carrion floating by | chart korbjitti by marcel barang

carrion floating by CHART KORBJITTI

carrion floating by TRANSLATED FROM THE THAI BY MARCEL BARANG

CHART KORBJITTI | CARRION FLOATING BY

You feel like your whole body is hurled against a stone wall or something just as hard. The force of the collision shakes you all over. In that split second, a deafening KRASH! fills your ears. Noise and impact are one and the same thing, tearing into your consciousness. The sound pushes in deep and fast like a scared animal in search of a hiding place. It digs its quivering self into that gap. You don’t feel any pain, only know that every part of your body is totally insensitive as if this whole thing about an accident is happening in a dream. A dream which startles you awake with a sense of relief. You open your eyes, see several pairs of lights so bright it hurts. Almost as soon as you see them, you close your eyes in apprehension. You don’t want to believe that what you see is true, sputter to yourself: – It’s a dream. – It’s only a dream. CARRION FLOATING BY | CHART KORBJITTI

4 Thrust this belief with alarm into your mind, try hard to force your awareness into accepting that everything that’s happening right now is only a nightmare. Too bad that what you feel around you won’t play along. Your body keeps performing as usual, but you feel as if it’s trying all ways to contend with your belief that this is a dream. It compels you to open your eyes to confront the world of bitter reality, the here and now. Sound of broken glass raining down. A few breaths later you hear running feet getting close. ‘Is he dead?’ ‘Not yet, not yet.’ Inside your ear you hear the clamour of a throng around you, engine noises, car-hooting everywhere, exclamations of curious onlookers. ‘Better prise the door open.’ ‘Right, let’s do it. Quickly.’ ‘Hey, grab hold of it right here.’ ‘One! Two! Three! Pull!’ Then your body is dragged out. Your shoes fall on the car floor. You’re still scared of the truth, don’t dare open your eyes, but know from the way you’re being handled that the good citizens pulling you out of the car number no fewer than three. Your back hits a hard slab of cement. They carefully make you lie down flat. The warmth from the cement permeates your flesh. You’d like to keep lying fully stretched like that, don’t want to open your eyes to look CHART KORBJITTI | CARRION FLOATING BY

5 at anything at all, thinking all along you’re dreaming, calling for everything right now to be nothing else but a dream, even though the noises around you contradict your belief, your secret hopes that it’s just a dream. ‘Don’t turn your head, sir. Don’t move.’ ‘Anybody got smelling salts?’ …The reek of smelling salts enters your nostrils. You inhale that smell deep inside though you’re not sure whether you want such a smell or not and can’t figure out why you’re inhaling it. ‘Sir, sir, sir!’ You hear the call as your left arm is being shaken. It’s like being shaken awake but you still don’t want to wake up, you still want to keep lying lazily drowsily in bed. You still pretend to have passed out, want others to think you’ve really passed out. For the time being you don’t dare face up to reality. You deny it. At least while you’re ‘passed out’ it’s like avoiding real life for a while, so you still aren’t ready to come to when you’re given the smelling salts. ‘But look at the blood! He’s bleeding non-stop!’ A woman’s voice, all shook up. When your ears hear the word ‘blood’ a searing pain wracks your head at once and almost at the same time you think ‘hospital’. Those two words are like twins. When you think of one you think of the other. You don’t know since when those twin words have been in your mind. You feel the headache getting worse every moment CARRION FLOATING BY | CHART KORBJITTI

6 and you’re aware of the track of blood trickling out of your wound. Your nose begins to get the sour smell of blood mixed with that of the smelling salts. The smell of blood getting stronger makes you apprehensive. ‘What about the people in the other cars?’ ‘They’re all hurt. They’ve all been taken out. What about this one? Is he in a coma? We’d better take him to hospital.’ You think it’s time for you to dare open your eyes and face reality, the reality which keeps flowing all the time. No matter which way you turn to avoid it, it keeps following you and finally when it drives you into a corner, when you can’t flee anymore, the only option left is to turn round and face it and grapple with it. You gather all of your remaining courage and open your eyes. You see a circle of faces peering down expectantly. ‘He’s come to.’ ‘He’s come to.’ Even though it’s now nighttime, the lights from roadside lampposts and from the cars, which form long unmoving lines, make the area look as bright as if there was a fair. The people gawping at the cars in the middle of the road and all around you are crowding together as if they’d really come to enjoy a fair. You slowly hoist your body into a sitting position. A young man comes to help support you. He’s dressed almost like a soldier, with a round-necked greenish brown shirt, greenish brown shorts and a crew cut. You CHART KORBJITTI | CARRION FLOATING BY

