Her Here

by Amanda Dennis

  —You won’t survive like that, he said, walking ahead of me. Rules are important, but you must break them to oblige the intuition. Otherwise, you lose it.

  —Isn’t that the point? I asked, struggling to keep pace with him.

  —To lose your intuition? He turned to look back at me. No.

  —But fasting lessens sense desire. It’s a way toward freedom.

  —Discipline and moderation regulate sense desire, not murdering one’s natural instincts. Do you listen to everything one tells you?

  I said nothing, concentrating on the path.

  —Proper care of the body and its desires is necessary to a full life. Asceticism on retreat is maddening. Turns out pliant fools, he said, turning to look me up and down, or messes.

  The walk was invigorating once I learned to lengthen my stride to keep pace with him. We crossed the street, veering away from the monastery. The street was deserted.

  —Where are we going? I asked.

  —Oh, now you’re curious! I was starting to worry about you.

  A tuk tuk careered around the bend and accelerated past us.

  We came to a clearing by the road where there was a bamboo thatch hut and plastic tables on packed dirt. A plump woman was frying noodles in a large wok. I felt relief. A restaurant.

  —Sawatdee ka, she called.

  Aromas woke the senses: herbs frying, the snap of shrimp as they sweated and turned pink. We sat at one of the tables. My hunger was a hollowness that was almost painful. The Man from Augsburg was speaking. Words echoed. The world looked large, like a fishbowl.

  —Ignore the body, he was saying. How without nutrients? We have a proverb. The Thais would agree, but it’s German: Der Mensch ist, was er isst. You can’t forget your body, because what is living, other than desiring, dying, eating, fucking?

  My body cringed at the blow of each of his consonants. Black dots danced before my eyes

  —Beautiful stuff, he said, leaning in.

  —They say you fast in your last days here, I said.

  —I fast to feed my hunger. Like trimming the wick of a flame.

  The woman brought us steaming plates of som tam, pad thai with succulent shrimp, and pad krapow gai. It was simple food, but the colors and smells sent me into raptures: tomatoes in the som tam, greens of limes and basil. Hunger burned through my body. My hands felt clammy despite the heat.

  —I don’t have money, I said, looking dazedly at the Man from Augsburg.

  He threw his head back, laughed, then fixed me with his pale eyes, as if I were some interesting, suffering specimen. He curled his golden hair behind his ears.

  —We’ll put it on my tab, he said, gesturing to the food without dropping his gaze: Please.

  My body won out. I tried to be delicate, but the tastes were consuming: crispness of young papaya, sweet-sour tamarind, textures of pad krapow, everything intense, herbed, spiced.

  When I looked up, the Man from Augsburg was staring at me. He plucked a shrimp from the plate and chewed it thoughtfully. Sweet mango arrived in a glaze of warm coconut milk.

  —It is the most sensuous of fruits, he said, taking the slippery flesh in his mouth.

  Guilty as I was at having transgressed the rules of right alimentation, at having answered the needs of the body and taken pleasure in it, I felt a chemical restoration occurring. I was energized, uninhibited. Exuberance flowed into my limbs and animated my face and hands. Language became coherent again, leading somewhere, ripe with possibility. I was chatty—and wanted to know the story of the Man from Augsburg. I posed bold, naïve questions, which seemed to amuse him: Do you believe in goodness? Do you believe in home?

  —In the last seven years, he said, I’ve lived in fifteen countries. Not counting the navy. To me, moving is like sleeping with women of all different ages and cultures. You are different in each place, with each body. Then there is the chance to distill whatever survives the changes.

  He sounded eccentric, yes, but who could blame us for speaking of essences when all we did every day was sit or walk alone with our breath? I thought of my journals, record of my plural selves. I imagined finding in them an overlap, a verbal Venn diagram of my essence.

  —Except in my case—he began to laugh—there’s nothing. In my quest to find a core, I disappeared. Most invigorating thing I’ve lived. You lose personhood; then it’s raw possibility.…

  He was still laughing, withholding the story I wanted but telling me something all the same, in control of his words. Still, I was frustrated, unable to know him ordinarily.

