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

she wouldn’t have him. At night I listened to the three of them, and it just turned me right off. You would think that I’d be spanking it myself, but the sound of them made me shrivel up. I would clamp one of the stolen Walkmans on my ears and go to sleep to Mallaria or the Stone Crows.

One day Loc Tuc took me into his confidence. I don’t know why. I’m not a person to be trusted. People always trust me, though. I’m the kind of person you think you’re having a conversation with, but I’m not there. If you look, my eyes are flying all over. Maybe Loc Tuc thought that loyalty was the least he could expect from me because he had rescued me. If you are ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are certain to be in peril in every battle. Why did I think of myself as Loc Tuc’s enemy? Perhaps it was boyishness on my part. Loc Tuc said he was going to return to Ho Chi Minh City because he was tired and old and there was one last score of computer chips and cellphone batteries he would make and then he was leaving. He told me this when I was tying his arm off for his daily dose, and I asked him when we were leaving, and he said I was free. And in a fit of jealousy I told him that the ugly man, Kien, was fucking his woman. Then he fell asleep and I left to go to the market with my bag.

When I came back, the monk was lying on the floor with his right arm in blood. Kien was sleeping and the woman was not around. I had waited for Kien at the railway station for our usual sweet tea, but he had not appeared. It was there that he used to show me the panties of the woman, which he had stolen. He would grin and place them to his nose. Loc Tuc, I suspected, had tried to tie himself off again and the butchered veins in his arm had bled. But as I went closer to him, I saw that he had a bicycle spoke in his hand. There was blood on it. Then I noticed that the room was more wrecked than usual. The goods, which were usually the only orderly things, were in a mess, and Kien did not answer when I asked him why he had he kept me waiting at the station. I kicked his foot and he didn’t move. Then I saw his face, which was a mask of black blood. I tried to shake Loc Tuc awake, but he was gone into his dreams, so I waited and waited until he woke up.

Kien was still dead when Loc Tuc woke up weeping. We doubled Kien into a mat. We threw him into the murky face of the Chao Phyara River. Loc Tuc could not control himself. He was weeping so much, thinking of the reincarnations he would have to make. I told him, “Shut up! People disappear all the time.” He was like a child. “Nobody comes back,” I said, “and nothing happens.” He looked at me strangely, and calmness fell over him.

You would think he would be more anxious to leave Bangkok after this. I expected him to take off right away, but he didn’t. We went back to the routine in our room behind the store, except that Kien was in the river and the woman was never seen again. “Loc Tuc,” I said to him one evening, “when will you leave for Saigon?” He lay listless on his mat, his veins a twist of broken strings, his arm like a discarded guitar. He had done something, it would seem, beyond shame, beyond life. He would stare at me as if he didn’t know me, only lifting himself, slowly reaching a bedraggled hand out for the dirty heroin I brought him. Other times he would pace and flutter about jerkily, making another plan to leave for Saigon, only to fall into weeping again.

But sometimes I caught him staring at me as if I were an evil man. I would ask him then, “Loc Tuc, what did Kien say to you? He was a liar, you know. He was planning against you. Did he tell you something?” Loc Tuc would pretend he didn’t hear me. But my questions would quiet his accusations, which he never voiced but which I understood. So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak. I determined that as soon as I found out what I wanted from Loc Tuc, I would let him go.

SEVENTEEN

TUYEN WAS WET from the rain. She mounted the stairs ahead of Carla and Oku and felt around in her bag for her keys.

“Sure you won’t have a smoke?” Carla coaxed.

“Nah, next time. Tomorrow, save me some.” Her fingers touched the camera. She felt nervous. “See you guys.”

“Are you gonna be pounding on my head again tonight?”

“No. I’m kinda stalled on that one.”

“Thank God!”

“You’re kidding! After you made us haul that fucking thing up, nearly killing ourselves!”

“Anyways! Later.” Tuyen opened her door and entered her studio, leaving them in mock shock on the threshold.

Her small darkroom used to be part of the kitchen. She drew the camera from her bag, looked at it, and seeing that she had two more frames in the roll, at a whim shot them off at her own face. Then she rewound the film and removed the cylinder from the camera. In the darkroom, the only neat space in the apartment, she approached the three trays and scissors that lay on the counter. The lights off, she pulled the film out, cutting it smoothly from the spool, then with a dexterous motion she pulled it onto the reel in the light-tight tank. She poured the developer into the tank, tapped it to dislodge