Chapter Text
For Kant, routine is his natural way of life.
And when one lives in a small village in Chonburi, routine is the status quo. However, though he may find it hard to admit it out loud, Kant is sick of it. And although he knows living in a small coastal village may be the envy of those who are eager to escape the concrete jungle that is neighbouring Bangkok, living in a seaside village seems to lose some of its charm when its occupant is deathly afraid of the ocean.
Kant used to like the familiarity and mundanity that living in a small town afforded. Considered a ‘small business owner’ around town, he enjoyed not having to put much effort into working for many things. The baristas working at the local cafes would greet him with smiles and offer him discounts. He was on a first-name basis with Babe’s high school teachers, and when Kant used to attend his parent-teacher conferences, the professors let him know they were making sure to look out for his brother (at least, most of them would). He even gets his groceries delivered straight to the studio for much cheaper than he really should by a hospitable middle-aged lady named Sally, who practically adores him.
“You’re always so polite, Mr. Kant,” Sally would gush every Saturday morning when she dropped the plastic bags of fresh produce on the front doorstep for him. “And handsome too. How do you not have a wife yet?”
He’d smile and give her a bill and she’d count out his generous change with practiced, slightly knurled fingers, clucking as she did so. “You know, I’ve got a daughter who’s single. She’s getting on in age and she really needs to find someone respectable.”
Kant would laugh, shaking his head affectionately. “I don’t swing that way, unfortunately, Auntie.”
“That’s okay, I’ve got a son, too,” she’d reply, unaffected by his attempt at deterrence.
But what used to feel safe and familiar can, in an instant, become claustrophobic and uncomfortable. Maybe it was just a natural progression, having lived in that same small neighbourhood in Chonburi for twenty years, or maybe it’s the knowledge that wherever he goes, everybody knows who he is and where he’s headed. Or, just maybe, it was because of the crushing fear those years ago of running into the same people he was trying so hard to avoid - like that police chief, who seemed to pervade every aspect of his life, floating in every small space and neighbourhood like an unrelenting, perpetual wisp of fog. And when your life is confined to a perceivable few kilometres, that fog seems to stretch far and wide; stretches until it creeps up into Kant’s house, his bedroom, his lungs. Choking him, consuming the air he breathes.
And yes, maybe it also had something to do with the ‘PERMANENTLY CLOSED’ sign that still looms ominously over the retro diner in the centre of town, the one which it seems even foreign franchisers do not want to attempt to revive. On his daily walk back to the studio from the nearby coffee shop in the mornings, Kant can never manage to pull his eyes away from the building - its glossy, streak-stained windows, which unveil nothing but quiet, abandoned space. Paint flakes from the wooden posts, shedding haphazard specks of white acrylic on the concrete; thin, flaky dots of chemical snow. It is the village’s big, silent elephant in the room. Has been that way, now, for two years.
And Kant has seen how words travel far in the small space he occupies. He knows they all used to talk about him, the mothers at the school pick-up, who would look him up and down, would gossip about his shady past and the new young twenty-something that he was going around with at the time.
“It’s tragic, isn’t it?” Kant had heard a particularly audacious woman hiss furtively to another from his car at the school gates one afternoon, undoubtedly assuming Kant was out of earshot. “That Piyapong kid. No father, no mother, and he’s being raised by that delinquent older brother of his, who runs around with boys who look his brother’s age. Apparently, he used to be in some sort of gang.”
“Just devastating,” the other had agreed, shaking her head sadly, face screwed up in sanctimonious pity. “That kid is destined to end up in the system for sure. Someone really needs to do something.”
Kant remembers sitting in his car, vibrating with rage, knuckles going stark white with how hard he was clutching at the steering wheel. They would have no idea, he thought, trying – unsuccessfully - to calm his borderline violent thoughts. He was angrier on Babe’s behalf than on his own - he couldn’t imagine anyone less likely to end up as a criminal than his gentle, sensitive, soft-spoken younger brother.
