Written by Nitipong Sumrankong
Translated by Peera Songkünnatham
Illustrated by Summer Panadd

[คลิกที่นี่เพื่ออ่าน “คลื่นเหียน” ในต้นฉบับภาษาไทย]

In the aftermath of the 2014 coup d’état, “attitude adjustment” was a major tactic used against hundreds of Thai dissidents. Such an adjustment varied from apparently benign conversations to alleged physical and psychological torture. Arrests and/or orders to report to the authorities—couched in the euphemism of “invitations”—were more often than not media spectacles: every television channel still remaining on air would be interrupted by announcements of wanted names. The rationale for attitude adjustment given to Amnesty International went like this:

People invited under Martial Law and not yet accused are only invited for conversations to adjust their way of thinking. People with different thoughts will have the tendency to create violence – they were invited in to adjust their way of thinking and return them to society. After that there will be no control on them – society will monitor them.[I]

[I] Bangkok Metropolitan Deputy Police Commissioner Amnuay Nimmano, in response to a question about the criteria used by the authorities to select people to report to army detention. Quoted in Amnesty International, Thailand: Attitude adjustment: 100 days under martial law, 11 Sep 2014, page 9.

Tellingly, dissidents are framed here as wayward individuals—as society’s thought aliens. Political conflict is reduced to a problem of unharmonious attitudes. Dissidents must be contained and rehabilitated into non-threatening, if not fully docile, citizens. This way, the hundreds detained and returned became teaching examples for millions: not only as cautionary tales, but also as deceptive social proofs that the junta’s really not that oppressive.

The following story is written by one of those who underwent attitude adjustment. In November 2014, at the half-year mark after the coup, Nitipong Sumrankong was arrested after posting on Facebook a picture of himself and two others flashing the three-finger salute in Chiang Mai City. He was taken in a military van to be interrogated at the local military base, and then forced to sign a memo of agreement at the local police station stating he had flashed the three-finger salute on an impulse (khük khanong) and promising to cease further political action no matter by writing or by symbolic expression. 

Nitipong’s dissent was framed by the media in blatantly epidemiological terms. A news report on his attitude adjustment began with the phrase “The contagion reached Chiang Mai.”[II]

[II] “33rd Army Circle Picks Up Middle-Aged Man for Adjustment of Anti-Coup/NCPO Attitudes,” Thai Rath, 22 Nov 2014.

In turn, Nitipong, a pharmacist by profession, cast dissent in terms of a congenital disease, as if to suggest that it’s not just an errant impulse:

In your patient history folder, car sickness is listed as your disease.

Writing in the second person can be alienating, especially if the reader cannot comfortably place themselves inside the second-person perspective. Reading it can cause dizziness, a kind of motion sickness as one is forced to move from one perspective to another. The hope remains, however, that identity among affect aliens would be possible:

Lately, the comedians have appeared more frequently on television screens. The compulsory programming on every station’s schedule prevents me from changing channels away from their Shove Happiness Down the Throat program. Going forward, apart from myself, an exponential growth of people may come to identify car sickness as their disease.

As we lounge around at home, eyes fixed on the images on television screen, we may think that our butts are glued to the sofa, but in reality we do not stay in place: we’re traveling back to the age where dinosaurs reigned/will reign supreme.

First published in 2018[III], “Nausea” takes the reader on a dizzying tour of contemporary Thai genres: literary fiction, poetry, interview, news report, encyclopedic article. As Nitipong’s idiosyncratic overwriting plays with the conventions of each genre, it displays both their capacity and their failure to register individual dissent. Amid a nausea-inducing existence full of rhetorical clichés, poetry stands out as transcendental. Turns out, verses that address no one may leave a more lasting impression—and lead to a stronger connection—than slogans that shout at you.

[III] The story was published in the multi-authored collection ขอศาลได้พิจารณาพิพากษาลงโทษตามกฎหมา (May the Court Consider Delivering a Guilty Verdict in Accordance with the Dogs’ Law, Tamnak Press, 2018). Read the translator’s review of the book here.

