The Windup Girl

11

Jaidee has a certain respect for the Chaozhou Chinese. Their factories are large and well-run. They have generations rooted in the Kingdom, and they are intensely loyal to Her Majesty the Child Queen. They are utterly unlike the pathetic Chinese refugees who have flooded in from Malaya, fleeing to his country in hopes of succor after they alienated the natives of their own. If the Malayan Chinese had been half as clever as the Chaozhou, they would have converted to Islam generations ago, and woven themselves fully into the tapestry of that society.

Instead, the Chinese of Malacca and Penang and the Western Coast arrogantly held themselves apart, thinking the rising tide of fundamentalism would not affect them. And now they come begging to the Kingdom, hoping that their Chaozhou cousins will aid them when they were not clever enough to help themselves.

The Chaozhou are smart, where the Malayan Chinese are stupid. They are practically Thai themselves. They speak Thai. They took Thai names. They may have Chinese roots somewhere in their distant past, but they are Thai. And they are loyal. Which, when Jaidee thinks about it, is more than can be said about some of his own race, certainly more than can be said of Akkarat and his brood at the Trade Ministry.

So Jaidee feels a certain sympathy when a Chaozhou businessman in a long white shirt, loose cotton trousers and sandals strides back and forth in front of him on the factory floor, complaining that his factory has been shut down because some coal ration has been exceeded, when he paid every white shirt who came through his door, and that Jaidee has no right-no right-to shut down the entire factory.

Jaidee even has sympathy when the man calls him a turtle’s egg-which is certainly an annoying thing to hear, knowing that it is a terrible insult in Chinese. Yet still, he remains tolerant of the emotional explosions on the part of this businessman. It’s in the Chinese nature to be a bit hot-hearted. They are given to explosions of emotion that a Thai would never indulge in.

All in all, Jaidee has sympathy for the man.

But he doesn’t have sympathy for a man who shoves a finger into his chest repeatedly while he curses, and so Jaidee is sitting atop that man’s chest now-with a black baton over his windpipe-explaining the finer points of respect due a white shirt.

“You seem to have mistaken me for another Ministry man,” Jaidee observes.

The man gurgles and tries to get free, but the baton crushing his throat prevents him. Jaidee watches him carefully. “You of course understand that we have coal rationing because we are a city underwater. Your carbon allocation was exceeded many months ago.”

“Ghghhaha.”

Jaidee considers the response. Shakes his head sadly. “No. I think that we cannot allow it to continue. King Rama XII decreed, and Her Royal Majesty the Child Queen now supports that we shall never abandon Krung Thep to the invasions of the rising sea. We will not flee from our City of Divine Beings the way the cowards of Ayutthaya fled from the Burmese. The ocean is not some marching army. Once we accede to the waters, we will never again throw it out.” He regards the sweating Chinese man. “And so we must all do our part. We must all fight together, like the villagers of Bang Rajan, to keep this invader from our streets, don’t you think?”

“Gghhghghhghhhh…”

“Good.” Jaidee smiles. “I’m glad we’re making progress.”

Someone clears his throat.

Jaidee looks up, stifling his annoyance. “Yes?”

A young private in new whites stands respectfully, waiting. “Khun Jaidee” He wais, lowering his head to his pressed palms. Holds the pose. “I am very sorry for my interruption.”

“Yes?”

“Chao Khun General Pracha requests your presence.”

“I’m busy,” Jaidee says. “Our friend here finally seems willing to communicate with a cool heart and a reasonable demeanor.” He smiles kindly down at the businessman.

The boy says, “I was to tell you… I was told to, to…”

“Go ahead.”

“To tell you that you should get your, your — so sorry — ‘glory-seeking ass’ — so sorry — back to the Ministry. Immediately if not before.” He winces at the words. “If you have no cycle you were supposed to take mine.”

Jaidee grimaces. “Ah. Yes. Well then.” He gets up off the businessman. Nods to Kanya. “Lieutenant? Perhaps you can reason with our friend here?”

