Going Native (27 page)

After boring through half a page of deadwood, Amanda's attention began to drift. Her eye strayed surreptitiously over the crowded boat. She enjoyed looking at these people as long as they weren't looking back at her. She liked to try divining worlds from the grace of a gesture, the ebb of an expression, always aware, of course, of the ever-present danger of romanticizing our Third World brothers and sisters, but she was a professional, this was her job to observe with scientific detachment humanity in all its incarnations so that later, under footlights or a Panaflex lens, she might mimic the truth with oracular accuracy. So, no matter where she went, no matter what the circumstances, she was always working, always gathering raw material. That, at least, was the rationalization; maybe she was really nothing more than an unregenerate voyeur. In which case she had found her people.

Now, as if released from behind the insulation of the disintegrating fog, the celebrated equatorial heat began to roll across the river in great invisible waves. The unfettered sun turning the fine hairs of her arms into spun gold as a dispiriting breeze lapped at her face like a wet, lazy tongue. The shore slid past like pictures painted on a mechanical loop, the same melancholy scenery mile after slow mile, every couple hundred yards the required pause at yet another floating dock to board or unload passengers in a maddening replication of a metropolitan bus route, all along the riverside the same happy people standing in the same serried order, toothbrushes in hand, foam dripping from their mouths, there was no jungle here, none, every green bough and random sprig culled, cut, and shipped to Japan long ago for chopsticks, in the wake of the machinery these open fields of coarse weedy
lempang
grass, a depleted soil's surrender flag, vast uninteresting expanses of secondary growth, a generic landscape, the depressing view from the rear of an industrial park. The nagging wind nipped at the stack of paper piled under her hand. Amanda watched for a moment, then lifted her arm to allow a page, then another and another, half a dozen at once, rise up into the wind and go flapping away over the churning brown water. After a moment's hesitation, she withdrew entirely the weight of her hand, let the wind take what it would. Like a sudden flushing of doves, the remainder of the manuscript broke into the air, tumbled helplessly about, settling in the furrowed turbulence behind like floating cobblestones to mark the trail home. An elderly man nearby waggled a finger at Amanda, speaking sharply in Malay. She apologized in respectful English.

Up on the roof, amid the strapped-down merchandise for village stores upriver, the matching sets of lawn furniture, barbecue grills, inflatable toys, the bags of plastic sandals, sun hats, boxes of canned cocoa, laundry powder, and Duracell batteries, Drake had found smoking refuge in a used obstetrical chair destined for a needy highland clinic. He was seated facing forward, feet propped up m the stirrups, watching this spectacular country advancing between his legs. So he missed the white flight of paper from the stern. He smoked a couple of
kreteks,
he took half a roll of photographs. The view was layered like a cake, in colors almost rich enough to eat, the sleek brown of the river still several miles wide at this point, dark and thick as gravy, teeming with traffic, the motorized longboats quick and buglike, the coal barges, the rafts heaped with yellowy rods of rattan cane, then the lurid green hills and, above, the sky virtually vibrating with blue fire. "The days are so bright here," Amanda complained, "my eyes hurt even behind these Ray-Bans." Of course, any day hurt with your system still dog-paddling through the alcohol of the night before. So far as Drake knew, it was not recommended that arduous jungle treks be begun on the morning of a hangover, but sometimes you had to forge your own path.

The evening had opened with the best intentions, an early dinner in the hotel restaurant, a brief stroll around the town of Sambir, and back to the hotel and to bed. But somehow, in the surprisingly overcrowded dining room, he and Amanda seemed to have been hijacked -- there was no other term for it -- by an older British couple at the adjoining table, the Harrelsons, Glen and Vivian, whose need for a touch of sympathetic company was distressingly overt. Drake had seen the scene often enough without wanting to play a part in it: dusky coconut culture serves as exotic backdrop for Anglo fantasies of global gaming and sexual derring-do under the rule that out in the non-Christian hinterlands there are no rules, no one is what he seems, and the congenial Welsh twosome you meet over rijsttafel in a restaurant whose wall murals depict a subtle range of lovemaking are, in actuality, ruthless agents of a foreign power who have selected you and your beautiful wife to play unwilling but critical roles in their horrid terrorist scheme. In fact, the Harrelsons were a pair of disillusioned tourists who had already done the up-country jaunt and were now, thankfully, on their way back to Aberystwyth. Art collectors of an eclectic adventurous sort, they had traveled far, endured much, in their search for genuine first-rate examples of Dayak beadwork, sculpture, textiles, and painting, and were departing "this mildewed thrift shop" with little more than a handful of locally mined diamonds purchased from a dealer in downtown Sambir for a price, they were willing to admit, less than half the going rate in London. The art, though once so highly valued throughout the world, had degenerated to the point of worthlessness, "second-rate copies of copies, mass-produced, then artificially aged for gullible tourists." The Harrelsons were drowning their disappointment in Johnnie Walker Red and Bintang beer.

