Euphoria

by Lily King

  Kanup was eager to hear what I knew of Fen and Xambun’s hunt. That is what they all thought—that Fen and Xambun had gone on a boar hunt. He led me to a back room of his men’s house where, he told me, the men were discussing this expedition. I sat on a thick cane mat and passed out the cigarettes, which quickly made me many pals. Chanta was there and broke into laughter every time our eyes met. Kanup did his best to translate, though it was clearly not a skill of his and I got only fragments of the long conversation. Now that Xambun was gone, they felt free to speak of him. Some of the men felt slighted not to have been included on the trip, but the general feeling was that it was a good thing he had gone. His spirit has gone wandering, they said. He had not returned with it. He was once a man on fire and he came back a man of ash. He is not the same man, they said, and he has gone to find his spirit and bring it back into his body. They appealed to his ancestors, reciting their long names, and to the land and water spirits. I watched how fervently they prayed to all their gods for the return of Xambun’s soul to his body. Tears sprung from their clenched eyes and sweat beaded on their arms. I doubted anyone had ever prayed for me like that, or any other way for that matter.

  I didn’t hear her come up. I was typing up the day’s notes.

  ‘I love that sound,’ she said just outside the netting, and I jumped.

  ‘I hope you’re not bothered. My notes turn to mush quickly if I don’t get them down.’

  ‘Mine too.’ She was bright and lovely, grinning at me.

  ‘I’m nearly through.’

  ‘Take as long as you like. That’s Fen’s machine anyway.’

  She went to her bedroom and came back with another typewriter. She set it on the adjacent desk. I tried to concentrate, though I was aware of her legs to the left of mine beneath the table and her fingers feeding a page into the platen and her lips fluttering slightly as she read over her notes. Once she began typing, at a furious rate that was not at all surprising, the sound concentrated my thoughts and our keys thundered together. I noticed that she was manually advancing the paper at the end of each line. It was a lovely instrument, dove grey with ivory keys, but it was dented in one corner and the silver arm had broken off at its base.

  She ripped out a page and snapped in another.

  ‘I don’t believe you’re writing actual words,’ I said.

  She handed me her first page. There were no paragraphs, barely any punctuation, the thinnest sliver of a margin. Tavi sits still her eyes drooping nearly asleep body swaying and Mudama carefully pinching the lice flicking the bugs in the fire the zinging of her fingernails through the strands of hair, concentration tenderness love peace pieta.

  I looked down at my own words: In light of this conversation with Chanta, and the proximity of his native Pinlau to the Kiona, one concludes that there were other tribes in the vicinity who also once practiced some sort of transvestite ritual.

  ‘You’re writing some sort of avant-garde novel,’ I said.

  ‘I just want to be able to put myself back in that moment when I read it over a year from now. What I think is important now might not be important to me then. If I can remember the feeling of sitting next to Mudama and Tavi on this afternoon then I can recall all the details I didn’t think important enough to write down.’

  I tried it her way. I wrote a full description of Chanta and his tumor and his hands without fingers and his wet clear eyes. I wrote down all the dialogue I could remember, which was much more than I had in my notes, though at the time I thought I was getting everything down. I loved the sound of our two typewriters; it felt like we were in a band, making a strange sort of music. It felt like I was a part of something, and that the work was important. She always made me feel that the work was important. And then her typewriter stopped and she was watching me. ‘Don’t stop’ I said. ‘Your typing makes my brain work better.’

  When we finished we ate dried fish and old sago pancakes. Through the doorway there were long flashes of lightning. There was a rumbling that I thought was thunder.

  She lit a mosquito coil and we sat in the doorway with mugs of tea.

  ‘Drums,’ she said. ‘Fen and Xambun’s beats. They are wishing them safety at night.’

  I told her about the talk in the men’s house and their hope that Xambun’s spirit would return to him. We could hear people gathering near the drums. A few women passed below the house, their children lagging behind, one with a knitted doll Nell must have given her. Lightning was still flashing, silently, behind the northern hills where the moon would soon rise. I felt the world had finally carved out a little place for me.

