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The Skylark
A Short Story by Chris Muhlenfeld
CHAPTER ONE
I moved to this island to write my first novel, but instead, I’m sitting on the couch in my SpongeBob SquarePants boxers at ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning, watching CNN International and eating dry cereal from the box. I’m scratching my belly, which I’m proud to say has shrunk to an almost imperceptible lump, more of an inflamed liver look than the supersize-extra-value-meal-drive-through look it had when I rolled myself out of the airport last year. CNN has been delivering nonstop, borderline hysterical coverage of the crisis on the Korean peninsula for days now. It feels like it’s been weeks.
The past year had been an endless stream of good news coming from Korea. It was all peace and love; de-escalation, denuclearization, reunification, pacification, and normalization. There’s been so much news and frenetic activity around the nascent peace between the two Koreas that the networks started to ignore it.
Then, as the emerging peace exploded and unraveled one tweet and one diplomatic misstep at a time, it was like watching the grand finale of a Fourth of July fireworks display running in slow motion in ultra-high definition.
My wife’s at work on the other side of the island, God bless her. I try not to think about this as I throw my head back and toss another handful of Banoffee Crunch Monster into my mouth. Breakfast of champions in this strange land, I reckon.
The TV flashes a bright, epileptic splash screen: “BREAKING NEWS,” and the monstrosity soars across my TV with a dramatic swooshing sound. When it finishes its acrobatics performance, the graphic settles into a corner where it spins and flashes with annoying urgency. There’s a woman on the TV now—a CNN anchor with Icelandic features, reporting from Seoul, talking about an evacuation of the greater Seoul metropolitan area. That gets me sitting bolt upright on the couch, my heart rate spiking so suddenly that I can actually hear it. I’ve spilled cereal all over myself and the couch.
CNN shows a Seoul that I’ve never seen before: a Seoul in absolute chaos. They roll drone footage of gridlocked streets, panicked crowds surging along packed sidewalks lined with shattered windows. The sound of the crowd rumbles beneath the anchor’s narration like a runaway train barreling out of humanity’s worst collective nightmare.
I grab my phone and walk to the front sliding door, speed-dialing my wife. She doesn’t answer. I open the messaging app and type, There’s an emergency. I think we should prepare. Get supplies. Maybe a gun.
She doesn’t respond, and the app doesn’t show that she’s read the message. I’m staring at the TV again, the camera showing more gridlocked streets in Seoul. Lines of people leaving the city on foot. What in the fuck could cause them to try to evacuate a city of ten million people? Is it even possible to evacuate that many people? Seems unlikely. At least not without a significant number of injuries. Fatalities, even. Looting. Murder. Chaos.
My phone chimes; it’s my wife, Noi. She tells me to calm down, that everything will be fine. Don’t worry. She says she’ll be home from work tonight. After she hangs up, I stare at the phone. No, I don’t think so. Not if they’re evacuating Seoul. Something terrible is about to happen, and we need to get ready. This could be the beginning of the end, right? That’s what CNN is saying. Then again, that’s the same thing CNN says when there’s a celebrity breakup. Sky’s falling, folks! Again. The apocalypse is the ultimate ratings generator.
If that rusty old wire does finally give way, and the red balloon does go up, at least Thailand wouldn’t be on anyone’s list of targets. We definitely won’t get nuked, but…if this thing escalates into a global confrontation…if Russia and America start playing nuclear grab-ass with their massive arsenals, things could quickly get out of hand. All it takes is one side shoving the other just a little too hard. One miscalculation. One misinterpretation of the other’s posturing.
We should be preparing. I wish we lived closer to her family. Well, fuck it. At least we don’t have any kids yet. Thank God for small mercies. Now I’m cursing myself for not getting a second car. Fucking moped. There’s no way I can outfit us for the apocalypse on a goddamn moped. Who do I know with a truck? Nobody. Damn it.
Turning away from the chaos on CNN, I open the GrabTaxi app on my phone and summon a minivan to take me to the big warehouse store. How bad is it going to be out there right now? Will the store be overrun with panic buyers? Am I planning on panic buying? No. No, I don’t think so. There’s never been a better reason to panic than what CNN is shooting out to the whole world right now.
My phone chimes: the van will be here in ten minutes. Good. It’s an expensive indulgence, but I’ll consider it a blessing if I’m here to pay the credit card charge. The reporter on CNN is talking about the sound of explosions now. The fear in her voice and on her face is unnerving, and it’s apparent that she suddenly wishes she hadn’t taken this assignment.
“My lord! Look at that!” she says, pointing to somewhere behind the camera.
CHAPTER TWO
The camera spins around to catch an orange and red fireball blooming from the side of a disintegrating glass highrise. The entire side of the building slouches off in slow motion and comes to a lazy repose in a pile of twisted rubble. Onyx-black smoke erupts from the mess, and fingers of orange flames appear and disappear like lightning in the smoke. It’s taking on a surreal quality, an otherworldly glow. It’s so real, it looks fake. Could it be fake? Is that possible? My mind is racing.
The Nordic anchor lady is saying, “Seoul is under some sort of attack. It seems to be conventional artillery, Morgan. The crowds are fleeing the streets and seeking shelter inside the buildings. We’re going to continue our broadcast from this location for as long as we can. We may have to seek shelter soon though. The…ah…”
She turns and looks behind her, then back to the camera. “The frequency of the explosions is increasing now. I don’t know if you can hear this in the studio, Morgan. There are—”
The TV lights up all white, like an overexposed negative, and the screen cuts back to a confused-looking CNN anchor at a desk, staring at the camera and holding a finger against his ear-piece.
“We, ah…seem to have lost Diana in Seoul. We’re working to restore our satellite link. We’ll now take you to Jason Resnick, reporting from the press room at the Pentagon.”
I hear a car honk outside and my phone chimes. The minivan. Jesus Christ. Okay. Whatever the fuck just happened on the TV, it’s only made me more anxious to get ready. Was that a nuke? It couldn’t have been a nuke, could it? The camera cuts to another reporter in a suit standing in front of an empty podium with the Pentagon logo on the wall behind it. Reassuring royal blue curtains hang behind the logo. The scene projects order, strength, and continuity.
The reporter says, “Yes, thank you, ah, Morgan. We’re here at the Pentagon, where a press conference was scheduled to start,” he glances at his watch, “thirty seconds ago, but nobody has appeared to deliver that briefing yet. We’re just standing here waiting, and the information that we’re getting is spotty. I can tell you that multiple anonymous sources have confirmed that hostilities have erupted between North and South Korea.”
I’m squinting at the TV. It feels like the house is sitting on a gigantic turntable, and has just started slowly rotating. Another honk comes from outside, longer this time. An irritated, hey-buddy-I-ain’t-got-all-day kind of honk. I look outside; a minivan idles in front of the house. I grab my phone and keys, leave the TV on and lock the door as I leave.
CHAPTER THREE
I jump into the passenger seat of the van. The driver wears a broad, warm smile. He’s got a grip of Buddhist amulets hanging from his rearview mirror. The dashboard is a thick forest of little monk statues and Buddha figurines. The van reeks of lemongrass and cigarette smoke.
The driver gives me a quick wai and says, “Where go, boss?”
I squint at him. “Makro. Fast. Go fast, and I’ll give you a big tip.”
He nods and jerks the van into first gear. We lurch forward with a jolt that sends his dangling menagerie of Buddhas and monks jingling and swinging.
