THE RIVER—a short story

Jungle Noir, Yellow Giallo

Note: this story tracking Dillon’s journey on the Sarawak River in Borneo was co-published—interlaced—with another strand written by my friend Dan, which follows Jerry as he goes down the Nissequogue River on Long Island. That version, called Rivers, in two parts, can be read on his page JunkMan. I've added a few bonus tracks for this, the Director’s Cut or 12” Extended Version.

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A perfectly straight line separates the latte-coloured water flowing from the Sarawak River Delta into the bottle-green South China Sea.

Dillon pauses at the top step of Ching San Yen, 120 feet above sea level—it’s nothing compared to mountains previously scaled, but now he’s out of breath. He takes a crackling drag off his vape, and gives a rattling cough back.

Left his Ray-Bans in the car and the cloudless noon sky drives neon-blue nails into his skull each time he looks up.

Quit drinking. Today. Cold turkey. Only way.

Green Hill Temple—built to beseech the Goddess Mazu for safe passage across the sea, two centuries ago by Chinese immigrants.

My race… but not my tribe. Doubly a fraud—what’s this unbeliever doing here?

A gaudily painted plaster stucco wall curves before the entrance, depicting the usual dragons and phoenixes and deities in red and gold and green. Dillon ducks into the prayer hall, lights a joss stick for his son.

I have no prayer.

Smoke from prayer money—hell dollars—burning in twin pagoda-shaped furnaces in the courtyard deposits fine ash on his Zegna trousers as he leaves.

The burning enacts a ritual of continuity, ensuring the river flows both ways—the living provides for the dead, and the dead watch over the living.

A vendor approaches, offering a veritable Switch store in paper and cellophane, from iPhones through iPads to MacBooks. Dillon waves her away.

I don’t know who my parents were.

Gunning his Jag, he drifts along the gentle curves of the nearly deserted Q111. In the boot, a small suitcase of clothes. Backpack on the passenger seat containing his laptop and retirement fund. All his worldly possessions at 55. The Le Corbusier suite of furniture, BOSE systems, and professional kitchen he liked to flaunt had all come with the architect-designed house leased in Green Hill Vista.

Rent paid for the rest of the year—no getting that back now…

The Waze app chimes—police checkpoint after the Barrage Bridge. Fuck. Cars banked up behind, and the road too narrow to U-turn. Dillon pulls over on the muddy verge. My poor Jag. Taking only the backpack, he darts across the road and sticks out his thumb.

Backtrack to Sejingkat, find a fisherman there.

***

The sun is a low fireball in the tangerine and mauve sky when Pak Kadir’s needle-thin fishing boat putters through the ship lock. Above, the checkpoint is in full-swing. Clear of the bridge, the outboard now revs, whipping a stiff breeze under Dillon’s spread arms. They skip along the river, past kampung houses with flakey paint—some on stilts extended over the water, laundry drying on nylon lines, rubbish bobbing against the bank along which women and children stroll—purposefully, aimlessly. A boy, maybe five, hears their motor and flings half a brick at the boat. It falls short. Dillon mock-sternly points two fingers at his own eyes, then at the naughty boy—who guffaws and turns and...

...wriggles his butt at me—I growl like a wolf and give chase. Jaysen shrieks “Mummyyy” and pounds on the backdoor with fists the size of squash balls, but Ning’s folding laundry, and ignores him. I scoop the Tasmanian Devil up in my arms, flip him upside-down. Doraemon t-shirt rides to his chest and I blow raspberries on his round tummy until he’s sobbing with laughter. My phone rings. Jaysen and I say “Shit!” simultaneously. “Oyy!” comes her admonishment from the kitchen. I wrestle with the tadpole—his legs now locked around my neck—and the door handle, while trying—without success—to dig the chunky mobile out of my trouser pocket. “Boof!” I deposit the feral cub headfirst into the rattan basket full of bedsheets. “Shit!” Jaysen and Ning both yell. I make a quick escape to see who’s calling. An unsaved number I could dial in the dark—and did, often. I slip out the back gate and stride briskly halfway down the service alley running behind our shophouse on the Main Bazaar before answering. “Pam.” It’s six. I don’t need to hear her crying voice to know it’s bad.

