The Windup Girl(68)

To be honest, it is only Gendo-sama's poor treatment of her that makes Emiko think so badly of him. He was a weak man. Or, perhaps, if she is honest, she was not all she could have been. She did not serve to her utmost. That is the sad truth. A bit of shame that she must accept, even as she strives to live without the loving hand of a patron. But perhaps this strange gaijin… perhaps… She will not let the cynical animal into her mind tonight; she will let herself dream.

Emiko spills out of her tower slum into Bangkok's cooling evening. A carnival feel informs the green-tinged streets, woks burning their nighttime noodles, offering simple dishes to the farmers of the market before they return to distant fields for the night. Emiko wanders through the night market, one eye out for white shirts, one on dinner.

She finds a vendor of grilled squid and takes one dipped in chile sauce. In the candlelight and shadows, she has cover of sorts. Her pha sin hides the movement of her legs. It is only her arms she must concern herself with, and if she is slow, careful, and keeps them close to her side, her movements can be mistaken for daintiness.

From a woman and her daughter, Emiko buys a folded banana leaf plate, cupping a nest of fried U-Tex padh seeu. The woman fries the noodles over blue methane, illegal, but not impossible to obtain. Emiko sits at a makeshift counter to shovel them in, her mouth burning at the spice. Others look at her strangely, a few make faces of distaste, but they do nothing. Some of them are even familiar with her. The rest have enough troubles without tangling themselves in the business of windups and white shirts. It is a strange advantage, she supposes. The white shirts are so despised that people don't draw their attention unless absolutely necessary. She shovels the noodles into her mouth and again thinks of the gaijin's words.

There is a place for New People.

She tries to imagine it. A village full of people with stuttering telltale motions and smooth smooth skin. She craves it.

But there is an opposing feeling, also. Not fear. Something she never expected.

Revulsion?

No, too strong a word. More a shiver of distaste that so many of her kind have shamefully fled their duties. All of them living among one another, and not a single one as fine as Gendo-sama. A whole village of New People who have no one to serve.

Emiko shakes her head forcefully. And what has service gotten her? People like Raleigh. And Kannika.

And yet… a whole tribe of New People, huddled in the jungle? What would it be like to hold an eight-foot laborer in her arms? Would that be her lover? Or one of the tentacle monsters of Gendo-sama's factories, ten arms like a Hindu god and a drooling mouth that demands nothing but food and a place to put its hands? How can such a creature make its way north? Why are they there, in the jungle?

She forces back her revulsion. It is surely no worse than Kannika. She has been enslaved to think against New People, even when she herself is one of them. If she thinks logically, she knows that no New Person can be any worse than the client last night, who f**ked her and then spat on her before he left. Surely, to lie with a smooth-skinned New Person could not be worse.

But what kind of life could it be in the village? Eating cockroaches and ants and whatever leaves haven't succumbed to ivory beetle?

Raleigh is a survivor. Are you?

She stirs her noodles with her four-inch RedStar bamboo chopsticks. What would it be like, to serve no one? Would she dare? It makes her dizzy, almost giddy to think of it. What would she do without a patron? Would she then become a farmer? Perhaps grow opium in the hills? Smoke a silver pipe and blacken her teeth as she has heard some of those strange hilltribe ladies do? She laughs to herself. Can she imagine it?

Lost in her thoughts, she nearly misses it. Only luck-the chance movement of a man at the table across from her, his startled glance and then the duck of his head as he buries his attention in his food-saves her. She freezes.

The night market has fallen silent.

And then, like hungry ghosts, the men in white appear behind her, talking in their quick song-song to the woman at the wok. The woman bustles to serve, obsequious. Emiko trembles before them, noodles halfway between mouth and lips, her slender arm suddenly shaking under the strain. She wants to put the chopsticks down, but there is nothing to do. No way to hide herself if she moves, and so she sits frozen while the men speak behind her, looming over her as they wait.

"… finally overstepped himself. I heard Bhirombhakdi was screaming up and down the offices saying he was going to get his head. 'Jaidee's head on a platter, he's gone too far!'"

"He gave 5000 baht to his men, every one of them, for the raid."

"A lot of good it does them now that he's been stripped."

"Still, five thousand, no wonder Bhirombhakdi was spitting blood. It must have been half a million that he lost."

"And Jaidee just charged in like a megodont. The old man probably thought Jaidee was Torapee the bull, measuring his father's footprint. Looking to take him down."

"Not anymore."

Emiko trembles as they jostle her. This is the end. She will drop the chopsticks and they will see the windup girl, as they haven't seen her yet though they cluster around her, though they bump against her with a self-confident maleness, though one white shirt's hand is touching her neck as though accidentally pressed there by the jostle of others. Suddenly she will no longer be invisible. She will appear before them, fully formed, a New Person with nothing but expired papers and import licenses and then she will be mulched, recycled as quickly as they compost dung and cellulose, thanks to the telltale twitching movements that mark her as clearly as if she were painted in the excreta of glowworms.