  We talked of our Grid.

  ‘Personality depends on context, just like culture,’ she said. ‘Certain people bring out certain traits in each other. Don’t you think? If I had a husband, for example, who said, “Your typing makes my brain work better,” I would not be so ashamed of my impulse to work. You don’t always see how much other people are shaping you. What are you looking at?’

  I wasn’t looking at much of anything. I was just trying not to look at her. No sign of the moon, and the lake wasn’t visible save in the few seconds that the lightning flashed. But the air was shifting. I felt something that was almost a cool wind against my arms and face, but not a wind, not even a breeze, just an air current that felt different, as if someone ten feet away had opened the lid of an ice box briefly. I reached out to feel it and, as if I had beckoned it, a great gust struck against my hand. All at once the trees shuddered and the grass skirt about the house swished.

  ‘Let’s go down to the sand and make the rain come,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Let’s do a dance, like the Zuni.’

  And then she was down the ladder, racing to the path. I followed. Of course I followed.

  Neither of us knew an actual rain dance, but we improvised. She claimed ami was the Zuni word for rain. It was cheating because the rain was coming, everything was shifting so fast, the wind had worked the tall palms into a froth above us and scudded hard against the water and the sky was low and black. But we stomped on the sand and called out Ami! Ami! and every other word we knew for rain and wet and water, and everything suddenly got blacker and cooler and the wind fierce and the memory of rain, real rain, came on quickly, only a few moments before the rain itself. We held our faces up and spread out our arms. Big drops smacked all over us and drove the insects on our skin to the ground.

  The rain hit the lake water loudly and it took my ears several minutes to get used to the roar. You don’t realize in the dry season how much is held in, but now all the sounds and smells came back, stirred up by the wind and humidity, flowers and roots and leaves exhaling their full flavor. Even the lake itself released a pungent peat odor as the rain dug into it. Nell seemed smaller and younger and I could see her easily at thirteen, at nine, a little girl on a Pennsylvania farm, and all I could do was keep looking. I hardly knew I wasn’t speaking. ‘I think we should go in,’ she said.

  I thought she meant go back to the house, but she turned from me and unbuttoned her dress and dropped it in the sand. She walked to the water in a brassiere and short American knickers, loose at the thigh. ‘I can’t swim, so you better join me.’

  I quickly pulled off my shirt and trousers. The water was warmer than the air and felt like the first bath I’d had in two years. I sank in up to my neck and let my feet float to the surface as the rain hammered the water as if it were a sheet of silver.

  She really couldn’t swim. How had I not noticed this before? I paddled around but she remained upright, bouncing on her toes. Of course I wanted to offer to teach her, to hold her as my mother had held me in the River Cam, to feel the weight of her in my arms, the edge of her brassiere against my fingers, knickers thin and wet as they broke the surface. I could feel it far too well without actually doing it, and I found I had to keep swimming away from her to try and subdue the effects, then swimming back to hear what she was saying through the smashing rain.


  The rain was still lashing as we ran back up to the house. We put on dry clothes, each in the dark of our respective mosquito rooms. I fished out some old-looking Australian biscuits from the hoard and she asked if I was never not hungry. I said I was twice her size which led to an argument about how many inches were between us which led to measuring each other against a post, marking the spot with a penknife then calculating the difference. I held the measuring tape out flat, my fingers damp from the swim and dusty from all the biscuits. Seventeen inches.

  ‘It seems like more when it’s horizontal like that. Up and down it doesn’t seem so dramatic, does it?’

  We were standing close by the pole and she was cheating by standing on her toes, her face lifted straight up and the rain crashing into the thatch above us and I wasn’t sure how I would kiss her without lifting her up to my lips. She laughed as if I had said this out loud.

