Angsley translated. Anderson held his breath. They waited. The girl ignored them, playing with her doll; its blank button eyes seemed to be mocking them.
Anderson walked over to Gai, squatting down next to her chair. She had her mother’s high cheekbones under the circles of white powder and her mother’s anxious eyes. He eased himself onto the floor and pulled his long legs into a cross-legged position. For a long time, fifteen minutes, he simply sat with her. Gai showed him the doll, and he smiled. They began to play silently. She fed the doll and gave it to him to feed.
“Nice baby,” he said after a while. She tweaked the doll’s painted nose affectionately.
“A really pretty baby.” Anderson’s voice was gentle, admiring. He followed Angsley’s Thai tones floating up and down like paper airplanes borne haltingly up and then falling, missing their mark. Who knew if he was saying it correctly?
She giggled. “It’s a boy.”
“Does he have a name?”
“Nueng.”
“Nice name.” He paused. “What are you feeding him?”
“Milk.”
“Doesn’t he like rice?”
She shook her head. She was only a few inches away from him. He could smell the papaya on her breath and a chalky smell, possibly from the face paint.
“Why not?”
She grimaced. “Rice is bad.”
“It doesn’t taste good?”
“No, no, no, not good.”
He waited a moment.
“Did something happen while you were eating rice?”
“A bad thing happened.”
“Oh.” He was aware of all the sounds in the room: Angsley’s voice, the scratching of the lizards as they raced madly across the ceiling, the quick clicks of his heartbeat. “What happened?”
“Not now.”
“I see. It happened in another time.”
“When I was big.”
Anderson looked at the sun sliding through the slats onto the wooden floor, the white circles glowing on the child’s face.
“Oh. When you were big. Did you live in a different house?”
She nodded. “In Phichit.”
“I see.” He forced himself to breathe evenly. “What happened there?”
“Bad thing.”
“A bad thing happened with the rice?”
She reached over the table to the papaya bowl, grabbed a piece of papaya, and shoved it into her mouth.
“What happened, Gai?”
She smiled at them with the fruit covering her teeth, the broad orange smile of a clown. She shook her head.
They waited for a long time, but she said nothing else. Out the window, the water buffalo was no longer in sight; the sun set the bright fields on fire. Down below, the chickens chuckled at them.
“I guess that’s it, then,” Angsley said.
“Wait.”
The girl was reaching again into the bowl of papaya, and this time she took the paring knife her mother had left there. She picked it up with her imperfect hand. They were so rapt, these two grown men, watching her, they didn’t react at first—they didn’t take the knife away from the baby. They watched her pick up the doll, wrap its crude cloth fingers carefully around the knife, and with one, focused movement turn the knife toward her body, stopping just before it entered her abdomen, its point grazing the wine-colored birthmark.
It was only then that Anderson reached over, prying the knife from her tiny malformed fingers. She let him take it.
She said something else. She was looking up at him, her face urgent beneath the white powder. A ghost child, thought Anderson. A dream. And then he thought: No, she’s real. This is reality.
There was a pause.
“Well? What is it? What did she say?”
Angsley frowned slightly. “I think she said ‘The Postman.’”
*
It was late in the day by the time Anderson and Angsley headed back in the boat. The hired truck that had taken them to and from Phichit had let them off at the riverbank, and now they were returning silently to Bangkok. Anderson stood in the front. Next to him Angsley sat and smoked.
The boat glided past the shacks with jetties, little spirit houses perched on the ends, miniature temples built for the shelter and appeasement of ghosts; past the women bathing, the children swimming in the muddy river water.
Anderson unbuttoned his shirt. He took off his shoes and socks. He needed to feel the water sloshing his toes, splashing his ankles. He stood on the boat in his open shirt and T-shirt, the late-afternoon sun roaring on his head. Every hair on his body was standing on end.
He thought of Arjuna, begging the Hindu god Krishna to show him reality: “Reality, the fire of a thousand suns simultaneously blazing forth in the sky.” He thought of Heraclitus: a man cannot step in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man. He thought of the police and coroner’s reports about the mailman from Phichit who had plunged a knife into the left side of his wife’s abdomen, killing her and cutting through three of the protecting fingers of her right hand, because she had burned the rice.