7 try to stand up, thoroughly puzzled. You don’t know where you are, which road this is. Your head is in a muddle. You can’t think of anything, except that you must drive to hospital. You lumber to the cars stalled askew in the middle of the road. ‘Just go to hospital. Don’t worry about the car. I’ll watch over it,’ the young fellow who supports you tells you. ‘Get all valuables out of your car,’ a middle-aged man shouts against the din of hooting. Your car is quietly static in the middle of the road, its nose half caught into the mud of a plantation. A taxi is stuck in front of it, its muzzle appallingly wrecked. You turn to look at your car. Its condition is hardly different. The front right mudguard is so crumpled it touches the wheel. The bonnet is all askew. The right headlight is all smashed in. Bumper and grille have nothing left of their former condition. Fine bits of glass from the windscreen are strewn all over the road. You forget your pain for a moment, can’t do anything right, can’t believe the damage you see, can’t believe that what you see is true, as if you were standing right between two worlds. ‘You’d better look after the valuables in your car,’ the middle-aged man cautions again. His voice calls you back to the real world. You turn round to thank him before walking over to the car’s door… Lean over and put your head inside. Pick up your shoulder bag and take it out. Before pulling out you look CARRION FLOATING BY | CHART KORBJITTI

8 into the rear-view mirror. In the light from the stuck cars you see your face covered in red blood running down your face entirely. Your heart quakes. You stagger out. – Must go to hospital, you tell yourself. ‘Don’t worry about the car. I’ll look after it. Just hurry.’ The young man helps you back. ‘Get the wounded over here,’ another young man also dressed almost like a soldier shouts out from the roadside. On that side there are two cars parked, the first a taxi, the other a sedan, blue, with dark film on the windows. You scramble into the taxi which pulls away rather fast. You turn round to have a last look at your car. It’s still stuck in the middle of the road. Behind it stretches a long line of cars with their headlights ablaze. ‘How come you crashed?’ a harsh voice asks. You turn to the young man whose voice it is. He looks at you with only one eye. The handkerchief in his hand covers his left eye. Even though it’s only one eye, its inimical glare is obvious. ‘I fell asleep,’ you answer matter-of-factly, not feeling like saying anything more. ‘When they pulled you out, I thought you were finished,’ the man sitting in the middle says, holding a handkerchief over his head. You smile at him and lean back against your seat, feel like the blood on your forehead is changing directions, so you grab your handkerchief and mop at the source of the stream, then close your eyes and listen to the men on CHART KORBJITTI | CARRION FLOATING BY

9 the front seats talking. ‘Lucky I wasn’t driving fast.’ ‘The other car must have been going damn fast to be so smashed up. How did it happen?’ ‘Well, I was right behind the car upfront. I saw him swerve, so I swerved too and that’s when I was run into at full blast.’ ‘How many cars in the crash?’ ‘Three. The car in front of me also got it.’ ‘All of them hurt, are they?’ ‘Don’t know. But in my car, yes, all of us. Lucky I saw it a split second before, so I could swing the car to the side of the road. Yet for all that the front got smashed. What rotten luck. That son of a bitch…’ ‘What a shame. Tonight there’s lots of people out too. Could’ve been much worse.’ ‘That’s right.’ ‘Think of it as a minor calamity. Nobody’s badly hurt, so that’s good.’ ‘Does the owner know yet?’ ‘It’s my own car. That’s why I say rotten luck.’ ‘Who’s looking after it now?’ ‘Soldiers in the local unit there.’ ‘Just as well there’s somebody to look after it. If not, before the cops arrived, everything would be gone.’ ‘But I’ve got nothing in there anyway.’ ‘I wonder if dad got concussed,’ the person next to you starts saying. CARRION FLOATING BY | CHART KORBJITTI

