Amok: An Anthology of Asia-Pacific Speculative Fiction (9 page)

Chandel fell against the car door, popping it open. Oblivious to the heat, she slid from the driver’s seat to the sand, sat up and caught another strain of the haunted radio, this time without guitars.
Torn to shreds like my fucking heart.
Chandel touched her temple to rub it sober. It was time for a tonic. Squinting ahead, through a patch of yellow light, she saw where the beach ascended, narrowed, and dropped to sheer cliff. If not for the crash she would had been headed straight for the ocean.

She stood up, her thick arms trembling like the strings of those Spanish guitars, which trailed her, ever so softly, as she made her way to the passenger side. She felt her ribs, then looked at the windshield, and winced. The tyre, its rubber caught on a heap of seaweed and rock, was another mess entirely. She stuck her hand through the passenger window and clicked open the glove compartment, spilling a carton of cigarettes and a hoard of paper napkins onto the seat as she fumbled for the smooth metal knob of her flask. The front surface had been etched prettily with someone’s silver initial: another souvenir. In it was the last seven ounces of a prime-grade whiskey, which, unlike anything else she currently owned, including the car itself, she had in fact purchased.

“
Cariño
,” she said, unaware she wasn’t speaking in English, and threw her head back for two generous gulps.

A sudden gust blew the last smoke from the car.

Her t-shirt clung to her chest in darkening splotches. She took a deep breath. In one swoop she ripped it up over her head, tossing it along with her shabby cargo pants into the back seat of the car. She polished off the last of the Maker’s Mark and set the empty flask down about five yards from the water, plenty of room for high tide to come in. She strode toward the tide, ignoring the feeling of being a body-sized bruise, and dove in. The ocean bloomed into one foaming mouth, rushing forward as if to form another body around her.

It was a long while before she felt half-way sober enough to turn back to the car, and by then, she was much farther down from where she had started. She walked, for what seemed like hours, letting her body dry in the sun, until a sharp glinting, like the pinnacle of a church, signalled the flask, the rest of it buried underneath sand. It, too, seemed much farther from the tide than she remembered. The sun quivered with the same level intensity, yet there was no trace of her footprints and the water had ebbed. She wondered how long she’d been in the water. Perhaps she had simply gotten the tides mixed. Even the radio was silent, in all probability dead. She slipped back into her blood-stained t-shirt and tattered pants, and finding a pair of slippers in the trunk of the car, turned for the road. By the time she passed the torn guard rail, the stand of blighted pines and the crumbling outcrop that did nothing to buffer her fall to the bottom of the beach, the ocean had retreated another thirty feet.

§

Back from the coastal highway on which our hero had just begun lay a dreamy valley of little wooden houses raised on little wooden stilts. Some of the houses sat perched before macadamia groves, or coffee. Some simply overlooked ponds. All of them stood above gardens—gardens of such lushness and variety as if to have bloomed in response to a prehistoric explosion. There had not been any volcanic activity for quite some time now. It is important to note these details, for at the end of this road, tucked into a grove of plumeria and pines, stands the centre of our story—an inconspicuous shop, more like a glorified shed, in which three women in faded, slim-fitting dresses have just banged through the door, the copper bell nailed above ringing in irritating succession.

“You Candelarios need to stop bangin’ that blessed door.” The man behind the counter, his coarse hair clipped close above his leathery ears, stood over a pile of coupons arranged on top of an inventory binder, his elbow and forearm greasy with newspaper ink. This was the only market for several miles, and the customers were either the odd local neighbours or the odd lost tourist, though most tourists had good enough aim of getting lost farther along down the road.

The first woman clucked. “What’s wrong? Mister Savei stay a virgin?” They were standing in a row, their hair-sprayed up-dos and prosthetic eyelashes towering over the top of the aisle. They busily filled a basket with Revlon nail polish.

“Goddamn trannies,” Saveliy said under his breath.

“Aww.” The third Candelario cooed. “Papa’s got his panties in a twist ’cause we’re bangin’ his door, and not bangin’—”

“Say, why don’t you ladies go sell yourselves?” Saveliy snapped open a newspaper.

