Spin

by Wilson, Robert Charles Charles

  It also allowed in the face of a local schoolboy, whom I had caught on two occasions peering at me. When I mentioned this to Ibu Ina she nodded, disappeared for a few minutes, and came back with the boy in tow: “This is En,” she said, practically throwing him through the curtain at me. “En is ten years old. He is very bright. He wants to be a doctor one day. He is also my nephew’s son. Unfortunately he’s cursed with curiosity at the expense of sensibility. He climbed on top of the trash bin to see what I was hiding in my back room. Unforgivable. Apologize to my guest, En.”

  En hung his head so drastically low that I was afraid his enormous eyeglasses would drop off the end of his nose. He mumbled something.

  “In English,” Ina said.

  “Sorry!”

  “Inelegant but to the point. Perhaps En can do something for you, Pak Tyler, to make up for his bad behavior?”

  En was clearly on the hook. I tried to let him off. “Apart from respecting my privacy, nothing.”

  “He will certainly respect your privacy from this moment onward—won’t you, En?” En cringed and nodded. “However, I have a job for him. En comes by the clinic almost every day. If I’m not busy I show him a few things. The chart of human anatomy. The litmus paper that turns color in vinegar. En claims to be grateful for these indulgences.” En’s nodding became almost spastically vigorous. “So in return, and as a way of compensating for his gross negligence of common budi, En will now become the clinic’s lookout. En, do you know what that means?”

  En stopped nodding and looked wary.

  “It means,” Ibu Ina said, “that from now on you will put your vigilance and curiosity to good use. If anyone comes to the village asking about the clinic—anyone from the city, I mean, especially if they look or act like policemen—you will immediately run here and tell me about it.”

  “Even if I’m in school?”

  “I doubt the New Reformasi will trouble you at school. When you’re at school, pay attention to your lessons. Any other time, in the street, at a warung, whatever, if you see something or overhear something involving me or the clinic or Pak Tyler (whom you must not mention), come to the clinic at once. Understand?”

  “Yes,” En said, and he murmured something else I couldn’t hear.

  “No,” Ina said promptly, “there is no payment involved, what a scandalous question! Although, if I’m pleased, favors might follow. Right now I am not at all pleased.”

  En scooted away, his oversized white T-shirt billowing behind him.

  By nightfall a rain had begun, a deep tropical rain that lasted days, during which I wrote, slept, ate, paced, endured.

  Ibu Ina sponged my body during the dark of a rainy night, scrubbing away a slough of dead skin.

  “Tell me something you remember about them,” she said. “Tell me what it was like growing up with Diane and Jason Lawton.”

  I thought about that. Or rather, I dipped into the increasingly murky pond of memory for something to offer her, something both true and emblematic. I couldn’t fish out exactly what I wanted but something did float to the surface: a starlit sky, a tree. The tree was a silver poplar, darkly mysterious. “One time we went camping,” I said. “This was before the Spin, but not by much.”

  It felt good to have the dead skin washed away, at least at first, but the revealed derma was sensitive, raw. The first stroke of the sponge was soothing, the second felt like iodine on a paper cut. Ina understood this.

  “The three of you? Weren’t you young for that, a camping trip, I mean, as they calculate such things where you come from? Or did you travel with your parents?”

  “Not with our parents. E.D. and Carol vacationed once a year, resorts or cruise ships, preferably without children.”

  “And your mother?”

  “Preferred to stay home. It was a couple from down the road who took us into the Adirondacks along with their own two boys, teenagers who didn’t want anything to do with us.”

  “Then why—oh, I suppose the father wanted to ingratiate himself with E. D. Lawton? Beg a favor perhaps?”

  “Something like that. I didn’t ask. Nor did Jason. Diane might have known—she paid attention to those kind of things.”

  “It hardly matters. You went to a campground in the mountains? Roll on your side, please.”

