A House in the Sky (6 page)

“I am
so not
falling for Dan Hanmer,” Kelly said in a way that was completely unconvincing. “No more questions.”

Lake Atitlán was a hypnotically glimmering blue-black pool of water cupped between three green volcanic mountains, with reedy shores and drifting fog and all sorts of honeymooners and hippies camped out in pretty little guesthouses along the shoreline. The village we were staying in was a new age enclave, with a meditation center where you could take classes in water massage and metaphysics. There were posters advertising sunrise Ashtanga and cheap Indian head massage, and used bookstores carrying dog-eared copies of Kerouac and
The Kama Sutra.

Everyone we met announced the same thing: They’d planned to stay three days or ten days but were heading into their third week. It was a badge you wore: The more time you logged on the banks of Lake Atitlán, the more everyday obligations—the plane tickets home, leases on faraway apartments, relationships with faraway people—you allowed to slip away. Which, as the meditation people would say, left you in the moment you were in: not thinking backward, not thinking
forward. Just being peaceful, being present. Which was a pretty good excuse to do whatever you felt like doing.

Dan Hanmer was now holding Kelly’s hand everywhere we went.

Meanwhile, Richie Butterwick and I drank a lot of beer and had a few make-out sessions, both of us knowing it would go no further, that we were just killing time. His flight was leaving in another few days to take him back to England, to whatever lawyerly life he would go on to lead. After we all said goodbye to him at the bus depot in San Pedro, I left Kelly and Dan Hanmer to their own private period of no backward/no forward, while I went to a different lakeshore village to reconnect with an American girl we’d met earlier. There were only forty-eight hours before Dan Hanmer, too, had to leave for home.

*

One of the best things you can believe about the world is that there is always, no matter what, someone worth longing for. Two days later, when I took a water taxi back to San Pedro to retrieve Kelly, I found her sobbing on the stone steps that led from the waterfront up into town. She had indeed, at least for a moment, fallen for Dan Hanmer. And now Dan Hanmer was gone.

“Oh, come on,” I said, wrapping my arms around her, offering what at that point had become our all-purpose panacea, “we’ll go have some beers.”

She pouted for the twenty-minute boat ride back to the village and cried off and on as we sat eating a late lunch at the patio restaurant of our lakefront hotel with my American friend, a freckled yoga devotee named Sarah. Sarah and I fed Kelly another brown bottle of Gallo beer whenever she started to get misty. We avoided bringing up Dan Hanmer’s name, but then we’d be talking about him again. “He played Bob Marley on his Discman,” Kelly said wistfully, as if this were the single most romantic thing that ever happened in her whole entire life. She would cry and then start giggling. Or she’d giggle and then start crying. Then all three of us would sigh. Dan Hanmer—for everything he was and came to stand for—was already a legend.

Late in the afternoon, we wandered down to the rickety wooden dock that belonged to our guesthouse and sat listening to the licking water and the quiet buzz of fishermen’s boats heading home for the day. Kelly’s pretty face was bloated from all the crying, but she seemed done with it at last. Sarah and I were lying on the dock, chatting about whether we should stay in town longer and take a three-day course in “lucid dreaming” at the meditation center, when Kelly’s voice broke abruptly into our conversation: “I want you to cut my hair.”

Sarah and I turned to look at her. “What?”

Kelly raked a hand upward through her hair and then let it fall—as if it weren’t the down-to-the-butt envy of every woman she’d ever met, the glossy cornerstone of her beauty, but rather some sort of tiresome dishrag. “I want this gone,” she said. “All of it.”

“No way,” I said. “You’re talking crazy.”

The idea of it was making her smile. I recognized the ignition point, a new flame running up some edge of Kelly. We eyed each other sternly for a good thirty seconds before I shrugged. “Just don’t hold it against me when you hate it.”