“How you think we get the cash for come shop your junk superette?” said the second Candelario. The other two laughed as they moved to the feminine hygiene aisle.

Saveliy looked up. “What the hell do you need that for?”

The first Candelario held up two boxes and the sisters, heads cocked to one side, shrugged, signalling her to drop both cartons into the basket as the bell rang with a new customer. She was slightly sun-burned and kind of bruised, which made for an irregular combination on her skin—under normal circumstances, a mute sienna; that, and her scalp seemed to be bleeding onto her shirt, adding brighter splotches to what might have been older and dried-up instants of other such splotches, or mud. She looked as if she’d been through a washing machine, but her clothes were dry and not especially clean. Saveliy and the three women paused to look at her. Chandel ignored them and headed for the liquor, trailing sand.

The third Candelario resumed a conversation that seemed to have been going on for quite some time now. “I don’t care how much work he’s had done, or how messed-up his nose looks, I’d sit on his face.” They were closer to the register now, each poised over respective copies of
People
Magazine’s Sexiest Man of The Year. Chandel stood with a focused stance before the glassed fridge.

“I don’t know, I’d have to be pretty strung-out, myself,” said the second Candelario, turning her neck, long and stubbled, with the other Candelarios, to the woman contemplating the alcohol at the back of the store.

Saveliy glanced up over the rim of his round-frame glasses. “You read it, you buy it. This ain’t a library.”

The third Candelario huffed, her laughter suddenly low in pitch. “Does it look like this tita can read?”

The first Candelario tossed her hibiscus-print lava-lava over one shoulder, and the second tossed back her hair—all three delicately replacing their magazines as Chandel slipped a 26oz. bottle of SKYY vodka between the cotton of her underwear and the wide elastic band of her pants.

“That’ll be $28.66,” said Saveliy.

“Bumbye,” said the Candelarios. The women lined up to consolidate their funds, their purses filling the counter and forcing Saveliy to move his newspaper coupons to one side. He didn’t notice the audible crunch of Chandel’s pockets holding two packages of dried ika and a bag of li-hing mui candy, nor the bell for the shop as she exited, her shirt a little more filled out and angular with a bottle of mouthwash and the last three boxes of lime Jell-O.

“Must be Gigi’s new tits,” said the second Candelario, arching her left painted-on eyebrow in the direction of the third Candelario, as the other two searched the bottom of their bags for the last sixteen cents. “Sava here distracted, letting that chronic just up and run off with his alcohol.”

Saveliy felt himself blush, processing the intolerable thought he’d let a thief get by. He dropped the cash in the register and flung it closed, bolting from behind the counter out the door.

“Thanks for the discount!” yelled the first Candelario.

Each extended a long dark arm to a stand of Dum-Dum lollipops next to the register.

The second Candelario concurred, leaning forward over the counter. “That Savei there ain’t so bad, you know.”

Their eyes followed him out past the store window, where he had paused at the edge of the parking, scanning both ways. They unwrapped the suckers and popped them in their mouths.

The third Candelario sighed. “Poor virgin.”

Although it had been no more than a minute since he had been robbed, by the time Saveliy made it past the stand of plumeria enfolding the entrance of the shop, he found himself at a clear disadvantage—very nearly out of breath, with the thief out of sight. He was hardly accustomed to coming this far down the valley, much less out to the highway. He had spent much of the past eight years in that three mile-radius, moving from his house to the shop, and it had been so long since he’d been to the beach or the harbour, for good reason. As he liked to tell himself, it was the age of retreat for a man of his status, or at the very least, years.

But now he was running, his gut flopping heavily, his neck hair gathering sweat, overcome with the inexplicable feeling he was on an important mission. He flushed with a new vitality, even as he felt he would surely die if he did not stop for breath, at which exact moment, heaving with his hands on his 58-year-old thighs, he looked up in time to see that net of black hair from the superette disappearing over the crest of the valley at the end of the black-grit road.

“You bitch! My shit!”

The mass of black hair continued without missing a beat. “Knees up, old man.”

