Methods Devour Themselves Read online

  Throughout all this, she has not asked how to stop the toxin of unmaking. Some curses are like the common flu. Others are cousin to genetic defects, unliftable, incurable. It sits there inside, cystic slag hardening to fossil, a seismic fault-line in the soul. The only answer is passage into the next life.

  Reincarnation is the true panacea.

  There’s nothing magical about Krungthep. The writers and artists were wrong, and what once resided within their fantasias and imagination are now everyday––everywhere. Metaphor and allegory no longer serve, having turned literal overnight. Even the statues and stencils in Suvarnaphum have come alive, adopted as vessels for the creatures they once depicted as fictional. What is the point of words on pages, or nielloware etchings or delicate carved ivory, when the genuine articles are full of voice and viscera?

  It’s strange: others who have wandered into Himmapan as children, the ones I know, none of them turned to art when they grew up. Not painting or sculpting, not the piano or the jakhe, neither verse nor prose. Those from the forest make better images and music than we do in any case. Maybe we are meant for brute industry and surgical calculation while they are built for the rest, including philosophy.

  Every time need summons me to Suvarnaphum, I bring vast quantities of food. They trend red, a menu selected for the carnivore’s palate. The giants can eat fruits and vegetables like anyone else, but they enjoy those no more than a child, and unlike a child they don’t need to worry about cavities, caloric intake, diabetic futures. Himmapan beings can eat as much as they like, gobbling up carcinogens and cholesterol with no cost or effect.

  The giants make their home where first-class passengers used to check into Thai Airways, under a pavilion of banana leaves that never brown. Few travellers venture near for fear of the giants’ appetite, and not without reason. There have been disappearances, though never remains. There have been questions, though never investigations. I do know for a fact that the giants are tremendous eaters and that they leave no bones.

  All three are home today, reclining on cushions made from hammered bronze and holding plates made from black nacre. Empty. Around them, the walls gleam with tableaus of holiness. Prince Siddhartha stepping on the lotuses of his birth; Prince Siddhartha forsaking his palace to seek the ascetic’s path; Prince Siddhartha triumphing over demonic temptation.

  As one the giants look at me, or at least turn their attention. Each of them has four faces apiece with eyes to match, their gazes reading existence in compound. Their faces are theatrical masks, red and blue and green, bristling tusks like machetes. Wood and acrylic transmuted to sinew and iron. I’ve asked them why they don’t wear their own flesh and get answers in verse that leave me no more enlightened. They have an abiding love of Sanskrit, which I never bothered learning (does anyone, who was once spirited away?); that is the province of a government liaison (I avoid that entire division––too many fetishists).

  “Child,” one of them says, “you did not come empty-handed; we can smell.”

  This is a ritual––they don’t talk without a bribe. The Styrofoam boxes I brought are damp with blood and grease: cartilage flavoured hot and sour, dripping meat just barely rare, plastic jars of namprik and dry chili. Pork, beef, the animal is nearly moot. As long as it is flesh that once belonged to a walking creature, flesh that once housed cardiac muscles the size of a fist. I don’t think much of vegetarianism, but if anything could turn me herbivorous it would be them, not religion or even health problems.

  Once they have filled their plates, the blue one says, “You look in want of a tale.”

  The green one chuckles, a sound like a landslide about to begin. “We tell stories not to excite or intrigue, but to harden their truth.”

  (Don’t you have names? I asked. The crunch of femur and the slide of tongue on new guts, they said. I didn’t ask again. You could call them Morrakot, Tuptim, and Pailin, but those are such soft names next to their predator might.)

  “I don’t. I need to know––” My breath trembles, cuts short, a juddering knock against my teeth. “I need to know if Panthajinda is alive.”

  They look at one another. Enough eyes to spare, still, to look at me too. “You left a wound in Himmapan, child.” This from the red one, though they all have the same voice, asphalt and seismic calculus. “It seeks to restore itself, in khrut-shape or not.”

