Map of the Invisible World: A Novel

by Tash Aw

  IT WAS VERY hot in the car. The old acacia tree under which they had parked had lost its leaves and offered little shade. “What a smug, self-satisfied, pompous bastard. I could have wrung his neck,” said Margaret. “What has become of this country? Why can’t we get any thing done anymore? It’s just so frustrating, Mick.”

  Mick shrugged as he reversed onto the cracked asphalt in front of the hospital. A hundred years ago they would have been in a carriage, Margaret thought; she would have been dressed in a fluffy, high-collared dress under the same unforgiving sun. She wondered which world she would have preferred living in: that lost world of the past in which she would have been powerful but despised by the locals, or this one, where she was completely powerless and only slightly less despised. She thought of the young doctor in his fashionable shirt and sunglasses, his cold, hard sneer. Maybe the past was a better place to live after all.

  “For as long as I’ve been here, Indonesia has been like this,” Mick said, navigating the car through the ranks of scooters and bicycles. The car kicked up a cloud of fine dust as it crawled along. “You know better than anyone how this place works.”

  “It hasn’t always been like this. I remember a time when the people were … well, everything was just easier.”

  “But that was an eternity ago, before …”

  “Before what?”

  He shrugged again—a tic he had developed, Margaret noticed, a vague lifting of his shoulders that did not seem to mean anything. She was not sure if it signified stress or nervousness or anger or ignorance.

  They were nearly out of the yard when they saw the nurse named Cantik running awkwardly toward them, tripping slightly on her flimsy sandals. She was clutching something in her hand—a white ball that turned out to be paper. She thrust it at Margaret through the open window, presenting it as if it were something rare and wonderful. “Sometimes patients leave things behind—when they die, for example, and no one comes and claims them. We put all these items in a box and most of the time we forget about them. Anyway, after you left I said to myself, Hey, why don’t I look in the box, just in case? There was almost nothing in it. To be honest, the people who work in the hospital, they take things. They figure no one’s going to come back for them, so why not? But at the bottom of the box I found this, and I remembered the photo you showed me of your friend’s son. I remembered his name.” She looked pleased with herself, even though she was squinting in the harsh white sunlight.

  The cheap, almost translucent paper, so common in Jakarta, had been wadded into a tight ball that Cantik had only partially uncrumpled, and Margaret carefully teased the crushed sheets apart. They clung to each other with the brittleness of the autumn leaves she remembered from her years in America. The first few sheets she extracted were blank, marked only by deep, already yellowing creases. Only one sheet bore any words—elegant handwriting, the letters slanting forward and curling like the crests of waves. The first line read, “To my dear Adam …”

  · 19 ·

  Daybreak. The sudden clearing of the skies, the fading of night into memory. The noise. The people. He recoiled from it all and wished he could retreat into slumber, where things were safer and, it seemed, more certain. In this daytime world everything was harsh and confusing and temporary. In this great city nothing remained the same for long. There was a time when he had been different and special, he thought, not so long ago in a place by the sea. But that place was far away and now he was just like everyone else.

  “Here, have another one,” Din said, handing him a sweet Chinese bun, its crumbly pastry shell topped with sesame seeds. Adam took it and pushed it into his mouth, cupping his palm under his chin to catch the falling crumbs. As the pain in his ribs faded slightly, a new irritation arose to trouble him: hunger. He could not remember ever having experienced this sensation in his life with Karl. It began as a twinge that seemed to expand into a hollow emptiness; it filled his insides so completely that he could think of nothing else. Din did not need to eat, it seemed to Adam. He scribbled furiously on scraps of paper and cut out articles from newspapers, deep in concentration. After he had returned from the rally, he had left Adam in the house to recuperate and reappeared sometime later with a small parcel of food wrapped in newspaper, which he presented to Adam with great ceremony, as if certain it would cement their new friendship. He also brought a satchel of Adam’s clothes from Margaret’s. Before they left the house that morning he had told Adam to put on some of these clothes—a nice clean shirt and smart trousers, as if they were going on an outing to somewhere special. “Where are we going?” Adam had asked, and Din had said, “Oh, somewhere special.”

