Mad Dogs (23 page)

I swooped her off her feet and she worked with me like a ballet partner as I leapt and swung her
safe
to the other sidewalk while killer bees skidded over the pavement where we'd just stood.
Carnage averted
through alert intelligence and decisive action.

Her blue eyes were wide and the pulse pounded in her smooth neck.

Rain drops spit at us as we scampered onto the bus.

We shared a plastic seat amidst bus riders who read newspapers and books. Bad music from boom boxes echoed off the metal walls. Her thigh glowed beside mine. Every lurching block thickened our air with diesel fumes and humid smells of strangers. We looked everywhere but at each other. Shoulder bags filled our laps; our bare arms didn't touch. We rode the bus. The rain turned from a patter to a pounding. Traffic crawled. Cars turned on their lights. Thunder rumbled. I rubbed mist off the window, saw we were in K.L.'s Bangsar neighborhood.

Derya's eyes locked to mine: “If we don't get off this bus I'll explode!”

“I… I know a place. Not far. Repair store, my friend's, he's gone and pays me a few bucks to check it and… It's empty. I know the key code.”

She pulled a collapsible umbrella from her shoulder bag. Jerked the signal chord. Bus stopped, rear doors jumped open. We leapt out to a liquid world. Pressed together. The umbrella barely sheltered our heads. Our shoes soaked through in five steps. We had to breathe with our mouths open to keep from drowning in the crashing rain.

Sheer will navigated us through the downpour to a side street. A concrete box of a store showed an unlit neon sign that read TV FIX above a door mounted with a flapped key pad lock. Derya held the metal flap off the lock as with my free hand I tapped in the code. The lock clicked, I pushed the heavy door open and we were
in
.

Later she'd notice that ground floor's tables of gutted television sets, shelves of parts, workboxes of tools. She'd smell oil and sodder and rubber, grease, electricity singed dust, and in the depths of that cavern, see a kick-standed motorcycle.

Later she'd wonder how we made it up rickety stairs to the loft with a curtained bathroom. A bed waited beneath the meshed skylight that rumbled with the drumming rain, a skylight now gray with muted sun and at night prismed with the red neon.

Later.

In
, the heavy door locking behind us as we lunged together, more a collision than a clutch. The umbrella rolled on the shop floor. My hands crushed cinnamon hair, her mouth worked up my shirt. We pulled apart to see our reflections in the others' eyes. Then,
oh
then we kissed, her mouth burning hungry against mine.

We dance/staggered upstairs. Tossed our shoulder bags towards the rumpled bed.

Trembling, not daring to touch her, scare her away, I floated in time.

Derya dropped her gaze. Unbuttoned her soaked blue blouse. Two buttons from the top she pulled it over her head. A tan bra paled against honey skin. Her right arm disappeared behind her back. The bra obeyed gravity.

Her breasts were angel tears.

And she pressed my hands on her. Filled my grip with her secrets. Arched her back into my grasp on her soft flesh, her nipples swelling. I pushed her against the wall. Covered her with kisses. She shoved her pants down, used one foot to push them off. My hands tore from her breasts, threw away my shirt, my soaked shoes kicked off. Derya shook as she unbuckled my belt,
naked,
I danced with her to the bed.

We were truly there as I kissed her mouth a million times, circled her breast with my lips and sucked her velvet nub—she cried out/her hips bucked against me and she moaned
“Now!”
but I kissed her stomach, her navel that fed her from the last world to this. The room perfumed salty sea and musk. Her skin tasted like its warm honey color. Fingers plowed my hair and she arched her hips for me to peel off her panties. Kissed the inside of her thigh, opened my mouth to her warm sea slickness and set free my tongue.

She cried out, yelled in Turkish, panted my name. Twisted away, pulled me up. Found her bag and condoms Shabana'd given her and we did that, it was part of it, not awkward. Kissing, my hands molding her breasts, cupping her wet half moon as she alligatored her legs, pushed me flat on the bed, straddled me and guided me
in
.
Back and forth
, my hands on her back, cupping her hips, cinnamon hair covering me like willow branches as she burned my face with kisses
rubbing her hips back-forth
. Her hair flipped through the air as she rose
up/down
, her hips slamming
up/down
on me, couldn't keep my hands off her breasts and she pressed my hand over her heart side squeezed her nipple with my flesh and came before me.

Panting. Coming back from
then
to
there
. She knelt astraddle me, hair across my face, her hot breath against the side of my neck. Rain pattered on the skylight. Her sweat dripped on my skin while she cradled me close, held me
in
as long as we could.

Laying face to face, she stroked my cheek.

Said: “I'm glad nobody was home.”

“I'm home.”

Her finger pressed against my lips. “Such words need their right moment.”

Those blue eyes glistened. “Nothing about us must be wrong.”

Her mouth wet the ribs above my heart and sealed my fate.

But we snuggled. She said: “Do you like your Christmas presents?”

I lifted the snow globe out of my bag on the floor. Laid back, set the globe on my chest not far from her chin. We watched the shaken snow settle on the tiny, trapped city.

“I love my Christmas presents.”
True
and
safe
. “And I love your name: Derya.”

“It means
ocean
. The sea.”

“Yes.”

She pressed her cheek against me and listened to my heartbeat.

“What do your parents think about this?” said Derya. “I mean, not
this
…”

We laughed and the room breathed easier.

