Going Native (26 page)

They left Sambir at dawn, the only white faces on an overloaded river taxi bound up-country for Tanjung Liang and the timber camps and scattered settlements beyond. The boat had filled quickly, and by the time the Copelands arrived, after a frantic last-minute bemo ride, clutching guardrails, their baggage, one another, through the narrowest, bumpiest, crookedest streets in town, they were lucky to claim a patch of space the size of a throw rug on the padded floor mats near the starboard side. Hung over, dehydrated, uncharacteristically grouchy, they decided not to speak until the urge for recriminations had passed. Around them every inch of deck was occupied, yet room continued to be found for late arrivals, whole families happily wedged into openings barely larger than a telephone booth, dozing babies dangled in beadwork carriers from hooks in the overhead beams. There were chickens in bamboo cages and a pair of ill-humored goats tethered to a red stanchion in the stern. Everyone, of every age and gender, was engaged in intense involvement with a cigarette, as if nicotine were some precious ingredient essential to well-being. The rows of hardwood benches were packed end to end with passengers who, like parishioners in their pews, faced uniformly front, obediently attentive to the muddled light emanating from the broken television set bolted to the forward bulkhead, Pastor Bob and his "World Wonder Hour" broadcasting live-on-tape from the Miracle Room of the Holydome in Corpus Christi, Texas, this morning's message: Dollars of Deliverance. The color on the screen had settled out into broad uneven bands of green, yellow, purple, the national flag of an alien planet superimposed upon the pastor's mesmerizingly piscine features. No one seemed to mind.

The harbor was swaddled in grainy fog, objects near and far standing about in random incongruity like icons in a dream. The bladed orange-streaked bow of a Malaysian freighter. The bulletlike dome of the town mosque, silver and wrinkled as if wrapped in aluminum foil. The red-tiled roof of the Hotel Happiness where brindle cats snoozed on the balconies and, like royalty, roamed through the rooms at will. The ghostly black sails of a passing prahu, sinister as shark fins. And downstream, visible through the murk at even this distance from the coast, the ragged gas flares of the refinery stacks of the Pertamina oil complex. The world in pieces at this uncertain hour.

With a sudden shriek of the boat's horn the deck shuddered to life and the long wooden pier began backing steadily away. They were off -- up the Kutai River into the tangled mythical heart of Borneo.

Drake gave his wife's hand a squeeze.

"I love you," whispered Amanda, glancing over his shoulder to check that this modest exchange of affection had given no offense to a people whose custom permitted only public displays of same-sex tenderness. Pastor Bob continued to enchant his water-borne audience. The Bible is the book of business. God has a personal financial plan for each and every one of you. Let Jesus be your money manager. Lounging in studied insolence against the far rail, oblivious, apparently, to the promise of pennies from heaven, a small wiry man in baggy shorts, clean white shirt, and faded pink turban, a member of the crew, stared openly at Amanda from a cinnamon face so devoid of expression she felt herself reduced to thinghood, a peculiar irritating shape that happened temporarily to be obstructing his view of the greater private spectacle without. He was, like most of the crew, a Bugis from the neighboring island of Sulawesi, descendant of the notorious seafaring people whose piratical exploits so impressed their European prey that it was said their very name entered the language to frighten naughty children in the dark windy English night -- be good or the boogeyman will get you.

"Where?" Drake's head went pivoting around. He couldn't tolerate such harassment and made a point of confronting perpetrators on the spot.

"Don't bother. He's gone already." The man's lithe, compact body unpeeling itself from the rail and scuttling rapidly aft, dragging his tail behind him. "He's been scoping us since we boarded." She knew now what was meant by the phrase "the Evil Eye," and wondered if evil was not a vacuum, the absence of connective tissue, psychic feelers drawn up so deep inside that the shell became the life, the power of blankness. A shiver ran through her shoulders. She grimaced. "Creepy," she said.

Drake continued to case the crowd. In his L.A. Dodgers cap and aviator sunglasses he looked like a baseball coach scouting the opposition. "Too damn early in the morning to be dealing with crap like this."

"Are you implying, then, that it would be okay later in the day, around two, three in the afternoon, perhaps?"

