hand on top of his, the first time she’s touched him in days. “Are you going to get us into trouble?”
“Absolutely not.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Very simple,” he says. “I’m not going to write the book.”
It takes only a second for his life to change.
The thrust of something hard into his back. The solid grip on his upper arm.
“It’s a gun,” a man says in English. “Stop walking. Don’t look around.”
“Or what?” Rafferty says, Miaow’s voice in his ears. The door to her school is a few yards behind him. She disappeared through it ten seconds ago.
“Or I’ll blow your spine to bits.” The English is almost completely unaccented.
“Just asking.”
“Hold still,” the man says, and something dark brown is pulled over Rafferty’s head and he’s shoved forward. “Bend down, pull the hood away from your chest, and look at your feet. There’s an open car door in front of you. Get in. Leave the door open behind you and sit in the middle. Clear?”
“Crystalline.”
“Then go.”
The car is black, and the bit of it he can see is clean and highly polished. He climbs in. It is cool and smells of leather. He slides to the center of the seat, his feet straddling the bump for the drive shaft, and waits. The front door opens, and the car dips as someone very heavy climbs in. A second later the back door to his left opens. A man gets in, and then there is another man sitting on his right. A gun probes his ribs on each side.
“With all friendly intent,” Rafferty says, “if those bullets go through me, you’re going to be shooting each other.”
“They won’t go through you,” says the man who had spoken before, who is now to Rafferty’s right. “They’re.22 hollow-points. They’ll just turn you to hamburger inside and stay there.”
Rafferty says, “Good. I’d hate to worry about you.” He hears a ticking that he identifies as the turn signal, the driver preparing to enter the stream of traffic.
“On the other hand,” the man says, “no exit wounds. You can have an open-casket funeral.”
11
The baby’s name is Peep.
The night whispered the name in Da’s ear just before she dropped off to sleep. She had spent hours, extravagantly letting her candle burn down, studying the child’s face. He is a beautiful baby with features of bewildering delicacy, especially the impossible miniature perfection of the nose and ears, the long, dark fringe of eyelashes, the soft curls of black hair. All of it so defenseless, all of it so
“Peep” is the first sound a chick makes, when its wings are silly, useless elbows and its feathers are yellow baby fluff. It’s a small sound, breath-edged, perfect for a baby.
So: Peep.
Don’t drop it, the man in the office had said.
How could she drop him?
Early the next morning, they were jostled down the stairs and across the drying mud into the back of a pair of vans. The men and the cripples were herded into one van, the women with children into the other.
The windows were covered with ragged pieces of sacking that had been glued to the glass. The covered windows frightened Da: Why shouldn’t they see where they were going? She pointed to the cloth and made a palms-up, questioning gesture to the deaf and dumb woman, who smiled and shook her head:
Da said, “Oh.” Feeling stupid, feeling naive. Feeling lost. Wishing she were back in the drowsy cluster of wooden shacks at the bend of the river that is now dry, its water stolen. The shacks empty now, knocked off balance by the big machines until they sagged drunkenly sideways. Even the dogs are gone.
The sidewalk that has been given to her is hard and hot and dusty, another kind of dry riverbed, a river of people. The booths from which the vendors sell their wares begin half a block away, while this stretch is given to store windows, small office buildings, foot traffic, and beggars. Da sits exactly where she was put by the man who had driven the van, a thickset tree trunk of a man in a bright blue Hawaiian shirt with brown girls all over it. He had looked at her incredulously when he realized she didn’t have a bowl, and then he’d tightened his mouth and stalked away, down to the booths. When he returned, he tossed a red plastic rice bowl into her lap. It had just missed Peep.
“You owe me eighty baht,” he’d said.
Now she sits there, the bowl upraised, hopelessly fishing the river of people. Most of them push past her, the same way they would sidestep a hole in the pavement. Once in a while, someone-usually a woman-will slow slightly and drop a coin into the bowl, often with a glance at Peep. Every time a coin strikes the bowl, Da feels a wave of shame wash over her.
The noise of the street is deafening.
Everything is in motion, but nothing seems to change: The people flow past, the cars glint cruelly, the sun slams down, the noise hammers her ears. How can the world be this noisy? How can the air smell like this? How can the people who live here endure it? Sweat gathers under Da’s arms and between her breasts and runs down her body. She feels repulsively filthy.
How will she survive this day?
One of the problems is that everything-the noise, the people, the dust, her shame-distracts her. It breaks to pieces her sense of who she is and scatters them unrecognizably at her feet. Where she grew up, silence was always available. There was always someplace she could go to reassemble herself when her grasp on who she was became frayed by distraction or anger, or even love. And now, sitting here, she feels as soulless, as valueless, as a piece of furniture abandoned on the sidewalk.
And she has been this way, she realizes, for days. Since her mother and father slung their packs over their shoulders and took her younger sisters by the hand and said good-bye to her and to their lives together. Since the bulldozer knocked the shacks crooked and made them unlivable. Since the moment she began the long, slow flight to Bangkok.
She has lost herself.
But now that she has recognized it, this is something she knows how to deal with.
She gathers her attention, reeling in the bits of her she left here and there over the days and nights that she was moving, no,
The noise gradually fades.
After an undefinable period of time, she becomes aware that Peep has stopped shifting restlessly in her lap. She looks down to find him gazing at her. His tiny eyebrows are very faintly contracted, as though he is seeing something different when he looks at her. The look that passes between them is a pulse of some sort. A fine thread of connection.
Peep brings up one arm, fingers spread wide, and swings it up and down. It looks to Da as if he is waving at her. The thought breaks her concentration and makes her laugh.
