The Garden Won't Do Itself
16. Twelve Days of Being Nobody in Particular
The driver was already waiting when David cleared immigration.
A handwritten sign. His name spelled correctly, which meant Lina had written it out herself rather than leaving it to chance. He noticed this before he noticed anything else.
Outside, the heat arrived without warning. Not the managed heat of Singapore’s air-conditioned corridors and sudden outdoor intervals. This was continuous. Patient. A warmth that had been here long before he arrived and would remain long after.
The car was old but clean. The driver said nothing beyond a greeting, which suited David. He watched the city give way to road, road give way to smaller road, the edges of Chiang Mai softening into something less organized. Trees with actual roots visible above the ground. Walls that had been repainted over years rather than replaced.
He hadn’t told anyone he was coming except Lina.
He’d texted her the week before — the tests, what medicine had and hadn’t found. She’d sent the receipt text back, and then, before he’d finished thinking about it: Come. I’ll have someone pick you up.
He’d sent her other things in the days between booking and arriving. Pieces. Not the full account — he didn’t have that yet himself. She had half the story and hadn’t asked for the rest.
No questions.
That alone was enough to make his eyes sting slightly in the back of the car, which he didn’t examine too closely.
Her house was set back from a narrow road behind a low wall threaded with something flowering. He didn’t know what it was called. He noted this — that he was in a place where he didn’t know the names of things — and felt something in his chest shift almost imperceptibly.
Lina was at the gate.
Smaller than he remembered, though he knew this wasn’t true. She was exactly the same. It was just that he’d been carrying a version of her that had grown in her absence, the way significant people do.
She looked at him the way she always had. Not scanning for damage. Not preparing a response to whatever she saw. Just registering him. Present arriving to meet present.
She said his name once. Pulled him in briefly. Released him.
“Come,” she said. “You’re thinner.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re thinner,” she said again, already walking toward the house.
A man appeared in the doorway. Medium height. A careful smile. He shook David’s hand with both of his, the gesture slightly formal in a way that suggested he’d practiced warmth rather than found it naturally. Lina introduced them. Her husband’s name landed and David caught it but barely.
What he noticed instead was the quality of space between them.
Not hostility. Not coldness. Something more like an arrangement that had been arrived at over time, each person occupying their separate gravity. Lina moved through her house the way she always had — as if it had organized itself around her. Her husband stood slightly to the side of things. Not outside them. Just adjacent. A weight that didn’t quite distribute evenly into the room.
David didn’t know what to do with this observation so he set it aside.
“Dinner in an hour,” Lina said from the kitchen. “Put your things down.”
He put his things down.
Her husband left on the morning of the third day.
Chiang Rai, he said. Friends. A few days. He shook David’s hand again with both of his. Said he hoped David would enjoy his stay. There was nothing wrong with any of it.
The car disappeared down the narrow road.
Lina watched it go for a moment, then turned back to the house.
“Come,” she said. “The garden won’t do itself.”
The days organized themselves simply.
He woke when the light came. Ate what appeared. Worked in the garden through the morning before the heat became unreasonable. Slept in the afternoon. Woke again. Helped with whatever needed helping — the kitchen, the carrying, the fixing of small things. Ate again. Slept when dark arrived.
He didn’t look at his email for four days. Then five. Then he stopped counting.
His body began doing something he didn’t have a word for. Not relaxing — that was too simple. More like a gradual renegotiation. Each morning he woke slightly less compressed than the day before. Each afternoon the sleep came faster and went deeper. Each evening the food tasted more specifically like what it was.
He stopped thinking in revenue increments.
He stopped calculating.
He walked to the market with Lina. Carried things. She pointed, he selected, she corrected him gently, he selected again. Nobody needed him to be impressive. The market did not care what his monthly revenue had been at its peak.
He found this, unexpectedly, a relief so large it had no clean edges.
It was around the eighth day that Amandha surfaced.
He was pulling weeds from the bed along the eastern wall and she arrived without announcement the way she always had — the laugh first, too large for polite spaces, entirely unashamed of itself. He remembered turning toward it across rooms before she appeared.
Melbourne. 2000.
He sat back on his heels and let it come.
They had been friends first in the way that contained its own pressure from the beginning. The conversations that ran long without management. The particular attention they gave each other that both of them understood and neither named. A familiarity that had arrived fully formed, as if they were recognizing something rather than building it.
He’d had a girlfriend. He’d kept this fact present between them, not as confession but as information. As a kind of structural honesty that he’d believed would hold things in their right proportion.
He’d believed Amandha knowing would keep him safe.
He understood now, hands in the soil twelve years later, that this had not been honesty. It had been a permission structure dressed as one. A way of wanting without being responsible for the wanting. She knows. Therefore if anything happens it happens within what she accepted by staying.
He’d used the information as a door he could claim he hadn’t opened.
The night arrived the way it had been building toward for months. A party. Dancing that started casually and became something else without either of them calling it. The music loud enough to remove language, which meant the body spoke plainly. He walked her home. Told himself this was just what you did. Late. Safe.
