Want Not

by Jonathan Miles

  Turning to Leah, Micah released her father, who cut his eyes toward Leah as well.

  “Was,” John Rye said to her. “Once.” Nodding toward Micah, he said, “She’ll see.”

  That was the last time she’d seen her father, though, care of the Lusks, they corresponded two or three times a year. Last she’d heard, the doctors had forced Motee to quit drinking, on account of his liver, and John Rye was attempting the same. He’d finally plumbed out the cabin, too, after devising a way to harness wind power into an old truck battery for running a well pump. Every one of his letters ended with the same ambiguous question: “Where in the world are you?”

  Following their five-month walk to Maine she and Leah had flown to San Francisco—the flight so terrified Micah that Leah force-fed her some contraband hashish somewhere over Ontario, which did the wild opposite of calm her down; this was nearly cause for emergency medical care, and, coupled with her father’s moonshine dependency, quashed all further curiosity about chemical enhancements—where for six months they lived with Leah’s ex-sister-in-law in a cottage on Telegraph Hill. The ex-sister-in-law, Julie, also called Micah “Tarzan,” and smirked at Micah’s childishly rapt fascination with saltwater, sushi, mangoes, tampons, bookstores, transvestites, Rollerblades, the zoo, silk sheets, panhandlers, espresso, the cruise ships docked alongside the Embarcadero, and the high-end, keypad-controlled, Japanese toilet in Julie’s bathroom that glowed in the dark, cleaned and massaged one’s rear with a pressurized jet spray then dried it with blasts of hot air, and played any of six soundtracks including traditional Japanese harp music which Micah found magnificently and exotically soothing.

  A flock of feral red parrots nested in a date palm in their backyard. Micah found that if she stood still long enough, with bits of apple on her outstretched palm, a few of the parrots would eat from her hand and even perch on her forearm. At first this was cause for ticklish fun—and for Julie to quip to Leah, as she peeked through the blinds, “I see your wild child is finally making friends”—but after a while, as the thrill and wonderment wore off and Micah found she could pet and even (she thought) communicate with the birds, she came to see the parrots as a prime rebuttal to her father’s indictment of the World. They were proof, she decided, that wildness could coexist with civilization, that a balance could be struck, that the World hadn’t been degraded beyond rescue. With a parrot roosting on her wrist, pecking apple from her palm, she would place her other hand over one eye and take a mental snapshot of the bird backed by a red spray of pyracantha and the wild blue haze of the Pacific in the distance; then she would transfer the hand to her other eye, to take in the opposing view: the houses piled atop one another on Telegraph Hill, the Bay Bridge, the Transamerica Pyramid, all the clamor and concrete abutting the water. And then the hand would flip back—to the parrot, the Pacific—and back again—to the skyscrapers, the iron fire escapes, the quilted city blocks—and Micah, radically in love and overwhelmed by the vast rich multitudinousness of this new World, would whisper to herself: You were wrong, Daddy, just look how you were wrong.

  Then came Dilly. Dilly lived next door; he was in his mid-fifties, wore a constant uniform of Hawaiian-print shirts and tassel loafers, and was equipped with a colostomy bag concealed beneath a decorative beaded pouch. Dilly didn’t like the parrots. They squawked. They dropped little greenish turds on his patio and its wrought-iron table. And, he claimed, they were an invasive species, like kudzu or mitten crabs, that was stealing precious food and resources from the beleaguered native birds. Parrot-feeders like Micah, he complained to Julie, were only aggravating the situation. Dilly was fulsomely emotional about it all, saying that while he didn’t wish to start a “conflict” with Julie (“as a neighbor I have nothing but love for you,” he said, afterwards spelling out love for bonus effect), the squawking was inciting migraines and, he said (patting the colostomy bag), he was “terribly worried” about the potential hazards of all those germ-laden “poos.” Julie apologized, hugged him, and promised an immediate stop to the feeding.

  Micah was incensed. All through dinner that night she pleaded her case—at one point Julie groaned, “Is there anything else we can talk about?” to which Micah replied no and silent Leah slid farther into her chair—and then long, long into the night, until Julie finally told Leah, “If Tarzan says one more fucking word about those parrots, I want her gone. As in, tomorrow.”

