On the 28th of July we sat above a fall of Đa Viêng, on a huge tree trunk that chance had dropped like a chopstick across the valley. Spiders with green-lined bellies rewove their webs in its brittle roots and T- sat and told stories.
A man was taking the buffalo for the sacrifice at a wedding feast but rested with it tethered near a pool in the stream. Now this pool was one where the Aul were known to walk and the man never arrived at the wedding. Many years later, though, some boys were seen leading a buffalo through the mist and wild taro of that same stream. The boys' faces were white and their hair was silver but something of the features reminded the watchers of that missing man.
T- was the head of his village though he was almost exactly my age. In fact he looked younger still with his slight frame and hint of moustache, his white bucket-hat and football shirt. Next to him, I felt positively robust but also clumsy. In comparison to his friend B-, whose eyes were always hooded, T- always seemed to seek connection. One time, when we were chatting in camp about spirits he asked me straight out: "Do people where you're from believe?"
I answered him as I thought good with: "Some believe, some do not and some don't know," then, before he said anything else: "and I don't know." That gave me a moment's relief at having said the right thing and then I felt the light of his intelligence swinging away, disappointed. In this case I don’t think it was disappointment at my frustrating claim that we Westerners were complicated, I really think he was looking for a connection, or maybe even some kind of alliance. Agnostics aren't useful allies for anyone.
I wonder often what T- is doing now. Did he get bloated and dulled yet by his head-man's job? Did he rise up the rankings, make deals with the loggers? Or is he still earnest and thereby presumably sidelined? Or did I ever really understand anything about his life in the first place? He might have been the closest I came to making a friend among the Katu but that isn't saying very much.
It wasn't them, it was me.
It seemed to me there was too much of a gulf between us. For years after, I got hit by bolts of guilt from a time when we sat in T-'s unbuilt kitchen after getting back from the forest. He handed out beers with such good humour as we sat on plastic stools in the mud. Myself, a student-translator and a bunch of his friends. Raw planks were stacked around us and I realized that he had paused the building work to take us to the forest. We'd sprung it on him suddenly, of course and whether it was more obligation or more opportunity to him, I don't know. The chickens wandered through and his little daughter went toddling after them; hunks of polystyrene rolled in. One man told me about his profitable sideline catching endangered eels. I knew the river would soon be dammed and thought I might as well tell him to go for it: get the last ones before they are all shredded anyway and do it with my blessing. I didn't, of course; it wouldn't have been appropriate. I worried too much about what would have been appropriate. I was really a bit of a prig.
I knew it was unfair, though. I think I couldn't get a new kitchen in our old house because I kept remembering T-'s and how happy he seemed with neither roof or foundations in place yet and the storms always heavy in the hills. It was grim there when it was drafty in winter and the summer, of course, was meltingly hot. So I felt bad about it, said nothing, and carried on stubbornly organizing field trips and asking questions about saola. In Paris, I heard some anthropologists talking about their research and their activist work and felt weak and useless. In my defence, I'd have been out of the country on my ear if in an instant if I'd tried anything resembling activist work myself.
Who are the Aul that walk by the water? I think it's fair to say that, to the extent the 'm'rieng' are 'vampires', the Aul are obviously fairies. Of course that begs the question: 'well what extent is that?' Perhaps I have to come back to that one. The other, more pressing question for me right now is: 'you let the saola be snared out from these valleys and the names of the khe have been numbered out. We are clearly now in a planetary mass extinction event and whatever '-cene' we think we're in, there's a new '-zoic' on its way. In an England whose oaks-on-the edge are scorched red by that summer, when you should be curling-up at the edges yourself you sit at your desk with a teacup and notebook and think about fairies?'
