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Canary Air	By : Nos4a2 Category: DC Verse Comics > Birds Of Prey Views: 7065 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Birds of Prey,nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 5
- 6
- 7
CHAPTER SIX
The baby continues to grin up at me in the taxi back to the hotel. Sonchai is quiet, as usual, watching me and the kid, some soft, sad expression playing at the corners of his mouth. The driver is listening to the radio, what I think is a talk show. It is the only sound in the car besides the soft cooing noises I’m making, the product of a maternal instinct I didn’t really know I had. Maybe I don’t know what else to do, so I fill the void with noise.
The voices on the radio speak in rapid Thai, a man and a woman who are arguing about something. Religion, maybe, or the weather. Who knows.
The taxi hits a snarl of traffic, and we pause long enough for the diesel fumes to intensify in the back seat. The arguing on the radio gets heated.
“What are they saying?” I whisper to Sonchai. He cocks his head, translating. “Our beloved King has approved the two thousand new surnames created by the senior monks, and the new names will be offered in a surname reservation service. The woman is a Buddhist. She is overjoyed at the news,” he tells me, listening for a few more seconds. “The man is skeptical. He wonders, like you, if our twenty-first century names should be determined by men dressed in robes chanting a language dead for a thousand years.”
I frown, my face crinkling into what I’ve been told is an adorable expression of petulance. “I wasn’t thinking that at all.”
Sonchai knows this is a lie, or an almost-lie. I had no idea Thai surnames were created and blessed by monks, subject to the approval of their King, and now that I do, I think of it in terms of more East-West disparity.
“For my people, something as intimate as a name must be imbued with magical powers,” he explains patiently. His face brightens a little and he loses the lecturing tone he’s had to use so often with me. “Now they are discussing the Western naming tradition.”
“Which is?” I prompt.
“Your names reflect your culture’s obsession with money, they are saying, in that Western names are often a reflection of what work your ancestor did. Smith, Woodman, Baker.”
“So it’s money with us, magic with you?” I clarify
“I wouldn’t put it quite that way,” Sonchai says gently. “Your culture cannot help what it is.”
I don’t reply, too busy trying to imagine what the Lance family did for a living.
The traffic ahead of us untangles and we start moving again. I’m making a face which delights the baby, complete with crossed eyes and tongue lolling out like a dog. He giggles mindlessly. I marvel at his innocence, at the way he is completely oblivious to how different I am from him. He might even think I am his mother, although my complexion and face are so different from Nong’s. I’ve been kind to him, and so he loves me, totally unaware of the fact that someday he will not.
“You knew one another in a past life, you know.”
Sonchai offers this statement so quietly that I almost miss hearing what he said over the noise of the radio. I glance at him.

“What do you mean?” I ask, the little boy’s chubby digits wrapping around my thumb.
“Reincarnation,” Sonchai says, settling back into the worn upholstery of the taxi as if he is not required to explain further but wants to anyway. “You two are old friends. He recognized you at once in Nong’s apartment. He was glad to see you.”
“Now there’s one for the record books,” I sniff. “And I don’t believe in reincarnation.”
Sonchai nods, and I see right away that my opinion doesn’t matter. Death, life and rebirth in another form are inevitabilities, like breathing for him and complicated sexual liaisons for me.
“Did you and I know each other?” I ask him.
He nods.
“Did we like each other?”
Sonchai grins, the first real smile I’ve had from him. He looks at me with such intense interest and emotion I have to mentally shake myself, and I expect him to laugh, to clap his hands, to kiss the baby on my lap. “Yes, of course!” he exclaims instead, folding his hands across his nonexistent belly. “Haven‘t you felt it?”
I sigh, deciding to play his game because it’s so strange to see him excited about something. “Felt what?
“The vibrations,” he replies. “In our first life, we strike a chord within the universe. The cord continues to reverberate throughout our successive lifetimes. Good or bad, the vibrations exist, and if one meditates properly, one can sense what has come before.”