10 ‘I don’t think so. When it happened he was still telling us to keep cool.’ ‘Where were you going?’ the driver’s voice asks. ‘To a party,’ the man sitting next to you answers. ‘I heard them say you were going to celebrate the niece’s graduation,’ the man sitting up front answers. ‘Well, let’s all go and celebrate at the hospital first,’ the driver’s voice quips. …The taxi reduces speed. Tic-tac tic-tac goes the indicator. You open your eyes and look. On that same tic-tac rhythm the car sweeps round the bend, whooshes into the hospital grounds and slows down to a stop in front of the casualty ward. When it has pulled up, a trolley with its sides down is brought alongside. Everybody gets out of the taxi. ‘You, sir, the fare,’ the taxi driver demands. All three men turn to look at you. ‘How much,’ you ask, peering at him. ‘Fifty, sir.’ You take your money and pay. The taxi backs away from the front of the building. ‘You’d better stretch out on this, sir,’ comes the voice of the porter. You climb and lie down on the trolley, unable to walk any longer, let it carry you away, you lie on your back looking at the neon lights on the ceilings passing by, one after the other, sliding by people milling about, a confusion of shouts, drunkards yelling they’ll get their revenge, CHART KORBJITTI | CARRION FLOATING BY

11 children screaming, wives calling their husbands. All the wounded of the night have piled up here. You tilt your head from side to side to look at them, taking comfort in the thought you’re not the only one to end up here, there are many people to keep you company. You can’t help feeling smug when you see a man with bandages all over his head and a shirt soaked in blood. He sits with his gloomy face turned to you as you pass by. You tell yourself you’re lucky to be less hurt than he is. Then the trolley turns and takes you into a room. When his job is over the porter rolls the trolley out, leaving you to lie on a bed by yourself. A partition divides the room into two halves. All around, the walls are lined with cabinets full of all sorts of instruments and implements. A strong smell of drugs pervades the room. The tinkle of medical implements dropped on a metallic tray comes out of the other side of the room. Left to yourself, the noise of the crash and the strength of the impact storm into your conscious mind again, terrifying the scared animal that lies deep inside. It frantically seeks a hiding place, hopes for a safe place, but there is none, so it quivers no end. – You shouldn’t have, you shouldn’t have, you shouldn’t have, you really shouldn’t have. – Come now, you’re not dead, so that’s okay, you pulled through. – Why isn’t the doctor here yet? CARRION FLOATING BY | CHART KORBJITTI

12 – It can’t be that bad, otherwise he’d be here by now. You’re relieved when you think positively like this. You’ve noticed every time you go to hospital, even though it isn’t often, every time your pain diminishes in the doctor’s presence, unlike at home when it gets worse all the time. That time when your back hurt so much you almost couldn’t walk: you went to hospital and while you waited to get the registration card you began to feel better even though the doctor had yet to examine you. Now it’s the same. You don’t feel very disturbed by your physical wounds. The tinkling of dropped instruments goes on and on. After a while you hear footsteps coming through the door you’ve just been through, approaching and stopping at the head of your bed. ‘Such a heavy load tonight,’ a woman’s voice says. ‘I’m really fed up trussing up those drunkards,’ another woman’s voice complains. You open your eyes and look up, see two young women in white uniforms. You smile at them. ‘What happened to you?’ the first woman asks as a big bright lamp comes above your head, its light so strong you have to close your eyes to shun it. ‘Car crash.’ You don’t want to talk about it again. Luckily the two of them don’t ask anything further, maybe because they’re both used to accidents of this kind so there’s nothing new in it for them. So you only hear them getting instruments ready. Before long the CHART KORBJITTI | CARRION FLOATING BY