And then, when Babe had left for university the year prior, it felt like he took with him the last remaining reason for Kant to hold onto anything in Chonburi. Now, Kant is lonelier than ever, in a village which makes it impossible to feel lonely in peace. So, inevitably, the morning that Kant receives the phone call, he grabs at the opportunity like it’s his only lifeline.
“Sorry to call you out of the blue like this,” a friendly-sounding young woman says when Kant answers the call, which comes through from an unknown number in Phuket. She speaks in a Southern Thai dialect, with a unique accent that Kant has always been fond of. The vowels open widely like the mouth of a river, allowing the consonants to flow freely through it. “I hope this isn’t a bad time to call.”
“Not at all,” Kant replies lightly.
“My name is Fern. I own Ink Point tattoo parlour in Ratsada. I’ll get to the point here - I saw your work on Insta, and it totally fits our vibe. If you’re down, we’d love to have you guest spot at our studio in Phuket for a couple of weeks.”
A wave of surprised pleasure flutters through Kant’s stomach. He’d only been a few times, but he has always loved Phuket, loves its vibrant colours and the glowing streetlights that line the cityscape like florid fireflies. “Wow, really? That’s awesome. I’d love to.”
She laughs, and it’s a pleasant sound, like a windchime tinkling melodically in a soft summer breeze. “Well, that was easy enough.”
Kant laughs too, flushing slightly. “Maybe too easy,” he concedes.
“We’ve got a small apartment we reserve for guests who come and work out of our studio - free of charge. It’s nothing to call home about, as you could imagine, but it’s nice enough. All we’d ask for is a little commission for the space.”
“You had me at Phuket,” Kant replies sweetly, and Fern laughs again.
“I’ll send the details to your inbox a little later. See you in Phuket, Kant!”
After Kant finishes the call and pencils in a tentative date, he sits for a second at his computer and tries to process the randomness of what has just happened, feeling a strange anticipation buzzing in the tips of his fingers.
Routine is Kant’s usual way of life, living in a small town. Things that interrupt his natural flow don’t tend to happen too often, so when they do, it feels purposeful and exciting, and he doesn’t quite know what to do with himself. A feeling of something odd and significant prods at his chest, but he can’t exactly pinpoint what it’s trying to tell him.
Even if it is just for a little while, Kant is eager to escape the routine. To leave behind the cramped walls of his studio, the pointed looks, the monotony; to slip past it all for a couple of weeks.
And, in turn, Kant hopes Phuket will accept him with open arms, will collect him in its warm, sticky embrace, like a messy child with a bag of candy.
And if Kant recognises the strange swell in his chest as the same thrill of excitement that he felt two years ago - in the bowling alley, at that shady hotel room, and for those resultant, volatile couple of months after - he’ll try not to think about it too much.
***
The faint hints of a summer thunderstorm charge the horizon on the morning that Kant packs his suitcase for the airport. The stiff air is aerated with a purposeful, ominous humidity, and the sky rumbles quietly like the warning growl of a tiger. The breakfast radio that Kant plays on low volume in the studio in the mornings had warned of the storm’s arrival, and Kant had listened to it absently, not paying it much mind. Storms are common in Chonburi during the summer, and Kant is just glad that he decided to have the rolling hurricane shutters installed on the windows last year.
Kant hunts around the studio, frantically looking for something, the faint grumble of thunder serving as the soundtrack to the compounding of his stress. He knows he should feel some vague sense of guilt or embarrassment for leaving all his packing to the last minute, but he has never been organised, and he isn’t going to suddenly start now.
Kant exhales when he eventually locates what he is looking for: the soft, pale blue cat carrier. He’s only used it once before, when he flew from Bangkok to Taipei last year for some estranged uncle’s wedding; the invitation really only extended to Kant as a pitiable gesture of goodwill and charity.
He clicks his tongue to beckon the source of, really, much of his stress nowadays. After half a minute, it slinks into the room lazily, paws padding softly on the hardwood, yawning in the languid way that cats do when they don’t have much to stress about at all.
“Hello there,” Kant coos affectionately, to the black shadow he has - somewhat affectionately - resigned to naming Coco.
Coco spots the cat carrier splayed out on the kitchen table and gazes at it, tilting her soft head curiously, as if asking, where am I going?
