Map of the Invisible World: A Novel

by Tash Aw

  Frankly, Johan, I’m worried about you. You just don’t have any direction in life at all. No respect for anything. You’re setting a damn bad example for Bob. And you’re a bad influence on Farah. You’re corrupting them both with that twisted stuff going on in your head. If you want to ruin yourself in spite of everything we’ve given you, then go ahead, but don’t drag your brother and sister down with you. It’s bad enough that you’re upsetting your mummy.

  There was a sound of breaking glass, something shattering on the cold, hard floor, followed by robust laughter.

  Johan thought about his brother and sister. Bob and Farah. They were not his brother and sister; he could not think of them in this way.

  He did not care about Bob. But Farah—he did not want to cause problems for her.

  You make a lot of trouble for me, Johan. You drive around town at night going to all these bad places, smoking and drinking. What’s more, I hear you’re going around with a girl. A prostitute what’s more. What kind of good Muslim boy does things like that? Don’t forget I have an important position, you know. People see you, people talk: There goes Halim’s son again with that prostitute. You bring shame on the family. I pray to god your mother doesn’t hear these things.

  I’m not the only one bringing shame. Anyway, don’t listen to gossip, as you say.

  Celaka. You are really too much. No respect at all. Enough nonsense, Johan, I have a proposal. That’s why I wanted to have a drink with you tonight, a drink and a chat, man to man, father to son.

  Yes, father to son.

  Don’t start that.

  Okay, Daddy.

  I think you need to be taught how to behave responsibly. You need to snap out of this stupid existence you have. You can’t spend all your life being reckless and inconsiderate. Think about your poor mummy. So I have made plans for you. You’re going to be enrolled at the RMC.

  I can’t. It’s too late. You can’t get into military college, you have to do stuff, tests and other things. I know people who’ve been trying for months.

  Don’t worry, it’s all settled. Ya, I called my friend—you know, Uncle Zam. He’s just been made a general. Brilliant fellah, went to Cambridge. No problem, he said, he can fix it. I told Uncle Zam, There’s hope for my kid but we really need to be harsh on him, really beat him into shape. He’s a wild kid, I said, but no one’s beyond control. This kind of kid, all they need is a bit of discipline. So you’re going to start in a few weeks, Johan.

  Johan stood up. He felt the bitter aftertaste of the drink lingering at the back of his throat, and he felt sick again. This kind of kid? he said.

  Aduh. His father sighed. What to do with you, Johan? Maybe it’s my fault, after all. But Uncle Zam said, Don’t worry, military college will straighten him out. Don’t be hard on yourself, Halim, he told me, it’s because of the boy’s genes, no one can help him.

  What?

  Well, your, let’s say, background. Being honest, it comes down to genes. Everyone knows Indonesians are a wild bunch. They’re not really the same as us. We just have to acknowledge that.

  Being honest, you’ve never loved me. You never wanted me in the first place, did you, Daddy?

  How can you say that? Who told you that? Did Bob say that? Did he tell you that? I’ll whack that fellah. Bloody big fat mouth.

  No. I just know. Only Mummy wanted me. You didn’t want some Indonesian orphan from the street, you wanted your own son, like Bob. I understand.

  Why are you so ungrateful, Johan? I can’t believe it, after all that we’ve done for you. Think about what might have happened to you if Mummy and I hadn’t picked you out of that shitty place and brought you over here. You’d still be living in the longkang with the rest of the orphans, no clothes, no books, no home, no future, just like your—I mean, like the others.

  Like my brother, you mean.

  Johan, no. Stop. We told you a long time ago, as soon as you were old enough to understand. You have to face the truth. Your brother is dead. How many times have we told you that? Nothing can change that. Your life is here, in this place, you mustn’t think of the orphanage. That is long gone. It is another world.

  I wish you’d left me there, Johan wanted to say. I wish you had left me and taken my brother. He would have made a good son for you. He would have loved and respected you because he was full of love, and he needed to be loved. Johan had wanted to say this all his life, he had waited for the right moment to say it, but now that the moment had arrived, he could not find the breath to say it. He felt sick and he still needed a bathroom.

  Okay, I have to go now. I have to go to dinner. Can’t waste any more time with this. Just drop me off, then you can take the car. At least you won’t have to steal it.

  They walked the length of the veranda, past men dressed in nice batik shirts sitting down to their dinners of chicken and oxtail soup. There was still no breeze in the night but Johan felt less sick. In a moment he would be in the car, moving again.

  You’re right, Daddy, my place is here. This is my home. He tried to believe what he had just said, but he could not.

  In the heavy shadows of the lane beyond the parking lot there were more shadows. Someone whistled at them from the dark, a high-pitched catcall.

  Finally talking sense, young man. Where else do you want to go? Better stay put and make your mummy happy.

