Wei Xiang turns towards a covered pathway that leads to the back of the school, where there are three blocks of classrooms each two-storey high, a garden gone riotous, a scummy pond filled with floating aquatic plants, and a cobblestoned quadrangle. Along the corridors, a few men, thickly bandaged about the head and torso, are groaning and futilely swatting the flies from their bleeding wounds. Wei Xiang looks into the classrooms, giving them a thorough scan; most of the rooms are packed to capacity, and the walls and floors filthy, reeking with a fetid odour. The women’s and children’s quarters on the second floor are not any better; outside one of the classrooms, a woman carries a child swathed in rags on her back—a girl or a boy? sleeping or dead?—undecided over whether to place the child on the cramped floor inside. In another room, a young woman is weeping over a naked boy, her cries echoing off the walls. The bodies of those who have just died are dragged out of the rooms and stacked along the corridors, to make way for the incoming injured. After checking every classroom, Wei Xiang sits on the cement steps in a stairwell and rests his face in his palms. His head is starting to throb with a vicious intensity. He needs to head back to the school hall, he’s not done yet; there are bound to be more bodies now. He steels himself against the thought of this endless task, and then pushes himself to move.
Back in the assembly hall, the stench has become overwhelming, rushing out to hit Wei Xiang in the face before he has even stepped inside. Four standing oscillating fans have been set up to alleviate the situation, but they do nothing more than stir the miasma into a thick, putrid stew. Wei Xiang holds his shirtsleeve to his nose, trying to block out the smell, but it’s useless. Everywhere he turns, he is overcome by the corporeality of death. The helpers are still carrying in new bodies, forming additional lines that come up all the way to the entrance of the hall. A group of men with pens and clipboards and cameras is examining the corpses, taking snapshots and jotting down notes. On the concrete walls, beside the broken-paned windows, a woman is taping up sheets of paper, some of them showing grainy photographs.
Wei Xiang looks around, unsure where he has left off before. A pair of bloated legs with patches of dark bruises sticking out of a thin blanket catches his eye. He lifts the cover and recoils backward when he sees that a part of the head has been sheared away, revealing the mushy, wrinkled surface of the brain. Wei Xiang feels the bile rising at the back of his throat, and before he can take another step, the vomit gushes out of him and onto his shirt, his hands, the dead woman on the floor. He stumbles outside and squats at the clogged drain, puking and shaking in violent spasms, as if his body were trying to purge itself of something horrible inside him. He retches for a long time, then wipes his mouth on his sleeve, and sinks to the ground. It’s impossible. There is no way he can go back in. Fighting his growing despondency, Wei Xiang stares at the faces of the curious onlookers peeking through the chain link fence. Then he sees the boy again.
Standing next to two middle-aged local women dressed in floral-print blouses and dark pants, the boy is staring at him. The look on his scarred face is not hostile, but hovers in a state of neutrality and blankness. Standing motionless amongst the crowd at the fence, the boy seems composed, unruffled by the tide of noises and commotion around him. Wearing a dirty white singlet and a pair of drawstring khaki shorts, he looks like any other street kid in Phuket, who might be playing beside the busy lanes of traffic, or panhandling the passers-by for money or sweets or pens. Getting up from the ground, Wei Xiang moves towards the school gate, brushing past incoming stretchers and scores of arm-banded helpers shouting instructions at one another. He bumps into a bony young girl with jutting shoulders and elbows, barely a teenager but carrying a baby slung across her back, and sends her toppling to the muddy ground. She shows no sign of annoyance, but simply gets back to her feet and makes her way to the Red Cross tent. By the time he makes his way through the crowd and out the gate, the boy is no longer standing at the fence. Frantically, Wei Xiang scans the area and again spots the boy walking away at a brisk pace towards the main road. He trains his eyes on the boy’s retreating back as he manoeuvres through the crowd. When he thinks he has almost lost him again, Wei Xiang cries out and the boy stops in his tracks, turning to look at him. At a road junction, the boy stands against the flow of human traffic, as if waiting for Wei Xiang to catch up.
But no matter how fast Wei Xiang pursues him, he can never reach the boy, who disappears momentarily and materialises somewhere farther ahead of him, always drawing Wei Xiang to him with his presence. Wei Xiang chases him down a network of lanes and alleyways across town, determined to reach him no matter what it takes, his feverish mind fired up by this all-consuming task.
16
AI LING
As the sun begins to set on the third day after the tsunami, the tiny island falls into shadows, steeped in silence. Across the iridescent spread of the sea, the waves ripple, a skin of shimmering light. The breeze, blowing from the northeast, has turned a few degrees colder, stirring the tufts of grass on the island, caressing the topography of the sand dunes.
A fine layer of condensation has formed over the woman, cooling the body that has been baking under the sun for days. In the soft, forgiving dusk light, the woman’s body exudes a frail, otherworldly beauty, as if released from its struggle. Along the stretch of beach, more things have been deposited by the waves: a few broken planks, pockmarked with decay and tiny holes where the screws used to be; a rutted car tyre; half-filled soft drink bottles; a decapitated plastic doll head with half-closed eyes.
With her head tilted westward, facing the horizon, the woman seems to be contemplating the sunset, and the trembling lights pirouetting on the surface of the sea. With her lips parted, as if in mid-sentence, the unspoken words that have pooled in her mouth slowly leak out in dark, viscous drips. The wind carries her silenced words out into the sea, scattering them like dust.
“Look at this,” Ai Ling said on the evening of Christmas Day. “It looks amazing, right?”
The quartet of friends had just settled into their seats at the seafront restaurant, and the waiter had left them with the menus. The view from where they were seated opened out to a commanding, picturesque vista of Patong Bay, with the sun sinking down to the horizon. It had taken them nearly twenty minutes to find the restaurant, following the bad directions given by the hotel bellhop, and using the grainy map that Ai Ling had photocopied from the Lonely Planet guidebook, which only showed the main roads of Phuket, conveniently leaving out the many arteries that branched out into every perceivable nook and cranny of the city. Ai Ling had insisted that they walk instead of taking a taxi or tuk tuk, and by the time they found the restaurant along the stretch of Prabaramee Road, they were all covered with a thin coat of dust and perspiration, the collars and armpits of their clothes stained dark.
Wei Xiang turned to take in the view of the sea, while Cody and Chee Seng studied the menu and scanned the drinks list. The waiter, a waifish teenager with a gaunt, acne-ridden face, came over and filled up the stain-spotted glasses with ice water, leaving the almost-empty pitcher on the table, and waited with a pen and a dog-eared notepad, smiling awkwardly. Chee Seng dismissed her with a request for more time. Ai Ling allowed her vision to follow the vanishing line of the horizon from one end to the other, noting the gold-and-red swathes of light piercing through the heavy, low-lying clouds. From somewhere, hidden out of view, Ai Ling could hear the gentle bobbing of longtail boats and the occasional cawing of seagulls.