With a bump, Kadir’s prau docks against the rubber tires wrapped around the edge of a small pontoon. Up the slatted ramp, the promenade’s bustling. A small playground—where Dillon’s son used to clamber over the brightly coloured castle with slides—has been replaced with standard outdoor fitness equipment. The vendors are hawking street food his wife loved but the barbecued satays and fresh-pressed sugarcane are now Lebanese kebabs and Taiwanese boba-tea.

The crowds fade… into ghosts.

The strings of bulbs dim to flickering afterimages.

The clashing songs from every stall cancel each other out.

I’m in the dark.

In silence but for the languid slap of river.

I’ve been searching… all night.

There, now.

In front of a small hornbill fountain—“Closed for Repair”—a prone figure.

One arm—Elvish tattoo—dangles off the unpolished concrete bench.

Its knuckles grazing an empty bottle on the weedy patch.

Dillon’s phone jangles in his pocket, and he gasps, plunged back into the humidity, the sounds and smoke and lights and life of the Waterfront.

The hornbill fountain is bubbling. The concrete bench is bare.

On his phone, a text from his oldest friend, his only friend.

Ohgui couldn’t stall Sammo and the Minister. They’ve left.

I’ve lost Jaysen again.

***

“Morning, Brudder. Fats has gone home but he’s agreed to meet you up there, at 9. Joh’s officiating at the opening of a Country-Western fest this weekend. The fuck’s up with Dayaks loving that shit? It’s not like they’re cowboys…”

“Oh but we so are, bro. Listen. I left the Jag key at reception. I ditched it on Jalan Bako yesterday, just before the Barrage.”

“Okay okay, I’ll geddit with my driver this afternoon. Keep it at my house til you come back?”

“No, bro. Send it to Ning, at her mom’s old house—you know Rat Lane? If she doesn’t want the car, sell it for anything and wire her the money.”

”Ehh why you talk so final-final like this, Dillon? Where you going after meeting Fats?”

“Up. Out.”

“Ahh shit... Look... I know three mil’s a big hit. But it’s not the end of the world, ya? I bounced back from losing, what, five?—during the ACF. You can do it too, brudder.”

“It’s just hell money, bro. Make-believe money. Means nothing in the end. I’m going home, is all.”

“Dillon—whadafuck?”

“I’ll miss you most of all, Ah Kwei. You always did the right thing by me.”

Dillon hangs up, turns off the phone.

Walking past a bin in the guesthouse lobby, he quickly throws his vape in before he has time to change his mind. Only way.

The sleek speedboat thrusts powerfully off from under the Darul Hana Bridge—an improbable serpentine steel-and-glass wonder connecting the North and South Banks of Kuching—and passes the heritage Brooke Dockyard, the gilded State Mosque. Now the Kubah Ria farmers’ market, bustling since dawn. Signs of development peter out quickly. A few more sleepy Malay villages. The Batu Kitang Water Treatment Plant spews stinking aerated wastewater. After that, only quiet mangrove swamps. A couple of crocodiles… or logs.

Time peels back, one decade, two… and Dillon is heading to his first meeting with the Godfather.

Why me? It was fucking Ohgui caught with his hand in the trust account of Naseer, Loh & Johan.

Oh fuck, there he is now: Fat Sammo.

Of course I know of him, but it’s still surprising to see the legend with my own eyes: Kuching’s most-feared gangster is an Aussie with dirty blond hair… and rail-thin of course.

The deal I negotiate for Ohgui is, he gets a cash loan of half-a-million to refill the kitty, and Sammo applies gentle pressure on his partners to forgive and never forget.

In return, Ohgui and I go on 24/7 call for the Siniawan Brotherhood for… several years, I lose track how many. Turns out to be a pretty cool ride, the toothpick-chewing gangsters wearing mirrored shades at night are surprisingly charming rogues—long as you’re on their side of the katanas.

I’m introduced to Pam. Alabaster skin, obsidian hair, eyes the colour of cocoa.

An Orang Ulu—‘people of the interior’—from the Kelabit Highlands, Pam says in her delightful accent—part-Bario and part-Bogan—that she met Sammo while studying in Brisbane to become an accountant.

