Timothy Hallinan: The Fear Artist

He stinks of paint. He’s soaked, even dripping. His elbows are swollen where they hit the pavement. The underside of his left forearm is scraped. One of his favorite T-shirts is ruined.

He eases out of his wet shoes and leaves them by the door. The noise the door makes when it closes resonates, as though the room were a hollow vault.

“I’m alone,” he says aloud, listening to the echo chamber. “Deserted. Abandoned. Bleeding.” His voice sounds lower than usual, bouncing off the barren walls.

His scraped arm sends off a spiteful little telegram of sting, and he shakes his head, blows out a breath he doesn’t remember having drawn, and checks out the scrape, which looks like it’s been disinfected with apricot puree. “Medication,” he says aloud. “And solace.”

The refrigerator surprises him by opening easily, extending, it seems to him, the first cooperation of the day. Five tall brown Singha soldiers stand at frosty attention, their caps just waiting to be popped. He hefts one and rolls its chill smoothness over his cheeks and forehead, then opens the drawer, pulls out the opener, and flips it into the air, closing his eyes and extending his hand in the precise spot the opener will come down. This trick used to delight Miaow, back when she used to be easily delighted. When he hears it hit the floor, he bends to pick it up, seeing for an instant the implacable eyes of the lean cop. His spirits droop, but the hiss of the beer lifts them a bit.

He knocks back about a third of the bottle in one icy, heart-slowing pull. With an operatic burp, he underhands the opener into the drawer from five feet away-nothing but net-and goes around the counter to sink onto one of the stools where the members of the family-although rarely at the same time these days-eat breakfast.

The running crowd , he thinks. He hasn’t seen one of those since the Red Shirts took to the streets to protest the coup that deposed the prime minister they’d voted in by the millions. Now that prime minister’s sister has been elected, the Red Shirts have faded, but Rafferty, like everyone, has heard rumors of isolated, apparently spontaneous crowd incidents since, protesting this or that inequality. The Thai media, which can accurately be characterized as cautious, hasn’t run the stories. He wonders whether the TV crew’s footage will ever make it onto the screen.

He tilts the beer again and swallows, looking idly through the sliding glass door at the darkening sky above Bangkok. The apartment is eight floors up, and their previously panoramic view has been divided vertically by two new condominium towers, both still skeletal at the upper floors. The sky is still there, although it’s been broken up into rectangles by girders like black fold lines, and he scans it for the halting, zigzag flight of bats. Bats in the city delight him-the preservation of wildness they suggest. Sees a lot of them, random tatters of black against a lowering gray sky.

To the north the sky grows even darker and the world disappears, as it has for weeks, in a shroud of rain: the worst monsoon season in sixty years, a huge blunt-force weapon a quarter of a country wide, striking wherever it pleases, filling and overfilling dams, swelling rivers, flooding entire towns, heedless of human life, human dreams, human prayers. As random, murderous, and unmalicious as a bolt of lightning.

And feeding billions of gallons of water into the Chao Phraya River, threatening Bangkok with the worst flood since the 1940s. Rafferty can’t see the river, but, like everyone in the city, he can feel the water level rising, and he’s seen the trucks, loaded with sandbags, splashing toward the city’s low-lying neighborhoods.

King Taksin established Bangkok in 1767 at the site of a trading center on the floodplain of the Chao Phraya, the River of Kings. The city sprawls across an expanse of ground as flat as the palm of a hand, its low points and high points separated by a matter of a few meters. Its buildings sprout from saturated soil, soil that doesn’t accept much water. The city has always had its feet-dry areas and its feet-wet areas, but the difference in elevation between them is precariously small. Over the centuries Bangkok’s builders formalized some of the river’s small tributaries as canals and dug other canals from scratch to spread the water’s flow over a larger area, trying to avoid the inundation that a significant rise in the river’s level would guarantee. Most years the strategy is successful, although in 1942 the city almost drowned.

This year looks like it could be worse than 1942. A city of 12 to 14 million, depending on the time of day, is following the daily rainfall reports with a degree of attention usually reserved for the World Cup.

Mentally Poke follows the surging water upstream, over an imaginary map, back to the rainy northeast, where his wife and daughter have been for two days now, visiting Rose’s family. He misses them even more than he’d thought he would.

And once again he thinks about the death, on a wet, apricot-colored sidewalk, of a former soldier.

Four hours later the knot of furniture in the living room has been untangled and the big pieces are back in their original places, but two feet from the walls. Rafferty has showered and scrubbed where he got scraped on the pavement, and he’s done a little self-barbering to snip some apricot patches out of his hair. He’s cut his hair shorter on one side than the other, so markedly that it makes him want to tilt his head to compensate. Studying it in the mirror, he thinks Miaow, whose own hair changes on a moment-by-moment basis, would probably approve.

Except that she’d never notice. She’s developed a selective vision impairment. No one who’s much more than five feet tall is visible to her.

When someone knocks on the front door, Rafferty’s already on his way toward it, wearing jeans and a Japlish T-shirt he’s liberated from Miaow’s room that says LET’S TOGETHER!! With the paint-splattered clothes rolled up under one arm and one of Rose’s umbrellas in his free hand, he stops, surprised by the twinge of uneasiness the sound causes.

He confronts the uneasiness head-on by peeking boldly through the peephole in the door. He sees no one, which does not reassure him. With a deep breath, he tosses the bundle of spattered clothes onto the couch and opens the door.

What he sees is a scrawny Vietnamese kid of twelve or so with a slender neck and a head so big it looks like a golf ball on a tee. He’s too short to have been visible through the peephole. The kid is carefully disreputable in his after-school clothes: a T-shirt that hangs almost to his knees, a pair of jeans about three inches too long for him that have accordioned around his big, clunky running shoes, and a pair of round, crooked, black-rimmed spectacles. His hair, Rafferty realizes with a start, has been dyed precisely the same shade as Miaow’s. He glances up at Rafferty, and his mouth tightens and travels a really remarkable distance toward his left ear, a semaphore of disappointment.

“Hello, Mr. Rafferty,” Andrew Nguyen says dubiously. He peers around Poke into the room as though he half believes that Rafferty is intentionally concealing something. “Is Miaow home?”

Rafferty says, “You know she’s not, Andrew.”

“Oh,” Andrew says. He blinks a couple of times and uses his index fingers to push the big black frames up his almost-nonexistent nose. Since he and Miaow met in a school production of The Tempest , they’ve been inseparable. The incipient romance delights Rose, but Rafferty is conflicted about it, which is a fancy way of saying it makes him crazy.

Andrew is pretty much occupied with looking at the finger he used to adjust his glasses, so Rafferty says, “Was that it, Andrew? Just ‘Oh’?”