Wednesday, April 21, 2010

autoclave

The Vietnamese are being deported.

Sorry. I meant to bring you glad tidings this time, honest. Things just got a little jumbled up along the way.

Not all the Vietnamese, you understand. Just the ones I love the most. Rosalind. Winnie and Alma and Alma's brother, a sweet kid named Josiah. Saul, the bastard, though I'm pretty sure this whole thing is his fault.

They left the shelter last week, disappearing in a poof of smoke. They didn't tell anyone they were going, not even me or Pippi. I was a little mad, but mostly hurt that they didn't trust us enough, that they thought we might betray them. And I missed them, of course. I missed them a lot.

They'd claimed to be going to Bangkok, but they were spotted around the city by Albert, Robin, Pippi, and who knows who else. They should have been more careful. They should have been more fucking goddamn careful.

They were arrested yesterday morning by the immigration police. Maybe one of their new neighbors turned them in. They themselves think it was Khruu Aajaan, their former roommate, but I can't bring myself to believe that. He couldn't have known where they were hiding, I don't think. Anyway, if I did think it was him, that he'd narced on them, I would have to kill him. And there's no sense in all of us warming that jail cell.

If we don't get them out, they'll all be deported to Cambodia. They have no papers, nothing at all, so they'll surely be arrested while crossing the border. The Cambodian government may throw them in jail, or it may send them back to Vietnam, the motherland, the place they fled after having been targeted, imprisoned, tortured.

The options are not great. Elizabeth and Albert managed to buy Nancy's freedom in a similar situation a few years ago, and we might be able to do the same with the Vietnamese, since Thai policemen tend to have remarkably greasy palms. We've already tried to pay, but for once, the po-po aren't having it - or, rather, they say they'll accept a certain amount, then change their minds when we offer it. By "we," of course, I mean a Thai citizen. Farang have no leverage in these situations, nor should they, I suppose.

But it could still work, if we landed upon the magic number. What we need is time, and we don't have it. They're threatening to take them to Bangkok tomorrow, and from there to Cambodia. They might be bluffing, trying to scare us, but maybe not.

Pippi has spent most of the last two days at the jail, trying to work out what the hell is going on and what we can do about it. She brings them food, since the police station would happily let them starve, women and children alike. There are no cots in the cell, Pippi says, no chairs or cushions. Everyone sleeps on the floor.

I wish I were there with her, with them, but I'm not. I have shit to do, stupid shit, e-mails to process and staff meetings I'm required to attend, and Pippi thinks it's best if the police don't see too many farang involved in this. I'm trying to help from the sidelines, digging up information and passing it along to her at ground zero, but it's hard. I want to be there. I want to do something.

In Pippi's absence, Sally has become increasingly dependent on me. She's cried, a little. Once or twice she's sidled up for an uncharacteristic cuddle. Mostly, though, she sits next to me with her knees pulled up to her chest, asking the same questions again and again, apparently hoping that I might magically divine the answers between rounds: what, when, where. And of course, like a toddler: "Why? Why? Why?"

"I don't know, Sally," I say. "I don't know. I don't know."

Not for the first time, I find myself wishing I were the crying sort. A good sob might make me feel better, or at least like my grief and frustration were active, alive, instead of this dead weight crowding up against the press of my ribcage, a black hole where positive thinking goes to die. I don't cry, though. Instead, I pace, around and around the tiny main room of my house, arms crossed, hands tucked tightly against my sides like I can somehow hold in the inevitable decompression. I'm going to blow any day now; I can feel it. They'll be finding pieces of me for months after, heart muscle and bile, lead in my stomach.

Hour after hour, around and around, feet blistering against the smooth rub of the floorboards. I try not to think, but strange thoughts keep floating to the surface.

If Gertie ever comes back, this will kill her.
Did Rosalind say it was her grandmother they poisoned, or her grandfather?
Alma was supposed to go back to school next month.

Walking, walking, walking. Waiting.

Sunday, April 11, 2010

a calm and reasoned debate

I argue with Sally all the time. Pippi does too. There's really no avoiding it. The only possible way I can imagine that a person might go one single day without arguing with that girl would be to crazy-glue her mouth shut, lock her in the cellar, and shove pointed sticks into your own eardrums. And we don't have a cellar.

Sally and I argue over serious things sometimes, like how she refuses to study and is careless with the baby, but most of our arguments are short-lived and stupid. Sally, we can't go to the market at 8:00 at night. M, you didn't shower and you smell bad. Sally, I can't let you use my phone because I don't have any minutes left. M, why are you only taking one fish, you obviously hate me and you're going to starve. Sally, you know I can't give you any money or we'll both get in trouble. M, for God's sake, you must eat two fish or we will all die screaming. You're a buffalo. You're a monkey. No, you're crazy. No, you're a child. No, you wear diapers.