Turns out Sammo has a real moneylender’s licence, and an office in Bintawa. Pam comes down twice a week to receive repayments and launder his meth income.

2006. Twenty years ago, we fall—in love or in lust? Does it matter? Between those two horses, we’re trampled underfoot.

Within three years I’ve roped Jaysen in to become my co-conspirator. Twice a week, instead of attending tuition, my beautiful boy sits in the front office of Prestige Finance—playing games and eating candy, studying deception instead of algebra—while I bang the boss’s wife in the soundproofed backroom. The backroom where Sammo’s associates help defaulting borrowers discover hidden cash.

Sammo meanwhile discovers the affair.

Pam disappears... “back to Bario”. Honestly? I don’t know if he’s killed her. The application forms for Sammo’s annual visa bearing her signature that arrive every year like clockwork say otherwise. I witness them. I stick RM10 revenue stamps on them. I submit them to the Immigration Office. I’m a good boy. I don’t ask. I’m physically sick in the toilet once, after Sammo thanks me—he was getting bored of Pam anyway. I remember the dimples on her lower back, like on a cello. That animal ambrosia between her thighs. I never see my lover again.

I sell my shophouse to help Ning buy her mother’s old house in Park Lane, which Ohgui and people our age call “Rat Lane”, because those terraces are built across the road from the “rat tunnel” bomb shelters under the Reservoir Park.

And Jaysen?

Jaysen discovers drugs.

Here we are...

“Here we fuckin’ are—the Yellow Rajah of Borneo hisself,” Sammo yells from the pub at the top of the jetty. The Bikalan is his unofficial conference room—like himself, it’s always open for business.

“Cunt, you try’na intimidate me?” He stabs a nicotine-stained knobby finger at Dillon’s t-shirt: Headhunters, with a photo of smoked skulls in individual rattan baskets. Dillon rolls his eyes skywards.

“Remindin’ me that, although you look like a chickenshit Chink ambulance chaser, you were brought up by Iban warriors?” Dillon sighs and takes the jabs, takes a high stool at the bar.

“Got a fuckin’ parang in that bag’a yers?” Rajesh holds up the bottle of Jack that Sammo’s been drinking from—Dillon, rattled by the roast, is briefly tempted, but shakes his head... it’s not yet nine.

Sammo suddenly smiles, teeth like a row of leaning tombstones.

“Just winding ya up, mate. Johan will be here in half. But just leave the stones with me. Jeweller can only come after lunch to verify if they’re worth one point five-“

“Two.”

“-One Point Five, and that they’re not marked. Mate, I’m taking yer word for it at the mo’. The stones, plus all yer shares of the bar—Jayde, on Green Hill… always thought that was a clever name. I suggested that to ya, didn’t I?”

Dillon shrugs and takes out the transfer form—consideration, one million—and slides it across. That was the machete in his backpack, hacking him free from the F&B rollercoaster.

Then Sammo drops the shit-eating grin, voice becomes gravelly.

“Look. Jayse is a good kid. I’ll channel the payment by tomorrow. Next Friday, Justice Naseer hands down a custodial sentence. Gunna be life, but.”

“No death penalty.”

“No death penalty. You know what a big ask that was.”

Dillon hands the black velvet satchel over. It clinks softly. Sammo opens the drawstrings for a peek—a crimson glow blushes the Australian’s tanned and sunken cheeks.

“No regrets eh, mate? ‘For wisdom is more precious than rubies.’”

Sammo notices that the boat ferrying Dillon away does not turn around for Kuching but instead continues on, upriver.

He shakes his shot glass at the bartender.

It’s a quarter past nine.

***

What’s more painful for Dillon than being swept into the crux—a hairpin turn in the River—is that he’d ignored the kayak owner’s advice to abort the outing.

Semadang jetty, 8 a.m., Francis looks out of his 4WD over the swollen waters and says this may be dangerous for novices. Dillon bristles at the word—he’s done this run twice before, easily.

He concedes to letting “the expert” take Ning in the tandem. He’ll shoot the rapids solo. Dillon brushes off his girlfriend’s concerns and starts to explain how that sharp bend should be negotiated.

