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The problem with well-lubed doors is that they move at the timidest touch.
The Bungalow’s door opened without a sound. Fifi was frozen there, like a hare bracing for a bolt.
“Hi, Fatima.” Hector addressed her formally. “Come on in.”
“Err... Hey.” She was dressed in a pair of baggy sweatpants and a tank top. Like Kero, she wasn’t wearing her mask. Her hair was messy and her eyes a bit puffy. She looked like she’d just gotten up from a very tumultuous sleep.
“Come on in,” Hector repeated. “You all right?”
“Yeah, yeah.” She sidled toward the vending machines. Then she stopped there with a curse. “I forgot my money, man!”
“I have some coins,” Kero offered, pulling out his wallet.
But the girl rejected him with a rigid, erected palm. “Thanks,” she breathed, barely audible. She turned to the right vending machine and kicked it with her slipper. “Doc, you’re a good guy and won’t hand me in, will you?”
“What makes you say that?”
“’Cause you are.” She knelt by the machine and hugged it with her right arm. “A good guy.”
Fifi slithered her left hand through the takeout port up to the goodies. When she straightened up, she was holding a Clamato can with a Chinese label. She popped the can open and gulped.
“Yum, yum, yum.” She licked her big lips. “Can you read Chinese, doc?”
“I don’t read Chinese, Fatima.”
“Fatima?” A chortle rippled through her chest. “What’s up with that?”
Kero, standing between him and her, now flopped into his seat with a frown.
“Don’t call me ‘doctor’ again.” Hector pointed his forefinger at her. “It’s ‘professor’ from now on.”
“But I like ‘doctor’ better,” she moaned.
Hector turned to Kero. “Goodnight, guys.”
“Come on. Doctor,” Fifi called.
But Hector ignored her and walked to the door.
“Prof, wait,” Kero called.
Hector stopped. “Yes, Kero.”
“Tell Yubi I’m okay. Okay? My mobile was uncharged but now it’s well-charged.”
Hector looked at him for a moment. “See you at seven sharp tomorrow.”
Hector wasn’t ten paces away when Fifi rushed past him toward the girls’ dormitory, dropping her Clamato can on the way.
“Fifi, what’s going on?” Hector called.
Her sobs were audible until she disappeared through the dorm’s door.
* * *
Yubi came after midnight. Quarter to one precisely. She was carrying two bags of pricey merchandise, Gap and Ashley Isham. She showed off to him. A pair of snakeskin, wedge-heeled red shoes. A wide-neck, kind of blotchy tie-dyed T-shirt that looked awful to him but he said it was lovely. A natural silk jet-black bolero.
“How much is all that?” he asked.
“Not much.”
“No, seriously. How much?”
“Baby, you said buy whatever you want. You forgot? Oh, poor baby. It’s been a long day for you. You look so tired.”
Yubi was wearing a duplicate of the sleeveless chambray top that had deceived her husband a couple of hours earlier (on another woman’s body) and below that a pair of white linen slacks. She took off her hair clip, and her heavy black hair dropped with grace over her shoulders, highlighting the smoothness and narrowness of her neck. Her eyes were quiet and clear and—yes—Asian. Yubi was a great beauty even if she didn’t pay it much attention. And the most gripping thing about her was not even her beauty per se. But her voice. It wasn’t singsongy or smooth: It was nasal, low-pitched, and rather shrewish. You couldn’t make out what she said without looking into her eyes and reading her full lips. Thus, the halo of her femininity, the anger in her obsidian irises, made her scream with life. She was so much there.
And it was this thereness about her that triggered Hector’s reaction.
“Where have you been?” he inquired.
“Where have I been?” She rolled her eyes. “Where have you? Kero saw you coming from a ‘stroll.’ Where did your legs take you?”
He ignored her question. “I called you like ten times. Why didn’t you answer?”
Yubi folded her bolero and dropped it in the bag. “Did you have dinner yet?”
“Answer me!”
She hitched her two shopping bags with a muted groan. She marched into the bedroom and slammed the door shut with her ankle.
Day two on Romantic Island, Hector. And tonight, you’ll be sleeping on the couch as usual.
* * *
For a long time after the fight with Yubi, Hector couldn’t muster any appetite for sleep. Muttering a litany of curses, he reached for the TV remote control on the coffee table. He muted the sound and worked his way through the settings till he hit the subtitles toggle.
