Part 3 (1/2)
...a little Chinese boy hiding in a closet...
The image flashes again. I must go up into the house. I steal away, sneak up the steps, respectfully remove my sandals at the veranda, and I slip into the house.
A kerosene lamp burns. Light and shadows dance. There is a low wooden platform for a bed, a mosquito net, a woven rush mat for sleeping; off in a corner, there is a closet.
Birds everywhere. Dead birds pinned to the walls. Birds' heads piled up on plates. Blood spatters on the floor planks. Feathers wafting. On a charcoal stove in one corner there's a wok with some hot oil and garlic, and sizzling in that oil is a heart, too big to be the heart of a bird.
My eyes get used to the darkness. I see human bones in a pail. I see a young girl's head in a jar, the skull sawn open, half the brain gone. I see a bowl of pickled eyes.
I'm not afraid. These are familiar sights. This horror is a spectral echo of Nanking, nothing more.
”Si Ui,” I whisper. ”I lied to them. I know you didn't do anything to Sombun. You're one of the killers who does the same thing over and over. You don't eat boys. I know I've always been safe with you. I've always trusted you.”
I hear someone crying. The whimper of a child.
”Hungry,” says the voice. ”Hungry.”
A voice from behind the closet door....
The door opens. Si Ui is there, huddled, bone-thin, his phakhomah about his loins, weeping, rocking.
Noises now. Angry voices. They're clambering up the steps. They're breaking down the wall planks. Light streams in.
”I'm sorry,” I whisper. I see fire flicker in his eyes, then drain away as the mob sweeps into the room.
My grandson was hungry, too. When he said he could eat the world, he wasn't kidding. After the second decaf frappuccino, there was Italian ice in the Oriental's coffee shop, and then, riding back on the Skytrain to join the chauffeur who had conveniently parked at the Sogo mall, there was a box of Smarties. Corey's mother always told me to watch the sugar, and she had plenty of Ritalin in stock--no prescription needed here--but it was always my pleasure to defy my daughter-in-law and leave her to deal with the consequences.
Corey ran wild in the Skytrain station, whooping up the staircases, yelling at old ladies. No-one minded. Kids are indulged in Babylon East; little blond boys are too cute to do wrong. For some, this noisy, polluted, chaotic city is still a kind of paradise.
My day of revelations ended at my son's townhouse in Sukhumvit, where maids and nannies fussed over little Corey and undressed him and got him into his Pokemon pyjamas as I drained a gla.s.s of Beaujolais. My son was rarely home; the taco chain consumed all his time. My daughter-in-law was a social b.u.t.terfly; she had already gone out for the evening, all pearls and Thai silk. So it fell to me to go into my grandson's room and to kiss him goodnight and goodbye.
Corey's bedroom was a little piece of America, with its Phantom Menace drapes and its Playstation. But on a high niche, an image of the Buddha looked down; a decaying garland still perfumed the air with a whiff of jasmine. The air-conditioning was chilly; the Bangkok of the rich is a cold city; the more conspicuous the consumption, the lower the thermostat setting. I s.h.i.+vered, even as I missed Manhattan in January.
”Tell me a story, Grandpa?” Corey said.
”I told you one already,” I said.
”Yeah, you did,” he said wistfully. ”About you in the Garden of Eden, and the serpent who was really a kid-eating monster.”
All true. But as the years pa.s.sed I had come to see that perhaps I was the serpent. I was the one who mixed lies with the truth and took away his innocence. He was a child, really, a hungry child. And so was I.
”Tell me what happened to him,” Corey said. ”Did the people lynch him?”
”No. The court ruled that he was a madman, and sentenced him to a mental home. But the military government of Field Marshall Sarit reversed the decision, and they took him away and shot him. And he didn't even kill half the kids they said he killed.”
”Like the first girl, the one who was raped and strangled,” Corey said, ”but she didn't get eaten. Maybe that other killer's still around.” So he had been paying attention after all. I know he loves me, though he rarely says so; he had suffered an old man's ramblings for one long air conditioning-free day without complaint. I'm proud of him, can barely believe I've held on to life long enough to get to know him.
I leaned down to kiss him. He clung to me, and, as he let go, he asked me sleepily, ”Do you ever feel that hungry, Grandpa?”
I didn't want to answer him--without another word, I slipped quietly away.
That night, I wandered in my dreams through fields of the dead; the hunger raged; I killed. I swallowed children whole and spat them out; I burned down cities; I stood aflame in my self-made inferno, howling with elemental grief; and in the morning, without leaving a note, I took a taxi to the airport and flew back to New York.
To face the hunger.
”Transcendence Express”
Jetse de Vries.
Dutch writer and editor Jetse de Vries has published stories in several highly-regarded English magazines and was for a time co-editor of Interzone magazine. He is currently editing an anthology of optimistic science fiction for Solaris Books in the UK and, hopefully, writing more stories himself.
I: Daybreak in a little village in the Zambian highlands.
She's teaching. Maths and science at the village high school. The school itself puts the word derelict to shame. A building so run-down our own country's squatters would find it uninhabitable. Windows are an illusion, walls that are more crack that brick, benches that should be reported to Amnesty's human rights watch and a roof that doubles as a communal shower in the wet season.
She writes large letters on a shabby blackboard. Her cla.s.s, slowly getting used to the sight of a freckled redhead whose skin is s.h.i.+ning from the liberally applied sunblock, starts to give more attention to the teachings than the teacher.
Hard to believe she's really doing this and enjoying it. Stranger still that she took a whole year off from one of the world's premier scientific projects. Most baffling, though, is the project she's taking up with her cla.s.s.
At first everybody--me included--thought it was a strange after-cla.s.s hobby thing involving manual skills. Carving wood: something she's not terribly apt at so she goaded the local sculptor into helping her and the children out with the practical parts. Making a flat, laptop-sized wooden box with a hinged cover. Each child making her or his own. So far, so good, so innocent.
Then she told her schoolkids they were going to fill their boxes up with something special, layer after layer. She made two large vats, filled them with certain 'secret ingredients', let them stand for a couple of days (so that they would 'grow full') and then added salt to one and zinc sulphide to the other until both solutions were saturated.
Right now they're applying the first layer.
”Miss,” one of her cla.s.s asks, ”why we do this?”
”You have to say 'why are we doing this,' Timmy.” She can be a bit b.i.t.c.hy in cla.s.s, too.
”Why are we doing this, Miss?” Timmy rolls his eyes but complies.
”Because--if we follow the instructions carefully--these boxes will become your window to the world and beyond.”
Which leaves me wondering, but those young kids can be very sharp.
”Like your laptop computer, Miss?” asks a large-eyed girl with k.n.o.bby knees.
”Very good, Melissa. Only better and on a purely biological basis.”
”Really, Miss?” Neither the cla.s.s nor I believe our ears.
”I know this sounds too good to be true. We will need several months and we will have to be very careful. But if we follow the instructions and do our very best, we might succeed.”