"Amanda."

"I was only asking."

Drake pushed back his cap and wiped his forehead with a black handkerchief. He was sweating already. "I don't know, hard to tell the perverts from the curious in this country. Who hasn't stared at us since we got off the plane in Jakarta? You want to be famous, you want the regard of the masses? Enjoy it."

"But these people aren't staring at us because they know who we are, they're staring because they don't. And I don't feel celebrated, I feel like a specimen on a slide."

"Hooray for Hollywood."

The boat chugged on, the racket of its unmuffled engines helping to clear a course through the harbor fog. The current sliding along the hull was gray and greasy as dishwater and it reeked of sweat and garbage and human waste -- the insidious scent of expiring forms. They passed a huge Japanese tanker where a sleepy crewman, wiping his hair on a towel, peered down upon them with an expression of amused benevolence. They zigzagged between squat coal barges and drifting rafts heaped with pyramids of massive hardwood logs with the raw, shocked look of freshly cut timber. Along the bank now, emerging gradually out of the thinning mist, were the rows of ramshackle huts on spidery stilts and the houseboats with tattered washcloths for curtains and the hand sawmills and the floating docks, each with its moored semicircle of sleek longboats radiating outward like elliptical wooden petals. People had begun to gather on the muddy shore in broken file, mouths white with foam, vigorously brushing their teeth with river water.

"I have to admit," Amanda said, "that for the first time I am starting to entertain serious doubts."

"About coming here or getting famous?" asked Drake innocently.

"About marrying you, asshole." And her hands were up under his shirt, tickling his ribs.

"Watch it," he hissed, trying to hold back his laughter as he fended her off. "You're behaving like the Western barbarian you truly are."

She looked around. To her right two unsmiling men had interrupted their chess game to study this coarse foreigner. There were too many faces turned in her direction. She smiled cheerfully back, then snuggled down amid her gear, attempting to present as inconspicuous a target as possible. The burden of pale skin. That sordid history, too.

Drake hid behind the cover of his ubiquitous guidebook,
Indonesia Today
. " 'Among the Pekit of the upper Kutai,' " he read aloud, " 'death is not a natural event. It is caused only by magic or violence, and when a death occurs, it must be avenged or the spirit of the people will be diminished.' "

"Not now, Drake."

" 'Three days after dying, the confused soul eventually finds its way out of the labyrinth of the body, exiting the mouth in the shape of a local insect or bird.' "

"I'm tuning you out, mister." Amanda laid her arm like a compress over her eyes, hoping to lose, for a few blissful minutes, her particular place in time and space. Immediately she was assailed by a choppy montage of overlit travel footage. Vacationer's vertigo. Too much novelty in too brief a time under too little sleep. Each new dawn in this remarkable country initiated a fresh assault upon the frail fort of their assumptions, as if the Asian sun were a big mystical revolver firing copper-jacketed days into the unprotected wadding of their heads. In Jakarta they had seen a green mamba crawl out of a man's ear. Among dunes of red ash they had watched a twelve-year-old boy juggle volcanic rock above the undulating sea of clouds at the summit of Mount Merapi. On Bali they had been forced from the streets of Denpasar by a mob dancing to the whims of the monkey god. All the world's dreams, beliefs, spirits congregated here within the enchanted islands of Indonesia. The elements of the human unconsciousness occupied the landscape as visible objects. Power crackled from mind to mind and the earth itself was uneasy, groaning and rumbling in its chains, the prison of matter. She let it run. Eventually, this mad stuttering rush must fade, slow, come to rest upon the central image of this movie, her heart's newfound anchor, the great stone mandala of the Buddhist shrine of Borobudur, a mammoth manmade cosmic mountain rising dramatically from the Kedu plain on the island of Java (the exotic names of these hallucinatory isles -- Bali, Sumatra, Maluku, Timor -- the sensuous language of Occidental fantasy, of moonlit colonialism, of contemporary high-fashion fragrances). The shrine was constructed of seven stepped terraces, a base of four square topped by three round. Entering the east gate, symbolically swallowed by the gaping mouth of the kala, the monster head carved over the doorway, you turned left (demons lurked on the right) into a narrow passageway lined with bas-reliefs depicting narrative scenes from the Buddha's 550 lives, sermons in stone to draw the pilgrim toward enlightenment as you circumambulated the shrine through the constricting channels of the phenomenal world, rising terrace by terrace from the realm of forms suddenly, startlingly out onto the broad circular terraces at the summit, the revelation of the open sky, the liberating miracle of formlessness. Amanda had never been so affected by a monument, even though, mesmerized by the imposing physical presence of the place, she had, upon entering, stumbled on a step and badly scraped her right knee, the sentence "I tripped in the world of desire" instantly echoing through future dinner parties back in L.A. The intellectual and spiritual design of Borobudur exhibited an undeniably pleasing rigor. So the question posed by this shrine was doubly persistent: how did one break the tether of death? The prescription of the major Eastern religions seemed to be to pretend that you were already dead. Put crudely, death was the cessation of pretty pictures. Learn to disengage yourself from the film, and the heat of the senses could no longer burn; summon the courage to get up out of your seat and actually leave the theater, and you will have slipped the bonds of mortality. Buddha as the world's first spiritual escape artist. We have all been locked in the same box, he said. Now I will provide you with a duplicate key.