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คลื่นเหียน
Nausea

“What you wrote in the preface—is that a true story?” (What a question.)

“No shit. Why would I make it up?”

After harking the reply, the friend lowered his head and scanned the contents of the thin novel.

“Haven’t signed it for you yet. Lemme. Give it back…”

“Hey, no need, no need,” the friend hugged the book tightly. Hardly had one uttered, It’s nothing, really, I mean to personally sign the book for such a dear pal as you, did the friend let fall an insensitive postface.

“A signature will knock down the price, I’m afraid. In case I don’t want to add to the clutter of the house after I finish reading. So I can resell.” (What an answer.)

“You bastard, I’ll whoop your ass.”

The friend was having a hearty laugh. Without hesitation, one seized the moment of distraction, scooted over to the friend, pulled the book from his hands, pressed penpoint on paper, and carved one’s full name on the first page.

“Holy father…” noticing the crabbed hand the friend let out an expletive.

“Swear on your doggy paddling skills that this is your best attempt at a signature.” Having said that, the friend, perhaps afraid of having offended or having forfeited his right to the book, pretended to pore over the text.

In the meantime, one let the friend relish the flavors of literature. It was a novel of barely fifty pages.[1] By the last sip from the coffee cup he would probably be approaching the final line. By that time, the friend’s eyes might have abandoned the procession of vowels and consonants, as they proved too queasy for comfort. Or, to the contrary, the friend might have fallen headlong into the literary labyrinth, retracing his steps again and again. The two trajectories were equally probable.

[1] It is a matter of debate in literary circles what page count constitutes a novel. Does a fifty-page book deserve to be called a short novel or a long short story? The cognoscenti predict that the debate will continue in (the) circles everlastingly.

…

‘Once upon a time, I was snatched by soldiers into a van whose windows were tinted solid black. I pictured a denouement of untold atrocity. Hoping to block the anxiety, not wanting those people to see my fear, I put together a poem in my head, word by word into a line into a stanza.

‘I beamed whenever I found an apt word that rhymed with the previous verse, my face filled with glee like fish who’d found a fresh new lagoon. Their soldiers were perhaps a little surprised. Most certainly, they wanted me paralyzed in fear. Fear was totally there, don’t get me wrong. But hey, I finished a piece of poetry here, of course I’m going to celebrate with a smile. Consequently, I guffawed for a good while in that echoey van, indifferent to the pairs of eyes that did a quick turn to stare at me.

‘Even with my destination unknown, I still felt like putting together a poem and bringing it to fruition. All the aforementioned is an example of the power of literature, because even with our freedom curtailed, there is nobody capable of confining our thought in a cage.’[2]

[2] The author’s preface to the novel ‘Like Organs Without A Body To Ache’ by Wayu Jarurasmi, Faber and Penguin, San Francisco, 2018 C.E.

…

In your patient history folder, car sickness is listed as your disease. At first the medical record staff balked at filling in that description, as car sickness is merely a generic symptom; it does not fall under the category of disease like diabetes, heart, hypertension. But you stood firm until the staff relented, grudgingly, and got it over with.[3]

[3] The Royal Institute’s Thai-Thai Dictionary Dictionary provides the following meanings of akan (symptom) and rok (disease): akan n. a current state of being, a developing state of being, condition, e.g., akan ill; demeanor, e.g. akan suspicious. rok n. a condition where the body cannot function normally as a result of pathogens, for instance.

The principal reason you wanted your car sickness on the record was its usefulness for future studies in epidemiology. Among the world’s population of over seven billion, you can’t be the only one suffering from the aforementioned illness, can you? You firmly believe that many people are besieged by dizziness. Only the statistics proving it are lacking.