Now he’s smashed painfully into the rock face, paddle ripped from his hands by the whitewater.

As Francis and Ning sweep past, Dillon sees, through a million beads of water hung in mid-air, the panic in her eyes, the laser beam focus in his.

Fucking idiot. Total noob.

Finally reunited on the riverbank outside Gua Angin, Ning rushes into his arms, crushes his bruised ribs through the lifejacket. She says “oh my god” over and over.

Dillon caresses her wet hair—helmet thrown in the mud at his feet—and looks over her fragrant shoulder, at a Buddhist shrine in front of the Wind Cave.

She doesn’t think I’m an idiot. She does love me.

He drops to one knee, face inches from her dripping, goose-pimpled thighs. He gazes up into her eyes, which now well with tears.

I owe her so much.

Luna’s barking up the tree in the compact backyard. I hope it’s a squirrel. I pick up a mango from the ground. It’s ripe and mostly whole, only one small bite stolen by the creature in the high branches.

The small kitchen is alive with sweet, tangy, gingery smells, with notes of chilli, cumin, cinnamon. I call her name softly—Ning startles so easily nowadays. I hand her the mango, and ask if it’s too late to be added to her chutney.

“No, it’s perfect… You can bring a small pot tomorrow.”

She looks up warily then, already expecting the blow coming from my eyes, already cringing from what I might say. My head drops.

“No… nonono, not cancelled again?”

She stabs her wooden spatula at the mixing bowl, misses. It clatters to the polished cement floor. I drop onto one knee and begin picking up the bits of mango pulp around her slippered feet.

The “why” is torn out of her chest.

I take her in my arms. She’s lost all resistance.

“I’m sorry. Jaysen argued with one of the guards, again. Got beaten up for that. Not too serious, this time. They kept him in the infirmary for a day, no concussion. Only the stitches over his cheekbone, opened up. I’m so sorry. He’s back in solitary. They wouldn’t say how long.”

Ning slumps. If I let go now, she would slide to the floor.

I look over her hitching shoulders at the mango tree in her mother’s backyard.

Something rustles in the high branches. Luna barks and barks.

***

The mighty Sarawak River is fed by thousands of small tributaries and water catchment basins. After the Wind Cave, Dillon is eventually forced to continue overland.

At the Bengoh Reservoir truck stop, after a troubling lunch of soggy fried chicken and day-old red rice wrapped in banana leaf, Dillon finds a driver to send him to the next jetty. The driver takes Dillon’s almost-new MacBook—for his daughter to use in school.

In the Prestige Finance front-office I teach nine-year old Jaysen how to go online on my iPad.

Six years after the divorce, he’s come to my flat, to delete a print job. I ask: that band you like, Rage Against The Machine, they mean printers, right? He sighs.

I teach him.

He teaches me.

Even now, the Buddhist river of life flows in both directions.

I’m the living, sending joss-paper gemstones to my son who’s in hell, or at least purgatory.

He, on the other hand, is imbued with the power of one already become a ghost, like Mazu, to grant safe passage on my journey home.

Oh my beautiful boy—not yet 25—will you hate me when you find out I traded everything I owned to deny you the release you’ve chased all your life?

The truck drops Dillon at the jetty of the Batang Ai Hydroelectric Dam, completed with the flooding of the valley in 1985. The primary school he’s boarded at since the age of eight—SK Nanga Delok—is decommissioned, and relocates to the Resettlement Scheme. This is where he meets its only other Chinese student, Loh Ah Kwei—whose given name sounds like ‘turtle’, so of course he’s henceforth known as Ohgui.

Ohgui has the gift of the gab. But with him it’s more curse than gift. The Blob can’t shut up. Even with his back against the dormitory wall, being robbed of his allowance, he’s talking a mile a minute. How his dad’s a bigshot engineer at the dam, and his aunty is front desk manager at the Hilton resort. Ohgui only stops when Pat cinches his perfectly spherical head in a chokehold and Ajang sinks a bony fist into his perfectly spherical stomach. Only now he starts to cry.