"But it sounds like the Dayak have simply adopted the lessons of the free enterprise system," said Amanda.

"And look what it's done to us," scoffed Mr. Harrelson, banging the bottom of his glass against the table.

"Save your money," advised Mrs. Harrelson in the tones of one whose recommendations were usually obeyed. Like a high-strung horse, she kept her lank strands of gray hair out of her face with nervous tosses of her head. She smoked one Player after another. "You will be trading a rather handsome sum of American dollars for the questionable privilege of viewing in situ dazed disorganized tribes in Western drag whose culture has been stripped and ravaged as thoroughly as the rain forest that once supported it."

"Do you know Indonesia's national motto?" asked Mr. Harrelson. He was bald and jowly and spoke in a loud voice that increased in volume with each drink.
"Bhinneka Tunggal Ika.
Sanskrit for 'Unity Through Diversity.' How absolutely preposterous. Unity at the Expense of Diversity might be more appropriate."

"At Lidung Payau," said Mrs. Harrelson, "we found in one of the tribal graveyards an effigy of a chain saw garnishing some poor elder's tomb."

"A rather witty gesture, don't you think?" asked Mr. Harrelson.

Mrs. Harrelson began shifting around in her chair. "Christianity is the chain saw of the spiritual world," she remarked with some heat.

"Well, I'm not much of a believer myself," offered Drake, "but --"

The woman went on. "It cuts the vitality right out of the soul. Then erects in the center of the wasteland it has made, the brutal sign of its triumph and occupation -- a grotesque instrument of human torture, need I remind you? -- and moves on like a horrid vampire in search of the warm life it requires to sustain its own deathlike existence."

Amanda burst into braying laughter. She couldn't help herself, she liked this odd woman.

"So the great art of a great people is irrevocably ruined, it's all garbage now. We've come too late." Mrs. Harrelson looked sadly into each of their eyes, to be certain they understood.

"And it's the same story everywhere," Mr. Harrelson declared. "The same process heading for the inevitable big showdown between Islam and Christianity. And it hardly matters who wins because in the end everyone everywhere will be subject to the one true god, working for the one true corporation, thinking the one true thought."

"And by then," Mrs. Harrelson said, "there'll only be one tree left. One bird. One flower. One dog. Horrifying."

"Disgusting," agreed Mr. Harrelson.

"Intolerable."

Mr. Harrelson leaned over, tapped Drake sharply on the knee. "You're not Greenpeace, are you? I understand there's a standing fat bonus among the native gendarmerie to anyone lucky enough to bag the pelt of one of those blue-eyed leaf freaks."

"Oh, Glen!" exclaimed Mrs. Harrelson.

"What a world, eh?" Mr. Harrelson examined the remaining contents of his glass, lost for a moment in the amber reflection. "Sound policy would have been to exterminate that awful white rajah set a century ago, the whole bloody
Lord Jim
crowd of them, stuck
their
overbred heads on cricket stakes out on the lawn of Government House."

"But, I wonder," said Amanda, "can you make a convincing argument for the case that each time a Westerner leaves home it's solely for purposes of greed or avarice?"

"Intentions, my dear girl, are so much pixie dust in this besotted life. Look to the ends. Look at the dripping record of our deeds."

"But isn't it conceivable that many people might wish to go abroad out of simple harmless curiosity, the pleasure of knowing what you didn't know before? It's only human."

"There are no harmless motives," said Mr. Harrelson.

"Curiosity is what killed the cat," said Mrs. Harrelson.

The discussion was obviously concluded. Mrs. Harrelson rummaged about in her rather large handbag for her wallet, which she opened and passed across the table to the Copelands. It was a glossy studio portrait of a pleasant young man in a British naval uniform, lips and cheeks garishly tinted by the photographer in processing.