  We went back to the sofa and somehow I told her about Aunt Dottie and the New Forest and my trip to the Galápagos in ’22. ‘My father had hoped the trip would make a biologist out of me but the only valuable thing I discovered was that my body loves a hot, humid climate. Unlike yours.’ I nearly brushed my fingers along her scarred arm beside mine.

  ‘I come from hearty Pennsylvania potato farmers on my mother’s side. You’ll have to see me in winter. The cold gives me energy.’

  I laughed. ‘I’m not sure I want to see what that looks like.’ But I did. More than anything I could think of.

  She told me more about her potato-growing ancestors and their escape from the Great Famine, which put me in mind of Yeats’s ‘The Ballad of Father Gilligan,’ and we ended up saying poems back and forth.

  After the war I’d memorized most of Brooke and Owen and Sassoon, and half convinced myself that they’d been written by John. Or Martin, who actually did write poetry. The war poets were all tangled up with my brothers and my youth and I thought I would cry when I got to the end of ‘Hardness of Heart’ and the bit about tears not being endless, but I didn’t. Nell did the crying for both of us.

  I try not to return to these moments very often, for I end up lacerating my young self for not simply kissing the girl. I thought we had time. Despite everything, I believed somehow there was time. Love’s first mistake. Perhaps love’s only mistake. Time for you and time for me, though I never did warm to Eliot. She was married. She was pregnant. And what would it have mattered in the end? What would it have altered to have kissed her then, that night? Everything. Nothing. Impossible to know.

  We fell asleep reciting. Who was speaking or what poem I am not certain. We woke to little Sema and Amini poking us in the leg.

  25

  The morning began as the one before, with children scrambling in and out of her lap, and hand games and explosions of laughter. Bani brought me coffee and I worked at her typewriter. A few boys peered in through the netting. Chanta didn’t come but I thought more about my conversation with him and jotted down some questions for Teket when I returned.

  All at once, far too early, Nell scooted everyone out of the house.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I called to her.

  ‘No mothers,’ she said. ‘No adult women today.’ She began packing her visiting bag. She was wearing the blue dress I’d first seen her in. ‘Something is going on. It happened last month and they wouldn’t let me in. I’m not going to be brushed off this time. I’ll be back at teatime.’ And she was gone.

  By teatime Fen might be back, too.

  I spent a few hours at their bookshelves and the piles of books around them. They had brought so many books, American novels I’d never heard of, ethnographies that had won prizes I didn’t know about, books by sociologists and psychologists with strange names from places like California and Texas. It was a whole universe I barely knew existed. They had a mound of magazines, too. I read about Roosevelt’s election and something called the Cyclotron, an atom-smasher that forced particles around in circles to accelerations of over a million electron volts, at which point they broke and formed a new kind of radium. I would have stayed in reading all day, but Kanup came round to ask if I wanted to go fishing.

  I followed him down to the water. The sky was clear and the sun beat down, but the ground was pocked and shredded from the storm, littered with huge fronds and leaves, nuts and hard unripe fruits. We crunched through piles of debris to get to his boat on the beach. Many canoes were already on the water, paddled by men. I asked him why the men were fishing today, and not the women.

  He smiled and said the women were busy. He seemed to want to imply more, but not say it. ‘The women are crazy today,’ he said.

  We checked our nets and headed out. The Tam men were born and bred to be artisans: potters, painters, and mask makers. They were, I learned that afternoon, staggeringly poor fishermen. They argued and insulted one another. Their fingers ripped holes in the fragile fiber nets. They didn’t seem to understand how the traps worked. Their loud voices scared the fish. I had a good chuckle watching them, but all the while I was aware of the far side of the lake, dimly shimmering, from where at any moment my canoe would reappear.

  I was glad when we got back to shore, eager for tea with Nell and what little time alone with her remained. But Kanup wanted to wash out the canoe, which he thought smelled of fish though he hadn’t caught anything, and plug up a small leak, so we went to get some gum sap from his house. I called up to Nell as we went by, but there was no answer.

