by Rea Tarvydas
Kate freezes, then escapes up the pathway. From a safe distance, she turns back. The wounded monkey is sitting at the deserted base of the banyan tree. He stares intently after her. Kate walks back to the hotel as fast as possible in the stifling heat.
Kate tosses in her empty bed and, sometime after midnight, drifts into a shallow sleep. Decker enters her dreams, lying below her in the wide hotel bed, thrusting up to meet her, and he tells her something important and, for some reason, she cannot understand him.
Pleasure clusters deep within and she begins to orgasm. Decker laughs and little purple-and-orange crabs crawl out of his gaping mouth, scrabble across the white sheets, onto the tiled floor, underneath the bed. Then the sound of a huge door slamming from somewhere deep in the earth smashes against the night.
Awake and sweating, Kate lies in her bed, her heart galloping. The guesthouse sways, wooden beams creaking. She jumps out of bed and, standing on trembling floorboards, locks her knees in an effort to keep her balance. At the window, large branches are whipping back and forth, leaves snapping inside out.
Long moments pass before the ground settles into a static hum. An atmospheric heaviness presses down on her. The ravine rings, a cacophony of animal noises; the only sounds Kate clearly differentiates are peacocks screaming. Panicking, she rushes out the door, through the garden and up steep stairs, across the spiky grass toward the now candlelit lobby.
There on the lowest step of the lobby stands a uniformed security guard and Decker, quietly talking together in Indonesian. Their words rustle in the darkness. Decker turns toward her. “No worries,” he says, his voice steady. “A small tremor.”
“What magnitude?”
“A small tremor. Nothing to worry about.”
The security guard says something and sweeps an arc of light over her. She is acutely aware she is standing there in a flimsy nightgown and her gaze slips, settling on a vague spot on Decker’s broad shoulder. A flush heats her cheeks.
Decker hands her an industrial-strength black flashlight. “Just in case you need it, Kate.”
“You remember my name.” She finds herself blinking back tears that she isn’t expecting, embarrassed more by revealing her emotions than her body.
“Yeah, sure,” says Decker.
Kate flees back to her guesthouse, tells herself that it was a small tremor, a magnitude no greater than blowing a seismic charge. The peacocks scream in the dark.
Kate sets out on foot for the dance performance. As she hurries up onto the main road, her heels catch in the gravel. She walks past several compounds surrounded by high stone walls. Moonlight shines off the glass shards embedded along the tops. A radio plays. Kate speculates what else lies beyond the walls. When the moon goes missing she wishes she’d brought along Decker’s flashlight.
The sprawling restaurant is comprised of raised pavilions scattered around a central courtyard, each building contains two or three tables and Kate’s is no exception. A table of six, glasses raised in some kind of celebration, next to hers. Speaking some Northern European language. They nod in her direction.
Near the end of dinner, a large stack of firewood in the courtyard is doused with an accelerant and lit. The wind surges and Kate smells the stench of gasoline. The emerging stars hang low in the soft dark sky, casting their own shadows as if double exposed. How unfamiliar the stars appear; their light is diffuse and yellow, unlike the hard white stars back home.
A flickering torch appears in the rice fields, then another and yet another. The men materialize behind the torchbearers, their heads bobbing. Single file, in two columns, one hundred men traverse the narrow footpaths between watery fields. Hoarse and raucous, the frogs announce the men passing.
The long lines converge and the men, young and old, approach the whirling bonfire. Bare-chested, they wear black-and-white checked sarongs and a black head wrap with a single, red hibiscus tucked in the folds. The men sit cross-legged, pressed close to one another, forming tight concentric circles around a small stage. Flames leap and skin glistens in the firelight. The men wait with eyes downcast. Even the sky holds its breath.
The narrator calls and the story begins. The men sway in unison, chanting: kechak, kechak. A heavily jewelled Princess with a sideways stare edges by and gazes over her shoulder at the Demon King, who is stalking her from the rice padi beyond. The glittering Princess is caught and imprisoned on a golden throne and off in the distance, her Prince roars in outrage. The chorus responds by leaning in, beating their chests and calling, louder and louder: kechak, keCHAK.