I’m forced to picture the people I’ve known in this lifetime. I’d love to hear his opinion on Barbara’s past lives. Or Ollie’s. Or Superman’s. All of them definitely vibrate, some so hard they shimmer and fade away. What happens to heroes when they die? Do they really come back as taxi drivers and housemaids and accountants? Or, god forbid, some kind of bug?
“So you mediated on my past life, huh?” I ask him. “And what did you figure out?”
“You love growing things,” he says, watching me carefully. “Plants, flowers…green things with deep roots. Did you ever consider why?”
I shake my head, feeling a drop of perspiration slide down the back of my neck. The baby on my lap suddenly seems to weigh a ton. “My mother owned a flower shop,” I tell him, blinking a little. All that diesel in the atmosphere is starting to sting. “I guess I grew up around it.”
“Or perhaps you studied plants as a botanist. You catalogued them, sketching them and pressing their leaves between the pages of your books, giving them Latin names. You believed that you might learn all their secrets.”
He’s smiling a little, and I wonder if he’s teasing, or if he actually believes that I was a botanist in a past life. “I was never much for learning the technical side of being a florist,” I mutter. “I didn’t even bother to do that six-week night course at the community college to get my flower-arranging certificate. I just learned by watching my mother. She knew everything about plants. My knowledge and love of flowers isn’t intuitive, Sonchai. Sorry to disappoint.”
I watch the cars and motorcycles flow around us, the air hot and flickering with pollution, thinking of a world I lost a long time ago. My mother’s flower shop back in Gotham doesn’t exist anywhere now, except perhaps in my memories. And even then I’ve lost pieces. I can’t really remember the layout of the shop, or the exact sound the cash registered made when she rang up a sale. I just remember the smell of the place, that scent of wood and moss and the slight perfume of fresh flowers mixed with the burning smell from the always-broken air conditioner. That was all part of another life, sure, but not a past life.
“You have many enemies, yes?” he asks me next. I’m reluctant to answer, but I do so anyway.
“I’m a superhero, Sonchai. We tend to collect our fair share in that line of work.”
“Have you considered why?”
I shake my head, letting the baby lean against my chest so I can free up both hands to sweep my long, heavy hair off my neck. There is no breeze in the car and I’m sweating. Dinah Lance was not built for tropical humidity.
“Most people think reincarnation is about tracing identity through time,” Sonchai is saying, still on his spirituality kick. “But it’s not a question of plausible hypotheses. You simply consider a person’s life as it is now, what sort of person they are like. That personality has grown and evolved through time. Your enemies are people you have been fighting for many generations.”
“Terrific,” I mutter, wanting to explain to him that the kind of people I fight are all the same: little men with big guns. There’s no built-up karma between us - I don’t even see most of them as individuals anymore. I just take them down and move on to the next hot-spot in the world. Maybe it was different, back in Seattle or when I formed the JLA. Maybe then our villains were former spiritual acquaintances and we fought each other because we were falling back into old patterns, old lives.
I stroke the baby’s back through the thin cotton t-shirt he’s wearing. That diaper we changed back at the apartment is already beginning to smell in the heat. “So we worked together before, huh? As friends?”
He grins happily, delighted that I’m getting it at last. “For many years. In a factory, I think. Or a textile mill. I have smelled the oil of machines in my dreams. We ate lunch together. Our wives cooked for us. We were happy together.”
“I was a man?” I try to clarify, wondering where he’s getting this stuff from. Maybe he gets his mystical insights from the same mail-order catalogue Shirley Long subscribes to, because it sounds crazy as hell.
He breezes over my question of gender to something more important. “You knew right away you could trust me, yes?”
I nod. The baby gurgles happily, pleased himself that I’m so close to understanding the mysteries of the karmic cycle. “But what does that prove?” my Western mind wants to know.
“We were kind to each other in our past lives. We laughed and played cards and got drunk together. We enriched one another. And when we died, our souls were reincarnated into different forms but we remembered and recognized our old friend.”
I want to shrug him off, but Sonchai’s so insistent, so passionate about this, that I ask another question. “And if we fought? If we hurt each other? How would we react when we encountered each other again, in this life?”
“Action and reaction,” he explains simply. “It would continue. Samsara.”
