Map of the Invisible World: A Novel

by Tash Aw

  The next day he sent Adam back to school again.

  The teacher taught them simple grammar and rudimentary arithmetic. She made them practice the letters of the alphabet and introduced them to new words, writing them out on the blackboard in short sentences that no one but Adam could make sense of. It did not seem to matter to her that almost everyone in the class was asleep or staring red-eyed out the window at the grassy plains pockmarked with blackened heaps of half-burned rubbish, where skinny goats picked through the piles of waste, dragging plastic bags out of the cinders. CITIZEN. REPUBLIC. PRESIDENT. REVOLUTION. WESTERN IMPERIALISTS. I am a citizen of the Republic of Indonesia. The president of the Republic of Indonesia is President Sukarno. President Sukarno led the revolution against the Western Imperialists who destroyed …

  “It’s hot,” someone whispered, “I have to go home.” Adam turned around and saw the girl with the birthmark slumped on her desk, twirling a dry strip of coconut leaf in her fingers. She brushed the leaf lazily against Adam’s back. “Are your parents expecting you home too?”

  Adam nodded. Close up, he could see that the discolored patch of skin on her face was not a birthmark but a scar, an inky mass of tissue that looked almost smooth, like a pebble on the riverbank, crisscrossed by long-dead veins. She was a few years older than Adam but no taller; her fingernails were dirty and worn.

  “Actually, I only have a mother at the moment,” she said.

  “At the moment?”

  “Yeah, my father’s in jail. Don’t know when he’ll be out. I’m an orphan! That’s what my mother says when she gets in a mood and starts crying. ‘I am a widow! I am nothing! My daughter is an orphan! Oh, my daughter is an orphan!’”

  Adam giggled. She was much darker than he was, yet she did not seem entirely like the other kids; she spoke with a different accent too.

  “My name’s Neng. What’s yours?” She tickled his neck with the leaf.

  “Adam.”

  “I have to go and collect this month’s rice from the district office later. Want to come with me? It’s not a long walk. Besides, you have a bicycle… .” Her smile showed off two gaps in her teeth.

  “Umm, I don’t know. My father will be worried if I don’t come home.”

  “Come on, it won’t take long.” She reached out and brushed the leaf softly across his cheek, giggling as she did so. “I know a shortcut back to where you live.”

  By the time they left school the sky had dulled slightly with patches of silver blue cloud, and it was no longer oppressively hot; the sea breeze had picked up, signaling the possibility of the sudden sharp showers for which Perdo is famous. Adam and Neng had just reached the end of the path that led to the main road when they saw a group of boys from school waiting for them, squatting at the edge of the broken tarmac in the shade of a sea almond sapling.

  “Hi, friend,” one of them said, standing up. He had taken his shirt off and tied its arms around his forehead so that it fell down his back like the headdresses of Arab sheikhs that Adam had seen in books. This boy was bigger than the others, and when he spoke his voice cracked, alternating between a child’s high-pitched squeak and a manly croak. “This is the little orphan who lives with that European man. You’re his servant, yeah?”

  “No,” Adam said, “he’s my father.”

  The older boy threw back his head and laughed. There was a circle of dried-up spittle around his lips. Behind him Adam noticed that one of the other boys was playing with a dead bird, stretching its red and black wings across the sand as if willing it to fly. “Yeah, yeah. You lick the shit from his toilet.” He pushed his fingers into Adam’s collarbone with a rough, jabbing motion, making Adam lose his balance; his bicycle fell from his grip and dropped to the ground. The other boys laughed. “What a weakling,” the gang leader said.

  Adam tried to pick himself up but found that his legs had turned to jelly; his face felt hot and he could not speak. Pressure filled his head, and he felt like vomiting. His ears filled with a great rushing noise, the kind you might hear if you are standing on the seashore before a violent storm, when the froth of the waves blanks out all other noise and makes you lose all notion of where you are. He lay on the ground, kicking feebly at the coppery leaves of the sea almond that lay scattered on the ground. The people standing over him seemed blurred, wobbling as though shaken by gusts of wind. He began to shiver.