“We’re going to Phuket,” Kant answers, and he knows he should probably feel a bit silly for talking to a cat out loud, but strangely, he doesn’t. In the short couple of years that he’s known Coco, she has surprisingly filled an absence in Kant’s life that he didn’t realise was there – a dormant loneliness, creeping into the shadow of his soul.
Kant revolved his life around looking after Babe for a long time, so naturally, when he left for university, Kant felt a strange conflict. Of course, he mostly felt both an immense, overwhelming pride for his brother, and a steady sense of relief and assurance that everything Kant had done had been for a concrete purpose. But even so, every now and then, Kant would feel a violent stab of loneliness, digging into his heart like a long, sharp needle. He could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through him when the rest of the world was hushed at four o’clock in the morning.
Kant pretended to mind at first - having to look after a cat. “Your food is so damn expensive,” he would mutter to her crossly, dumping the kibble into the bowl unceremoniously, and she would just sniff, unaffected, nose pointed haughtily in the air. But then, later, she would curl up sleepily in his lap while he worked on flash designs and purr gently, like the thrum of an idle engine, and Kant figures he wouldn’t have spent that money on anything useful, anyway. And that loneliness, while it didn’t go away completely, it began to subside, like wax slowly dripping from the top of a candle wick.
But Kant is fallible. On particularly lonely, ruminating days, Kant’s mind returns to the fact that the cat is the last remaining thing that connected him to the boy he used to love. “You’re just as affectionate as your old owner was,” Kant would whisper when nobody else was around to hear. And she would gaze at him with affectionate pity and knead her little black paws into his thighs, succumbing to the futile ways of the world.
Kant checks his watch, swearing quietly. At this rate, he’d be lucky to make it to the airport before the year is over.
“Where is my fucking plane ticket, Coco? Hm? Do you know?” Kant coos melodically, scratching behind her pointy ears gently with the pads of his thumbs.
Coco, unhelpfully, offers no hints as to the whereabouts of his plane ticket, choosing to lean her head into his touch instead.
Kant sighs, resigned to his fate. In the distance, the rain starts - gently at first; tentative, as if testing the Earth’s reaction.
Then, the storm comes all at once.
***
As soon as Kant touches down in Phuket, he cannot stop himself from breathing an audible sigh of relief. The heat is not stifling and constrictive like it is in Bangkok, squeezing until he cannot breathe; instead, it is a warm, pleasant embrace, one that envelops him gently and tenderly despite the humidity.
Hints of the storm just passed still linger in the atmosphere. There is a distinct smell of petrichor in the air, and the leaves on the trees lining the path that winds out of the domestic terminal are still dewy, droplets glistening like small pearls in the setting sun. It must have been a wide storm, Kant thinks. The turbulence as they passed through it alone was enough to turn his stomach three times over. Coco had seemed unaffected, of course, nestled in her pale blue carrier, oblivious to Mother Nature’s machinations.
He meets Fern at the airport. She’s holding a big piece of paper with Kant’s name hand-written onto it, with an equally big smile on her face. She looks to be a young girl - if Kant were to guess, probably around twenty-five or twenty-six - and her face is pretty, her features set softly and gently. Her dark hair is twisted into twin braids, which travel to the small of her back and are woven gently with dyed strands of sage green. Her arms are adorned with inked decoration, and a silver stud is nestled in her right nostril. Kant already knows he is going to like her.
They had kept in contact intermittently over the past couple of weeks, discussing flight details and setting up contact with interested clients. Kant had been overwhelmed with how much interest he had received from people in Phuket looking to be tattooed – maybe he’d finally found an excuse to travel more often, he had thought, slyly.
“Kant, right?” she says as he approaches, cat carrier held in one hand and suitcase wheeled in the other. Her Southern accent is even thicker in person than over the phone, Kant notices. “I’m Fern, the one you’ve been chatting to.”
Kant smiles, a little bit of nervous tension leaving his shoulders. “That’s me. Nice to meet you, Fern,” he says, politely. “Thank you so much for everything, by the way.”
