We Are All Wasteland On the Inside

Benjanun Sriduangkaew

She is dying, the old spymaster, when I visit her house. Spread all over the room: lethargic on the bed, a hand (thick, callused) pinned to the ceiling, a leg (long, shapely) dangling from a bookshelf. The rate of her decay has been rapid, toxins mating and making nations in her body, fighting wars and creating cultures and making history that expresses in the bioluminescence blotting her skin. It looks editorial, opal tones and swallowed sea-storms, and would have made her the star of a body-mod exhibit. Jellyfish chic, arising salt-thick and hungry from the deep.

But still she breathes and when she sees me, she says, "Help yourself."

The bar is fully stocked, red bottles and faceted cups. Clean stirrers, cleaner glassware. She has a housekeeper, some fresh-faced (as they eternally are) upsorn-sriha newly out of the forest: the sandals left at the door are telltale, delicate gold and shaped for hooves. For my drink I pick smoky wine and red petals that dissolve in the alcohol, giving up spice and salt and sour. I skip the coconut syrup that's supposed to go with the cocktail. Sweet things are not my province.

I settle on a chaise lounge. It's distracting, her collapse, the slow agony of a body pushing free of each other as though they are similarly polarized magnets. Phantom limbs have sprung from the sockets of her arm and leg. They curl about her, boneless, barely real in their pallor. Her torso is intact otherwise, the head still firmly joined to the rest. A pre-murder scene, avant-garde and carefully posed on sheets and headboard for maximum statement. She must be on anaesthetics, medulla oblongata sloshing in drugs, but her eyes are steady, her voice smooth and uninterrupted by intoxication.

"I'm your assigned legal executor." A sip: as hard-hitting as I expected. She has good taste and the means to satisfy it, though I can't imagine she has enjoyed anything lately. "We'll need your authorization to unseal your will, Khun Jutamat."

Her mouth pinches. A smile aborted late-term. "I don't have one."

That's news to me. I know she has close family and two ex-wives. "Your property will revert to the state."

"I'll be dead and money won't matter to me. I didn't ask for you specifically on account of your law degree. You worked with police."

"Yes, ma'am." I have worked in many things: theatre, accounting, a stint in forensics and vice. Mine is a timeline in disarray, but so are most people's. Much of life has become debris and dead skin after Himmapan, the convergence event.

Jutamat's poltergeist arm stretches unsteadily, the movements more like limp rubber than bone and muscle. Undulating, repulsive. "It's a good range of skills. Much more important than one's bank balance or where that balance goes after one expires. You and I, we'll solve my murder together before I go."

In Jutamat's garden there is a tree, old, its canopies dripping star-shaped leaves. Gold, green, tipped in stark white. It is heavy with a crop of makkalee fruits on the cusp of maturity and independence from the bough. I have never seen one of these trees; they don't grow just anywhere and resist attempts at cultivation. Only at the liminal edges do they flourish, where Himmapan hovers and seeps into city, black loam making sludge of asphalt, green radiance splattering traffic signs and sidewalks. Where birds fly too close to that border they disappear, the dirt-crusted pigeons and smoke-stained crows.

Accordingly there are no birds here or butterflies, no ants or amphibians. All is clean. Not a blade of grass is too long; no weeds or infestation of fungi touch the earth, no mark of worm or insect hunger on petals. Frangipani, lotuses — either Jutamat favours those, or no other flower would grow. Symbols of passing on and peace, respectively. Appropriate perhaps.

Myth tells that makkalee fruits are alluring and sweetly scented. Reality is less glamorous. They smell faintly vegetal rather than like palm sugar, jasmines, or some heavenly blossom. On the ground one of them lies fallen and premature, ivory skin bruised from impact and seeping blue sap. I turn it in my palm, tracing the contours of full breasts and small waist, flared hips and thick thighs. The face is rough, a work in progress, but there is already a nose and mouth defined, eye sockets deepening. The ones on the bough are shaped similarly. All makkalee fruits from the same tree look alike, replicated over and over in some internal mould, the way dolls emerge from a factory.

"Have you ever met one of them full grown?"

I put the fruit down. Jutamat's wheelchair labours, for all that her mass can't weigh that much anymore. Shreds of her ghost leg get stuck in mechanism, between joints. "Can't say I have, ma'am."

"Poor conversationalists. They only think of the soil and the air, rain and sun. Not much else; I can't imagine what hermits in legends see. But then, mythical hermits tend to be ugly and desperate." She wheels forward. It continues to be a struggle, looking at her directly. The eye protests. Optic nerves flinch. The mind attempts to reconstitute what is there and fails. "Rumour has it that eating makkalee will cure any ill. Incorrect, of course. My housekeeper planted this, by the way, to keep her company — not many Himmapan natives live in the neighbourhood. Would you like a bite? Think of it like moulded chocolate or marzipan."

"I will pass, thank you." I don't consider myself squeamish. But still they look humanlike and, given time to ripen, they will talk like humans too. Pastiche personhood. "I don't think I am the person you want for this." A simple arrangement of paperwork, what will go where, a list of beneficiaries and then a cut for the tax collectors. That is what it should have been.

"I'll be the judge of that. You were police, more or less."

"Less rather than more." With effort I focus on the banal details: her thinning hair, the indented scar on her chin. "What makes you think there's a crime to figure out, a perpetrator to bring to justice?"

"Justice has nothing to do with it, Khun Oraphin. I seek satisfaction and, from your records with forensics, you seem to have a nose for the strange. When you were very young, you were lost in Himmapan for a day, I understand."

A day to my parents; a month to me. It wasn't a bad month — Himmapan is kind to children, and I was twelve going on thirteen, sufficiently young and sufficiently pure — but I returned changed, one of the first to have made the crossing before true...