Her Here

by Amanda Dennis

  The last two evenings, I’d gathered courage and looked for Seb at his house. He wasn’t there. Since we barely spoke anymore, I had to learn from Béa where he was.

  —You shouldn’t follow him, she’d said. He’s with Ploy. You’ll only hurt yourself.

  Béa was always too careful. Besides, she didn’t know. No one knew.

  So I took the motorbike up the winding dirt paths into the hills. The colors were brilliant, the sky an impossible blue. At turnoffs to waterfalls, the air grew cool. Bamboo groves turned to deciduous forests and back again. Boars trotted off the road as I approached. I got off and walked the motorcycle when the road got too steep to ride. Finally, I reached the wooden sign with gold letters: NAAM JAI SAI. WATER OF THE CLEAR HEART.

  Many months ago, when Seb and I were exploring the region’s waterfalls, we’d stumbled upon the place by accident. I was new at driving the motorbike, and Seb was getting tired of having to stop so much. We thought at first that it was the entrance to a hill tribe village, but then we sensed the stillness and rare quiet of the place. We walked down a lane of birds-of-paradise to a Lanna pavilion. Breezes blew through the space. We could see all the way to Myanmar.

  We met the owners of the resort—a young Thai couple who took an immediate liking to Seb because he spoke both French and Thai. The couple had worked for a year in Bordeaux before deciding to give up their jobs and use what they’d saved to build a paradise. After a year of searching, they found this site in the hills of Doi Mae Salong. It was low season, and they offered to give us a tour.

  All of the villas had been built with the region’s finest teakwood. The architects and builders had designed the space in harmony with the landscape, in Lanna style. One of the villas opened onto a deck with an infinity pool: bright blue of water and tile against the valley below. I could have stared at it forever, but the couple invited us for jasmine tea and lavender cookies. I was Seb’s sister. We never bothered to correct them.

  Now, I reached the resort’s pavilion, its view causing my breath to catch in my throat: tea plantations, orange orchards, pineapple fields, and villages tucked into hills creviced by waterfalls. Still, I spent my days in the valleys, not at these heights.

  The female innkeeper kissed me on both cheeks.

  —Sebastian’s sister, she said, smiling with warmth that made tears gather, hot and hidden, behind my eyes. Yes, yes, he is here.

  She offered to accompany me to the villa, but I said I could go alone. I needed to compose myself. She drew her hands to her chest. I wai’ed in return.

  I drew in breath on the walk, juniper, jasmine, and teakwood on the breeze. I knew Seb wouldn’t be alone. I’d come with a sense of urgency, but would I know, once he and I were face-to-face, how to ask him for a word? I was braver in mind than in body. Still, I knew that if I didn’t tell him, something inside me would always gape. The path narrowed as I approached the villa.

  A Lanna house has no borders. Walls are doors, open to breezes blown across rice fields, orange orchards, and tea plantations. Teakwood gave the room its odor, rich and sharp. A breeze touched my face and arms. Seb was packing, suitcase on the bed. His back was turned, and his white shirt stood out against polished wood walls. Behind him, through wall-size doors, hills stretched into Myanmar.

  Silently, I floated into the room, closer to Seb, who was folding a shirt. With the odor of him—familiar—my heart squeezed. My throat grew tight. All of Vietnam came rushing back. Where was Ploy? Had Béa been wrong? Had Seb come not with Ploy but by himself—to be away from things, to think? Hope swelled in my chest.

  There was the humidity of his body, carried to me by the breeze.

  —I thought Ploy would be here, I said, inches from his back.

  Even to my own ears, my voice sounded raw, accusatory.

  Seb flinched so hard, he almost hit me as he wheeled around, his eyes the gray of polished marble.

  —Jesus, Ella. How did you get here?

  —I had to speak with you, I said.

  —Now? he asked, performing incredulity, to shame me.

  —I didn’t know when you were getting back.

  —I’d have been in Ban Du in an hour, he said.

  —I didn’t know that. Béa told me you took a trip with Ploy.

  I tried to stay calm, but my voice was accusing again. He sighed.