This would become the thing I remembered, a memory I’d lunge for in my mind five years later, when I was locked up and kept alone in a rat-infested room in Somalia, when I was suffering and half starved and my earlier life seemed like a made-up story. This warm early evening on a shimmering satin lake in Guatemala would feel like a fever dream. I would reach back for it, trying to lasso the small details and rope myself closer: Kelly and Sarah with their legs kicked out on the dock, their faces lit orange in the sunset. The way I ran barefoot up to the guesthouse lobby, borrowed a wooden chair and a pair of blunt-edged office scissors from a drawer in the front desk, and asked Kelly one last time if she was sure. There was the fact—refreshingly unimaginable, given that one of my kidnappers had hit me so hard, he’d broken several of my teeth—that the stakes of a haircut ever could have seemed so high. There was the specter of Dan Hanmer and the half-bloomed, eternally perfect love affair, and the first loops of Kelly’s dark hair dropping heavily to the dock. There was the way the mountains angled like
green drapery behind the sparkling eye of the lake. We were laughing at this point, harder than I think we’d laughed all those three months we’d spent traveling, as Kelly sat in the chair and I struggled to hold the scissors steady, hacking off one thick tendril and then another, as Sarah—whom we’d never see again after that week—streamed tears of hilarity and clutched at her belly, and as Kelly, no longer heartbroken and still lovely with a shingled, jaggedy bob, reached down and swept the remnants of her hair into the big lake.

A
s I calculated it, three or four months of serving martinis to nightclubbers in Calgary could buy me a plane ticket and four or five months of travel—six, if I kept the budget extra-tight.

“What do you do?” people would ask me casually, the way people do—new friends, the dentist, the woman seated next to me at a wedding. Or “What do you
want
to do?” was what people who came into the bar more often asked, presuming correctly that nearly everyone working there had other aspirations.

“I’m a traveler” was what I’d say back. “I want to see the world.” It felt exactly that simple.

I’d made two trips to Latin America and one to Southeast Asia, and I was fully obsessed with doing more. Travel gave me something to talk about, something to be. That I’d just been to Nicaragua or was thinking about going to Ethiopia seemed, in the eyes of the people I encountered at work, to override the fact I hadn’t been to college or that I was late in getting a round of dirty mojitos to table nine. It helped erase the past, too, allowing me to duck questions about where I’d grown up or who my parents were. Among travelers, talking about the past usually meant talking about the just passed. The expiration date on old experiences came quickly. What mattered most was where you were going next.

In the late fall of 2004, when I was twenty-three, I spent a month traveling in Thailand with my mother. We wandered beaches and Buddhist
temples, ate curry and mangoes, and slept in three-star hotels rather than my usual budget backpacker places. My mother was a surprisingly mellow traveler. For the first time, she and I were learning to really laugh together, to excise some of the ugliness of the past. When she flew home, I continued on to Burma, where—still nervous as a solo traveler—I immediately grafted myself to a group of traveling geologists who were doing field research in the jungles. From there, I went to Bangladesh, in part because the flight was cheap and in part because it was on the way to India, where I wanted to go next. I had an idea that I needed to get better at being independent. I didn’t know anybody in Bangladesh. I didn’t know anybody who’d ever even
been
to Bangladesh. It felt like the right next place.

*

Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated countries on earth, and Dhaka, where I landed in January 2005, is the country’s most densely populated city. Walking from the airport arrival hall and into the swelter of the afternoon, I saw nothing but people, a few hundred of them pressed up against the black iron gates separating the airport from the parking lot—taxi drivers, rickshaw drivers, unofficial baggage porters, women in bright saris clutching the hands of little children, vast families waiting for a relative to turn up.

“Hello, madame!” a man shouted, a hopeful taxi driver, it seemed. And then another—“Hello! Hello, madame?”—and then more—“U.S.A.? Den-a-mark? Where from? Hotel? Hotel?”

On the plane I’d met a man named Martin, a middle-aged German guy roughly my father’s age who worked for an electronics company and did business in Dhaka all the time. “You’re traveling alone?” he said, lifting his eyebrows. “That’s going to be interesting.”

Martin had insisted that a taxi ride to the Old City and the twelve-dollar-a-night hotel I’d picked out of Lonely Planet would take three hours and the driver would overcharge me by virtue of my white skin and my gender. “They never take you to where you want to go, anyway,” he said. “You’ll end up at their cousin’s hotel.”