Kanya makes a face of puzzlement. “Is something wrong?”

“It seems Pracha is finally ready to rant and rave at me.”

“Should I come with you?” Kanya glances at the businessman. “This lizard can wait for another day.”

Jaidee grins at her concern. “Don’t worry about me. Finish here. I’ll let you know whether we’re being exiled south to guard yellow card internments for the rest of our careers when you get back.”

As they head for the door, the businessman musters new bravery. “I’ll have your head for this, heeya!”

The sound of Kanya’s club connecting and a yelp are the last things Jaidee hears as he exits the factory.

Outside, the sun glares down. He’s already sweating from the exertion of working on the businessman, and the sun burns uncomfortably. He stands under the shade of a coconut palm until the messenger can bring the bike around.

The boy eyes Jaidee’s sweating face with concern. “You wish to rest?”

Jaidee laughs. “Don’t worry about me, I’m just getting old. That heeya was a troublesome one, and I’m not the fighter I used to be. In the cool season I wouldn’t be sweating so.”

“You won a lot of fights.”

“Some.” Jaidee grins. “And I trained in weather hotter than this.”

“Your lieutenant could do such work,” the boy says. “No need for you to work so hard.”

Jaidee wipes his brow and shakes his head. “And then what would my men think? That I’m lazy.”

The boy gasps. “No one would think such a thing of you. Never!”

“When you’re a captain, you’ll understand better.” Jaidee smiles indulgently. “Men are loyal when you lead from the front. I won’t have a man wasting his time winding a crank fan for me, or waving a palm frond just to keep me comfortable like those heeya in the Trade Ministry. I may lead, but we are all brothers. When you’re a captain, promise me you’ll do the same.”

The boy’s eyes shine. He wais again. “Yes, Khun. I won’t forget. Thank you!”

“Good boy.” Jaidee swings his leg over the boy’s bike. “When Lieutenant Kanya is finished here, she’ll give you a ride back on our tandem.”

He steers out into traffic. In the hot season, without rain, not many except the insane or the motivated are out in the direct heat, but covered arches and paths hide markets full of vegetables and cooking implements and clothing.

At Thanon Na Phralan, Jaidee takes his hands off the handlebars to wai to the City Pillar Shrine as he passes, whispering a prayer for the safety of the spiritual heart of Bangkok. It is the place where King Rama XII first announced that they would not abandon the city to the rising seas. Now, the sound of monks chanting for the city’s survival filters out onto the street, filling Jaidee with a sense of peace. He raises his hands to his forehead three times, one of a river of other riders who all do the same.

Fifteen minutes later, the Environment Ministry appears, a series of buildings, red-tiled, with steeply sloping roofs peering out of bamboo thickets and teak and rain trees. High white walls and Garuda and Singha images guard the Ministry’s perimeter, stained with old rain marks and fringed with growing ferns and mosses.

Jaidee has seen the compound from the air, one of a handful taken up for a dirigible overflight of the city when Chaiyanuchit still ran the Ministry and white shirt influence was absolute, when the plagues that swept the earth were killing crops at such a fantastic rate that no one knew if anything at all would survive.

Chaiyanuchit remembered the beginning of the plagues. Not many could claim that. And when Jaidee was just a young draftee, he was lucky enough to work in the man’s office, bringing dispatches.

Chaiyanuchit understood what was at stake, and what had to be done. When the borders needed closing, when ministries needed isolating, when Phuket and Chiang Mai needed razing, he did not hesitate. When jungle blooms exploded in the north, he burned and burned and burned, and when he took to the sky in His Majesty the King’s dirigible, Jaidee was blessed to ride with him.

By then, they were only mopping up. AgriGen and PurCal and the rest were shipping their plague-resistant seeds and demanding exorbitant profits, and patriotic generippers were already working to crack the code of the calorie companies’ products, fighting to keep the Kingdom fed as Burma and the Vietnamese and the Khmers all fell. AgriGen and its ilk were threatening embargo over intellectual property infringement, but the Thai Kingdom was still alive. Against all odds, they were alive. As others were crushed under the calorie companies’ heels, the Kingdom stood strong.

