Winter 2007 (13 page)

“There!” She stops and
points at a silver Jag, an XK coupe. “I like that one.

Can I take a test drive?”

“That’s a sixty-thousand
dollar car,” says Cliff. “You want a test drive, I’ll have to clear sixty
thousand on your credit card.”

“Do it.”

He goes into the office and
runs the card—it’s approved. What, he asks himself, is a sixteen-year-old
doing with that much credit? He knocks on Jerry’s door and tells him that he
has a teenage girl who wants to test-drive the SK.

“Fuck her,” says Jerry
without glancing up. “I’ve got a dealer who’ll take it off our hands.”

“Her card cleared.”

“No shit? A rich little
cunt, huh?” Jerry clasps his hands behind his head and rocks back in his swivel
chair. “Naw. I don’t want a kid driving that car.”

“It’s the girl from the
Celeste.”

“Shalin?” Jerry’s
expression goes through some extreme changes—shock, concern, bewilderment—that
are then paved over by his customary. “What the hell. He throws a lot of
business our way.”

Cliff doubts that a man who
rents motel rooms for twenty-nine bucks a night could be boosting Jerry’s
profits to any consequential degree, and he wonders what shook him up…if,
indeed, he was shaken, if he wasn’t having a flare-up of his heartburn.

Shalin, it turns out, knows
her way around a stick shift and drives like a pro, whipping the SK around
sharp corners, downshifting smoothly, purring along the little oak-lined back
streets west of Ridgewood Avenue, and Cliff’s anxiety ebbs. He points out
various features of the car, none of which appear to impress Shalin. It’s clear
that she enjoys being behind the wheel and, when she asks if she can check out
what the SK is like on the highway, he says, “Yeah, but keep it under
sixty-five.”

Soon they’re speeding south
on Highway 1 toward New Smyrna, passing through a salt marsh that puts Cliff in
mind of an African place—meanders of blue water and wide stretches of
grass bronzed by the late sun, broken here and there by mounded islands topped
with palms; birds wheeling under a cloudless sky; a few human structures,
dilapidated cabins, peeling billboards, but not enough to shatter the illusion
that they’re entering a vast preserve.

After a minute or two,
Shalin says, “My mother and I…I mean, my aunt. We shared an unique connection.
We resembled each other physically. Many people mistook us for mother and
daughter. But the resemblance went deeper than that. We had a kind of
telepathy. She told me stories about her life, and I saw images relating to the
stories. When I described them to her, she’d say things like, ‘Yes, that’s it!
That’s it exactly!’ or ‘It sounds like the compound I stayed at on Lake
Yogyarta.’ I came to have the feeling that as she died—she was sick the
whole time I was with her, in dreadful pain—she was transferring her
substance to me. We were becoming the same person. And perhaps we were.” She
darts a glance toward Cliff. “Do you believe that’s possible? That someone can
possess another body, that they can express their being into another flesh? I
do. I can remember being someone else, though I can’t identify who that person
was. My head’s too full of my aunt’s memories. It certainly would explain why
I’m so mature. Everyone says that about me, that I’m mature for my age. Don’t
you agree?”

Scarily mature, Cliff says
to himself. He doesn’t like the direction of the conversation and tells her
they’d better be heading back to the lot.

“Certainly. As soon as I
see a turn-off.”

She gooses the accelerator,
and the SK surges forward, pushing Cliff back into the passenger seat. The
digital readout on the speedometer hits eighty, eighty-five, then declines to
sixty-five. She’s putting on a little show, he thinks; reminding him who’s in
control.

“Aunt Isabel spoke
frequently about the man who made her ill,” Shalin goes on. “He was handsome
and she loved him, of course. Otherwise she wouldn’t have risked getting
pregnant. He said he couldn’t feel her as well when he wore a condom, and since
this was at a time when protection wasn’t considered important—nobody in
Southeast Asia knew about AIDS—she allowed him to have his way.”

A queasy coldness builds in
Cliff’s belly. “Isabel. Was she an actress?”

