Map of the Invisible World: A Novel

by Tash Aw

  There was a song playing in the elevator as they went up to the restaurant, an American song that was always on the radio. Johan did not know what it was called, or who the singer was, he just recognized bits of the chorus. It was something like can’t get used to lovin’ you, or losin’ you, he was not sure which. There was a young Chinese couple in the elevator with them. The woman knew all the words but the man only knew the last part. He sang it out of tune, in a voice like a child’s, and she giggled. You-oo. You-oo. Her hair was thick and glossy and set in an arc that came down one side of her face, ending in a curled tip. Her lashes were heavy and her eyes outlined in black. Johan thought, She wants to look like Chan Po-Chu or some other Hong Kong singer. She was laughing gaily and looking up at the ceiling of the elevator as if she was looking at the sky, as if there was no roof above them and she could see the moon, or perhaps flocks of birds flying across the night sky.

  There was a table already set for them right by the glass walls that offered a panorama of the lights in this darkening city. Not long ago, on a holiday by the sea, Johan had gone swimming on his own, late at night when everyone else was asleep. He had crept out of their beachside chalet and walked into the warm, clear water and swum over the fields of coral, which, in the moonlight, looked like a shadowy map of an unknown world where the boundaries were uncertain and the countries kept changing shape. And when he went deeper still, beyond the shallows where the water was black, he had seen clusters of fluorescent light, and he had thought maybe these were pearls or sea creatures, or maybe it was light from the sky, refracted in funny ways. When he came back, Farah was waiting for him, sitting on the sand with her legs crossed. She said, It’s dangerous to go out there on your own, but she said it gently, as if she didn’t mean it, and then she asked what he had seen, and Johan told her about the brilliant lights in the dark, fathomless sea. Come and see them, he said, but she didn’t dare, even though she wanted to. He could not stop thinking about those lights. Even now.

  Hello, Mister, can you stop staring at the lights for a second? I know it’s a nice view but you can at least look at your mummy once in a while. Anyone would think you’ve never been out in town at night. What on earth do you do every night, anyway? I ask Farah and she says, Oh, Mummy, don’t worrylah, we just go to the movies, relax at the hawker stalls with our friends. Relax, my foot. I know you don’t just drink teh-tarik when you go out. Every time I see my friends I’m worried they’re going to say something about you, especially that Mrs. Teo, she loves saying things like, Wah, I hear your boy Johan is very popular with the girls, huh? I can’t stand that. Oh, Johan, what am I going to do? You were always such a good boy.

  Beneath them the city seemed to be moving, slowly, the lights blinking, the shadows shifting. Johan felt tired and slightly ill. He needed to move. He needed to be in a car, going fast, not sitting here at this table.

  And besides, Johan, kids are getting into trouble every night, good children from good families, not just naughty boys from Selayang. The FRU are beating people up left, right, and center just because they feel like it. After dark they treat everyone the same, whether you’re a gangster or a normal teenager. Can you imagine the shame if … if something happened to you? Daddy’s position would be … oh I don’t even want to think about it.

  I won’t get into trouble. I promise. Don’t worry, Mummy.

  Oh, baby, Mummy’s not saying you do anything naughty, I’m just saying be careful, that’s all. Now, what looks good? This place is brand-new, just opened. For two weeks I’ve been saying to your daddy, Please can you take me to that new place? But he says no, too expensive. Ridiculous! Look how he spends on other things. Just order anything you want. We’re going to have a nice time. Australian steak for you? Shall I have lobster thermidor?

  Anything. Please order for me.

  Look, look! Can you see? The restaurant really is revolving!

  Yes, Mummy, I can feel it. It was a lie. He could not feel it moving.

  Wow, look at the view, Johan. When Daddy and I moved here just after the war there was nothing here—nothing! Now look at it. Just in the last ten years, my god what a change. When you were a little boy this was just a big kampung, can you remember?