The Monkey God materializes out of nowhere, his body smeared with ashes. He embarks on a rigorous journey to rescue the Princess. Kate cannot take her eyes off the Monkey God as he celebrates. He leaps and staggers through the men. Dozens of ornate, silver bracelets band his upper arms, forcing his arms up into the air. With heavy eyebrows and contorted mouth, he brandishes a sword and flashes messages to the night sky. The chorus leans in, reaching for him and the Monkey God bounds away, tail jerking. The chanting fractures into a frenzied counterpoint: KeCHAK, KECHAK, KECHAK.
Then the chorus disintegrates. Several men fall to the ground, exhausted. Others wander the stage in a trance, back and forth, back and forth. No patterns emerge in their erratic movements. Kate calms herself by staring into the roaring bonfire.
Later that evening, overlooking the ravine, Kate wonders where Alan is, what he is doing in a city full of beautiful women whom he never mentions. Then again there are a number of things she never mentions. Granitic extrusions, she thinks and realizes that, even though she’s living on the hardest bedrock in the world, she isn’t on solid ground.
Kate turns back to garden pathways curving around a swimming pool that glows like a stratigraphic time-slice. A lighter flares and a cigarette dances in the darkness. The wind whispers: kechak.
A striped shirt floats toward her.
“Why are you here, Kate?”
“To get away. You?”
“Trying to be good. What do you do?” Decker exhales a lazy O.
“To be good?”
Decker laughs. “No, your job.”
“I used to be a geophysicist. You?”
“Communications.” He pulls a beer out of an ice bucket stashed beneath a poolside table and pushes a slippery can into her empty hands. “Tell me about your job, Kate.”
“I analyze seismic maps and search for patterns underground; find oil and gas deposits,” says Kate and takes a seat at the table.
“How cool is that.” Decker settles into a chair across from her, leans back and stares into the soft darkness above. “Look at the stars. I can’t remember the last time I saw so many. You never see any in Hong Kong.”
“I can’t read the constellations,” says Kate, smoothing her skirt over her knees. “Underground formations are my specialty.”
“There are star charts. You like maps, don’t you? You’d better get on it, Kate,” says Decker.
Kate laughs.
“Jesus, it’s hot.” Decker removes his shirt, exposing a smooth hairless chest, and his tattoos emerge. On one arm, a reddish-gold carp climbs a waterfall up his flowering shoulder and on the other, crabs climb up into cherry blossoms. A green-scaled coil curves around one side of his waist. There’s a creature that lives on his back.
“Your tattoos are remarkable.”
“What do you see?” Decker carefully folds and drapes his shirt over the arm of his chair.
“Transformation,” says Kate. “Do you map out your tattoos?”
“I figure it out as I go.”
“Does it hurt?”
“You get used to it.”
“The colours remind me of waveform classification.”
“What’s that?”
“Images of formations. Anomalies, specifically.”
“That’s me. Anomalous.” His stare is impenetrable, both hard and soft. “You must be good at your job, Kate.”
“I used to be.”
A lizard s
kitters across flagstones.
“What are you doing here?” says Decker.
“I told you — ”
“Getting away from the bright lights of Hong Kong.” He considers the burning tip of his cigarette and grimaces. “Same, same. I’ve developed some bad habits.”
“What kind?”
“Bar girls. There are none in Ubud, thank Christ,” says Decker, as if he wishes it wasn’t the case. He pauses. “Listen Kate, you gotta be careful in Asia. You don’t want to spend all your time hanging around with a buncha tai-tais, getting into all kinds of trouble when their husbands are out of town.”
“So you’ve heard.”
“Yeah, you could say that.” Decker laughs and tosses back his beer.
Quiet stretches between them.
