Amok: An Anthology of Asia-Pacific Speculative Fiction (13 page)

§

Aran ran alongside the canal through the rain, slipping on the smooth slick stones from time to time. His knees battered, hands scraped, the wound on his foot opened up and bleeding. His right arm dangling uselessly by his side, bouncing in time to his balls as he ran through the dark and the wet.

They would be getting in boats now, coming down the canal, following his locater chip. But sanctuary was nearby. Home was nearby. He banged on the gates of the embassy, screaming, until a burly Australian in a military uniform came to the gate. The buttons on the shirt across the man’s broad chest strained against the fabric.

Aran pushed his arm through the bars, imploring the guard. “I’m Australian.”

The man looked down at Aran standing there, shivering and bloody and naked, then back down the canal. Sirens were flashing in the night on a series of craft racing out from the hotel dock. The guard nodded. “Better come in then, mate.”

§

White room. Black, plasteel table. Mirrored window against one wall.

Aran sat on an uncomfortable chair, staring at a young man in a grey suit standing across from him. Aran had on some crumpled tracksuit pants and a tee shirt they’d found for him. The shirt had the words, ‘I’ve been to Bali, too’ printed across the front. His arm was in a white sling—the wounds had been healed with a medical nano-spray, but the numbing effect of the pulse knife had yet to wear off.

The man in the grey suit was holding a palm screen, looking at its contents. “Aran Sintawichai?”

“Yes.”

He looked up, gave a small smile. “I am John Borthwick, the consular officer here at the embassy.” His speech was crisp, unaccented. Aran knew the type. He had worked in IT support for a while, for a company that serviced the Australian foreign affairs building. Aran had heard the young man’s way of speaking there among the other diplomats. It was the sort of speech that formed after a dozen years at fenced-in international schools and a thousand conversations with diplomats from California and Northern Europe and India. The bumps and divots of cadence and tone buffed and smoothed to an unaffected sheen.

Aran got up, walked around the table and held out his good hand. “When can I go home?”

Borthwick grasped his hand for a moment. His grip was weak, his fingers soft. “I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

Aran lowered his hand slowly. “What?”

The man cleared his throat. “How can I put this? It’s quite delicate. I guess I should be straight with you, Mr Sintawichai. In light of you aiding another country in an illegal military action, Canberra has decided to revoke your citizenship.”

“What?”

Borthwick held up the palm screen. “This decision came straight from the Minister.”

“What?” Aran didn’t feel quite right. He couldn’t focus on the young man.

“Sorry. But this is from the top. You understand.”

Aran shook his head slowly. “But I’m not Thai, I’m Australian. We moved there a few months after I was born. During the Tribute Crisis.”

“You have
dual
-citizenship. And according to our records—and several recent, very popular Chinese freewave broadcasts—you’ve rather unfortunately been fighting for an enemy of Australia.”

Aran shook his head again, more definitively. His eyes began to refocus. “They press-gang prisoners and homeless people into service to meet the volunteers quota imposed on Thailand, you moron. I was in lockup overnight for being caught with weed at a full-moon party. I’m a tourist.”

“Hmm.” Borthwick looked down at the small screen in his hand, “I see the Chinese gave you a medal for bravery during a fire fight with some Vietnamese troops.”

Aran rubbed his temple with two fingers. “I didn’t do anything to deserve it. I just killed… I think they were refugees.”

Borthwick raised an eyebrow. “You’re telling me you committed a war crime?”

“No… I…”

“Because that’s what shooting unarmed refugees amounts to.”

Aran put his hand down on the smooth black desk, his legs felt tired. His voice was soft. “You lecture me. You lecture me when Australia hasn’t accepted refugees for a decade.”

Borthwick pursed his lips. “I don’t understand your point. We do have the sovereign right to determine the circumstances in which people come to Australia. We don’t have the right to butcher innocent civilians.”

“I didn’t have a choice. I was following orders. If you don’t follow orders in the Chinese army-”

Borthwick interrupted, shaking his head. “That’s the Nuremberg defence Mr Sintawichai. You should know that historically,” he smiled a pained smile, “it was not a successful one.”