  “The kind of campground with a parking lot. Not exactly pristine nature. But it was a weekend in September and we had the place almost to ourselves. We pitched tents and built a fire. The adults—” Their name came back to me. “The Fitches sang songs and made us come in on the choruses. They must have had fond memories of summer camp. It was pretty depressing, actually. The Fitch teenagers hated the whole thing and hid out in their tent with headphones. The older Fitches eventually gave up and went to bed.”

  “And left the three of you around the dying campfire. Was it a clear night or a rainy one, like this one?”

  “A clear early autumn night.” Hardly like this one, with its frog choruses and raindrops bulleting the thin roof. “No moon but plenty of stars. Not warm but not really cold, even though we were some ways up in the hills. Windy. Windy enough that you could hear the trees talking to themselves.”

  Ina’s smile broadened. “The trees talking to themselves! Yes, I know what that sounds like. Now on your left side, please.”

  “The trip had been tedious but it started to feel good now that it was just the three of us. Jase fetched a flashlight and we walked a few yards away from the fire, to an open space in a poplar grove, away from the cars and tents and people, where the land sloped down to the west. Jason showed us the zodiacal light rising in the sky.”

  “What is the zodiacal light?”

  “Sunlight reflecting on grains of ice in the asteroid belt. You can sometimes see it on a very clear, dark night.” Or could, before the Spin. Was there still a zodiacal light or had solar pressure swept away the ice? “It came up from the horizon like breath in winter, far away, delicate. Diane was fascinated. She listened to Jase explain it, and this was back when Jason’s explanations still fascinated her—she hadn’t outgrown them yet. She loved his intelligence, loved him for his intelligence—”

  “As did Jason’s father, perhaps? On your stomach now, please.”

  “But not in that proprietary way. It was pure goggle-eyed enchantment.”

  “Excuse me, ‘goggle-eyed’?”

  “Wide-eyed. Then the wind started to pick up, and Jason turned on the flashlight and pointed it into the poplars so Diane could see the way the branches moved.” With this came a vivid memory of young Diane in a sweater at least a size too big for her, hands lost in knitted wool, hugging herself, her face turned up into the cone of light and her eyes reflecting it back in solemn moons. “He showed her the way the biggest branches tossed in a kind of slow motion, and the smaller branches more quickly. That was because each branch and twig had what Jase called a resonant frequency. And you could think of those resonant frequencies as musical notes, he said. The tree’s motion in the wind was really a kind of music pitched too low for human ears, the trunk of the tree singing a bass note and the branches singing tenor lines and the twigs playing piccolo. Or, he said, you could think of it as pure numbers, each resonance, from the wind itself to the tremor of a leaf, working out a calculation inside a calculation inside a calculation.”

  “You describe it very beautifully,” Ina said.

  “Not half as beautifully as Jason did. It was like he was in love with the world, or at least the patterns in it. The music in it. Ouch.”

  “I’m sorry. And Diane was in love with Jason?”

  “In love with being his sister. Proud of him.”

  “And were you in love with being his friend?”

  “I suppose I was.”

  “And in love with Diane.”

  “Yes.”

  “And she with you.”

  “Maybe. I hoped so.”

  “Then, if I may ask, what went wrong?”

  “What makes you think anything wen
t wrong?”

  “You’re obviously still in love. The two of you, I mean. But not like a man and woman who have been together for many years. Something must have kept you apart. Excuse me, this is terribly impertinent.”

  Yes, something had kept us apart. Many things. Most obviously, I supposed, it was the Spin. She had been especially, particularly frightened by it, for reasons I had never completely understood; as if the Spin were a challenge and a rebuke to everything that made her feel safe. What made her feel safe? The orderly progression of life; friends, family, work—a kind of fundamental sensibility of things, which in E.D. and Carol Lawton’s Big House must already have seemed fragile, more wished-for than real.

