and slam my fists against the sides of his head. Then I choke, and oil oozes down my throat.

They say chin oil clogs veins and clings to organs so steadfastly an exorcist may die trying to remove it. It courses through me in seconds. My mouth and esophagus flame, and hot pressure pulses behind my eyes. My hips begin involuntarily heaving, my penis is a thermometer about to burst. My testicles are red coals.

"Malee!" I call out.

"My friends will love having you," I hear Laud say, but I no longer see him. Malee is in my arms. We make love with a passion beyond even that of our honeymoon, she crying out not from nightmares but in abandon. Her hips are against mine, lips against mine--the taste and smell of oranges.

Somewhere I hear Laud scream.

I open my eyes briefly--through delirium I see him slumped against the post that marks Bat's and Malee's graves. He is staring at his crotch--his pants stained with blood.

#

I do not live on the roof any longer. Sak hooked up one of those air filters the Japanese build here but claim as their own, and has taken over the grocery. It disgusts me when he feeds me, but I like to watch him work with customers--always the mediator.

The store is open-air front, and I sit all day on the bench at the small marble table, my back against the wall. Customers and passers-by wave and say "Hello, George" as best they can, and on days when the chin oil does not swathe me in dreams, I sometimes manage to smile. No one calls me "John" anymore. Sak must have said something.

I often wonder what became of Laud. Sak says he was carted off to the hospital and then to jail after the police found him by Bat's body. Supposedly he sits staring at his crotch night and day, whimpering about his missing genitals. It can't be pleasant for the other prisoners, given the overcrowded conditions.

Sometimes I hear him howling through five hundred futures.

It is not how I wanted things. I lied about the tattoo needles. I only wanted to make Laud realize there were ways we could get to him if we wished. There are always ways.

I don't know what seized him that night. Sak trundled me away before the police arrived. Was there power or memory in the post that marked the graves? Did Bat and Malee combine into a Phii Tai Thang Klom? Had they somehow called up a ghost from the past?

Malee asked me once: Can a ghost be reincarnated?

She wanted to be buried at Ayutthaya should anything happen to her. I think she sensed her time was coming--the Thais and their awarenesses--and she wished to meet former selves . . . but worried about former spirits.

When the sun clears the building tops and shines through the smog, I bask in the light and think about Malee. What future lives will she have? To the outside world I appear mindless, looking as if through unseeing eyes, but behind the invalid's wall the chin oil created, my days are dreams.

We drive toward Ko Chang, the languid island to the southeast, where I plan to ask her to marry me. I peel an orange. We share the sections, me feeding her; because of the traffic, she dares not take her hands from the wheel.

"They say love binds souls for eternity," she tells me. "Only personalities and relationships change."

She laughs when I offer her the last section, for she knows I often cheat so she gets what she wants.

###

for Noi

I love you