The Windup Girl

Pracha doesn't say anything for a moment. "I don't know who it is. Better that you don't know, either. What you do not know, you cannot fight." He slides a card across the desk. "This arrived today, under my door." His eyes lock on Jaidee so that Jaidee cannot look away. "Right here in the office. Inside the compound, you understand? We are completely infiltrated."

Jaidee turns over the card.

* * *

Niwat and Surat are good boys. Four and Six. Young men. Fighters already. Niwat once came home with a bloody nose and bright eyes and told Jaidee that he had fought honorably and been horribly beaten, but that he was going to train and he would take the heeya next time.

Chaya despairs over this. She accuses Jaidee of filling their heads with impossible ideas. Surat follows Niwat and encourages him, tells Niwat he can't be beat. Tells him he is a tiger. The best of the best. That he will reign in Krung Thep, and bring honor to them all. Surat calls himself trainer and tells Niwat to hit harder next time. Niwat is not afraid of beatings. He is not afraid of anything. He is four.

It is at times like these that Jaidee's heart breaks. Only once when he was in the muay thai ring was he afraid. But many times when he has worked, he has been terrified. Fear is part of him. Fear is part of the Ministry. What else but fear could close borders, burn towns, slaughter fifty thousand chickens and inter them wholesale under clean dirt and a thick powdering of lye? When the Thonburi virus hit, he and his men wore little rice paper masks that were no protection and they shoveled avian corpses into mass graves, while their fears swirled around them like phii. Could the virus really have come so far in such little time? Would it spread further? Would it continue to accelerate? Was this the virus that would finally finish them? He and his men were quarantined for thirty days while they waited to die, and fear was their only companion. Jaidee works for a ministry that cannot hold against all the threats it faces; he is afraid all the time.

It is not fighting that he fears; it is not death; it is the waiting and uncertainty, and it breaks Jaidee's heart that Niwat knows nothing of the waiting terrors, and that the waiting terrors are all around them now. So many things can only be fought by waiting. Jaidee is a man of action. He fought in the ring. He wore his Seub luck amulets blessed by Ajahn Nopadon himself in the White Temple, and went forth. He carried only his black baton and quelled the nam riots of Katchanaburi single-handed by striding into the crowd.

And yet the only battles that matter are the waiting battles: when his father and mother succumbed to cibiscosis and coughed the meat of their lungs out between their teeth; when his sister and Chaya's sister both saw their hands thicken and crack with the cauliflower growths of fa' gan before the ministry stole the genetic map from the Chinese and manufactured a partial cure. They prayed every day to Buddha and practiced non-attachment and hoped that their two sisters would find a better rebirth than this one that turned their fingers to clubs and chewed away at their joints. They prayed. And waited.

It breaks Jaidee's heart that Niwat knows no fear, and that Surat trains him so. It breaks his heart that he cannot make himself intervene, and he curses himself for it. Why must he destroy childhood illusions of invincibility? Why him? He resents this role.

Instead, he lets his children tackle him and roars, "Ahh, you are a tiger's sons! Too fierce! Too fierce by half!" And they are pleased and laugh and tackle him again, and he lets them win, and shows them tricks that he has learned since the ring, the tricks a fighter in the streets must know, where no combat is ritualized and where even a champion has things to learn. He teaches them how to fight, because it is all he knows. And the other thing-the waiting thing-is something he could never prepare them for, anyway.

These are his thoughts as he turns over Pracha's card, as his own heart closes in on itself, like a block of stone falling inward, as though the center of himself is plunging down a well, dragging all his innards with him, leaving him hollow.

Chaya.

Curled against a wall, blindfolded, hands behind her back, ankles tied before her. On the wall, "All Respect to the Environment Ministry" is scrawled in brown letters that must be blood. There is a bruise on Chaya's cheek. She wears the same blue pha sin that she had on when she made him a breakfast of gaeng kiew wan and sent him on his way this morning with a laugh.

He stares dumbly at the photo.

His sons are fighters, but they do not know this warfare. He himself does not know how to skirmish like this. A faceless foe who reaches out to touch him on the throat, who strokes a demon claw along his jaw and whispers I can hurt you without ever showing its face, without ever presenting itself as an opponent at all.