by Tod A
“I’m telling you, mate, the weather patterns are changing worldwide,” Cooney was saying. “I’ve been on this island near twenty year and it’s only in the last five the monsoon has gotten tetchy. You used to be able to set your clock by it.”
The sky was an angry painting—the palm trees like slashes of black paint on a fiery canvas, crisscrossed with the vapor trails of jets.
“They say the deserts will expand and the tropics will get wetter,” Monty said.
“It’s already happening!” Cooney cried. “The Sahara is moving forty clicks south every year.”
“We’re in the tropics, aren’t we?” I said. “Why won’t it rain?”
“Madunese people lazy,” Kubu said. “Bad offerings, no monsoon.”
The errant monsoon was all that anyone on Madu could talk about.
The fact that no-one had a clue didn’t prevent everyone having an opinion. Ex-pats blamed global warming, meteorologists the freakish cyclone season. Priests and imams put it down to the effects of creeping Westernization, scorn for tradition, and general moral decay. Such was the public’s unquenchable thirst for answers that they were ready to believe just about anything. The papers were filled with contradictory theories from self-styled experts. The Madu Post—never a bastion of journalistic ethics—printed hearsay and half-baked hypotheses from pundits with dubious credentials. Raj had penned more than one of these articles.
When science falters, religion thrives. Clerics were quick to capitalize on the fears of the faithful. The number of ceremonies doubled—then trebled. Believers, their faces taut with worry, flocked to their places of worship. Hindu and Buddhist temples were piled high with offerings. Mosques overflowed at prayer time. Even the Christians—easily the biggest slackers on the island—attended extra services. The chanting of priests and the throb of drums rang long into the night.
Even animals seemed to sense the escalating tension in the air. Dogs were edgy: the fall of a dead palm leaf set them howling. Crows jumped nervously from branch to branch. Only the monitor lizard in the hollow tree outside my bedroom window remained unfazed, propped up on one elbow like a leathery old drunk at a bar.
“The natural systems are breaking down, that’s the problem! Everything goes wonky,” Cooney said.
“Hasn’t the weather always been unpredictable?” I asked. “That’s why we have meteorologists.”
“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, Cowboy. Just look at what they’ve done to the sea! Red tides, jellyfish plagues, the Pacific garbage vortex. Seventy percent of the planet’s surface is water. Once that’s fucked up, we’re all fucked.”
“We’ll all be underwater soon, I imagine,” Monty said. Nothing ever seemed to rile him.
“Not Cooney,” Raj said. “He’s building an ark.”
It was hard to worry about anything on such a glorious evening. The sky had painted the still waters of the lagoon a salmon pink. As fishermen waded in to lob their nets they were transformed into weird creatures—their reflected silhouettes like the double-headed images on playing cards.
“So how goes the job, Mark?” Raj asked.
“Can’t complain. I’ve moved into the guest cottage. It’s a pretty sweet deal.”
“What’s your purview, exactly?” Raj asked.
“Easy-peasy. I just have to re-write his website text into real English.”
“Real English?” Raj said.
“I take his bad translations and make them sound sexy. For a native speaker, it’s a piece of cake—no offense.”
“No offense to who?” Raj said.
“To whom,” Monty corrected.
“To anyone,” I said. “You must have read bad translations that made you cringe. And since Frank is trying to appeal to a more upmarket—”
“Fuck. I almost forgot you’re working for that cunt, Fochs,” Cooney cut in.
“What, the fake antiques thing? I already know about all that.”
“Nah, that’s small beer. I’m talking about the fucking trees. Never been up back-island, have you?”
“Where’s back-island?”
“North end of Madu, beyond the volcano,” Raj explained.
“You won’t find it on the map,” Monty said. “Back-island’s what we mayat call it. The local name’s a bit long and trying on the tongue.”
“I’m on a river trip up the Mahabang last year, spotting orang-utans, a little R & R,” Cooney said. “And what keeps coming down-river? Huge rafts of logs, scads of ‘em. This is supposed to be one of the last remaining virgin forests in the world!”
“Seems she’s a virgin no more,” Monty said.
“Logging is supposed to be banned on Madu,” Cooney said. “Banned. But does it make any difference in this neck of the woods? Fuck no. Anything for a price. And where do you think all this timber is coming from? Straight out of this ‘protected’ rain forest. And who’s collaborating? Your man Frank is.”
“According to the Naga website, they only use certified lumber.”
“You’re dreaming, Sunshine. Rupees in the right pocket go a long way around here. Put an obliging pen-pusher on the payroll, and you got paperwork for anything, stamps and all. Suddenly your illegal teak is sustainably harvested, everything nice and Kosher for Passover.”
“Take it easy on the poor boy,” Monty said. “I don’t see him chopping down any trees.”
“I just think he should know who he’s in bed with.”
“Trees grow back, don’t they?” I muttered.
“Yeah, in three hundred years. If the fuckers haven’t already turned the place into a desert. Which they are attempting to do as we speak.”
“The region is being reforested,” Raj said. “Palm oil plantations. I’m meant to do a piece on it for the Post: Sustainable Industry Brings Prosperity to Rural Peoples.”
