The Sad Part Was Read online

  The host picked up a glass from the coffee table in front of the sofa and quenched his thirst with a swig of water. He gargled two or three times before swallowing all the water in his mouth down into his stomach. He turned to the traveler.

  “Water?”

  The traveler shook his head.

  “Don’t be nervous. You’re doing great. The story about whatever light that was, was a surefire way to snag the viewers’ interest. When we go back on air in a moment, you don’t have to rush straight to the secret. Massage the viewers’ curiosity first. Why don’t you start with the general appearance of it, for example, the size, the color, the material, anything on our planet that it might resemble? And then act a bit scared, like you’re worried that lightning might strike you down if you say something too directly, or something along those lines. The more you can stretch it out, the better. We have hundreds of commercials tonight. We have to manage the air time accordingly, so we can’t let the program end too soon.”

  The traveler turned pale, like someone caught breaking the law red-handed. He turned to the westerner as if to seek his opinion, but the latter coldly shrugged his shoulders.

  The producers signaled that they were about to go back on air. The host, the blond American and the sign-language woman each quickly straightened up and readied their camera faces.

  “We’re back. So we don’t lose any time, let’s continue our interview with Mr. Traveler.” The camera zoomed out. The host leaned eagerly toward the traveler, who was now trembling in his seat.

  “When we left off, there was a strange light coming from the bamboo grove, right? Once you got accustomed to the brightness, what did you see?”

  His lips quivering, the traveler managed to say:

  “I saw… something…”

  “This something, how big was it? Was it large or small?”

  “It was… small… about the size of a thumb.” The traveler then held up his right thumb. The sign-language lady in the corner of the screen raised her own right thumb in response.

  “Really! Viewers, the mystery that we’ve all been waiting to hear about is only the size of a thumb.” The host bugged his eyes out for the camera before turning back to the traveler.

  “And what else? This thing, was it a lump? A sheet? A ball? Or did it have some other unusual shape? Was it thick or thin? Long or short? On the surface, was it smooth, or was it ugly and eerie and rough?”

  The traveler swallowed his saliva.

  “It wasn’t ugly… it wasn’t eerie.”

  “It wasn’t at all ugly or eerie?”

  The traveler shook his head to confirm.

  “In that case, was this mysterious object something beautiful?”

  The traveler shook his head again.

  “It wasn’t beautiful either, viewers. It was neither ugly nor beautiful. This thing’s getting more and more interesting. How fitting, given the fact that it’s a secret from outer space.” The host paused to adjust his suit jacket.

  “Let me ask a stupid question,” he said, flashing a quick smile into the camera.

  “This secret, did it look mysterious? Did it have the appearance of something weird and mysterious?”

  The traveler shook his head. His neck folded. He could only look at the flip flops on his feet.

  Weird and mysterious? He could no longer remember.

  After all, there are no secrets in this world.

  The producers cut to the commercials.

  The Sharp Sleeper

  Morning. The sun was still low, flushing the earth’s edges a juicy red. The sky, though not black, bore a smattering of gray cloud. Natee awoke, and as he was yanking his head up from his plush flame-orange pillow, he caught sight of a transparent button rolling off his stomach onto the wood floor by the foot of his bed, and slipping into a crevice between the slats.

  He’d lost another button. This was the third one that week, from as many of his favourite night shirts. All three had fallen off at night, when Natee was sound asleep. In the matter of this button-shedding, at least three major possibilities existed.

  One: Natee was, unbeknownst to himself, such a freakishly restless sleeper that he generated near-spark-inducing friction, causing the threads holding the buttons in place to fray unduly quickly. Two: one or more other hands were involved, and he was a victim of petty foul play. Three: the threads broke naturally, due to unavoidable wear and tear.

  While all three theories were possible, Natee still lacked sufficient evidence to draw definitive conclusions regarding this puzzling case.

  One — If Natee were that restless of a sleeper, why has no button-loss incident ever occurred before? He wasn’t a kid anymore. It was almost ten years since he’d got his bachelor’s degree. The cumulative hours he’d spent between going to bed and waking up, since his head was, as they say, the size of a fist (though his parents have never verified, and it cannot be proven, that his head was ever that size), were so many it was embarrassing to count. Even on nights when someone of the opposite sex had occupied the same bed (at the present time, several such persons have since managed to purchase beds of their own, while others have moved on to occupy the beds of people they’re more compatible with), the friction generated never reached the point of slicing off a button. Natee had been involved in a bed-related accident only once, a long time ago. When he was not quite three years old, he fell off the bed. People often contended that he’d dreamed up this incident. (“Who the heck has such an amazing memory?” a university friend of his had exclaimed. “I can’t even be sure I was alive when I was three. By the time I could remember anything, I was already in double figures, at least. You hardly understand human language at three… or your parents, either. How do you know they’re really your mum and dad? Do you really remember whose stomach you were kicking in? You couldn’t even if you tried. It’s pitch dark in there.”) But Natee believed that it really had happened. It wasn’t likely that it was a bad dream he was remembering. A child not even three years old wouldn’t have much to dream about.