  —Your questions, Ella, he said, sensing this. You want to find a man in front of you. Oh-ho, there isn’t one, Ella.

  Each time he said my name, he seemed to gather some ritual control over my reaction.

  —Why the monastery? I asked, needing to say something. What are you trying to find?

  —Or lose? I’m peeling away occasional selves—he smiled ironically—layers of masks. I’ll be honest with you, because you’re darling and earnest. I don’t believe in karma as a model for responsibility, but I love expiation. It’s an old addiction, from my childhood. It … feels good.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, I OPENED MY EYES from a sitting meditation to find the Man from Augsburg sitting cross-legged in front of me, staring, his pale eyes as blank as the sky.

  —What is your astrology sign? he asked with utmost seriousness.

  When I answered, he said:

  —A scorpion. Of course! With you it’s clear. You desire, you repel. You’re doing it now. I can feel you, afraid.

  —I’m afraid of you? I asked, indignant.

  —No, he said. Of your desire.

  DECAPITATION OF THE I YIELDS THE IRRATIONAL i like the square root of negative one: imaginary.

  THE BIKKHUNI CUT MY HAIR IN THE STREAM. It washed away, and we watched bougainvillea blossoms falling into the brook and water sliding over the smaller stones. Body so light as to be elsewhere. Here everyone is alone, the bikkhuni told me. Lay-people come to the gates with orchids, lotus buds, gifts for the temple: forms fading among fading forms, arising and passing away. The monastery is a simulacrum more real than living, magnified, so the feeling is more.

  TO KEEP MY HEAD IN THE MONASTERY, I began attaching great importance to small things. In the heat of the afternoons, when meditation was hardest, the promise of a shower kept me sane: rush of cool water, sloughing off debris of dead days. I plunged on, walking, sitting, teeth clenching at image obsessions after which I trailed, wanting word labels to fix to their calamities.

  When the timer sounded, giddy with anticipation, I undressed in my room, shivering in the heat, and stood under the showerhead. With the flow of water, the moment would open. I’d climb inside. Stay. Present. I turned the knob.

  Nothing. I jerked harder. I turned the knob back to its starting position, counted to three, twisted again. Hard. A single drop, brown and putrid, fell to my cheek. Shaking, with chills in the heat, I stretched myself across the floor tiles, pressing my skin to their cool surface.

  It was still too hot. I dragged myself up. Still no water. I went to ask Pra New about it. But he was busy, speaking to new arrivals, retelling the story of his name.

  —Past is past! he said, flicking his wrist. So we start again. So I’m New.

  I walked on. By the time evening fell, I was calm, meditating in the library. Fans blew breezes across the space. Marble tiles were cool. Monks murmured chants from dark corners. Lamps were lit as the night advanced. I left with the last of the monks, down the stairs flanked by naga statues, glass mosaic bodies glittering in the moonlight. I carried my sandals, wanting to feel the roughness of the pebbled walk on my feet.

  As I approached the row of bungalows, I saw that the inside of one was silver, reflecting the brightness of the full moon. It was mine. It looked like magic. When I opened the door, water rushed around my toes. After turning off the shower in the bathroom, I stood very still, guilty. Then I began a walking meditation, sloshing through the shallow w
ater. Hundreds of ants had been killed in the flood, their corpses in the water like specks of dirt. Then, later, I dragged my backpack to a shaft of light in the middle of the room, lay in the water with my head on the pack and laughed, looking at the moon.

  WHEN MY RETREAT WAS OVER, there were details again, things to arrange. I apologized to Pra New for flooding my room. I would miss him.

  My street clothes sagged, loose sandpaper against my skin. My hair was short.

  Pra New found me a ride on the back of a monk’s motorcycle to Tapei Gate, where I was having dinner with Aurelia. Mobile phone turned on again after so long.

  Aurelia’s hands shook as she picked at her food. She talked in bursts. She asked about the monastery. But her questions came too quickly and didn’t correspond to what I was saying. When I asked how and with whom she’d spent her time, she looked intently at her spicy vegetables, as if sight alone were the right way of ingesting them. It seemed cruel to press her.

  —You don’t want to flow time, she said. You want to—not stop it, but slow it, so you live more, better? Flow is what they want us to think. It’s a stupid trap!