13 gashes on your forehead are being cleaned. You hardly feel anything, it doesn’t hurt at all. – Is it numb or are they using some drug to clean it, you ask yourself. ‘Are you going to stitch him right away? No local anaesthetic before?’ a young woman’s voice asks. ‘No need. It’d make his face swell.’ – Without anaesthetic it’ll hurt, you think with concern for yourself. ‘Won’t you give me an anaesthetic?’ You come up with a question even though you keep your eyes closed. ‘No sir. Usually if you inject the face with anaesthetic it’ll swell. Just bear with it a little. It won’t hurt, sir.’ Her voice is serious and credible but you tremble with fear. By now you’ve completely forgotten about the damage to your car. The feel on your forehead tells you the two of them have started their work. It stings all the time and at times you have to grit your teeth… ‘At the chin too, here and here.’ They help each other deal with the wounds until it’s over. Before it’s completed it feels like it’s been going on for ages while they clean you up, wiping off the clotted blood on your throat, arms and chest. ‘Does it still hurt somewhere, sir, where we haven’t stitched you up?’ ‘No, it’s fine.’ ‘If it hurts some place, say so,’ the other voice adds. CARRION FLOATING BY | CHART KORBJITTI

14 ‘All right, it’s fine, and don’t forget to come and have the wounds cleaned every day.’ And then the light goes out. You open your eyes and look at the two of them, but don’t see their faces clearly. The dazzle of the light is still in your eyes. ‘Thank you,’ you say before gingerly sliding off the bed. As soon as your feet touch the floor, you feel something unusual arising to warn you. You think of your shoes which fell in the car. It makes you squeamish for your feet naked on the floor, as if you’re missing something essential in your life, but for the time being you need to get out of the room, so you put it out of your mind. When you let your whole weight off the bed, your knees hurt so badly you can hardly walk. You must stand holding to the bed frame firmly, to get used to the sprain. After a while you cautiously shuffle on bended knees out of the room, with the unusual contact of your feet on the cold floor. ‘Get your registration card outside, sir,’ a nurse behind you tells you as she collects her paraphernalia. You are out of the room together with your shoulder bag. Look around for the registration counter. People are still milling about in confusion. A trolley is rushed past you. The patient lies, his face livid, blood all over his belly. Two or three people troop after him in a flurry. You stand perplexed for a while, feeling dazed. You’d like to sit down and rest. CHART KORBJITTI | CARRION FLOATING BY

15 ‘Here, sir, he’s here,’ a young man tells the policeman he has come with. ‘Please go to the police station,’ the policeman tells you. You’re dying to tell him to let you rest for a while but seeing how anxious they both seem to be, you change your mind and accept to follow them. Seeing the manner in which you walk, the young man comes and helps support you. From the looks of him, you guess he must be about your own age. He’s wearing a long-sleeved shirt and a well-knotted necktie. As for the policeman walking behind you holding a register he must be younger than you but hides this behind an attitude of authority. Along the way lots of eyes stare at you. You’re beginning to get used to the situation, thinking you’re in the wrong, you’re the one who caused the accident, getting other people in trouble. What you have to face from now on has to do with the law, with regulations, and you have to accept the laws and regulations as we’ve made them. The young man unlocks the car door and sits down in the driver’s seat. He unlocks the doors for the policeman and you. You get in on the back seat. The policeman sits down beside the driver. ‘How is it? Are you badly in pain, sir?’ the driver asks as he turns round to back out of the parking space. ‘I can bear with it.’ ‘When you fold your knees it must hurt,’ he tells you once the car is out of it. ‘What’s the story?’ the young policeman turns to ask. CARRION FLOATING BY | CHART KORBJITTI

