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“You said I killed you—haunt me, then! [...] Be with me always-take any form-drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!”
― Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
***
He thinks he was in Tankhun’s rooms when they were told, but maybe he was somewhere else. Everything is a blur—Kinn and Porsche coming to find them with a team of bodyguards. The sinking feeling in his chest at their faces. The dried tear tracks on Kinn’s cheeks.
Tankhun laughed at first, thinking it was a joke. He couldn’t really be dead. Tankhun teased him about that just last week, had always teased him. You aren’t dead yet? Kinn’s crumpled face, his shaking shoulders cutting off Tankhun’s laughter. Tankhun collapses onto the rug with an animalistic howl. There is a cacophony of gasps from the surrounding guards who reach out for him in unison.
Chay wonders if this is how it feels to suffocate. Porsche holds him as he gasps for breath. He can’t form words. He can’t form thoughts. Only Kim Kim Kim. He doesn’t know what happened. He doesn’t think he wants to. He knows whose fault it ultimately is and knows just as well that there is nothing he can do about that.
If it were you, Kim would get revenge, a voice whispers at the back of his mind.
But Porchay doesn’t know how.
Sometimes he sits with Kinn and Porsche, huddled close, doing nothing. They speak to each other, but Chay remains quiet. Neither of them seem to notice the random pockets of cold, the shuffling sounds when items shift on the nearby shelves.
He wonders if he’s going crazy.
Porsche keeps watching him with a puzzled expression. He doesn’t understand the depth of Chay’s grief but seems hesitant to ask what exactly Kim was to him.
Kinn tries to force himself to robot on, but he doesn’t actually manage it. His hands shake as he tosses back glass after glass of amber booze. Chay hates the taste, but he can understand the impulse. The need to be as numb as possible.
Sometimes he wonders how Porsche managed this awful grief as such a small child, how Kinn and Tanhun and Kim did when they lost their mother.
“Does this feeling ever go away?” he asks out of the blue, into the silence.
“No,” Kinn answers, regretful. The truth is preferred, no matter how painful. “But it does get smaller. Easier to breathe around.”
He tries to sleep in his room, but feels too watched. No amount of sweaters and hot showers can chase away his chills. When he does manage to drift off for a moment here and there, he dreams of tinny music, the static of a badly tuned radio. It’s as though it’s trying to come through, but he’s not in quite the right place to catch the signal.
And so he has taken to lying with Tankhun in his enormous bed for hours—crying, sleeping, crying some more. He pretends not to notice the extra presence hovering, the feel of cold breath against his neck. Often when he wakes he’s covered in extra blankets. He’s sure Tankhun didn’t have the presence of mind to pull them over him.
Arm comes in on one such afternoon and summons them for a meeting. He’s taken over appointments with Kim’s private attorneys so that Kinn doesn’t have to set aside his own pain. He has to do that so often these days; in this situation it just doesn’t seem right.
In Kinn’s rooms, Porsche lurks near the back, eager to rush to Chay’s side, to Kinn’s. To anyone who shows signs of needing him. Chay stares into space, his eyes stinging with the dryness of having shed lakes of tears. His throat aches. His hands shake when he tries to sip from the glass of water Pol hands him.
Arm fills them in on what the attorneys advised, handing papers to Kinn about land holdings and stocks and bank accounts and safe deposit boxes and royalties. Chay mostly tunes it out and focuses on trying to drink his water. He’s so parched and it’s so cold. He wonders, idly, how long it has been since he ate something. His hands are awfully shaky.
But then he hears his name. His name in amongst legal jargon and other official gobbledegook. His name.
I hereby leave my entire estate—
Pichaya Kittisawat
He feels the air move around him, all warmth sucked from the space. Tears miraculously appear in the dry, burning desert that used to be his eyes. He cracks. “ Why? ”
Around him the faces of the others ask the same question.
The presence at his side doesn’t answer. It only does things for him when they’re alone. He hasn’t allowed himself to be alone in days.
On the first day of the third week, Porsche takes Chay to Kim’s apartment. It’s his apartment now, according to Kim’s will. Lawyers sent him a mountain of documents to sign. He’d scribbled his name a hundred times, not reading any of the words.
It felt wrong.
“Take it,” Kinn told him. “He wanted you to have it.”
And so Chay does.
“I’d like to be alone,” he tells Porsche, who hesitates. “Really, hia. I think I need it.”
Porsche is reluctant, but he goes. He says he’ll stay with the bodyguards down the hall.
After he’s gone, Chay stands in the living area and stares into space, just trying to breathe. “Kim?” he whispers. A soft breeze ruffles his hair. The windows are closed and there are no nearby vents.