He’s listening to Thai country music, all cowbell and electric guitar. Crooning men blathering wistful words about the women who stole their hearts. I should have known better than to tell him to go fast. He’s literally squealing the tires around turns, passing cars as we go around blind corners, narrowly missing tentative pedestrians. Sometimes, it seems like he’s aiming for them.
I want to ask him what Buddha would think of his driving, but instead, I say, “Please slow down!”
He shoots me a curious glance. “You want go fast? You want go slow?”
“Yeah, look, just not too fast, okay? Safety. Drive fast but safe. No need drive dangerous, okay?”
He gives me a look that I’ve seen a million times before from a million Thais, but he does slow a bit. Then I ask him to turn down the music. He does, but slowly. Reluctantly. He doesn’t turn it down much.
“You know what happen? War? Kollea?” I ask him, my Thenglish automatically taking over, the words coming from the reptilian part of my brain. It’s a reflex. I can’t help it anymore.
He glances at me. “Americans allway war. Allway. Bua. Boring. No worry. We in Muang Thai, war not come here. Muang Thai never occupied. Never colonized.”
I’m staring at him, my mouth dropping down a little bit. I’m not sure how to respond to that.
Outside the minivan, it’s just another beautiful day in the neighborhood. Cars drive with their usual degree of recklessness; people cross the road, frogger style. Nobody is running. Nobody is screaming. There’s no mad rush to storm the markets. It just looks like a typical day in Phuket, and I’m baffled. The missiles could be in the air already, dark seedpods racing into outer space to rain down nuclear winter and freeze all the goodness and light from the world in explosions of stupidity over targets on the other side of the planet.
I get out my phone and bring up one of the pirated CNN video streams. I turn it up all the way, but I can’t hear it over the cowbell and electric guitar. I make out two words of the song: jai dam. Black heart. Yeah, I’m thinking. Jai dam is fucking right.
“Look, I can not hear news. Please music off! This im-por-tant! My family maybe trouble back home.”
He gives me a much more apologetic look this time and turns the music off.
“Thanks,” I say.
“You family Kollea?”
“America,” I say.
The CNN feed on my phone is choppy and pixelated. They’re definitely broadcasting video taken by a cell phone. The crawler at the bottom of the screen says it’s live from a reporter named George Sinclair who is twenty-five kilometers northwest of Seoul. The video is wobbly, the hand holding it obviously shaking badly. Still, I can make out flames in the distance. Not flames. It’s more of a glow. There’s a bright red glow on the horizon, and the reporter is saying, “Again, that is Seoul that I’m showing you right now. I don’t know if you can see it, but conventional artillery is streaking across the sky and arcing up and down the entire border in both directions. It’s an astonishing and terrible sight.”
The voice sounds broken. Ashamed, almost.
It’s really happening. Is this really happening? Is this possible? Can they stop it now that it’s started? I don’t think so.
“Khun,” the driver says.
I look up at him, and we’re stopped.
“Oh. We’re here?”
“Kap. You want me wait? One hunled baht I wait for you.”
“You come inside with me. Help me shop? I pay you.”
He looks at me quizzically. “You pay me shop?”
“Yes, I pay you five hundred baht help me shop.”
His eyebrows go up, and a big grin spreads across his face. “Okay, boss! My name Somchai. What you name?” He gives me a very convincing military salute.
Five hundred baht is probably what the ride here and back home would have cost me. At this point, I’d give him ten thousand baht if he asked for it.
The Makro’s parking lot, just like the rest of Phuket, is business as usual. Everything is perfectly normal. The place is much less crowded than it is in the early evening when I’m usually here with my wife.
I grab a cart and Somchai starts walking next to me.
I say, “No. You get a cart too.”
He gives me a deer in the headlights look. I point at my cart, then at him, then at the rack of carts. His eyes light up, he smiles, nods, then jogs over to grab a cart.
My phone is still streaming the pirated CNN feed. They’re showing clips of Incheon International Airport in flames now, clearly visible even in the shaky video they’re playing. Jesus. I start shoveling pounds of canned tuna into the cart as fast as I can. Mercury poisoning, I figure, is going to be the least of our health concerns a few weeks or months from now.
I’ve got half a cart of tuna before I move on to other canned goods. I’ve sent Somchai down another aisle to gather all the dried goods that he can. Huge, twenty-kilo bags of rice. Pasta. Powdered milk. Instant coffee. I’m loading a bundle of shrink-wrapped cans of peas into my cart when I hear the reporter on CNN saying, “Dear God!”
The awe in his voice pulls my eyes to the phone resting in the kid’s seat of my cart.
CHAPTER FOUR
The camera is zooming in on the unmistakable bloom of a mushroom cloud. It’s out of focus at first, a badly pixelated red blob. Then the stream’s quality inexplicably leaps up to high definition, and it’s a shit-your-pants-worthy sight to behold. The first mushroom cloud that the planet has seen since the test ban treaty was ratified in the nineteen-sixties. All those arms reduction treaties and detente were for nothing, as worthless as ashes in the wind.
The mushroom cloud grows, but not as big as I expect it to. I’m utterly transfixed, the case of canned peas in my arms suddenly weightless. I realize that I’m cradling it the way I would an infant and snap back into reality, tossing the peas into the cart.
The reporter says, “It’s almost surely a nuclear weapon, and it seems to be directly over downtown Seoul. We don’t know how many more of these the North Koreans might have, but we have to assume that they have more. It must have been fired from an artillery cannon because we haven’t seen any aircraft in the sky since all air traffic over South Korea was grounded hours ago. There’s a lot of speculation on the ground here that the North Koreans are holding back their air force until their airspace is invaded.
“Wait. I hear something. It’s a rumbling sound, and I’m not sure…”
The camera swings around to the south and pans across the sky, shaking badly.
“I can see the outlines of a huge fleet of airplanes against the full moon. They’re flying without any lights on, coming from the south, heading north toward the border. This is surely the South Korean and American forces launching a retaliatory strike. It’s too dark to see how many there are, but from the rumbling, my first guess would be that it’s hundreds of aircraft, Peter.”
The camera swings back to the mushroom cloud on the horizon, which has faded to a dull glow that’s being out-shined by the brightness of the ground beneath it. A firestorm must have erupted; the speed that it’s growing makes me hold my breath. Ten million people in Seoul and the backs of my eyeballs are stinging. A second case of peas tumbles from my arms and clatters to the gray linoleum. The noise sounds far away.
The cans are dented, and I’m staring at them, feeling stupid. Dented cans. They’re dented. What does it mean? I shake my head, pulling myself back into reality yet again. My heart is really pounding now. I close the video feed and redial my wife. She doesn’t answer.
I send her a message: The North Koreans just nuked Seoul. Come home NOW!
She doesn’t reply, and again the messaging app doesn’t show that she’s read it. I call her yet again, but she doesn’t answer. Did she forget her phone somewhere? I hang up and call one more time, pushing my nearly full cart down the aisle, grabbing cases of canned food as I go, holding the phone between my ear and my shoulder. Carrots. Green beans. Corn. Mixed vegetables. Peaches. Peas.
At the end of the aisle, Somchai meets me. He’s smiling and nodding at his cart, clearly proud of himself.
“Yes, good. Let’s go pay. We come back again. Another trip, okay?”
Somchai frowns and shakes his head. “Cannot, boss. Another call. Must go.”
My heart lurches. “No! I can pay you. One thousand baht. Okay?”
