Wreck and Order

by Hannah Tennant-Moore

  If only I could know the exact number of times Brian had fucked me and come and then stolen into sleep without offering me a word or gesture, and I had managed not to yell or beat his head with a pillow or dig my nails into his forearms (I did that only two—at most four—times, and that was after he fell asleep while he was touching me), but instead I got out of bed and took some NyQuil and read on the couch until unconsciousness took me. If I could know the exact number of times I fell asleep in that state of miserable acceptance, I would have a solid true fact that made me deserving of forgiveness. But I had no idea how many times I had done anything with Brian—two? twenty? five hundred?—and now I would never know, and I was suddenly shrieking at the man on top of me and the woman with pompom nipples to take their hideous bodies the hell out of my apartment, leave us alone, didn’t they have any shame?

  My next-door neighbors yanked on their clothes, calling me batshit crazy and psycho-bitchy. They slammed the door on the way out. Jared laughed. He fucked me for a long, long time since we were both too coked up to come. I awoke at dawn on the hardwood floor, toes and fingers icy, mind and heart now clear enough to feel the pain. Of seeing Jared’s cock inside a stranger’s tits. Of the distance between Brian and me being equal to my need to bridge it—that much space, that much need. Of knowing that if you don’t treat people well, you will always have to wonder if everything wrong with life is a result of personal failure. I wriggled out from under Jared’s clammy deadweight and walked to the apartment’s one small window, level with the concrete backyard. The cold glass held my achy forehead. I let my eyes get small and unfocused so that the world became darkness interrupted by dazzles of artificial brightness, one of which I chose to believe was the moon. I craned my neck back and leaned my chin against the glass. But no matter how far up I could see, I was still endlessly far from all the things that matter in a day and in a life.

  I left Jared sleeping on the floor and crawled into my ripped sheets, certain of one thing: I had to start working as soon as I woke up, get my mind back inside Fifi.

  Sometime later, Jared crawled into bed with me. He was sweet and hesitant. He rubbed my back, said how glad he was that I kicked those losers out, he had no idea that dude was trying to fuck me or he would have kicked his ugly ass. “He did fuck me,” I said. Jared looked away and offered to go buy coffee and bagels. I was at my desk when he got back, rereading the last passage I’d translated, begging my brain to focus.

  “You know that your mailbox is overflowing?” Jared said, handing me breakfast in a paper bag. “They’re leaving shit on the floor.” He dumped a pile of paper in my lap—sharp corners made from tree pulp. How incomprehensible the world of objects was. One by one, I tossed the envelopes to the floor. Credit card bills, Amnesty International needing money, a salon offering me fifteen percent off my first wax, a Thai restaurant offering fast free delivery, a thick purple envelope covered in stamps bearing an image of one of the Buddhist gods, I couldn’t remember which one. Inside the purple envelope was a card on which LOVE had been written out of spices, the names of which were listed on the inside of the card, along with an invitation: “Dear El Akki, I wish you can spend Sri Lankan New Year with my family. I ask the gods for that wish. God bless you, Suriya Nangi.”

  Oh. Suriya. We hadn’t been in touch for at least a year. And how many years had passed since I met her in Sri Lanka? Four? Five? Was the girl in that memory really me? The one with the greasy hair and the baggy salwar kameez, content to sit and watch, be nobody, go nowhere, for hours at a time—had that really been me? It must have been, because now another human was calling to the girl, practically begging her to exist. This had nothing to do with me, of course—Suriya and I barely knew each other, she just wanted to be close with an American, she probably hoped I would find her a job in the States or something—but the letter was addressed to me. Someone faraway was beckoning. Or rather something. Why not think in those terms? It helped, and it was so hard to have thoughts that helped. I reread the invitation to come to Sri Lanka as if it were an invitation from the archaic torso of Apollo. Is it even possible to quote Rilke without irony anymore? Maybe not in public, but I do it all the time in my head. Of course I would visit Suriya in Sri Lanka, help a kind stranger change her life. Which would, in turn, change me. Because I needed to be changed. I wish I were dead. A sentence I thought, wrote, spoke all throughout adolescence. A child’s complaint, stated with the willingness to strike at anything, to demand anything, because nothing one wants seems possible, one is always at the mercy of people, places, words, hours, bodies larger and clearer than oneself. But the childish complaint had become real to me lately, a companion, a comfort—possible. I needed something else to comfort me. I would find it in Sri Lanka, staying with a devout Buddhist family in a remote village. I would finish my translation, I’d get really serious about meditation, I’d become involved in some important way with this poor, kind, Buddhist family—condescending, I knew, but I didn’t care, so much did I need Suriya’s invitation to make me better. Something big would happen to me there. Something external would claim my life. It has to. It will. I am not a bad person.

