The Night Train

The Night Train

By Lavie Tidhar

(To read full story, read The Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology, 2011 Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois).

An assassin can take many shapes. It could be the sweet old lady carrying two perfectly balanced baskets of woven bamboo over her shoulders, each basket filled with sweet addictive fried Vietnamese bananas. It could be the dapper K-pop starlet with her entourage, ostensibly here to rough it up a bit for the hovering cameras. It could be the couple of French backpackers – he with long thinning silver hair and a compressed-data cigarette between his lips, she with a new face courtesy of Soi Cowboy’s front-and-back street cosmetic surgeries – baby-doll face, but the hands never lie and the hands showed her true age, in the lines etched there, the drying of the skin, the quick-bitten nails polished a cheap red –.

An assassin could be anyone. A Yankee rich-kid on a retro-trip across Asia, reading Air America or Neuromancer inn a genuine reproduction 1984 POD-paperback; it could be the courteous policeman helping a pretty young Lao girl with her luggage; it could be the girl herself – an Issan farmers-daughter exported to Bangkok in a century-long tradition, body augmented with vibratory vaginal inserts, perfect audio/visual-to-expert, always-on record, a carefully tended Louis Wu habit and an as-carefully tended retirement plan – make enough money, get back home to Issan was bigfalla mama, open up a bar/hotel/bookshop and spend your days on the Mekong, waxing lyrical about the good old days, listening to Thai pop and K-pop and Nuevo Kwasa-Kwasa, growing misty-eyed nostalgic…

Could be anyone. She waited for the Old Man to arrive. The trains in Hua Lampong never left on time.

Her name before, or after, doesn’t matter. They used to call her Mulan Rouge, which was a silly name, but the farangs loved it. Mulan Rouge, when she was still working Soi Cowboy, on the stage, on her knees or hands-and-knees, but seldom on her back – earning the money for the operation that would rescue her from that boy’s body and make her what she truly was, which was katoi.

Woman looking sideways. They call it the third sex, in Thailand. But she always considered herself, simply, a woman (Lavie Tidhor). Illustration © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)