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graveyardbirds · 7 years ago

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Forsakers

(Construction workers demolishing skyscrapers in a future Kuala Lumpur ruined by climate change are pitted against a deadly enemy and each other.)

Publication history: “Forsakers: in HEAT: A Southeast Asian Anthology by Fixi Novo (2016)   Forsakers

Under Kuala Lumpur’s zinc alloy sky, Serik had a captive audience in birds and men. Three falcons perched on a rusty overhead I-beam watched him in the afternoon heat – while the foreman and other demolition workers laid watch on him watching the falcons.

“Better than World Cup!” Omar proclaimed as he took bets from the group gathered on the opposite rooftop. He collected the cigarettes and meal vouchers and stuffed them into his hip-pouch. The grand prize was a carton of Marlboro Lights.

Omar still operated out of a habit left over from working the golf and race courses in Doha and Dubai. He had been a caddy and a camel rider, until androids and drones replaced him. Sensing the men’s scrutiny, the falcons squawked and flapped their wings every few seconds. Most were female birds, captured and trained for their bigger talons. If they attack the men, they go for the eyes.

Appraising the situation, Serik raised his gloved fist and yelled, “Hoy!” The falcons scattered and dispersed through the wide spaces in the scaffolding. But it was not the sound of Serik’s voice that startled them. The foreman took off his visors and pointed to a larger bird circling in the warm updrafts rising from the concrete.

Kantubit, a two-year- old female golden eagle trained by Serik, swooped down and intercepted a falcon in mid-flight before returning to Serik. She deposited the now lifeless falcon at his feet and landed on his outstretched forearm. Serik looped the leash over her neck. He had cleared the falcons for the day. Now scared away, there was no need to send Kantubit after the others. Omar sighed as he noted the outcome in his crumpled exercise book: none of the men had bet on the killing of one falcon. The team was now free to enter the gutted office tower block and continue stripping it.

“Ignore the bodies,” the foreman always instructed them, but it was unnecessary. In order to do their jobs, the workers had gone numb inside. Some of the newer team members vomited over the ledge at the sight of the victims: other demolition workers.

“Damned hawks,” the foreman spat.

“Not hawks,” Serik corrected the foreman. “The small bird is falcon. Shumkar-”

“All I need to know is how many of them and where they are,” he cut Serik off, before barking orders to the crew via megaphone.

“Show’s over. Cepatlah! You guys think you’re on Discovery Channel?”

The Indonesian crew had nicknamed the foreman ‘Tuan Badak’. As Serik watched him walk off the demolition site, he thought, More like a bulldozer than an old rhinoceros.

After evening prayers, Omar recalled camel racing in Dubai, while Kuala Lumpur lay in darkness below and the workers sat on the roof of the office tower.

“Whoosh!” Omar supplied his own sound effects, as he acted out a camel race, pumping his arms to mimic the remotely controlled plastic whips attached to robot jockeys’ motors. Serik scanned the dark sky for Kantubit.  Back home, Serik’s golden eagle hunted with him for three years before he released her. After a successful hunt, he brought the wolf or fox to his grandmother, where she prepared the pelt. He took the anklets and jesses off the eagle’s feet and poured a bowl of milk in front of her as a sign of gratitude.

“You’re special. Saving our lives everyday. Respect, my brother!” Omar slapped Serik’s shoulder. Serik felt that anyone who owed Omar money and a packet of cigarettes was his ‘brother’.

“I am just berkutchi, a hunter.” Serik turned his eyes up to the stars. Orion winked at the city through the wispy haze. He suddenly craved shubat, although he had disliked the sour fermented camel’s milk as a child. Meat roasting in a nearby oil drum stirred up longings for manti dumplings filled with ground lamb.

Omar emptied a packet of oral re-hydration salts into his water flask and said, “We need a little ‘special’ sometimes or we all go crazy at work. Just like Erxat.”

Serik frowned at the memory and held out his hand for a cigarette. Omar slipped Serik two, but he always tucked the extra stick back into Omar’s pouch. It was their little routine.  #

When Serik was a boy, his elder brother fell off his horse and gored his head. The wound swelled up like a goat’s infected bladder by the time the red-cheeked shayki, a wandering shaman, entered their yurta. As the shayki performed tsat-tsah incantations, his mother clutched her hands over her chest, knelt and lowered her forehead to the parched grass and prayed to Tengri, the sky god. Three nights passed until he opened his eyes.

Serik never asked his mother what she prayed for in exchange for his brother’s life. She died when the Shining Dust blew from the ashes of Lake Balkhash, and rotted her lungs and what remained of the family’s herds. His brother survived for two more summers working in Nepal. He took a bus and crossed the border into Mongolia. On Zaisan Hill overlooking Ulaanbaatar, a tent city gang stabbed him for his stash of yarchagumba, the rare and highly prized cordyceps fungus.