  “What does he mean, the squawking bothers him?” Micah kept on. “That’s like saying the ocean being blue bothers you. Or the leaves falling off the trees.”

  “For fuck’s sake, welcome to reality!” Julie howled back. “Welcome to civilization, okay? It’s not a zoo. It’s my house! It’s my neighbor! Get over it! Find another fucking . . . hobby.” Then she threw up her arms, in Leah’s direction, and went clomping off to her room in thick exasperation. In the morning she told Leah it was time for them to go. Micah’s presence was warping her chakra something bad.

  So they traveled to India for three months, Leah and Micah, though not before dumping two hundred pounds of birdseed in and around Dilly’s patio. Obtaining a passport for Micah proved a serious hurdle, requiring the aid of her father’s Knoxville attorney, Leah’s father’s attorney, and two forged documents. Micah’s passport photo, taken at Walgreens, was the first formal portrait of her life. For hours and hours she stared at it, rubbing it with her thumb as if to disprove its flat one-dimensionality, as if to make tactile contact with this piece of herself trapped beneath laminate. The blue passport itself was her solemn badge, signifying newfound allegiance to the World, and though it mesmerized her, with its official notice from the Secretary of State and inscrutable numeric coding, it also felt treasonous: a vinyl-bound repudiation of all that John Rye had tried to shield her from. On the long flight to Mumbai, dulled by regular doses of Xanax that Leah administered (“It’s nothing nothing nothing like the hash,” Leah promised), Micah wondered about the girl in the photo: Was she friend or foe? And of whom?

  They roamed from hostel to hostel, watched their underwhites turn malevolently green in the cold waters of the Ganges at Haridwar, observed a ritual cremation pyre at the Manikarnika Ghat in Varanasi, made slow giggly love in a pink poppy field outside Bundi with their lips dyed crimson from chewing paan, dispensed thousands upon thousands of rupees to children on the beach at Chennai, and reveled in their conversions to vegetarianism (Micah) and Jnana yoga (Leah). Mostly, however, India made Micah cry. This wasn’t an unusual reaction to the country, where American women had been known to come sniffling up to hotel registration counters after staring out the window openmouthed on the five-mile taxi ride from the Mumbai airport. But Micah’s response was different from that. It wasn’t the makeshift blue shanties and lean-tos, or the women thrashing clothes on rocks, the men squatting to defecate in the shade of Peepal trees, or the naked, cinnamon-colored children cooling themselves in puddles—all this was too familiar, even nostalgically comforting, to faze her. What wrenched her, instead, was the unnatural landscape of the poverty: the scale, the density, all the degraded details. The coolant-green, battery-acid-yellow swirls in the puddle those children were cooling in. The mustardy burning-trash haze that strangled the breeze those women were sucking into their lungs as they paused between thrashings. And the hunger: the everywhere night-and-day hunger that seemed to her so impossible—how could so many be so hungry and contaminated, yet the earth still be spinning, the newspapers publishing, the factories factory-ing, the lovers loving, the preachers preaching? How could God justify this lopsidedness, with endless Hamburger Helper granted to one side of the world and what looked like nothing to the other?—and yet so insurmountable, so unrelievable at the same time? It can’t be like this but it is; it must change but it can’t. A thought scratched at her: Was this the World her father had warned her about? Was this sensation of enraged helplessness, rather than God’s voice, what had sent him into the woods?

  One afternoon, beside a biscuit stall near the Anjuna m
arket, she watched a pair of toddlers scraping stray lentils—so few she could probably have counted them—out of a discarded plastic bowl with their fingers. A backpacker’s leftovers, plucked from the street: She’d seen the disposal, and the rapid scavenging too. With tender formality, the pair took turns scooping equal-sized gobbets from the bowl, the boy licking his fingers clean while his sister dug in, and vice versa, then vice versa again. The sight was not extraordinary, by any means, but something about it—the mature resignation on the toddlers’ faces, perhaps, or the poignancy of their diplomacy—struck Micah as unbearably, crashingly tragic. For a long while, jostled by crowds of backpackers and trinket-hawkers and scam artists poking metal rods into tourists’ ears to sell them bogus ear cleanings, Micah waited to see if a mother might appear, her chest as tight as when she’d waited all those weeks and months for her own mother to reappear. To this story, at least, she needed an ending. Then Leah came to fetch her.

