Geography (5 page)

Marion teased me about the letter for a long time after that. ‘You didn't waste any time slotting yourself and Michael into some great romantic tradition. Chemical reaction? Re-tuned body fluids? De Beauvoir and Sartre? He's old and a bit smart, and you're young and smart. There the resemblance ends.'

I spent the next day at MOMA. I got home that afternoon and put on the TV just as the tanks moved towards the compound and it erupted in flames. You could hear the screams, see people on fire as they leapt out of windows trying to escape the flames. There was the odd gunshot as some contrived to cut short their suffering. Eighty-six people died. It was not clear to me why the government thought killing these people was a way of saving them. In their own way they were as crazy as Koresh.

Finn got home as I was watching a blow-by-blow news report of what had happened. ‘That Michael guy sent a fax for you to my work number,' he handed me the fax, before turning to the TV. ‘He likes to keep things enigmatic, doesn't he?'

‘I don't mind enigmatic.'

‘I can't believe the government went in like that,' Finn wasn't listening. ‘It's insane.'

But I was no longer watching the TV.

‘Catch a plane to Phoenix,' said the fax. ‘I have five days. I'll meet you at the Desert Sands Hotel, May 4, 4 p.m. We can tour around from there. M.'

Three

‘Fact: this is where the Australian cricketers drink,' Ruby tells me, as we sit in the bar of the Galle Face Green Hotel, drinking a midday beer. The tropics do that to you.

‘Counter fact: Bombay has the largest film industry in the world. Bigger than Hollywood.'

‘It's Mumbai, not Bombay. Bombay is part of India's colonial past. Mumbai is the future. You can be a know-it-all, but sometimes I know more.' Ruby thrusts her fist into the air as if she has just taken a wicket. ‘
Yes
.'

‘I know you think it's funny, but it does seem like only yesterday that I was there, and it was called Bombay. And you're not helping,' I say, half accusing, half teasing. ‘On the second day we met you asked me if I was alive when Gough Whitlam was sacked.'

Ruby laughs out loud and I realise I like watching her, even when she is provoking me: the way she throws her head back to laugh, her pale freckled face, her broad mouth.

‘I just want to know,' Ruby continues to stir me, ‘whether historical moments you've lived through have felt big when they happened. Like being alive when Marilyn Monroe died. Or Kennedy was assassinated. Or even seeing Kashmir before it was destroyed?'

I say that the shimmering light and water of Kashmir seemed timeless and that it never occurred to me that things could change. Kashmir felt outside of history, floated out of time, like things do when you are in love. It is only when the affair is over that you realise months or years have gone by, and, sometimes, what was beautiful has been laid waste. I tell her that she should know how these things feel, what with her months in Colombo. She refused to go home when the government urged all Australians to leave the country; now she has developed a habit of starting whenever she hears a loud noise. She's cut short her time here for that reason.

‘I wasn't born when Marilyn died,' I say. ‘But I was born the very day Kennedy was killed. November 22, 1963. My mum tells me that she couldn't sleep because the radios in the hospital were never turned off.'

‘Did you have to spend every birthday watching footage of Jackie picking the top of JFK's head off the back seat of the limo?' Ruby asks.

She is right, I did. And I wonder whether that is why media events are one of my organising principles. I wonder if that is why I became a journalist. There are the big moments; those things that happen that make everyone draw breath, make them realise that at any moment anything and everything could change—cyclones, wars, a man walking on the moon, bushfires, sudden deaths and earthquakes. The things that happen in the world that mean for a few moments a lot of people are talking about the same thing and for a few moments there is the illusion of community. Then there are the smaller events that act like punctuation points: songs, films and television shows.

We discuss whether this really is community. I used to think it was but now am not so certain. Ruby thinks it is, a sharing of experience as people talk about what they have seen and heard. I wonder whether it is just a kind of perving.

‘When did you ever actually do something as a result of seeing something on TV?' I ask her, and she stumps me by saying, ‘Now. That's why I'm in Sri Lanka. I saw a documentary about the civil war and decided to go and help out for a while.' As she talks I realise I'm touchy on this subject because the more I've watched, the less I've done.

‘You sound like one of those old “TV is evil” fogies,' says Ruby.

‘I'm becoming one,' I admit. ‘I recently worked out how many hours I'd spent in front of the box. Assuming two hours a day every day from the age of five—which is probably an underestimate—the answer is 23,496 hours. That's almost three years of my life in front of the television. Four if you allow for sleeping at night.'