“No problem at all. Come this way. I’ve brought my car, if you’re ‘right with me driving you,” she says, as they make their way out of the airport. “I promise I’m a good driver. Or, well, I’m not terrible, anyway.”
Kant grins and tilts his head in affirmation. “Can’t be worse than what I have to put up with in Pattaya,” he replies.
She laughs softly, the windchime tinkling again. When she laughs, her head moves slightly, and it causes her sparkly silver hoop earrings to jingle softly against her neck.
They reach the carpark, and Kant pops his luggage - and Coco - in the back of Fern’s red Astra. The car radio is set on a low volume to a local AM station, and the presenters speak in a smooth, soothing murmur that threatens to send Kant to sleep. When he strains his ears, he can vaguely hear them discussing the storm. A cold snap rising in the east, and storms billowing through to the south-west, maybe. Kant sighs – he can’t seem to escape the bad weather, it seems.
He glances sleepily through the window at the wide, pretty streets of Phuket as Fern starts the car and pulls out onto the road, ignoring the slightly crunchy ticking of the engine that Kant is sure would send Style into hysterics.
Fern must notice his unconcealed interest in the scenery, because she smiles. “You’ll like the strip where the studio is. There’re all sorts of things there: a coffee roaster, a Tom Yum place, a wedding planner, a cute souvenir shop. Oh, and an art studio right next door, so we steal a bunch of art tools from them when they’re not teaching classes. But don’t tell anyone that, ‘cus I’m a little bit scared of the guy who runs the printmaking classes. He’s pretty cute, but kinda scary.”
That’s not the first time he’s heard that description, Kant thinks absently.
“You know,” Kant says, suddenly, turning to look at her. “I’ve been a tattoo artist for five years now, and this is the first time I’ve ever tattooed anywhere other than Chonburi.”
Fern looks back with interest. “Really? Well, we have foreigners come all the time to guest spot. It’s kind of a growing space in Thailand right now. Our studio gets some good business from it, especially with social media now. So, I always try and reach out to good artists, try and steal them away to Phuket,” she grins. “The tourism department should really consider paying me commission.”
Kant snorts. “The tourism department doesn’t even pay their own employees commission.”
“You got a good point there.”
They lapse into a comfortable silence, and Kant watches the scenery of Phuket flash past – the marbled, sapphire blue water that seems to stretch on endlessly, cats slinking around gratuitous street market stalls, colourful tourist villas that look as if they were pulled straight out of a Wes Anderson film. The cornflower blue sky is mostly flecked with wisps of white, but a steady smudge of dark grey is steadily engulfing the horizon. A couple of impatient drops of rain flick onto the front windscreen, and Fern flicks the wipers on with a clunky thunk, thunk.
After around twenty minutes or so, much of which Kant spends desperately fighting to stay awake, Ferns pulls into the garage, which is connected to a smallish, white-lacquered weatherboard building that reminds Kant somewhat of a beach villa. A cute, quaint sign hangs off the front fence, reading ‘Ink Point Tattoo Studio’ in rounded English letters, with the dot in the ‘i’ replaced by an arrowhead.
“It’s not much, but it’s honest work,” Fern grins, as they step out of the car.
“It’s cute,” Kant comments, looking around at the rest of the street. Fern was right, there is indeed an art studio next door – its mosaic stained-glass windows project kaleidoscopic rainbows onto the pavement in the gleam of the unburdened sun. Across the street, there are a couple of residential houses, and Kant can see a child’s bathing suit and a couple of plastic tennis rackets spread out on the grass in one of the front yards. The faint spritz of an automatic sprinkler system is audible from where he’s standing, and he supposes he’s probably in a fairly nice area of Phuket.
“Are we near the ocean?” Kant asks, suddenly, not without some trepidation. If he listens closely enough, which is easy in the quiet of the strip, he can hear the faint sound of seagulls honking in the background. One coastal town down and onto the next, he thinks.
“Yeah, we are. There’s a pier just around the block. It’s a nice spot to watch the boats, actually.”