The residence cable had only a handful of channels available for students and guests. All were in Mandarin or Cantonese, except two: a Hollywood-Bollywood streaming service overwhelmed by ads, and the regional brand of the BBC, self-proclaimed as “BBC Asian.” The latter was Hector’s only window to the world. So he stuck with it and hoped the stories would distract him.
The first story on BBC Asian was, strangely, not Asian. It was an update on the situation in a torn country known as Syria. The rebels had overtaken the town of Qaysa and were engaging in bloody skirmishes with Assad’s army in Damascus. Over a hundred people had been killed. The report added that the UN’s fresh estimate on the death toll had reached beyond 80,000 souls. In effect, the General Assembly had passed a resolution “demanding that all sides end hostilities,” which Russia and China had both nayed. An end to this debilitating war was not forthcoming.
Many people, Hector included, had assumed that after the death of Mosa al-Damashqy—the symbol of Syrian resistance—the rebels would go suicidal en masse to avenge him, simply win. Mosa al-Damashqy—Moses of Damascus, notoriously nicknamed “Mosa al-Damawy,” or Bloody Moses—was Syria’s Jeanne d’Arc. But he didn’t wait for the enemies to come and capture him. He went for them. Deplorably, Mosa’s death had little if any impact on the war. And only now Hector saw things from the Cardinal’s perspective. America didn’t understand the Middle East. Only a regional power, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, could untangle this mess.
Which did little to assure Hector that he was doing the right thing by pledging to carry on with his part in Operation C.O.R.O.N.A.
The next stories on BBC Asian were Asian.
One was about a widow in India who used her late husband’s hundred and eleven pairs of shoes to cremate him. “He was a lovely man,” said the widow. “He loved to wear good footwear and he spent a lot of money on them. My daughter and I decided to send his collection after him on the trip of samsara. In his new life, my dear Prateek should be happy to relive his life as a pair of winklepickers.”
The story after that was about a diplomatic crisis between Pulau and the Netherlands. A Dutchwoman had been caught handing out 5 chewing gum to three callous Pulaui girls on a transit bus. Chewing gum was a serious crime in Pulau, something to do with a gum epidemic in the late ’60s that had driven Fei Guo insane. The Dutchwoman had been sentenced to six years in prison. The Netherlands had withdrawn its ambassador, but there was no Pulaui response as yet.
On another sphere, the fuss over China’s avian flu epidemic had finally been addressed by the government. A spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Health had confirmed that most deaths reported were due to “natural causes.” One was a ruptured brain aneurysm, another myocardial infarction, a third spontaneous combustion. Only one death was a legitimate flu case, but this was regular seasonal influenza. Not subtype H7N9, the cause of so much ado about nothing among the Chinese people.
In Japan, the thirtieth anniversary of the silver-screen phenomenon Oshin had been hosted by the empress consort herself. Thousands of photos were shared on social media featuring the hale, septuagenarian first lady posing with fans from all around the world. Especially Pulaui fans: They dominated the festival. One Pei Fen Chong—a Chinese-Pulaui infant swaddled in a golden layette—won the empress’s heart and millions of likes on her mom’s Instagram account.
Hector leaned forward and squinted at the screen. The infant was crying throughout. Yet every adult in the photos looked one step away from the Pearly Gates.
Hector remembered his dead child and closed his eyes.
He stood up and went to the bathroom. When he came back, the Japanese story was still on. Pei Fen Chong, the Chinese-Pulaui, was the princess of the Japanese festival.
Hector marveled at how the Chinese and the Japanese had made it up so well. Of all Asian communities, these two were, if not mortal enemies, then hateful neighbors.
Once upon a time Japan, like most Asian polities, was part of China’s ancient Tribute System. Japanese rulers were vassals of the Chinese emperor. They adopted Chinese calligraphy and customs out of deference. But collapse had finally come to this master-follower hierarchy in the nineteenth century—thanks to the British.
The British had come with their barges and their breeches and their lust for opium, and inflicted severe damage upon China’s legacy. It had been a “century of national humiliation,” as Chinese pundits still described it. China was wrist-locked into unfair treaties, and large swathes of its landmass were wrung out of its control. Soon the Japanese, those former followers, declared themselves superior to Chinese men. They invaded China and sought to dominate their former masters.