16 ‘I fell asleep at the wheel,’ you answer. The face of the young policeman smiles gently in the dimness. You don’t want him to ask any more questions, so you turn away to look through the window. The car turns into the main road. You try to adjust to the environment, encouraging yourself not to get panicky, but every time the car brakes you can’t help feeling alarmed. You try to calm down, look at the things moving past, think comfortingly that nobody’s been seriously hurt, but it doesn’t work. Your mind is aware all the time that you’re trying to deceive it, to deceive yourself, so it switches to following what the other two are saying in order to forget what you’re brooding over. ‘…lots of people on the road.’ ‘Tomorrow is a holiday for office people.’ ‘Everybody complains they’re poor, that the economy’s bad, but from what I can see people keep going out,’ the young driver adds, his eyes on the road. ‘What’s your line of work?’ the young policeman turns to invite you to talk. ‘I work in an advertising agency.’ ‘Does it close tomorrow?’ ‘It’s closed for three days. It’ll open again on Monday.’ ‘Working in an office isn’t bad, right? Christmas Day’s off, and the weekend too,’ the young driver chimes in, sounding as if he’s talking to himself. ‘And what about you? What do you do?’ You’d like to talk idly too, talk about anything but the car crash. CHART KORBJITTI | CARRION FLOATING BY

17 ‘I’m a doctor at the hospital where you were just now.’ ‘Hey?’ the policeman exclaims sotto voce then laughs. ‘What have you got to do with him, then?’ he asks with a smile. Your heart starts to beat in alarm when the policeman brings back the topic you don’t want to hear about. ‘I went to a friend’s wedding and gave him a lift on the way back. I’d never come this way before, mind you… I saw his car about to collide with mine, so I swerved hard but not enough, he got me a little at the back and the front of my car went to scratch the back of the one in front. So I got it back and front. You’re lucky, though, you know. The car I scratched, the driver didn’t want to make waves. I saw him stopped, looking at the damage. He must’ve thought you were badly hurt, so he drove away. Maybe he didn’t want to waste his time…’ the doctor says, so you can piece things together more or less. ‘…never came back this way…’ His voice trails away as if he’s talking to himself, but you can hear it. You also feel like telling the doctor that your friend invited you to stay with him overnight. He pressed you to. If you’d done as he suggested nothing would’ve happened, but the thought strikes you that even if you say so it’s already happened, there’s no way it can be changed to something else, so you keep silent, unwilling to speak. ‘Tonight there’s been lots of car crashes. Three already since I took my shift. I don’t know yet if there’ll be CARRION FLOATING BY | CHART KORBJITTI

18 others. The first two were able to agree, nobody got hurt. Yours is a bit more serious, with some people injured but just as well nobody died.’ He turns to you smiling to comfort you. You merely smile back for his kindness. And then there is silence, because talking about this doesn’t make you feel like joining in. You go back to looking through the side window again. ‘Turn into the street to your left right up there,’ the policeman says, with a flicker of his hand. Once in the street the policeman keeps pointing the way until you get through to another main road, turn left and enter a police station. The doctor stops the car before the main stairs in front of the building. You shoulder your bag and step out of the car. Your knees murder you again. Pain shots up as if the bones inside are cracked. Your hands shoot out to grab the top of the car tightly but when the car moves away you have to let go. ‘Wait for all the plaintiffs to be here and then come to an agreement between yourselves,’ the policeman says to you before walking up the stairs, and then he must’ve thought of something because he turns round. ‘Go and have a look at your car if you want. Take everything out of it, sir,’ he orders and then goes up and disappears inside. You turn round and slowly walk away from the stairway, trying to gradually get used to the pain, gritting your teeth with every step, every step. Nevertheless you CHART KORBJITTI | CARRION FLOATING BY

19 still miss your shoes to tread the gravel which hurts your feet. As you walk towards the parking area for vehicles involved in accidents, the doctor who has parked his car comes back to you and helps support you. ‘Get your knees x-rayed tomorrow,’ he tells you as you walk. ‘But I don’t think there’s anything much, because you can still walk. Just normal sprains.’ You feel somewhat better. ‘They must’ve knocked against the dashboard during the crash,’ you surmise. The doctor agrees with you and nods. The parking lot is lit by a moonbeam from the top of a pole. There are five or six cars parked in a row, all of them totally bashed up, like as many corpses ready to be taken to the cremation ground. Yours is one of them, the only one surrounded with onlookers as though curious of a freshly dead corpse. You gingerly slip through an empty space between them. Their interest shifts to you, maybe because of your bandages and the way you walk which isn’t that of the average individual. ‘Were you the one driving?’ one of them asks. You nod and smile at him. Even though you can’t see your own smile, you know it comes out yellow because distilled by sorrow. ‘Oh-ho! Unbelievable! We were just saying the driver must be dead…’ he praises you. ‘That’s right. The car a terrible mess and he can still walk. Unbelievable!’ seconds another. CARRION FLOATING BY | CHART KORBJITTI