  —They? I asked, worried by her rapid, disjointed way of talking.

  —You know, everybody—everybody who wants to hurt us? Aurelia said.

  I noticed, maybe for the first time, how frail she was, her chest bones sticking out under her necklace of beaten gold. Emotionally, too, I felt her craving a vague thing she had to keep herself from having. Although I hadn’t touched anyone in a month, some instinct guided me around the table to the wooden bench where Aurelia, quivering, forked the vegetables she couldn’t eat. When I hugged her, I felt the sharp ridges of her shoulders, the frailty of her bones. She pulled back. Awkward, I hugged harder. She began a quiet sob into my stiff clothes. I held her until she stopped shaking and excused herself to go to the restroom. She said it was nothing.

  —It’s just life, you know? Ha-ah! Just life. No, nothing happened. Just life.

  The Man from Augsburg had given me his address and instructions to ask the building concierge for keys to his high-rise apartment. I hadn’t planned to go. My plan was to check into a guesthouse and wait for Seb, who had texted to say he would come to Chiang Mai after all, for Songkran. But the monastery’s fragile serenity was slipping, replaced by a sad, worried separateness. I wanted to feel close to someone, if only by being in his space. Aurelia’s fear and desire always reminded me uncomfortably of my own.

  Inside the apartment, everything was urbane, clean. There was a balcony with nice views, musk-smelling soap in the shower, patchouli cologne in the bathroom. There were soft sheets but no personal details: no pictures, letters, not even bills. He must keep other apartments in other cities, I realized. There were Buddha heads in the living room, sleek candles, a large TV and stereo, meditation books in German, and tapestries in black and red. Wished for something more human. Nothing in the refrigerator. I lit the candles.

  Sometime in the evening, my mobile phone buzzed. There was a creaking in the hallway. Blood rushed to my face. I grabbed the phone. Would he say I am outside, open the door? Would he come in with his smell, patchouli like the cologne in the bathroom? Want what? Eighteenth floor. No escape. Fear, yes, only fear of his presence, body taut, intentioned—magnetizing all space.

  His message demanded a response: What are you trying to tell me?

  I looked at the clock, as if this information would help me. It was late. What? I messaged back, inelegant, clumsy—when I could’ve said, I’m in your room in the dark, thinking you’ll enter, impossibly, that I’ll learn who you are and be afraid. …

  But his first message turned out to be a sort of summons; he wanted me in front of my phone, looking at his words as they appeared.

  You visited me tonight during meditation. You were asking me something in a language you made up that only you could understand. When I got back to my room, for the first time in the seven years I’ve been coming here, I saw … Can you guess?

  His reply was quick:

  Scorpion on the wall. Just above my bed.

  The phone flashed again, insistently.

  So what are you trying to tell me?

  Had I sent the scorpion? What did he want me to say? Things felt animated, live symbols connecting us. I looked at the phone.

  What did you do with it? I texted.

  It took him a long time to respond, enough so that I worried. I was right to.

  Smashed it. Stained the wall with its guts. Still twitching. Shouldn’t have been in my space, the nasty thing.

  In his bed all night, I dreamed of flooding, water cascading into spaces it shouldn’t go. The next day I took my things, blocked his number on my phone, and checked into a guesthouse. I never saw or heard from the Man from Augsburg again.

  32

  CROSS IF POSITIVE. LINE IF NEGATIVE. The worst is waiting, plastic stick on the back of the toilet while the timer ticks down. I think how stupid I’ve been. Guilt over Z. When I went home with the painter, I wasn’t myself. Now the idea of something growing inside me—unknown—terrifies me.

  There is an image that will not fade: a long sand beach under hot sun. Horizons mingled, blues. A strip of sand into water. It is very real, more like a memory than a scene from the journals. My memories have a gray aura, a cast of reality, like a tarnish. Hers are brighter. Which is this? It might be my missing year.

  The stick is a mess of blurred lines. I can hear my heartbeat in the empty flat. There is a second stick in the pack. I try to pee in a straighter line. While waiting for the second reading, I try to put my panic in order, map if/then scenarios, but I think of her instead. Who would she tell? Muay? Goody-two-shoes. Aurelia? Unstable. Béa? Yes, ordinarily, but too busy with Lek’s photo exhibition, which would travel next to Chiang Mai. Only Soraya would understand.

