Breathing Water (5 page)

T
he phone in the Silk Room rings at 11:17
P.M.

The man in the big bed is awake immediately. Late-night phone calls are so common that his wife sleeps in the Teak Room, more than thirty meters down the hallway. It is a very big house.

“Yes.” He switches on the bedside lamp, and the pale silk walls of the room appear. He listens for a moment, until something he hears brings him up to a full sitting position. His forehead wrinkles and then smooths immediately, automatically erasing the display of concern even though there’s no one to see it. “Seriously?
A farang?
”

He peels back the blankets and gets up, a lithe, slender, balding man in his early fifties, whose face retains the fine bone structure that had made so many well-bred hearts flutter when he was younger, the bone structure that landed him the problem daughter of one of Thailand’s oldest families, now sleeping down the hall. He wears silk pajamas. “Was he drunk? He must have been drunk.”

A desk, the work of some English craftsman who’s been dead for three centuries, gleams between the heavily curtained front windows. On one corner is a silver tray holding a decanter of water and a heavy,
deeply cut crystal glass. The man cradles the phone between ear and shoulder and uses both hands to pour, being careful not to splash any water onto the wood. He picks up the water and sips. “No,” he says, “not at all. You were right to call.” He puts the glass back on the tray and picks up a pen. “Spell it?” He listens and then writes,
Rafferty
. The man on the other end asks him a question.

“Let me think about that for a second.” His underlings call him “Four-Step” behind his back, because of his insistence on thinking things through four and sometimes even five steps in advance. He closes his eyes briefly, his finger making tiny circles on the wooden surface of the desk.

His eyes open. “Good idea,” he says. “Two in English and two in Thai. All morning papers, and one of them should be the
Sun
. You’ll need to make the calls right now and use my name to make the morning editions. And I need information about Rafferty. By the time the papers come out.” He listens again for a moment, and impatience twists his face. “
Everything
,” he says. “I need everything.”

T
he 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.

T
he Day of the Telephone begins at 6:20
A.M.

He rolls over blindly at the first ring, his hand slapping the surface of the bedside table and knocking the alarm clock to the floor, and Rose stirs and mutters beside him, although it takes more than a ringing phone and a falling clock to awaken her.

The side of his hand hits the phone, sending it skittering to the edge of the table, but he manages to grab it before it follows the clock down. “What?” he says, his voice a frog’s croak in his ear.

“Mr. Rafferty?” A woman’s voice.

“Time is it?” Rafferty says.

“Mr. Rafferty, this is Elora Weecherat with the
Bangkok
—”

“Elora what?” He is rubbing scratchy eyes with his free hand.

“Weecherat. With the
Bangkok Sun
.”

“I don’t want a subscription.”

“I’m wondering whether you have a comment about the story on page three.”

Rafferty says, “Ummmm.”

“Is the story accurate?”

He hauls himself to a sitting position. “Give me a number,” he says.

She recites a phone number, and he hangs up in the middle of it. He sits there, feeling the edge of sleep recede like the shoreline of a country he’s been forced to leave. The phone begins to ring again, and he pulls the jack out. This silences it in the bedroom, but he can hear it chirping away in the living room. He wraps himself in his robe as though it were a grievance and goes through the bedroom door, into the stuffy heat of the living room.

The air conditioners in the bedrooms make sleep possible in the hot season, which this year seems to be twelve months long, but it makes little sense to cool the living room when no one is in it. The door to the balcony is closed, and the air is heavy with the stink of Rose’s cigarettes. For the thousandth time in his life with her, Rafferty wonders why cigarette smoke smells so much worse in the morning than it does at night. At night it has a sort of sinful razzle to it, but in the daytime it smells as toxic as asbestos. He goes to the sliding glass door and opens it. The clouds responsible for the previous evening’s drizzle have thinned to a high, pale ghosting, semitransparent as a film across the sky, a brilliant chromium heat-yellow in the east, but still a sleepy, pillow-feather gray to the west. As he checks his watch—
6:25?
—the phone rings again. Or, more accurately, it chirps like the world’s biggest, most aggressive cricket, the ring tone Miaow programmed into it.