  I was a child, I could say; I did not know what I was doing. But the actual meat of it, the reality, is what it is and will not bend to my excuses. “Let me talk to her.” What remains of her.

  The green giant opens their mouth, and keeps opening. Past the unhinging of jaw it opens, a gaping hole lined with bright tongues and red teeth. I have seen it before, and don’t look away, but it’s not a sight I wish on anyone. The tongues and teeth roar and blur into a vermillion haze. Himmapan colours bleed into that with difficulty. Sometimes I don’t think the giants are from the forest at all; it is a place of green and gold and opal radiance while the giants are red on red inside, a hungry insatiable mass.

  The image stabilizes and there is Panthajinda, enthroned, eyes shut. When I left her and Himmapan, we were both children, but her echo––spirit remnant, dregs at cup’s end––has aged, tall and strong, her four arms immaculate. Two for the wings, two for human things. Droplets of water in her black-sun hair, on her gilded throat. She looks asleep; of course she looks asleep, a goddess at rest.

  How do you begin to apologize, even if it wasn’t your fault? How do you start to grieve, when you are as good as the murderer? The giants don’t judge or condemn, but they don’t have to.

  We don’t talk; what communication occurs is at a preverbal level, the sensation of elevating pulse and heart knotting into stone, the memory of dying. Wisdom passes from her to me in impressionistic blots, truths on mortality and samsara that turn like barbed wheels. The dead don’t have secrets to keep. They tell you everything, everything. All you need to do is ask, all you need to have is the stomach to bear.

  I promised myself I wouldn’t cry; it leaves me small and brittle, robbed of dignity. I break this promise, every time.

  On the train ride home I watch a girl, seventeen maybe, compulsively blotting her face. Sheet after sheet; she is too sweaty and the air conditioning too sluggish. At the far end of the carriage, two kinnaree murmur in quiet conversation, fair salaries and weather, the merits of birdseed and imported fruits. Their foreheads and noses produce no excess sebum. Their eyelashes are voluminous without the requirement of mascara, their lips pink without the assistance of lipstick, their skin lustrous and poreless without the help of foundation. Enough of them and the cosmetics industry will go extinct entirely. Himmapan women make farang supermodels look pickled and haggard, farang celebrities overpainted and swollen with Botox.

  Back at my apartment, I take out the lockbox that has accompanied me from move to move down the years, home to dormitory to apartment. It’s small and mundane, a dial lock to guard it and not much else. Few pieces of jewellery are attached to my name and all of them reside here, but the star is this: two bangles beaten thread-thin, clinched together by a star sapphire. The one gift from Panthajinda that she intended to be the first of many. Funny really; it was given to a child, but somehow it’s stretched as my wrist grew, the gold so soft and so warm. I rarely wear it. For two days I don’t leave my apartment, pulling blackout curtains over the windows, double-bolting my door, switching off my phone. An anechoic chamber, liberated from human interaction.

  On the third day, I return to Khun Jutamat’s house, the bangles gleaming on my wrist. I’m dehydrated, famished, and my head is full of feathers.

  She isn’t home, but one of her staff lets me in on her instruction. Wait in the garden, they say; she’ll be back shortly from the hospital. Perhaps some miracle cure has been found, last-minute. Most likely not.

  Her garden overlooks the Chao Praya, which isn’t what it used to be, that mucky sewage-blighted self. After Himmapan and Krungthep collided the river has been ru
nning clear, its skin lacerated nacreous white, smelling of cleanness and paya-nak and––toward the sea––mermaids. To filth the waters is to court incredible misfortune, swifter and harsher than falling apart slowly. So much converges, so much moves inexorably. What Himmapan brought is not magic but consequence. What happens to us, inside, is a wasteland.

  The upsorn-sriha housekeeper steps, dainty, onto the veranda. The tray she carries holds a perspiring glass. Her eyes are downcast, demure. You always forget the damage an upsorn-sriha can do, they all have this look of harmless grace, their delicate feet made for running. Away, you think, because of the folktales. Kinnaree, upsorn-sriha, makkalee fruits, all the girlish things of the forest who exist to be captured, painted, admired.