His eyebrows arch comically in what I take to be a well-rehearsed expression. My brain invents footage of him practicing his facial expressions in front of a mirror. Now surprised. Now angry. Now scared. I notice that he very nearly has a unibrow, an uncommon feature for an Asian.
He nods vigorously. “Kap, kap. Okay, boss!” He takes out his phone and calls someone as we wheel our carts toward the registers. It’s a lot more work pushing them with all the extra weight. The back right wheel of my cart isn’t spinning, making it even more of a chore.
We make three more trips through the Makro, loading his minivan with food. It will have to be enough. On CNN, grainy cell phone video of the air battle is looping beneath the frantic voice of the unnamed journo who’s narrating. The anonymous voice of the apocalypse, loud and clear. On my phone, the sky is ablaze with bursts of anti-aircraft shells, though it’s not clear if they’re trying to shoot down North Korean or South Korean airplanes. Do the North Koreans even have an air force? They must, right? I never had any reason to wonder before today.
As Somchai drives us home, I can’t believe that none of the Thais seem to be the least bit bothered by what’s happening in Korea. Do they not know? How could that even be possible? How are they not panicking? Do they not understand how interconnected the world has become? How dangerous fallout is? That this thing could quickly escalate into World War Three?
China isn’t going to stand for an American takeover of the entire Korean peninsula. Neither will Russia. It’s not a matter of preference. It’s unlikely that they’ll be very polite about making that fact known, either. Hopefully back channels are already open and cooler heads are trying to de-escalate this thing.
Just another day in paradise: people drive with their customary lack of civility, disregarding any traffic laws they find inconvenient. Back in the USA, you’d quickly be arrested if you tried driving like this. In Thailand, it’s unsafe to drive any other way. I don’t say anything to Somchai about nuclear war because I don’t want him to panic and bail on me, stealing our food. It could happen. I’ve been incredibly lucky so far, so I don’t want to push it.
We pass a building supply place—a little mom-and-pop one. It has big plastic rain collection barrels stacked out front. I tell Somchai to pull in. I quickly buy three of the medium-sized barrels—anything bigger wouldn’t have fit into the van.
“Why you want this?” Somchai asks, sounding amused.
“I think the water is going to stop working soon. Need to collect rainwater.”
He laughs and shakes his head, giving me another of those ‘you-crazy-foreigner’ glances. The look jars me, and then I curse inwardly. Rainwater will be radioactive. Poison. That’s not going to work. Hopefully, I can at least fill them with the garden hose before the water goes.
On CNN, the guy on the roof of that hotel is still frantically running from one side of the roof to the other, showing grainy, shaky video of the growing firestorm that until very recently had been a city called Seoul. The camera pans over to where the airport was, and the island is just one long string of explosions. Must be the jet fuel storage tanks, the reporter is saying. One fireball after another. Nobody could have survived. I was just there a couple months ago. Best airport in the world.
Across the border in North Korea, the American and South Korean joint strike forces should have reached their targets by now. No news in that department. No news about escalations, just the horrors CNN is broadcasting.
It hasn’t gone global yet, and that’s at least one thing I can be grateful for. CNN cuts back to the studio where they’ve assembled a full checkerboard of talking heads who are passionately discussing the escalating situation.
I look over at Somchai. “You know where I can get gun?”
He gives me a devious grin and turns his index finger and thumb into the universal symbol for a pistol, then points it at me and shoots. “Bang bang! Foreigners no can. Illegal. Foreigner have gun, foreigner go jail.”
I roll my eyes. “Yeah, yeah. I know. But do you know where I could buy one? I know they’re not hard to get.”
He gives me a long look, probably appraising whether it would be more profitable to take a commission for hooking me up or to take whatever reward the police would give him for turning me in after I had the gun. Probably both.
He’s still staring at me, and I’m about to tell him to watch the road when there’s an explosion. The world spins out of control. My neck snaps to the side, a sharp pain races from my neck all the way down to my big toe, and the world is just spinning and blurring. I’ve got that nauseating carnival ride perspective, and I’m wondering if my neck is broken.
The sound of screeching tires, shattering glass, scraping metal. Spinning. Still spinning. Then a crash and we come to a sudden, violent stop. My neck snaps to the right this time, and another pain shoots down to my other big toe. Great.
CHAPTER FIVE
The world’s stopped spinning. Blackness. Am I blind? No. I’ve closed my eyes without realizing it. I open them, and I’m staring at oncoming traffic. Cars are skidding to a stop in front of us.
Somchai is slouched to the left, his head hanging out of the driver’s side window. The glass in all of the windows is gone. The heat of the day has replaced the frigid air conditioning.
He isn’t moving.
“Somchai?” I’m surprised by how gravelly my voice sounds, like I just swallowed a handful of deep-fried grasshoppers.
I clear my throat and try again, shouting this time. Somchai still isn’t moving. I need to get up to help him. I test my neck, carefully moving it from left to right. There’s pain, terrible pain, but I can move it. It feels mostly like torn muscles and ligaments, hopefully not anything too serious. I look down at my body, and despite being covered in little chunks of safety glass that makes me think of New Year’s Eve, I look relatively unscathed. A few cuts are bleeding, but they seem superficial.
My skin is coated in white powder. Ash? Fallout already? Can I feel my toes? I think so. I wiggle them and am awash with relief when I see them move. I’ve somehow lost both of my flip-flops; my feet are bare. I look around, but I don’t see the shoes anywhere. How the hell did that happen? There’s a terrible burning smell, but it only takes me a second to figure out that this is from the airbag that punched me in the face. My nose is bleeding.
I reach down and unbuckle my seatbelt, but it doesn’t retract. I toss it aside and crawl over to Somchai. I try to find his pulse, but I can’t. Jesus. What do I do? My phone. I need my phone.
A crowd’s gathered around the van now. People are gawking, staring, and chattering in low, excited voices. I don’t know how to perform CPR.
I start shouting, “Help! Help! Puan pom jeb! My friend hurt bad! Need help! Maw! Payaban! Nurse! Doctor! Help! Choy Duey!”
A man rushes over to the driver’s side door and looks in. “You are hurt?”
“My friend. I can’t find his pulse.”
The man yanks the driver’s side door open, and it comes away easily, like the top of a tin can after it’s been run through an electric opener. Somchai’s head lolls to one side, then flops forward. There’s a lot of blood. The man pulls at him, but his seatbelt keeps him in place. I release the seatbelt and Somchai tumbles into the man’s arms. He lays him on the baking street and checks for a pulse. Checks for breathing. Then he begins chest compressions, counting in Thai. Nung, song, some, see…
I scramble back over to the passenger side. My side of the van has slammed into a concrete barrier and I can’t open the door. I waddle into the back, shoving aside the big rubber water barrels so I can get to the sliding side door. It won’t budge, so I pull myself out through the shattered window. A few of the chattering rubberneckers help me out. They’re all taking turns touching me, and I don’t know why. A bunch of them are holding phones aimed at me. I pretend they’re magical medical devices that are healing my injuries, so I don’t lose my cool and start smashing phones.
The social media feed is the new temple of self. Knowing that every platform is about to be permanently zeroed out isn’t bothering me. The way they keep touching me like I’m some lucky statue, on the other hand, is starting to freak me out.
I reach into my pocket, but my phone’s not there. Shit. I’ve got no shoes. I can’t be without my phone. I need to call Noi and have her come pick me up. I don’t even know if the world still exists out there beyond Thailand. I grab a woman who’s staring at me and say, “The news? The war? What’s happening?”