Embargo! Chaiyanuchit had laughed. Embargo is precisely what we want! We do not wish to interact with their outside world at all.

And so the walls had gone up-those that the oil collapse had not already created, those that had not been raised against civil war and starving refugees-a final set of barriers to protect the Kingdom from the onslaughts of the outside world.

As a young inductee Jaidee had been astounded at the hive of activity that was the Environment Ministry. White shirts rushing from office to street as they tried to maintain tabs on thousands of hazards. In no other ministry was the sense of urgency so acute. Plagues waited for no one. A single genehack weevil found in an outlying district meant a response time counted in hours, white shirts on a kink-spring train rushing across the countryside to the epicenter.

And at every turn the Ministry’s purview was expanding. The plagues were but the latest insult to the Kingdom’s survival. First came the rising sea levels, the need to construct the dikes and levees. And then came the oversight of power contracts and trading in pollution credits and climate infractions. The white shirts took over the licensing of methane capture and production. Then there was the monitoring of fishery health and toxin accumulations in the Kingdom’s final bastion of calorie support (a blessing that the farang calorie companies thought as land-locked people and had only desultorily attacked fishing stocks). And there was the tracking of human health and viruses and bacteria: H7V9; cibiscoscosis111.b, c, d; fa’ gan fringe; bitter water mussels, and their viral mutations that jumped so easily from saltwater to dry land; blister rust… There was no end to the duties of the Ministry.

Jaidee passes a woman selling bananas. He can’t resist hopping off his bike to buy one. It’s a new varietal from the Ministry’s rapid prototyping unit. Fast growing, resistant to makmak mites with their tiny black eggs that sicken banana flowers before they can hope to grow. He peels the banana and eats it greedily as he pushes his bike along, wishing he could take the time to have a real snack. He discards the peel beside the bulk of a rain tree.

All life produces waste. The act of living produces costs, hazards and disposal questions, and so the Ministry has found itself in the center of all life, mitigating, guiding and policing the detritus of the average person along with investigating the infractions of the greedy and short-sighted, the ones who wish to make quick profits and trade on others’ lives for it.

The symbol for the Environment Ministry is the eye of a tortoise, for the long view-the understanding that nothing comes cheap or quickly without a hidden cost. And if others call them the Turtle Ministry, and if the Chaozhou Chinese now curse white shirts as turtle’s eggs because they are not allowed to manufacture as many kink-spring scooters as they would like, so be it. If the farang make fun of the tortoise for its slow pace, so be it. The Environment Ministry has ensured that the Kingdom endures, and Jaidee can only stand in awe of its past glories.

And yet, when Jaidee climbs off his bicycle outside the Ministry gate, a man glares at him and a woman turns away. Even just outside their own compound-or perhaps particularly there-the people he protects turn away from him.

Jaidee grimaces and wheels his cycle past the guards.

The compound is still a hive of activity, and yet it is so different from when he first joined. There is mold on the walls and chunks of the edifice are cracking under the pressure of vines. An old bo tree leans against a wall, rotting, underlining their failures. It has lain so for ten years, rotting. Unremarked amongst the other things that have also died. There is an air of wreckage to the place, of jungle attempting to reclaim what was carved from it. If the vines were not cleared from the paths, the Ministry would disappear entirely. In a different time, when the the Ministry was a hero of the people, it was different. Then, people genuflected before Ministry officers, three times khrabbed to the ground as though they were monks themselves, their white uniforms inspiring respect and adoration. Now Jaidee watches civilians flinch as he walks past. Flinch and run.

He is a bully, he thinks sourly. Nothing but a bully walking amongst water buffalo, and though he tries to herd them with kindness, again and again, he finds himself using the whip of fear. The whole Ministry is the same-at least, those who still understand the dangers that they face, who still believe in the bright white line of protection that must be maintained.

I am a bully.

