What We All Long For by Dionne Brand (most important books to read txt) 📗

I spoke less and less as time went on. What is the use? I thought. And so when I uttered any sound he would perk up with curiosity. If I fell asleep, I would wake to find him watching me. When we arrived in Bangkok, I began to feel uneasy about his attention. You have to know that I wouldn’t recognize love if I saw it. So I thought he meant to do me harm. How would I know that he saw in me one hundred years of meditation, that I had lived several other lives before my present reincarnation. Garbage, I said when I found out, and anyway it was too late by then.

We settled in Bangkok in the Klong Toey district. Settled is not the word. We had a room in the back of a store that sold nails and tin and wire and keys. Bangkok was a city in constant dust and smog, the movement of it was turbulent. Bees, I heard the city as if a hundred thousand bees were buzzing in my ear. The bridge over the river had a constant hum of traffic resounding over the tin roofs of the hovels below, which was Klong Toey. There we made a prayer place. The three of us, his followers, were emaciated like reeds. It was strange how Loc Tuc seemed to stay healthy, looking through all of our hard travels. He wanted to be like some monks who had patrons, but he wasn’t as charming as he thought, and in Bangkok there were many monks ahead of him. The three of us, his followers, had more of a chance to end the cycle of reincarnation than Loc Tuc. We broke the rules of devotion, of course, smoking and drinking and such, but Loc Tuc was insatiable. More insatiable than all of us. We were his shadows, we performed all the tasks of meeting Loc Tuc’s desires. The female he fucked, the male cleaned and fed him, and I got his opium and submitted to his teaching, and we all three did his bidding when it came to delivering messages and bringing them, beating up on someone defenceless, stealing and doing the same duties for Loc Tuc’s associates in the dirty places of Bangkok.

Once I beat a man up, a man who owed us money. He ended up in the hospital, and I followed him there and beat him some more. I broke his wife’s jaw when she came at me. I don’t like people taking things from me. It was in the newspaper how daring I was and how I was low-life from Malaysia.

This is all hindsight. I sound bitter. I’m not. I didn’t hate Loc Tuc. After all, he took me from Pulau Bidong. He gave me a direction. He taught me who I was.

As I said, we lived off a tiny alleyway in the back of a store that sold nails and spanners and nuts and pails. Nobody came to buy any of this that I ever saw. A card game kept things going. Here you could bet on anything—where the rain would fall, whether two ants would go in a certain direction, anything. Sometimes there were dog fights and rooster fights and fights between men. Our room was small, and the four of us stuck close to it for the first few months while Loc Tuc put out his feelers for clients of one kind or another. Women wanting their fortunes told or men wanting a job done, like unloading a truck of TV sets or computers or American sneakers or cellphones. This was the beginning of the economic boom, the Asian tigers, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Hong Kong. Tigers. You could get a job in an American factory, a German factory, an Italian factory—all right here in Thailand. Those stupids tied to those machines would stumble back home with less than what they went to work with, if they were lucky. Not we. We lived on the fat. We weren’t big. Not as big as Loc Tuc would have liked. Again it wasn’t his country; we couldn’t be too conspicuous. We ran into a lot of competition too, a lot of knives, a lot of treachery. Treachery. We ran into people like us. People wanting to get by. To live.

I’m not a liar. Every time Loc Tuc sent me to do something, I put a little aside for myself. If we stole television sets, I skimmed two per cent off the profits, same with dresses or video recorders or watches. Loc Tuc knew. Why would you trust me if I didn’t steal a bit too? Just like he did. What was I supposed to be? A sage? I made my own contacts, I cut my own deals. Stole vegetables, sold them to food vendors, stole cigarettes, sold to tourists and children. I was swift. I am swift. I learn fast. Anything. I pick up anything. I watch everything. I had a black bag full of cigarettes, watches, cellphones, pens, tapes, computer disks. I’d peddle them in the tourist district and all along Silom Road. From the old market, around the White Orchid, all over.

I often ask myself why I wore this disguise as a monk like Loc Tuc. No answer. I was a monk. I renounced the world. I didn’t know the world. It’s all self-deception, anyway. I’m not about to apologize for what I did.

Most days, when things were busy, we worked until one or two in the morning. When things were slow, we walked about all day, begging alms or sitting near the filthy river Chao Phyara. Our room was hot and dusty and suffocating in the daytime. At night the other guy and I listened to Loc Tuc do nasty grunting things with the woman. It got to be like music we fell asleep to. The other guy, Kien, jerked himself off to this tune every night. He wanted the woman, but he was such an ugly man