Fern shows him to the guest room, which is a small room set up in the loft of the tattoo studio. Wooden slats triangulate above his head into a point, which would usually make Kant feel claustrophobic; but strangely, this room feels spacious, comfortable. The contents of the room are fairly conservative - a small double bed with an esoteric palm-tree quilt cover nestles in the corner, and the adjoining wooden bedside table houses a small digital alarm clock and a couple of seashell trinkets. There is no wardrobe, but there seems to be enough room in the bedside drawers for a few shirts and pairs of shorts, Kant supposes. A timber desk and plastic desk chair sit opposite the bed and hung up all over the walls are prints of various flash designs and graphic artwork, all in different styles. Kant resolves himself to contribute something to the wall.
Once he settles in, plugging in his phone charger and placing his clothes into the drawer, he finally takes Coco out of her cat carrier, and she tumbles out into the room, glaring at him for his lack of attention.
“Sorry, Coco,” Kant sighs, apologetic, giving her little head a pat. “I promise I’ll make it up to you later.”
Coco bites him on the hand, clearly not happy with this outcome.
“I deserved that,” Kant admits.
***
Kant purposefully set up his first few clients the day after he arrived in Phuket, so Fern suggests he explore the surrounding streets of Ratsada a little while he has some free time. It’s mid-afternoon, and the sun is peaked in the sky, but the sky is gently darkening with threatening storm clouds.
“I recommend the pier,” she says. “But if you’re gonna go, you should go now. I think the storm is supposed to start up again soon.”
So, he does. He walks down the local road, inviting paths flecked with green shrubs and sprawling vines, and feels a comforting sense of wholeness, a connection with the place that seems inexplicable and difficult to explain. There is not a single soul around, but the permeating sense of loneliness that has managed to nestle itself in the corner of Kant’s heart seems to be suspiciously absent.
Kant makes it to the wharf, and the sound of crashing waves is louder here, where sea foam sprays intermittently onto a bed of rock constructed as a wall separating the sea from humanity. And the debilitating fear, the one that seems to rear its head every time he so much as thinks about the steely depths of the ocean? In this town, with its quiet streets and its boats and its rock wall separating him from the water, he finds the fear is surprisingly absent.
Kant starts to walk toward the quay. And then stops. Freezes. Blinks a couple of times, unsure if what he’s seeing is real, or just some sort of astral projection.
Because leaning against the granite-marbled wall of rock is a short, slight figure. A frame so familiar that Kant can recognise it immediately; thinks he could pick it out if he knew nothing else, even if he were standing at the very end of the earth.
Sparks of the sun project off buoys and cast slivers of blinding light back into the horizon, and Kant has to shield his eyes with one hand to ward against it. He can only see Bison’s back from where he is standing, where he is resting his forearms on a rocky ledge, facing the sparkling glimmer of the pier, but Kant is certain it is him. He can just make out the slightness of Bison’s features from the side of his face, can place the curve of his soft, full lips, his small nose. Can see the lit cigarette dangling loosely between his fingertips, smoke curling lazily into the atmosphere.
Kant hasn’t seen Bison in two years. Hasn’t spoken to him, hasn’t heard from him, hasn’t even seen proof of anything that would confirm his existence, since the day Kant was knocked out in the hospital and tied up in the boot of his own car. He’s let his hair grow longer, Kant notices, and the soft strands curl gently, softly, at the nape of his neck. A single silver hoop earring fitted to his right earlobe catches the light and glints. He looks lighter, somehow, Kant thinks. Happier.
“Bison?” Kant blurts before he even has time to think about it.
And the second that the name leaves his lips, Kant immediately regrets his decision. Because as soon as Kant says the word, he sees the other boy freeze where he’s standing, every single line in his spine going as stiff and rigid as a wooden plank. It is like Bison’s name were an arrowhead dipped in poison, and by speaking it, Kant has sent the point of it flying straight into Bison’s back, paralysing him from the ground up. Kant would almost find it comical if it was in any other circumstance.
Almost as if he didn’t quite believe the sound was real, Bison stands there for half a minute longer, facing the pier. The stormy southern breeze passes unaffected, picking up strands of Bison’s soft hair and rustling it with the wind. Silently, calmly, he puts out his cigarette, twisting the butt onto the top of the rock wall, and turns around to face Kant ever so slowly.