Actually, to call it car sickness does not quite cover it, technically speaking. Because other than cars, you get sick in every kind of vehicle: oxcarts, elephants, horses, cows, camels, various other beasts, trains, rafts, hang-gliders, airplanes. Not included are rockets and space shuttles, pending an opportunity to board. All signs, however, point inexorably to the same sickness.

You keep pills for car sickness with your person at all times for easy reach. One time, the pills had run out from the bubble pack when you boarded a car. Forty meters in, your face had gone pale, your blood pressure dropped low. Your friend took the opportunity to rub it in your face with things like, Knowledge overflows in your head and you can’t help yourself, you work with pharmaceuticals but get knocked out by the basics like a fish in shallow water, what a damn shame. At times while on the sidewalk, just catching sight of vehicles zipping on the roads and alleys makes you feel nauseous and dizzy without having to bring yourself on board.

When you’re seized by car sickness, you are left bedridden and have to waste a day’s worth of work for no good reason. Your friends and coworkers show concern, afraid that an ordinary symptom may later grow to be a ravaging disease. You say half tongue-in-cheek, Matter doesn’t cease to exist, we don’t see it because it changes states, its chemical composition stays the same, only the form is altered. Car sickness is a kind of matter. The transformation of the elements, ergo, inexorably involves the matter of messy slimy vomit spurting from the mouth.

…

The English-Thai Dictionary of Medical Terms does not include the word “carsick,” only “motion sickness,” which groups symptoms of dizziness from every moving vehicle under the same category.

Car or vehicle sickness arises when the balancing system cannot adjust in time to the movements of the body and the head. When we sit in a car or a boat, our body seems to be glued to the seat, yet doesn’t really stay in place; it shifts and shimmies in rhythm with the fluid moves of the vehicle.

The functioning of the balancing system starts at the eye and the inner ear detecting movement, before sending signals to the cerebellum. Textbooks say that familiarity can reduce the symptoms to comfortable or nonexistent. Reminds you of the time the professor lectured in class and you raised your hand to argue you’d been riding in cars since you were little, your body should have adjusted to it by now, but no, the symptoms worsened with time, your balancing system lost its balance, alienated from the image seen by the eye, to the point where the brain misinterpreted signals, giving rise to an intractable, chronic car sickness, a sore that didn’t scab over, waiting to sprout and take root during commute hours.

…

Q : You said that during the ride in the military van, you still felt like writing poetry in your mind, a state I believe to be shared by everyone in a certain stage of life, when one faces a crisis but somehow is caught up wanting to ad lib thoughts to oneself elegantly.

A : I get carsick easily. Car sickness is to be expected. I am absolutely terrified of riding in a car. When the military officers took me in the van, I was most afraid of car sickness. I followed them into the van and forgot to take a pill for motion sickness. My mind was racing, who’s going to pick up my kids this afternoon, what about my job, who’s going to sub for me, all sorts of worries. During the ride I tried not to think; stress could lead to car sickness hailing around the corner. That day, they drove around and around for a very long time. Hours. I sat there without car sickness poking out; that was quite odd. Sat there until I didn’t know what to do. Bored, too. Had to find something to do to while away the boredom. I reviewed the names of soccer players I knew down to the last one and we still didn’t arrive. So I ad libbed a poem in my mind, stumbling my way forward until I thought of the university students of Earth Star [Dao Din] Group who were arrested for demanding democracy, so I crafted a poem as a token of moral support to them. After I was released I tried to retrieve it from memory, jotted it down on paper, revised and polished it further until I published it on Facebook. While detained in the van I made a great effort joining each word to the next, each stanza to the next, smiling at myself whenever I found a satisfying word. The military officers were probably puzzled why this dude in detention kept grinning. In conclusion, the poem came from boredom, worry, fear also; I wanted to be doing something to escape from that state.