  —The idea was to have a mini break before the semester began. The owners—

  —They gave you a discount?

  —Of course. He smiled boyishly—a flash of the old Seb—then grew serious. Ploy is overworked. She has all these new students with the start of term, and now she is leading tourism visits to the tea plantations, the botanical gardens—

  —Where is she? I asked, cutting him off, looking around.

  —She had a lesson at noon. I stayed on a bit. I’m going now, he added.

  It was time to say what I had come to say. But just then there came a sudden, delicious sense of peace. I could barely remember what I had to tell Seb or why it had seemed important.

  —It’s good to be up here, I said, up in the hills. I should’ve come more often.

  Silence ballooned between us.

  —I went to the States, I began, then looked at Seb as if this alone were enough to make him understand, without speech, without words that would make it more real than it had to be.

  Seb placed a last shirt in his suitcase and looked around the room.

  —Your book, I said, pointing to the deck by the infinity pool.

  I watched him enter the panorama of the landscape, then followed. The deck edged dizzyingly over the valley.

  —Sublime here, I said, wanting banalities, phatic niceties to steady myself.

  He reached for his book, keeping my position in sight, nervous. His movements were stiff. The old comfort was irrecoverable.

  —I came to say I’m sorry, I said helplessly.

  It was not at all why I had come, but Seb came toward me, an opening. It was time to tell him.

  —What are you reading? I asked, changing the subject.

  —The Magic Mountain. Hard to get into—look, this couldn’t have waited until I was back?

  —I’m leaving Chiang Rai.

  I studied his face for surprise but could find none. Only his eyes seemed to darken.

  —Tomorrow, I added. For good.

  —Ah, he replied, still without astonishment. They asked you not to teach.

  I nodded, studying the edge of the pool.

  —It’ll be okay, he said. Maybe they’ll ask you back next term, after you’ve rested some? Muay told me. It’s not fair of them, is it?

  —I’m going to the south, I said, to the Andaman Sea, to “take time for myself.”

  I tried to laugh, but the laugh came out bitter.

  —I came to say good-bye and to tell you—

  Seb held up his hand as if to shield himself, the way he’d shielded himself from the vase.

  —You were upset, he said gently. A lot happened. I know you didn’t mean …

  His eyes were clear. I forced myself to look at him until I felt I would crack. Then he put a hand between my shoulder blades, holding me upright. I looked over the hills, wishing I could jump and fly over them, be a fleck of dust in the light, dancing down into the valleys. I’d driven two hours, hauling the motorbike up steep inclines, to tell him. I’d vowed to tell him, to say it even if it had to be in front of Ploy. But now the chance was here, and the words wouldn’t come.

  —Ella? Are you okay? I felt him shaking me. Are you okay?

  I said vague things about Bangkok, the States, and looked at him meaningfully, hoping he would guess. Wasn’t it obvious? My voice came in shudders, breath too fast.

  Seb frowned, puzzled and a bit afraid.

  —I should go, he said. We’ll ride down together, yeah?

  I thought of how to say it on the way down, though every jolt of the hillside made it feel as if an organ would spill out through some hidden opening. The doctors had adv
ised me not to return to Asia. They said I should stay at home in case of complications. Mom insisted that my obligations to the university didn’t matter, that my health was more important, that they would find someone to take over my class. We’d find a way to get my things. She said all this, and yet I felt it would be certain madness if I stayed: no job, no sense of identity outside her care. So I flew eighteen hours over desert and ocean and slept for a week in the house by the rice fields, telling no one. Soraya was the only one who knew, and she was gone.

  When we reached the superhighway, Seb leaned toward me, his eyes naked, full of feeling, and kissed me on the cheek.

  —Take care of yourself, he said, cupping my shoulder in his palm.

  I nodded, and he sped away.

  October 5

  Dusk descending over waters multilayered in blues. Sands are marble-colored, sticky in the mist. The Andaman is smooth, drifting to sleep under my gaze. I’ll cross it tomorrow, on my way to where the sea gypsies live. These skies and sands are too vivid to exist in life. They must be images. I’ve stepped inside a photograph or between the frames of a film, crawled into a space that is neither life nor art, but the zone created when they reflect each other infinitely, like facing mirrors. This is more real than regular reality. Can feel the earth, magnetic, under my body. People born in the year of the rooster (I heard this) must scratch the earth to feel secure. Feet dug like claws in the sticky sand. The moments keep moving, yes.