  KANDY

  I ignore the rickshaw drivers crowding the bus stop—“Tuk-tuk, madam? Yes, madam! Come, madam!”—and decide to carry my backpack the two miles to my guesthouse. Maybe the pain in my shoulders and sweat soaking my kurta will hurry me into the old sense of belonging. By the time I turn up the steep, narrow road to Rose Land, my legs have roasted beneath my long skirt and my sticky inner thighs grate with each step. Mary sits on the front porch, her bare feet crossed at the ankles. The calluses on the pads of her big toes are cracked and bloody. She stands and opens the gate.

  “Remember me?” I ask.

  “Yes, yes,” she says, letting me know she meets many tourists and I am not to embarrass us both with further questions. I ask if the small room in the back is free. Mary nods and stands. Her unruly hair has been tamed into a braid. I follow her through a large, furnitureless common area to my old room abutting the monastery.

  Mary gives me a tiny key, which unlocks the tiny padlock on the door to my room. Sitting on the edge of the thin, hard mattress, I untie the mosquito net hanging from the ceiling and let it fall around the bed. Lying on my back, I blink at the water-stained ceiling through blue gauze. I was a panicked mess leaving Brooklyn, moving my stuff into my old room at my dad’s house, so afraid that I would end up there after all. And then as soon as I got on the plane and turned off my phone and put it away for—I don’t know how long—I felt like laughing. It all seems so far away now. That wistful line in old movies. I don’t feel wistful. I feel relaxed for the first time in months. Shadows of crows fly across my face. For the next twelve hours, my eyes close out the world.

  I yawn and roll onto my belly. Monks patter and whoosh past my window in bare feet and maroon robes. Soon there will be chanting, followed by the ping and clank of pots, the beginning of days whittled down to the most basic decisions. It’s good to be near people who have committed to being human in the simplest way, to remind myself that such a life is possible, that even I have another self who is quiet and content, aware above all of her breath. Maybe this time I will become her.

  —

  Morning at Rose Land unfurls one way only. The black Lab, no longer a puppy, steals guests’ underwear out of their rooms and pulls towels off the line in the backyard. Mary bustles about in a long white skirt and tie-dyed T-shirt, cutting curry leaves off the karapincha, wringing out bedsheets faded all to the same soft beige, leaving scraps for the crows in worn metal buckets hanging from the fence in the backyard. Skinny, shaggy-haired Europeans smoke cigarettes in the courtyard at the center of the house. Breakfast is five pieces of toast with pineapple jelly, a pot of dark tea with milk powder, half of an overripe papaya. “You want more toast, you ask,” Mary says, as I know she will.

  I drink the pot of tea, pick dead ants out of the jelly, and eat all five pieces of toast. Then I head down to t
he lake, a body of unnaturally still grayness around which the town careers. A boy wearing a crisp, white school uniform follows me. Do I want to see his baby alligator? Come and see, madam, no charge. The tinny, high-pitched notes of the ice cream song trickle out of a cart pulled by a grinning, toothless man. Halfway around the lake, I pause to squint up at the Tooth Temple, which is said to hold one of the Buddha’s left canines in a gilded turret piercing smog. A hurried man in flip-flops and a faded suit stops short in front of the temple gates, drops a coin in a padlocked box, and bows his forehead to his hands, pressed together in the center of his chest.