It wasn’t until China had reformed its economy—divorced both ideology and nostalgia, both with their crippling sensitives—that its dignity was restored.
Now, not only was a reconciliation with Japan possible, but also the celebration of Japanese drama by so many Chinese people.
But that didn’t explain how Chinese-Pulauis, of all people, flooded to attend the Japanese festival.
Who could forget the bloody Japanese occupation of Pulau during the Second World War! It was the single most national disaster in Pulaui history.
Hector was confused now. And the new story on BBC Asian made him more so. It made him even question his grasp on his discipline, on political science.
The story was about Pulau’s Golden Jubilee celebrations of last Friday, which marked half a century of independence from Britain in ’63. Hector watched the carnivalesque processions of Disney characters, of Chinese mythical creatures, of Buddhas, of Jesuses and Marys, and of big-eyed Hindu gods. There mingled in the crowds millions of Chinese, Indians, Malays, besides the table-salt modicum of whites, Arabs, and other newcomers. All were hoisting the island’s spectacular flag: Our Lady the Mermaid, sketched in blue, crowned in gold, crouched in a sea of milk.
Newcomers who celebrated a date most of them hadn’t even seen.
And they broadcast it on Britain’s own mouthpiece—the BBC that called itself “Asian.”
They were masked in a haze of their own making.
Nothing made sense at all. Not his operation, not Asia, not even the world at large.
* * *
Hector shut down the TV and paced his hall. There was no liquor in the fridge—damned Pulauis!—and the only book around, Davies’s The Rebel Angels, reminded him of his silly early twenties at the University of Toronto.
His brain seemed to have exhausted its data plan to download any good memories. His head ached.
He went twice to check on Yubi, propelled by a drudgerous libido. Each time, her pose made it harder for him to relax. Yubi slept on her left side, her left arm curled—like a saint’s halo—over her head, her right thigh flexed at the hip.
He did a few pushups on the frieze carpet to weary himself up, but his ears caught something interesting. He stopped. There was a soft creak at the next door.
This was followed by hasty footsteps rushing past his door, then down the stairs.
Hector straightened and cocked his ears. The world was now silent. He referred to his watch. Two-seventeen a.m. Not high time for a nightly stroll or a morning jog.
He walked into his flipflops and opened the front door. Instantly the smell of clean soap and bergamot flooded him—a souvenir from the incredible rendezvous only five hours earlier.
The sealed windows of the hallway commanded a hazy view of the illuminated pond and the wooden bridge arching over it, and of the girls’ dormitory across: five stories of pastel beige, a replica of the one he was looking from. Hector fixed his eyes on the bridge and waited three minutes. No one showed there. This was the main route out of his side. A flagged trail walked you alongside the girls’ dormitory to the marigold and dahlia pots ring after that, then finally onto the asphalt driveway.
Theoretically, however, there were two alternate routes.
The boys’ dormitory had two exits. One of them lay three floors under Hector’s feet, close to the bridge over the pond. Another exit, more to the northwest, gave onto a grassed mini-backyard that bordered the ring trail. It was fairly possible to skip the bridge altogether and climb a mere four-foot hedge to the ring trail.
Or, more savagely, you could crowd through the cashew, neem, and breadfruit trees neighboring the mini-backyard and from there extract yourself some twenty feet after onto the asphalt driveway.
Either way was not conventional. But Hector knew his night visitor: He wasn’t one for convention.
Hector waited another minute to see if the night visitor would pop up on the ring trail. He did not. So Hector walked to the end of the hallway. And there, by Unit 312, his suspicion was confirmed: The lush branches of cashew, neem, and breadfruit were stirring, in a definite course toward the driveway.
It wasn’t possible to follow it all the way through, though. The burly, lush arms of a mango tree covered Ozgur’s egress from the residence.
* * *
Baxter opened the door but held it close to shut down any thoughts of a possible invitation. His grin was his trademark and when Baxter grinned, his violet lips parted and his pearly teeth rear-marched. He stood there shirtless, barefoot in pewter cotton boxers. His six-packs and his obliques wiggled as he rebalanced his weight, from his right to his left leg, where the shrapnel scars were visible.