I can’t take the blubbery blubbering anymore and walk up to the robbers, who have two years and twenty kilos over me. Ajang giggles and grabs fistfuls of my shirt like it’s Christmas. Before he can break my glasses, Pat releases Ohgui—who curls up on the floor exactly like his namesake—and whispers in Ajang’s ear. The big lug says, “This ching-chong?” then narrows his shark eyes to re-assess me for a moment before releasing my shirt. He pats me roughly on the chest, whap-whapp, nearly caving my sternum in, and says with mock respect, “Tuah Rumah”. ‘Elder of the House’—another mess Dad’s got me out of.

That night, Ohgui shows me the Playboy magazine he’s stolen from his dad’s collection and smuggled into school under a fake ‘States of Malaysia’ cover. I’ll never forget her—Karen Velez, Playmate of the Year 1985. Lights out, and Ohgui claims to have a stomach-ache and sneaks that magazine to the toilet under his shirt. Afterwards, he passes it to me and it’s my turn to fake diarrhea. The centrefold is horrifyingly humid, warped with sweat and... something else… but I can’t think anymore—my soul is spurting out of my body. When I get back to the bunk with the ruined smut, I tell Ohgui he needs to borrow more reading material from home—urgently.

They’ve been best friends ever since.

A lorry pulls up.

The Malay driver helps a local Iban youth lower a freezer onto the longboat moored there. It dips halfway into the water. The cargo’s bound for Dillon’s destination, Rumah Asap. Reagan the boatman accepts his iPhone—despite the longhouse being out of mobile coverage.

“Your headman, Rantap, of course I know—that’s my baby brother!”

It’s been over four decades. He wonders if they’ll recognise each other.

Mummy Julip is still alive. Dillon would’ve got a call if Mummy had died. He wouldn’t have missed her funeral like he does Daddy’s, when in 1998 he’s stuck in Singapore with a million bucks smuggled for Sammo. As good as hell money, after Mahathir demonetizes thousand-Ringgit notes in ‘99.

Easy come, easy go.

It’s getting late. Dillon hops to the bow with the long bamboo oar. The rapids are so shallow now, he has to spot and push off against boulders under the waterline. He jumps in and out of knee-deep water—fucking up his shins—to pull and push the overloaded vessel past deadly obstacles.

The sight of pepper and hill paddy plantations finally signals arrival.

A clutch of naked children in the shallows twist and shout at the sound of their sputtering approach.

Their bare-breasted mothers, wearing sarongs only around their hips, kneel on the egg-shaped pebbles along the bank, washing their laundry and their hair.

Reagan hollers for help with his delivery. From the dark longhouse high above, a few men jog down the muddy slope with practised confidence.

Except the older one taking up the rear, shirtless and pot-bellied, who treads with the gait of one who’s half-blind in the dark—thanks perhaps to a prematurely exploding firecracker flung by a reckless adopted brother during a Gawai harvest festival celebration half-a-century ago.

At the lichen-slick final log, a teenaged villager offers his hand to the Tuah Rumah. It’s ignored… the visitor in the cheap souvenir t-shirt and expensive muddied trousers looks so familiar…

“Abang,” Rantap cries, and throws his arms around the prodigal.

***

Dillon refuses Rantap’s offer of the Tuah Rumah’s bilik—his personal apartment—at the head of the longhouse. He unrolls one of the stained mattresses under a dust-choked mosquito net.

Dogs’ toenails tip-tap across the split bamboo platform. Go away, go back to sleep. Domesticated boars snuffle in the mud under the raised platform, under his head. Sleep, sleep—I need to... A rooster flaps up and lands on the window sill at the foot of his mattress. No! It’s not dawn yet—don’t you fucking-

Bwaaaark-a-aah-aaaaah!

Dillon crawls-rolls out onto the ruai—the long central corridor which is the spine of the longhouse. A kerosene lantern marks the toilet door. He steps on someone’s leg. The sleeper just grunts and rolls over. Dillon warily enters.

No external wall—he can see the towering dipterocarps beyond, silhouetted in black against a riot of stars.

Floor’s wet but… it doesn’t stink? Then he remembers, and looks, through the hole in the floor, straight down, at the rushing water below. A pipe fed by the mountain stream behind the longhouse serves as a continuously running flush and bidet.