Her eyes go wide. “Nowl Engrish. Mai dai ka. Mai kaw jai ka!”
I let her go and start searching the ground for my phone. Nowhere. I shove my way through the useless crowd of looky-loos and shout, “Cannot find iPhone. Lost! Help! Choy duey!”
I walk around the van. When I try to bend over to look under it, it feels like someone’s taking a miniature two-stroke chainsaw to my kidneys. I’m thinking this is probably not a good sign. The pavement scorches the soles of my feet, and I jump into the shadow of the minivan.
Once my feet have stopped melting, I climb up on the concrete barrier that we hit and look in the passenger side. No phone there, either. There’s another van across the street that’s been severely smashed up. I hadn’t noticed it before. It’s even in worse shape than ours. It must have hit us in the ass and sent us spinning, but unlike our trajectory that had us sideswipe this concrete barrier, theirs slammed them into another barrier, head-on.
From the looks of it, the van was packed with Chinese tourists on their way to see a ladyboy cabaret, or maybe a SCUBA trip to take selfies while sitting on endangered coral and accidentally killing the protected coral fish by feeding them food they cannot digest. Bleaching entire ecosystems to add a splash of color to their Weibo profiles.
A woman was ejected through the windshield; she’s sprawled out on the ground. She’s wearing a flowing, ankle-length pink sundress that’s tangled up around her. One of her legs is bent behind her at an obscene kama-sutra angle, and a wide-brimmed straw sun hat, covered in blood, lays a couple meters away from her.
Someone’s covered her upper body with a denim jacket sporting huge, faux needlepoint sans-serif rainbow type that says, “CRAP YOUR HANDS!” Beneath that, and in smaller script, it says, “Wishful Noise Makes Laughing.” I curse myself for thinking, “She’s crapping her hands in the big minivan in the sky now.” I say a little prayer for the dead Chinese lady. A pool of bright red blood spreads out beneath her. I notice partial footsteps in blood tracking away from her and wonder how that happened.
I’m still searching for my phone when a thin, feminine-looking teenage boy runs up to me and says, “Khun!”
Wait—is this a boy or a girl? Doesn’t matter. He’s holding his arms out with his hands pressed together into a little bowl. My phone is resting in the middle like he’s making some sort of weird offering. I grab it and pull him in for a big bear hug. He resists. I ignore this and squeeze him. “Kab kun kap,” I tell him. As I’m hugging him, I realize that it’s actually a she. Oops. I let her go and blush, then look down at my phone.
There’s a big, ugly crack running diagonally across the screen, but to my total amazement, it’s still streaming CNN. American engineering, baby. They’re back to the rooftop reporter who’s just showing the same scenes of spreading flames. He’s rambling about firestorms. He sounds like some sort of weapons expert. He’s talking about conventional ordnance. Not weapons, but ordnance. I’m wondering what the difference is.
The guy on CNN looks like he’s about to lose his mind. He’s somehow ended up with front row seats for the apocalypse, and that’s just not how he had imagined he’d be spending his day when he was having his his eggs Benedict and maybe a skinny chai latte this morning.
He’s saying there is no doubt that nuclear weapons have been deployed by the North Koreans.
My phone rings as I’m staring at it. Noi’s name and a cute picture of her sticking out her tongue at me pops up on the phone’s cracked display. The crack gives her an oddly injured look, but I’m beyond relieved to see her name. “Thank God, Noi! I need help! Can you come now, please!”
“I can’t leave work. You know that. What’s going on?”
“I’ve just been in a very bad accident, and I need you to come get me.”
Her voice leaps several octaves. “What? On the motorbike? You were wearing your helmet, right?”
“No, no. I wasn’t on the bike. I was in a minivan. It’s bad. My back hurts, and I’m a little scratched up.” My neck is really sore. I look down at my body like I’m expecting to find a numbered list of my injuries there. “I’m okay, but I don’t know if the driver…”
I glance over at Somchai. The man who was giving him CPR has given up. Someone’s draped what looks like a beige Member’s Only jacket over his head and upper body. I’m briefly lost in wonder at all the jackets, then remember that they wear them as protection from the sun, so their skin doesn’t get any darker. They think we’re equally absurd for things like tanning beds and “sunbathing.”
I’m pulled back from my reverie by the sound of ambulances whee-whooing towards us from both directions.
Too late, too late.
CHAPTER SIX
“Are you hurt?” Noi asks.
I can’t look away from Somchai’s lifeless body. How had he died? He was wearing his seatbelt. The airbags had deployed. I’m not understanding.
Noi raises her voice to nearly a shout. “Steven! Are you hurt? Are you okay? Where are you?”
I can tell from her breathing that she’s jumped up from her desk. Maybe she’s already making her way to the parking lot. Good, good.
“I’m not hurt too bad. Just a little bit. I don’t think I even need a doctor. I can move. There’s some pain, and my nose is bleeding from the airbag, but I think I’m okay. The driver…Somchai. He’s dead?” Silence. I pull the phone away, glancing at the screen to confirm the call is still connected. It is. I put it back to my ear and say, “I’m at the intersection of Thepkasatree and Bypass Road. Can you come right now? I need you to help me bring all these supplies home.”
“What? What supplies? Are you sure you’re okay? Why are you in a minivan?”
People are milling around the accident site. There are ambulances, but no police yet. Weird. Well, maybe not so weird for Thailand. The medics are busy with more serious injuries, and aside from a few cursory glances, they leave me alone.
Once I convince Noi that I’m okay, her first question is how much I spent at Makro. I spent more than both of us combined earn in three months. She starts giving me a lecture before she realizes what she’s doing, then stops herself. I could have just died, I can hear her thinking. The money that I just spent doesn’t matter. She doesn’t understand the severity of the sudden tectonic shift in the geopolitical landscape. She tells me she loves me, and that she’ll see me in a few minutes. We disconnect.
She’s on her way, and I’m sitting in the shade of the shattered van. The paramedics are talking to me now in broken English. The police have finally arrived. The paramedics clean up my bloody nose and put some betadine and band-aids on the scratches on my arms and legs. They tell me I should go to the hospital for an exam. I smile and thank them but tell them I can’t. They’ll take me in the ambulance, no problem. Not expensive. No, really, I tell them. Thanks, but no thanks.
These people. How are they not absolutely freaking the fuck out? I’m suddenly overcome by a wave of panic and dread. Why hasn’t CNN said anything about the USA? What’s happening there? Is it chaos? Are people looting and rioting? That’s what always happens in the movies, isn’t it? The war starts and people lose their minds. No. No, that’s not right. The psychotic panic starts once the missiles have been launched and the air raid sirens start their swan song.
There’s no breeze, and it’s stifling even in the shade today. I can feel the heat coming off the pavement in waves. I shiver despite it. The sky is beautiful and blue, with big, fat, white clouds strolling by in an endless parade of beach-day advertisements.
I pick up the phone again and call my mom, waking her. She hasn’t heard about the war yet. It’s after midnight there, and she’s very groggy. I’m telling her to get the whole family together and try to gather supplies. Try to prepare. Get food, rolls of polyurethane, duct tape, iodine tablets. Do whatever you can. Things don’t look good. I make a few more calls to family and friends back in the States before my battery finally gives out. No, no, no! All the video streaming must have killed it. Why didn’t I bring an extra battery? Shit!
Maybe I could plug it into the van’s cigarette lighter. Would that be disrespectful? It might be. I see my wife pull up on the opposite side of the cement barrier and park. Traffic crawls past like the wreck is an irresistible magnet that they cannot escape. Corpses. Blood on the pavement. Social media fodder. Likes.