“You remember! That makes
it so much easier. Isabel Yahya. You cracked jokes about her last name. You
said you were getting your ya-yas out when you were with her. She didn’t
understand that, but I do.”

She swings the SK in a
sharp left onto a dirt road, a reckless maneuver; then she brakes, throws it
into reverse, backs onto the highway, raising a dust, and goes fishtailing
toward Daytona.

“Take it easy! Okay?” Cliff
grips the dashboard. “I didn’t give her anything. She gave it to me. And it
obviously wasn’t AIDS, or I’d be dead.”

“No, you’re right. It
wasn’t AIDS, but you definitely gave it to her.”

“The hell I did!”

“Before you became involved
with Isabel, you slept with other women in Manila, didn’t you?”

“Sure I did, but she’s the
one…”

“You were her first lover
in more than a year!”

Shalin settles into cruising
speed and Cliff, sobered by what she’s told him, says, “Even if that’s true…”

“It’s true.”

“…she could have seen a
doctor.”

“She did,” says Shalin. “If
you hadn’t gotten her fired, perhaps she could have seen the doctor who
attended you.”

“What are you talking
about? I didn’t get her fired! She vanished off the set. I didn’t know what had
happened to her”

Shalin makes a dismissive
noise. “As it was, Aunt Isabel went to a
bomoh.
A shaman. I can’t blame
you for that. She was a country girl and still put her trust in such men. But
when he failed her, she wrote you letters, begging for help, for money to
engage a western doctor. You never replied.”

“I never got any letters.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“She didn’t have my
address. How could she have written me?”

“She mailed them in care of
your agent.”

“That’s like dropping them
into a black hole. Mark…my agent. He’s not the most together guy. He probably
filed them somewhere and forgot to send them along.”

They flash past a
ramshackle fishing camp at the edge of the marsh, wooden cabins and a pier with
a couple of small boats moored at its nether end. Their speed is creeping up
and Cliff tells her to back it down.

“It’s an astonishing coincidence
that we bought the Celeste and you started working for Uncle Jerry,” she says.
“It almost seems some karmic agency is playing a part in all this.”

Cliff doesn’t know what
troubles him more, the idea that the coincidence is not a coincidence, a thought
suggested by her sly tone, or the implication that an intimate relationship
exists between Jerry Muntz and the Palaniappans. Now that he thinks about it,
he’s seen Jerry, more than once, stop at the motel for a few minutes before
heading home. He has no reason to assign the relationship a sinister character,
yet Jerry wouldn’t befriend people like the Palaniappans unless he had a
compelling reason.

“All of what?” he asks.

“Aunt Isabel was a woman of
power,” says Shalin. “By nature, she was trusting and impractical, not at all
suited for life in Manila or Jakarta. She ended up in Jakarta, you know. In a
section known as East Cipinang, a slum on the edge of a dump. We survived by
scavenging. I’d take the things we found and sell them in the streets to tourists.
We had enough to eat most days. Tourists bought from me not because they wanted
the things we found, but because I was very pretty little girl.” Her lips thin,
as if she’s biting back anger. “Isabel could only work a few hours a day, and
sometimes not that. Her insides were rotting. She received medicine from a
clinic, but the disease had progressed too far for the doctors to do other than
ease her pain. She’d lost her beauty. In the last years before she died, she
looked like an old, shriveled hag.”

“I’m sorry,” Cliff says. “I
wish I had known.”

“Yes, you would have flown
to her side, I’m sure. She often spoke of your generosity.”

“Look, I didn’t know. I
can’t be held responsible for something I didn’t know was happening.”

“Is that what it is to you?
A matter of whether or not you can be held responsible? Are you afraid I’m
going to sue you?”

“No, that’s not…”

“Rest assured, I’m not
going to sue you.”

Her voice is so thick with
menace, Cliff is momentarily alarmed. They’re within the city limits now, driving
in rush hour traffic past fruit stands and motels and souvenir shops, not far
from the lot—he can’t wait to get out of the car.