He had a driver waiting behind the fence with an air-conditioned white minivan parked nearby. Walking out of baggage claim, I took one look at the taxi drivers scrumming madly for our attention and decided it was okay—a minor infraction of my mandate to be self-reliant in Bangladesh—to accept a ride in Martin’s car.

It took us two hours to crawl through Dhaka’s traffic to the old part of the city, along the north bank of the Buriganga River, which was full of slow-drifting freight barges and ferrymen rowing blade-thin canoes over the mud-brown water. The sun was going down. The streets narrowed, and the intersections between them were an unpatrolled bedlam of thousands of swarming bicycle rickshaws, honking vehicles, and wandering pedestrians. When Martin’s driver found a way to ease the minivan over to a corner near my chosen hotel, I climbed out, hefted my backpack, and cheerily shook both men’s hands.

The noise around us was deafening, a cacophony of bike bells and blaring car horns, people yelling at one another, and some sort of shrill siren cutting through it all. Martin was sweating through his nicely pressed shirt. He had to shout so I could hear him. “Are you sure,” he was saying, “you don’t want to just stay at the Sheraton?”

I waved a hand as if I’d stood on this corner a hundred times before. “No, no, this is good!”

Martin pressed his business card into my hand. “All right, then, call if you need anything.”

With that, they drove off. And I was alone.

Only I wasn’t at all alone. Every head on the street seemed suddenly to swivel in my direction. As I walked the fifteen feet toward the sign marking my hotel, pedestrians stopped and stared. A round-bellied man was trotting behind me, calling, “English? Hello? Hello, hello, hello?”

I ducked inside the hotel and climbed a narrow flight of stairs leading to a small second-floor lobby. Two men in white Muslim prayer caps sat behind a Formica desk, watching a soccer game on a small television in the corner. The guidebook had identified this as a cheap English-speaking place with clean Western toilets.

“Hello,” I said. “I’d like a single room, please.” I pulled out my wallet and passport.

The older of the two men took a long look at me. He had deep brown eyes behind a pair of rimless spectacles and a sparse gray beard. “For you?” he said.

“For me.”

“Where is your husband?”

“I don’t have a husband.”

The man tilted his head. “Then where is your father?”

I’d met young women travelers who wore fake wedding rings and pretended to have husbands stashed elsewhere, in an attempt to ward off men who believed that an unmarried woman who wasn’t staying virtuously at home while her father negotiated her bride-price had somehow been disgraced and therefore was either a prostitute or a witch. I had always been irritated by this, thinking that the male attitude toward women like me was bullshit and that the fake-ring solution was not helping the cause. I was wearing a couple of rings on my right hand—cheap, chunky silver and rhinestone things I’d bought on the beach in Thailand—but I wasn’t going to pretend they meant anything.

“My father’s home in Canada,” I told the man a little hotly, “and I need a room, please.”

By now, the second guy had taken his eyes off the soccer game and was shaking his head slowly and silently, as if the very thought were preposterous. The older man leaned back in his chair. “What are you doing here?” he said. “I cannot understand it. Does your father know you are here?” He lifted his hands in the air with feigned helplessness, as if to say it was not his fault that my father had let me out of his sight. I did not mention that my father was home with his gay lover and that I was in Bangladesh on vacation from my job serving alcohol to unmarried young people who went out at night, largely looking to get laid.

Instead, I continued to angle for a room. “I won’t bother anybody. My money is no different than a man’s money. What is the problem
here?” At the same time, I was examining the hotel map in my Lonely Planet, relieved to see another recommended hotel a couple of blocks away. Giving in to what seemed like inevitable defeat, I descended the stairs in search of another place.

Old Dhaka smelled of diesel fuel and fish paste. Horns blasted and rickshaw bells jingled as I left the first hotel. It was early evening now. The round-bellied man materialized almost instantly, taking up his chant of “Hello? Hello? How are you? Madame?” Within minutes, I was caught inside a swirl of inquisitive onlookers, a rapidly dividing cell of mostly men.

A man with a neatly trimmed mustache and short-cropped hair had pushed his way into the patch of space where I was standing, the eye of our human hurricane. He wore a white prayer cap, but where the men at the hotel had worn loose-fitting Arab-style shirts and Asian-style
lungi
wrapped around their waists, he was dressed in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt.