The Lunatic Express (10 page)

It started raining, so Colly and his brother and their friends returned inside to the packed bar. Colly stood by one of its four-foot-square windows, his brother to his right, a girl he’d just met to his left. West African rhythms filled the room, every seat taken. Colly opened the window. Rain, now harder, flew in—the
Joola
had sailed into a squall—and he slid the glass closed again. Around the room, lives were being lived: Music. Drinking. Laughing. Flirting. Everything was normal, except for the wind and rain outside, and even that was normal.

And then it wasn’t.

Colly heard a noise. A loud CRACK! Felt a bump. Everyone heard it and felt it.
“Q’est qui c’est passé?
What’s happening?” The lights went off; the hot, crowded room plunged into darkness.

Shouting.

The lights went back on. “What’s happening? What’s happening?” cried a hundred voices. “Are we going to die?” Colly heard a woman near him scream.

The
Joola
rolled heavily to port. Colly grabbed the window, the curtain, a seat that was bolted to the floor. From instinct he slid open the window as he watched people, bags, cans of Castel beer tumble across the floor. The lights went out again. Decks below him, the cars and trucks on the
Joola
’s ferry deck broke their chains, a sudden and massive shift in weight. When the untethered vehicles tumbled to port the
Joola
rolled faster, past the point of no return. Colly heard a noise, a noise he’ll never forget: the sound of thousands of tons of rushing water. He knew only this: the water had him, it held him, and it pulled him of the window and it was night and dark and raining and he saw the sky. He reached out, felt something solid, grabbed it, thought,
I’d better stay here until it finishes
, and then he realized it already had. The MV
Le Joola
floated upside down in the darkness.

He saw something white. A light. He swam toward it, calling his brother’s name. He swam and swam, and called and called, in rain and wind and rough seas. He swam for fifteen minutes, until he came to a floating fish trap. Seven people were clinging to it, and it began to sink, so Colly swam to the next one. Others were already there.
I’m lucky
, he thought.
I better keep fighting
. But it was still raining. Cold. Colly was freezing. His raftmates were losing strength. “Don’t give up,” he said. But one by one they slipped away and Colly was talking to no one, just hanging on to the floats telling himself over and over again not to give up.

Toward dawn, six hours later, a fisherman in a small sailboat appeared. He was frightened. “What are you doing here?” he asked Colly.

“Don’t be afraid,” said Colly. “We were on the
Joola
and it sank.”

“That’s impossible!” said the fisherman. Then he told Colly that there was a flare stored in the floating trap. Colly found it, and the fisherman lit the flare.

And then. And then the details go hazy. Colly can’t remember. Other boats appeared; he remembers a different fisherman refusing to help and then he was on a pirogue with eight other survivors, and that’s all, and then his life dissolved into a strange fate: of the 1,863 confirmed passengers on board the
Joola
, Colly and sixty others survived, only one of them a woman. Three hundred more people died on the
Joola
than on the
Titanic
, and nearly every single one of the dead came from the town of Ziguinchor—among them its best and brightest students. Colly lived to become something he didn’t want to be, something that soon had a name: a
rescapé
.

A survivor.

I wrote, and listened for almost two hours. At times the tale rolled out of Colly, at other moments he stopped talking, said nothing, stared for long seconds. And then it was done; no journalist or investigator had ever asked to speak to him before. He had endured the sinking and then had been left alone. “I was lucky,” he said. “It was God who pushed me out of the window. But … often the sadness comes. I am alone and I think about my brother. And what happened was a big thing for people in Ziguinchor. People look at me like I’m weird. They say, ‘How could so many die and you live? It’s not normal! You saved yourself and the rest died!’ They give me a hard time. They call me the
rescapé
—the survivor.”

Colly had dropped out of school and never returned. “I couldn’t think, and my older brother had been in charge of the family, so I had to take his place.” Now he was a taxi driver. Colly had to get back to work; Zaid had to get back to his girlfriend, waiting for us at the port. We climbed in Colly’s taxi and lurched down the streets in a cloud of dust. “When the anniversary comes, I just want to go away from here. I want to escape; I want to leave here and find a job and start a new life somewhere else.” A muezzin called the faithful to pray, the chants cutting through the heat. Colly pulled up to the gates of the port. He was silent, staring straight ahead. He had nothing else to say.

“Have you taken the ship again?” I said, fumbling for money to pay the fare.

“I have not done it, but if I had to I would. If I have to die on that ship, I will.”