“Tell that to the orang-utans. And prosperity for who, I wonder. Think about it! If they didn’t de-forest, they wouldn’t have to bloody re-forest, would they?”
“I’m informed the locals are quite positive about the scheme,” Raj said.
“Until they realize they’ve been fucking taken,” Cooney said.
“Look, man, it’s just a job.”
“That’s what the guards used to say at Buchenwald.”
He pushed back his chair and stalked off toward the bar.
I put some rupees on the table and got up to go.
“Pay him no mind, Mark,” Monty said. “The man is a paranoiac.”
“Paranoiac,” Kubu said.
I staggered across the bridge and stumbled down the beach with Tripod hobbling along beside me.
“We’re quite the pair. You can hardly walk, and I can barely stand.”
She wriggled into her den in the bushes beside the basalt shrine.
I let myself into the compound through the door in the back wall.
I lay awake listening to the tokays crying out in their plaintive voices. Other nocturnal creatures joined the chorus, until the night was as raucous as a pachinko hall. I stared up at the mosquito net, waiting for the din to drown out Cooney’s words, as bats went about their work, emitting shrieks that only the dogs could hear.
The days passed swiftly despite the appalling heat. When the sun roused me daily at six, the old farmer was always hard at work, opening dams in the irrigation canals to flood the paddies, as children cooled off in the muddy water. I wanted to jump in myself. I was usually sweat-soaked before nine. At midday the workers retreated to the shady gangs, and the paddies became as still as mirrors, reflecting the dark volcano. The monsoon still hadn’t come. People said the reservoirs up in the hills wouldn’t hold out much longer.
I had thrust Cooney’s sermon to the back of my mind and thrown myself into the job at hand. After years of freelancing I could crank out catalog copy with my eyes
closed. If my words were bullshit, my inspiration was genuine: my great-grandfather had made Shaker furniture, so I could appreciate the skill required to craft Naga’s wares.
I even admit enjoying my work at times. I wondered whether Frank had pegged me better in ten minutes than I had come to know myself in a lifetime. Either way, my text was an improvement over the mangled English I was replacing. After our brief phone conversation I’d heard no more from Frank. Even Sanjaya claimed to have no idea where he was.
My passport, too, was MIA. I called the consulate every few days, but there was always some new delay—a strike at the Jakarta embassy, or a paperwork mix-up. That was okay. I had no plans to leave Madu anytime soon: I wanted the gravy train to last. If I was lucky, I could finish my new novel by the time the money spigot ran dry. Yet the book was dragging its feet.
I’d roughed out the basic storyline. A comedian witnesses the death of his entire family. Deeply in shock, he can no longer tell a joke—or even distinguish between comedy and tragedy. Smiles look like grimaces. Laughter sounds like the bleating of goats. Humor had always provided his livelihood and coping mechanism. Now robbed of this crutch—along with the tools of his trade—the comedian is condemned to play the straight man in a cruel farce.
I had always loved jokes for their rude truth. But I had never been able to tell one. I invariably flubbed the punch line. My uncle Buster had been a gifted storyteller. I was certain that if I could somehow channel his mastery of the ridiculous I might produce a black comedy with some real weight to it. Yet the right words refused to materialize. I would labor over a paragraph, writing and re-writing until the rhythm felt perfect, then second-guess myself and trash all I had written. There is nothing sadder than a joke that falls flat.
Often I caught myself staring out at the paddy, my mind an utter blank, as the workers bent to plant rice seedlings, inch by inch, in neat little rows.
Wulan came to my room every day at five. At first we barely spoke. Her phrasebook English and my pidgin Madunese precluded much conversation. As a Yankee Catholic I’d been raised to flinch at human touch, so it was unsettling to lie half-naked on a bed, straddled by a comely stranger. I soon found myself chattering away to defuse the tension.
I’d rant and rave about whatever was on my mind—usually the war and the stupidity of the president waging it—assuming that my words would be no more than meaningless babble to Wulan. But often she’d surprise me by cutting straight to the root of an issue. I realized she understood far more English than I originally thought.
I also discovered she was a crack businesswoman. She ran the massage service and a laundry business here in Joro, meanwhile managing her family’s guest house in her home village. Her mother was frail, her father long-dead from drink, and her sister Muda had inherited more looks than brains. So, at twenty-three, Wulan was the de facto family matriarch.
Certainly she had wisdom in her hands. With no formal training, she was a prodigy in the art of touch. She divined my stress with her fingers, attacking malignant knots in my shoulders with the precision of a surgeon extracting tumors. Wulan’s massages were cathartic—more intimate than sex, and infinitely more vexing. I relived my life’s worst moments as she probed my flesh to erase the scars they’d left behind. I’m sure she healed me more in those first few weeks than the Bellevue shrinks had in fifteen years. So I didn’t complain when she began practicing her English on me.
“What kind house you live in America?”
“You mean my luxury penthouse in the Empire State Building?”
“What is a penthouse?”
“A house for pent-up, up-tight people like me. But there are chimpanzee waiters serving chilled champagne, so—Ow! Take it easy!”
When I teased her I was duly punished.
“You are too much pulling my leg, Mr Mark.”