As for the poem I was talking about, I later revised it to the following:

Out of earth, a basic, common element
was sculpted into mass, birthed into substance;
a worker’s hand, with rough, sinewy fingers,
molded it bit by bit into shape and form.
A star is surely earth element’s child,
each sparkling speck a sand-flake, a dust-powder;
it is not of high-and-mighty sierra stone
to be sledgehammered to erect some palace;
it simply fused into an ordinary mass
of pulverized particles coating the fields,
where seedlings grow luxuriant, luminous:
pitch-black may be the sky—but not the earth![4]

[4] Interview with Wayu Jarurasmi by Roland Bus, MediaOne Magazine (Year 47 Issue 1278, August), Ordinary Publishing, Khelang Nakhon, 2016 C.E.

…

A long time ago, the Greeks, the Egyptians, and the Indians learned how to use herbs to curb pathogens, whereas Russian peasants put smoldering earth on an infected wound to heal it. Around the seventeenth century, the Polish mixed bread with cobweb to patch a wound. After World War I, the discovery of penicillin led to the invention of antibiotics…

You went over the chronology of medicine. Lethal diseases that killed hundreds of thousands in the past are nearly harmless nowadays, due to scientists who have researched and developed countless formulas of pharmaceuticals and vaccines. When you decided to study pharmacy, you dreamed of coming up with a medicinal formula that gets rid of dizziness and vertigo once and for all. You kept the dream to yourself and almost never told anyone. For others, car sickness and dizziness is just a nuisance, not a torture, no bloodletting, no near-death devastation. It is rather funny to find someone who is obsessed with symptoms of floating lightness, as opposed to cancer.

The structural formula of dimenhydrinate[5]

[5] Image from http://www.newdruginfo.com/pharmacopeia/usp28/v28230/usp28nf23s0_m26380.htm (Accessed on 9 September 2016 C.E.)

The friend looked up from the thin novel, knit his eyebrows, and handed you the book/handed one the book.

“What kind of novel is that? That’s what you have for illustrations? Please enlighten your good friend who flunked science, he will very much appreciate it.”

“The picture shows the chemical structure of the medicine used to alleviate symptoms of dizziness from car sickness and seasickness, that’s what,” you said/one said.

“Why put the picture in the book? What are you trying to convey to society…” the friend pursued, unwilling to relent.

You fell silent and recalled one’s long-winded sentences when you inadvertently revealed a long-ago dream/One fell silent and recalled your long-winded sentences when one inadvertently revealed a long-ago dream.

One told you that/You told one that “humanity has suffered from head-spinning dizziness since primordial times, since the Paleolithic period. The first person to experience it was a woman. She was hit in the head by a scruffy, unkempt young man with a club before being dragged ruthlessly through grassy and rugged terrain into a cave.[6]

[6] Consequently, the first woman in history to suffer symptoms of dizziness was probably not dissimilar to Wilma Flintstone, wife of Fred Flintstone. See ‘The Flintstones,’ cited in Museum of Broadcast Communications: The Flintstones.

In the future, the atmosphere of extraterrestrial colonies will destabilize inner ear pressure and affect the balancing system to the point of wanting to throw up. It is beyond cure, apart from symptomatic treatment… No doubt, humanity will have vertigo in aeternum.”

One’s words left you astonished/Your words left one astonished. All this time one had sought to prevail over car sickness symptoms/you had sought to prevail over car sickness symptoms/I had sought to prevail over car sickness symptoms, seen them as foes to conquer. Only then did I realize that I’d been misguided all this time being fixated on a vendetta, turning it over and over in my mind. The structural formula of dimenhydrinate reveals the base elements that form the medicinal substance… Carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, chloride: each and every element generates heat through combustion for human blood, flesh, and pulse. My thin novel was written in part after I recovered from a bedridden condition, as if back from the dead. Car sickness symptoms have given me new life over and over again. I’ve got to incorporate it into my life, fuse disease into one with cell, tissue, blood, lymph, every organ.

Lately, the comedians have appeared more frequently on television screens. The compulsory programming on every station’s schedule prevents me from changing channels away from their Shove Happiness Down the Throat program[7]. Going forward, apart from myself, an exponential growth of people may come to identify car sickness as their disease.