  “Been looking everywhere, Jesus,” Leah said, her voice tinged with a burr of annoyance. “You have got to see these bangles down this way. They’re so freakin you.” She tugged at Micah’s arm, and then, sensing resistance, asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “Everything,” Micah wanted to say, but didn’t. Instead she bit her lip and kept staring, forcing Leah to survey the scene for clues. Leah frowned, shifting her weight to one leg with the audible harrumph of someone hamstrung by a riddle. She saw a splotchy humpbacked cow ambling through the litter. A mustachioed man pedaling a rickshaw down the street, a giant black vat of something tethered to a trailer. A woman sitting crosslegged and shut-eyed behind a basket of bananas. A torrent of motorbikes, a rainbow of sari-draped women. And then there, at the side of the biscuit stall, the two toddlers: expressionless, the boy in a crouch, rocking on his heels, and the girl picking listlessly at a knee-scab, their exhausted bowl of lentils overturned beside them.

  “Them?” she asked, and Micah nodded. When Micah said nothing more, Leah sighed with enough theatrical emphasis to be heard over the street clamor, and said, “Yeah. It’s awful.”

  For a few respectful beats, she waited, then tugged at Micah again. Again Micah resisted.

  “Okay,” said Leah, drawing a pink thousand-rupee note from her beaded change purse. “Let’s do this.”

  Micah watched as Leah made a swift, efficient beeline for the children. She had the air of someone conducting an unpleasant business transaction, similar to the way she’d approached a hosteler in Mumbai after contracting 240 volts through her finger via a ceiling fan switch: her gaze level, her posture impeccable, her movement crisp and considered.

  The boy peered up at her indifferently. Then, spying the rupee note, he raised an open palm which Leah covered with the money. She said something to the children that Micah couldn’t hear, and the boy nodded weakly and passed the money to his sister, who examined it with the same enervated half-interest she’d given the scab on her knee. Leah turned back toward Micah, almost but not quite smiling, and Micah watched—with a sudden sadness more focused and intense than the sadness preceding it, though far less scrutable—as the crowds parted for Leah, fell back to let her stride untouched through the visible shimmers of heat.

  By the time Leah was beside Micah again, yanking her toward the bangle stall with blithe tenacity, Micah was no longer in love with her. Micah would agonize about this, and reconstruct the scene over and over again in her head in an effort to determine just what had broken the spell and if perhaps it was just a sag rather than a snap, but it wasn’t, and she was never quite able to pinpoint the cause: It was as if the indifference on the boy’s face, as he’d squinted up at Leah, had been transferred to Micah via some telepathic, love-smothering infection. She was suddenly, even violently immune to Leah as she encircled Micah’s wrists with various bangles, deliriously colored yet uniformly drab, her inability to select one impelling Leah to buy half a dozen of them for her, the languorous, charmed way Leah sidled up to the shopkeeper contrasting so starkly with the way she’d approached the smeary-faced children crouching beside the biscuit stall. It wasn’t as simple as a case of insufficient pity, of Leah’s casual regard for the toddlers revealing some hidden chilliness within her, or the way she’d used her father’s money as a kind of salve, like the rosebud salve Micah’s mother used to rub onto Micah’s scrapes and insect bites, in order to rescue not the children but the moment, her moment; Micah had dismissed those theories by nightfall. No, something larger had come between her and Leah, she thought, something that had little to do with Leah and possibly just as little to do with her and Leah, or her and anyone. In those moments, as she’d watched the children scooping salvaged lentils into their mouths, love—the act of it, the narcosis of it, the exclusivity of it—struck her as an indefensible luxury on a par with the computerized toilet in Julie’s apartment or the cruise ships towering above the Embarcadero. The memory of her and Leah tattooing each other’s bodies with paan-dyed lip-prints amidst a coral sea of poppies—which had seemed, in its silky recollecting, an inexhaustible fount of pleasure—had come back to her corroded and drained of color, etched by guilt. In its wake, with fierce vividness, came another memory: “It’s a beautiful world,” Leah sleepily announcing from the wide-grained floor of the cabin (a line she’d repeated, over and over again, in that swaying field of poppies), and John Rye wagging his head and saying, “She’ll see.” Had she seen? But seen what?

