A small group of young children in tattered, threadbare rags surrounds me, excited like a litter of puppies, asking question after question, none of which I can decipher. Finally, one of the men comes up to me and takes me down a lane to where a row of houses stands. Women stand at the thresholds, watching us with open curiosity. In front of a small narrow courtyard, the man points to a rusty motorbike with a badly-torn seat, gets on it, and motions for me to hop on. He revs out of the village, a spray of dust trailing behind us. Not wanting to fall off the bike, I grip the man’s waist, praying that my strength will hold up for as long as it takes to get us to Patong.
Even before we reach the outer fringe of the town, the road is already jammed with traffic and people moving in both directions, making it almost impassable. Along the way, winding down the hills, I finally see the full extent of the destruction that has been inflicted on Patong and the beaches that line the coast; from high up, the town looks like a huge debris-clogged swamp, dark brown with large pools of brackish water glistening in the afternoon light, studded with stumps of decimated buildings. The shoreline has cut deeper inland, like the curved edge of a sickle. The sea remains proudly innocuous, placid.
The drive slows to a trickle, sometimes barely moving at all. Occasionally, a shrill vehicle siren sounds out, and a small path suddenly, miraculously, appears, making way for an ambulance or emergency vehicle to pass, and immediately after it has passed, the path would be swallowed up again, the cars and bikes and humans coming together like an organic mass. In a few pick-up trucks, I see piles of blackened bodies, barely covered by flimsy tarpaulins, hands and feet sticking out, stiff as mannequins. The death smell that rises from these bodies is thick and rank and cloying, forcing me to hold down the little that is in my stomach.
The man drops me off at a makeshift medical centre, previously a school with a basketball court and three-storey buildings, a Red Cross sign hanging on the gate. He looks concerned, but after I give him a thumbs-up, he drives off, disappearing around the corner. Standing amidst the sweaty swirl of people, I have no idea where to go, unable to discern the way back to the hotel. From nowhere, someone pushes me roughly aside, issuing a shout, and carries a body into the medical compound—a young girl in the arms of a woman, her head lolling like a broken doll, her ashen face bloated. The woman—mother? sister?—is screaming indiscriminately, her voice cracked and hoarse, until a nurse appears and directs her into one of the tents. The air is abuzz with a taut tension, alive with the flow of movements and cries and smells.
Rooted to the spot, I suddenly feel a sharp jab of longing, to be back in the hut with the old woman, somewhere up in the hills, away from all this misery and death.
23
WEI XIANG
The coastal town of Patong is in a much worse state than Wei Xiang imagined, from where the boy has led him over the course of the day. Rows of houses and shops that run parallel to the beach have been flattened to rubble; palm trees are slanted at impossible angles or have been ripped out of the earth. Near the beach, the pewter sea water is stagnant and foul-smelling.
From time to time, Wei Xiang catches a glimpse of a bloated body bobbing in the water like discarded flotsam, or caught between staggered piles of debris. The boy does not seem to pay much attention to these distractions, focused only on leading them onwards, still not saying a word. Wei Xiang has somehow concluded that the boy is either deaf or mute, or both, and has given up trying to talk to him. Even without the aid of a common language, he has found it easy, almost effortless, to communicate his intentions to the boy, whether to stop or slow down or make a detour; the boy is able to read him without any trouble or assistance. But when Wei Xiang tries to read the boy’s face for signs of distress or fear, he gets nothing—the boy’s expression is stone-like, his eyes always looking straight ahead, as if expecting something important to appear any time soon.
Whenever they come to the flooded places, Wei Xiang stoops to lift the boy onto his shoulders, and they wade slowly through the water. The boy’s weight feels negligible—a bag of feathers—and Wei Xiang has to hold on to the latter’s ankles to keep him steady.
Sometimes they stop to allow small teams of rescuers to pass, hauling bulky bags containing bodies. The rescuers are often so engrossed—frazzled by fatigue perhaps, or numb-shocked by their task, Wei Xiang can’t tell—that they rarely look up to take heed of the passers-by who have stopped to stare at them. Wei Xiang holds his breath as they pass, his guts turning at the barest hint of the fetor of death.
They have gone on for hours without rest, and at some point in their seemingly pointless meandering, Wei Xiang has started to question his own actions, this blind ceding of will and reason to a complete stranger—a boy—being led to places unknown. What has compelled him to do this—an unexamined motive, or a dark impulse? What is preventing him from staying put, or going in the opposite direction, or more importantly, doing what he ought to have done in the first place—finding Ai Ling?
Wei Xiang stops in mid-stride, and the boy walking beside him stops as well, looking up at him. Wei Xiang flings up his hands in exasperation and shakes his head. The boy watches him for a few moments before reaching out to pull at his hand, tugging him to continue walking.
“No, I can’t follow you around all day. I’ve other things I need to do,” Wei Xiang says. “I need to find my wife, she’s missing. I have to find her. Do you understand me?”
The boy gives Wei Xiang a peculiar look, one heavy with sadness, and releases his hand. He drops his shoulders and looks away, as if contemplating his next course of action.
Around them buzz different hives of activity: scores of locals are breaking up the towering stacks of rubble along the streets, frantically searching for missing people; skinny, dark-skinned kids, oblivious to the destruction, are playing in the water, leaping from the shaky peak of a pile of mortar. Wei Xiang feels a deep, fractured sense of disconnection from the scene before him, a man severed from life.
He sits down heavily on the curb and puts his face in his palms. In his bones, he feels the heaviness weighing down on him, the hours and days of mindless exertion and fear, walking the tight rope of desperation and dread. He can’t take another step. He rubs his eyes on his sleeve and sinks into himself. Wei Xiang imagines that he looks like one of the survivors he has often come across the past few days—sitting by the roadside or near a collapsed house, a soulless look on their faces, their bodies reduced to hollow shells. He has felt helpless looking at them, and now he is one of them. He shakes off this mental image and looks up, and in his temporarily glazed vision, the world before him suddenly becomes hazy, as if he were looking through thin gauze.
The boy is still standing beside him, hovering at the periphery of his sight, waiting. Wei Xiang stares at the boy’s bare feet, caked with mud and streaked with tiny red cuts. They look frail and breakable, like feet of clay hardened in the heat of the sun. Wei Xiang takes off his sandals and places them before the boy, nodding at him. The boy steps into them and starts clomping around clumsily, a faint smile playing at the corners of his mouth. Despite himself, Wei Xiang chuckles and proceeds to tighten the straps of the sandals. The boy moves to take them off but Wei Xiang signals to him to keep them. The boy practises walking around with the sandals, trying not to trip.