“Isabel, as I told you, was
a woman of power,” says Shalin. “In another time, another place, she would have
been respected and revered. But ill, buried in the slums, power of the sort she
possessed could do her no good.”

“What the hell are you
getting at?” he asks.

She flashes a sunny smile
and goes on with her narrative. “Isabel loved you until the end. I know she
hated you a little, too, but she maintained that you weren’t evil, just
profligate and vain. And slight. She said there wasn’t much to you. You were
terribly immature, but she had hopes you’d grow out of that, even though you
were in your thirties when she knew you. She was basically a decent soul and
power was something she used judiciously, only in cases where she could produce
a good effect. It was among the last things she transferred to me.” She sighs
forlornly. “Taking control of me was the one selfish act she committed in her
life. You can’t blame her. The streets had left me damaged beyond repair and
she was terrified of death. Of course these transfers are a bit like
reincarnation, so it’s not exactly Isabel who’s alive. I mean, she is alive,
but she’s a different person now. There are things that are left behind during
a transfer, and things added that belonged to the soul who once inhabited this
body.”

“You’re out of your tree.”
He says this without much conviction. “All you’re doing is screwing with me.”

“Right on both counts.”

She slows and eases into
the turning lane across from the lot, waiting for a break in the traffic.

“Now,” she says, “I use my
power to get the things I want, to make my family secure. Sometimes I use it on
a whim. You might say I use it profligately.”

She edges forward, but
brakes when she realizes she can’t make the turn yet. A semi roars past,
followed by a string of cars.

“One thing Isabel didn’t
transfer to me was her love for you,” she says. “I imagine she wanted to keep
that for herself, to warm her final moments. She was almost empty. All that was
left was a shell, a few memories. Or maybe she didn’t want me to love you. You
know, in case I ever saw you again. Do you suppose that’s it? She wanted me to
hate you?”

“You can get by after that
red pick-up,” he says.
“I see it.” She makes the turn, pulls into the lot
and parks. “If that’s so, if that’s really what Isabel wanted, she got her
wish,” she says. “No child should have to endure East Cipinang. You have no
idea of the things I was forced to do as a result of your nonchalance, your
triviality. Your shallowness.”

She looks as if she’s about
to spit on him, climbs out of the SK and then bends to the window, peering in
at him. “This car won’t do, I’m afraid,” she says, blithely. “It corners
horribly.”

“What’re you trying to
pull?” he asks. “You were at my house the other night, weren’t you?”

“If you say so.”

“What the hell do you want
from me?”

She straightens, as though
preparing to leave, but then leans in the window again, her teeth bared and
black eyes bugged. Except for the color of her skin, it’s the face of the
witch, vividly insane, without a single human quality, and Cliff recoils from
it.

“If you want answers, watch
Isabel’s movie,” she says, her face relaxing into that of a teenage girl. “I
believe you have a copy.”

Chapter Eight

Cliff sits in his office
for an hour, hour and a half, not thinking so much as brooding about Shalin’s
story. It’s absurd, impossible, yet elements of it ring true, especially the
part about him giving Isabel the STD. He digs deep, mining his memories, trying
to recall how she was, how he felt about her, and remembers her as a simple
girl, not simple in the sense of stupid, but open and unaffected, though it may
be he’s prompted by guilt to gild the lily. She didn’t seem at all “a woman of
power,” but then he didn’t take the time to know her, to look beneath the
surface. His clearest memories relate to her amazing breasts, her dancer’s legs
and ass, and to what a great lay she was. He wishes he could remember a moment
when he loved her, an instance in which he saw something special about her, but
he was a superficial kind of guy in those days, and maybe still is.

Thoughts buzz him like
mosquitoes, a cloud of tiny, shrill thoughts that swarms around his head,
diving close just long enough to nettle his brain, questions about Shalin’s
story, more memories of Isabel (once a trickle, their flow has become a flood,
but all relating to how she looked, smelled, felt, tasted), and disparaging
thoughts, lots of them, remarking on, as Shalin put it, his triviality, his
nonchalance, his shallowness. If he could go an entire day without his life
being captioned by this dreary self-commentary…