Laugh or Disappear – The First Rule (Part 2)
The door opened again at six o'clock.
Mook had sat on the bed without moving. Not out of fear—that came later—but because moving would have confirmed something she didn't want to confirm yet. As long as she sat still, this was a misunderstanding. A logistical error. A hotel with a bizarre onboarding process. She had come up with three scenarios in which she would laugh about this story tomorrow morning and tell her sister that she had briefly thought she was in a hostage situation.
She didn't believe any of the three.
The woman with the clipboard was no longer there. In her place stood a man, in his mid-thirties, thin, in a white shirt that was too big for him. He spoke Thai with an accent that Mook could not place.
"To eat."
“Aha,” said Mook. “I thought so, this is quite a long briefing.”
The man looked at her expressionlessly. He waited for her to stand up. Mook stood up. She took her bag with her. The man said nothing about it, which she noticed and pushed away, because pushing away comments was now her job.
The hallway was long and lit in yellow. Doors on both sides, all closed. Somewhere behind one of those doors, someone was crying softly, once, and then not again. Mook didn't know if she had really heard it or if her mind was already starting to make up sounds to fit the situation.
The dining hall was larger than she expected. Four long tables, plastic chairs, fluorescent lighting. A buffet with rice and something brown and something green and a large pot of soup that no one was looking at. About forty people were eating. Most were young. Most were quiet. Some were Thai, some were not, and Mook heard snippets of Vietnamese and something that might have been Tagalog, and at a table in the corner, Mandarin was being spoken by three men who were not eating but were watching.
She picked up a tray. She scooped up rice. She chose a table where two girls who looked her age were sitting. She sat down and said "sawasdee," and the girls nodded without looking up and continued eating.
“Tasty,” said Mook to no one in particular, chewing on something that was neither tasty nor not tasty, just food in the most clinical sense of the word. One of the girls looked up for a moment. It was not a laugh, but something moved in her face and then it was gone again.
A television hung on the wall. The sound was off. A Thai news channel, images of soldiers somewhere in the mountains, a map with a red line. Someone had placed a remote control on a high shelf where no one could reach it. Mook looked at it and then looked away.
After dinner, they were divided into groups. Mook heard her name and walked along with seven others, down a hallway, into a room. No sign on the door. Inside stood desks, computers, headsets. A whiteboard with English sentences on it. Hi, my name is Jessica. I work in customer support for a cryptocurrency platform.
The man who received them was different from the first. He had the kind of smile that betrays practice. He spoke good Thai, too well for someone with his face, which meant that he had learned it for his work and that this was his work.
“Welcome,” he said. “You are here to learn. The work is simple. Whoever follows the system will have a good life here. Whoever does not follow the system…”
He didn't finish the sentence. That was the system.
Mook raised her hand.
The man nodded at her.
Sorry, I thought I was applying for a job at a hotel?
Silence. One of the other newcomers, a boy of perhaps nineteen, gasped for breath. The man with the smile tilted his head.
“What's your name?”
“Mook.”
“Mook.” He pronounced her name as if he could taste it. “The track has changed.”
“Aha. And can I go back to my previous job then?”
He laughed. It was a short laugh, neither friendly nor unfriendly. Functional. He turned to the entire group.
First rule: don't ask questions you don't want to hear the answer to.
No one said anything. Neither did Mook.
Second rule: your passport stays with us. For your safety. The border here is difficult. People get lost. With a passport, you get lost faster.
Someone behind Mook exhaled, slowly, as if air were escaping from something that had been held closed for too long.
Third rule: you will be assigned targets. Whoever meets the target gets food, a place to sleep, and phone privileges. Whoever fails to meet the target…”
Again the unfinished sentence. Mook began to understand the structure. It was a language. What was not said was the message.
"To ask?"
No one had any questions.
She was assigned a desk. Computer, headset, a script in English, and a list of names and phone numbers. The names were American. The numbers all started with +1. Next to her sat a girl she hadn't seen during dinner, older, perhaps twenty-five, with dark circles under her eyes that weren't from fatigue but from a kind of permanent state.
“First day?” asked the girl, without looking up.
“Is it that clear?”
You still have your bag.
Mook looked at her bag. She had placed it against the chair leg. The girl shook her head slightly.
They’ll take those tomorrow. Take out now what you want to keep. Something small. Not your phone; they already have that in the system. Something they aren’t looking for.
Mook pretended to rummage in her bag. She took out a small wooden amulet that her grandmother had given her, no bigger than a coin, and put it in her bra. The girl didn't look, but Mook had the feeling that she knew.
"Thank you."
“Don’t say thank you. I tell everyone. Then there are more people with something to hold on to, and that makes it here…” She searched for the word. “A little less empty.”
At the end of the hallway, behind a glass door, someone sat alone. A boy, younger than most of the others. He had taken off his headset and looked at the ceiling as if he were counting something. He didn't see Mook. Mook did see him. She didn't know why her eyes fell on him. Maybe because he was the only one in the whole room who wasn't pretending.
Then he turned his head, just for a moment, and their gazes met through the glass. He did not look away. He did not look friendly. He looked as if he were registering something and would look it up later.
Mook looked back at her screen.
Her new name appeared on the screen.
* * *
Previously published in this series:
Laugh or Disappear – A New Story by Hans in 10 parts
Laugh or Disappear – The First Rule (Part 1)
About this blogger
- His name is Hans Vredevoort from Amsterdam (pun intended), born in 1956, and he has never written stories before, but he does have technical articles and a book to his name from 2012 about the private cloud. After studying English literature at Utrecht University in the early eighties, he ended up in the IT world. After all, there were no jobs for a young academic in those years. He developed into a specialist in the field of IT infrastructures and Microsoft software. In 2017, however, he decided he had had enough, quit his job, divorced his Dutch wife, sold the house, and bought a ticket to Bangkok. Earlier that year, he had been in Bangkok to give training to HP engineers and had run into a stunning Thai woman that week. From that moment on, part 2 of his life was clearly in his sights. A few years later, he was married to that same Thai woman, and they moved into a new home in a quiet village on the southern flank of Udon Thani. One with a solid fiber optic connection, mind you.