PART THREE

ASIA

A ferry carrying around 850 passengers sank in a storm off Indonesia’s main island of Java and hours later only 12 survivors had been found, a military commander said Saturday. The cause of the accident was not known. Sea accidents are common in Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago nation, where boats are the main way to reach many islands. Safety measures are often poorly enforced and many craft lack sufficient safety equipment
.

—New York Times,
December 30, 2006

SIX
Jalan! Jalan!

T
HE HEAT FELT THICK
enough to touch. Sweat dripped from my temples and I couldn’t keep the flies off. Smoke from hundreds of cigarettes hung in the air like faded, yellowed lace curtains. I was three decks down, in
ekonomi
—steerage—on the
Bukit Siguntang
, a 479-foot-long steel ferry operated by Pelni, the Indonesian government-owned shipping line. The
Siguntang
officially carried 2,003 souls, all but 300 in third class, but it seemed as if every man, woman, and child in Jakarta were swarming into her belly. There were no beds or bunks—just two open decks full of knee-high, linoleum-covered platforms on which we were supposed to lie like hot dogs lined up on a grill. The bulkheads were brown, the ceiling brown, the deck white linoleum covered in ocher cigarette burns. It was an industrial holding pen with the occasional basketball-sized porthole that didn’t open.

“Nasi, nasi, nasi!”
vendors yelled. Babies cried. Water and chips, noisemakers and rice wrapped in brown paper cones, balloons—it might have been the circus.

“Air, air, air,” water in Bahasa Indonesian.

We hadn’t left the dock; I wanted to go on deck but feared leaving my bags. I was the only foreigner, hungry and nervous to be so totally submerged in otherness. Indonesia was a world of islands, some 17,000 stretching across 3,100 miles, and without ferries the nation would never hang together; they were its lifeblood, carrying not just people, but cars and refrigerators and anything and everything too big or too expensive to fly. The
Siguntang’s
route was epic: nine days from Jakarta to Sorong, in Indonesian Papua, via Surabaya, Makassar, Bau Bau, Ambon, Bandaneira, and Fak Fak. I was booked through to Ambon in the Molucca Islands, five solid days in steerage with no breaks, no bed, no door to keep acquisitive hands off my stuff, and, it was immediately clear, no way to get out quickly if we hit rough seas. And chances were good that I might have to: In 2002 and 2003 two ferries sunk, each killing more than 500. In 2006 the
Senopati Nusantara
went down in heavy seas off Java en route to the island of Borneo, and more than 800 died. Like the
Joola
, these weren’t ancient rust buckets; the
Nusantara
was built in 1990 and was government-owned, just like the
Siguntang
. And those were just the big ships; thousands of small, decrepit wooden ferries plied shorter routes, and they foundered with the frequency of kids’ bathtub toys. Two months after my journey on the
Siguntang
, another ferry sank and the online magazine
Slate
ran a story postulating that so many Indonesians died in ferry disasters because they didn’t know how to swim. One look at the
Siguntang
reveals that claim as ridiculous. It was just crowded, and the ocean distances across which it sailed were wide and wild. Safety took a back seat; no one said it, would ever say it, but risk was just one more economic calculation in a country of islands with 240 million people, great masses of whom earned only a few hundred dollars a year and lived in villages or urban slums. Everybody was just trying to make a little more; politicians skimmed big, and ship captains and lowly seamen skimmed little.

“Why aren’t you flying?” asked a man who was seeing his large extended family get settled on the plank across from me. The question was rhetorical; he wasn’t really expecting an answer. But flying in Indonesia wasn’t much better. After a string of aviation disasters, including Adam Air Flight KI-574, which simply disappeared off the radar in January 2007 en route from Java to Manado with 102 passengers, every one of its airlines were banned from flying to the U.S. and Europe, including its national carrier Garuda. I shrugged, said I liked ships better.

“You must be careful,” he said. “Sometimes the people … they take things. And pirates …”

Porters in yellow shirts humped boxes wrapped in twine—more and more boxes that they piled in the aisles, against the walls. This was no casual, quick hop to Chicago for the weekend. Whole families were on the move, armed with goods and prepared with bedding and enough plastic bins of rice to survive on a desert island for weeks. “Hello,” a high-pitched voice said. I turned, and next to me knelt a teenage girl wearing skinny jeans and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt that said
PIRATE GIRL
in sequins. “I am Mrs. Nova,” she said. “What is your religion?”