"Our son," said Mrs. Harrelson. "Killed in his sleep aboard the
Ark Royal
during our Falklands misadventure. The Argentine missile hit amidships directly over his bunk."

"To maintain our claw upon every last scrap of worthless rock." Mr. Harrelson was drinking now straight from the Johnnie Walker bottle.

"Roger loved the navy," said his mother. "What were we to do?"

"I'm sorry," said Amanda.

"Go home," Mrs. Harrelson urged. "There's nothing more to see. Even out here. It's all soiled bank notes, television, and death."

Drake and Amanda fled the table at the first polite opportunity. Drunk, depressed, eager to drive the Harrelsons' odor from their nostrils, they ventured down to the waterfront and the notorious Hot Hot Disco, a long, loud building the size of a bowling alley and pulsing with music, bodies, and a sense of personal recklessness most communities preferred to keep well policed. Three steps inside and you knew in the roots of your scalp that under this spangled roof anything was possible. The place had the air of a frontier saloon where guns were checked at the door and the fraying fringes of the West found solace in unsafe sex and easy violence. The clientele, an inebriated mob of maenadic hookers and horny oil hands, was packed in so tightly that under the smoky black light it was difficult to notice at first that what appeared to be isolated outbreaks of highly energetic dancing was something else entirely. Hands were snaking with practiced anonymity in and out of sweat-damp clothes. Amanda was nearly stabbed in the eye with a lethal red fingernail attached to the end of some dragon lady's flailing arm. Onstage a quartet of skinny double-jointed Javanese was screeching its way through an enthusiastic, original interpretation of "That's All Right." The fat bartender was missing a thumb and a shirt. Amanda hadn't experienced a scene even remotely similar since her teenage bootwoman years as front fox for the all-girl cult band Angry Women Cleaning House. She and Drake found seats at a small wet table in the rear where they could sip their bottles of Bintang and observe as inconspicuously as possible. The flaring of a match at an adjacent table revealed the dark blue stain of a head-hunting tattoo decorating the throat of a Dayak man too young to have participated in the fabled ritual wars of his ancestors. He eyed the Americans through a series of perfect smoke rings, then spoke rapidly to the two girls in satin miniskirts who attended him. They all laughed.

Drake returned from an extended visit to the men's room to announce proudly, shouting into the amplified wind, "I just had a blow job on my way to the John."

"Male or female?" Amanda shouted back. Drake leaned over, touched his wife's cheek with his lips. They drank, they danced, they drank some more. Over and under the noise of the band, each number progressively indistinguishable from the last, other, more discordant sounds began insinuating themselves into the mix: the bright tinkle of breaking glass, here and there the screech of a protesting chair, the bark of a voice inescapably human in its intensity of outrage and threat. A bottle went sailing onto the stage. A trio of beefy Australians, sunburnt, drunk, in matching ten-gallon hats and powder blue western shirts, approached Amanda and asked her to dance. When she politely declined, they began chanting at her in a language that wasn't quite English.

"She's with me!" Drake shouted.

"I know," retorted the bland Aussie.

Drake pushed himself away from the table. All thought, all feeling, draining ruefully away. What was being given would be returned, no more, no less.

Abruptly, every light in the club was extinguished and the darkness was total. Someone screamed. The black wave of fear breaking over the room sent furniture toppling and tumblers flying. Invisible bodies began groping in blind panic for a way out. Drake seized Amanda by the hand and pushed on through the jostling crowd toward a promising patch of paler darkness from which flowed the wonderful scent of salt air and fish reek and petroleum waste in all its modern manifestations. Near the exit, traffic started to slow and thicken, skirting the fistfights that were erupting now with alarming rapidity, the familiar ozone-smell of impending riot harrying the revelers on. "This way!" shouted Drake and, turning, was slugged in the mouth by a beautiful blond woman in a stunning red dress. Reeling backward in pained surprise, he probably would have taken a second hit had not Amanda, pushing determinedly from behind, propelled him past the commotion and out the narrow door into a false neon dawn and a stampeding horde of frantic taxi drivers who rushed them en masse, crying, "Where you go? Where you go?" The end of the century, the heart of the night, the well of the world.