He glares at it, but it doesn’t explode, so he goes into the kitchen.

He has taken lately to grinding the coffee beans before he goes to bed, not so much because of the noise the grinder makes in the morning, since nothing short of a collision with an asteroid would wake Rose, but as a way of shortening the amount of time it takes him to get the first gulp of coffee into his system. All he has to do now is turn on the pot, pour bottled water into the reservoir, and then stand there in suspended animation while the coffee drips. And drips. And drips.

The phone rings four more times as he waits, his forehead pressed against the cool of the refrigerator door. As he pours his first cup, it begins again. He ignores it, sipping the hot liquid and waiting for the daily miracle, the renewal of consciousness and judgment and volition, that coffee always brings. At the twenty-fourth ring, the phone stops.

And, with the chirping silenced, he hears his cell phone ringing. The surge from the coffee gives him the energy to go into the living room and check the display, which says ARTHIT.

His throat tightens as the previous night comes back to him. Noi’s stash of pills. What it might mean.

“Arthit,” he says.

“One of our friends has been busy,” Arthit says. He sounds thick as sludge, as befits a man who drank his weight the previous evening.

The fact that this is not about Noi sends a porous buoyancy through Rafferty and makes the day visible through the open door look less stifling. “We have friends in common?” He sucks down most of the coffee that remains in the cup.

“One of our friends in the card game. You’re famous.”

Rafferty says, “Well, don’t worry, I’ll still say hello to you. If we should happen to meet, I mean. However unlikely that may be.”

After a moment Arthit says, “How much coffee have you had?”

Rafferty looks down into the mug, which is empty. “One cup.”

“You have a very responsive system.”

“Some people are Ferraris,” Rafferty says, “and some are Land Rovers.”

“And some are in the
Bangkok Sun
and the
World
,” Arthit says. “And a couple of the Thai-language papers, too.”

“Wait. What’s in the paper?”

“You and Pan,” Arthit says. “You’re big news.”

Rafferty puts down the cup. “Let me go get the papers,” he says. “I’ll call you back.”

THERE HE IS:
page three in the
Sun
and page seven in the
World
. The
Sun
even has a dark, fuzzy picture, cribbed from the color shot on the back of Rafferty’s book
Looking for Trouble in Thailand
but oddly mutated by being cheaply converted into a black-and-white halftone.

“I look like an ax murderer,” Rafferty says.

“With all due respect,” Arthit says on the other end of the phone, “how you look is the least of your problems.”

“No,” Rafferty says. “How
you
look is the least of my problems. How
I
look is a matter of some concern. Who talked to the press?”

“None of them. They don’t have this kind of clout. One of them, probably Vinai, talked to someone who
does
have this kind of clout.”

“Why Vinai?”

“He’s the one who brought Pan.”

“And why don’t you think he made the call himself?”

“As I said, clout. By the time the game ended, the papers were coming up on deadline. It took somebody with weight to get the stories into the morning editions. And then look at what’s
not
in the story. The card game, any hint of resistance on Pan’s part—practically everything is missing except the fact that a
farang
has been selected to write Pan’s biography, with Pan’s blessing.”

“So what does that mean?”

Arthit says, “I don’t know yet.”

Rafferty’s adopted daughter, Miaow, comes into the living room, her hair wet and pasted to her head from her morning shower, on her way to another challenging day of fourth grade. She has been detached and even sullen lately, but she’s sufficiently surprised to see Rafferty—who’s not often up at this hour—to give him a startled little wave. Then she damps down her enthusiasm and heads for the kitchen.

“My phone’s been ringing all morning,” Rafferty says to Arthit.

“Oh, sure. This is news. Bangkok’s most profligate billionaire, the guy who gold-plated his Rolls-Royce and is known not to care for
farang
, has suddenly given one of them the right to tell his story.”

As if on cue, the other phone begins to ring.