Wulan wasn’t alone in her obsessive curiosity about America.
The Madunese were always asking what things were like where I came from. Men grilled you about the girls: were they as horny and loose as they looked on TV? I told them what they wanted to hear. American girls had sex five to ten times a day, on average. They did it everywhere—in airplane toilets, on Harley Davidsons and photocopy machines. Their lips were pneumatic, and their breasts were pumped with helium so they could screw in swimming pools without sinking. They carved their initials into your back with painted claws.
Madunese women had more pragmatic concerns. They were curious about emigrating to the US, making some money, securing a better life for themselves and their children. I couldn’t really blame them for their interest, but after a month or so the incessant questions began to get on my nerves. Wulan was incorrigible.
“What brand car you drive in America?”
“I used to drive this piss-yellow Toyota.”
“Toyota is Japanese brand. Why not American?”
“It was free. My sister gave it to me.”
“Your sister gave to you car?” The idea was incomprehensible.
“It barely ran. I think she took pity on me. Anyway, I lost it. It’s history.”
“You lost your car?”
“Speeding. Drunk. Without a license. The police impounded it.”
She nodded gravely, giving me that look which told me she had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. There were no driver’s licenses on Madu, and no speed limits. Truck drivers swilled whiskey behind the wheel. She was about to ask another question but I cut her off.
“Don’t you know that curiosity killed the cat, Wulan?”
“Oh, Mr Mark, these cat idioms I really do not understand. Dead cats? Swinging cats? Cats in bags? Do Americans hate cats so much?”
“We’re a cruel people. We even flog dead horses.”
“What is flog?”
A few days later she showed up in a Ramones T-shirt. I was stunned.
“Wulan! The Ramones? Now we’re getting somewhere!”
“We are? Where?”
I pointed at her shirt. “The fucking Ramones! Only the inventors of punk rock.”
“What—this?” she said, examining the logo. “I buy it from the fashion shop of my friend in Kang-Kang. Two-for-one sale. The other I give to Nenek.”
The Kang-Kang street markets sold knock-offs of whatever was trendy in Bangkok or Jakarta. Nenek was her sixty-three-year-old grandmother.
“Wulan. Just tell me. Do you, or do you not, know the Ramones?”
“What is Ramones?”
“Christ on a crutch. Wait, wait, wait. Hang on.”
I went over to the laptop and cranked up ‘Rockaway Beach’. At first she looked wary, like someone sampling a foreign food. Then she began to shimmy a bit, but seemed uncertain whether she should enjoy it or not.
“This is America music?”
“Not America. New York.”
“New York, America, the same.”
“Not the same.”
She listened some more, then stopped dancing.
“I don’t know, Mr Mark,” she said, finally. “I like more the T-shirt.”
“Wulan,” I said, sadly. “You still have so much left to learn about being an American.”
“Really?” She gave me her Sad Face.
I felt a twinge of guilt—but I didn’t want to encourage her. Did the planet really need more Americans? We’d been a plague upon the earth for too long already. What was it that America appeared to promise that the rest of the world so desperately wanted? Money and more money, I supposed—or maybe some semblance of freedom. Anyway, the incessant questions were aggravating. One scorching afternoon I lost my temper.
“Will you please stop going on about America all the time?” I said, leaping from the bed. “It’s not like in the music videos, you know. It’s just a fat, lazy country full of fat, lazy people.”
She gave me her Sad Face again.
I went to the desk and lit a cigarette.
“Look, Wulan, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to yell. But what’s so fucking great about America? Will you tell me that?”
“America is rich,” she said quietly. “People are happy. People are free.”
“Happy? Free? I don’t even think I know what those words mean anymore.”
I’d grown convinced that the American Dream was merely another product we manufactured, like Tom Cruise or Marlboro Lights. Freedom was the dangling carrot, the bait in a classic confidence trick. Seventeen brands of laundry detergent didn’t set you free: choice was an illusion, conjured by shills to sucker in the marks. The carrot was really the stick, and the stick kept you slogging away on the treadmill. I was weary of all the hawkers flogging their shiny wares, worn down by the vast mechanics of it all. It was a con, a grift, a Ponzi scheme, and I was sick to death of the whole racket. But try telling that to someone who can’t afford a washing machine.
“America is going down the toilet, and the rest of you are just following merrily along.”
I thought she would have been used to my rants by now. But this lashing out had upset her.
“I think you are not happy inside yourself, Mr Mark.”
I looked out the window. The lizard was there, watching.
“Why are you so not happy?” she said. “Your life is so good.”
I stubbed out the Chesterfield and lit another.
“You are a smart man, Mr Mark. You are handsome, a mayat. You can always go somewhere you want to go, do something you want to do.”
“So can you, Wulan.”
“No, Wulan must take care of the family. Mother. Grandmother. Wulan can never go somewhere she wants to go.”
“Why doesn’t that sister of yours pick up some slack? Why do you have to be the only one carrying the load?”
“This is Madu, Mr Mark. Not like New York, America.”
“Well, I think it sucks. It’s your life too. You don’t need America to be free. What are you gonna do, move to Staten Island? You’ve got Paradise right here. Just go your own way.”