Thai eyes cannot resist, regardless of how minor or grave an accident may be. They must slow to a crawl and stare, ideally taking at least twenty pictures as they drift past. Noi is yelling at me across the idling engines and exhaust fumes. Well, fuck. There’s no way we can load up the car from over there. We’d have to carry all this shit through two lanes of traffic.
I wave at her and shout, “Can you bring the car closer? There’s a lot of stuff to load.”
She throws her arms up in the air and shakes her head. I shouldn’t have made it a question. I’m being too polite.
I shout, “Make a U-turn and come back. Tell the police that your husband was in the accident and that you need to get to him.”
She considers this for a moment, then gives me a single, resolute nod. She jumps back into the car and creeps forward, forcing the other drivers to make way for her or get bumped. There are a few short honks of protest, but she’s not having it. That’s my girl.
The police come by and give me the third degree. The one who apparently has the best English skills, he’s got a mustache and keeps asking me the same questions over and over, almost like he thinks my answers will change. I assume it’s because I’m a foreigner. I wasn’t driving, and the other driver was obviously responsible for the wreck. Any idiot could see that, but they still want my identification and my story. I’m sure they check the status of my visa as well, groping wildly for a pretense to shake me down.
I can see our car now, creeping down the single lane that the police have traffic funneled into. They’re taking measurements, and insurance agents are crawling through the wreckage now, like insects. The corpses have been loaded up and taken away; I’m not sure how I missed that happening. Captain Mustache must have been interrogating me.
Noi creeps through the traffic and finally pulls up alongside the shattered van. I smile at her. She smiles back, but she looks terrified. She jumps out of the car and runs over to embrace me in a near-death hug. I feel a jolt of pain in the lower right-hand quadrant of my back. “Ouch! Careful!”
She backs off and frowns at me. “Sorry. I’m so sorry. Let’s go home, okay? We’ll go to the hospital first. Don’t you think? You should see a doctor.”
“Let’s get our stuff first.”
Loading the car takes longer than it should. Noi is clearly irritated with me for spending so much money, and I keep telling her that she’ll be glad I did later. That if this thing keeps escalating, it could turn into a global war. A world war. She has a better idea of what that means than most Thais, I know, because she’s lived in the U.S., she’s lived with me, we’ve spent time in Europe, and I’ve given her oral history lessons throughout our marriage, much to her irritation.
Lots of these cans are dented now, tossed around in the minivan like popcorn when it slammed into the embankment. If we end up needing this food, we’re not going to give a shit that it’s got a dent in it. I wander over to ask the police if I can have my passport back. When the officer sees Noi with me, he ignores me completely and speaks to her in Thai for a few minutes. Then he turns to me, smiles, and hands me my passport. “Have a nice day. You were very lucky today, sir.”
I nod politely and slip my passport into my hip pocket.
In the car, Noi peppers me with questions. She’s got the radio tuned to one of the few English language stations in Phuket. The DJ is talking about Korea, about Seoul, about how his heart and prayers are with the people suffering through the war right now. He’s Canadian, and I think my wife has a crush on him, even though neither one of us know what he looks like. He’s talking about changing his social media profile picture to a South Korean flag in solidarity.
She’s driving since I’m all smashed up. Sitting in the car, I’m starting to realize that my neck is very badly sprained. Is that what you call it? A sprained neck? Pulled muscle? I have no idea, but it’s starting to hurt like a motherfucker. It’s getting worse.
Noi sees me grimace when I turn to face her and says, “I’m taking you to the hospital.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“No!” I shout. “We have more to do. We have to get ready, babe. If this thing gets any bigger, there won’t be any food or water. This might be the Land of Smiles, but if there’s nothing to eat and people are starving, I promise you that all these smiley, happy little Thais are going to start sharpening their knives and roaming the streets in search of calories. We’ve gotta be ready.”
She gives me a hard look, then immediately replaces it with a frown that breaks my heart. She sighs and focuses on her driving. People are still not panicking, and as we pass the big Tesco Lotus hypermarket, it doesn’t look any more crowded than usual. Our little Honda is absolutely packed. We had to put the back seat down, and there’s not a square centimeter of space left back there. I’ve got a few cases of canned chicken under my bare feet. We had to abandon the water barrels. Maybe I’ll be able to improvise something. We couldn’t fit all the food I’d bought in the car. Noi didn’t want to leave the rest in the van, but in the end, we had no choice.
I’m trying to explain to her what would happen if World War Three were to begin, which seems pretty goddamn likely. I’m no expert, but I grew up during the 1980s, and my subconscious is littered with the flotsam and jetsam of the Cold War. All those made-for-TV movies about nuclear war. Apocalyptic novels. Movies. In my twenties, I went through a phase where I was obsessed with Cold War history, and specifically, the history of nuclear war, the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, and what would likely happen if the balloon ever went up.
The short answer is that it wouldn’t be pretty, no matter where on the planet you were. There’d be nowhere to hide. The consensus among the experts was that none of the books or movies that had been produced about nuclear war had sufficiently delivered the full weight of how bad it would actually be. The really hopeless movies—The Day After from the USA, and Threads from the UK—those movies painted an incredibly bleak picture. It’s hard to imagine how it could be worse.
We’re near the equator, which is probably the worst place to be if you want to avoid heavy fallout. I remember reading that the best place to be in the event of a nuclear war was at high altitudes. Switzerland would probably fare well. When we visited there, I was amazed by the incredible number of bomb shelters built into mountainsides and hills. I heard that the government of Switzerland had shelter capacity for their entire population.
No such luck in Thailand. I think it was something about air currents that would make living near the equator after a nuclear war a dangerous thing, but I’m not sure. Since Noi started driving, I’ve been expanding a mental to-do list that’s beginning to sprawl, and I really need to dump it onto paper before it starts leaking out of my short-term memory.
We’re finally home and start frantically unloading the car, tossing everything into the living room. We can sort it out later, I tell Noi. Just get it all unloaded as quickly as we can.
Could I be wrong about this? Am I being irrational? Jesus Christ! No! They’ve fucking nuked Seoul! There’s a hot war between the U.S. and North Korea. There’s a zero percent chance that China will just roll over and allow the Korean Peninsula to become a unified democracy, like a cancer on their collective belly. It would be an existential threat. They’ve said as much.
“What can we do?” Noi asks, sounding a little scared now.
Good. I’ve finally gotten her attention.
“We need to go back and get more supplies. We need more food. And water. Lots of water. We need to get more of those barrels. We need to hide all this stuff, and to think about how we’re going to live without electricity. That won’t last if it goes global. Well—it might last a few days. I don’t know. Thailand gets almost all of its electricity from natural gas, and I’m not sure where they import it from, or if they produce domestically, or what. Either way, it won’t last if there’s a world war.”
She squints at me. “Why not?” She’s leaning into the back of the Honda, pulling out another case of powdered milk and handing it to me. She grabs another one, and we walk to the house.
I shake my head. “Look. We might not have much time left. It could happen any minute.” I nod at the TV. CNN anchors are talking frantically, moving their hands a lot. Video of the mushroom cloud erupting over Seoul is playing on an endless loop in the corner. That’s good. Well, not good. But if they’ve still got their circle-jerk of punditry going, then there’s still hope. Isn’t there?