He coughed, and with feigned energy sprinted down the hill. The bobbing net of hair rounded the second bend in the black-grit road to where it met up with the highway and then dived in a parallel curve by the shore. He pumped his legs harder than ever. His side burned and his teeth ached. The tree trunks narrowed and zipped past, and the ground rose up as his boots kicked up a storm of dirt and pine needles but he knew, just a few more steps and he would reach out and snatch the thief by that net of hair, a few more steps, a few more breaths, and he would have justice. But instead, as he cleared the entrance to the beach, fully ready to lay hold of her, he stopped cold and nearly collapsed in fright.

The ocean was gone.

Saveliy shook and pulled back, then instinctively called out to the woman he’d been chasing, who was now climbing through the window of her car, which looked as if it had been tossed off a cliff.

He stammered, tried again, and screamed. “Wait!”

She didn’t seem to hear him. He took one last look at the beach, then turned and hurried back to his shop.

§

By nightfall the entire town had moved out of the valley to the mountain. The highway slowed and thickened, as if the road had halfway through the day melted into a parking lot. People fled, abandoning their cars at odd places in order to escape up the trail. Although it hardly made sense to run from something that was not even there, the town was more afraid of what they could not see, the unknown.

The air was dryer, thinner, and cooler at this height, although the mountain was hardly a mountain by any means—more like a semi-formidable hill. But neither was the town really a town. It did not possess a post office or restaurant, and the two commercial enterprises, a gas station and convenience store, were little more than converted houses themselves.

The town spent a restless evening watching the newly-formed canyon, listening for news of the disappeared ocean. But no one on the radio was reporting. And as the night grew longer, and the shadows of the sea-less canyon grew darker and deeper and steadily more tedious, the sparsely-pined ridge resonated with the laboured snoring of the makeshift campsite.

By dawn the ocean was back.

The campsite discovered this gradually. With no news on the radio, most of the residents slept in, which was easier to do now that the sun had taken an extra six hours to rise. Not even the roosters had crowed. Many people awoke during the night, but attributed their restless sleeping to the distressing events of the previous day, and promptly returned to unconsciousness.

The only one who seemed to have rested soundly throughout the night was Saveliy. He awoke from an uncharacteristically deep and restful slumber, on his side, as custom, facing the direction of the sun—or so he thought. But when he opened his eyes he found himself in an unusual position, instead facing the mountain. He stretched, yawned, and rolled over, but when he rubbed his eyes he found himself, inexplicably, once again facing the mountain. He flipped back and gaped in horror.

A wall of water, the height and breadth of the mountain to which the town had fled, and at some distance from the coast, stood poised over the valley like a sneeze awaiting release, or perhaps a tsunami posing for a photograph. Many of the townsfolk had, in fact, pulled out their cameras. The wind was still, the sun just barely visible over the lip of the ocean.

“It’s just like that movie.” Saveliy heard the town, now climbing atop their cars, rousing as he pulled on a flannel coat and stumbled from his truck.

The wave loomed like a rug on the point of its being flung, threatening the townsfolk with utter annihilation. Fortunately, it was as if some benevolent force had intervened to hold the torrent back, and at a polite distance of about a hundred yards from the shore. The surface of the water stood as flat vertically as it once lay horizontally, as if drawn up behind a giant panel of glass to frame a world-class aquarium.

One can imagine how, after some initial stage of shock, the more perceptive or business-minded types might have even entertained such commercial potential, for it would have been absolutely mesmerising during a later time of day, when a certain angle of light might shine through and illuminate an underwater universe. Unfortunately, at this point, there was no such illumination: only a five-hundred-foot shadow the ocean cast like a curse.

Saveliy thought he heard a small child ask someone if they were in fact dead. Then, naturally, everyone began to panic.

“Where are the planes? Where are the helicopters?” Not getting an answer to their queries, they would then repeat themselves. “The planes! The helicopters!”

Some of the townspeople ran back to the highway in a misguided effort to salvage things from their homes, while others grabbed at them, urging them not to go, lest the wave arbitrarily crash and flood the roads. The ones who went anyway were soon stuck in traffic, while those persuaded to change their minds to remain were soon calculating in sober and detached agreement that were the wave to drop they would all drown anyway, which sent everyone back into a fit of absolute terror, instigating yet another round of panic. The cycle of fretting was fortuitously interrupted by the sound of a familiar bell.