Grateful that there’s no longhouse upstream of Asap, Dillon returns his truckstop lunch to nature.

Face scorching, he emerges but no one’s heard the slaps on the river or, more likely, no one cares. Fires in the smouldering chimneys awaken, as the residents start making coffee and deep-frying eggs. Smoke is the pervading, permanent feature here. Dust motes perpetually dance in sunbeams.

Rantap yodels ‘selamat pagi’ and proudly shows-off the Chief’s new clothes—Dillon’s Versace shirt too small on him, Gucci loafers too big.

Over Jacob’s Cream Crackers slathered with condensed milk, Rantap points out a dozen youths, reminding Dillon who their parents are, or were.

“Tuah Rumah-”

“Eh eh, don’t call me that. I’m your Adik.”

“You’ll always be my little brother—no matter how big your gut becomes—but, along this Ruai, you’re my Tuah Rumah.”

“It’s you who would’ve been Chief… if you’d come home.”

“I couldn’t have done a better job than you, my brother. Listen Ranny, I wanted to say, my memory, it’s full of holes. All these names—father of this girl, mother of that boy—I can’t remember any of them.”

“Of course. You left for primary school, Abang.” Rantap slaps Dillon’s thigh, hard. “But the life. The small moments. They’ll come back. When you least expect them.”

“Hunh… Tonight, please, no big homecoming dinner, alright?”

“Why! You leaving tomorrow?”

“No… I’m not leaving.”

Rantap hugs his big brother like Dillon didn’t abandon him forty years ago.

“Kay’okay... No feast. Just a prayer from the Dayong.”

“Pak Tiwi? Oh god please no!”

“Pak Tiwi? You crazy, Abang? He died years ago—aged ninety-nine! The new Dayong’s his daughter.”

“The crooked old man found a wife?”

“Long after! He had Liwan at seventy-five.”

“You’re joking.”

“No, bro—Daddy always swore by Pak Tiwi’s aphrodisiacs!”

“Oh Jesus, can you not?”

“City boy’s a prude now? Daddy and Mummy had to have sex to make me, didn’t they?”

“Stop!”

“They’re not even the ones who made you.”

“Yeah... about that... I need to ask Mummy about my real parents.”

“We all heard the story, what. Chinese couple show up out the jungle and left baby-you, right? Everyone said they were communist dissidents, on the run.”

“Yeah but that was 1970, Adik. The communists had pretty much given up all through Malaysia by then. Were they even in the jungles beyond Sibu at that time? There’s something more to the story. Mummy must know.”

“Mummy donno what she had for dinner last night.”

“Hunh... Okay, so tell me about the new shaman.”

“You’ll meet her later. I’ll make her promise not to spray you with a headless chook this time.”

“I still have nightmares from Pak Tiwi trying to exorcise me when I was five.”

“One of his rare failures.”

“Fuck you!”

Liwan keeps her word and doesn’t sacrifice any fowl to bless the aristocrat’s return. She merely chants in a lovely melancholy voice for half an hour. Dillon keeps his eyes on her pleasant oval face the whole time. She keeps hers closed until the final plaintive note.

The home-distilled rice spirit langkau—basically tequila on a bad day—is rolled out in ten-litre barrels. Dillon succumbs and accepts the lard-smeared plastic cup passed around in the longhouse game of musical chairs—where the cup only pauses to let a player regurgitate barbequed pork through a window to the waiting hogs. Cycle of life.

***

Dillon doesn’t recall going into Liwan’s bilik to drink from the pipe but he seems to have wrenched the plastic tap clean off. He stuffs his finger in the pipe like the boy at the dike. Outside, the gongs—all three sets—are gonging. Everyone’s whooping, screeching. No one hears Dillon’s hollers.

He slumps against the rough cement of the warm hearth and catches himself reflected in a mirror with a neat diagonal faultline. His eyes don’t line up, making the kitchen spin faster. He lets the spirit take him to the other side of the sky.