Maybe the president isn’t really tweeting his way into a nuclear war, but that’s what they’re saying is happening on CNN. It would be an entirely appropriate irony that after all it’s suffered through, what finally destroyed our civilization was some insipid Internet app that gave narcissists and megalomaniacs a platform to shout from in droves.
What more appropriate final curtain could there be for such a ridiculous world populated by bipedal, talking apes with obscenely bulging foreheads? I shake my head and let the thought go. By tomorrow, witty navel-gazing will probably be extinct, right along with half of the human population. The thought sobers me, and I snap back into the present.
We start loading the food into our spare room. There’s not much in there besides a single bed. It takes a while, and my arms are sore from carrying all that weight. The pain is nothing compared to the fire in my neck, but I keep that to myself, not wanting to be forced to the hospital. When we finish, Noi sits on the couch, watching the TV. “It’s kind of beautiful, isn’t it? I mean horrible, but there’s a kind of beauty. The colors. Like a flower.”
“Hmm.” But I know what she means.
She looks up at me with tears in her eyes. “Are we going to die?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
I rush over and sit next to her, putting my arm around her. “No. We’re going to fight like hell, baby. That’s what we’re doing here. And if we work really hard, and as fast as we can, I think there’s a good chance that we could survive this thing. Right now, the most important thing that we can do is to get more food and fill up the gas tank. Once we’ve made a few more trips for food, we can try and get gas cans and start filling those up. If we’re really, really lucky, then the whole thing will blow over, and we’ll feel like idiots, and we won’t need to buy any tuna fish for a couple of years.” I glance at the mountain of canned tuna. “Or decades.”
She narrows her eyes at me. “Why do we need petrol?”
I frown. I’ve explained this at least three times already. Is she in denial?
“Because global shipping will break down. Commerce. Banking. Everything we know will stop. Electricity. Food. We won’t be able to get anything. The police will disappear. There won’t be any more government. No soldiers. Nothing.”
She considers this, then looks back at the writhing mushroom cloud on CNN. “Why bother, then? If it will be that bad, why not just give up?”
I wasn’t expecting that, and it takes me a few seconds to come up with an answer.
“Because starving to death or dying of radiation poisoning, or both, would be very slow and painful. There’s no reason to suffer through something like that if we can prepare now and save ourselves.”
She considers this and nods.
The TV announcer says, “The White House has issued a statement stating that they reserve the right to defend South Korea using all means necessary, including tactical and strategic nuclear weapons. The statement condemns North Korea’s attack on its neighbor to the south and enumerates a list of demands on North Korea, the most dramatic of which is an unconditional proclamation of surrender. The North Korean government has not yet responded.
“Shortly after the White House released its statement, China issued a harshly worded warning that any nuclear attack on North Korea will be considered a hostile act against the People’s Republic of China. We’re just…”
I turn my attention back to Noi and run an index finger over her cheek, struck for the millionth time by her incredible beauty. Her black eyes are harboring a new, bottomless sadness that I want to reach in and pull out, but I know I can’t. The best I can do is try and keep her alive and healthy. Shelter her from the unfolding nightmare in whatever capacity I can muster.
I slow my mind and take in as many details of this moment as I can, hoping to preserve it in the formaldehyde of memory. Her beautiful face. Her reddish-black hair. The feel of her soft skin. The way the light filters in through the front door in little rays that land on the white tile floor in random patterns. The sound of birds in the trees outside, happy and oblivious. The feel of the couch under my body. The mild, satisfying soreness in my arms from carrying the groceries. The stiffness and ache of my neck, reminding me that I’m still alive. The feel of the breeze from the air conditioner hitting my skin and evaporating the perspiration. I’m imagining that all these tiny details—that are usually so far in the background that I’m not even conscious of them—are going to be the things that I remember most about today.
Noi leans in and hugs me. I pull her tight, wanting to tell her that it’s all going to be okay, but I need to start tempering my assurances. I don’t want to lie to her. It’s not going to be okay. There’s no way that any of this is going to be okay.
I lean back on the couch and sigh. “We’ve got a lot of work to do. Are you ready?”
She wipes her eyes, sniffles, and gives me a sad, exhausted smile. “Yes. What should we do first?”
We spend the rest of the day running around and buying things on my ever-expanding list. I’ve been paying for as much as possible on a credit card, to conserve cash. Hell—the banks probably won’t exist next week anyway, right? If the missiles fly, cash will probably be worthless too, but for the moment at least, people are still believing in its value. Not me. We’re taking a flamethrower to our life savings, and putting it all on the line. I wish we could get at our retirement accounts.
Back at home, I get my laptop out and try to send a wire transfer from my bank in the States to my Thai bank account. Every time I get to the point where I’m supposed to confirm the transaction with a code they send me via email, the page just hangs and eventually returns an error. Then I have to log back into the bank’s website and start over. I’ve tried calling their customer service number, but I can’t get through. It’s the middle of the night over there, but the call should still get routed to someone in India or wherever. Funny. I’m calling the USA from Thailand, and my call is being routed across the Pacific, then sent back over the Pacific again to somewhere in India.
At least that’s what’s supposed to be happening. I can’t get through to any phone number in the U.S. Every number I call gives me a fast busy signal, and that’s been happening for the past two hours. I’ve tried three different voice-over-IP services and two different calling cards. I’ve tried calling direct from my cell phone, and from Noi’s. I’ve been able to get Thai operators, but their English is terrible, and my Thai is worse. I had Noi try talking to them, but all they could tell her was that they were unable to complete calls to the United States. They couldn’t explain why.
I’m getting worried about my family now; I can’t talk to them anymore. It’s around six in the morning on the East Coast, and CNN is speculating about what’s happening at the emergency session of the United Nations Security Council. The president still hasn’t made any statement. There’s been no word out of South Korea. We don’t even know if their government still exists. CNN’s reporting at this point is delivered with the disclaimer that it’s from multiple unnamed sources, off the record. It all sounds more like rumors than actual news. They’re showing new cell phone videos from South Korea.
Some new guy on CNN is saying that the North Koreans attempted to launch a massive ground invasion of the South, but that they have been devastated by American and South Korean aircraft. CNN is showing an endless reel of cell phone videos showing long swaths of land along the border erupting into explosions and flames. The entire area is scorched to black cinders, but the North Koreans just keep coming. Unrelenting. An ocean of them. It looks like a video game.
CHAPTER NINE
Noi is on the phone with her mom—they’ve been talking every few minutes. I’m getting more and more nervous. Someone should be de-escalating this thing. Pulling back from the edge, but it doesn’t seem to be happening. The talking heads on CNN aren’t helping at all. I can hear Noi crying. I tell her to go through everything we bought and have her parents go out and buy the same list. Right now.
I finally give up on the bank transfer and load the page for Fox News. It won’t open. I try CNN. ABC. CBS. None of them will come up. I finally try Russia Today, and that page loads very slowly. In what must be at least thirty-six point type, it says, “American Arrogance Pushes World to Brink of Global Nuclear War.” That’s about what I expected the Russians to be saying.
I’m half listening to some defense think-tank pundit rambling on the TV about how Mutually Assured Destruction is still the official doctrine of the United States, and that it has ensured for the past eighty-odd years that nobody used atomic weapons, but that now, the calculus of that whole philosophy has changed. He starts talking about something called Nash equilibrium, then the screen goes black.
After a few seconds, it switches over to a title card with a bunch of Thai words on it that I can’t read. I call Noi over, but she ignores me. I put on my “but-it’s-really-important” tone of voice, and call her again.
