Kitchen Curse

by Eka Kurniawan

  NO CRAZIES IN THIS TOWN

  Vacation was almost here. So, three officers climbed into a pickup and drove around looking for crazy people.

  About five years ago there had been an incident, one quite embarrassing for the town. It began with a gang of high school kids on break who were staying at a cheap inn, not far from the bay. It was the height of vacation season, and they were lucky to have gotten a room, even though it was a filthy mess, with clogged toilets and cloudy water. The group, eight boys in all, were hoping to find a little action far from home. Too bad for them, the girls on the shore wearing short shorts and carefree smiles were all closely guarded by their boyfriends or under their parents’ constant watchful eye.

  Then one of the boys suggested going to a whorehouse. They had never done that before and, imagining it would make a great story for their schoolfriends back home, not one of them objected. Renting four motorbikes, they drove around the town. They asked some local kids hanging out at an intersection where the whorehouse was. But it turned out the last prostitute in the town had been paraded around town and beaten black and blue a month before, by a group of pious men.

  “If there are any left,” the local kids said, “We’re not going to share. Sorry.”

  Sorely disappointed, and so horny they were about to burst, the eight schoolkids came across a crazy woman on a bridge. She looked to be in her thirties. She wasn’t too ugly for them. And, so, driven by their natural instincts, they bathed her and brought her back to their inn. And that was how it all started.

  Nobody knows how or why the idea spread to other tourists, but the police started getting reports about out-of-towners capturing crazy women and bringing them back to their lodgings. At first they didn’t pay much attention, since the local youth got up to similar tricks from time to time. It only became a scandal after it had been going on for a while and a local preacher lamented, on Eid al-Fitr no less, the fact that tourists from all over the world were coming to their town to sleep with crazy people. In a fiery sermon, the preacher incited his congregation to burn down the inns unless the police immediately rid the town of crazies—because, of course, they could never rid the town of tourists. The preacher himself made a good living selling packets of dried fish, most of which were bought by tourists as gifts, and the mosque finances were heavily dependent on benefactors who also made their money off the tourists.

  So, the cleansing of the crazy people was carried out—and not just crazy women, but also crazy men. The more wackos they found, the harder they looked for them. At first, it was a job for the police. But after a while, the civilian officers charged with maintaining order took over.

  The town was small, on the southern coast of Java. They didn’t have a mental hospital, they didn’t even have a regular hospital. They had only one community health center and an orphanage. So, this is what the three officers in the pickup would do: They would drive around the town and if they found a crazy person or two by the side of the road, they would grab them and throw them into the truck. As afternoon approached, by which time they would have caught a few, the pickup would drive north, away from the town, into a government-owned teak forest, beyond which was the nearest town. When they’d driven about halfway through, they would stop and release the crazy people.

  Marwan drove the truck, and he would always be the one to say goodbye:

  “Until we meet again, at the end of vacation season!”

  When the season was over, Marwan and his two friends would get back into the pickup and drive back to the teak forest. They wouldn’t immediately see any crazy people, of course.

  This year they had released three women and two men. After slowly driving along the road that cut through the forest, they pulled over and climbed out. Then, just as always, they set out on foot. Marwan was carrying a twine rope—so far they had never been forced to tie anyone up, but they always had to be ready. His two friends, Darto and Kartomo, followed him. Darto was wearing a backpack.

  In their experience, crazy people never strayed too far. They checked the small stream at the bottom of a hill. For some reason, they often found their first one there—perhaps, like animals, crazy people preferred to be near water. And they did find a man, slumped over on a big rock, feet dangling in the current.

  Marwan approached the crazy man, stood on the edge of a rock, and peered down at him. Then he looked back at his friends and said,

  “Dead.”

  They had lost one. Kartomo reached into in his pocket and took out a cellphone, preparing to photograph the corpse. Marwan and Darto squatted next to the body, posing and smiling broadly. Kartomo pressed a button, and they heard the sound that indicated the picture had been taken.

  The corpse didn’t smell yet, but they all spat anyway. After Kartomo took a few more pictures, they continued on their journey, following the stream. They left the corpse without touching it. That’s a matter for the police, one of them said. And the gravedigger, said another.

  Then they heard the second crazy person’s voice, coming from the top of the hill. A woman. Darto heard her first. He looked up and whispered, “Is this nut-job singing?” But after all three heard it, they couldn’t tell whether she was really humming to herself or snarling. They hurried up the slope, holding sharpened teak branches. At the top of the hill, there was a rest hut for the forest rangers. That’s where the crazy woman was. Snarling.

  A foul smell assaulted the men’s noses—there were piles of shit strewn all around the hut.