Kant has spent a lot of time thinking about what might happen if he ever came face-to-face with Bison again. A lot of those thoughts happen in dreams, in that hazy space between sleep and wakefulness, and they are usually coloured in violence – red, hot anger, tears, blood, paralysing fear. Sometimes, rarely, they are charged by a crescendo of sexual tension, and those are the ones that leave Kant waking up sweaty, longing, and painfully hard. But the look that Bison gives him as their eyes meet now is nothing like any of that, nothing like Kant has imagined at all – in sleep or otherwise. Because rather than anger, hatred, fear, or even lust, Bison’s face has no clear discernible expression, carries not a single line etched onto it, like he has decided not to waste a single atom of energy or space on Kant.
When Babe came back from university to visit during the semester break, he came armed with dozens of old classic Hollywood movies that he had been assigned to watch in his film studies class. “You have to watch them with me, Phi,” Babe pleaded, and when he turned those excited, starry eyes on him, Kant could do nothing but humour him. And maybe Kant is, deeply in his heart, a true old-school romantic, because he always got sucked into the drama; the charged, fervent romance, the frenzied passion. The star-crossed lovers from rival families, the adulterous husband who manages to rekindle his marriage, the fated couple who reconnect after a decade apart.
And when Kant was feeling particularly desperate, which quite often seemed to happen when he left his thoughts to drift for too long, he imagined meeting Bison again in the same way, their lives intertwining again like the lovers in those films.
But as soon as their eyes meet, Kant immediately disregards everything he’s seen on the screen, disregards everything he imagined every time he allows his thoughts to stray too far. Time does not fall away, a sudden spark of energy does not charge their air, a flame is not lit. There is nothing there at all but a painful, hollow emptiness.
“I’m sorry,” Bison says, and his face shows no hint of emotion, nothing perceptible that Kant could grab on to and interpret. It is carefully, terribly blank. “Do I know you?”
Kant is suddenly lost for words. For a minute, neither of them says a single thing, Bison’s face adhering to that carefully arranged blankness; unfaltering, unwavering. It is eerily quiet, this moment that hangs in the air - so quiet that Kant can hear the gentle rumble of the waves falling over into the shore, can hear persistent cries of seagulls overhead.
It has only been a couple of years since Kant last saw him, but Bison looks a lot different. His hair falls softly, invitingly, framing his face, and curling around his forehead. His eyes are somehow sharper, more intelligent, and a couple of extra lines here and there have only meant that he has grown into his face a little more. It suits him, Kant thinks. He has always thought Bison attractive, and it is bitterly ironic that he has never looked better when he is looking at Kant with so much concealed hatred.
And then, suddenly, a silent challenge. Bison’s face doesn’t flicker, but his head does. He tilts it slightly as if asking, so what now?
And maybe once, Kant would have known how to answer that question. When he could read Bison like a book, could spell out the words in the lines of his body like Kant was reciting a sonnet. But not anymore.
And Bison can tell that Kant does not know - because he always could tell these things. And maybe it’s not disappointment that Kant can pick out in his eyes, because Bison’s eyes do not waver, but it is something almost like it.
Suddenly, as if immune to the gravity of the moment unfolding before it, a seagull lets out a loud, ominous squawk, and lands unceremoniously on the ledge next to where Bison is standing. And perhaps it acts as a harbinger of futility, because as quickly as the moment begins, it passes. Slips away into the shore like the tide, continually being pulled gently backward into the unknown.
“No, I didn’t think so,” Bison answers, before Kant can speak, and his voice is at the same time cold and indifferent. “If you’ll excuse me.”
Then, suddenly, Bison turns on one heel and walks away, back toward the boat ramp. Calmly, like he knows Kant will not follow him. Dares not to.
And Bison is right, because Kant can do nothing but watch him go, vision swimming as if he were observing it all through a marbled window.
He feels a single drop of rain smack onto his forehead, and it rolls down his cheek like a salty tear.