  October 7

  Whose fault? Fault lines. Anything nuclear, fissures in family. No borders or bounds; any breast can nourish anyone’s child. Fault in the idea that home exists. Utopia buried in rubble. Here: salt, sea, nomads. Two miles from the bungalows, Angus says, are the chao leh, also called the gypsies of the sea. Unwritten letters to my birth mother on my walks: I’ll be cured, salted, like a sea cucumber, strung up in the sun. Sapped of humors by the magic of the sky and sea.

  Grade upon grade of blue, then the white gold of sand. Bungalows stretched two hundred meters along the coast of the island, near the place where I washed up in my hired long-tail, hoping for deserted shores. The driver tossed my pack from the boat and came aground with me. I scratched the sand with my toes, rooting myself in the cool beneath the sun crust of surface.

  I wished the driver would go. But he secured the boat, and we walked a hundred meters along the shore to a bungalow set back from the coast, the space around it crowded with clay statuettes, hammocks, dartboards, and sculptures made of wood and beer cans. A man with smooth skin, no shirt, dark dreadlocks, and silver rings on his large hands paid the driver what I thought was a commission. Later, Angus told me it was for marijuana from the mainland.

  The driver stuffed the money in a pocket.

  —Kap khun krap, Angus said, and, turning to me, priced the bungalow in British English. He had a gentle way of speaking. His face was broad, with high cheekbones and a flat nose. He looked half Asian. (I learned later he was half German, half Malay.) I paid a month up front. I wanted to be relieved of the money I’d brought, to carry less. Angus offered me cold beer. We drank it in his bungalow before he showed me to my own.

  I watched the old words float to the surface of my thoughts and spill away into the space around us. Your accent—have you lived in England? How many people live on this island? What is its circumference? Will you be here always? Or will others come to replace you? How do you live your days? Where have you come from? Why did you leave? Giving voice to even one of these questions would have meant slipping back into the old ways. Here, I would not need others. They distract from looking within. The questions died away unasked. Finally, I was elsewhere—far enough that here wouldn’t find me. The island teemed with unmarked paths, raw possibilities. It was a place to live forever.

  Hours ago, I’d left Krabi, the mainland shore, where monkeys placed their tiny hands in mine and laughed and screeched, for this island I didn’t know existed until I arrived. I lay on the threshold of my new bungalow, heels inside and hair spreading into the sand: relief of displacement. Could I do it forever, dump my excess of self into larger and larger containers, until the pressure of enclosure would become negative and the skin of my body would burst? I would empty out at last into the world. Chiang Rai was too full of me. Familiar places only chanted back regrets. I needed unscratched sand with nothing of my impression. I wrote:

  iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

  oooooooooooooooooo

  to sound the void. I liked the o shape best and made more.

  The nuts and dried fruit I’d brought from Krabi were not enough. I was hungry all the time. In my mind’s image of the island, I could pick papayas from trees and net fish in the sea. Instead, a gnawing in my stomach brought me to Angus’s bungalow. Unsurprised, he led me down a small concrete road to a town that further jarred with my vision of the island. We bought what we needed and returned to his bungalow. He made Malaysian curries. His father was from Malaysia, which surprised me. I’d assumed it was the other way around. Maybe it was. It didn’t matter. He offered me beer again, and the first sips eased a dull emptiness of hunger that was beginning to feel like pain.

  Angus was saying something about the low season, the restaurant in the town being closed. His voice was reedy and rough, like wind through a pipe. The fizz of the beer numbed my lips. I played with savoring the sensation. I watched and smelled him cooking. Slow, slow. His slow, careful movements reminded me of Seb. Angus’s body was larger than Seb’s. But when night fell and we had eaten and began to make love, it was Seb’s hand on the small of my back, pressing me to him and protecting the small bones in my back from the wood of the bungalow wall.