“Wheel of destiny,” I finish. That much I remember from my old sensei back in Hong Kong. Every good martial arts student knows the basics.
“Wheel of life,” he nods in agreement. “The endless cycle of punishment because the soul refuses knowledge. Endless suffering.”
“I thought life is suffering.” Buddhist 101.
“It is,” he agrees. “But some suffer more than they must, because they struggle so against their own karma, against self-knowledge. But you,” he sighs happily, “are not one of those. You are a young soul, Dinah. Fresh, although life has not been easy for you. You have lived only a few times before, but you have learned much. This life will be again be a pleasant one for you. Your samsara will not be long as others, perhaps a few thousand cycles.”
“That’s just…great,” I mutter, watching the baby’s face. He’s so fascinated by my eyes: I wonder if it’s the color, so unusual in his country, or simply the way I’m looking at him.
Sonchai touches my hand where it rests on the baby’s neck, and I look at him. That joy of recognition is gone from his face now, replaced by his old quiet, thoughtful expression. “We all knew each other, once,” he tells me. “Don’t forget that.”
All this touches me, of course, but in the end it doesn’t mean much. I want to tell him about the cycle of birth and death I’ve witnessed working alongside mutants and metahumans, clay-formed Amazon princesses, undead archers, shape-shifting Martians and walking miracles. Hell, even I’ve died and been reborn in a Lazarus pit. All this is old hat to me. If Sonchai wants me to believe that we knew each other in a past life, I’ll buy it if it makes it easier for us to work together. But I’m not going to start meditating on a lot of religous bunk that, significant as it may be, can’t help me in the end. Because when I go away from Bangkok and head into the jungle to see if the former love of my life is alive or dead, I won’t be thinking about my karma, about samsara, about any of it. I’ll just be trying to get the job done.
“What are we going to do about him?” I ask Sonchai. The baby has cuddled close, his eyes drifting shut, still half-sedated from that gasoline-induced nap and dozy from the heat.
“When you leave tonight with Nong, I will care for him,” Sonchai vows. “I have a sister in the country who will take him.”
<:p>
The baby’s heartbeat slows as it rests against mine, his breathing steady. I try to picture his future, shuffled from one relative of Sonchai’s to another, maybe to end up in a monastery, maybe one of the sex clubs in Bang Kwan. And again, there’s nothing to be done about it. I’m so powerless here, so impotent. And I still can’t see the right path. I only know that whatever is taking me to Ollie is pulling harder now, and I can’t let a baby distract me.
I made that decision a long time ago, back in Seattle. No orphans.
**********************
The hotel room is just as we left it. The bed, messy and unmade. An empty yellow bag of M&Ms. My room, like my life, a total disaster area. There’s a message.
“Call me on Red 01.”
Oracle and her damn codes. I forgot to take my communicator to the meet with Nong, and my negligence has caused a sharp, distinct frost to form in Barbara’s voice. I slip the tiny receiver into my ear, close the bathroom door, and prepare for a lecture.
“Dinah? Are you okay?” Babs asks, breathless.
“Sure,” I reply, wondering what’s gotten into her. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I’ve got some more information. Where are you?”
“At the hotel with Sonchai and-” I hesitate. “With Sonchai.”
She seems to accept that, and I can practically see her ranking things in her head according to the priority of what she has to tell me.
“First thing’s first,” she begins, and I grin. I know her so well, now.
“I did some decoding work on that note you faxed me,” she says. “It’s a Laotian dialect they use in the jungles that boarder Cambodia. Difficult to translate because it’s an insular language. The note contained Oliver Queen’s return-ticket information and a number to call for a hotel reservation in New York. I think Jones was using Queen’s identity to get Stateside again.”
“Yeah, I know,” I tell her gently. Babs hates it when I beat her to the scoop. “Jones stole Ollie’s identity. He replaced him, used his credit cards, checked into the room at the Hilton and created the information that we used to track him to Bangkok.”
“Okay, Miss Smarty-Pants,” Barbara says, “Any idea why he replaced Ollie?”