[7] At present, the Shove Happiness Down the Throat program is broadcast daily, 24 hours a day. It has garnered more than a thousand trillion views.

As we lounge around at home, eyes fixed on the images on television screen, we may think that our butts are glued to the sofa, but in reality we do not stay in place: in truth we’re traveling back to the age where dinosaurs reigned/will reign supreme.

The Shove Happiness Down the Throat comedians will make us so dizzy we’ll be puking a big pile.

—

21 November 2557 B.E.

Officers of the National Peace and Obeisance Maintaining Command took into custody Mr. Wayu Jaruratna, house address 336/789 Sansai-Doi Tao-Hot Road, Soi 8, Moo 7, Sansai Yai Subdistrict, Sansai District, Chiang Mai Province, a man past his prime/pharmacist/poet-erotica writer directly from the hospital to attend the course Do Good for the Country, accelerated curriculum.

This followed an incident yesterday, where Mr. Wayu Jaruratna, a man past his prime, and two other men past their prime arranged to show an aggressive gesture to National Peace and Obeisance Maintaining officers by raising three fingers in the officers’ faces and then taking photographs to post on Facebook, all while the officers were diligently, tirelessly keeping peace and safety for vendors and members of the public, monks and novices, schoolchildren and university students, children and women.

At approximately 1:45pm today, officers of the National Peace and Obeisance Maintaining Command took into custody Mr. Wayu, a man in his prime, by car toward the Nineteen Eighty-Fourth Military Fort. Once at the fort, Mr. Wayu was brought in for interrogation, to discover in particular the reason behind the three-finger salute. After the interrogation ceremony, the man past his prime attended the course Do Good for the Country, accelerated curriculum. As regards the three-finger salute, the man past his prime gave the statement that he had committed the act because he lacked proper knowledge of the situation, combined with being under the influence of alcohol and narcotics, making him lose judgment and show an insulting gesture to the officers without meaning to.

Subsequent to the questioning, the reporter had an interview with the head of interrogation at the National Peace and Obeisance Maintaining Command. It was found that, in fact, the authorities still had lingering doubts about Mr. Wayu’s professed ignorance, as it was highly likely that the man past his prime had accepted money from abroad from a person of ill intentions in order to undermine the country’s security. In any case, the security officers would continue to follow Mr. Wayu’s activities and search for the conclusive and irrefutable evidence against him, so that fellow citizens could live their lives on the straight and narrow path for ever, in fulfillment of the intentions of the national administration.

The authorities returned Mr. Wayu to the hospital at 7:30pm, after the man past his prime finished the accelerated curriculum Do Good for the Country.[8]

[8] ‘Man Past His Prime Detained for Drunk Flashing the Three-Finger Salute,’ Dao Siam Millennium Newspaper (21 November 2557 B.E.), Phra Nakhon.‘

…

Appendix

An excerpt from the novel
‘Like Organs Without A Body To Ache’
By Wayu Jarurasmi

Part 1 : Cloud Fiddle[9]

[9] ‘Cloud Fiddle,’ the first chapter of the novel ‘Like Organs Without A Body To Ache’ was, according to an interview with Wayu Jarurasmi, adapted from a short story of the same name published on Jut Prakai Wannakam, as transcribed by Nitipong Sumrankong, interviewed on 19 April 2018 C.E.

1.

Make clouds of cotton
Summon streams of gold
For dreams to flow in
Apply glints of sunlight
Braid strands of rainbow
For life to glow in

The young man kneaded his temples. The inside of his head felt as if bored through by worms and insects. The buzzing of the insect chorus made him put his pen down. He could not tell for sure whether it was the headache symptom that caused the poem’s following stanza to stop dead in its tracks, or it was his inability to find words that induced the headache symptom.