An old friend once taught philosophy in the school that my son now attends. His students used to give 'fairies in the bottom of the garden' as their stock ridiculous proposition which annoyed him. "Perfectly reasonable proposition," he'd say, with a fringe of bluster. Which, 10 or so years ago, still seemed like quite an exotic thing to say. When I was young, if you believed in ghosts, or UFOs, or for that matter in creationism or homeopathy, it meant you had some screws loose. If you thought climate change would be burning English oaks in just decades then perhaps you needed to calm down a bit. But if you said you believed in fairies, you were probably just trying to attract attention. No-one actually believes in fairies.
Now, well... OK, the way I was trained, you can't possibly trust anyone who doesn't have a null hypothesis. If you can't even ask the question "is all this just bullshit?" then obviously the Kool Aid's in your blood. I don't think my attitude's changed much in that regard and I don't think that I could change it even if I were sure I wanted to. If I can't even consider the option that T-'s belief in spirits was useless nonsense, then I'm a broken trumpet, useless nonsense myself. What has changed is that I've belatedly noticed that nothing is 'null' for everyone. T-'s starting position is different from my own.
Does that makes fairies something one could take seriously? I've been trying to understand what other people think about it. Perhaps there are answers to the question that I don't even know exist. The answers I'm aware of are:
What? No. Of course not.
Why should I take them seriously?
They're a way of talking about processes, ecological or psychological or both.
They might not be real but their stories still help.
They are real for some people because we live in distinct (but warring) worlds.
If their stories help you, then they are real for you.
We might as well assume so because there's no hope otherwise.
It doesn't matter if they're real, it matters whose side you're on.
Why shouldn't I take them seriously?
Yes.
Since Paris, I've been trying to get my head around the ones in the middle that 10 seems, from a distance, like a refuge. Wouldn't it be easier to say “you know what? It's not complicated. I believe in fairies"? Alright maybe not being able to answer the question is part of what fairies are. They either don't exist or they only sort-of-maybe do. I've heard it argued, for example, that the fact that British fairies have been reported leaving Britain for centuries shows that they're inherently liminal beings, always by their nature on the cusp of departure. I don't really follow that, surely by that logic, the same is always true of wolves.
In Vietnam, I don't know how T- really saw it and I do know that anthropologists can exaggerate alterity. He never had to ask me if I believed in pigs.
The boulder is patched with moon grey and black, unknown colours, lichen seams. Waves like the grooves of a record lap round in stone. Stripes on my green blanket. A rubber shoe, empty steps from the stone by the stream. Smoke-glass dark.
And I have a text message from Thailand! "How do you feel about Obama?" my wife has asked me. We're playing a game, texting writing prompts. She must be feeling uninspired. I write "Other people play civilizations. I am rock in the cleft of the stream and my white locks are water flying forward." I don't know why I write that. A bronze green fly taps at my knee, an ant fumbles through the hair on my chest. My head is a block. I am square. I can see a hand made of moss creep over a stone.
I don't write any more about the hand. I don't know what I meant. Back in the camp the hammocks hang like sow's teats. T- is in one with his music and Nikolas is in another. One is for me tonight.
There's a black crab with red eyes in the pool. That's normal though.
"My pen keeps reminding me of you - linked backwards - the river is written on itself." I'm not sure who I was addressing there, or what I meant.
.
My two young girls read lots of fairy books, and I’ve kept the tooth fairy notes and money coming each time. One night while my wife was away, we three went for a night walk up our drive way. There was a stand of bananas with a faint glow of light at its base. It was probably a reflection of the moonlight or the outside house light but both girls froze and both said simultaneously it was probably fairies. I agreed of course, and for days afterwards they would walk by the banana stand but never approach, in order not to disturb the fairies. I feel like one of my duties as a dad is to protect this belief for as long as possible, protect it from anyone else like their Wi-Fi-iPad-connected city cousins from shitting on the idea. As for me, I’ve not seen a fairy, but taking a cursory glance through the many recollections in the “fairy census” taken a few years ago, I’d never claim they don’t exist. I’d like to think they exist. There’s a lot of spirits here in the Philippines and we have a kids book about them, most of them seem like straight outta horror movies, there wasn’t any benevolent ones in the book.