  The food arrived and he ate it even though he was not hungry. He cut into the meat carefully and watched the knife slicing slowly through the bloodless flesh. He dabbed at his mouth with the corners of his napkin now and then and poured some ice water into his mother’s glass.

  It’s so nice to be out to dinner with you. Sometimes Mummy just needs to show you how much she loves you. You’ve always been my special one. My perfect son.

  You’ve got Bob too.

  Yes, Bob, of course. But Bob came after you. You were my baby, just mine. Anyway, I don’t know why Daddy started calling him Bob when he was a baby. Darling, I said, we call Johan Johan and Farah Farah, why do we call Hisham Bob? But he just, well, you know what he’s like. Sometimes you know when not to argue.

  He loves Bob. Bob’s his real son—he looks just like him.

  Don’t say that, darling. Daddy loves you too.

  You know he doesn’t. Don’t pretend he does. He hates me. He hates even looking at me.

  It hurts me to hear you talk like that. I wish you weren’t so angry with your daddy and me all the time. Take it back.

  Why did you adopt me?

  Oh, darling, we promised we would never talk about that again. Why do we always have to go over the past? All that history, it’s another world, baby, it doesn’t exist anymore. Why do you keep bringing it up?

  I like hearing about it. Don’t know why. I keep thinking, maybe one day you’ll tell me something different. Sorry, Mummy, I’m not angry with you. Please tell me, it makes me feel better.

  You know I couldn’t have babies for a long time. We tried so hard, and all Daddy’s family were saying, When is Salmah going to have a baby? When is Salmah going to have a baby? as if it was my fault. That’s when we went to Indonesia. We have to go somewhere far far away, Daddy said. I don’t know why. Daddy didn’t speak to me for the whole journey there. There, I never told you that before. But when I saw you, I knew. I knew I found my baby, my very own son.

  Okay, I’m sorry I asked. Don’t cry, Mummy. I don’t want you to be unhappy.

  The restaurant did not seem to be revolving at all. Johan looked out the window and saw that nothing had changed. The patches of light were no longer moving. Johan looked at the silhouette of the hills in the distance, the rise and fall of the slopes, and thought maybe if he stared long and hard he would see them move sinuously, like the dragon-shaped lanterns the Chinese kids would hang during the Autumn Festival; they would light candles and place them in the hollowed-out dragon bellies so that they flickered and shifted and cast funny, silken shadows on the walls. But he knew the hills and the city would not move, no matter how hard he tried.

  Mummy, he said in a softer voice, will you tell me again about my brother?

  No, please, Johan, I can’t stand talking about that. Oh my god. She wiped her eyes with a thin handkerchief. It makes me feel sick remembering how—oh—how he … It makes me sick … lucky you didn’t see. Anyway, Bob is your brother, your only brother. Don’t you forget that, darling.

  Okay. I’m sorry, Mummy.

  I don’t think I can finish my food now. It’s too much for me.

  Are you sure, Mummy? It looks very good. Mine is delicious.

  No. Anyway I have to watch my figure.

  I’m sorry, Mummy. I won’t ask you about all that stuff again. Promise.

  Across the room the Chinese couple who had been in the elevator were reaching out to each other, fingertips brushing against fingertips, barely touching, just seeking reassurance that the other person was there, wanting to know that they could grab hold of each other and never let go if the restaurant started to spin out of control. Johan wished that the room would revolve faster and faster. He wanted to see what the couple would do, because he knew that they would not
remain together.

  I’m just going to the ladies’ room to freshen up, then we should go, darling. I’m tired all of a sudden, I don’t know why. I feel so hot, oh, I think it’s age. My son is nearly a man now, what do I expect? I must be an old woman! Give me five minutes, then home.

  Alone at the table Johan looked at the Chinese girl. She was wearing a slim-fitting flowery blouse with a mandarin collar and very short sleeves that showed off her arm, her still-extended arm that lay flat on the table from elbow to fingertips. They were getting ready to leave, heading back out into the night, and Johan felt calm because he knew that soon he too would be driving through the city.

