Screw the Afterlife

I placed this order for a whole bunch of shirts in some shirt factory in bangkok last february. I still haven't received the shipment until now for almost six months but I wasn't worried about the whole transaction, maybe a bit but not as much as hell because I had been doing business with this shirt factory for a decade that it should be more than enough time to be trusting somebody. Once though they did forget to send my shipment because it got mixed up at their warehouse storeroom floor and it stayed there for so many months until I found it myself, when I thought the whole goddam thing got lost in transit or out in the sea, on another occasion too they even sent everything before I made my payment. This time though I paid for everything already six months ago.

They haven't replied to my email too but I think it was fine because when they're in full production they can't reply to my email for months, I did try calling them up too but some recording kept singing me the song of their people which I didn't knew if it was singing about going to hell.

It just so happens my parents were on their way to the tiger's nest

It's kind of like the hidden mountain temple in the movies where they taught batman how to beat up other people that started his whole disturbed vigilante career. Batmen weren't the main attraction at the place though, my parents are just trying to fill their postcard bucketlist before they die out. Anyway they dropped by bangkok for a day and I thought I'd ask my old man to drop by their office and knock a reminder in case they forgot about the whole thing for so long already, but my old man was surprised to see a new bunch of people were using their office space and they said that the last people renting the place just vanished like con artists without a trace.

I swear I didn't see this coming because like I said I have been doing business with the runcheang couple for a decade (that's how their family names goes, just in case you know them tell them I'm looking for them real badly), they are hindus whom I thought their karma afterlife scared the hell out of them form doing really bad things, but I guess they didn't believe in an afterlife crap anymore and better get the most out of life with only the law to run away from. Not like christians that can go on believing in a better afterlife even after doing something really bad to others, all they have to do is pray like mad for forgiveness and imagine a godly voice whispering to them that's good enough and you can go to heaven after you die, while those they did bad things to will think otherwise that these bad people will still go to hell, but both of them will just die with their consciousness just vanishing into oblivion without anybody going anywhere at all.

Anyway I ruined my days that soon followed, I couldn't do much though, I'm here and they're across the south china sea or someplace else running from the law. But after my parents came back from the batman school in the mountains and my old man said that I should go to bangkok and see things for myself, and I needed a break too.

I flew to bangkok last week, the flight radio I had on my plane seat had a whole bee gees album which was great because I had something to listen over and over the whole flying time. Then I thought I'd play some word puzzle game on the plane seat screen with the music but when I started the game, the bee gees stopped singing and the whole screen crashed and went blank, then I remembered that the same thing happened months ago when I tried to run both the radio and a game on my seat altogether, which I forgot I swore I shouldn't be doing. Maybe I could get the thing running if I restarted the whole plane which is a bad idea to ask from the pilot while mid air. Hell the only book I had 'the curious incident of the dog in the night time' I left up in my bag in the ceiling apartment, so all I ever saw was clouds clouds and goddam clouds for more than two hours.

When I got to bangkok I went asking these other shirt factories about the runcheangs because I felt these other rivals knew the most about what happened to them, I already met these rival shirt factories before because sometimes I also pass on small job orders to them with this premonition that someday if something happens to the runcheangs, I'd still have other shirt factories to run next to, and by now everything just went into plan. This is a rundown of what I got from their own rivals: It all happened right after songkran (its some holiday they have for a hindu john the baptist or something like that, where everybody goes out on the streets splashing the daylights out of everybody with water). When everybody went back to work after the holidays, they began to notice that the runcheang couple's office had been closed for days, thinking somebody must have splashed the hell out of them to drive them sick for weeks. Then the landlord came for rent dues and broke the locks to the door to find out the goddam place empty, without any dead bodies on the floor though. People tried to find them but they already vanished with all the money they took and they further found out that the runcheang fugitives also had problems with the bank, I couldn't make out what it was because all I heard clearly from what they were saying were the words bank, financial, gone and swag, though I know swag got nothing to do with it but you could hear the goddam word being said once in a while in a foreign language.

I didn't have plans to pursue them, I was a long way from home and where I couldn't say crap to almost anybody without pointing or talking with my hands and where beer can only be bought after five in the afternoon. Besides the other thing I wanted to do was get some other shirt factory to take over that job order I had been waiting for half a year already. That same day I got to 7-11 after five in the afternoon to get my load of beer, and you could see people coming out of the shop opening their beers and sitting right away at the sidewalk to drink it, like they have been waiting for five o clock in the afternoon to strike, because having beers starting at only at five in the afternoon is goddam ridiculous. I just drank a bottle while looking out at my hotel window down into the streets, it was on the 14th, 15th, 16th or 17th floor I think but I was sure it was a very high floor, and down below you could see a lot of taxi cabs screwing traffic but it was goddam cute because their taxi cabs came in light colors of green, pink, lilac and other girly shade and it made you feel better seeing all these colors scramble on the road at rush hour over beer. Then from across the street I could see a small dental clinic on a lower floor than mine, and I could tell it was a dental clinic because it had a lighted tooth sign outside its own window, and the only trade you could have from having a tooth sign is being a dentist, or selling toothpastes and toothbrushes, or selling broken teeth in bulk if tooth fairies existed and lined up at the place.         when I get back to manila but all I got inside my bag going back home was newspapers, instant noodles and four cucumbers, I didn't know what to put inside my bag. I swear I wanted to but I didn't anyway.t