Whatever, don't give me that look. Like none of you have ever gotten into an argument with a 14-year-old over which one of you wears diapers.

You have to understand that I love Sally, far more than I can put into words. I really do. I worry about her, and I want her to make the right decisions, and every so often I fantasize about throwing myself into traffic and bringing her right along with me.

Like this morning, for example, when she rolled up to my humble abode at 6:40 AM shouting, "M! M! Where are you?"

Now, I get up without complaint at about 7:00 during the week, but I will defend to the death my right to sleep in on Sundays, when the women and volunteers are all off-duty and everyone does their own thing. I was especially tired this morning, since the heat had kept me awake until well after midnight. I'd been hoping to sleep until the luxurious hour of 8:00, but Sally would not be deterred.

"M!" she shouted. The house rattled as she stomped up the steps to the porch, then again when she flung open the entry doors. "M, what are you doing?"

"I'm sleeping, Sally," I mumbled, rolling over and pulling the sheet over my head. "What are you doing?"

"M!" she shrieked again, reproachfully this time. She sounded deeply offended, as if I had told her I was busy shooting heroin with my favorite underage boy-whores. "Wake up! M sleep big big!" This last bit she said in English; it's one of her favorite lines, combining the novelty of English with the pleasure of unjustified condemnation.

"Mai sleep big big, you liar," I groaned. I considered explaining that I'd slept for a mere six hours, but couldn't be bothered to puzzle out the required vocabulary. Besides, she wouldn't have cared. "What do you need, Sally?"

"I'm leaving! Get up! M sleep big big!"

Most of the women had already left to go home for Songkran, arguably the biggest holiday of the year. Sally had indeed mentioned that she was leaving today, though at the time I'd been pretty sure she was lying. Occasionally, however, she spots a real wolf, so I grudgingly hauled myself off the mattress and set about searching for clean clothes. "I'm awake, I'm awake," I grumbled. "One minute."

Having requested Sally's patience, I really should have been able to predict that she would jerk open my bedroom door as I was halfway into my pants. "M!" she said, brow furrowed with disapproval. "What are you doing?"

Fortunately for our relationship, I don't know the Thai words for, "What the fuck does it look like?" or, "Experimenting with cold fusion - it helps if I'm naked." I settled for snapping, "Getting dressed! I need a minute!" and slamming the door shut in her face.

In the thirty seconds it took to make myself decent, an ominous silence descended on the house. As I slid my door open again, I braced myself for any number of unpleasant developments. Sally had decided she hated me for snapping at her. She had found and was in the process of demolishing my stash of M&Ms in the fridge. She had entered a catatonic state as a result of her brief but traumatizing exposure to my ass.

She had...disappeared?

Now it was my turn to play Marco Polo. "Sally?" I called, peering into the bathroom. "Sally! Where did you go?"

"M! M, come here! You have to come here!"

I followed her voice outside to where she was standing by the "meditation pond," a little man-made pool filled with the darkest, foulest water you've ever seen. The water arrives pre-polluted by our neighbors at the chicken factory. We've asked them to clean up their operations; they declined, but magnanimously offered us 300 chickens in "compensation" - one of the weirder bribes I've heard of.

"M, look!" Sally held up an enormous fish, which she'd apparently yanked from the pond, where several of its comrades were floating listlessly on their sides. "The fish are dead, M. Do you see?"

"Yeah, I see. Gross. Where's Pippi?"

She pointed to the bamboo house, where Pippi had taken to sleeping. "She's in bed. Pippi sleep big big!"

"Uh huh. And when are you leaving?"

"Tuesday," she said cheerfully, dropping the dead fish back into the pond with a splash.

"Sally," I said, digging my fingers into my forehead so they wouldn't be tempted to reach out and strangle her. "Did you get me out of bed before 7:00 on a Sunday to show me a dead fish?"

She cocked her head and squinted at me, not unlike a puzzled dog, and I realized I'd been speaking in English.

"I'm going back to bed," I said, spinning on my heel.

Her voice followed me back as I walked barefoot through the grass, up the steps, and into my bedroom, locking the door behind me: "M! Come here! What are you doing? You're lazy! You're a child!"

"You're a lunatic," I muttered under my breath, collapsing onto my mattress.

"M! M! You wear diapers!"