Breathing Water: A Bangkok Thriller

8

The children who joined the boy in the alley have eaten their fill at a roadside soup stand, and the boy has given each of them a small amount of money for the needs of the following day. The little ones are already curled up on old blankets spread over the dirt floor close to the damp wooden walls, since they go to sleep earliest. The older kids take the middle of the room, with the biggest ones in front, near the door, next to lengths of two-by-four with nails driven through them at one end.

Just in case.

The boy steps outside into the misting rain, pushing the shack’s wooden door closed behind him. The mud, thick beneath his flip-flops, slopes down toward the edge of the river, which is low at this season. A cloud of mosquitoes orbit him, but he waves them off and makes his way up to the boulevard, where he flags down a motorcycle taxi.

There’s a one-in-three chance that he’s guessed right about where the village girl with the baby will end up. She came out of Wichat’s building, and Wichat maintains three holding pens, or at least three the boy knows about. There could be more.

But his luck is good. He is sheltered in a doorway when another moto-taxi bounces over the ruts and stops in front of the empty-looking building across the street. She is on the backseat, the baby at her chest and a white plastic bag dangling from her free hand. He retreats into the darkness as she climbs off and takes her first real look at her destination.

Partway across the stretch of mud, Da stops.

Six or seven steps distant, seen through the gaping doorway, the hall is ghost-dark. To Da’s heightened senses, the building teems with spirits. It is roofed but unfinished, surrounded by an expanse of mud behind a rusted chain-link fence. Pitting its surface are dark, empty windows that look to Da like missing teeth. Patches of plaster have peeled from the walls, exposing sagging layers of crude, handmade mud bricks. The place smells of piss and abandonment.

Da takes two more steps, peering into the hall that yawns in front of her. There is enough city light reflecting off the low clouds to dilute the blackness of the hall into a kind of darkness in suspension, like a glass of water into which a writing brush has been dipped repeatedly. A long pool of black rainwater has collected against the left wall. Dimly visible at the hall’s far end is a staircase.

The baby sleeps, heavy and loose-limbed, in her left arm, curled against her chest. The baby’s blanket stinks of ammonia. A heavy plastic shopping bag cuts into the fingers of her right hand. Behind her she can hear the mechanical heartbeat of the motorcycle taxi that brought her, as the driver waits to make sure she’s in the right place before he abandons her.

A thin wash of light dances on the ceiling of one of the rooms on the second floor. A candle. So someone is here. Da turns and lifts the bag, swinging it back and forth as a good-bye to the driver. She tries to smile. He pops the moto into gear, and Da stands there, watching the red dots of his taillights disappear in the falling mist.

Then she hoists the baby higher, takes a deep breath, climbs three steps, and passes through the doorway.

Instantly something scuttles away from her along the opposite wall, the one to her left, creating a V-shaped wake in the water: a rat. Da doesn’t like rats, but she’s lived with them all her life. There are worse things than rats.

The only doors in the hall are on the left, but they are closed, and nothing could make Da step into the water. That leaves the stairs.

Da has climbed stairs more frightening than this one.

On the edge of her village in the northeast was the house where the woman died. It was the largest house in the village, with two stories above the ground, this in a town where most families shared a single wooden room.

The woman had lived alone. She was not born in the village, and she was not friendly. She moved through the streets without talking to the other women. She didn’t use the town shops. The shutters over her windows were kept closed.

So no one knocked on her door. And when she died, when Da was eleven, it was more than a week before the smell announced it, and two of the village men forced their way in and came out running, their hands over their noses and mouths.

In the year that followed, people gave the house a wide berth. One of the village grannies, a woman who had dreamed several winning lottery numbers, said she heard the sound of weeping coming from the house. No one else heard it, but no one else had dreamed winning lottery numbers either.

Naturally, the boys talked about going in. And talked about it and talked about it, until finally Da said she was going in. And quickly, before she could lose her nerve, she pried open the front shutters, hoisted herself over the sill, and let herself drop to the floor. Stood there, holding her breath, listening to the house creak in the heat. Felt the dust on the floor beneath her bare feet. Heard the rustling of mice in the walls.

Heard the weeping.

It came from upstairs. It flowed like water, without pauses for breath, a river of grief. Whoever or whatever was making that sound, it did not need to breathe. But it needed comforting. With every hair on her arms standing upright, Da went to the stairs.

There was no increase in volume as she climbed. The weeping filled the air evenly, like dust in a storm, the same everywhere.

The stairs took Da up to a short hallway. The weeping came through the open door at the end of the hall, a room that was tightly shuttered, because it was even darker than the hallway. Da slid one foot forward, then the other, moving as silently as she could. It seemed to her that it took a very long time to reach the door, and when she did, she put a hand against the jamb for balance and looked in.