20 ‘Seeing that the steering wheel’s broken I thought it did you in.’ ‘What kind of amulet do you wear? Let me see.’ ‘I wear none,’ you answer truthfully. ‘Come off it, when you’ve got something good, you don’t want to show it,’ one man tells the man who asked. ‘Is the taxi driver hurt?’ ‘I don’t know yet,’ you can’t help answering. ‘He must be okay. His car isn’t in such a mess as this one.’ ‘Where was it you crashed?’ You’re most reluctant to answer that string of questions. They seem so curious you’d think they were all reporters. You lean over into the car. The first thing you want right now is your shoes. Your eyes search every corner but you can’t see them, even though you clearly remember they fell in the car before you were hoisted out of it. You think about the other things in the car – the royally designed shirt you bought to offer your father, a new pha nung for your mother, the English course tapes your little sister asked you to buy. Those things you’d placed on the back seat, but there’s no trace of them left, not even the bag for the shirt. Furthermore, the glove compartment is still wide open, with papers all over the place. You can guess that the search was done in a hurry. You’re sorry, you regret those things, and then you CHART KORBJITTI | CARRION FLOATING BY

21 become angry. You’d really like to know what the hearts of those who took the things are made of. You come out of the car, hoping to tell the doctor about this dirty trick, but the doctor is nowhere to be seen. You don’t know when he went away. So you just stand touchy and clumsy among the ring of eyes, feel like asking who took your things, feel like telling them folk about it. But it’s too late to tell, too late to ask. – The soldiers who volunteered to guard the car. – The people who took the car to the police station. – The folk standing around it here. You can’t figure out who could have taken those things. Since you didn’t see anything with your own eyes, you don’t want to accuse anyone. – Better take care of what’s left, never mind what’s lost, you tell yourself to put it out of your mind, knowing full well you can’t. You think of a way to gather the remaining items in the car properly. There’s still the spare tyre and the jack in the boot at the back. Before they disappear you should find somebody to watch over your car but who will do this? When there’s no other way you decide to find a taxi to come and watch over your things for you. You cut through the assembled people. In the absence of someone to support you, you walk like an old man suffering from arthritis. Awful as it is, you still manage to reach the main road and call a taxi. You tell him how things stand and offer to compensate him for the time CARRION FLOATING BY | CHART KORBJITTI

22 wasted waiting for you to be back. He listens to you with a sympathetic, understanding face and then tells you all right even before agreeing on a fee. Once you’ve put all the things together you hobble away with the intention to go back and wait in the police station. You see the doctor stroking his car right where you scratched it, think you’ll stop by to have a look but then change your mind. You don’t want to see the traces of your mistake. So you make for the front stairs. Inside the station it’s about as chaotic as in the hospital. Inmates in the jail shout out at their friends to go get their dads. A young woman stands in a corner, her face bathed in tears. Policemen go back and forth in confusion. In this chaos many pairs of eyes bear on you. You take shelter by sitting down on a bench in front of the duty officer’s office. An old Chinese woman sits at the other end of the bench. She shakes her head as she peeks around all the time like a bird watchful of danger. It seems she’s startled when you sit down on the same bench as her, so you look away, you don’t want her to panic. Then you take out a cigarette and light it, letting time go by. You think of your friend. By now he must be happily resting. You’d like to call him up to come and keep you company at this venture but on the other hand you don’t want your happy friend to wake up and learn something sad. You consider and decide this is something you yourself caused and you’ve got to handle it yourself and try to have nobody else suffer because of you. CHART KORBJITTI | CARRION FLOATING BY