Then Decker asks, “How many men you screwed since you got married, Kate?” The lizard freezes on the railing, fixed in silver light, eyes glittering like amphiboles. “C’mon, you can tell me. I just admitted I’m addicted to bar girls, for chrissakes.” Decker taps cigarette ashes into the garden. The tendons along his wrist and hand are taut, well defined in the moonlight.
Kate thinks she has arrived here for some reason. Here at the pavilion on the grounds of this small hotel, here on the faulted ground above a deep ravine. Natural fractures enhance permeability. “Patterns of three,” says Kate.
“What?”
“Three. I’ve slept with three men.”
“Affairs?”
“One night stands.” If you could call them that, they never stayed the night exactly. She didn’t have to ask them to leave. They simply dressed and walked out of anonymous hotel rooms, pulling the doors shut behind them. Above a thick layer of rhyolite.
“You know, it’s funny,” says Decker quietly. “All that time I spent with bar girls, what I craved most was a regular conversation. A couple of months ago, I figure I’m ready to go on a regular date, with a regular woman, and the weirdest fucking thing happened. I discover I can’t talk anymore. I mean. I can’t connect.”
“I’m sorry,” says Kate.
“Yeah, give me a month or two and I’ll get over myself. Meantime, night’s a puppy.” Decker removes the remainder of his clothing. He turns his back and a scorch-eyed, winged green dragon emerges, tail writhing in a sea of half-finished waves. Mesmerized by incomplete waveforms, Kate searches for stable patterns and finds none. Geological confusion. Decker dives into the glowing pool in a single, fluid movement and, as he swims, the outline of his body shimmers one way and then the other.
21:23
THE NIGHT PORTER arrives earlier than usual and knocks twice.
Load Toad swings the door open.
Two women, hand in hand, stare down at their feet.
“Too much, parenthetically speaking,” says Load Toad and shakes his head.
The Night Porter narrows his eyes and says, “Long Live the Chinese People.” An old-fashioned military button on the breast pocket of his new uniform sags, and a blue thread dangles.
An hour later, the Night Porter returns with a young man.
“Christ,” says Load Toad and grins. “I don’t swing that way.”
The Night Porter smiles.
Trapped at The Skyline Business Hotel on account of a stalled contract, and no cigarettes. Load Toad’s sworn off smoking and tries to forget the large bottle of duty-free rum tucked in his luggage. Next door, The American turns up the television.
The next evening, a single knock, forceful.
The Night Porter gestures at the young woman next to him and says, “Yes, yes?”
The woman has no face.
Load Toad slams the door.
On the way to the client’s office, Load Toad’s taxi skirts the partially constructed Guangzhou TV Tower. It is a slender hourglass of twisted steel columns that cinches at the waist like a corset. At the base lie mounds of concrete rubble from demolished apartment buildings, assorted construction debris, and abandoned trash.
Offerings to the future, thinks Load Toad.
The taxi slows in heavy traffic.
Red-and-white striped, plastic sheeting circles the construction site. An immense yellow machine shoves the debris, bullies it into oversized dump trucks that line the narrow streets. The taxi comes to a halt and the driver turns up the already blaring radio. From this angle, Load Toad isn’t certain if the TV Tower relays or blocks information, but he has a hunch she’s hiding something up her skirts.
A three-legged dog emerges through tattered sheeting and barks a warning at the stalled traffic. A man edges past on a motorcycle, a battered plastic container of water strapped to his seat with fluorescent bungee cords. As the motorcyclist navigates potholes, it shifts and water sloshes into the dusty street.
Load Toad checks his Blackberry for messages. Nothing pressing, just a short email from his wife reminding him of an increase in school fees. More money. Load Toad drums his fingers on his knee. More.
Another futile day of contract negotiations ends in a stalemate. On his way through the hotel lobby, Load Toad notices The American alone at the bar and joins him.
“What d’you think of The Skyline Business Hotel?” asks Load Toad then places his drink order.
“There are tomatoes in my fruit basket,” says The American.
“Tomatoes?”
“Cherry tomatoes. And they’re completely covered in wax.”
“Christ,” says Load Toad.