“You’re following orders, aren’t you?”

Borthwick paused. “I don’t know what you mean.”

He straightened, took a step closer. “What do you think is going to happen to me out there, arsehole? I’ll be put back in the war. I’ll be a dead man.”

Borthwick waved away the suggestion with the flick of his fingers, “Orders or not, the point is moot, Mr Sintawichai.” He drew in a deep breath, then smiled again. “Now, because of your links with Australia…”

“Links?” Aran felt himself going red, his good hand started to shake.

Borthwick held up one finger. “Because of your links with Australia, we have provided you with an explanation as to why you are no longer welcome in our country. We’ve given you first aid for your injuries. More than could be expected, really. But you’re not Australian any more, Mr Sintawichai, and this,” he pointed downwards, “is Australian land. It’s time you left.”

Aran did the only reasonable thing there was left to do. He kicked Borthwick in the balls. The man collapsed with a groan, eyes wide, holding himself. His palmscreen clattered on the clean white floor.

Aran stood over him. “Links? What are your links?” His voice was shaking, “You don’t even have an accent, motherfucker. What are your fucking links?”

Borthwick responded with a groan.

He’d started yelling again when the burly Australian entered the room. The big man shook his head, a sad smile on his face. “Sorry about this mate.”

The force rod came down.

Darkness fell.

§

They stood on the baking airfield, waiting to board.

“[Sergeant Sintawichai, what’s our destination?]”

Aran turned, looking down at the thin volunteer. “Da Nang.”

“[What’s there?]”

Aran looked off into the shimmering horizon. “Home.”

About TR Napper

TR Napper worked as an international aid worker for ten years. He lived for several years in both Mongolia and Lao PDR. He has also worked in Papua New Guinea, Myanmar, and Indonesia. He currently resides in Hanoi, Vietnam. Over the past five years he has had numerous articles published at
The Guardian
, Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s
The Drum
,
New Matilda
, and others. TR Napper has also had fiction published at OMNI Reboot. You can find him online at:
www.nappertime.com
, and follow him on Twitter here: @_Ruijin_

Bright Student

Terence Toh

~ Malaysia ~

The boy with the scorpion tattoo threw back his head and laughed.

It put Yi Ling in mind of the cry of a raven.

“The one thing my shop
doesn’t
have!” he said. “And that’s what you want!”

This is getting surreal
, Yi Ling thought. She caught sight of her reflection staring back from the glass jars on the shelves all around her: it was almost hilarious how nervous she looked.

“What exactly do you need ginseng for?” the boy asked.

Yi Ling hesitated before answering.

“It improves your memory, right? I’ve got a big exam coming up, and I need all the brainpower I can get.”

“Oh, is that so?” The boy smiled. “I have something far better for that.”

He looked right into her eyes: he was a cobra, staring down its prey. Yi Ling was shocked at how green his eyes were.

“Imagine having a brain as swift as quicksilver, a memory as powerful as a mammoth’s. Imagine if you could answer any question put forth to you, whether as trivial as a baby’s name or as complex as the dance of the stars in the sky,” he said. “I have something that can supercharge your brain. It’s an old recipe given to me by my ancestors. You’ll never have to worry about tests or any kind of academic challenge ever again. And all I ask in return is something simple.”

Yi Ling shivered.

“It’s not… my soul is it?”

The boy laughed again. “What would I want with a soul? Do I look like the devil or something? No, my dear. All I want is your shadow.” He smiled.

“Excuse me?” Yi Ling thought she had misheard.

“Your shadow.”

“But why?”

“We have our uses for it,” the boy said. “Bottle it maybe, weave it into a cloak, or pickle it and serve it with rice and sambal. You’ll be amazed what you can do with a shadow.”

Sensing her hesitation, the boy spoke again.

“It’s not like you really need it, right? What good has your shadow ever done for you? Seriously, when was the last time you even noticed it was there?”

Yi Ling had to admit that he had a point.

§

Five hours ago, everything had been normal.

A double period of Tort law lectures. Ugh. Yi Ling hated those. Two hours of Mr Ong droning on and on, his flat monotone turning the most sordid cases of harm and human injury into agonising exercises in staying awake.

