That night, Ab stared up at the slowly circling ceiling fan, and thought about Nancy. After years of mulling around in the past, his fear that this relationship might actually lead to something, some unexpected landing in a strange place, fed into a vague, almost disturbing, sense of excitement. He spoke to the ceiling, as he sometimes did, a kind of prayer, but just talking out his sense of never being at home, neither in the land of the English and French in Canada, nor here, and asked out loud if this was just the human condition, to feel marginalized. Everybody thinks he is on the outside, even all the insiders. Maybe even especially the insiders, since they have worked so hard to get there that they can’t believe that they are there. “There” must be somewhere else. History played tricks like that. Maybe Nancy and he, two outsiders, were made for each other. Maybe here was “there.”
He recalled something Nancy had said on the way home from George and Sarah’s when he asked more about her parents and grandparents.
“Please don’t ask me about them. If I tell you more about them, the way you have talked about your family, then I shall have to kill you, and I really don’t want to.”
She had reached over and rested her hand on his thigh at that point. He remembered that touch, and held his Dutch wife pillow more closely, and fell asleep.
The next day was Eid al-Fitr, the big feast day. He took a Colt down to Malioboro Ave, the big tourist street leading down to the kraton, the sultan’s palace. The bus was stifling, and filled with smoke, and he was glad to be back out in the open air when it finally stepped down near the flower shops. On impulse, Ab stepped into the nearest flower stall and bought a large bouquet of orchids.
Nancy was waiting for him just down the street, leaning against the whitewashed wall in front of the Garuda Hotel. He saw her first, looking the other way down the street. Set against that white wall, her black hair still wet from a mandy, she was striking. In a long, loose dress made of the local black and gold batik, which set off both her hair and her pale skin, she looked both strong and lithe, vulnerable and on guard. It sent a quiver through him. I don’t deserve this, he thought. He handed her the orchids just as she turned to check his direction.
“These are kisses, which I cannot give you here in the street or we’ll be arrested for pornographic behaviour.”
God what a stupid thing to have said. She looked at him, quizzically, seriously, then leaned up and kissed him on the cheek. “Let’s go get a cup of coffee.” She waved her hand toward the other end of the street. “The crowds are gathering up toward the kraton. Looks like it will be a very dense crowd today.”
Superman’s was an eating place down a small alley just off the main street of Malioboro. They played 1960’s rock-and-roll and served food palatable to low-budget western travellers. Ab sometimes went there to just sit and listen to the music and drink the gritty coffee. Today, he ordered himself a tall glass of hot orange juice and a banana pancake. Nancy ordered a soda. Ab looked around. The place seemed fuller than normal, and the white, low-budget travellers looked very young. He could be a father to half these kids. He felt as if they were staring at him, a wealthy foreigner with a young Indonesian woman. What did they know about anything? Only what they saw. And what they saw was not what was. He wondered if Nancy sensed this as well, but he did not wonder for long.
After one glance around the room, she stood up and yanked Ab after her, announcing, so that everybody could hear, “Oh, forget this food. Let’s go back to your place. I can give you exactly what you want.” She winked extravagantly, grabbed his crotch, and then turned to walk out of the restaurant.
Back out in the alley, she put her arm through his. “Sorry. I don’t know where that came from. Let’s go stroll down towards the parade. Maybe we’ll get to see the prince.”
As they rounded the corner of the old Garuda Hotel on to the main part of the street, they were suddenly in the chaotic press of a crowd. He took her hand as they pushed their way toward the kraton.
They passed a man sitting on the sidewalk with a large wooden box full of black scorpions. Several scorpions were crawling on the pavement before him. He picked one up and allowed it to crawl across the palm of his hand. In his other hand, he was holding up a jar and explaining something to interested by-standers. “It’s medicine,” Nancy whispered into Ab’s ear. “Scorpion oil. In small doses, good for eye infections and impotency.”