The bed was terribly stained. Da’s mind reeled back from considering what had caused the stains, and she forced her eyes past the stain, to the edge of the bed, to the corner of the room. And stopped.

Slowly she looked back at the bed. Nothing, nothing but the stains. She looked away again, and felt her knees weaken.

The woman was sitting on the edge of the bed, slumped forward over her lap. Long gray hair hung loosely all the way to the blanket, covering her face. But when Da looked at her, she was gone.

Da grasped the doorframe with both hands and let her eyes scan the room. While her eyes were moving, the woman was clearly visible. When she looked directly at the bed, it was empty. But the weeping continued whether the woman was visible or not.

Da forced herself to study the empty bed. This time she could see something: The pillows beyond the spot where the woman had been sitting were wavering, as though Da were looking at them over a steaming kettle.

“Please,” Da said, and then stopped to clear her throat. “Please don’t cry.”

The weeping continued.

“Don’t cry,” Da said. “It’s all over. Whatever broke your heart, it’s over. You need to go.”

A moment of silence, and into it Da said, “And if you can’t go yet, I can come back. If you don’t want to be alone, I mean. I can come see you again. I can be your friend.”

Nothing.

“You don’t have to be alone,” Da said.

Then the bed creaked and the crack between the shutters seemed to widen, letting in more light, and Da took a lightning step back.

She could see the pillows clearly.

Da heard the house again, heard the wood groan and shift, heard the mice in the walls. Heard, as though from very far away, the boys outside calling her name. She felt the weight of her own body return to her, and she shifted from foot to foot, wondering what would be the most polite way to take her leave, just in case something remained to say good-bye to.

After a moment she backed away from the door. Halfway down the hall, she stopped and said, “Bye,” and gave a wai of respect. Then she turned and walked, without hurrying, to the head of the stairs, and down them, then across the living room and through the window into the bright sunlight and the circle of waiting boys, all demanding to know what it was like, what she’d seen, and all unsatisfied when she said, “Nothing,” and walked home alone.

And now, with the weight of the strange baby against her chest, with her left arm aching from the burden and the handle of the plastic bag cutting into the fingers of her right hand, Da looks at the stairs in the unfinished apartment house and begins to climb.

On the second story, there are no doors in the doorways and the openings are pale with light. Da peers into the first one and finds herself in one of the waiting rooms for hell.

A kerosene lantern. Its glow falls on hunched shoulders, bent backs, sharply angled necks, open wounds. Four of the people are fragments: their limbs are twisted or missing, their torsos folded over stunted appendages. The effect is of a roomful of people assembled, in the dark, from the litter of a battlefield. The fifth one, the whole one, is a child of ten or twelve. Da has to look twice to see the harelip that pulls her face up into a permanent grimace, like a painting smeared by a malicious hand before the oils were dry.

“Excuse me,” Da says, backing away. One of the adults sees the baby and waves them off. “No,” he says sharply, “not here.” He rises, his knee dangling, crimped at the end like a sausage, and Da backs out, into the hall.

Huddled in the next room are old-looking children, all teeth and joints and fingers; one of them hisses at her. The room after that reeks with whiskey and is crowded with men, dangerously full of unhealthy heat. Da looks into six rooms, six separate hells, before a heavyset woman in her thirties smiles at her and waves her in. This woman, ten or twelve years older than Da, also has a baby.

The older woman has somehow made the unfinished room feel warmer, although all she has done is lay a faded, threadbare blanket over the cement floor and made a soft mound of clothing to put her infant on. A candle burns in a bottle in the corner. Da offers a grateful wai, her palms pressed together as if in prayer, and then sets down the bag containing her new T-shirt, the blanket, the cake of soap, the milk, the small bottle of whiskey. Giving the other woman as much space as possible, Da sinks to a sitting position with the baby in her lap and says, “Thank you.”

The woman makes a fluid movement, precise and economical, from mouth to ears. She can neither hear nor speak. She puts her hands side by side and extends them toward the baby in Da’s lap as though she wants to pour water on it. She brings her hands back to her chest and repeats the gesture, and Da realizes what it means and hands the child to the woman.

In the woman’s arms, the heavy, stinking bundle becomes a baby. She gently unwraps the cloth, and a tiny hand emerges and opens and describes an arc through the air. The woman extends an index finger, and the baby’s fist closes on it.

Da feels herself smile.

The woman looks up and catches Da’s smile and returns it. At the sight of the smile, of the tiny fist around the finger, something breaks in the center of Da’s chest, something that has been hardening there for days. Her eyes fill with tears. The woman shakes her head slowly and extends her free arm, and Da creeps beneath it. With a stranger’s arm around her shoulders, Da wipes her eyes and looks down for the first time to study the face of her new child.