“I’m going to look through all your stuff now,” Chay says to the silence. “You gave it to me, so you aren’t allowed to be mad.”
Regardless of his threat, Chay finds he can’t bring himself to look through anything. He goes inside to Kim’s bedroom, walks into his palatial closet. The thought of touching his clothes, his shoes, his jewellery makes Chay want to weep. He’s too tired for that. He pulls back the covers of the bed and climbs between them. The pillows don’t smell of Kim like he’d hoped. They don’t smell of anything at all.
In his dream, Kim sits on the edge of the mattress, one leg crossed over the other, his foot bouncing to some unheard melody. His thin fingers follow a meandering trail over Chay’s back, tickling his sides, whispering along his spine.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I wanted to see you again. I wanted to tell you in person.”
You’re telling me in person now, Chay thinks. He can’t speak. You’re asleep, he tells himself.
Kim must be able to read his mind, because he sighs. “If only,” he says. His tracing fingers pull away, leaving behind a chill. “I’ll let you rest.”
Music threads through his subconscious. A classic lullaby—Chopin, or maybe Brahms. It’s clear now, tuned to the right frequency.
When he wakes the air is frigid. There is a soft blanket he’s never seen before tucked tightly around his shoulders.
The music hadn’t been a dream, it plays even still. Heart pounding, Chay slips from the bed. He walks slowly down the hall. The melody cuts off abruptly when he turns the corner, a clanging of keys.
Staring at the now silent piano, Chay takes his phone out of his pocket to text Porsche.
i’m staying the night you go home to p’kinn
You sure?
yes
Chay sits on the hard leather sofa and waits.
He waits so long in silence. Kim never did as he expected, so why would he start now?
There are streaming services programmed into the TV; Chay gets up with a sigh and searches a drawer underneath for the remote.
Instead of the remote there is a small black box. Feeling like he’s snooping, he lifts the top. To find his own face smiling up at him from inside.
He lets out a long breath. His own face over and over, and a few times, Kim’s. His static smile is like a stab in the heart.
“You kept…” he wonders aloud. He flips through the photos, the ticket stubs, the receipts. Kim kept them all. Everything they’d done together. He’d hidden them in a fancy box and what? Wept over them? Regretted his actions? Laughed at Chay for being so stupid?
Was it all bullshit? Was Kim that great of an actor? Why the fuck had he broken Chay’s heart otherwise?
Chay throws the photos back into the box and jumps to his feet.
“Why?” he yells at the air. “If it was all bullshit, then why did you keep those, why did you send the song? If it was bullshit, why did you leave me everything? Kim! What the fuck am I supposed to do? I’ll never know why, and it’s going to drive me crazy! Why did you do it? Did you love me, did you feel guilty? What the fuck were you thinking?”
There is a soft whoosh of warning. Chay barely notices it, barely makes it out over his own sobbing, the thundering of his heart. A cabinet door bangs open, hinges bouncing, and a fluttering fills the room. Sheaves of note paper pour from within, dancing and swirling about as though caught in a gale force wind.
Chay stares, heart in his throat, as the storm of paper quiets. The pieces float to the floor, landing in a patchwork all around him. He goes to his knees and picks up the nearest one with shaking hands.
On it: Porchay. Porchay. Porchay. His name written over and over again in Kim’s messy script. Why can’t I say I love you? I’ve never said it to anyone before. The words get caught in my throat even when I’m alone. I’m too fucked up for you anyway.
Panting for breath, he grabs another paper. There are lyrics, bits of prose. It’s all about him.
He grabs another, and another. More of the same.
I can’t be WIK without you. Maybe I could only be WIK because you were always there, even when I didn’t know?
Chay lets loose a shuddering sob, his shoulders shaking. He chokes on his cries, he gasps for breath.
“Kim. Why?”
Why didn’t Chay reach out to him after the song? He wanted to. He was too afraid. What would have happened? Maybe Kim wouldn’t have gone out that day, maybe he would have been safe here with Chay?
Behind him, the same delicate lullaby begins to play on the piano.
Chay turns slowly, afraid any sudden movement will chase him away. The melody changes, but doesn’t stop. He can see the keys depressing on their own. The air turns frigid.
He crawls across the room, lies on the floor beneath the piano. He watches the pedals move next to him, feels the reverberation thrum through his body.
“We can just stay here,” he whispers. “Together.”
The music stops, but the chill remains. Chay shivers. “You’ll stay with me, won’t you phi?”
A single clear note. Yes.
A few more notes, discordant.
“I loved you,” Chay whispers.
An expanse of cold settles over him, the epicentre a weight against his lips.
I love you.