  That morning Little Natee had suddenly felt a strange sensation by his lower belly. A millisecond later, he fell flat, facedown, from the bed onto the wooden floor. It made a loud thud. A moment later, he heard sluggish footsteps approaching.

  “What happened here? How did you fall off?” a male voice asked in a flat, lifeless tone.

  Little Natee was still lying facedown on the floor. Nobody cared to pick him up and put him back in bed.

  “Very weird. The side of the crib is so high.” This time it was a female voice, equally unexcited.

  “Did he climb over it?”

  “Is that possible? Look how small he is.”

  “He didn’t even let out a cry.”

  “Do you think he injured his brain?”

  “Don’t know. I guess we’ll know when he grows up.”

  “If he turns out stupid like you, then he must have done.”

  “Hey now, stupid isn’t so bad. Nowadays, lots of stupid people make it to high places.”

  “Then why haven’t you made it up there like the rest of them?”

  “Because I’m not stupid, clearly. The fact that I haven’t succeeded proves I’m smart.”

  The two quieted down for a moment. Little Natee started to feel like he was getting scrunched.

  “Aren’t you going to pick him up?” the male voice asked.

  “You pick him up. I have a headache. I don’t want to bend down.”

  A male sigh followed.

  “My knees hurt.”

  “Just leave him like that for now. He’s lying there so quietly, he seems to like it well enough.”

  Natee couldn’t remember how long it was before he was picked up and put back in the crib. Sometimes he wasn’t sure whether these events had really taken place, because once he was old enough to understand such thin
gs, he noticed that his parents didn’t behave at all like the pair of voices that he remembered. They were normal parents, who worried about the well-being of their child no more and no less than other parents did. Nonetheless, Natee’s memory only became more vivid over time, so it was hard for him to discount the truth of the story.

  He asked his parents about it once, but both of them pretended not to hear him, which added to his conviction that his memory was perfectly accurate. In any case, that was Natee’s only bed-related accident, and it had nothing to do with pajama-shirt buttons.

  Two — If there really had been a second or third or fourth party involved, who had broken in to tear off his buttons as he slept, he’d be extremely surprised. The last human to have invaded his fifty-square-metre rented room and got within a hair’s (or a thread’s) breadth of him had voluntarily ceased such incursions several months ago. The spare key that Natee had made for said person had since been returned, neatly placed in a brown document envelope, together with a short note written on cutesy stationery, the kind with Japanese cartoon characters. The gist of the message was: too bad some couples haven’t accumulated the same amount of good karma in their past lives, so they just aren’t meant to be. One might interpret this as: some people were born to sleep on a bed that’s too hard and too small to be shared for an extended period of time.

  That night, after Natee finished reading that brief note, he immediately picked up the phone.

  “That’s it?”

  “I only had the one key.” The last human invader sounded a bit sleepy.

  “I’m not talking about the key. I’m talking about us, our story. Isn’t it a little too short?”

  “Short stories are easier to read than long ones.”

  The woman was right. Natee has never finished reading a single novel. He put the phone down about as immediately as he’d picked it up. Immediateness is sometimes quantifiable, but hard to explain.

  If it had been some other mysterious person or group that had intruded on his territory and snipped his buttons off, the culprit must have the ability to walk through doors, windows and cement walls, all without leaving a trace. If that was the case, Natee concluded, there was nothing he could do to rectify the situation. He’d simply have to submit to his fate, continuing to sacrifice himself as the victim of beings from the fourth dimension, because in a comparison of special powers (Natee can hold his breath under water for three minutes without coming up for air), he wouldn’t make the cut. It didn’t seem like a smart move to put his life on the line for a handful of buttons.

  Three — Natee’s three button-down pajama shirts, one pale blue, one banana yellow, and one communist red, weren’t from the same era. The blue one was the oldest of the bunch. He got it as a New Year’s present, which, if a detailed account were required, was two years, eight months and two days ago. The gift came from Aunt Urai, an actual blood relative of Natee’s, whom the family had dubbed Aunt Millionaire owing to her being the richest of the lot. This wealth established her as an important person in the family, whom the relatives were keen to fawn over. Aunt Urai gave Natee clothing as a gift every year and for every occasion, except for Valentine’s Day, for which she liked to give him something to slather over his gums instead: Italian chocolates that come in a bright red heart-shaped box. The blue pajamas from Aunt Millionaire were a brand named after a westerner who had stores bearing his name on various corners of the globe. In truth, not all of these stores were located on corners, and in fact, photographs from outer space have documented our planet earth as a round object akin to an orange, without any edges or corners whatsoever. Still, this westerner’s name could indeed be said to be on every corner of the earth, because he had enough fame and fortune to change the shape of nature. It followed that whoever had the means to buy his merchandise as gifts for friends and family must have influence on a similar scale. Natee’s Aunt Urai was one of those who were weighed on this same scale (which was sometimes heavy, sometimes light, depending on the other scales around, though those without the luxury of being judged on such a generously-weighted scale all felt that it was heavily rigged). Therefore, it can be conjectured that Natee’s blue pajamas had been manufactured in accordance with the standard production procedure which is a fundamental factor shoring up the status of the prosperous foreigner. In accordance with the Western-language warranty, a button must not rupture under normal pressure. How could friction from everyday use cause it to fall off so easily, and after only a short period of wear?