The American shakes his balding head. He’s wearing a faded T-shirt that announces Princeton University.
“Move ’em around,” says Load Toad.
“Behind the door? That sort of thing?”
“Nah. March ’em across the floor. Military style.”
The men laugh together.
The bartender turns up the volume on the television, a variety show with a bunch of clowns hopping across a watery obstacle course. The clowns all fall in, one after another, while the host laughs maniacally.
“They’re filming the story of my life,” says Load Toad. “Two weeks in China trying to close this deal. Two fucking weeks.”
The American says, “Tell me about it.”
After a while Load Toad asks, “Ever wonder what it’d be like, moving home?”
“The States? Economy’s in the toilet.”
“Yeah. Same in Britain. Bloody recession.”
“You got it,” says The American.
“We’re sky-lined at The Skyline Hotel,” says Load Toad. He smoothes down his rumpled dress shirt and reminds himself to send his dirty clothes to the hotel laundry.
The American lights a cigarette.
“My old man died last month,” says Load Toad and bums a smoke. “Massive heart attack. Couldn’t get out of China in time for his funeral.”
The American waves at the bartender for another round.
“My sister sent me a letter, describing the service. Hilarious.”
“Hilarious?” says The American.
“Yeah. Bunch of midgets showed up.”
“Midgets.”
“Masons,” says Load Toad. “The old man was a member. Grand Master. Big man in charge.”
“Of midgets or masons?”
“Both,” says Load Toad and describes a long line of vertically challenged elderly men who, one by one, limped up to rest a hand on the old man’s coffin. Murmured some kind of an ancient prayer, a benediction, no one knew.
“Midgets,” says The American like he can’t quite believe it.
“With disabilities,” says Load Toad.
The men laugh until they cry.
“To your old man,” says The American.
“A right bastard,” says Load Toad and they clink glasses.
“What’s your best memory?”
“Drinking beer in the shed, talking footie,” says Load Toad. He pictures his old man crammed into a rusty camp chair, coils of green hosepipe at his feet.
The American nods. “My old man cemented everything. Covered the front yard in
the ’80s.”
“There was a recession in the ’80s, eh?”
“You got it.”
“Fortifications,” says Load Toad. “Makes sense to me.”
The American doesn’t say anything in response.
Load Toad asks, “Your old man still alive?”
“Ten years,” says The American and points up.
“Sidelined at The Hotel in the Sky,” says Load Toad.
In his room, Load Toad removes the bottle of Bacardi from his luggage and carefully places it on top of the lacquered television cabinet.
There’s a sound outside.
When he opens the door, The Woman with No Face is standing there, alone. No Night Porter. In a moment of weakness, Load Toad lets her in. Sitting at the end of his bed, she touches him, talks to him in Cantonese about his future.
A fire alarm rings in the hallway.
“Yeah. Don’t worry,” says Load Toad. “It rings for me.”
The Woman with No Face carefully folds her small hands, lotus buds, in her lap. Her movements are so beautiful, Load Toad’s throat aches.
They evacuate the hotel. In the stairwell, his next-door neighbour, The American, the one who leaves his television on all night, says, “She’s very pretty.” Load Toad nods and, when they reach the street, sends The Woman with No Face away.
The fire brigade arrives and Load Toad catches a glimpse of The Night Porter in a speaking role he has never seen him in. The Night Porter barks orders at firemen and hotel staff alike. His voice is loud, abrasive. When curious bystanders in the street file past to catch a glimpse, he barks at them too.
No fire exists.
When the fire brigade departs, the siren is silent but the flashing lights are on. The Night Porter gives the all-clear and hotel patrons return to the building. As Load Toad winds through the crowded lobby, he thinks he should never have let The Woman with No Face in.
The tape on the sleeve of the Bacardi sticks but Load Toad persists. Glass of amber liquid in hand, he tries not to worry about his contract and reminds himself to review Perfect Order Measurement in the morning.
The next evening, Load Toad returns to The Skyline and finds a young woman in white-fringed go-go boots draped naked across his bed.