“How kind,” Sarah said, pretending to think it over while wanting nothing more than to distance herself from this early-morning gin-drinking woman who struck her as a loose cannon.
She had been about to politely refuse, but something had shifted in her mind: perhaps a few acquaintances in the building might be expedient after all. Even after only a few days—she had to admit to herself—she was already lonely, and with that, distinctly bored. The distractions of the city had not yet penetrated her solitude, if they ever would, and each evening, not knowing quite what to do with herself, she would sit on her balcony and listen to the student dances lighting up the night in the university campus on the far side of the street. She grew aware of how completely they excluded her and how isolated she was likely to remain.
“Come,” Mali insisted. “You can play poker?”
“I haven’t played in years. But you can refresh my memory.”
“Done. We also drink a lot—so I hope you’re not a teetotaler. We can’t have one of those in our midst.”
“I drink once in a while. Not much.”
“It’s usually yadong and rum—a toxic but fun combination. What else is there to do on Tuesday nights?”
Or on any other night, Sarah thought, recalling her monotonous evenings.
“I can tell you’re a little shy,” Mali said. “But don’t be. Come hang out with us—we’ll bring you out of your shell, I promise.”
Was the shell so obvious? Sarah felt her jaws tighten against each other, and yet she made the effort to be nonchalant, as she thought someone of Mali’s class would be. Very subtly, however, she felt herself being tugged by the other woman into admitting things that she didn’t necessarily feel. She admitted that she was a little “alienated” by the city, when in reality she was merely uncertain of it. It was a strange reaction. It was, she decided in that moment, Mali’s openness, the softness of her voice, which rolled out even blunt phrases as if they were silk carpets—and the dancing playfulness behind it—that persuaded her. It was as if Sarah needed to surrender a secret opinion in the interest of true honesty, a secret that her own deficiencies had kept withheld, and was now being pried from her by a touch of charm. Some people have that gift—to get you talking more than you ought. Mali then got up without any haste, shot Sarah a smile, and said that she was late for work. “I’m in Unit Seventy-Four. You?”
“Eighty-Six.”
“I’ll drop a reminder under your door. Oh, and you have to bring a bottle of something. Wine doesn’t count.”
“Whiskey?”
“Whatever makes you crazy. Whatever makes us sane.”
Mali made an exit similar to her entry, clogs swishing against the tiles, deliberately impervious to everything, her thermos of gin and tonic dangling from one wrist by a rubber band. There was something Old Hollywood about her, as if she had been studying those films for years. The way Bette Davis might enter and leave a room, using a cigarette as a wand, signifying authority. But then, Sarah had finally met one of her neighbors. It had left her with the distinct feeling that her defenses had been breached. A little distractedly, but amused, she went back to her apartment and ran a hot bath in order to think it over. Sarah hardly needed a new friend, but she did need a new social life, as she put it to herself. Mali was faintly preposterous but she had a charm, a slink to her. Or else she would prove a distraction while Sarah passed a few months waiting for her disappearance from New York to become less significant. Perhaps Mali and her friends could be just that: light entertainment while time passed, like the music and champagne between the acts of a tedious play.
* * *
—
From the bathroom the skyline could be seen, towers adorned with crests like samurai helmets, by neon letters and hanging gardens, a demented free-for-all created by generations of developers. It could be Bogotá, São Paulo, any city near the equator that she had not seen. Even though she had been looking at it every day since she had got here it was no less incomprehensible. It was a landscape created purely by money and autocracy. At night a host of flashing red lights would come on to warn tycoons in helicopters away from the rooftops, and men on distant balconies would fly drones that dipped between the towers along with the shrilling swallows. But now it was morning. The construction site had finally come to life, and the crane at its center moved through a humid onslaught of rain. The endless mania to build luxury condominiums that would remain mostly empty, their Chinese buyers perpetually absent. Even the recently completed towers were dark at night. As each tower went up, banners offering discounts to new buyers appeared within a month, but the sad little units remained unclaimed. Around this site lay muddy pits with excavator machines clawing away at the soil where rods and cement pillars were beginning to emerge from the chaos. The noise was distracting, and she had to wear earplugs all day long until nightfall, when the machines finally went silent.
She sometimes glimpsed a neighbor or two. An old lady watering her plants in Chinese pajamas or a man in a string vest doing his tai chi in front of the TV. Figures from an antediluvian age, from before the flood that had destroyed their world. At seven that evening a piano began playing in the unit above hers, a rendering of what sounded like an old Thai tune. This had been going on ever since she’d arrived at the Kingdom, but she was convinced that it was becoming louder and more frequent. It sounded like a child doing her exercises. She hoped that this time the mangled tune wouldn’t go on for hours. After fifteen minutes it stopped, and she heard light footsteps padding around the balcony above hers.
In the half-light, white cattle egrets floated around the golden rain trees that surrounded the Kingdom and proliferated both in the gardens of the wealthy villas and in the undeveloped parcels of land around them. It was only beyond their plumage that the streets of the city could be seen, shining in the rain as the headlights of cars passed along them. The land around the Kingdom glittered with saan jaoti—the spirit houses where little figures of the dead sat on thrones next to miniature zebras and rotting apples. In these shrines sat the previous occupants of the land on which the modern buildings now stood. During Sarah’s initial meeting with Mrs. Lim, the formidable landlady explained to her that her family had once owned all the land of the Kingdom, and that her grandparents had lived in a gracious mansion that had been torn down after their deaths during the tuberculosis epidemic of 1942. Her forebears sat there still on their tiny thrones while their souls voyaged onward through their unknowable reincarnations. Among the offerings that surrounded them were bottles of red Fanta, distinct from the green Fantas that were normally offered in most of the stores, and she, Mrs. Lim, had heard that while the green Fantas were meant to evoke the sacred color of the god Indra, what made the red ones significant in the context of the supernatural was that their color was similar to the blood of demons.