  The elevator doors opened and a man and a woman stepped out. Their faces were obscured by a bouquet of orchids on the bar, but Johan could see that their arms were linked, elbow locked comfortably into elbow, and he could hear the waiters’ voices, servile and nervous and twittering, and he could discern the color and tone of a young woman’s taut calf, the slenderness of her hips contrasting with the stoutness of her middle-aged partner as they were shown to a table at the far end of the restaurant, hidden in a niche perfectly made for secret lovers.

  Johan got up and went to the shiny marble desk at the front of the restaurant. Please take my bill to my father, he said. He’s over at that table there. Yes, Dato’ Zainuddin. Just tell him it’s from his son. Johan, yes. He’ll settle the bill for me.

  In this new, rich city, Johan thought, people’s lives were like currents out in the open sea, pulling them to places they could not resist. It was no use swimming, you just had to surrender to the waves and see where they took you. A long time ago, when he was small, he’d imagined himself borne away by the sea. He wanted to be dragged away by the waves, which would leave no trace of him. If he had done so, his brother would be in this expensive restaurant, the perfect happy son for Mummy and Daddy. But Johan had not dared, and so he was still here.

  Come on, Mummy, let’s go. I’ve taken care of everything. Please don’t say that, it’s nothing, really, it’s nothing. You give me so much pocket money anyway. Take my arm. Careful, the doors are closing. Look at the time. It’s late. Don’t worry, I’ll drive carefully.

  · 13 ·

  When the telephone rang, Margaret knew it would be Bill Schneider. He said, “I’ve got news.”

  She listened for a few minutes without speaking. Bill was always quite precise about what he knew, and what he wanted. For a very brief moment she remembered all the things he had said to her when she first met him, many years ago. He had been very direct, and she very gullible. It was a time she did not care to remember, but she could not stop remembering. She said “yes” and “mm” several times, then she hung up. All in all, it was not a very long conversation.

  “You were trying to keep your voice down,” Mick said. He had not moved from his reclining position; his eyes were still closed. His body was too wide for the modest Asian sofa and he had to lean slightly on his side, pushed up against the cushions in what looked like an extremely uncomfortable position. “You sounded very shifty indeed.”

  “Not at all,” Margaret said, sitting down. “I was just trying not to wake anyone up.” She realized that she, too, had fallen into a too-deep sleep in the armchair, waking up with the crick in her neck that brought with it nagging aches and pains. She thought of some of the places she had slept: on the bare boards of a Dayak longhouse, listening to the snuffling of pigs under the house; on the mud floor of a Sepik dwelling; on the back of a truck traveling toward Bromo, propped up against sacks of rice, surrounded by cages of defecating chickens. She had managed to sleep quite happily then, and she had never woken up with a bad back or a stiff neck or a cramped arm as she did so often these days. She could not remember ever waking up from a night in a jungle lean-to feeling out of sorts, plagued by a mild sense of dread, wondering how she would fill the day ahead of her. The days seemed to take care of themselves back then; the hours went by and there was never enough time to do all she wanted. Now there was only time, and time created space—and nothing could occupy the space that it created.

  “Do you ever wake up afraid of what the day has in store for you, Mick?” she asked.

  “Usually I have a bad hangover and all I want to do is find an aspirin. Or another drink. So, no, I’m not afraid, just desperate to clear my head. But don’t try and change the subject. What did Schneider say?”

  “Shh.” Margaret lifted a finger to her lips. “You’ll wake Adam.” Night was turning quickly into dawn but in those twilight moments there was still a heavy calm, troubled only by the bored halfhearted yap of a dog in the distance. “Bill thinks Karl is being repatriated. It seems he got picked up in an army raid on Communists. They weren’t expecting to find a Dutch guy, he just got trawled up in the net—you know, like some prehistoric fish that everyone thought was extinct but gets hauled up with a big catch of sardines. Sheer accident that they got ahold of him—he was so far off the radar that he would have got away, but it seems nowhere is out of reach these days, Mick. The army has its tentacles everywhere.”