  I am just like everyone else I am just like please I am just

  “Anyway,” he could hear the man-boy’s croaky voice, “whatever the white man is to you, he’s rich. He can buy you another bicycle. This one’s nice.” Adam saw feet moving around him and heard the chain of his bicycle ticking. Someone tugged the strap of his satchel, which came away from his body as if it no longer wanted to belong to him.

  “Stop!” Neng shouted. She put her hands under Adam’s armpits and hauled him into a sitting position. “This is not fair. Leave the bike or I’ll kick your balls.”

  “Oh-oh, look who’s talking,” the croaky voice said. “What you going to do, help this weakling? Look how tiny he is! Look at those little fat legs. He’s not worth getting beaten up over. Right, boys?” The voice was steadier now, threatening.

  “At least he can read and write. You’re nearly an adult and you still can’t read.” Neng was trying to yank Adam into a standing position but Adam’s legs were still weak.

  “You just want the bike for yourself, that right?” The man-boy took a step toward Neng; he looked nearly twice as big as she was.

  “Just leave him alone.”

  The boy raised his hand and hesitated a second before slapping Neng hard. “You’re just a dirty foreigner too,” he said. “Look at you, a dirty monster.” Neng stood blinking at him, as if she had not been struck.

  “Careful, Yon,” a smaller boy said in a quiet voice. “She’s Madurese. You know what they’re like.”

  “I don’t care,” the boy croaked. “These bloody foreigners, they come here and all they do is cause trouble, taking our land. They’re going to chase us off our own island soon, there’ll be nothing left for us. There’ll be more of them than us! That’s what my dad says. He’s fed up with them. Need to teach them a lesson from time to time, he says.”

  “Yon, c’mon, let’s take the bike and go. Don’t get mixed up with the Madurese. They’re big-time trouble.”

  “But this one’s only a girl. My dad says all Madurese women are prostitutes anyway. The sooner we teach her who’s boss around here, the better.”

  Adam had managed to get up to a half-kneeling position, one leg still trailing on the ground, when he saw Neng raise her knee, swiftly, in one firm, neat motion; it thudded into the boy’s crotch with a loud squashy noise and he crumpled silently to the ground. He put his hand between his legs to protect himself but it was no use. Neng stood over him and continued to kick him in that same spot, sometimes hopping up and down to stamp on his crotch as if putting out a cigarette. His cries cut through the ringing in Adam’s ears and made him feel less sick; it was as if someone had doused Adam with cold water, and he was able to rise slowly to his feet. The other boys had backed off; Neng was straddling the bicycle and ringing its bell. “Come on,” she said gaily to Adam, as if nothing had happened. She patted the horizontal bar in front of her. “You sit here, I’ll cycle. Okay? Great. Off we go!”

  Along the coast road the wind was fresh and tinged with the softness of impending rain. The clouds strained the sunlight that fell on the waves, and this made the sea look calm in places but dark and mysterious in others. It was often like this on Perdo, where the slightest shift in the weather could change the very nature of the island. On those days when the sun was high and unflinching the possibility of rain would seem ridiculous, and on rainy days, when water soaked through everything, you might believe that even if the sun were to reappear, it would never be able to dry the moisture from the earth. But there were other days too—days such as today, when you could feel both the dry dustiness and the heavy moisture that mad
e up the very air on this island.

  Neng produced a banana from her pocket. It was blackened and squashed, the pulp beginning to ooze from its tip where it had been torn from its comb. “You look tired,” she said, handing it to Adam. “Eat this. It’ll make you feel better.”

  It was very ripe and mushy and sweet. Adam ate it quickly and wiped the stickiness from his fingers on his shorts. Maybe it was the fresh breeze, maybe it was his imagination, but the trembling in his chest began to subside, his heartbeat calming. He blinked; there was dust in his eyes and he turned his head from the wind. His face was very close to Neng’s now, and he could see the tiny imperfections, the fragile creases of skin on the scar on her face. She was smiling and stuck out her tongue at him, just as she had done on the first day of school. It was beginning to rain. The first heavy drops of a shower fell through the leaves above them.