23 – Huh, I shouldn’t have. The doctor comes up and looks around. When he sees you he comes to you and sits down on the same bench. You know he’s pissed off at having to wait from the way he doesn’t quite sit still but gets up and paces then comes back to sit, moody and clumsy, grumbling that dressing the wounds should be well over by now. …Finally, the others arrive, eight of them altogether. The bunch of them comes straight at you, one man leading, anger in his eyes as if he’s found his sworn enemy. He points to you in the face. ‘Just you wait, you sod. If something’s the matter with my dad, you’ll see.’ You don’t answer or show any reaction as you can’t figure out yet if it’s just a show or if it sincerely comes from his heart. ‘Stop that, there’s no need, take it easy, believe me.’ A woman in her forties takes him by the arm and pulls him away. You sense that none of the eyes of the people in that bunch are friendly towards you. You sense the oppression from the surrounding atmosphere. ‘Are you all there?’ the young policeman comes out and asks with a smiling face friendly with everybody, including you. ‘Are we all there?’ the doctor now asks, obviously in a big hurry. The newcomers all nod. CARRION FLOATING BY | CHART KORBJITTI

24 ‘Please go inside then,’ the policeman says before turning round and going back in. The doctor is the first to follow him, with all the wounded in tow. Their relatives wait outside the room. You’ll learn later that the reason why they’ve come late is because they phoned each other and waited for one another at the hospital and only when they were all there did they come to the police station. ‘Let me see your driving licence,’ the young policeman tells you. You take your wallet out of your back pocket, pick up the driving licence and hand it over. He takes it and begins to fill in the details in his register. He writes rather fast as if in a hurry to be done with the case, sometimes stops to read back and then lowering his head goes on with the writing. At one point he opens the drawer of his desk, takes out a ruler and draws three rectangles. You can guess that the rectangle which is heading for collision is your own car. He reads the whole thing over again before turning the register upside down and putting it in front of you. ‘Please sign here.’ Like a docile child, you sign without reading and then return the pen to him. ‘Please sign here, doctor.’ The doctor takes the register and reads through, then takes out his pen from his shirt pocket and signs in the appropriate slot. CHART KORBJITTI | CARRION FLOATING BY

25 ‘The injured party, please sign here too.’ The policeman smiles and hands over the register to the oldestlooking person in the group. ‘My goodness, I haven’t got my glasses, just couldn’t find ’m. Just now I had my son look for ’m in the taxi but they weren’t there. Don’t know what happened to ’m…’ he grumbles loudly as befits a corpulent person. You guess he must be in his fifties, with rarefied hair on his head and two pieces of plaster stuck on the top of it. ‘You read it, little one.’ He hands over the register to the young woman sitting next to him, while instructing her, ‘Read carefully, you’re the lawyer,’ then turns to address the young policeman. ‘This is my niece. She’s just finished law. Got herself her graduation certificate this very afternoon. I’d just arrived from upcountry. I planned to celebrate with her and we were on our way but then we got unlucky…’ The young woman in question sits reading. She must be a little over twenty. Her face is plain, with nothing outstanding to be remembered, apart from a clean white bandage behind her ear and around her throat. ‘…came with my sons. They’re afraid something might be the matter with me. Now I’m the only bulwark, you see, my wife passed away just last year. And I…’ Two men whom you understand are his sons sit on the next chairs. They look alike, down to their frizzy hair, but you can see who the elder is and who the younger. The elder has a bandage round his head, the younger a CARRION FLOATING BY | CHART KORBJITTI

26 piece of plaster above his left eyebrow. They were the ones who rode with you in the taxi on the way to hospital. The taxi driver sits on the chair at the end of the row. He’s rather small, with a sorrowful face as if bearing a heavy burden at all times. He has no bandage or plaster on his head, even though you remember he kept complaining to his fellow taxi driver on his way to hospital that his head hurt. Altogether there are five people injured besides you. All five sign their names and then hand over the register back to the young policeman. ‘Well now, gentlemen, tomorrow at ten come back to agree on damage costs. For tonight, go back and take a rest…’ he says in a loud voice as if to proclaim it all round. Everybody leaves their seats and files out of the room. ‘Don’t forget to come with your money ready,’ he says to you privately, with a ready smile as if to comfort you: – It’s no big deal, don’t be alarmed. ‘How much?’ ‘It’s not for me to say. It’s up to the injured parties, because they are casualties, so it’s hard to say. If it was just one car, you’d call the garage over to make an estimate and that’s it, but there are people injured. I don’t know how much they’ll ask for. Get a lot ready just in case, sir…’ he tells you in a low voice before you step out of the room. CHART KORBJITTI | CARRION FLOATING BY

