[The Rainy Season Inn] Chapter 2 🦎 When I woke up, the dense night that had filled the room had already lost its outline.
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[The Rainy Season Inn] Chapter 2 🦎 When I woke up, the dense night that had filled the room had already lost its outline.
I couldn't tell if my sleep had been deep, or if my consciousness had simply been submerged in mud.
However, the weight that had been settled heavily at the bottom of my body had certainly been stripped away to some extent.
The smell of cheap perfume remaining on the pillow, and the faint sense of unease regarding the few banknotes missing from my wallet, had already been pushed far away as things that no longer mattered.
The gecko on the wall had already disappeared.
Perhaps it had finished its business and returned to the darkness, or perhaps it was just hiding in a crevice out of sight, still watching me.
I slowly rose from the creaking bed and headed to the communal bathing area.
The morning air was still humid, but unlike the sticky air of the night, it had a lightness that allowed me to breathe it deep into my lungs.
I doused myself with lukewarm water from the rusted pipe overhead.
Water smelling of red clay flowed down from my head, traced my back, and was sucked into the cracked tiles.
That inorganic flow washed away the remnants of the night that had clung to the folds of my brain.
Sentiments and regrets were processed here merely as physical stimuli, disappearing down the drain.
That was enough.
When I returned to the dimly lit front desk, the proprietor in his undershirt was already awake.
He sat deep in a plastic chair, saying nothing, just staring at me with an appraising gaze.
I patched together some broken Thai and English to order breakfast.
It was doubtful whether it had been conveyed accurately, but the proprietor gave a short nod.
As I smoked a cigarette at the table, a bowl of rice porridge (jok) was brought out from the back.
The person carrying the tray was the woman from last night.
With a completely expressionless face, as if nothing had happened, she slammed a bowl down in front of me.
Our eyes met for a fleeting moment, but there was not a trace of affection, nor any guilt for having pilfered my money.
To her, the night's events, her sticky fingers, and even the act of bringing me porridge now, were all merely identical tasks flowing along the conveyor belt of life.
I, too, had no desire to seek any further meaning from her.
The porridge was hot enough to burn my tongue, yet it had almost no flavor.
I drizzled some fish sauce over it and silently poured it into my stomach.
That bland simplicity was, if anything, deeply comforting.
My body was slowly reconnecting to the reality of this land.
To reach my next destination, the forest where the rhinoceros beetles live, I needed transportation.
And above all, I needed someone who knew the roads of this land, which were like crazed veins.
I asked the proprietor.
About how to get to my destination, and the necessity of a guide.
My words were fragmented, and I wasn't sure if my request had been conveyed accurately.
Even so, the proprietor stood up as if he had understood everything and shouted toward the back of the shop.
Before long, a young man with bedhead appeared, looking sluggish.
Narrow eyes, dark skin.
He had facial features somewhat similar in bone structure to the woman from earlier.
The proprietor pointed at him with his thumb and said briefly.
Brother.
Whether that meant his actual younger brother or was just slang for a young man from the same village, there was no further explanation.
But that was enough.
Led by him, I stepped outside.
In the relentless light of morning, this town revealed a face entirely different from the one it wore last night.
Things that had only asserted their eerie outlines in the darkness were now exposed in the harsh light, down to their meager details.
However, because everything was too visible, the landscape lacked a sense of reality, appearing as flat as a painted backdrop.
The asphalt paving had ended long ago.
The ground was composed of dry red clay and sticky mud puddles left behind by last night's rain.
The wooden houses were unnaturally low, the boundary between inside and outside was ambiguous, and people, dogs, and livestock shared the same stagnant space without any distinction.
Brother walked through the mud without hesitation and stopped in front of an old, weathered off-road motorcycle.
It was covered in mud, a thing whose original color was impossible to tell.
There was almost no exchange that could be called a negotiation regarding the payment.
Just a few short words and an exchange of cold glances.
With just that, my life for this day was entrusted to him.
I silently straddled the rear seat.
Licenses and helmets have no meaning whatsoever in this place.
The kickstarter was pushed down, and an ear-splitting roar of the engine echoed.
Violent vibrations traveled through my crotch and pierced my spine.
And then, the bike suddenly shot forward.
The road was far too brutal to be called a road.
On the red clay, countless deep ruts gouged out during the rainy season had hardened.
They intersect and overlap in complex ways, completely obscuring which path is the correct one.
The block tires forced their way over the irregular terrain, slipping wildly in the mud and bouncing off the rocky protrusions.
I clung to Brother's sweat-drenched back.
If I were thrown off, I wouldn't get away unscathed.
To survive, I focused solely on maintaining my grip.
My body was shaken mercilessly up, down, and side to side, and my internal organs, like my stomach and intestines, collided within their cage of flesh with a slight delay.
That physical misalignment created a strange sense of dizziness and weightlessness.
My vision flickered intermittently, and the passing scenery no longer formed a continuous image.
Even so, it was certain that we were moving forward furiously toward somewhere.
Before long, the texture of the raging ground changed.