  The banana-yellow pajama top had a rather bizarre back story. It was a second-hand item that Natee had acquired inadvertently.

  About a year ago, Natee’s bosses assigned him to go and sort out an urgent issue in the provinces (the specific issue and province are superfluous to the matter at hand). When he arrived, he checked into the hotel that his company had reserved for him, which looked like your average three-star hotel (a somewhat undersized pool, bath towels that weren’t as soft as they could have been). In room 3017, Natee opened the door of the white wardrobe to hang up his black suit jacket, only to find a yellow man’s pajama shirt already hanging there. The previous guest had probably forgotten it.

  Natee picked up the phone by the side of the bed and dialed zero.

  “Yes.” He flipped the key in his hand to check the room number, which he hadn’t yet committed to memory. “I’m in room 3017. There’s a shirt hanging in the closet. I think the previous guest must have left it behind.” He looked out through the window. The afternoon sun clung soothingly to the run-down white building across the way, but Natee was no sun-worshipper, and the sight appeared somewhat intimidating to him.

  The female operator on the line sounded as though she was chatting with one of her fellow operators. Natee could hear her snickering through the phone line.

  (He he.) “What was that, sir?” (Ha ha.)

  Natee repeated the sentences above.

  “What kind of shirt is it?”

  “I think it’s a pajama shirt.”

  “One moment, sir.”

  One moment passed.

  “Sir, the last guest in 3017 was from Taiwan. We probably don’t have any way to contact him.”

  “Really? That’s too bad then.”

  The operator started snickering again.

  “Does it fit you?”

  “Does what fit?”

  “That pajama shirt.” (He he he. Ha ha. He ha. Ha ha.)

  “I don’t know. I didn’t try it on. Why?” The more he studied the sun outside, the hotter he began to feel.

  “What colour is it?”

  Natee glanced over at the wardrobe, its door still ajar.

  “It’s yellow.”

  “Is it a nice yellow?” (He ha. He ha.)

  “It’s a little pale, but quite bright.”

  “Is it yellow like a banana peel?”

  (Ha ha. He. He he ha. Ha. Ha ha.)

  “Something along those lines.”

  “If it fits you, you can just take it. We won’t be able to send it back to the owner. Thank you. Is there something else I can do for you?”

  Natee said no, thank you. He hung up, walked over to the wardrobe and stood meditating in front of it for a good while. He asked himself how much he liked the pajama shirt hanging in front of him. Eventually, he started to find it endearing, like a starving puppy that had got separated from its owner and hadn’t been fed for several meals. From that day on, Banana Peel had been a faithful pajama shirt to Natee. He imagined that it had completely forgotten its former master by now, so he couldn’t believe that Banana Peel would allow one of its buttons to fall off just like that.

  The communist-red pajama top, which, during certain periods of Thai history, would elicit a rather negative reaction from the majority if anyone had been sufficiently non-conformist to wear it, was the one that Natee was wearing on the morning in question. It was his n
ewest pajama top, which he’d been inspired to seek out in the shops the previous month after a documentary about Mao Zedong had held him glued to the TV. Natee felt that if he had lived in mainland China when Mao was in charge, he would most likely have been one of the millions of Chinese people who put their faith in that broad-faced man’s ideology. He even got misty-eyed while watching the documentary. Restless with enthusiasm, he was determined to leave the house right away and buy something bright red. The only communist-red thing that Natee had in his possession at that time was a plastic toothbrush, which was, in his opinion, a strictly personal item. It simply didn’t demonstrate any sense of unity with society at large. No matter how sparklingly white and plaque-free his teeth were, the majority didn’t share in the benefits. At least a comfortable pajama shirt helped people sleep soundly, and made, therefore, an important contribution to the prevention of societal unrest.

  But finding a communist-red pajama shirt proved to be no mean feat. Natee spent several hours scouring various malls. Eventually he found one, at a big shopping complex in the city centre. (We won’t specify the name of the mall here because Natee’s not getting any kind of commission or compensation for promoting it. If the mall wants credit, please have a representative contact Natee privately.)

  The red pajama shirt was sitting in a plastic box on a shelf, as though it had been waiting for him.

  “Are you sure?” the sales clerk asked Natee as he keyed in the price on the cash register.

  Natee looked up.

  “Sure about what?”

  “This shirt. Are you sure you want to buy it?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” Natee asked, annoyed.

  “The colour’s so flashy. It doesn’t suit you. You seem reserved, polite and proper. If you wear this shirt, it might distort your personality.”

  “It’s a night shirt. I’m going to wear it in bed.”

  “It can still have an effect. It might change your personality in your dreams.”

  Astonished and mildly irritated, Natee stared the shop assistant in the face. Why is this idiot butting in on my life? It’s my dream personality, not his, he thought.