  The Big House had betrayed her, and eventually even Jason had betrayed her: the scientific ideas he presented to her like peculiar gifts, which had once seemed reassuring—the cozy major chords of Newton and Euclid—became stranger and more alienating: the Planck length (beneath which things no longer behaved like things); black holes, sealed by their own imponderable density into a realm beyond cause and effect; a universe not only expanding but accelerating toward its own decay. She told me once, while St. Augustine was still alive, that when she put her hand on the dog’s coat she wanted to feel his heat and his liveliness—not count the beats of his heart or consider the vast spaces between the nuclei and the electrons that constituted his physical being. She wanted St. Dog to be himself and whole, not the sum of his terrifying parts, not a fleeting evolutionary epiphenomenon in the life of a dying star. There was little enough love and affection in her life and each instance of it had to be accounted and stored up in heaven, hoarded against the winter of the universe.

  The Spin, when it came, must have seemed like a monstrous vindication of Jason’s worldview—more so because of his obsession with it. Clearly, there was intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy; and, just as obviously, it was nothing like our own. It was immensely powerful, terrifyingly patient, and blankly indifferent to the terror it had inflicted on the world. Imagining the Hypotheticals, one might picture hyperintelligent robots or inscrutable energy beings; but never the touch of a hand, a kiss, a warm bed, or a consoling word.

  So she had hated the Spin in a deeply personal way, and I think it was that hatred that ultimately led her to Simon Townsend and the NK movement. In NK theology the Spin became a sacred event but also a subordinate one: large but not as large as the God of Abraham; shocking but less shocking than a crucified Savior, an empty tomb.

  I said some of this to Ina. She said, “Of course, I’m not a Christian. I’m not even Islamic enough to satisfy the local authorities. Corrupted by the atheistic West, that’s me. But even in Islam there were such movements. People babbling about Imam Mehdi and Ad-Dajjal, Yajuj and Majuj drinking up the Sea of Galilee. Because they thought this made a better kind of sense. There. I’m finished.” She had scrubbed the soles of my feet. “Have you always known these things about Diane?”

  Known in what sense? Felt, suspected, intuited; but known—no, I couldn’t say so.

  “Then perhaps the Martian drug is living up to your expectations,” Ina said as she exited with her stainless steel pan of warm water and her assortment of sponges, leaving me something to think about in the dark of the night.

  There were three doors leading into or out of Ibu Ina’s medical clinic. She walked me through the building once, after her last scheduled patient had departed with a splinted finger.

  “This is what I’ve built in my lifetime,” she said. “Little enough, you might think. But the people of this village needed something between here and the hospital in Padang—quite a distance, especially if you have to travel by bus or the roads are undependable.”

  One door was the front door, where her patients came and went.

  One door was the back door, metal-lined and sturdy. Ina parked her little power-cell car in the pressed-earth lot behind the clinic, and she used this door when she arrived in the morning and locked it when she left at night. It was adjacent to the room where I lived and I had learned to recognize the sound of her keys jingling in it not long after the first call to prayer from the village mosque a quarter mile away.

  The third door was a side door, down a little corridor that also housed the toilet and a row of supply cupboards. This was where she accepted deliveries and this was the route by which En preferred to come and go.

  En was just as Ina had described him: bashful but bright, smart enough to earn the medical degree on which he had set his heart’s hopes. His parents weren’t rich, Ina said, but if he landed a scholarship, studied premed at the new university in Padang, excelled, found a way to finance a graduate degree—“Then, who knows? The village might have another doctor. That’s how I did it.”

  “You think he’d come back and practice here?”

  “He might. We go out, we come back.” She shrugged, as if this were the natural order of things. And for the Minang, it was: rantau, the tradition of sending young men abroad, was part of the system of adat, custom and obligation. Adat, like conservative Islam, had been eroded by the last thirty years of modernization, but it pulsed under the surface of Minang life like a heartbeat.

  En had been warned not to bother me, but he gradually lost his fear of me. With Ibu Ina’s express permission, when I was between bouts of fever, En would hone his English vocabulary by bringing me items of food and naming them for me: silomak, sticky rice; singgang ayam, curried chicken. When I said, “Thank you,” En would call out “Welcome!” and grin, displaying a set of bright white but wildly irregular teeth: Ina was trying to convince his parents to have braces installed.