His mother had made a trade with the spirits, exchanging Serik’s fortune for an extra two years of his brother’s life. Broken early, the rest of his brother’s time on Earth was like a limb not set right, and finally amputated on Zaisan Hill. Serik remembered him being more useless than a hunting dog – too lazy to holler foxes and wild cats from their hiding places, while Serik beat and threw stones to drive out prey.

Serik seized the opportunity to work in Malaysia. New fracking and mining money had built most of the newer cities in Kazakhstan, but those agencies in Astana only hired young men. Yet destruction was as important as construction; the agency told Serik that older men were more suited for demolition work.

When Serik and Erxat, a 33-year-old from Almaty, arrived at the rundown Kuala Lumpur International Airport terminal a guide shunted them into a waiting van. Through the grilled windows, Serik watched the highways transmute into abandoned office towers and sprawling malls. Sentimental nostalgia on behalf of the real estate moguls delayed the tearing down of some buildings in Kuala Lumpur.

Before he left, Serik promised his fiancée, Guli, that he would be home in time to celebrate Nowruz. That was six months ago. His passport was still with the agent in Kuala Lumpur, who promised the workers new digital ones from their respective embassies when they paid off travel expenses and other debts. That was also six months ago.

Erxat had fared worse than Serik. A clerical error caused the agency to mistakenly list him as deceased. When he finally went home a year later, his wife had screamed at him, outside what was to have been their yurta, “Why didn’t you stay dead? I don’t have to give back our compensation payment!”

Erxat returned to Kuala Lumpur, but his work slipped. The explosives team found him high on heroin under a bridge near Masjid Jamek. In hospital, Serik observed that Erxat had more stab marks than his brother. He asked Erxat if he had resolved matters with his wife; he shrugged and tried to give Serik his dented wedding ring. Within a week, Omar and two Bangladeshis found Erxat at the base of an electrical pylon, not picked clean like other animals. As if the shumkar were contemptuous of easy prey.

“Erxat is free,” Serik said to Omar on the office roof by way of consolation, but it was not quite true. Erxat had obtained release. It was not the same as freedom, but better than nothing.

The heat was never good for work. All morning, men labored up and down the fire escape, hacking away at remaining doors and plaster walls with fire axes. Other men wielded oxyacetylene torches to cut through steel braces on each story, as a precursor to using other wrecking equipment.

On the lookout for more falcons, Serik remained on the roof. Kantubit spread her black primary feathers and dug her talons into the thick glove on his forearm.

“Patience,” he chided her. The falcons didn’t attack in the late afternoon, preferring to strike at dusk.

Silence enveloped the remaining steel and glass high-rises around the office tower. Shamans always said everything was alive. Serik wondered if buildings had their own spirits. If people died during demolition, were their ghosts added to the myriad?

Serik’s childhood memories resurfaced sometimes, as hunts and treks across the Kazakh Steppe at sunrise.

“Humans keep trying to fly higher than their Creator,” Grandfather used to observe every time he saw distant orange flares of space shuttles being launched from sites on the horizon.

“It’s progress,” Serik’s father would shrug. “Not when they start changing the weather. These recent late winters are bad for our herds.” For Serik, to recall what it was like in the past was pointless. He had only looked to the future, but progress was not development. Humans also tried out-creating their Creator. These shumkar were not falcons but demons created in the name of ‘progress’.

Around the world, cities with large pigeon populations began using falcons for pest control. Kuala Lumpur had been no different, until rich urbanites and the upper-middle class started taking up falconry for sport. Smuggling into Malaysia began when the demand for wild birds increased; they were deemed better hunters than those raised in captivity. Serik had heard of the black market in Kazakhstan, but could never believe it: smuggling eggs in ice boxes or tranquilized birds of prey over the border to Xinjiang, China.

Stress destroyed their immune systems, made the birds vulnerable to opportunistic pathogens. For the smuggled raptors, one was a certain fungus called aspergillus fumigatus, attacking the bird’s defenses and spreading throughout the respiratory system. One strain of the fungus mutated, not only infecting the shumkars’ lungs but also their brains and behavior, making them more aggressive.

During a day off, he and Nilam, a Bangladeshi engineering graduate from Dhaka, were exploring an abandoned bungalow in the Bangsar suburb, in the hope of salvaging remnants of the previous occupants’ lives. Serik found stacks of brochures extolling vacation getaways and eco-refuges off the coast of Terengganu. He kept one brochure because it had photos of Malaysian white-bellied sea eagles nesting in one of these places.

“Listen,” said Nilam, and both men heard flapping and piteous cries coming from the basement. They found a golden eagle chained to a perch in the darkened room. Her feet had been bound with plastic cable ties that cut into her feet, and the toes were swollen with infection. When Serik felt her flight muscles, they were soft. There was no telling how long she had been in her prison.