The stickiness of the mud decreased, and the road regained a slight flatness.
My view opened up, and on both sides of the road, a vast wetland filled with water like a mirror appeared.
Standing there were several water buffalo.
With bodies as huge and black as boulders, half-submerged in the muddy water, they did not move an inch.
They only slowly flicked their tails to brush away insects and flapped their large ears.
Their movements were extremely slow, as if only the space around them was governed by a different, high-viscosity time.
At the water's edge stood a sun-tanned child.
Barefoot, with a face covered in dirt, they simply stared at us.
There was no laughter, surprise, or curiosity in those eyes.
They were simply letting us pass by as a 'harmless noise' passing through, as if we were just a part of the scenery.
The motorcycle passes by the side without mercy.
Splashed muddy water wets my ankles.
The unpleasant coldness pulls my consciousness back to reality for just a moment, but it is immediately overwritten by the overwhelming vibration of the engine.
From a break in the distant forest, white smoke rises thinly.
The signs of someone's life slowly dissolve into the heavy sky.
Brother does not slow down at all.
He pushes forward with the throttle open, as if there were no reason to pay respect to this painting-like, peaceful landscape.
Endless silence and violent speed.
Gentle time and uncontrollable vibration.
These contradictory elements stand side by side in this strange space without interfering with each other.
I had already lost all sense of how long we had been riding.
Time had shattered into pieces, and the concept of distance had also evaporated in the heat.
Before long, the motorcycle suddenly slowed down and came to a stop, kicking up a cloud of dust.
When Brother turned off the engine, the roar vanished, and the world suddenly regained its lightness along with a ringing in my ears.
It was a small village that looked as if it were half-swallowed by the forest.
Crude stilt houses were scattered as if melting into the red earth, and thin smoke was rising from them.
Here too, the boundary between inside and outside, between people and the forest, was extremely vague, and it seemed as if there was not even a will to resist the erosion of nature.
Brother gets off the seat without saying a word.
I follow suit, trying to soothe my stiff legs.
An old man approaches from somewhere and exchanges a brief nod with Brother.
That alone seemed to complete the transmission of all necessary information.
After a while, tea was brought in a chipped teacup.
It gave off steam that smelled of earth and had no particular taste.
It simply went down as a warm liquid, washing away my dust-choked throat.
Before I knew it, the village children had gathered around in a swarm.
One by one, they increased in silence, surrounding me in a circle while maintaining a reasonable distance.
A foreign object like a farang must be quite a spectacle for them.
Eventually, one of them stepped forward just a little.
In their small hands, they were holding something as if it were precious.
Then, they held it out proudly, as if to show it off to me.
A heavy piece of metal, covered in red rust and dirt, discolored to black.
Having lost half its original form, it was the remains of something that had certainly been a projectile,an artillery shell or a bomb, in the past.
Then, another child brought something else, as if competing.
A disc-shaped, crude, and corroded lump. Something that had been a landmine.
Or rather, the remains of what had been a landmine.
Whether the gunpowder inside had been completely removed and neutralized, I, as an amateur, had no way of judging from its appearance.
But the child, oblivious to my tension, tapped the surface of the metal lightly with a mud-stained finger.
A dry sound rang out, indicating that it was hollow inside.
That disproportionate lightness felt, if anything, unnaturally chilling.
The brother, who had been puffing on a cigarette, said in a low, gravelly voice from the side.
"Old... bomb."
He shrugged exaggeratedly and added, as if spitting out the words.
"Kids... pick. Sale."
He said the children pick these up in the forest and sell them to the rare, curious outsider who happens by. As souvenirs.
I looked again at the lumps of metal in the children's hands.
Things that once existed solely to tear apart human flesh and destroy everything are now treated as tools for innocent trade.
Their original purpose—the intent to kill—has long since vanished, leaving only their gruesome forms behind.
And now, the children swarming around them have given them an entirely different, distorted meaning.
The children hold up the fragments of death they have gathered with pride.
How dangerous those things once were is of no concern to them.
The only truth in this settlement is the fact that they are "there" and that they "make money."
I drank the lukewarm tea in one gulp.
When I turned around, the brother was already straddling his bike, preparing to start the engine.
Even after realizing I wouldn't buy anything, the children were still staring at me.
In their gaze, there was no fear of war, nor any sense of tragic poverty.
There was only a strong familiarity with their daily life and a faint, lingering curiosity.
I said nothing, turned my back on them, and climbed back onto the bike seat.
The engine roared to life, and the violent vibrations returned to my body.
The settlement—the children, the old people, and the remnants of death—would all be left behind just as they were.
Everything would likely continue to exist just as it had yesterday, unchanged.
Only I, a foreign object, was severed from it and forcibly dragged back into a reckless progression.
Brother twisted the throttle without once looking back.
The motorcycle kicked up mud and began to move.
In that moment, the fleeting silence was swept away in an instant, and only the vibration that scrambled my blood circulation became the entirety of my world once again.
To be continued in Chapter 3
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