Two women wearing headscarves on the other plank eyed me. The woman to my left clutched a Koran. I was surrounded, captive. I hesitated. “Atheist” seemed too provocative. Thankfully Mrs. Nova, who was clearly not a Mrs., didn’t wait for an answer. “Christian?”

I bobbled my head noncommitally.

“My hobbies are singing and billiards,” she said in nearly perfect English, as if reading from a conversation book. “Mr. Carl,” she continued in the third person, “Mrs. Nova likes Linkin Park and Britney Spears. Mrs. Nova is seventeen and she lives in Makassar.”

That broke the ice; suddenly the family across from me cut in. Florinda spoke a little English and wore a pink headscarf, and she was with her sister and one of their sons, Kahar. They’d traveled three days from Makassar to Jakarta for a family wedding, stayed a week, and were now making the three-day hike back. Thirteen days, six of them traveling. A ramen seller came by, and I flagged him down. Mrs. Nova nearly attacked him, barking a string of Indonesian. She jumped up, fished around in her bag, and pulled out a case of ramen. “For two!” she said. “For Mrs. Nova and Mr. Carl!”

A vendor hawking thin cotton mattress pads muscled by. I waved him over; five days on linoleum wasn’t going to be easy. This time the woman with the Koran barked, looked at me, shook her head, waggled her finger no. Then pantomimed picking tiny things off her ankles, and held her nose. The message was clear. The vendor scowled and stomped off.

There was another message, too: once again, the more I gave myself to the world, the more I made myself vulnerable by putting myself completely at the disposal of people and situations in which I had no control, the more people took care of me, looked out for me. At first I had thought they were taking pity on me. But over the days and weeks ahead I started to understand something else, something that had been sinking in gradually over the months. Being a white American conferred on me an automatic status. I represented power. Affluence. Vast numbers of the world were poor, watched American television and films, listened to American music, but had no real contact with westerners, and if they did it was often as chambermaids, taxi drivers, waiters—none ever sat down in their slums or ate their food. Florinda’s brother’s question—why wasn’t I flying?—said much. It was a question I heard over and over again. Why wasn’t I in first class? Why wasn’t I on an express bus? Why wasn’t I anywhere but here? My fellow travelers were right: I could have been flying. I could have been traveling in first class, in an air-conditioned cabin with a soft mattress and stewards. In silence and stillness. That I wasn’t was like a gift to them, a mysterious one they couldn’t fully understand but that they appreciated in a way I would never have imagined. And the more I shed my American reserves, phobias, disgusts, the more they embraced me. In the weeks ahead I would accelerate what had started gradually over the miles. I would do whatever my fellow travelers and hosts did. If they drank the tap water of Mumbai and Kolkata and Bangladesh, so would I. If they bought tea from streetcorner vendors, so would I. If they ate with their fingers, even if I was given utensils, I ate with my fingers. Doing so prompted an outpouring of generosity and curiosity that never ceased to amaze me; it opened the door, made people take me in. That I shared their food, their discomfort, their danger, fascinated them and validated them in a powerful way. And as Lena waved away the cushion man and Mrs. Nova insisted I share her food, I realized I was in good hands, surrounded by women with eagle eyes. I could relax; murder or robbery was the last thing I had to worry about.

Which was a good thing, since I was dying to find the head. I got off my plank, walked through the hot crowd. Hundreds of eyes watched. At the end of the long room that stretched the width of the ship stood the bathroom. The smell hit first, like gallons of piss had been simmering on the stove for weeks, boiling down to a concentrated essence. Where once three urinals had been attached to the wall were bare pipes. The sink’s drain had no pipe—it drained onto the floor, which was two inches deep in liquid. A man stood in the corner pissing into a floor drain. Behind two doors lay Asian-style toilets, rank with humanity’s excretions. I rolled up my pants, tiptoed through in my flip-flops, strained to aim in the darkness of the stalls, not that it mattered. And I noticed what appeared to be large black spots. Moving. I blinked, opened my cell phone to shine a little light: cockroaches the size of half-dollars scuttled across the floor.

Sometime, I don’t know when, we pulled away from the dock and headed to sea, and I lay down on my plank—Lena six inches to my left, Mrs. Nova six inches to my right—and tried to sleep. The fluorescent lights hummed brightly overhead. People coughed. Babies whined and screamed. A kid nearby twirled a noisemaker, the sound like stones grinding in a barrel. The air was still and humid and oppressive. Radios blared. And lying there, staring at the walls and ceilings, I noticed more roaches. Half an inch long, they scurried up the walls, across the ceiling straight over my head. What is the saying? For every roach you see there are a thousand you don’t? Or for every one you see there are ten thousand you don’t. Either way there must have been millions, hundreds of millions, of roaches on the
Siguntang
. They were everywhere, and I became convinced that one or two would eventually lose their grip and fall. But no one else took notice of them; roaches were a constant in their lives, not even worth noticing.