  There’s nowhere else for me to go.

  That’s right. Just swallow some pride once in a while. You’ll enjoy RMC. It will be very good for you, you’ll see.

  They got into the Mercedes. The streets were brightly lit and there were many cars, for the evening was warm and still and young.

  · 20 ·

  There were not many things that Margaret did not understand about life. She understood quite well, for example, that love was not a constant thing, that it changed over time, drifting away from you and perhaps returning again when you had all but forgotten, that the inconstancies of love did not afflict one gender more than the other; women could be every bit as fickle and unpredictable as men.

  And yet some things eluded her. She had not really been able to grasp the concept of children—why people felt the need to bring new life into the world, for it seemed to her something not just illogical but counterintuitive: Why sacrifice your life to something that is almost certainly going to turn out to be imperfect, something you will never be able to control? Why on earth had her parents decided to have her when they knew they would never be able to be good at parenting? Even now, at the age of forty-two, she had not yet figured it out. Yes, she had had a unique path through childhood and adolescence. Yes, it had brought (on balance) more good than harm and had prepared her for the harshness of life. But if she was honest, all she’d ever wanted was a normal childhood in a nice town, in Massachusetts, maybe, where the people had comfortable homes from which they never moved—someplace where people grew up, fell in love with the boy next door, and then raised happy families.

  “Do you ever long to have kids, Mick?” she asked as they drove away from the hospital.

  He smiled. “Of course. I’d love to have kids. I often dream of having a great big, noisy Greek family—you know, huge dinners with music and people arguing and laughing. Not like the miserable Christmases we used to have, just me and my parents, no one saying a word. Only problem is getting married. Don’t like the idea of that.”

  Margaret smiled. In her hands she held five sheets of thin, crinkled paper, smoothing them with her fingers in the hope that the creases would disappear. She looked at the first sheet, at the lines of cursive handwriting that scrolled across the page; it was the kind of handwriting that seemed to emerge from a lost, earlier world, one in which typewriters and cheap newsprint did not exist. The letters were slightly spidery, the writer’s hand shaky, unsure. Most of the lines had been crossed out, though not thoroughly enough to obscure the words that lay underneath. It was not as if the writer had wanted to hide what he had written, Margaret thought, but rather to rehearse wha
t he wanted to say. She reread the lines that had been struck through:

  A long time ago, I made myself a promise.

  When you were six years old, I promised

  Before I die

  Ten years ago, when you were six When you were six I vowed promised

  vowed

  Many years ago I promised vowed that on your sixteenth birthday

  I would tell reveal

  Only two lines survived intact in this jungle of barbed-wire deletions:

  To my dear Adam

  and

  I always wanted a son like you.

  The other four sheets of paper were blank, clinging to the first sheet with what Margaret considered a sort of desperation, as if they too wanted to be filled with deletions.

  When the nurse named Cantik had given her those scrunched pieces of paper, she had allowed herself to think that this tangible link with Karl meant that he was still alive, still waiting for her to find him in this city. You can never predict what life is going to serve up. Always expect surprises. She tried to recall the times in her life when simply repeating phrases like these could cheer her up, when she could trick herself into believing that nothing was ever beyond salvation and once set on the right path she could make things happen by the sheer force of her will, turn a hopeless situation into at least something acceptable. It seemed such a recent thing, this blind confidence of youth, but now she had lost it—and she knew it was gone for good. What was worse, it had been replaced by an overdeveloped appreciation of reality, which now told her that she would never see Karl again.

  “You’re right, Mick,” she said, “we just need to find Adam and take him back to his home, make sure he’s all right. If Karl’s not there, we’ll find him somewhere else to live. Maybe,” she paused, “maybe he could come and live with me.”

  “You seem to like him a lot. I’ve never seen you so motherly.”

  “I loathe that word.” She chuckled. “I mean, look at me. I couldn’t be Mummy if I tried. But there’s something about Adam that I understand—I don’t know what it is, I just feel I know what’s going through his head.”

  “Let’s just see what happens. We might find his father, in which case it’ll be happy families all around.”

  Margaret turned away from Mick. The highway in front of them dipped and curved slightly and offered a view of a shantytown, the tin roofs of the houses melding together to form a plain of rust and corroded metal. “I think we need to prepare ourselves for the worst, Mick. I have a feeling Karl’s not coming back.”