  “Damn it!” Darto swore. “Hi, wacko, quick, let’s get out of there.”

  With quite some difficulty, they hauled her down the hill and dunked her in the river. Darto took a clean dress out of his backpack and changed her clothes. After they gave her some rice cake and a slice of white bread, the crazy woman followed them on foot. And on their journey back up the hill, on a different path than the one they had taken before, they found the third crazy person, a man.

  He was naked and had a muscular body, but the most striking thing about him was his genitals—dark, big, protruding from behind a wiry thicket of pubic hair that stuck out in every direction—swinging in rhythm with his steps. The three officers marveled at the sight. Even though they had seen him a number of times, and so the size wasn’t exactly a surprise, they still felt a pang of envy.

  The crazy man grinned as soon as he saw the three officers. He recognized them. Seeing rice cake, he didn’t need to be persuaded to fall in step and follow them.

  They brought these two crazies to the pickup and helped them in. It was Kartomo’s job to guard them while Darto and Marwan went looking for the other two. With some luck, they would be found before dusk. Marwan and Darto knew the two remaining crazy women fairly well—they usually went everywhere together and had a tendency to roam farther afield than the other two.

  “I hate to see a crazy man die,” Darto muttered as he walked.

  “Mm-hmm,” Marwan agreed, following behind. “But sooner or later there will be a new one. Believe me. God is the Infinitely Just.”

  Darto chuckled. He didn’t say anything else, but now had a cheerful spring in his step. Then he sung a line of a song. Neither remembered who sang it, or what the title was, but Marwan was soon singing along. They looked happy—and, indeed, good work should make people happy.

  The next vacation season would arrive in two months. Marwan stood at the door to the bar on which a large sign was hung: “KIDS UNDER 17 AND IN SCHOOL UNIFORMS PROHIBITED.” A pair of Japanese tourists stood on the sidewalk under a streetlight, checking a page in a Lonely Planet guide. Two Finnish girls sat on the chairs on the bar terrace, beers on the table, one of them absorbed in a Michael Crichton book while the other listened to her iPod. A family of local tourists—from Makassar, judging by their accent—bicycled by. Even though high season was still a long way off, there was already a smattering of tourists. Marwan smiled happily at that, and of course so did all the other folks in the town.

  A well-dressed man approache
d from the beach. He looked to his left and right and then read the name of the bar on the sign. He looked over at Marwan, hesitated for a moment, but then approached.

  “Are you Marwan?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  Marwan pointed to the red Honda 700 motorcycle parked nearby. The well-dressed man nodded and followed Marwan to the bike. Without saying anything else, Marwan got on and the man sat behind him.

  They drove away from the bar, taking small back streets, passing the used bookstore Big Mushroom and the kitchen in back of Hotel Rosebud. The road descended, and they turned, circling around a hill. Somehow they passed by Big Mushroom again from the other direction, a row of local houses, a per-kilo laundry, and a small coconut grove. Then they turned into a narrow alley, with men stationed on the left and the right: security. They stopped Marwan, frisked his well-dressed passenger, and let them through.

  And then there they were, in an old building with writing on the wall: “No cameras, no cellphones, no kids.” They went in through a door, past two more guards, who again searched the well-dressed man. Once inside, they found themselves looking at an old badminton court that had long ago been turned into a futsal stadium. The bleachers were full, and the voices of the crowd merged into a droning hum. Marwan guided the well-dressed man to his seat.

  “Thank you,” the man said.

  “Meet me at the door after,” Marwan replied, and then left.

  Marwan stood leaning against the doorway, waiting for the show to begin. The arena was pitch dark. Enthusiastic introductory talk came over a loud speaker, then some music.

  Soon the MC spoke again, and a dim reddish light shone on the middle of the arena. A hush fell over the crowd—there were three beds there, each with a naked woman sitting uneasily atop it. But what captivated the audience was none other than the fourth person: a muscular man, also naked, with dark skin, smiling cheerfully at the women. His penis fascinated them; as it slowly rose, they wondered how big it would get.

  “It’s a damn shame one of them died. The police didn’t even bother to take him out of the river,” said Marwan to the man standing next to him. He took a cigarette out of his pocket, offered another to his companion, and lit up.

  Sometimes a resident would complain, “Why do they always come back here? Can’t we just shoot them?” During the vacation season, they didn’t need the crazy people anymore—they could be discarded because business was good, and that made the pious folk happy.

  Still, when vacation season arrived, Marwan and his two friends got back into the pickup. Crazy people were roaming the streets, and so they would have to catch them and release them into the teak forest.

  “There’s a new nut-job in town!” Darto exclaimed, looking out the window.