She glares at me through puffy, tear-filled eyes, but she walks into the living room. When she sees that I’m pointing at the TV, she quickens her pace.
“What does it say?” I ask her.
“It says ‘Technical difficulties. Thank you for your patience’.”
I squint at it, not sure what this means. Could it have started? I grab the laptop and refresh the Russia Today page. The icon spins and spins, but it’s not refreshing. Eventually, it comes back with a timeout error.
I try CNN. NBC. The BBC. The CBC. Nothing. I try every website I can think of in the U.S., but none of them will open. No Google. No Facebook. No Whitehouse.gov. I try the Bangkok Post, and after a few seconds, it loads right up. The headline is still about Seoul. It hasn’t been updated in hours. The escalating crisis hasn’t had any effect on their sense of urgency. I open up the Phuket Gazette, and it too loads immediately, but the headline is about rising tensions, and it hasn’t been updated since the war started.
I grab my phone and turn off the Wi-Fi connection, then open the browser and start trying the same websites. The only ones that will come up are sites hosted somewhere in Thailand, and none of those have any updated news. I still have a signal. I can still make phone calls within Thailand, at least. That’s something, I suppose. Not a terribly useful something, but I’m glad that Noi can at least keep talking to her family.
The weird thing is that nobody’s declared war yet. It’s obviously a war. Seoul is a radioactive slag heap. There must be millions dead. None of the search engines will open. Timeout, timeout, timeout. What’s that Russian search engine? Yandex? Timeout. The Chinese one? Baidu. Timeout. What in the fuck is going on?
Noi has gone back to her conversation with her mom, gazing vacantly at the TV screen. There’s some cheerily antiquated Thai country music playing—gentle, exotic string and wind instruments. Soothing percussive gongs. A friendly-sounding xylophone. It would be relaxing if reality weren’t providing such a disturbing backdrop for it.
I decide not to say what I’m thinking. If it’s really started, then Noi will know soon enough. If it hasn’t, then there’s no point in scaring her. It could be some sort of communications failure. Sabotage. Posturing. Electronic weapons. Cyberwarfare. It could be anything. I grab the remote and start flipping through the other channels. With dawning horror, I realize that it’s only the foreign language channels that are displaying the technical difficulties message.
The Thai channels are chugging right along, pumping out the daily quota of ghost movies, soap operas, monk lectures, and slapstick comedies sagging under the weight of overfed laugh tracks and hammy sound effects.
Noi lowers the phone when she sees the Thai shows. “So it’s okay?”
I pucker my lips, not sure what to say. “Maybe it is. But the foreign stations are all off the air.”
I’m still flipping through the channels when they all switch to the technical difficulties message. Same soothing Thai country music. I feel like someone’s just injected liquid nitrogen into my spine, and it’s pumping up into my aching neck. The room is stretching out, and I’ve got a momentary sensation of vertigo.
“What does it mean?” Noi asks. Her voice sounds far, far away.
“I don’t know.” I cycle through the channels. Some stations have now gone to static, but most of them just show that same technical difficulties panel card.
I grab my laptop and refresh the page for Bangkok Post. No updates. I don’t even bother with the Phuket Gazette. Outside, I can hear one of our neighbors chatting happily into her cell phone. I walk out the front door and look up and down the street. The old retired couple from down the street is having an after-dinner stroll. They smile at me, and I smile back.
“Sawat dee kap,” I say.
“Wat dee kaaaap,” they both reply.
“Sabai dee mai?” I ask. How are you?
Their smiles widen, and they both nod. “Dee, dee, kap.” We’re good. All good. Not a care in the world. Do these people really not know what’s happening? Down the street, someone is washing their fucking car! I do a double take, then spin around and go back into the house.
Noi’s working the TV remote, scanning the channels. No change. I pick up my laptop again. I don’t know why I think it will work now. Habit? It’s always worked before. I’m getting the same timeout error on the CNN site when the TV cuts to a fifty-something Thai man in a snappy gray suit standing behind a podium. Behind him, there’s a yellow wall trimmed in white lotus blossoms. A big floral arrangement, like he’s at a wedding or something.
He gives the camera a deep wai and starts speaking rapidly in Thai. There are no English subtitles.
I look at Noi. She’s staring at the TV, enraptured. Her eyes are wide, mystified. Her face is a deepening shade of crimson. I see the tears welling up again, and her hand with the phone in it is slowly slipping away from her ear.
“What’s happening? What’s he saying?” I ask.
She ignores me and continues staring at the screen.
“Noi! What’s he saying?” I shout.
She turns and looks at me. “He’s saying that a war has started, and that China, the USA, and Russia have begun fighting, and that there are missiles in the air right now. He says that Thailand is safe, but that we will need to prepare for what’s coming because this will not be like other wars. He’s talking about radiation. Water. Food.”
She stops talking and listens, processing more of his words to translate for me.
I sink next to her on the couch, put my arm around her and say, “We’ve done everything we can to get ready. So have your parents. I don’t know how long the electricity will stay on, or the cell phones. Things might get crazy. Your parents should stay where they are.”
I dictate a quick list to her that she translates to her mom on the phone. Don’t go outside for a month if you can. If you have to go out, be as quick as possible. Don’t go outside for more than a minute or two at a time. Tape up the windows with polyurethane. Tape the doors. Barricade yourself inside. Stay on the bottom floor, don’t go upstairs. Put mattresses over the windows if you can. And so on. All that useless civil defense stuff rattling around in my head from growing up as the tidal wave of the Cold War crested, broke, and rolled harmlessly back out to sea without causing even a single megadeath. At least…that’s what we all thought had happened.
Noi tearfully ends the conversation with her mom, not sure if they’ll be able to call each other again.
The man on the TV, I recognize him as the junta-installed billionaire general-cum-prime-minister. He’s still talking. That man loves the sound of his own voice, and I suspect he’ll go on bloviating until he can’t anymore. I wonder how long that will be. No way to even guess at this point. The planet has gone entirely off-script and is about to lose the plot entirely.
“What do we do?” Noi asks.
“Exactly the same thing we just told your mom to do. We get ready, hunker down, lay low until the worst of the fallout has passed, and the radiation risk isn’t as high.”
She’s staring at me. “Then what?”
Outside, we hear a car racing over the speed bump and smashing back to the ground. We rush to look, but the car is already gone. Our neighborhood is usually very quiet. Whoever that was, they hit that speed bump hard enough to bottom out when they landed. Even by Thai standards, they were driving way too fast.
CHAPTER TEN
We can hear the same car squealing around the corner down the street. I’m thinking that’s the sound of reality finally penetrating the membrane of Thai isolationism. We were lucky to have gotten all those supplies before people started losing their minds. Before it was too late. Now, it was time to hide.
“People might start to get crazy when they realize how big a disaster we’re careening toward.”
Noi frowns at me. Her lower lip starts to tremble. “Is it really going to be that bad? If no bombs hit Thailand, why would it be so bad here?”
I give her my calmest, most reassuring look, and start rubbing her back. “Well,” I start. “It’s really all just been a theory until today.” I glance at my watch. “Shoot. We should write down the date and time. Uh…”
She grabs a pen and a notepad from the coffee table and in her perfect handwriting scratches the date and time on the page.
I’m staring at the paper, imagining it as a burnt and battered future version of itself. Crumpled up in a corner. A scrap of information I thought would be valuable that ends up being junk blowing in the howling winds of nuclear winter. Maybe. Maybe not.