He sighs and parks the cycle in front of the administrative offices, which are desperately in need of a whitewashing that the shrinking budget cannot finance. Jaidee eyes the building, wondering if the Ministry has come to crisis thanks to overreaching, or because of its phenomenal success. People have lost their fear of the outside world. Environment’s budget shrinks yearly while that of Trade increases.

Jaidee finds a seat outside the general’s office. White shirt officers walk past, carefully ignoring him. That he is waiting in front of Pracha’s office should fill him with some satisfaction. It isn’t often that he is called before a man of rank. He’s done something right, for once. A young man approaches hesitantly. Wais.

“Khun Jaidee?”

At Jaidee’s nod, the young man breaks into a grin. His hair is cropped close and his eyebrows are only slight shadows; he has just come out of the monastery.

“Khun, I hoped it was you.” He hesitates, then holds out a small card. It is painted in the old Sukhothai-style and depicts a young man in combat, blood on his face, driving an opponent down into the ring. His features are stylized, but Jaidee can’t help smiling at the sight of it.

“Where did you get this?”

“I was at the fight, Khun. In the village. I was only this big—” he holds his hand up to his waist “—only like this, perhaps. Maybe smaller.” He laughs self-consciously. “You made me want to be a fighter. When Dithakar knocked you down and your blood was everywhere, I thought you were finished. I didn’t think you were big enough to take him. He had muscles…” he trails off.

“I remember. It was a good fight.”

The youth grins. “Yes, Khun. Fabulous. I thought I wanted to be a fighter, too.”

“And now look at you.”

The boy runs his hand over his close-cropped hair. “Ah. Well. Fighting is harder than I thought… but…” He pauses. “Would you sign it? The card? Please. I would like to give it to my father. He still speaks highly of your fights.”

Jaidee smiles and signs. “Dithakar was not the most clever fighter I ever faced, but he was strong. I wish all my fights were so clear-cut.”

“Captain Jaidee,” a voice interrupts. “If you are quite finished with your fans.”

The young man wais and flees. Jaidee watches him run and thinks that perhaps not all of the younger generation is a waste. Perhaps… Jaidee turns to face the general. “He is just a boy.”

Pracha glowers at Jaidee. Jaidee grins. “And it’s hardly my fault that I was a good fighter. The Ministry was my sponsor for those years. I think you won quite a lot of money and recruits because of me, Khun General, sir.”

“Don’t give me your ‘General’ nonsense. We’ve known each other too long for that. Get in here.”

“Yes, sir.”

Pracha grimaces and waves Jaidee into the office. “In!”

Pracha closes the door and goes to sit behind the expanse of his mahogany desk. Overhead, a crank fan beats desultorily at the air. The room is large, with shuttered windows open to allow light but little direct sun. The slits of the windows look out onto the Ministry’s ragged grounds. On one wall are various paintings and photographs, including one with Pracha’s graduating class of ministry cadets along with another of Chaiyanuchit, founder of their modern ministry. Another of Her Royal Majesty the Child Queen, looking tiny and terrifyingly vulnerable seated on her throne, and in a corner, a small shrine to Buddha, Phra Pikanet and Seub Nakhasathien. Incense and marigolds drape the shrine.

Jaidee wais the shrine then finds himself a seat in a rattan chair across from Pracha. “Where did you get that class photo?”

“What?” Pracha looks back. “Ah. We were young, then, weren’t we? I found it in my mother’s belongings. She had it all these years, tucked away in a closet. Who would have guessed the old lady was so sentimental?”

“It’s a nice thing to see.”

“You overstepped yourself at the anchor pads.”

Jaidee returns his attention to Pracha. Whisper sheets lie scattered on the desk, rustling under the breeze of the crank fan: Thai Rath. Kom Chad Luek. Phuchatkan Rai Wan. Many of them with photos of Jaidee on the cover. “The newspapers don’t think so.”

Pracha scowls. He shoves the papers into a bin for composting. “The papers love a hero. It sells copies. Don’t believe these people who call you a tiger for fighting the farang. The farang are the key to our future.”