The warm sunlight put the young man in a trance writing away at the desk, silent and engrossed in the task. Then, when the sunbeams wove a gray net over the sky, he’d simply push himself back, got to his feet, and lit a candle before dropping to the same chair and twirling his wrist like a gardener loosening the soil until another day’s sunlight taped over the eastern horizon. He’d stretch to keep fatigue at arm’s length and continue to write until the paper heap nearly touched the beam of the house.

Villagers usually dropped by to take a look from the fence, their eyebeams slipping through the railing into the house proper. The old fiddle player related the story of the young man in Lanna fiddle verse, a lullaby for the ears of rice withering away on their stems, a lullaby for the phayom tree shedding its leaves left and right, standing soundless, its lone trunk worn out. The old man’s fiddle verse talked about a crazy man with long unkempt hair, sunken eyes, sunken cheeks. Hoey…the sky refuses to be giving, his rain won’t come; the crazy man don’t eat, don’t sleep, don’t speak to anyone.

The leafless phayom tree still cast a trunk-shadow. Gazing through the window frame he saw it standing, dejected. His temples still throbbed with pain. The young man ruminated, How long did it take from the old man’s first chanting of his verses to his fiddle songs traveling widely to every person’s ears? The young man wished that the old man would adapt his poems into singable Lanna verse. The strings of sueng and saw would extend upwards to the foot of the clouds, and the boy above would hear them. Helpless, he only dreamed up a fantasy. His poems remained unfinished. The chorus of insects was buzzing clamorously. He searched everywhere for aspirin, but could not find a single pill.

2.

In his musings, the chanting of fiddle verse still rang sweet, accompanied by the chorus of buzzing insects. The glare of the sun made him narrow his eyes. Taking steps in the sunshine, the leafless phayom, tiny in his field of vision, became larger and larger. He halted his steps once he was face-to-face with the trunk of the phayom tree.

Hoey…the sky refuses to be giving, his rain won’t come, that’s why the phayom branches are brittle and scrabbly. Placing his pen-roughened palm on the trunk, he felt only hollowness atop a lifeless body that used to be redolent of life and soul, of crows perching and making nests, of squirrels and chipmunks skip-climbing.

“Old Man, you have a beautiful voice that resounds like a church bell.”

The young man had complimented the day the old man came to his doorstep, jungle liquor in hand.
The old man slurped a shot of liquor as if inhaled. His face reddened, highlighting time-eroded wrinkles. A rush of hot and humid wind scooped up balls of dust.

“That’s because I’ve got a good fiddle.”

Said the old man before lying flat on the bamboo bench, head resting on an arm, eyes on the skies. The balls of dust still hung in the air. The young man’s memory went back to the time he was armed on a patrol, in green camouflage, metal helmet, top boots, tactical backpack.

He took cover behind a rock formation, shivering. Sweat licked his palms, loosening them even as they clung to the firearm. The second an enemy’s body appeared, the finger on the trigger somehow made a move. Bang-bang-bang. All fear was forgotten. Everything around him was still. When the crack of the gunshots died down, leaves were flip-falling, his index finger numb.

“Because I’ve got a good firearm.”

The young man murmured. He downed a shot of liquor in an instant. He felt a hot sting down his throat all the way to his stomach. The redolent smell of burning heart spread outward. The old man was snore-snorting, already fast asleep. The bottle of fermented corn was more than halfway gone.

Nobody knew the young man’s pedigree. The dazzling sun of early April, even in the late afternoon, was still at a boiling point. On the dusty-red dirt road, the long-haired one carried a backpack and left a trail of footprints to be erased by hairs of dust.

The long-haired one came, and didn’t leave ever since…

From first sight, the phayom never produced a leaf. The young man figured that it had shot upward just to wait for the day it’d rot and turn to dust.

3.

Oftentimes, at night, the young man dreamed of a body punctured all over with gunshot wounds, blood-soaked, red. The enemy’s agonized cry usually woke him with a start, sweat flowers varnishing his body. It was a familiar sound. Multiple times in his boyhood, the young man had uttered it when that man came home drunk and hit him relentlessly with a rattan stick soaked in salted water. Mother swooped in to protect him; her clear skin was lined with cuts as a result.