  A group of students had gathered near the main gates of the campus. Over the last few months there had been ragged bands of protestors almost every day, sometimes as few as five or six, sometimes as many as a hundred, often consisting of more nonstudents than students. Margaret was never clear what they were protesting against (“In Indonesia today there is much to protest against,” Din had said not-so-casually one day). Sometimes they railed against the neodictators (meaning their teachers), sometimes against America and Britain, other times against the corrupt politicians, but mostly it was just the standard Ganyang Malaysia. Crush crush crush Malaysia, the chants would repeat tediously, and even the protestors themselves would seem bored. Today, however, the crowd was very large, two hundred or more, and relatively calm. This worried Margaret more than the usual rabble, who compensated for lack of serious intent by making as much noise as possible. Today’s gathering was different: a young woman was standing on a podium, speaking animatedly through a loudspeaker—not an incomprehensible stream of vitriol but what seemed to Margaret to be a sustained lecture of some sort. There was a cohesion in the way the students raised their fists to cheer every crescendo in the speaker’s voice, a sense of purpose that Margaret had seldom witnessed at these campus protests. Through the steady murmur of voices and the crackling static of the loudspeaker, Margaret discerned the words “… and so becomes dark, rotten, evil to the very core.” The woman’s voice was dramatic and clear, the emphasis on each word perfectly judged, like the formal speech of a lenong play. Margaret strained to hear more, but the words were drowned in a chorus of cheers and whistles.

  “Do you see Din?” Mick asked, slowing down as they skirted the fringes of the demonstration.

  “No,” Margaret said. “He might be in the crowd, of course, but he’s not with those guys standing up by the podium. Those are the members of the student council. Let’s drive around to the back. There’s another entrance farther along where there won’t be anyone and we can leave the car. I don’t think it’s a good idea to fling ourselves into the midst of this mob.”

  “Agreed. Students are the most dangerous ones nowadays.”

  Margaret looked back at the young woman who had been speaking. She was stepping down from the podium to raucous applause, shaking hands with a slim, long-haired boy. “She looks like a ringleader,” Margaret said. “That’s who we need to speak to.”

  They left the car and walked across the badminton courts; the smooth concrete surface was marked by cracks where tree roots were forcing their way slowly upward. Overhead the spreading acacias were shedding their leaves at the end of the long hot season, scattering their tawny confetti across the shady court. There were pieces of paper too, hundreds of leaflets urging hundreds of different things. Every day there were students handing out these flyers, but Margaret was never sure if anyone read them; they lay trodden into the dirt, bleached to a crust by the sun. Along some of the walkways outside the classrooms there was broken glass, and many of the panes from the louvred windows were missing. Not so long ago, from her office across the court, Margaret had seen a boy remove one of these windowpanes and smash it over another boy’s head. He had calmly walked up behind his enemy, raised the rectangular sheet of glass, and brought it down neatly on the boy’s crown. The glass had broken very easily, as though made of thin, crumbly plaster. It had exploded into a million tiny shards that refracted the sunlight—balls of brilliant color that exploded into existence for a second, like those magical bursts of fireworks that light up for a moment before suddenly disappearing, leaving you staring at nothing ness.

  They could hear the scraping of chairs on hard, gritty floors; a distant voice on a microphone, harsh, exhorting; singing in the auditorium; a guitar; a sudden chorus of whistling—all the usual sounds of the campus, and yet there was an odd calm to the place. Margaret and Mick made their way up to Margaret’s office, past a makeshift barricade of desks and chairs with a piece of paper pinned to it. Revolutionaries only past this point, it proclaimed in shaky handwriting; it reminded her of a child’s den, a tree house that had fallen to the ground.

  “That’s weird,” Margaret said when she got to the door. “I can’t get it open. My key isn’t working—the lock seems to be jammed.”

  Mick wiggled the key, teasing the handle at the same time. He leaned a shoulder against the door, pushing his weight against it. Margaret noticed how heavy he had become. He had always been sturdily built, even as a young man, but now he was heavyset. His hands, however, worked with a delicacy that was not in keeping with the bulkiness of his frame. “Someone’s been tampering with the lock. Don’t worry, it’ll give, it’s only a flimsy thing. And it’s not really broken.” He pulled the door toward him, and with a gentle twist eased it open.

  Margaret’s desk looked exactly as she had left it three days earlier. She sat in her chair and surveyed the mounds of paper and books: all in order. There were notes too, from various students, as well as political leaflets. Instinctively she reached for the bottom right-hand drawer, just below her knee; she found the key, hidden in the thin ledge on the underside of the desk, and when she unlocked the drawer she was comforted to see the same buff-colored folder that had been there for many years, on its cover the words: “Tchambuli: Kinship and Understanding in Northern Papua New Guinea.” Her passport, too, lay nestled between the folder and the side of the drawer, its pages opening just enough to reveal the dollar bills folded inside. It had been a lon
g time since she had seen either of those things; they seemed foreign, unreal—things that belonged to someone else. She considered taking them with her. But then she closed the drawer and locked it, returning the key to its hiding place. Somehow these two items—which amounted to a mere jumble of paper—seemed safer here, where they had always been. In spite of the riots outside, she trusted her office and the university more than she did her house.