At her door she turned and they were already close and the decision had been made hours ago by two bodies in a crowded room.
He went inside.
Afterward he lay in the particular quiet that follows something that changes the proportions of your life, listening to her breathe, aware that what he’d believed would keep him safe had not kept anyone safe. Not her. Not his girlfriend who trusted him in another part of the city. Not himself, though he wouldn’t understand that part until later.
He left before she woke.
He didn’t call. Didn’t write. Stopped appearing at gatherings, then stopped answering, then made himself simply absent until the absence calcified into something that couldn’t be addressed without excavation neither of them attempted.
She deserved better.
His girlfriend deserved better.
He’d known this then. He knew it now, pulling something with stubborn roots from dark soil, sweat at the back of his neck.
The soil smelled of iron. Wet earth and underneath it something older — the smell of long decomposition, things that had been breaking down.
I left.
The root came out intact.
He kept working.
On the twelfth day Lina came and sat on the low wall at the garden’s edge.
He kept working for a while. Then sat back and looked at her.
“Tell me,” she said.
He told her about the agency first. Not the version with lessons and turning points. Just the sequence. The numbers at their peak. The specific morning he understood it was finished. His parents’ flat, which had always been there, now suddenly the only ground available. The studio he’d built that sat waiting for a self he hadn’t returned to yet.
He told her he didn’t know what to do with it. Any of it.
He told her about Karen’s house plans. How he’d seen the drawings. The rooms designed for a particular future, for a family taking shape in her imagination with or without his participation. He’d looked at those drawings and felt not resistance exactly. More like the sudden awareness of standing outside a picture he was supposed to be inside.
He told her honestly that he didn’t know if he wanted that life. That he’d assumed he would, eventually. That the not-knowing had arrived recently and hadn’t left.
He told her about the factories in China. The trips. The particular quality of those rooms — the hum and scale of production, the way things were made without apology for being made. How he’d felt useful there in a way that didn’t require performance. How he’d noticed the contrast when he returned. Singapore with its calibrated surfaces and borrowed urgency. His own body in those spaces, doing things to make projections work rather than because the work itself asked for him.
He told her about the quiet he’d found here. How it felt different from the quiet he sometimes found at home, which was more like exhaustion wearing the shape of rest. This was something else. He’d been trying to find the word for it.
He told her he was afraid.
Not of failing again — he’d done that already and the ground was still under him. Something less nameable. The way his heart was doing something that medicine couldn’t describe and wouldn’t know how to prescribe for. A squeezing. Not pain. More like the organ itself registering something that hadn’t yet arrived in his head.
He didn’t know what he was rebuilding. He didn’t know if rebuilding was even the right word. He only knew that the thing he’d been building toward had collapsed and he was still here and the not-knowing what came next had a texture he couldn’t locate anywhere on any map he’d been given.
Then he told her about Melbourne.
It came because it had been working its way up through the soil for four days. He told her about Amandha. The friendship that had its own pressure from the beginning. The night. What he’d told himself would keep it from happening. How it happened anyway. How he’d left before she woke and kept leaving until the leaving became permanent.
Lina was quiet.
“You used the truth as a door,” she said finally.
He looked at her.
“Telling her about your girlfriend. You believed that made it her choice. Her acceptance.” She paused. “But you were the one who knew what you wanted. You gave her the information and then let the wanting continue.”
He didn’t argue.
“And then you couldn’t stay inside what you’d done,” she said. “So you left.”
He looked at the eastern bed. The cleared section. The section still remaining.
“You don’t know yet what you’re building,” Lina said. Not as question. Just acknowledgment.
“No.”
She looked at the garden for a moment.
“You know what you’re doing here.”
“Weeding.”
“Removing what doesn’t belong,” she said. “So what does belong can grow.” She stood, brushing soil from her clothes. “That’s what you need. Not a plan. Not advice about the studio or Karen or the factories.” She looked at him directly. “Remediation.”
He turned the word over. Medical. Environmental. Larger than what he’d expected.
“I don’t—”
“You don’t need to understand it yet,” she said. “Listen to yourself. Not to me. Not to your parents. Not to what any of it was supposed to become.” She paused. “Your heart is already telling you something. You said it yourself. Medicine can’t name it. That’s because it’s not medicine’s territory.”
She went inside.
He stayed in the garden until the light changed, his hands still carrying the smell of soil, the word sitting in him like something that had taken root before he’d agreed to plant it.
At the departure gate, bag between his feet, thirty minutes to boarding, he typed it into his phone.
Remediation: the action of remediating something. The process of reversing or stopping environmental damage.
He read it twice.
Removing contamination so what was originally there can become viable again.
He still had no idea what that was. What had been there originally. What was viable underneath everything that had accumulated.
He only knew that for twelve days someone had fed him and given him simple work and asked nothing of him except to weed what didn’t belong.
And that his heart had stopped squeezing quite so hard.
He picked up his bag.
He got up and walked toward the gate.