  Will the coffee-colored man still be lying in the muddy grass outside the temple gates, his legs bent at the knees, his right hand mechanically swatting his forehead? Yes, here he is, his clothes the color of his hair, which is the color of his skin, which is the color of his eyes, which is the color of coffee grinds from the strongest, oiliest beans. I watch his swats for several minutes. A sick-animal smell wafts off his clothes like the vapor of all the things I have failed to do. A juvenile, narcissistic thought, but calming nonetheless. Nearby, a family of red-faced monkeys stares out of tiny, ruthless eyes.

  Main street. Men hawk inflatable kitty cats and bags of pineapple covered in chili salt. A blind woman sits on a sheet of newspaper, palms open on her lap, a real kitten curled beside her. It’s easy to give her a coin because she cannot see me. I don’t have to make eye contact and smile, pretending to believe she’ll be just fine. I pass my reflection in the black-tinted glass door of a shop advertising Internet and phone services, and push on my face to enter the store. I sit down at a computer and open the drafts folder of my email. When I told my boss at Barnes and Noble that I was quitting to focus full-time on translating Fifi, she encouraged me to contact a friend of hers, the publisher of a small press specializing in translations. I reread my note to the publisher: Might he be so kind as to read a sample chapter or two of this quietly brilliant magnum opus by an idiosyncratic thinker who died before reaping the recognition he deserved?

  A bit florid, sure, but my humble notes never got me anywhere. I’m hopeful this time. I have a contact. My coworkers at Barnes and Noble said you had to have contacts, cold submissions got you nowhere. On the balcony across the street, a young girl hops back and forth, back and forth. Gripping my hands together over the keyboard, I press Send with my pinkie finger.

  The town center is crowded with beggars and monkeys stalking roti stands and wooden tables piled with spices and men’s underwear and fish doused in kerosene to keep the flies away. Auto rickshaws pull up beside me, one after the other. I flip my palm back and forth in the air, meaning no. One of them continues crawling alongside me. “I am walking,” I say to the air in front of me.

  “Yes, come,” he says. I shake my head no and continue walking. The rickshaw coughs.

  “Yes, come, you, come.”

  I glance toward him to say no again. His face is a large, gleaming eye. There is more activity in the area of his crotch than I suspect is necessary to operate a rickshaw.

  “Yes, come. You so nice. You come.”

  He looks like all of them, the way I’ve learned to see them: soft bellies; thin, floundering arms; a tongue too quick to flick his cracked upper lip. I put up my hand to shield my eyes and quicken my pace. “Go away. Leave me alone.” How have I forgotten the only Sinhala words I ever needed? The movement in his lap becomes frenzied. His voice hardens into a monotone chant. “You come. You come. You come.” I shout to drown out his voice. “Go away. Leave me alone.” Two women in saris pause their conversation to frown at me in either concern or irritation. I rush down a side street and lean against the wall, gritting my teeth. A gray-haired man sidles up to me. “He-llo.” I march back toward the lake, eyes glued to the ground. My body is well covered in a long skirt and baggy T-shirt. My greasy hair is pulled back into a messy, low bun. The object of my rage becomes the white woman I saw in the Internet café, wearing a red spaghetti-strap dress, her breasts spilling over the gold belt tied above her waist. She’s probably on vacation with a man she wants to impress and doesn’t care that she may as well be prancing around buck naked as far as the locals are concerned, freely doling out erotic delight. Not that I’m usually the champion of propriety. But I don’t want to be reminded of familiar social games.

  A cloud of black-and-white birds blows through the trees bordering the lake, a cacophony of squawks and waste. Unlike the women around me, I have no umbrella and get shit on three times. When I pause to wipe the back of my forearm against a tree, I notice a long fish floating on its side in the smoky lake, its glassy eye reflecting the gray sky, one fin sticking up like a tiny sail. A swarm of smaller fish pecks at its underside.

  What did I love about it here? Kandy is smoggy, stifling, dull, dangerous, needy, indifferent, raging with heat and noise and trash and con artists and molesters, all the while pretending to be Lord Buddha’s chosen city.

