Missing In Rangoon

The goldfish talked to her from inside the well. The catfish had died. Holding the dead fish in a pot and raising it to a monk in the sky, she looked to the sea. There she saw crocodiles and dragons, and another monk who’d been alive from the time of Buddha. He held a fan and stood watching the horizon. A group of yogis walked down the road to the temple. She dreamt of a dragon goddess in lace, her hands in a wai, and on her head was an entangled mass of green snails.

She shared her dream with her daughter and sister over morning tea. She decided to save money to contribute toward paint for the new stupa. And she fasted and prayed, working the prayer beads as she chanted. She donated money for the prayers so that merit would be sent to her father. She lighted candles in front of his photograph. Three days a week she ate no meat.

The next night, she dreamt of a nat who’d been in the room beside the garage, next to the window in the back. The nat wore lots of jewelry. The spirit was a man around forty years old, but she couldn’t see his face in the shadows. People from the spiritual world waited for her. She gave merit for them, waiting for them to come. For three days she didn’t tell anyone. She was too scared. For three nights she was too afraid to get up at night. On the third day she told her sister. Now they were both frightened. The dragon goddess was her guardian angel, and whenever she was insecure or had a problem, she called her name and asked for help.

She didn’t know the way of replying to someone inside this invisible world. Suffering and in great sorrow, she wandered in a world without form, looking for her father for another three days and not finding him.

She wanted to cleanse her body of meat. She sought purity.

She had a string with 108 beads. No, it was actually 111 beads. Each one as black as pure evil, but when she rotated the beads quickly, she found they turned white like an elephant’s tusks, pure as ivory. She showed the beads to her sister, even though she knew she must be humble and unassuming. It looks like your father’s work, a monk said. The sister’s son, Yadanar Khin, smoked a cigarette at the piano. She heard the music rise but she couldn’t smell the smoke. The sister’s husband in his general’s uniform stood with the remote pointed at the TV, watching a pirated tape of a reality show.

The sister watched as her father stared at her husband in front of the TV. Her marriage to a soldier had been a huge disappointment. He had left the bookstore to Mya’s mother. A statement affixed to the will had said, “Your husband will find you many buildings. The bookstore and house are to belong to your sister.” But when the troubles came in 1988, the deed was signed over. It had been a victory for her. The father had come to tell her the trouble was long past. She must return the property.

Mya’s mother had also seen their father in her dream. He’d told her that the blood of the Buddha family will co

me together, not in this life, but in the bloodline carried by the nats. People will gather around and form a community. They would never go to hell. They would be spared the fate of mortals eaten by worms. Instead they’d live in nirvana.

The sister collected eight leaves from the grounds of the Shwedagon Pagoda. They were best collected on a Saturday. As her father instructed in the dream, she then put them under the mattress and slept over them every night. One day she called Mya’s mother for the first time in many years. It was at six o’clock, to say she must see her immediately. On the way to her house, her driver, an Indian, hit a crazy monk who wandered into the road. She left the car and phoned her son Yadanar, who came in a sports car and took her to see Mya’s mother. They discussed the meaning of the dream. They phoned a monk and asked for advice. That night the sister placed fresh leaves under the mattress. The next morning she found two dead cockroaches there.

The house was broom clean, spotless. There was no way the insects could have crawled into the bedroom from the garden. They must have hidden in the leaves placed under the mattress. On a Thursday a monk came to her house and asked her, “Are you okay?” He knew that she wasn’t. That was why he had come.

She told him about the dream, her sister’s dream and the accident. The monk said that he had stopped them from being hurt in the accident. He’d had a vision as it happened and intervened. And he told her that we must all die; even the Buddha had to die. Before we die, though, we must be useful to people who are lost. He also said that the father had sent a message about unfinished business with a sister and that the elder sister would know what was intended by that message. Mya’s mother had kept faith all of these years that her elder sister would tell her when she received the sign.

The morning her sister arrived with Yadanar, Mya’s mother knew that her sister would bring the title deed. Yadanar waited until the two sisters were deep into discussions about the dreams, and then he gestured for Mya to meet him in the garden. It was in the garden that Yadanar said he had a plan to tour with his band and wanted her to join as a singer. He pressed her, saying the house deed could easily be reclaimed. His father had the power to do anything. She should know that. She asked if he could fix a problem her boyfriend was having. Naturally, Yadanar asked what kind of problem, and she told him about how Somchai had come around to the club in Bangkok. He always came with three or four friends, and they had got to know each other. It turned out he was doing business in Rangoon and wanted to let Rob in on a good opportunity to make money.

“I was having problems raising money for my brother,” Mya explained to Calvino. “Rob went to his father. The bastard wouldn’t help even though he was filthy rich. Rob said he’d help out Somchai. Only it turned out, Somchai didn’t want Rob for bringing back a few pills. He wanted him making a couple of regular runs each month. Rob thought about it and told Somchai he wasn’t interested. Next thing, someone tried to kidnap Rob. I think Somchai wants to kill him.”

“What kind of business was Somchai running?”

“Cold pills. He said there was no problem. ”

“No problem? Then why the need to smuggle them into Thailand?”

“It’s complicated.”

“You’re saying Yadanar found a way out of the mess for Rob?”

She got up from the stool and walked around the counter, stopping in front of Calvino.

“You don’t want to get too far into this. It’s done.”

“What’s done?”

“Yadanar said, ‘If I fix this, you’ll sign an exclusive with me.’ He owns me for a year. Rob kicks free of his problem.”

“Rob isn’t taking it well,” said Calvino. “He asked me to pick up a book about dreams. The one you said you were writing.”

“I’m still working on it,” she said. “Every night there’s more material.”

In Mya’s dream she saw Rob looking out a window at a blank wall and seeing himself with Monkey Nose playing back at the club. No singer, just three guys trying to get through a set with the audience talking and forgetting they were playing.

Calvino left five dollars for the biography on Chekhov and slipped the book in his jacket. It would give Rob something to read and think about until Calvino could get him back to Bangkok.

“Does Rob know that you and Yadanar are cousins?”

“At first he was relieved,” she said. “But it didn’t last.”

Another man might be competition for the affections of a woman, but a man who was part of the family and who wanted much more could never be defeated. Calvino started to understand why Rob had dropped the acid and saw fantastic visions. Psychologically, he’d always been better suited to live in the demimonde of Henry Miller’s world—his father’s world—only to discover he’d been isolated, left struggling inside a Dorian Gray underworld, chased by murderers.