His cry, Mother’s cry, the enemy’s cry, even the ogre-hearted man’s cry once he was close to death: each and every cry came out through the filter of wounds. The resonant howling and screaming, the bitter pain had a resemblance.

The encounter between the young man and the boy began one dawn. The nightmare woke the young man. The stars camouflaged under thick fog. The young man walked out of his house. The boy dragged his bare, bedraggled feet along the road from the other direction. The boy’s clothes were flimsy. The young man noticed a shivering demeanor.

The sun revealed the sky inch by inch. No words were spoken. Eyes were fixed on the sky above. The gravel road was composed of big red granules. The young man and the boy sat idling by waiting for the sky to open.

“I should have brought a black pen with me,” said the young man. “Black clouds bring rain.”

“The wind blows the rain to pour on someplace else every time.”

The boy’s words reminded him of the leafless phayom. The young man was silent.

“Uncle, you know how to make a cloud?” asked the boy.

“Of course. Back when I was a boy, I was the best in the village,” the young man responded, examining both his palms.

“Too bad I’ve completely forgotten how to make a cloud.”

“I’ve never made one…” he sounded discouraged.

The shaft of sunlight gradually thickened, cooking the sky until fluffy white clumps shone spectacular.

He pondered for a moment before reaching up his hand to pluck and collect the clumps with care. The boy seemed puzzled.

“Didn’t you say you’ve forgotten?”

“Yes—for myself,” the young man delivered them from his arms to the boy.

“You should try doing it.”

4.

The eyes of the long-haired one were gloomy. The old man remembered the first day he arrived at the village with a backpack. The land behind might have left debris buried within him, the long-haired man. As if there was a lump blocking his throat, the old man could only sigh; he could not put into words…that there was no place to plant his heart, especially here, this drought-desiccated land that consumed people like a conflagration.

It was cremation day for the boy. The pyre was put together under a bench. A sedge mat covered the scrawny, lifeless body. A pack of vultures descended to perch on the phayom branches, feverish, their overzealous eyes shining toward the same spot. With the call of mythical hassadeeling bird, gasoline was poured. The flames licked everything clean, leaving only an ash pile. The wind blew, kicking up boy’s bone ashes.

“It’s too sad.”

The old man said to the long-haired one when he asked…how come the fiddle has been left on the wall. The cremation proceeded in shadowy silence.

“Like your poems, Young Man. “Too sad. Too dispiriting.”

The long-haired one fell silent, tears welling up.

He remembered his feelings very well. Anguish, sadness, dejection. He squeezed them out, scribbled away furiously, I dream of a beautiful world, I desire peace and happiness, but I don’t believe in that world. But this—the deformed faces of people, their emaciated bodies, the sound of their screams, the scent of blood and stink of feces. These things are the true world. My pen, my paper carries the true essence of existence, which is sickness.

The long-haired one complained of the racket of buzzing insects in his head, which caused the poem’s next stanza to stop dead in its tracks. On the day black clouds were gathering, the old man encountered him in a furious state, eyes bloodshot, tearing out his own hair and beard.

The old man set the fiddle strings. He moved his nimble fingers while chanting the story of a crazy young man. An eternity passed: only then did the long-haired one unwind from the fury.

“Old Man, if I finish my poem, you must promise that you’ll adapt it to Lanna verse.”

“It won’t be too sad, I hope.”

“It won’t be,” replied the long-haired one.

A booming, thrashing sound called the old man to turn and look up at the gloomy gray sky. In a blink, a strong wind rose and blew the black clouds away. The old man looked through the window to a vanishing point in the distance. Apart from the sun-drenched vault of sky, the earth everywhere was drought-cracked. The dry husk of the phayom tree was still standing, bent and stunted.

The old man stood still by the window. He stood by waiting for the poem from the long-haired one. He wasn’t done crafting it.