27 …The old Chinese lady is still sitting on the bench as before, still wary of danger as a bird out of its nest. You carefully go down the stairs step by step and as you do you hurt much more than on flat ground. You slowly walk over to the taxi that’s waiting for you. ‘We can leave now, it’s over.’ You tell him in detail where you’re going. …On the empty road Hardly a vehicle from the opposite direction Lights by the roadside yellow and dim One lamp after another after another Cold wind flailing at your face You try to forget your troubles… ‘What time is it, sir?’ ‘A few minutes past two.’ You withdraw your eyesight from the outside. …The taxi slows down and stops in front of your flat. The driver gets out and opens the hatchback, lifts out the spare tyres, jack, gallon of motor oil, bottles of distilled water, brake fluid and fan belt and takes them to the front of the building. The downstairs guard walks up to have a look and when he sees you merely exclaims, ‘Oh, it’s you!’ ‘Help me take those things upstairs, will you?’ you tell him in a familiar tone of voice, then turn to the taxi and ask, ‘How much? Including waiting time, of course.’ ‘Fifty, sir,’ he answers as if he has already figured it out. CARRION FLOATING BY | CHART KORBJITTI

28 You give him a hundred baht. ‘Keep the change.’ You know that what he’s asked for, even without compensation for the time wasted waiting, is far too low. ‘Oh, no, sir, I can’t. You’ve suffered enough as it is.’ He pushes your hand away. ‘Take it, my friend. I can afford it.’ ‘I think fifty’s enough, sir. One hundred’s too much. You’ve got such bad luck already, I couldn’t accept,’ he persists. ‘I haven’t got enough small notes.’ You open your wallet for him to see. He nervously fumbles into his shirt pocket. There are a few tattered banknotes. He gathers coins in his hand, pulls out the notes – three tens – then opens his hand and counts the coins and places the whole lot into your hand. ‘That’s all I have, really. I’m not trying to short-change you.’ You feel obliged to accept his generosity. ‘You’ve wasted so much time for me. Thanks a lot. Thanks truly.’ ‘No sweat. We help each other out.’ He smiles at you before going back into his car and driving away. You stand looking at the taxi until it turns by the gate and disappears… The downstairs guard helps you carry the things to the lift and goes up with you to your room, meanwhile asking you about what happened. At times you’re irritable and don’t feel like answering. Even though the two CHART KORBJITTI | CARRION FLOATING BY

29 of you are on friendly terms and greet each other every day, tonight you feel like he’s a stranger to you. …Late into the night, you toss and turn, close your eyes, close your mind to sleep, but it’s like there’s someone with you keeping your eyes open. You try everything you know to go to sleep but aren’t feeling sleepy at all. Besides, the sound of that crash is spooking you. – You shouldn’t have. – You shouldn’t have. – You really shouldn’t.

CARRION FLOATING BY | CHART KORBJITTI

2 You open your eyes, wake up and see slabs of clear dawn sky. Every morning before getting out of bed you like to lie looking at the sky in those frames. It’s like realistic pictures painted by a top artist. Their borders are the red frame of the window, rather than the individual frames of the pictures hung on the white wall. The three pictures are at the bottom of your bed. The first two are partly obstructed by the mosquito net. The third one is of clear glass. This is the one you prefer. You’re able to see clearly the changing colours of the sky...

Chart Korbjitti, born 1954, is a highly successful, self‐publishing Thai novelist and short story writer with a wide range of styles. Both The judgment, 1981, and Time, 1993, received the SEA Write Award and were translated into French, English and other languages. They can be downloaded from thaifiction.com, along with Mad dogs & co, 1988, and his best short stories.

CHART KORBJITTI | CARRION FLOATING BY