  Ina herself shared a small house in the village with relatives, although lately she had been sleeping in a consulting room in the clinic, a space that couldn’t have been any more comfortable than my own bleak cell. Some nights, however, family duties called her away; on those nights she would note my temperature and condition, provision me with food and water, and leave me a pager in case of emergencies. And I would be alone until her key rattled in the door the next morning.

  But one night I woke out of a frantic, labyrinthine dream to the sound of the side door shuddering as someone turned the knob in an attempt to open it. Not Ina. Wrong door, wrong hour. It was midnight by my watch, only the beginning of the deepest part of the night; there would still be a few villagers haunting the local warungs, cars transiting the main road, trucks trying to reach some distant desa by morning. Maybe a patient hoping she was still here. Or maybe an addict looking for drugs.

  The knob-turning stopped.

  Quietly, I levered myself up and pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. The clinic was dark, my cell was dark, the only light was moonlight through the high window…which was suddenly eclipsed.

  I looked up and saw the silhouette of En’s head like a hovering planet. “Pak Tyler!” he whispered.

  “En! You scared me.” In fact the shock had drained the strength out of my legs. I had to lean on the wall to stay upright.

  “Let me in!” En said.

  So I padded barefoot to the side door and threw the latch. The breeze that rushed in was warm and moist. En rushed in after it. “Let me talk to Ibu Ina!”

  “She’s not here. What’s up, En?”

  He was deeply disconcerted. He pushed his glasses up the bump of his nose. “But I need to talk to her!”

  “She’s at home tonight. You know where she lives?”

  En nodded unhappily. “But she said to come here and tell her.”

  “What? I mean, when did she say this?”

  “If a stranger asks about the clinic I have to come here and tell her.”

  “But she’s not—” Then the significance of what he’d said pierced the fog of incipient fever. “En, is someone in town asking about Ibu Ina?”

  I coaxed the story out of him. En lived with his family in a house behind a warung (a food stall) in the heart of the village, only three doors away from the office of the mayor, the kepala desa. En, on wakeful nights
, was able to lie in his room and listen to the murmur of conversation from the warung’s customers. Thus he had acquired an encyclopedic if poorly understood store of village gossip. After dark it was usually the men who sat talking and drinking coffee, En’s father and uncles and neighbors. But tonight there had been two strangers who arrived in a sleek black car and approached the lights of the warung bold as water buffalo and asked without introducing themselves how to find the local clinic. Neither was ill. They wore city clothes and behaved rudely and carried themselves like policemen, and so the directions they received from En’s father were vague and incorrect and would send them in exactly the wrong direction.

  But they were looking for Ina’s clinic and, inevitably, they would find it; in a village this size the misdirection was at best only a delay. So En had dressed himself and scooted out of the house unseen and come here, as instructed, to complete his bargain with Ibu Ina and to warn her of the danger.

  “Very good,” I told him. “Good work, En. Now you need to go to the house where she lives and tell her these things.” And in the meantime I’d gather my possessions and exit the clinic. I figured I could hide myself in the adjoining rice fields until the police had been and gone. I was strong enough to do that. Probably.

  But En crossed his arms and backed away from me. “She said to wait here for her.”

  “Right. But she won’t be back till morning.”

  “She sleeps here most nights.” He craned his head, looking past me down the darkened clinic hallway as if she might step out of the consulting room to reassure him.

  “Yeah, but not tonight. Honest. En, this could be dangerous. These people might be Ibu Ina’s enemies, understand?”

  But some fierce innate stubbornness had possessed him. As friendly as we had been, En still distrusted me. He trembled a moment, wide-eyed as a lemur, then darted around me and deeper into the moonlit clinic, calling, “Ina! Ina!”

  I chased him, switching on lights as I went.

  Trying at the same time to think coherently about this. The rude men looking for the clinic could be New Reformasi from Padang, or local cops, or they might be working for Interpol or the State Department or whatever other agency the Chaykin administration chose to swing like a hammer.