  This came near the end of the trip, which, coupled with a bout of giardiasis that reduced Leah to a dismal, shuddering groan-state, relieved Micah of the immediate need for painful declarations. She had only the vaguest bookish notions of what happened at the end of love, and of how you treated its remains. Still, Leah knew. The teasing and playfulness commenced a slow fade-out, leaving only somber affection. Every touch lingered, as if each was the last. The clearer farewell came when Leah fell ill and they reversed roles: Where Leah had been the older, wiser guide to the exterior World, the midwife for Micah’s entry into civilization, Micah became the guide to Leah’s interior landscape, nursing her through the cramps and cradling her head while she vomited, applying cool damp rags to Leah’s forehead just as she’d done for her father. She spent her eighteenth birthday in a luxury hotel suite in Mangalore (Leah abandoned the freewheeling hostel-and-streetfood mode of travel the very instant she got sick, handing Micah a heretofore-unseen Amex card), reading an Ivan Illich book she’d scrounged from a hostel while monitoring Leah’s sleep from a silk-cushioned rattan chair.

  For the rail trip back to Mumbai and its international airport Leah dosed herself so heavily with Xanax that she spent most of the journey immobile; every few hours she would stagger to the bathroom, her crusty, slitted eyes of limited use to her as she’d feel her way down the aisle, then sink back into her seat like a water buffalo submerging itself in mud, dunking herself into a brown subconsciousness.

  Theirs was a first-class car with air conditioning. Across from them, in a sheenful pinstriped suit, sat a middle-aged Indian man holding a cordovan briefcase atop his lap, as if fearful to place even an inch of distance between the briefcase and himself. Because this reminded Micah of Dilly with his beaded colostomy bag, and because the man’s suit reminded her of all the lawyers who’d milled indifferently about the courtroom during her custody hearings, she took an instant dislike to the man—this despite the warm, beatific, slightly amused expression he aimed at her throughout the long ride, and his endearingly clumsy attempts at conversation. “I see that your friend is ill,” he said, several hours out of Mangalore. “Yes,” replied Micah. “That is extremely unfortunate and I am sorry to hear it,” he said, before another hour passed between them.

  That’s when Micah noticed the plates. The first one, barely: a white disk flitting in and out of her peripheral vision, from outside the window, quick as a diving bird. But then another, and a minute later another. She glanced at the man to see if he’d noticed them too, but he was staring straight ahead as he’d mostly done since Mangalore, en
gaged in some businessman’s version of meditation. Noting her glance, however, he smiled and nodded and parted his lips to speak. Sharply, Micah returned her gaze to the window where, again, she watched a polystyrene plate sail by. Bewildered, she stood up and, leaning over Leah, peered out the window at the tracks. How had she not noticed this before? Thousands of smeary plastic plates were strewn alongside the tracks, where bonesleeve dogs were licking them along the dirt here and there—a fringe of multicolored saucers lining the tracks for as far as she could see. As she watched, more and more plates came coursing by; passengers were apparently flinging them out the windows of the car or cars in front of theirs. Her grimace, as she fell back into her seat, was acute enough to provide the businessman an opening.

  “This troubles you?” he asked, jutting his chin toward the window.

  So he had noticed. But because his tonal emphasis was on the word troubles, Micah construed the question as a challenge, as if he was goading her to pass judgment on his country and his countrymen’s habit of chucking their trash out the window. Still, it did trouble her, so she met the man’s eyes and said, “Yes.”

  “Me too!” he blurted, then laughed as uproariously and incredulously as if he’d just discovered they were cousins. “It is terrible!”

  “Well,” Micah demurred, not sure if it was terrible or just ugly.

  “But there is an explanation,” he said, raising and shaking an index finger. “To proceed you will tell me your name.”

  “Micah.”

  “Mica!” This seemed to him another happy discovery; the way his eyes glowed, Micah half expected him to say it was his name too. “An extremely important mineral,” he said, his voice shifting suddenly into professorial mode. “Did you know that the Kodarma district in Jharkhand has the greatest deposits of mica in the world?”