  Adam searched the satchel for his notebook and photos, hoping that Din would have packed them too; but there was nothing but clothes. His life on Perdo with Karl—what he had always known as his Present Life—was slipping away from him. And it was being replaced by a newer Present that he did not like.

  “Why don’t you have the rest? I’m not really hungry. Didn’t we have a lot of food this morning?” Adam knew that he was meant to say, Yes, it was a treat, thank you so much, Din. But he could not bring himself to enthuse about the curious assortment of stale snacks that Din had produced, for it had done little to alleviate the aching emptiness that filled Adam’s belly. He did not want to recall his breakfasts on Perdo: copious quantities of rice and leftovers from dinner, and fruit and coffee. They had seemed restrained and sensible then, as had all his meals, but now he realized that each time he’d sat down at the table with Karl it had been a small feast. Still, Din was trying to do his best; and in any case those Perdo meals seemed to belong to some distant past. He was not going to find Karl—he had to accept that.

  They were walking along a dirt road, beyond the limits of Kota, almost beyond the city itself. Tiny shards of grit and sand worked their way into Adam’s shoes. Somewhere in a cluster of shacks by the road a radio was playing a pretty, lighthearted keroncong tune, the soprano voice tinkling in the air like splinters of glass. Adam thought he had heard it somewhere before, on Perdo, a long time ago. Din began whistling the tune as he walked; there was a spring in his step, and he seemed bright and full of energy, speaking without any of the previous day’s vitriol.

  “We’re really not far from the coast now. Afterward, once we’ve done what we need to do, maybe we’ll go and look at the ships at Sunda Kelapa. You know, those big colorful boats with the huge sails. Hey, I can smell the sea—can you?”

  Adam nodded weakly. He could not, in fact, smell the sea; all he could discern was the faintest tinge of moisture in the arid breeze, but otherwise there was nothing but the sour, ever-present stench of rotting garbage and kerosene.

  “Thing is,” Din continued, “we forget that Malaysia is just over there. If we wanted to, we could almost swim there! It’s really part of Indonesia—we could annex it so easily.” He stretched out his arm and pointed at some unknown point in the distance, as if he could reach out and touch that country called Malaysia. “That’s where your brother is,” he said.

  The road became gravelly, the tiny pebbles underfoot crunched loudly.

  “You said you couldn’t remember much about your brother,” Din continued, his voice softening, becoming almost fatherly, the way it had when he met Adam that first day.

  “I try all the time.” Adam felt he could speak freely now; they were so far from Margaret or Karl or anyone else Adam knew that it did not seem to matter what he said. “But nothing comes back. Just the basics—he was older and bigger than me, and I have a vague memory that he was brave. And then he went away. I know that, but I can’t remember it.”

  “You were very close, weren’t you?”

  Adam nodded. He did not know how he knew this—he just did. “I get so angry with myself when I can’t remember anything. I try and think of him, but nothing comes back. I hate myself. I’m useless.”

  “No you’re not,” said Din, putting an arm around Adam’s shoulders. “It’s quite common, even normal
. You must have suffered some sort of trauma that your brain has blocked out.” He sounded authoritative and entirely certain, as if expounding a scientific theory.

  “But I can’t remember any trauma.”

  “That’s the point. The brain is a very complex thing. When a human being suffers great emotional or physical pain, sometimes the only way to deal with it is to forget it altogether. You can’t control this—the brain does it by itself, a kind of selective amnesia. You do know what amnesia is, I presume. Anyway, the brain creates a void in the memory. Other things associated with the pain might remain—noises or smells or visual recollections—but the pain itself is removed. The problem is that a lot of other valuable stuff is sometimes dragged into the void too.”