  More dogs were barking now, calling idly to one another across the rubbish heaps that littered the streets. The air smelled fresh and moist, but in a few hours it would be hot and dusty again, and the memory of last night’s rain would evaporate into the ocher sky. “It seems that Karl is still here, in Indonesia. At first they kept him with the farmer-fishermen Communists from the islands. You know what they’re like, they’re rednecks. They panic at the sight of a white guy—either they try and marry their daughter off to him or they lock him up. Then he got moved to Surabaya, then the trail begins to get fuzzy. There have been one or two repatriation flights from East Java, but Bill can’t find any trace of him on those lists. He thinks Karl is here in Jakarta, waiting to be flown back to Holland. Bill’s contacts are trying to find out more, but it’s not easy. U.S. dollars can’t buy everything nowadays, and besides, no one’s really interested. There are bigger things on the horizon. Even Bill says so. He was honest about our chances of finding Karl. There’s big trouble not far away, he says. You were right, Mick. Something terrible is about to happen.”

  “It’s the Communists, isn’t it? They’re falling out of favor and Sukarno doesn’t know if he should get in bed with them or chop their balls off.”

  “That’s what Bill says. The Soviets and the Chinese are pumping money into Indonesia and no one knows where it’s going, or what they’re doing. The army’s getting very nervous about the whole thing—they don’t know what’s going to happen.”

  “No one knows anything anymore.”

  Margaret watched Mick reach for his long-empty bottle of beer and scratch at the last remnants of the label with his fingernail. “I just cannot accept that there is a white guy wandering around Java and we can’t find him,” she said. “No, I will not accept it.”

  “You’re on a losing wicket, darling. This is a country of more than a hundred million people. Why should any Indonesian care about some solitary white guy who’s gone AWOL when they’re dying of hunger and on the brink of a civil war? The Dutch are ancient history in this country, can’t you see? Even if your guy is in Jakarta—and there’s no guarantee he is—we still need to find him in the biggest, dirtiest, most wretched and corrupt city in the world. There is no chance.”

  “That’s always been your problem,” Margaret said, raising her voice. She felt curiously energetic; the stiffness in her neck had ceased to bother her and she was no longer feeling lethargic. “You’ve always just accepted the way things are, you just go with the flow. Ever since I’ve known you, that’s been the way you are. It’s so damn frustrating. What is it you used to say to me when we first met? ‘L’action c’est pas la vie, so why bother?’—or some bullshit like that.”

  “Actually it was ‘L’action n’est pas la vie, mais une façon de gâcher quelque chose, un énervement.’ It’s from Rimbaud.”

  “Whatever. That’s why you’re still a third-rate hack, stringing fo
r the mediocre newspapers of the world. You have a brilliant mind and you’re in one of the hottest political climates in the world—and still you refuse to get your act together. We can find Karl. It can’t be that difficult. Come on. You’ve got scores of contacts in Jakarta. Call your journalist friends. I’ll speak to people I know, I’ll sniff around—I have a nose for these things. We’ll find him. Don’t be so defeatist. And will you stop picking at that bottle, please?”

  “You haven’t told me why this Karl de Willigen is so important to you. I presume he’s the long-lost love you never confessed to having had.”

  Margaret looked him squarely in the eye and contemplated telling him the whole truth: how she sometimes woke up in the night and remembered exactly the way Karl looked in the half-light of a Balinese dusk; how she remembered being sixteen and in love, knowing that she would be clinging to her memories a quarter of a century later. She said, “It’s complicated, Mick. We were very close friends. He must have represented something to me, though I’ve never figured out what, exactly. But do you really think I’m the sort of woman who pines after a man? Get a grip on yourself, Mick Matsoukis. I’m doing it for the boy. I want him to get his father back. Don’t you?”