  I take the glass, gazing into it, the milky tea. It’s flat, bright orange, the same colour a child might shade in a sun. I think of drinking it in one big gulp, emptying the glass just like that and grinding the ice to dust in my mouth. “Is this painful?”

  “Pardon, ma’am?” Even her voice is ordinary. Her face too, plain and homely as though she’s been particularly cursed among a species made for breathtaking beauty.

  “Whatever you added to the tea. Will it put me to sleep without pain, or do you mean for me to suffer like Khun Jutamat did? Or worse.”

  Her gaze meets mine, direct, before fixing on the bangle. The star sapphire that is so like the colour of Panthajinda’s wings. “She was meant to be a queen among khrut.”

  “I remember you now.” A handmaiden, or childhood companion. Panthajinda didn’t give her much attention during the time I was in Himmapan; I was novel while the upsorn-sriha was not. She used to hover just out of sight, dutiful and a little sad, I thought. “You must’ve been there when she died.”

  “She wouldn’t have been there near the river, had you not slipped. So close to the territory of her enemies. They were at war; still are.”

  It’s not as though I need reminding. The war between nak and khrut, that forever enmity between those of the water and the sky. Serpent against eagle. As a child I didn’t understand it; as a child I thought only of Himmapan as a vast playground, freer than any Krungthep street. “I couldn’t have known.” That the nak would drag her in and drown her; that her wings––strong on land, impossibly mighty in flight––would be deadweight in water, no use at all. “She was a child.”

  “She would have grown to rule and command. They destroyed her as they would any weapon. I will avenge her, but their logic wasn’t unsound.”

  The nak spared me, once my purpose as bait was past. Because I was a human child, they said, and to take a mortal life was a sin. Not so with another of Himmapan kind. With others of the forest, any tactic was permissible, any death a justification unto itself. “Would this even bring her back?” Killing Jutamat, killing me.

  She stares at me, unblinking. Do deer need to blink, I wonder. “It’s not the flesh––Khun Jutamat, like you, is mortal––but the essence, the karmic heft. Some are bound for better destinies than others. You should pay for what you did, but your place on the wheel is far beneath what I require. Khun Jutamat is gold. You are dross.”

  How strange that the spymaster is, evidently, possessed of greater virtue than most. Than me, though that’s no surprise. “What is still there…” My breath comes out thin. “It’s not her anymore.”

  The first hint of anger: “What do you know about my liege.”

  Nothing, nothing at all. An image, a memory. The dead bear no resemblance, a distant cousin to their living selves. Less. “How many more do you need?” Counting cargo, reducing it to simple arithmetic.

  “If I find a single shining soul, rich and pure, it will suffice to give her a new body. I will need nothing more.”

  “Isn’t this prohibited for you.” Human lives: Jutamat’s and whoever else’s, before and after. How many in total, I could ask, balancing a chequebook. Murders against one resurrection, crimes against one act of reparation.

  Her hands twitch; her shoulders coil, tense. “I may be exiled. But I will see her back.”

  Isn’t that what love is like, after all. What I feel for––about––Panthajinda is tangled in an ideal. I slide the bangles off my wrist, hold them out to the upsorn-sriha whose name I have not asked (and would she tell me? No). “Take it. More yours than mine.”

  She might move to slap it out of my hands, out of pride. Instead she takes those thin gold threads and puts them onto her wrist. Slimmer than mine, and already the bangles appear to fit as though they’d been made just for her. She doesn’t offer, But she would have wanted you to keep them. No quarter.

  When she’s gone, I drink the tea. Not too sweet, not too much condensed milk. It’s just right and it’s just tea, unburdened by the acrimonious acid of poison or curse.