Jaidee nods at the portrait of his mentor Chaiyanuchit hanging below the Queen’s image. “I am not certain that he would agree.”

“Times change, old friend. People are hunting for your head.”

“And you’ll give it to them?”

Pracha sighs. “Jaidee, I’ve known you too long for this. I know you’re a fighter. And I know you have a hot heart.” He holds up a hand as Jaidee stirs to protest. “Yes, a good heart, also, just like your name, but still, jai rawn. Not a bit of jai yen in you. You relish the conflict.” He purses his lips. “So I know that if I rein you in, you will fight. And if I punish you, you will fight.”

“Then let me go about my business. The Ministry benefits from a loose cannon like me.”

“People were offended by your action. And not just stupid farang. Not everyone who ships air cargo is farang, these days. Our interests reach far and wide. Thai interests.”

Jaidee studies the general’s desk. “I wasn’t aware that the Environment Ministry only inspected cargo at others’ convenience.”

“I am trying to reason with you. My hands are full with tigers: blister rust, weevil, the coal war, Trade Ministry infiltrators, yellow cards, greenhouse quotas, fa’ gan outbreaks… And yet you choose to add another.”

Jaidee looks up. “Who is it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Who is so angry that you’re pissing your pants this way? Coming to ask me not to fight? It’s Trade, yes? Someone in the Trade Ministry has you by the balls.”

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.

At first, Jaidee’s voice doesn’t work. Finally, he manages to croak, “Is she alive?”

Pracha sighs. “We don’t know.”

“Who did this?”

“I don’t know.”

“You must!”

“If we knew, we would already have her safe in hand!” Pracha rubs his face angrily, then glares at Jaidee. “We’ve received so many complaints about you, from so many quarters, that we just don’t know! It could be anyone.”

A new terror seizes Jaidee. “What about my sons?” He leaps to his feet. “I have to—”

“Sit down!” Pracha lunges across the desk and grabs him. “We’ve sent men to their school. Your own men. Loyal to you only. The only ones we could trust. They’re fine. They’re being brought to the Ministry. You need to have a cool heart and consider your position. You want to keep this quiet. We don’t want anyone to make sudden decisions. We want Chaya to come back to us whole and alive. Too much noise and someone will lose face and then her body will surely arrive in bloody pieces.”

Jaidee stares at the photograph still lying on the desk. He stands and starts to pace. “It has to be Trade.” His thinks back to the night at the anchor pads, the man, watching him and his white shirts from across the landing fields. Casual. Contemptuous. Spitting a stream of betel like blood and slipping into the darkness. “It was Trade.”

“It could have been farang, or the Dung Lord-he never liked that you wouldn’t fix fights. It could have been some other godfather, some jao por who lost money on a smuggling operation.”

“None of them would stoop so low. It was Trade. There is a man—”

“Stop!” Pracha slams his hand on his desk. “Everyone would like to stoop so low! You’ve made a lot of enemies very quickly. I’ve even had a chaopraya peer from the palace complaining. It could be anyone.”

“You blame me for this?”

Pracha sighs. “There’s no point in assigning blame. It’s done now. You made enemies; I allowed you.” He puts his head in his hands. “We need you to make a public apology. Something to appease them.”

“I won’t.”

“Won’t?” Pracha laughs bitterly. “Put away that foolish pride of yours.” He fingers the picture of Chaya. “What do you think their next move will be? We haven’t had heeya like this since the last Expansion. Money at any cost. Wealth at any price.” He makes a face. “Right now, we may still be able to get her back. But if you continue?” He shakes his head. “They will surely slaughter her. They are animals.

“You will make a public apology for your actions at the anchor pads and you will be demoted. You will be transferred, probably to the south to process yellow cards and handle internments down there.” He sighs and studies the picture again. “And if we are very very careful, and very lucky, perhaps you will get Chaya back.

“Don’t look at me that way, Jaidee. If you were still in the muay thai ring, I would place every baht I own on you. But this is a different sort of fight.” Pracha leans forward, nearly begging. “Please. Do what I say. Bow before these winds.”