She had gotten last week’s Negligence assignment back. A bright red ‘D-’ was scrawled at the top of her paper, together with ‘
Poorly written
,’ and ‘
Out of topic
’ scrawled in her lecturer’s messy handwriting underneath.

Yi Ling had wanted to cry. Five nights she had spent on this essay. All those long hours poring over textbooks and course materials, all wasted!

The results put her in a funk, and she had little mood for the day’s lecture, which was on Vicarious Liability.

She should have copied off Kenny’s paper, Yi Ling reflected sadly. It would have been the easiest thing to do. Kenny, the class swot, who lived and breathed the law, a man whose idea of fun was an evening in the library with a statute book and a mug of coffee. He also didn’t go out much: one little smile, and he would have bent over backwards to help her score.

But no, she
had
to listen to Amira. Sweet, sanctimonious, Saint Amira of Petaling Jaya, always doing the honourable thing. “You should be ashamed of yourself!” she had lectured Yi Ling. “If you don’t use your own effort, you might as well not try at all!” How they were best friends, Yi Ling sometimes couldn’t understand.

It was easy for Amira to say, Yi Ling reflected bitterly. Amira was blessed with a quick brain and a marvellous memory. She also sported an impressive co-curricular résumé that would give any university recruiter a hard-on: the girl was a state debater and swimmer, for goodness sake. She would have no problem finding a scholarship.

Yi Ling, on the other hand, was getting seriously worried. That assignment had contributed 30% of her grade. She did some mental calculations: with her marks, she would need at least a B+ on the final paper to be accepted into a good university.

Fail that, and she could kiss her current lifestyle goodbye. Farewell to the bustling metropolis of Subang Jaya, with its clubs and bars, and hello again to the coffee shops and paddy fields of Alor Setar, her hometown. Her parents would put her in some God-forsaken university in the middle of nowhere with an oppressive dress code and dreary lecturers.

And she would rather kill herself than let that happen.

There has to be another way
, she thought.

Yi Ling closed her eyes, and imagined sleeping with her lecturer.

It wouldn’t be that bad, would it? Mr Ong, all 220 pounds of him, with his food-flecked beard and sweaty palms. She imagined lying beneath his colossal weight, pretending to climax as he huffed and puffed from the physical exertion: the man perspired walking from one end of the classroom to the other, for God’s sake!

And that’s if they even got to there. Mr Ong had probably never been laid in his life: would he even know what to do? Yi Ling wondered if her lecturer would be able to find his penis beneath all his rolls of fat. Or who knew, perhaps it had shrivelled up and dropped off, after decades of disuse. Grown a pair of wings and flown away, maybe.

The thought made her giggle.

Her laughter broke the silence: in the front of the classroom, Mr Ong stopped speaking. He glared at her momentarily before going back to his lecture.

Oh damn, that’s not a good start
, Yi Ling smiled.

She suddenly felt disgusted with herself. Three years ago, Yi Ling knew she would never even have contemplated anything like this.

But that had been before the days of the law degree. Before the days of the endless lectures, the ultra-competitive coursemates, the never-ending assignments and the death of her social life. Law school was the ultimate vampire. It drained everything from you: your finances, your time, your dignity, and peace of mind.

She needed to study harder, she told herself. Exams were in a week, and painstaking analysis of past year papers over the last seven years showed that examiners seemed to have a hard-on for questions on vicarious liability. Why, her seniors told her that in 2005, there had been
two
questions on the topic for Paper 3, which had thrown the entire class into disarray: most of them had expected occupier’s liability and the rule of
Rylands v Fletcher
.

Law exams were tricky bastards.

Yi Ling was thankful when the lecture ended. She made sure to make an impression on Mr Ong on her way out: a flirty smile, laughter at his jokes, ‘accidentally’ brushing against his tremendous girth as she left the room.

Every little bit counts, she told herself.

§

Her housemate did not even look up at her as Yi Ling entered their apartment.

“Hey girl,” Kumar said, his eyes not moving from his laptop.