I say, “No, not the time right now. The time that the Prime Minister came on the TV. What was that? Five minutes ago?”
She looks at me, her brow furrowed.
“Because that’s closer to when the missiles must have been launched. It could be important later. I don’t know how, but we’re not going to have Google or the Internet to answer all our questions anymore. It’s gonna suck, actually. It’s gonna suck pretty bad.”
She scratches out the time and writes down a new one.
“So, like I was saying, nuclear winter is really just a theory, but one that seems likely. They did a lot of studies on it in the 1980s. I know it depends on how many bombs fall, but it really doesn’t take all that many to cause a nuclear winter. The bombs vaporize billions or trillions of tons of mass—trees, dirt, people, factories, you name it. It vaporizes all this mass, turns it into highly radioactive ash, then blasts it straight up into the atmosphere like a gigantic cannon. Then fires start on the ground—firestorms bigger than anyone’s ever seen before—and those pump more thick poison smoke and ash up into the atmosphere. Eventually, wind currents swirl it around the planet and create a sort of blanket in the atmosphere that blocks out the sun. Not as much sunlight can get through the ash, so it’s darker.”
Her eyes widen. I guess she’s never heard of this before; probably there was no reason for her to have. She’s much younger than me. The Cold War was over by the time she learned to talk, and she didn’t grow up in a country that was directly involved. Thailand has never been a nuclear power, or even under anyone’s nuclear umbrella, for that matter. Not that either of those things ended up doing anyone any good in the end.
She’s still staring at me, waiting for me to go on. I can tell she’s trying not to start crying again.
“So this thick blanket of smoke and radioactive particles hangs in the atmosphere and blocks the sun, and the temperature all over the planet drops as a result, enough to cause a permanent winter for years. Like I said—it depends on how many bombs fall. How big the war is.”
She stands up and walks to the front door, stares out at our street. It’s quiet again. The people who had been outside earlier seem to have suddenly found something better to do.
“We just won’t know until it happens,” I say. “Unless the Internet comes back, or it’s a very small nuclear exchange. That seems unlikely, though. What’s the Prime Minister talking about now?”
She turns back to the TV and listens for a moment. “He’s saying that we should all start saving our scrap metal, tin, and aluminum cans.”
“Why?” I ask, astonished.
“I don’t know. He says the Thai people need to stand together as one and support the government so that the country can survive.”
“Nothing about the bombs? Missiles? Radiation? Fallout shelters?”
She listens a while longer, then shakes her head. “Now he’s talking about what to do if your plumbing stops working in the house.”
Now I’m shaking my head. “Why wouldn’t he give us the news? The Thai government must know something about what’s happening. They must be in radio contact with the Chinese or the Americans. Thailand’s been in a tug-of-war between the U.S. and China for the last decade or so. They must know what’s happening.” I glance at my watch. “It’s been fifteen minutes. That’s long enough for submarine-launched ballistic missiles to have hit their targets on the coasts. Washington DC. Los Angeles. San Francisco. Beijing. St. Petersburg. New York City. London.”
We’re both silent as we consider the weight of this fact. Outside, a skylark is warming up, preparing to offer her song to anyone within earshot. A warm breeze carries the smell of honeysuckle into the living room. The incongruity of how ordinary everything feels is disorienting. How many millions of people have been vaporized in the last ten minutes? How many billions more will be vaporized before the sun sets on us?
I walk up behind Noi and wrap my arms around her. “It doesn’t seem like this could really be happening, does it?”
She lets out long, weary sigh. “No, it doesn’t.”
I squeeze her hand, and we both listen as the skylark begins an elaborate and beautiful song. It makes me feel sadder and more powerless than I can ever remember feeling. An endless, bottomless feeling.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Will we see any explosions? Or feel them?” Noi asks.
“Not from here. I don’t know what the nearest target would be. He said it was China, Russia, and America. That means any allied country that’s a threat or has nuclear weapons would probably be targeted as well. All the western democracies. All of western Europe. All of China, I guess. All of Russia. If all three superpowers are involved, then the U.S. will probably get hit the hardest. China is the closest country to Thailand, and they’ll almost surely get blown to atoms, but that’s thousands of miles north of us. We wouldn’t see or hear anything. It’s too far away.”
She turns to face me, and I keep my arms wrapped loosely around her. I don’t want to let go. Outside, the bird’s song takes on a new urgency, as if it knows it’s running out of time. It’s my imagination, I know, but it still sounds that way to me.
Aside from bird songs, and the faraway sound of a barking dog, our neighborhood is still weirdly silent. One of our neighbors turns the volume on their TV up to a ridiculous level. Our TV suddenly sounds like it’s in stereo. We’re both tuned to the general who’s still rambling on and on about God knows what.
Noi leans her head against my shoulder. “Should we drive to Surat Thani to be with my family?”
“I don’t know how safe it will be. The car we saw speed by earlier—that’s probably what everyone out there will be driving like. Everyone’s going to be trying to get somewhere. Get to their families. Wherever they think they’ll be safe. They might be desperate. We’re better off staying here for now.”
She doesn’t say anything.
“Your family should stay where they are,” I go on. “I hope they’re getting ready like we told them to. You and I were fortunate to get as well prepared as we are. We were especially lucky to get all that gas—we should be able to drive to them later when it’s safe. That might be a while, though.”
In a whisper so soft that I almost can’t make out the words, she asks, “How will we know when it’s safe to go?”
I think about it, then say, “I don’t know.”
Somewhere far away, a motorcycle revs up and speeds down a highway, its engine screaming and stuttering before its rider relents and up-shifts. It whines away in a sloping Doppler howl.
Outside, the bird stops singing. In the silence, I hear the distant rumble of jet engines, but higher pitched than a big jetliner. Like a thick piece of paper being slowly torn from end-to-end. Fighter jets. I slide open the door and walk out into the front yard, shielding my eyes from the bright sun.
Far away to the south, I see a sparkle of metal in the sky. Noi walks up behind me. I point at the airplane. It’s just a speck up there, but its engines are eviscerating the peace and silence of the afternoon.
“Is it?” Noi asks. I’m not sure what she’s asking, or how to answer.
We both stand there in the blazing sun as sweat begins to bead up on my forehead and arms. We’re shielding our eyes and staring at the glimmering jet up in the sky.
It’s the only airplane up there. What happened to all the people who had been on commercial flights when the bombs started exploding? Was there a protocol to follow? Is the pilot supposed to open the flight operations manual to the page titled “Nuclear war”? I try to imagine the captain making that announcement. They probably wouldn’t say anything at all to prevent an in-flight panic. Would they see the fiery mushroom caps blooming over the planet below? Damn.
The plane glides across the azure expanse, then disappears behind the tree line to the north.
“It’s going toward Bangkok,” she says.
I shrug. “It’s going north. China is also north. It could be going to escort a U.S. bomber coming from some base to the south. Who knows?”
We go back inside, and the TV has gone to static.
I grab the remote and flip through the channels, but they’re all static now. Every single one. Why? It doesn’t make sense. Thailand should be able to keep the lights on for at least a few days. Are they trying to conserve fuel? The power’s still on. I scratch my head, baffled.
I look at Noi and can see the tears welling up in her eyes again.
“Let’s start taping the plastic over the windows,” I say.
She gives me a sad nod. I close the front door, and then we unroll the plastic sheeting without talking. Noi’s tears make a pattering sound as they fall on the plastic. My tears soon join hers as I think about what my family back in the States must be experiencing right now.
Outside, the skylark starts to sing again.