He pushed his body back against Nancy and pressed his hand against her belly. She guided his hand gently away. “In high doses, it kills,” she said. “Does it seem strange that one thing could do both?”
“No. As a matter of fact, we make use of such properties commonly in medicine. Nux vomica, for instance, is a seed which we use to stimulate a cow’s stomach when she has indigestion.”
“And the active ingredient is the poison strychnine.”
Ab turned to face her. “How did you know that?”
“The tree is native to south Asia. We use it commonly here, both for its stimulation, and for its poison. Life is a matter of harmony, of balance, yes?” She smiled brightly and continued on down the sidewalk and he hurried after her.
“So strychnine is readily available?”
“Of course. Why?”
“Just thinking. Like you can get large quantities?”
She pondered whether to say anything, her face softening as she considered Ab. “If you know the right people. Your butcher in Gandringan for instance, or the farm manager Waluyo, if that’s what you are wondering about.”
The heat was blazing, suffocating. The sidewalk and street were full of large groups of students, as well as families, hawkers, becaks, bicycles, and the occasional foolish car. They passed a thin, wizened old man, with no legs, sitting on a straw mat on the sidewalk. He was holding out his hand and looking up plaintively, trying to catch someone’s eye. His little tin bowl had a handful of rupiah coins in it. Nancy leaned down and set the orchids Ab had given her into his lap, and said something.
“What did you tell him?”
“A kiss for you, old man.”
Ab put his arm around Nancy’s waist and gave her a squeeze. He began to believe, after all these years, that he might even be falling in love, that maybe there was life beyond obsession or lust. Maybe this wasn’t just an emergency landing because he had run out of fuel.
As they neared the palace, the crowd pressed in around them tighter and tighter. A parade was emerging from the palace grounds, a parade of flowers, mountains of food, local dignitaries and members of the once-grand and still-respected royal family. They were decked out in full Javanese regalia. At first, Ab felt the ripple of excitement in the crowd, body to body, a kind of public orgy, as the parade neared. Then, as the pressure increased, he had trouble getting air, as if he were a beach ball, the last air being squeezed out, ready to be stuffed away into some dark corner of the basement. He struggled, unsuccessfully, to move. The police were keeping the crowd back with whips, which they lashed out over the people’s heads. He felt his hand and Nancy’s being pulled away from each other, even as they grasped for each other more tightly. The air was thick with sweat and clove-scented tobacco. He tried to fight back, but found himself buffeted from side to side by the dense crowd of bodies, out of control. A whip flicked over his head. Someone behind him cried out. He felt as if he were drowning. With a sudden, fierce burst of energy, he elbowed his way back away from the palace until he was free of the crowd.
He found her back outside the Garuda, looking worried.
“Did you get whipped?”
He shook his head, wiping the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief, still panting.
He bent over to his knees and breathed deeply and she rested her hand on his shoulder.
“Some people feel it is an honour to be whipped by the royal guard.”
He straightened up. “I am not one of them.”
She rested her hand on the sweaty small of his back. “Why don’t we go back to your place? Have you ever had a good Indonesian massage?”
He lay on the bed, face-down in his sarong. She had tucked up her dress and was barefoot. He was not sure what to expect, something to do with sex, he thought, and then he thought how strong her hands were as she began working the rosemary-scented oil deeply into the base of his skull and down his neck. When her fingers dug into the muscles where his neck met the shoulder, he flinched with pain. I didn’t have any pain there until you made it, he joked into the pillow, and then sank into a kind of pleasurable torpor as she encouraged the pain down his arms, into his hand, into her hands. It seemed at one point that she was walking on his back, her toes digging into all the painful sulci between the ribs, wiggling into the small of his back, her hands kneading his buttocks. The hands gripped his thighs and milked all the tension down toward his feet, pressing, wringing out all the tension and pain he never knew was there. The fan turned slowly overhead in the afternoon heat, barely stirring the air.
When he awoke, she was gone, and his mind was pleasurably empty. He found a business card with her name and the address of her computer shop on his dresser.