  Adam thought of the sounds and images that came to him from time to time. Din was right; everything made sense. It was as if all his life he had been standing in a room lit by electric lamps and suddenly someone had thrown open the windows and let in daylight. “I must be a freak,” he said.

  “Not at all. There are plenty of case studies that document the same thing. For example, I once went to a village in Sulawesi. I had a scholarship then and it was part of my so-called research—ha! Anyway, in this village there had been a bloody war between Muslims and Christians a generation before, but now the sons and daughters of the people who had butchered one another were living side by side again. The only way they could do this was by blocking out the pain. But wait, this is the weird part. There was hardly any noise in this village, no loud voices or arguments or laughter. Everyone walked about in a daze, as if they were daydreaming. It was as if their whole beings were devoted to suppressing their memories. Their brains had erased too much.”

  “I’m not that bad, am I?” Adam said, trying to laugh. “I’m not a zombie.”

  “No, of course not. We all suffer from it in one way or another. Erasing memories in this semiconscious way goes on everywhere, on a national scale, with culture—everything. We Asians are very good at it. If there’s a drought that kills hundreds of thousands, or an earthquake, or the government fires on demonstrators—well, we just forget it and move on. It lingers in our psyche, but we never let it come to the surface. It just stays buried deep inside. When I lived in Europe I saw that Westerners remember everything—they commemorate bad things that happened to them. It was the only thing I liked about the West.”

  Adam thought about Karl, who never spoke about his past. He had always buried the things that had happened to him—good and bad alike. So it was not true that all Europeans commemorated everything; but at least they remembered them. Adam was sure even Karl remembered.

  “What you’re saying is that I need to find my brother,” said Adam.

  “What I’m saying is that you need to find your past, your real past. If that means finding your brother, then, yes, you must. Because to be ignorant of one’s true history is to live in a void. It’s as if you’re floating aimlessly in the sea, being dragged every which way by currents and waves. You get pulled under water: There’s nothing there. No people, no trees, no air to breathe. It’s another world, a place your body occupies but where you don’t really exist. So what’s the problem? you ask. You’re here, aren’t you? As long as you’re not dead, it’s okay. Well, look around you, look at those babies sitting by the road, staring into space. Life has just begun for them and already it is empty. Is that really better than death? Do you think they’re poor but happy? Those kids back there, begging, selling their bodies for a few rupiah—they don’t know what their history is. Our history. We are not a country that was made for this. This”—Din raised his hand and brought it down in one violent chopping motion, as if cleaving an invisible foe in two—“is what we get when we don’t know our past. We cannot claim our future. That is the problem. You can never go forward.” They walked past two toddlers playing in a shallow puddle of muddy water, splashing each other’s naked bodies with gray mud.

  “You’re right,” said Adam.

  Din began to whistle the keroncong tune again. He looked pensive, as if mulling over something that had just occurred to him. After a while he said, “Don’t worry, I will help you find your brother. You must reclaim your past. I promise I will help you, Adam.”

  “And you,” Adam said, “do you know what your past is?”

  Din continued whistling, his hands tucked comfortably in his pockets. “Actually, I do.” He seemed calm again, and smiled at Adam. “That is why I know where our future lies.”

  They reached a row of flimsy houses. Two old men sat on a wooden bench; on the dirt before them they had laid out a few things for sale: a carton of Winstons and a few bottles of honey-colored benzene. They nodded at Din, their sun-scarred faces livened for an instant by faint smiles. Din stopped in front of a sheet of zinc; pasted onto it were old advertisements for soft drinks and cigarettes, flaking away in the heat to reveal layers of even older posters. It was only when Din began to undo a heavy padlock that Adam realized that the collage of posters was a door to a shack so dilapidated it seemed to disappear into the shadows of the houses that flanked it. There was a flutter of tiny wings; nesting swifts, disturbed from their peaceful roosts, escaped from the deep gloom through the holes in the roof. Pools of light made nearly white circles on the dirt floor, but nonetheless it took Adam a few moments to make out what was in the shed: stacks of timber, damp and edged with crinkly mold; old worn tires piled up at the far end of the long, narrow space; a few bicycle frames hanging from the walls, stripped of their wheels, chains, and pedals, like skeletons of a strange creature. Din unfurled a length of tarpaulin and began to remove planks of wood; all the while he continued to whistle the same bright melody they had heard earlier, and it made Adam think of Perdo, of his house with its solid floors and solid roof that had no holes in it. He began to feel a sudden welling up of the bitter sickness that he had become all too familiar with in recent days.