‘Time for more screen action, then,' Ruby says, downing her beer. ‘You must be feeling deprived.'

We're heading off to watch four hours of pulsating melodrama, singing, dancing and cricket:
Lagaan.
We walk down the road to the Liberty Cinema and it's a shock to be out of the airconditioning. Colombo is hot, hotter than anywhere else we've been in Sri Lanka. Rolls of barbed wire signal military checkpoints every fifty metres or so. The roads are pocked with large potholes and some are shut off altogether. Everything looks battered, ruined, closed down.

‘Should I be excited about a film whose title translates as “Land Tax”?' I ask.

‘You should be very excited.' Indeed Ruby can hardly contain her excitement and is speaking with great animation. ‘Indian film reviewers have described it as the best film
ever
made in the entire
history of the world
. The climax is one hour and twelve minutes of cricket.'

‘That pleases you?' I ask.

‘Very much.' She puts on a Sri Lankan accent. ‘Shane Warne,' she nods her head thoughtfully. ‘Ricky Ponting,' she beams. ‘Adam Gilchrist. Muttiah Muralitharan. Sanath Jayasuriya,' she raises her eyebrows theatrically. ‘In those names, with appropriate hand and facial gestures, a whole world of conversation lies.'

It is an expansive and joyful film, it makes us happy. Ruby dances out of the cinema, doing a kind of sideways Indian rumba down the street and moving her head from side to side. We sing the words from one of the film's songs as we move our way back towards Galle Road:

Black clouds, black clouds, shower down rain!
Let loose not the sword of lightning, but the arrows of raindrops!
Our difficult days have passed; brother, play for us the songs of the monsoon!
Our minds and bodies will be soaked by the rain of love.

As Ruby sings ‘soaked by the rain of love' she runs her hands over her body in a sexy, comic way, putting all her emphasis into the final word of the sentence. She sings ‘lerv' instead of ‘love'. People stop and stare.

We get to Galle Face Green and stop for a moment. Our exuberance has slowed and we are hot again. We stand and look up at the sky, as the characters in
Lagaan
do after their dance is finished and the clouds have moved on without unloading themselves. Parched in the heat, waiting for rain.

I would tell friends the story of the start of my affair with Michael like a recitation of great moments in pop culture. The fact that I watched my first ever ‘Seinfeld' episode the night we got together. The fact he had eyes like Peter O'Toole. The fact that Janis Joplin died in the hotel I was staying in. The fact that it was the night before the Rodney King verdict came down. As if these dramas were connected to us, to our passion.

The rugged American landscape conspired to make our time together seem even more iconic. We met at the Grand Canyon and drove around Monument Valley, the location for John Ford's
The Searchers.
We made love in a desert town where a killer was born, and that night there was a full moon.

When I retell the story I slip between what happened to me and what was happening around me. Solid facts anchored the affair, earthed the tentative messages that were sent over the years: down phone lines, by fax, by email, the occasional old-fashioned postcard. Gave weight to those seconds when his hand sat in the small of my back, when the lightness with which he held me suggested the most delicate, the most fragile of feelings. I built a relationship, block by block, from words and weather, the phases of the moon, pieces of movies, and media soundbites.

It was four in the afternoon and I'd been sitting around in my motel room in Phoenix for hours waiting for Michael to arrive. He was late, though he'd warned me he might be. He had a long way to drive. I was becoming nervous. Could you really make an arrangement to meet someone you hardly knew in the middle of Phoenix and have them turn up?

There was a knock on the door. I opened it and Michael was standing there, grinning at me, a bottle of cold beer in his hand. I had it again, that feeling of my breath catching when I looked at him. Actually, the word to use would be swooned. I swooned to see him. He kissed me on the cheek as he walked in, pulled off his baseball cap and ran his fingers through his hair. He looked tired. ‘I haven't had a shower and I've been driving for ten hours. Am I too dirty to kiss?'

I put my swooning to good use and fell upon the bed. ‘Dirty enough to fuck, I'd say.'

‘That's the kind of welcome I was hoping for,' he said, laughing for a moment before becoming intent. He rested one hand on my hip and undid his fly with the other.

‘Wait,' I said, and got off the bed while he stood there, hard. I pulled off my shoes, my jeans, before getting back onto the bed, turning my arse towards him. ‘Now.'

‘Jesus,' he groaned, as he slid into me. ‘I'm going to have to try not to come straight away.' I ground against him, lowered my body so I was at such an angle that he could get in deeper.