  When we returned to the beach she was standing ankle-deep in the water, both hands shielding her eyes, scouring the surface of the lake. Kanup was talking and she turned about and saw us. Her arms dropped to her sides.

  ‘They told me you’d left!’

  ‘Left?’

  ‘Yes. Chanta told me you’d gone off in a boat.’

  ‘I went fishing with Kanup.’

  ‘Oh, thank God.’ She grabbed me by my shirtsleeves. ‘I really thought you’d gone to find them.’

  ‘Bit late for that.’

  Kanup had gone over to his canoe, but I did not follow to help him because Nell hadn’t let me go. She held on and examined the fabric of my plain white shirt. There was something different about her.

  ‘I thought you’d gone to Bett,’ she said.

  ‘Bett?’

  ‘Because she has a boat.’

  I’d forgotten about Bett and her boat. And that I’d told Fen about her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said laughing, though she seemed to be crying, too. She let go of my shirtsleeves and brushed at her face quickly. ‘I’ve had a very strange day, Bankson.’

  I could not take my eyes off her. It was as if she were performing some trick, some sort of unfolding. There was something raw and exposed about her, as if many things had already happened between us, as if time had leapt ahead and we were already lovers. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Let’s go up to the house.’

  I gave Kanup an apologetic shrug, which I wasn’t sure he understood. But nothing could have separated me from Nell at that moment. I took one last fearful glance at the horizon. Empty. A bit more time. I followed her closely up the path.

  We didn’t have tea. She poured us whiskey, and we sat across from each other at the kitchen table. ‘I don’t know if you’ll believe me.’

  ‘Of course I will.’

  She stood up. ‘Sorry, I think I should write it all up first.’ She went to her desk and slid a piece of paper into her typewriter. I waited for the rush of keys. Nothing. She came back and sat down at the table. ‘I think maybe I do need to tell you.’ She took a long sip of her whiskey. She had a lovely throat, unmarred by the tropics. When she put the glass down she looked at me directly.

  ‘If I tried to tell Fen this, he wouldn’t believe me. He’d say I’d made it up, or mis—’

  ‘Tell me, Nell.’

  ‘As soon as I turned up the women’s road, I felt it, the same queer stillness as that one other time when they kept me out. I went straight to the last house, where smoke wa
s coming out of all three chimneys and all the windows were sealed tight. I pushed through the curtain before anyone could stop me and was struck in the face by hot stinky wet air, like a smelly steam house. I gagged and tried to stick my nose out the doorway for some air but Malun pulled me in and took my basket and told me it was the minyana and they’d all decided I could stay.’

  The minyana. She hadn’t heard this word before, she told me. When her eyes adapted to the dark room, she made out round black slabs of something cooking in small amounts of water on pans in the hearths. The room was full of women, many more than usual, and no one was mending a line or weaving a basket or nursing a baby. There were no children at all. Some of the women tended the pans on the fire and others were lying on mats along all sides of the room. All at once the black slabs were flipped over. They made a great clatter. They were stones, smooth round stones cooking in flat earthen pans. The women then left the stones and came away from the fire, carrying small pots they had been warming. Each woman on a mat was paired with a woman at the fire. An old woman named Yepe led Nell to a mat. ‘I tried to get my notebook from my basket but she stopped me and made me lie down.’ Yepe squatted next to her and unfastened her dress clumsily, inexperienced with buttons. Then she dipped her hands into the pot. They came out thick and dripping with oil and she placed them on Nell’s neck and began a slow massage, working her way down her back slowly, kneading, her hands moving easily in the thick oil. ‘It was happening like this all down the rows of mats, the massages deepening, quickening, and the women—you have to understand, these women are hardworking and unpampered; the Tam men are the ones who have much more leisure, who sit around painting their pots and their bodies and gossiping—these women started grunting and groaning.’

  Nell got up for the whiskey bottle, and when she came back she took the seat sideways to mine, filled our glasses, and put her feet on the rungs of my chair. ‘You’re sure you want me to go on?’