  Pink line, sharp and clear. I throw myself onto my bed with relief.

  Z is at work, but he picks up. He whispers for me to hold on and takes the call outside. I have the impulse to hang up, no explanation. It has been a month since we’ve talked.

  —Are you okay? Z asks in full voice. How is Paris?

  I hear wind behind him. Maybe there’s sun in Boston. I feel terrible and have nothing to say. I ask about work and he tells me. I ask when he’ll quit and become a philosopher. He laughs. Our conversation is strained, too polite. He asks about the project. He doesn’t ask when I’m coming home.

  —I think I’m starting to see things from the months I don’t remember.

  I hear him draw in breath, annoyed by the sudden intensity. But he was with me during that time, almost every day. I have to ask:

  —Was there a body of water, a sea, an ocean, or even a very large lake, where there may have been waves? Was there a beach we went to? Someplace we visited?

  —No, he says. Why?

  —I saw a beach—

  I stop short, confused. Is it mine, this vision? The journals create memories, but usually I know they’re hers. This one is at the edge—I don’t know where it comes from.

  Z sighs. He’s working. He has to go.

  —Do you think you can just … maybe concentrate on moving forward?

  —Of course, I say, wanting to seem in control, the sort of person who is aware of her excesses and recovers quickly. Maybe … we can talk more often?

  —I’m here, he says.

  When he ends the call, I feel an unbearable sadness—discomfort, too, at the image that hides its source: a beach, low waves. Dusk is falling. Raw breeze through the windows. It will rain again tonight.

  33

  THE MONASTERY HADN’T FREED ME from earthly attachment, still less from desire. When Seb appeared, hunched under his worn backpack, gray eyes scanning the stalls of the weekend market, the force of his familiarity was too much. I ran through the crowded aisles, falling into his surprised hug. He was glad to see me, too, and he sized me up with careful eyes.

  —The monks starved you, he said.

  I laughed. It wa
s true. My clothes were loose, baggy since I’d left the monastery.

  Seb bought us mango and sticky rice, which we sat on the curb and shared, and it was like old times, conversation bubbling between us. Those few days in Chiang Mai were halcyon. We played like children, celebrating Songkran with water guns and buckets, and happiness hit with all its force—too bright, too joyous, too unlasting.

  In Hanoi, we spent most of our time apart. Seb reasoned that you encounter a city more deeply in solitude. Under a leaden sky, I watched tai chi in parks, drank Vietnamese coffee in lakefront bars, and smiled at children who asked for money, buying them baguettes from an ancient woman wheeling a bread cart. In quiet spaces, I listened for the flow of fountains and the slender strokes of bells. Some things Seb and I did together, like squatting in line to see the corpse of Ho Chi Minh and eating bo bun on stools so low, our knees were higher than our bowls.

  There were nights on a wooden sailboat in the Gulf of Tonkin, then Haiphong, Hội An, Hué, Da Nang, Ninh Hòa, Nha Trang, Ho Chi Minh City. From each place name hung a smell, like the street of spices in Hanoi, where banyan trees plunged their wooden arms into the earth.

  The gray sky dissolved as we made our way south. In Hội An, a textile town and old trading port, Seb grew annoyed at the tourists and felt the urge for solitude. He hired a motorbike for the day and drove into the hills to look at Champa ruins. Respecting this, or at least accepting it—creature of harmony that I was postmonastery—I set out walking, past the Chinese shophouses and temples, the Japanese Covered Bridge, the French colonial buildings and narrow Vietnamese houses, past the tailor shops, once, twice, along sand beaches and wharves, covering the city with my steps. In one of the tailor shops, a woman was drawing. I stopped and asked if she would make me a dress.

  She took my measurements, and we picked out a Vietnamese silk that was pleasantly coarse, a shimmery peach color. She asked how I wanted the dress, sketching options to give me inspiration. It would be strapless, tucked at the waist, and fall below the knee. I had nowhere to wear such a dress. I asked if I could watch her make it.