  A huge sound wakes me from my string of complaints. What is that? Violins? Cicadas? Siren song; siren song. The phrase marks each of my slow, heavy steps toward the temple. Tiny white birds fly in one butterfly-shaped mass from tree to tree, causing a brief, isolated tremor with each landing. The siren song blares from speakers outside the temple. Monks chanting. Pirith, I remember it’s called. I cannot pronounce the word and I cannot describe this congruence of voices eddying, swooping, sinking, falling, rising, retreating, drawing near. On the lawn outside the temple, families walk and loaf. A little girl picks a jasmine flower off a bush and hands it to her baby sister. Men sit atop their briefcases with bowed heads and prayered hands and closed eyes. Here is my love for this place.

  —

  Dinner is dhal and rice out of a plastic bag. I eat in my room, mashing the spicy yellow lentils and rice into little balls with my fingers, then scooping up the balls and pushing them onto my tongue with my thumb. My hand moves quickly from the bag to my mouth. Cardamom seeds and garlic cloves and curry leaves and chilies and whole cinnamon sticks. I will sleep well again tonight, my senses exhausted.

  At the hallway sink, I try to scrub the yellow out from under my nails. The guesthouse murmurs with the day’s many endings—Mary’s grandsons chatting in their bunk bed, the dog sighing in the courtyard, a sad German song on a radio in one of the guest’s rooms. I walk back to my room and stretch out beneath my mosquito net, one hand on the soft knot of my pubic hair and one hand on my breast. My body has no context here. I’ve never been attracted to a Sri Lankan man. And even if I were, I wouldn’t let myself feel it. Lust is forbidden to women in this country. Maybe that’s partly why I came back here. An island that makes my sexual need irrelevant.

  NILLAMUWE

  Suriya is waiting for me at the entrance to the Tooth Temple, next to a guard shifting his rifle strap from one shoulder to the other. I wave with too much emphasis as I approach, surprised by the intensity of my discomfort. How to behave at a reunion with a near stranger? Even when I’m directly in front of Suriya, my hand worries the air between us. Her smile is oppressively genuine, sharpened by an eagerness for something I doubt I can provide.

  After we say hello to excess, Suriya clarifies the plan that was vague to me in our emails: She has two months off from classes. We’re going to the home of the sister of her mother, in the rural northeast. Suriya’s family—cousins, uncles, and aunts—are gathering there to celebrate the New Year. They are all excited to meet me. I am to stay as long as I like. Suriya is especially glad for me to meet her brother. He has vacation time from the army. She grabs her small bag off the ground. “Bus coming!” We run down the center of the street to avoid the throngs of merchants and shoppers, hoist ourselves onto the back steps of the bus just as it picks up speed. Because I’m white, a young woman gives up her seat for us. Suriya and I wedge ourselves onto the narrow bench, me saying, “Sthoo-thiy,” again and again, a word I learned from a guidebook and have never heard a Sri Lankan person use.

  As we come down the mountain, the ai
r on the bus grows so sticky and thick that it’s almost soothing—nothing else to feel. It no longer matters whose bony thigh is pressing against my shoulder or whose hand is on top of mine on the metal seat back, squeezing my knuckles as we stop short for motorbikes and lurch around sharp turns. Holograms of Lord Buddha and Ganesh flash above the driver’s seat. A little boy on his mother’s lap blows a whistle every few seconds, then giggles. I try to explain to Suriya how angry Americans would be if a toddler were allowed to play with a whistle during a five-hour bus ride, but I grow weary with the effort of communication. Her English is much worse than I remembered, my Sinhala as nonexistent as it will always be. Why did I agree to stay with her? I could be traveling on my own, doing exactly as I pleased, speaking only if I felt like it.

  We pass a roadside marketplace, an angry racket of money. Suriya taps my arm and points out the window. A throng of singing, clapping people walks alongside a ditch filled with multicolored trash. A teenage girl in a sari blaring sunset colors leads the pack, casting backward glances at the others, sometimes worried, sometimes glad. “I think is big girl party,” Suriya says.

  “Big girl party?”

  “When small girl becomes big girl.” She smiles largely, revealing her crooked front tooth. “Have not big girl party in U.S.A.?”

  “Only Jewish people do that.” She stares at me. Her thick eyebrows draw together. “You don’t know about Jewish people?”

  “No!” The word comes out as a small yelp.