I pulled a T-shirt over my eyes, tried to get comfortable. It was midnight and already my hips, knees, and ankles hurt from the hard plank. I don’t know when I finally fell asleep, but at 4:30 a.m. the PA system blared to the chanting of the muezzin. Dawn: time to pray. I tried to wait it out, shut it out. But all around me people began to move. Lena slid a white dress over her clothing and enveloped her head in a lace headdress, knelt, and bowed up and down, murmuring.

I got up, stiff, and went up two flights of stairs and out on deck, first light just beginning to illuminate the eastern horizon. Ten-foot-wide decks ran the
Siguntang
’s length, and there was a snack bar on the stern under green corrugated fiberglass. The air felt balmy and fresh; nothing but dark blue calm sea and lightening sky, and at 6:00 a.m., when the snack bar opened, I got a sweet coffee in a thin plastic cup. My ass hurt; there was no place soft to sit anywhere on the ship. I wandered; I stared at the sea; I returned to my plank. “Mr. Carl,” said Mrs. Nova, “you must eat breakfast!” With my ticket, it turned out, I was entitled to three meals a day. I stood in a long line that wound past a window; each passenger was handed a Styrofoam box and a bottle of water. I opened my box: white rice and a fish tail, a packet of sambal—hot sauce. There were a lot of bones. Mrs. Nova sang softly to herself and then someone brought out a guitar. She took it, started singing. Lena joined her. It was melodious, beautiful, and I lay down in the heat and dozed off.

That afternoon, sitting on a rail overlooking one of the lifeboats, I met Daud Genti. He was tiny, five inches shorter than me, dressed in blue jeans and a T-shirt that read
ILLINOIS
STATE
, and he spoke English well, part of the army of cheap, semi-skilled laborers dispersed throughout the world, keeping their parents and their ancestral villages afloat. He was returning home to the Celebes after five years, the last six months as a seaman in Dubai. The
Siguntang
, I soon discovered, was packed with people just like him. “I need a break,” he said. “I’ve been working twelve hours a day, seven days a week, for six months straight, and I quit because they weren’t paying us enough. We were supposed to have one day a week off, but we didn’t.” He’d been working on a dredging barge creating The World, a miniature land of islands in the shape of a Mercator projection of the world’s continents on which vacation villas for the rich would be built, with a crew of Iranians and Filipinos. “In Dubai I never saw an Arab,” he said. “Indians, Bangladeshis, Filipinos, Indonesians only.” Over the years he’d worked in Singapore, in Brunei, on oil rigs off the island of Kalimantan, and he straddled worlds. He was a Toraja, a once fierce race of seafarers who lived in stylized wooden houses with upturned roofs, carried out elaborate funeral rituals and interred their dead in family caves. “All of my family is in a cave,” he said, “but we’re running out of room. I haven’t seen my family in five years.” He fished out his cell phone, checked to see if it had a signal. “I’m worried,” he said. “Not so excited. My village is very traditional and it will take me eight hours by bus to get there from Makassar. There is no electricity. No television. No mobile phone service—I have to go to town an hour on a motorcycle to check my messages. What am I going to do? Maybe when I’m old, like you, I will want to go back there, but not now …” He was used to the world at large now, wanted to stay in it, and he had no idea how long he’d be home for.

A few hours later I met Arthur, another returning worker. He had a narrow face, alive, brimming with enthusiasm. “There is much work,” he said. “Too much to be free!” He was just twenty-four, returning to Ambon after seven years, his last job having been as an electrical mechanic for Shell/Petrobras in Brunei. And for seven years straight he had worked six days a week. “My boss loves me because I work, work, work!” His journey, too, was epic in its length, its passing between worlds. He had driven for two days from Brunei to Pontiniak, Indonesia, taken a ship to Jakarta, then five days to Ambon—nine days from start to finish, from a world of oil wells and technology and English to a village to see parents he hadn’t seen in seven years. It was hard to imagine; I had trouble coming and going and being away for two weeks. What would it be like to be away seven years? And not just away, but away in a different world, speaking a different language?