Baxter, a former 101st Airborne Division sergeant, had been injured four years ago in Kabul. His unit had been the famed Band of Brothers 4th Brigade Combat Team, a detail he never tired of repeating. He didn’t look it, but Baxter was close to his professor’s age—early forties—and, according to rumor, “dishonorably discharged.” Yet you couldn’t be sure of anything with Baxter.
“Yessir.”
Hector would have responded with his comradely “Sergeant” had the visit been at a more convenient hour. “Hey, Baxter, is Kero there?”
“Nope. Haven’t seen him in like forever.”
“You know where he went?”
Baxter shook his shaved ebony head, the door moving infinitesimally in his grasp.
Hector got the message and was about to turn away, when he remembered, “How was the bar scene by the way? Any good places around?”
“Yeah, some of them are good. Spiffy Dapper or something was a pretty good one. And Exclusive near Chinatown. There’s also this place called Djang or Djing where you get a cantaloupe tequila for six bucks. Good times, boss.”
Baxter always called him “boss,” a welcome variation from the incorrigible “doctor.”
“Did you have a few drinks, then?”
Baxter looked utterly, if not disappointedly, sober, but he nodded. “Yeah, I had a few.”
“And Fifi... did she hold up okay?”
Baxter’s grin buckled. “Man, this girl never had a drink in her life or somethin’? She couldn’t hold it. I paid for her Uber ride home. Won’t let her throw up on my shirt, no thank you.” He shook his head. “Never again.”
Hector still didn’t leave. “Baxter... Yubi is having one of her bad headaches. Can I borrow some of your pills?”
The embattled sergeant considered his professor with an amused look. “Sure, boss.” He released the door. “Tylenol. Advil—”
“Actually, I was thinking tramadol.”
Hector sniffed the air. It was unmistakable: Ozgur’s perfume was all over the apartment.
Baxter scratched his smooth chin. “Okay. I don’t have that. But I’ve got other stuff. You into hardcore: Chalk and Oxy and all that?”
“You’re kidding me. Do you have that?”
“No way, man.” Baxter chortled. “I’m just kinda measuring you up. You know what... Forget it. Anyway, you want this trama junk? I don’t like it, but I know someone who does.”
Hector waited patiently while Baxter disappeared into the one bedroom. The apartment was a mirror-image copy of Hector and Yubi’s: a bedroom, a tiny washroom, and a modest hall with a kitchenette, a teal-upholstered sofa, a glass table, and a big Samsung plasma TV. Pulauis were open-handed, yes, but by no means ostentatious.
Baxter came back. He opened his left fist to show six yellow caps. “It’s Kero’s. I don’t think he’ll mind, though. You have a paper on you?”
Hector said no.
Baxter limped back inside, then returned with a printout of their itinerary. As Baxter tore out a paper and rolled it into a cone, Hector read City Hall and National Museum, which were the first two visits for the day.
Baxter saw him off at the door. “Hey, boss, what did Ernest say that campaign was called? The one about farming in China?”
Hector recalled Ernest’s defense last September, which everybody had attended. Hector had been Ernest’s supervisor, and he had passed him on the first go. It was well-deserved, for the prince’s wunderkind of a son had written one of the most original theses in AIMES’s history.
Ernest’s thesis was a comparative analysis of Sadat’s Infitah versus Deng Xiaoping’s Opening-Up. Both economic reforms had happened around the same period and boasted similar agendas. But only China had thrived. Egypt had flopped big time. Ernest defended the hypothesis that the Egyptian president at the time—Anwar al-Sadat—had implemented a mock reform, a ploy to trick his new ally, the United States, into believing he’d divorced socialism forever. Thus Infitah—literally “opening-up”—was no match for Mr Deng’s extensive Four Modernizations and his sincere will to move China past Mao’s earlier ideological disasters.
“You mean Mao’s economic whims? Forcing the Chinese society to jump from agricultural to communist to socialist? It was called the Great Leap Forward, Baxter, and you should always remember that it was an atrocity.”
“Yeah yeah yeah,” Baxter said. “The Leap Forward. So this thing I gave you, boss, is gonna give you a good leap forward—if you can read me.”
“I don’t read you, sergeant.”
“I mean take it easy on the dame. We’re tired and we wanna have a couple hours of sleep before the sun come up. See you soon, boss.”
And with a wink, Baxter shut his door.