Serik wrapped the eagle in a tarpaulin cloth and took her back to the accommodation. Tuan Badak exploded with rage when Serik took the eagle into his office the next day but it did not matter. Serik told him of his skills as a berkutchi back in Kazakhstan and of a new plan for clearing condemned buildings of shumkar. Tuan Badak listened. The constant loss of workers looked bad on his track record.

Kantubit took off from Serik’s arm, soaring up into the twilight. Given her condition, Serik would have to release her soon. For her age she should not be ill, but something didn’t sound right in her lungs. Serik feared her ordeal had permanently weakened her, despite his painstaking care and nursing.

A large, matte black dragonfly hovered at the sixth and seventh levels, darting low before ascending high. Serik and Omar heard Tuan Badak laugh for the first time since they met him.

“Tuan Badak has a new toy,” remarked Nilam over the walkie-talkie.

“Copy,” replied Serik with disdain. An eagle could outmaneuver any drone because its brain made continuous adjustments in flight and speed.

“Serik! See me in my office after work!” Tuan Badak’s voice nearly broke the walkie-talkie loudspeaker. “Copy,” sighed Serik.

In the laboring air-conditioning of Tuan Badak’s office, Serik decided that if he was a shumkar, he would attack the foreman the same way as the other falcons: anchor talons to the shoulders and peck out his oily eyes, while simultaneously shitting in the mouth to add insult to injury.

“Your eagle – get rid of it,” said Tuan Badak, leaning back in his worn, neoprene-cushioned chair.

“But you said…?”

“That was then, this is now. More drones will be coming tomorrow.”

Serik kept quiet, trying to think of a reply to this new information. Tuan Badak mistook it for obstinacy.

“Get rid of your eagle now. Or find another job.” The screen door slammed shut as Serik strode out.

After lunch break, Omar glimpsed Serik as he disappeared into the office tower lobby, running past workers stepping off a bus.

“I know what Boss Badak said to you!”  “You can’t help me!” Serik replied, waiting for the lift to take him to the rooftop.

“There’s always a way.” said Omar.

“You’re right,” Serik nodded as both of them got into the lift, “I must let her go now.”

A message alert pinged in Omar’s pocket. He took out his phone and read the SMS from Nilam.

“Brother, don’t go up to the roof. Please.” Omar’s voice wavered.

Serik heard gunshots as the lift opened. As if Tengri was splitting the sky in half.

Serik scrambled on to the roof, searching for Kantubit. He saw eagle feathers – brown, white and black – scattered on the cement floor. Nilam was taking cover behind an exhaust vent.

“Tuan Badak now gone amok!” Nilam muttered as he shielded his face from the sun and possible incoming bullets. When Nilam saw the rage in Serik’s eyes he realized that fury was not necessarily explosive; it can be endothermic and drain the heat from the surroundings.

The foreman was on the roof, reloading a pump-action shotgun.  “Hoy!” cried Serik, clenching his fists.

The foreman spun around and did not lower the gun. “I told you to get rid of the eagle! I always hate it when my men don’t listen!”

Serik approached him, hoping that a worker’s serious injury or even death on the job would get Tuan Badak arrested. No such effect: a bullet missed Serik and ricocheted off the exhaust vent.

Kantubit’s body lay on the ledge. Her leash was still around her neck and the white secondary feathers of her wings were soaked with blood. Serik scooped her up and cradled her under his arm.

“Get off my site!” roared Tuan Badak in disgust.

Serik took hold of Kantubit’s leash and swung her body at the foreman. In death, she was still majestic as her wings spread out to full breadth. Tuan Badak’s face turned pale as he backed away from Serik. He tugged again and aimed the eagle like a sling. The foreman screamed as Kantubit’s legs jerked forward and her talons scratched his face.

Omar and Nilam did not see Tuan Badak fall off the roof, but they heard his long scream, distorted and getting fainter as he neared the ground below. Both men heard a final muffled thump and a metallic clanking as the body landed on a pile of steel pipes and cables.

All work on the site ceased. Serik stood on the ledge and Nilam yanked him back.

“Don’t let them see you!”

Omar tried to release Serik’s white-knuckled grip on Kantubit’s leash, but the fingers refused to budge.

“Leave now,” advised Omar.

Nilam shoved Serik towards the fire escape door on the roof. Omar reached into his hip-pouch and took out a packet of cigarettes, oral rehydration salts, and a wad of notes. He handed the items to Serik and said, “This is my ‘special’ for you, brother. Now go!”  # Running down the stairs, Serik wrapped Kantubit in his jacket. Descending floor after floor, he suddenly remembered the brochure with photos of the place of the white-bellied sea eagles.

According to the information on its pages, Terengganu was only a short bus journey out of Kuala Lumpur. With any luck, he would get to bury Kantubit at sea and find some sanctuary before trying to return home.

Sanctuary was not freedom, but for Kantubit, Serik was willing to find a sense of belonging.

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