  “Hey, it’s getting late,” said Neng. “You look tired. I think you should just go home. We’re not far from where you live.”

  “But I want to go with you—you know, to help you collect your rice.”

  The bicycle slowed to a halt and Adam had to hop off. “Don’t worry, I’ll go on my own. Your father will be worried. Besides, you look really tired. I don’t want to get the blame—I’ve been blamed for enough things already!” She handed him the bike and began to walk off into the distance, heading away from the coast into the hills. The rain was falling heavily now, an earnest downpour that would not ease up for at least an hour, maybe two. Adam felt a sudden panic at being left behind and started to follow her. She turned around and said, “If you follow me I’ll kick your balls too.”

  He watched her splash through the puddles that were forming on the road; the rain fell like a thick curtain of mist, and within a few seconds she was out of sight.

  As he cycled home, Adam felt the rain running in thin rivulets down his face and neck until his entire body was wet. Occasionally a gust of wind would sweep raindrops into his eyes and he would have to slow down and blink hard just to see where he was going; his sneakers were soaked through and his toes felt clammy and gritty. But the rain and wind were not cold, and he was no longer tired. Funny, he thought: At this moment, he didn’t even fear what tomorrow might bring.

  “Where have you been, Son?” Karl said, rushing to meet him with an enormous towel that he held between outstretched arms, the way the fishermen hold their nets before flinging them out to sea.

  “Nowhere,” said Adam, letting Karl towel his hair vigorously. “I just took my time. It was … it was raining.”

  With his head wrapped in the darkness of the towel, Adam knew how unconvincing this sounded. For a moment, he considered telling Karl all that had happened. He was doing something wrong, he knew that. He knew he ought to share everything with Karl because Karl did the same for him; Karl had taken him in and shared his whole life with Adam, so why couldn’t Adam do this tiny thing for him? He also knew that if he was going to tell Karl he must do it immediately, otherwise the opportunity would be lost. Two, three, four, five seconds. The moment was gone.

  Adam did not feel bad at all. Now that the moment was over it did not seem as if he had done anything wrong. Karl lifted the towel from his head and draped it across his shoulders, letting it fall around him like a cape. He looked at Adam unblinkingly, waiting for an explanation, but Adam merely stared out at the murky sea.

  Karl said, “You should go and change out of those wet clothes.”

  The next day, Neng was waiting for him in the shade of some trees, not far from where the main road curved toward the town; the dirt track that led to school ran like a tangent away from the road, disappearing into the bushes beyond. “Let’s skip school, maybe go for a walk. It isn’t going to rain today,” Neng announced, squinting at the sun.

  They left the coast behind and began to cycle along the gravel paths that led into the hills, and when the path became too steep they hid the bike behind some bushes and began to walk. The coarse earth crunched underfoot, the black volcanic sand sticking to Neng’s bare toes and covering them like tar. She talked endlessly, pointing things out to Adam: a flock of brilliant green parakeets fluttering like giant locusts in the distance; a boulder the shape of a hand with its fingers cut off; the coral reefs, which, from up in the hills, resembled a map, a huge, watery atlas.

  She told him about herself too. Her father was in jail because he’d killed someone, she said cheerily. Well, not exactly killed him, but the man he’d had a fight with had died, purely by accident. All Neng’s father had done was hit him; okay, he hit him quite hard, even her mother said so, but still, he wasn’t the only one. There had been lots of men fighting, it was just a street brawl outside the rice merchant’s, you know, just by the clock tower. But her father was the only one who was still in jail. Just because he’s Madurese. It was so unfair. He didn’t even want to be on this island anyway.

  “Then why did you come here?” Adam couldn’t remember where Madura was, but it sounded far away. He tried to remember his lessons at home with Karl, when Karl had shown him where all the big cities and islands of Indonesia were.

  She frowned, looking closely at him with squinted eyes as if she had spotted something nasty on his face. “God, you’re dumb. Transmigration. We were forced to, just like everyone else.”