  “Come help me,” Din said, tugging at a thick length of timber and sliding it toward Adam. It was rotting and splintered, and when Adam touched it he had to resist the urge to recoil from it. Together they moved all the wood until they had cleared a space, and it was then that Adam noticed an old tin chest that must once have been used to transport tea or spices from island to island. When Din opened it, Adam saw a tangle of wires and a few jars of pale yellow liquid, heaped together with some metal rods, an empty Bintang bottle (with part of its label scratched off), a child’s doll with Western features, and other things that Adam did not recognize. It looked like a fisherman’s net cast carelessly across a wash of flotsam.

  Din delved into the contents of the chest and emerged with a canvas satchel that he slung immediately over his shoulders so that the strap sat across his chest, the small pouch resting safely against his hip. He put a hand on it, adjusting it minutely, as though reacquainting himself with something old and familiar and comforting. “Good,” he said, and smiled; he was standing on the edge of a column of sunlight that flooded in through the patched roof; the light caught the side of his face, harshly illuminating half his smile while leaving the rest in the shadows. He held up the old bottle of Bintang. “A souvenir,” he said. “The only time in my life I ever got drunk. I’d just arrived back from Holland. I was angry—I’d given up so many things to pursue a dream far away, and suddenly I was back home again with nothing. No ‘Doctor’ before my name, just plain old Din, no different from one hundred million people around me. All I had was the last of my guilders in my pocket. I went to a Chinese place in Glodok and drank five bottles of beer, one after another. I’d never touched alcohol before. I can remember the streets feeling very long and uncertain as I made my way home; in the becak I felt as if I were slipping downstream in a boat on a big, muddy river, like the Musi that I remembered from my childhood. I didn’t feel happy, but I wasn’t depressed either. It was just this feeling of in-betweenness, where it seems everything’s possible yet you can’t control anything. One day you might experience it, but I hope not. I
t was frustrating. Even when I fell asleep, I wasn’t really asleep. I closed my eyes and I could still see the ceiling spinning. When I woke up I felt the worst I have ever felt, as if my body had been poisoned and rotted to the bone. I swore I would never drink alcohol again, and I never have. I keep the bottle to remind me of what I did.” He was staring intently at the bottle as though he had been addressing it rather than Adam and was now waiting for it to respond.

  “Oh well,” he said at last. “It’s only an empty bottle.” And he threw it hard past Adam against a stack of timber at the back of the shed. It hit the wood with a dull thud and did not shatter but merely broke un-dramatically into three or four neat pieces that fell onto the dirt floor.

  “Come on,” Din said. “We have to get going.”

  THE ROADS WERE blocked off as they approached Monas, and their becak came to a complete halt in the tangle of traffic. They got out and proceeded on foot, skirting the edge of the square. Bicycles brushed past them as they walked on the grass-and-dirt shoulder of the great avenue, and sometimes, as they went past a stationary van, Adam would have to wait and let Din pass in front of him or else risk slipping into the ditch.

  “Actually, it’s better on foot,” Din said cheerily. “You see lots of famous landmarks close up.” He was still whistling the silly tune, never progressing beyond the same few notes of the chorus. Adam wished Din would stop, for it made him think of that place by the sea that was no longer his home.