“They look alike?” I guess. “Ollie made himself a target? I know Jones was using the cover partly as a way to hide out from some Khmer agents who wanted him dead for a drug deal gone bad, but-”
“Drug deal?” Babs repeats. “How’d you know?”
“It’s either drugs or kiddie porn with this guy, Babs. He’s bad news all round.”
“I took another pass at that website,” she goes on. “The one with the streaming digital feed from Jones’ piano room. I figured out why the site was so heavily encrypted.”
“I thought it was because there was child pornography on the site.”
She sniffs; I think she’s drinking chamomile, which always makes her sinuses run. “Most child-porn sites on the internet are easily accessed. The live-stream video was a tough one. And why, you ask?”
I didn’t, but whatever she says.
“Because there was something buried in the signal. Directional information for a bi-weekly flight into and out of Southeast Asia.”
“Drugs,” I mutter.
“Drugs,” she agrees. “That yaa-baa I wanted you to find out about. Concealed so that the feds wouldn’t pick it up.”
“They had drug-trafficking information buried in a child-porn website?” I repeat in disbelief.
“Turns out the FBI isn’t as concerned about child sexual exploitation as much as they are with the War on Drugs,” Barbara tells me, her voice rich with irony and disappointment. Not that she has much love for Quantico anyway, but this is pretty bad, even for those knuckleheads.
“Christ, Barbara,” I say, closing my eyes, knowing we’re both thinking the same thing. Maybe the world doesn’t have a chance, despite all our efforts.
“Was Ollie just in the wrong place at the wrong time?” I ask, my voice heavy. “Or was he mixed up in this too?”
“I don’t know how he fits in yet,” Barbara tells me, “but I feel like there’s something we’re missing.”
“You’ll figure it out,” I promise, hoping I sound more convinced than I feel. “I’ve got to go,” I tell her as the first peals of a wailing infant’s cries filter into the bathroom. Babs doesn’t ask me what’s up - I don’t really give her a chance. I shut down the comm line and high-tail it back into the room to discover Sonchai calmly changing the baby. We made a pit stop for diapers, a bottle, a cheap stuffed animal and some formula on the way in.
“My contact back in the States translated that note,” I tell Sonchai, who disposes of the soiled diaper in the too-small hotel dustbin and slides the new one underneath the baby. He looks like he’s done this before, and I refrain from asking if he was a father in a past life. “Looks like Jones was using my friend’s identity to get back into America. I guess he knew the Khmer were after him.”
The baby is playing happily with his toes. Sonchai finishes changing him, lifting him up gently to cradle him against his chest. He’s really very gentle with the baby, very natural. Ollie’s like that too. I guess it’s fairly obvious that I’m a sucker for a guy who’s good with kids.
“In the old days,” Sonchai is saying, “if the Khmer were after you, you were already dead. They were brutal, vicious people led by a madman.”
“I thought Pol Pot was a Buddhist monk,” I ask. Sonchai shrugs.
“Evil comes in all forms,” he replies philosophically. “Holy men are still men. I suppose it only made him more dangerous than most, because of the hold he had over his troops. They believed it was prophesized that he would lead them to the liberation of Cambodia.”
I think of Cortes and the Aztecs, how Moctezuma and his people welcomed Cortes because they believed he was a god, how they followed him to their own damnation, how that’s part of the fabric of life in so many places: a spiritual path that bleeds in the end. I’ve heard whisperings of a religious cult developing around Superman and Wonder Woman, who many believe are some kind of Messiahs. And I know how nervous that makes the rest of the superhero community. Kal and Diana are no Pol Pots, but I understand the potential for death and destruction in the very idea of a superior being worshipped by people who don’t see either of them as people, just symbols.
“You should rest,” Sonchai says. “If you go to the border, you will not sleep for many days. It is a dangerous place.”
I nod, climbing back into bed. Sleep seems like an impossibility, given the fact that I’ve only been up for a few hours. He sets the baby down beside me and sinks down into that hard chair he occupied last night. I watch as he falls into a meditative state somewhere between waking and sleep. The baby dozes off, and I guess I do too. Night falls.
*********************
- 5
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- 7
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