“…But you. The martial arts thing: I understand
transcending
, making sometimes more, sometimes less of what other people see. And the poetry. You not being… doing what all Americans are supposed to do, get a job, marry some blonde.”

“Blondes are over-rated.”

She poked me. “You better say that! But what do your parents think of—”

“They're dead. Dad's heart attack and cancer for Mom. The American plagues.”

“I'm sorry!”

I kissed her head. “Dad first. Year later, I flew back for another coffin sinking into the ground. No sisters, no brother. But my folks got to see… what you see.”

“So what did they think?”

“That I was crazy.”

Laughter echoed through the room's lengthening shadows. Rain on the skylight.

“I've always been… different,” I told her. “Maybe I've always been crazy.”

“Stay that way.”

“OK.” I kissed her head again.

“My parents live in Ankara,” she said. “Two sisters, a brother, all love me.”

“Of course they do.”

“But they worry. Not about me, about the world, out here, so far from home…

I switched on the lamp by the bed and she rose up like a lion in its glow.

“This place,” she said, looking around. “Your friend…”

“He'll be gone for weeks.”

“So it's a safe house.”

Accident! Just her English making a figure of speech! Not spy craft lingo!

“We're safe here,” I said. “It's like…”

“Our place.”

She kissed me. Held the kiss, opened her mouth to deepen it, her leg brushing up across my loins. I reached down and guided her thigh up, pulled her on me.

Her whisper turned husky as I felt her nipple stiffen. “No.”

Yes, we did the condom thing again.

She said: “Cover me!”

And I did. My left arm on the mattress took my weight, my right hand caressed her breasts as I kissed her, whispered her name. Her legs opened to scissor me, her heels curled in above my hips as I thrust myself over and over again deep into the heart of her.

We had five days for our lie.

Five days. Teaching, hammering, squeezing hands when we passed in the hall. Laughing. Surveillance photos taken by the Malaysian police Special Branch showed me standing on a street corner, alone but unable to contain my grin.

Derya urged me to practice on the school roof:
‘You can't ignore who you are.'
She abhorred violence, yet made me show her the Yang short form of
T'ai Chi
I had supposedly come to Malaysia to study, plus
gung fu
, differences between Japanese karate and Korean Tae Kwon Do. I showed her how to turn a bad guy's jab into his broken arm, how an open hand slap delivered with no arm muscle could give him a concussion, how one false step dropped him with a foot sweep.

One false step and down you fall.

That roof was where Julia took the picture of Derya, her hair floating in thick air.

One night we spent in the apartment she shared with Shabana and Julia. The romantic novelty of being
oh so quiet
vanished long before dawn.

One night we spent at “my” condo, a bus ride I took every day—officially to “check my host's mail,” truly to stall Langley's insistent e-mail demands for
progress
.

The other three nights we lived at our nearer-to-work place. The safe house. No desire to be anywhere but there with each other, with the billion things to talk about, the skylight and the bed. Nights of cinnamon and Tupelo honey.

The sixth day I was working in the shed on the roof when my cell phone buzzed.

Chinese spoke in my ear:
“Wei! Wang hsien sheng yao hong yu chi se ma?”

“I'm sorry,” I said, English signaling WILCO. “Wrong number.”

Thumbed my cell phone off. What any snoop overheard didn't matter.
Wang
was a place, not a man, and it wasn't paint he wanted. The color was
hong
: red.

I stored my work, ran downstairs, found Derya and Julia drafting a grant proposal.

“I've got to go,” I told them. “Might not be back today.”

Derya hurried with me as I headed down the hall to the door.

I told her: “Tonight, go to our place. You know the door code. Wait for me.”

“Is everything OK?”

I squeezed her hand.

Two blocks away I found a killer bee driver willing to earn a huge fee from a crazy American tourist who just
had
to get to the giant art deco Central Market near Chinatown, probably to meet some tall American woman. I clung to the back of that rackety bike zipping through traffic and knew I was racing into a nightmare.

That indigo night, clouds covered the stars. Mist floated above the puddles on roads and sidewalks. I stood in the shadows across the street from the TV FIX store. Lights glowed in that safe house. One on the first floor, two in the upstairs floor behind pulled curtains. My whole life waited in there.

Why couldn't I have run away. Why did I walk across that street.

The store's heavy door clicked closed and locked behind me.

Like a child, Derya's head popped around the edge of the rickety stairs. She hurried to me, her blue shirt untucked from her black slacks, her feet bare.

“I was worried about you!” She kissed me.

I let her lead us up to our loft.

“You left and then I realized you'd gone with empty hands,” she said. “Didn't take your shoulder bag, your rain jacket, and—I'm sorry, I know I shouldn't have, but…”

She gestured the pile of my gear on the bed.

“But carrying it here, I stuck your jacket in your bag, and when I got here, I pulled it out to hang it up and when I did, this fell out.”

Derya held the scrap of paper that I'd salvaged. Most of the lines I'd scrawled were crossed out. We both knew the surviving words by heart.

Pulse

I only think of you

in light from the sun or stars

or whenever I breathe.

“It's beautiful,” she whispered. Blushed and tried to be businesslike: “We have to get you a notebook to write in, to work, you can carry it—”

“I don't write poems anymore.”

“I know, it's a
haiku
, yes? It's so—”