  They had had nothing in Madura; it was an overcrowded island where there were a few cows and too many people who had no food and no work. They had been promised work, she said, in a place where there were few people and much land. The government was building a new pumice mine and there were lots of jobs, and maybe the workers would be given some land of their own. Her parents didn’t even know what pumice was. Don’t worry, the official had told them; we will give you rice to eat every month and your kids will go to school. But the mine was never built. There was no land for them, and often no rice. They’d been in Perdo for three years, but there was no work at all.

  “What about you?” Neng asked. “Where did you come from?”

  Adam shrugged. He looked around, hoping to see those parakeets again, but there was nothing.

  “Sorry,” she said, reaching out and touching him on the elbow. Her scar obscured her cheek and made her look as if she was only smiling with half her face. “I forgot you’re an orphan.”

  “That’s okay.” He smiled. But he thought to himself: It was not okay. Why did he not know which part of Indonesia he was from? What dialect had his parents spoken? Even orphans had to come from somewhere. It was not that he had never dared ask Karl, but rather that it had never occurred to him to ask. He had known little of his past and cared even less, and he had liked it that way. So why was he now troubled by this lack of knowledge? Suddenly he felt guilty at having missed school without telling Karl.

  “Come on,” Neng said, breaking into a run, “there’s something I want to show you.” Beyond the trees the grassland gave way to a rocky plain covered with cacti and scrubby bushes; in the distance the land rose toward the point of the dead volcano that dominated the island. Neng disappeared behind some rocks, and when Adam caught up he saw that she had crawled into a natural depression sheltered from the sun and the rain, a scooped-out hollow so perfectly formed that it seemed man-made.

  “Here, look,” Neng said, showing him a stash of objects. She picked up a small comb made from pink plastic and ran it through her spiky hair. “I found it on the road, just lying there waiting for me to pick it up.”

  “But that’s stealing,” Adam said, repeating what Karl had once told him.

  “Don’t be stupid. If something is thrown away, it means its owner doesn’t want it anymore—in that case anyone has a right to take it. Idiot.” She showed him other things she had found: a small motorbike made of tin, rusting where the paint had worn off; a cracked mirror; a book with a frayed paper cover showing a large sea fish about to be attacked by a diver wielding a knife (there were some words in German too, but Adam was not able to read them); and a doll with blue eyes and dark curly lashes.
Its painted blond hair looked like a scar on its head, an imperfection. Neng picked it up and cuddled it as if it were a real baby, holding its head to her cheek and swaying from side to side; she sat down with her legs crossed and looked out of the miniature cave. They could see over the low trees to the tawny flatlands and the sea in the distance. “No one can see me in here,” she said. “It’s my secret place.” She leaned over and kissed him on his cheek and he could smell the musty unwashed odor of her clothes and skin. He blushed, and withdrew slightly; her lips felt funny—dry and hot; he wasn’t sure he liked it. She giggled and continued to cuddle her doll.

  From then on, they skipped school every day, cycling as far as they could or taking long walks into the interior. In the coves of the south coast they stood atop the steep fern-covered cliffs and saw the shipwrecks poking out of the surf; in a rainstorm in the hilly forests they were chased by wild goats; in a dried-up riverbed they found the giant stones for which Perdo is famous, those ancient boulders inscribed with fragments of scrolling words in a foreign language that Adam copied in a notebook and later found out were Spanish (and also nonsensical: dream and madman). They met a team of scientists who were taking rock samples not far from where Adam lived; they wanted to build a mine, but they did not say what kind. One of them, an American, gave Neng and Adam three dollars each and an old T-shirt that said BERKELEY. Neng said Adam should have the T-shirt. She didn’t want it; she was happy enough as it was, not because of the money, but because her father would finally, FINALLY! have a job in this mine. That was what she kept repeating to Adam as they cycled home. She turned around and made funny faces at him, the bike zigzagging along the road. Above them, a flock of birds winged their way slowly southward, small, black flapping triangles against the blue white sky. Maybe they were migrating to cooler climates, Adam said, to Australia, and Neng replied that he couldn’t possibly know such a thing. He did not know what kind of birds they were; and he did not know either that this would be the last thing he would say to Neng.