Under her, Amanda could feel the vibration of the deck, the sliding-forward movement of the keel, she could hear a baby crying, the murmur of incomprehensible conversation, the pages of Drake's book being periodically turned, the quiet tolling of a quiet day, when gradually, in the darkness, she became aware of the bellows of her chest opening and closing like a door swinging to and fro in an almost imperceptible wind, teasing her with glimpses of another darkness beyond the door, a darkness deep and luminous that pulsed gently to the measure of her heart, the careful spacing of her breaths, she controlled the door, she controlled the darkness, too, her darkness, her fear, her -- progress toward nirvana abruptly blown by the scratch and pop of a cardboard match. Back in the world of pain and loss Drake was firing up his first
kretek
of the day.

"Those are evil," she said.

Drake glanced up from his book. She hadn't moved, but his wife's eyes had come open. How long had she been silently studying him? "I thought you were asleep."

"If you're going to start smoking again, why not stick to American brands, the good old tried-and-true domesticated cancer?"

Drake shrugged helplessly. "When in Rome." As he inhaled, the lighted tip of the cigarette crackled and sputtered, bits of exploding clove nuggets showering down upon Amanda.

"Ow! My blouse!" She sat bolt upright, brushing embers from the batik shirt she'd purchased not two days ago and was wearing now to impress any police officials they might encounter on their journey upriver. Drake had read that Indonesian civil servants were especially susceptible to fine attire.

"Go away," she said. "Before you have me in flames."

"Everyone else is smoking."

"Yes," she agreed, "and they all have holes in their clothes."

Drake struggled to his feet. "This ain't no veggie juice bar in Malibu."

"Go."

He went away, high-stepping gingerly among the arms, legs, torsos of his fellow passengers, muttering something cheap about smoking sections, low cholesterol, and alcohol-free drinks.

A shirtless child of three or four, clutching a half-eaten mangosteen in its slippery fist, was gazing at Amanda with the huge-eyed concentration of pure wonder. Without a thought, Amanda made a nasty face and stuck out her tongue. The child blinked, head jerking back as if struck, and, lunging for its mother, let out such a howl that everyone on the main deck must have turned around to stare. Yes, thought Amanda, it is I, the terrible white she-demon from over the seas. From her bag she pulled fat handfuls of typewritten paper to hold before her like a shield, damp tattered sections of a pirated manuscript copy of that hot new novel with cool attitude,
Wittgenstein's Jockstrap,
a dimly imagined tale of one vague young man's desperately vague quest for something or other, composed in a freeze-dried Europrose so devoid of nutrients even tears couldn't vivify it. Six-figure option to Pogo Pictures. Bernardo Scungilli slated to direct. Friends of Amanda's at GAM thought she would be "perfect" for the part of the earnest young English professor who serves as clumsy ventriloquist's dummy for the author's startlingly conventional views on any number of trendy topics. She also attends to our hero's less lofty needs. She's hip, she's urban, she gives good allegorical head.