  When she was still alive, I asked Panthajinda what Himmapan would have been like untouched by human imagination; how the wars would have played out, how each race would have evolved, deific and alien. Meeting you is the best thing that ever happened to me, Oraphin, she said. I can’t wait to see your Krungthep, all your skyscrapers, all your lights. We could go to school together. After she died, I asked her again, and it was then I learned that the dead do not use words, do not speak. Instead she showed me an image, a dark line stretching forever, drinking all light: an event horizon, full of ruin, the endpoint of Himmapan crossing over. There is no room for dreamers.

  On the way out I take a final look at Jutamat’s lost, forlorn limbs, stacked together in the living room. Two legs, one arm. Soon she will be simply a human torso, and then not even that. Maybe that is the future. An epidemic of disassembly and all of us lying exposed, apart, awaiting the end.

  I will be there too. By then Panthajinda will have come back, picking a path through the vision she foresaw. She will glide on her taloned feet, the upsorn-sriha at her side, and stop by my body. For one last time, I will see her again.

  Chapter Two

  Debris and Dead Skin: the capitalist imaginary and the atrophy of thought

  J. Moufawad-Paul

  Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious.

  Mark Fisher

  We are nearly two decades into the 21st century and occupy a world cluttered with objects and phenomena that would have been scarcely imaginable even in the middle of the 20th century. All of the dreams of the fantasists of the 1950s are eclipsed by the reality of technological development; the science fictions of the 1960s are largely outdated. And yet we have also failed to transcend the limits of even 19th century imagination: despite all these new technologies, many of which must appear like magic to our long dead counterparts, the world is still determined by the logic of capital. Whereas a 19th century utopian imagined a future that transcended exploitative and oppressive social relations we are losing our ability to think outside the capitalist box. Following the so-called “end of history” our imagination has atrophied. Is it any wonder, then, that much of the world still resembles the hell on earth reviled by past socialist thinkers? As dystopia becomes normative everywhere––endless wars, increased exploitation in the global peripheries, a resurgence of fascist movements in the imperialist metropoles, environmental devastation––it is much more difficult to imagine a time beyond these centuries of capitalist logic.

  Our imagination is becoming thoroughly capitalist.

  The victory of the capitalist camp secured this dystopian monopoly on imagination. Since cold war ideology had already succeeded in valorizing a dystopian literature where all resistance to capitalism and imperialism was coded as “totalitarian” and doomed to failure (Orwell’s 1984 and all of its imitations), its greater success was in passing off its own dystopia as reality itself. Hence, the most powerful capitalist nations would loudly proclaim that they possessed moral credibility––and these proclamations were accepted as “common sense” by their citizens––and were free and op
en societies while they subjected the majority of the globe to harsher regimes of exploitation and oppression. Eighty per cent of the world was transformed into a massive concentration camp, all resistance to neo-colonialism was brutally crushed, but since none of this resembled the totalitarian dystopias the capitalist camp had ascribed to their defeated cold war enemy, history was over and we were stuck with “the best of the worst” which was also called democracy.

  By the time the crisis of 2008 erupted the end of history discourse and the institutional maintenance of this discourse was so complete that imperial subjects, certain they lived in the freest countries on the planet, were collectively unable to recognize that things were even worse than the Great Depression. At the same time there was also an explosion of new dystopian literature, though most of it was written for Young Adults, as if to signify that people were aware that reality had become dystopian. Unfortunately, if such an awareness existed it was mainly unconscious; the vast majority of this new dystopian literature (The Hunger Games, Divergent, etc.) was just a rehashing of tired tropes about “totalitarianism”; the authors seemed unaware that the world in which they wrote was far more dystopian than their plagiarized fantasies from Battle Royale, 1984, or Brave New World. A world in which a bunch of people have to fight in an arena to secure social peace is in fact less nightmarish than a world in which an entire country can be slated for re-management, as Haiti was in 2005 by US Americans and Canadians at a summit to which not a single Haitian was invited.

  We are living in a world that is more dystopian than dystopian literature and this fact generates two popular responses: ignorant denial or cynical acceptance. Both of these responses are determined by the capitalist purchase on thought since, having conceived of itself as the end of history, part of capitalism’s dystopic power is in its ability to prevent thinking from transcending its limits.