  When I reached for Angus’s hand and cupped it across my mouth, he didn’t act surprised. He was probably high.

  During nights with Angus, there were sometimes swells of disgust, though no feelings passed between us. Our coming together happened as if on its own, without pleasure or passion. We slipped into nakedness and the strange rhythm as if it were an extension of our meal. Angus smelled of musk and something very sweet. Animal flesh. I grazed the skin of his chest with my nose to find the source of the sweetness. It was everywhere. He pressed himself against me, into me with little interest. He never held me or clung to me, and this was good. He was always partly in the sea and thinking of other things, and I was, too.

  Seb was the object of all my meditations. I learned I could make his face appear on the still surface of the sea at dusk. I thought about him so much that one day his whole body emerged, wandering among the palms behind my bungalow.

  I knew I wasn’t well in Chiang Rai—could read it in others’ faces: Béa’s, Aurelia’s, Lek’s, and Muay’s. Muay had trembled as she gave me the news about my job. Teaching was okay. It might have kept my mind and thoughts in order. But at the university, too, they sensed something was wrong. In their way, through Muay, they asked me not to teach. Saving face—mine, mostly—they recommended I take a holiday; we would see about my job once I was “rested.” So I meditated and asked the god powers I believed in from time to time what I should do. Home wasn’t the answer. Neither was going to look for my birth mother in Paris—not yet. I needed empty space. But I feared every elsewhere would turn into here and I’d never be able to leave myself.

  I brought one book with me to the island, thinking I’d read it over and over, like a Bible. I’d hoped it would be a manual for stoicism. It wasn’t, but I read it anyway. The book was Natural Questions. It was falling apart because I kept returning to its pages and because the sun and salt got in its binding. “Death,” Seneca wrote, “is the tribute and duty of mortals, the remedy for every suffering.”

  One night, by accident, I discovered Angus’s library. Awake while he slept, wandering through his rooms, I found some hundred books in boxes. I didn’t get the sense that Angus read much anymore, but he must have once. Why store them on the island? Had he nowhere else? In one of the books, there was a passage that singed me. It was about essences unable to flo
w in certain people: from these people into those they love and from those they love into them. Their ego is terrible. They are like a house “with the shutters eternally closed; the sunlight would like to shine on this house, too, and warm it up, but the house does not open … it is terrified by happiness.” Inside the house, there is “wild and despairing activity … an endless rearranging …” No space can ever be the one in which we’re meant to be.

  When I grew tired of books, I read the sands.

  In the sands are etched things of great importance, the past in the future. One need only know how to look and to translate. It was Seb who taught me. He gestured. I saw: sound waves pressed into the surface of the sands. Chladni figures everywhere. Tangible frequencies, physical sound. Oh, the sands were full of these present absences, and so full of sounds from all times that I stopped being able to read them, too much interference (like fuzz on the airwaves). I would retreat, at those moments, to the lazy indifference of Angus or to the relative silence of my book: “Enslavement to oneself is the most severe enslavement.”

  One day I looked toward the sea. Seb asked me, Don’t you want to know more about the shape of this place? How can you stand living on this bit of fringe, not knowing? I asked him how many days it would take to circle the island by foot. He didn’t know. We decided to find out. We knew we would have to sleep outside, but the rains had stopped and the sky was clear. In Chiang Rai, it would be the cool season. The semester would have started, first classes taught, students milling in their black-and-white uniforms. I thought of Aurelia, how she’d been dressed as a student the day we met. The sounds of the island were different at night. Seb and I could see the stars from the beaches and groves where we slept amid the constant tearing of tides and the insects tunneling earth and flesh.

  It was on this exploratory adventure that I first chanced upon the chao leh, the Moken, the people of the sea, always casting their nets and pushing off in their boats. Their settlement was temporary, I discovered, for the chao leh were always moving. They traveled lightly, by boat, and touched down only during the heavy rains, when the sea was too rough to carry them. From the Moken I learned that the earth has veins and arteries. The chao leh could predict the moods of the sea, and they lived without leaving a scar on the land.