***

You double-check the licence plate number against the message on your burner phone, then ride up to the mark’s car on your stolen bike, catch him just as he’s finished reversing from the parking spot under his office, setting sun in his eyes, and bump your gear against his car door, making him glance sharply up, the expression on his face turning from mild to angry, zero to a hundred in three seconds, because you look like any other Dayak worker in an oversized shirt and half-faced motorbike helmet, gardening equipment loosely hanging between the bike handle and your shoulder, and you know he’s thinking you may have slightly scratched his BMW, and then he’s thinking it’s pointless checking since there’s no way you can pay for the respray. When you pull out the shotgun tucked behind the grasscutter, his eyes widen and keep widening and through the window you can hear him scream for his wife to get down, get down, as he reaches blindly for the gear stick to shift into drive without taking his eyes off your weapon, and he’s still staring when you empty both barrels into his face, then you toss the gun through his shattered window, a little too hard, and it bounces off his lap, onto his wife who’s crouching on the floor. You casually ride off until, two lanes down the main road, you ditch the bike, while the helmet, work-shirt, burner phone, grasscutter and gardening gloves go into the skip there, just where the assistant warden’s waiting to send you back to death row. But he surprises you, says you’re not going back, yet, busy week, new job just came in, the assignment backpack’s on your seat, this time it contains a silky Batik shirt, a Panama hat, sunglasses, thin leather gloves, and you even get a fake passport, keys to a rental Corolla, and a burner phone with the location pin where you are to pick up the mark, then you’ll be heading to Indonesia this evening, and her passport’s also there, her real one presumably, which you open and then you whistle because she looks like a model, so you make a lame joke that you might as well elope with her and go into hiding in Pontianak rather than drive all the way back tomorrow to keep your appointment with the lethal injection, but of course the assistant warden doesn’t bother to respond, because you both know he’s heading to your parents’ house after this, to give them the money for these two hits.

You like her name. Pam.

***

Liwan calls his name. Dillon.

He jerks up from an intense nightmare, which instantly evaporates. His back’s in agony, it feels as bent out of shape as her father’s had looked. She kneels to release his finger—it’s swollen, black in the moonlight. Liwan says she will cut it off in the morning when there’s daylight. Not fully sober, Dillon recoils in horror. Then she laughs and kisses him, shrugs out of her sarong. She’s half his age, and he’s not that drunk after all. When he’s hilt-deep, she leans forward and starts moaning. It sounds like a spell. Her hair falls like a blackout curtain around his face—she’s a witch after all; cut his throat like her father did to that chicken; paint her ceiling with his arterial spray- but these thoughts don’t work. Nonono. He slams his head back onto the woven mat and he comes and comes. Pathetic old man. She pulls his dripping cock, still erect, out of her, and pats it gently. She kisses him on the forehead, coos that it’s alright. Hair-trigger geriatric.

Naked, the boys leap into the River. They find a dead catfish, take a broken piece of bamboo and gut it, like they’ve seen Mother do. Quickly bored, they leave the butchered corpse on the stony bank for the fat black flies. Dillon dares Rantap to come to the waterfall. Adik ducks under the longhouse to get Father’s parang. “We’ll need this”, the tadpole fiercely declaims. Abang lets him bring the machete—nearly as long as his leg—even though he knows the path’s recently been cleared. The jungle is cacophonous but, apart from two colourful hornbills perched up high, the lads don’t encounter the gibbons or proboscis monkeys or wild boars...

...or monitor lizards or flying foxes or pythons or sunbears that are there, just out of my sight. The roar of the waterfall is half as loud, its summit half as tall.

And I reach the source of the River. The source of all life—according to my people’s myths. Where we began, but also where we re-begin.

I realise why Daddy had warned us not to come here by ourselves. This pool that we fall into—forward somersault, backward pike, again and again—is much shallower than I remember. Protected by the invisible armour of childhood, or had we simply been too light to hit those green boulders under the surface?

I should be getting back. Sun’s about to set and I didn’t bring a torch. A few forks will be tricky in the dark.

Holding onto a twisted vine, thick as my wrist, I crane to gaze down into the hypnotic depths. So much nearer than before. Jaysen would have liked it here.

I feel the pull of rebirth. I lean just a bit farther.

.

THE END

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Table of Contents (2026.07.01)—the State of my Stack