“Where’s Ai Ling?” Chee Seng mumbles.
“I don’t know. I can’t find her.”
“What about Cody? Is he with you?”
“He’s okay. He’s at the hotel.”
“Is he injured? Did anything happen to him?”
“He hasn’t left the hotel room at all.”
“What do you mean?”
“He locked himself in the room on the day of the tsunami, and has not come out at all. But I could still hear him from behind the door this morning. Come, let’s go back. You’ll see,” Wei Xiang says, motioning to Chee Seng to follow him.
It takes almost an hour to reach the hotel; they have to stop a few times so that Chee Seng can rest. Arriving at the hotel, Wei Xiang sees a porter cleaning the front steps, sweeping up the hardened clumps of soil and debris with a bamboo stick broom, and depositing them into black rubbish bags. The man glances up warily, then recognises Wei Xiang and presses his hands together in a greeting. Wei Xiang smiles and enters the hotel with Chee Seng, walking past a group of Japanese tourists standing around in the lobby, engaged in solemn conversation.
On the fourth storey, they walk along the quiet corridor until they arrive at Cody and Chee Seng’s room. Wei Xiang looks at Chee Seng, waiting for him to do something, but he stands rooted to the floor, paralysed and uncertain. Wei Xiang, sensing his hesitation, says, “He’s in there.”
Chee Seng returns a perplexed look, but does not make a move. Knowing that there’s nothing more he can do, Wei Xiang leaves Chee Seng in front of the room, and walks away.
Standing at the entrance of the hotel once again, Xiang pauses to consider his next step. When he looks around, he sees the boy with the scar standing by a slanted lamppost a street away, in the same clothes he has been wearing for the past few days—a torn white singlet and khaki shorts. For a second, Wei Xiang isn’t sure it’s the same boy, but as his mind slowly pieces together the features, he runs towards the boy, afraid that he will lose him if he should hesitate a second longer. As he approaches, the boy looks up at him, a thin line of a smile breaking across his lips. Before he can reach him, the boy is already walking away, silently signalling to Wei Xiang to follow.
“Wait, where are we going?”
The boy stops to glance back at Wei Xiang, as if to convey his reply: Follow me.
They cut across Phang Muang Sai Kor Road, choked with rescue trucks and medical vans. The local and international news agencies have sent in reporting teams to cover the disaster, descending on the survivors like packs of vultures searching for the best stories, the most memorable sound-bites, mikes and audio recorders thrust into the faces of people willing to give interviews. The young boy keeps a steady pace, paying no attention to what is happening around him, weaving through the crowd without stopping. They move south, to Karon, then Kata, through places that reveal new scenes of destruction, the landscape littered with ruins and brokenness. Before long, they are standing at the entrance leading up to Karon Viewpoint. Wei Xiang can faintly recall Cody and Chee Seng mentioning this place in the conversation at their last dinner, something about the views of the sunset. Ai Ling wanted to check out the place the day after their dinner, the day she disappeared. This shard of memory is now as foreign to him as something conjured up by someone from a different time.
The boy does not wait for Wei Xiang to catch up; he slips into the shady canopy of the trees, onto a rock-paved path that ascends in gentle-curving bends. Wei Xiang trails behind him like a shadow. After what seems like a long trek up the hill, they stumble into the blinding light of the afternoon sun, into the clearing of the promontory, the calm, undisturbed sea below them stretching to the vanishing line of the horizon, and in the distance the dark patches of islands. The boy walks to the edge of the cliff and points to somewhere out in the sea. Wei Xiang looks in the direction that he’s pointing: a series of small islands scattered at the southeastern side of Phuket. Is this what the boy has wanted him to see? But why?
“What’s there? What are you trying to tell me?” Wei Xiang asks. The boy gives no reply.
Wei Xiang looks down at the waves breaking against the sleek walls of the cliff, sending up huge sprays of water, the sound of the impact like a distant rumble of thunder. How many of the dead are still lost at sea? How many will be returned, in the days, weeks or months to follow? Will Ai Ling be one of those returned? Barely has the thought entered his mind that Wei Xiang realises what he has been secretly harbouring in his heart, something he has refused to give utterance to. He shakes his head hard, as if the act of doing so will dispel the thought from him.
When he turns his face aside, he notices the boy looking intently at him, and in his stare, Wei Xiang sees something akin to sympathy. The boy puts his hand on Wei Xiang’s stomach, and again points to the islands. He pats it several times.
“I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me,” Wei Xiang says, his voice cracking as the words come out of his mouth. “Please help me understand what you’re saying. Please.”
The boy suddenly looks crestfallen, an expression of helplessness clouding his face. His eyes slowly fill with tears. He opens his mouth but nothing comes out. Unable to articulate what he wants to say, the boy seems stricken. Apart from his furtive gestures, which are barely adequate to convey his intention, they are lost to each other, strangers grasping at shadows.
The boy leans his head on Wei Xiang’s stomach, tears wetting the front of his shirt. Wei Xiang holds the boy’s head in his hands, stroking his hair. He smells a hint of eucalyptus rising from his shaking body. When the boy breaks from the embrace, he turns to look out at the islands again. And then he gives Wei Xiang a long, thorough look before turning back to walk into the forest, vanishing into the darkness. Wei Xiang watches the boy leave, and in his absence, the promontory feels bare and desolate, a place marked only by silence and emptiness.
After the boy has disappeared, Wei Xiang heads back to Patong. In the recesses of his heart, Wei Xiang knows—without knowing why—that this is the last time he will see the boy, and now it’s up to him to make a decision, to act. But to decide what, and to act on what? He can continue to search for Ai Ling and hope that at any moment she will turn up, that things would be all right. But this no longer seems possible to him now, this continual, indeterminate search, in light of what the boy has prompted in his heart.
With no destination in mind, Wei Xiang stands at a junction along Thaweewong Road, with streets branching into several directions. He wants the boy to appear again, to see him standing at the lamppost, signalling to him, showing him what he needs to do. Perhaps, if he waits long enough, the boy will reappear, and, because he wants so much to believe this is true or possible, he is willing to wait for as long as he can. And so he loiters at the junction, the flow of people around him breaking like water over a rock. Then, as afternoon tilts into evening, Wei Xiang is unable to keep up the blind hope any longer. He closes his eyes, forcing himself to snap out of his delusion.
Though he has no clue where he should head next, Wei Xiang turns into one of the alleys and walks to the end of it. He only wants to walk and walk and not turn back, as far and as long as his legs can carry him, before he finally collapses—perhaps to the farthest reach of the island where the land disappears into the sea. In his mouth, he holds onto Ai Ling’s name, saying it over and over again, an incantation he hopes will lead him to a specific location, where he can find her at last, until it finally hits him that what he’s really doing is trying to take hold of the grief that has only just materialised inside him, a grief that will never let him go. He stops in mid-stride, doubles over, and starts to heave, gasping, as if someone has just punched the air out of him. Then he pulls himself together and staggers on.