“There’s my public,” Rafferty says. “Do you know somebody on the
Sun
, a reporter called Eloise or Eleanor or something?”

“Elora?” Arthit asks. Miaow comes into the room with a can of Coke in one hand and an orange in the other and starts toward the ringing phone. Rafferty holds up a hand to stop her.

“That’s it,” he says to Arthit. “Elora.”

“Elora Weecherat,” Arthit says. “Business section. Looks like a fashion model, but she’s as tough as nails.”

Miaow tucks the orange under her chin and picks up the phone, ignoring Rafferty’s attempt to wave her off. “Yeah?” she says.

“Is she pro or con on Pan?” Rafferty asks.

“She’s got a kind of horrified fascination,” Arthit says. “Mainly because of all the girls.”

Miaow says, “He’s on the other phone. This is his daughter.”

Hearing Miaow refer to herself as his daughter makes Rafferty smile, although he knows she won’t like his smile any more than she
seems to like anything else these days. “What’s she going to think when I quit?”

“
Are
you going to quit?”

“No,” Miaow says, in the put-upon tone Rafferty’s been hearing a lot of. “I won’t write down a number. I’m eating breakfast. Call him back.” She hangs up and takes the orange out from under her chin, and her eyes drift to the newspapers on the table.

“I thought we’d decided that last night,” Rafferty says. “I’m going to call him today and tell him I changed my mind.”

“Just checking,” Arthit says. “I didn’t know we’d come to a firm decision.”

“All this nonsense this morning has, as the British say, stiffened my resolve. I am stiffly resolved not to do it.”

Miaow nudges Rafferty’s arm. He glances up to see her finger pointed at his photo in the
Sun
. He nods, and Miaow tugs down the corners of her mouth and lifts her eyebrows, looking grudgingly impressed. At least, Rafferty thinks, it’s a reaction.

“Well, when you tell her you’re not going to write it,” Arthit says, “give her a reason, or she’s going to think you’ve been scared off.”

“But if Pan has given me permission to write it, why would he scare me off?”

“There are other people,” Arthit says, “
lots
of other people, who would much prefer that a book, especially a sympathetic book, not be written.”

“Who?”

“People who are worried about his personal power base. He’s extremely popular among the poor, especially in the northeast.”

“Why?”

“Ask someone who’s poor,” Arthit says. “Or used to be.”

Miaow is reading the story that accompanies the photograph. She gives a low whistle, which comes as a surprise. Rafferty hadn’t known she could whistle.

Watching Miaow run her finger along the lines of type, Rafferty says, “What would you do if you were in my shoes?”

“I’d take a careful look around, assess the total situation, add up the pros and cons, and then scream.”

“Thanks. How’s Noi?”

“We’ll talk about that later,” Arthit says, and hangs up.

“What
is
this?” Miaow asks. She is rubbing the surface of the photo with her index finger as though she expects it to come off the page.

“It’s a picture of me.”

“You look really ugly,” Miaow says, and the door to the bedroom opens and Rose comes out, wrapped in a towel and a frown, just as the phone begins to ring.

“Why is it so
noisy?
” she asks.

“Poke’s in the paper,” Miaow says, rotating the
Sun
to face Rose. Then, without another word, she turns her back on both of them and heads for the kitchen.

“What?” Rafferty says into the phone.

“Listen to me,” says a man’s voice.

“I have the phone at my ear and everything,” Rafferty says. “Just poised to listen.”

Rose says, “This is a
terrible
picture.”

“You will not write this book,” the man says. “If you write it, you, your wife, and your daughter will die.”

“Who is this?” Rafferty says, and the tone of his voice brings Rose’s eyes up.

“Did you hear me?” the man asks.

“I asked who you were.”

“All three of you will die,” the man says. He hangs up.

Both Rose and Miaow, who stopped at the kitchen counter, are staring at Rafferty now. He brings up the corners of his mouth, hoping it looks like a smile, and says, “I don’t think the picture’s that bad.”