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“What’s wrong?” Yubi asked him when he rejoined the group.
Hector shook his head. Nothing.
They were walking toward the National Museum, threading their way through the masses in a conga line, Yubi the dancer he was tagging. Finally they came upon a glass-and-steel truss dome, within which resided a marmoreal growth from the same era the founding fathers of Pulau were so besotted with.
Now if City Hall was the Temple of Artemis, what could the National Museum be, but a dwelling place for all the gods—in a word, a Pantheon?
Paul ambled to the box office, while Yubi turned to Hector. “Who was it?”
“Who was who?”
“You caller. Did something happen, in Cairo?”
“It was the Egyptian ambassador.” Hector raised his eyebrows and shook his head. “This woman doesn’t know when to stop.”
On their first day in Pulau, the Egyptian ambassador had treated them to dinner at her house: a double-terraced villa niched on the slope of Mount Victoria in a savanna of olive trees and wild grass. The place was close to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the hilltop and to Mister Prata down at the foothill. But they would make stops at both locations on the next day without calling on her, and they would ignore her phone calls ever since.
“Wash up your dishes when you’re done!” she had shouted to her guests. “Fatima, pick up that salami piece you dropped. Now! Be clean or get out. The Embassy cannot afford a cleaning lady to clean all of your mess. It’s been rather tight since your daddy made a Revolution. It’s like a march a day keeps the doctor away these days. Interesting times. Very interesting times. Is that what your daddy taught you, Fatima: to drop garbage in other people’s homes? How did he raise you all by himself, I wonder? Did he invite any ladies over? People talk. Tut-tut. Why does he want to destroy the country a second time? Answer me! Hey, don’t cry on my carpet!”
Later, she had apologized and wept and put it all down on Iblis, an evil spirit that had penetrated her house. “Did you bring pork-eaters to my house, Dr Kane? Don’t be offended. It’s been scientifically proven. Oh, I feel so bad now. We’ll hang out later and patch it up. Hug Fatima for me and tell her I’m sorry. I’ll hug her myself tomorrow when she’s calmer. Do you need a drive home? My car is yours anytime. Please take the rest of the pizza with you. Flies hang around here all day.”
* * *
Paul returned with the tickets and they followed him into the museum. And soon the dome cut them off from the horrors of the outside crematorium. Tchaikovsky’s fifth symphony was playing in the background, a piece of music so perfect, so victorious, it was its own universe.
And the air was cool and redolent of blueberries and jasmine. They breathed, and they were cured of all worry.
They were in a courtyard peppered by souvenir stalls and flanked by double-storied colonnades. Entrances to side exhibitions were on the ground floors of the colonnades. As for the court, it was a work of art: Lit by the glare penetrating the glass dome, a ceramic chessboard rolled endlessly.
Baxter whistled. “Looks like the White House is over there,” he said, referring to an edifice crouching on the horizon.
Paul corrected him. “That is the Pantheon, Mr Simmons. It looks like your White House, absolutely, but the copyright belongs elsewhere,” he said with a smile.
Hector clapped his hands. “It’s a big place,” he said, “so we’ll break into groups.” He set himself, Paul, Baxter, and Kero in one group to tour the exhibitions in the Pantheon. The others, he said, could explore the side galleries in the colonnades.
Yubi averted her face, but he could afford that.
The four men raced to the Pantheon, driven by Hector’s outspoken zeal for the old monument. Once they reached the white stone steps, Hector came up with a fresh tactic to isolate his guide. Unlike the original Pantheon in Rome, this one was multi-storied. Hector had anticipated this by measuring it up from afar. It looked—it had to be—bigger. The columned portico alone rose over two hundred feet and, behind it, the rotunda to almost twice that height. The bold architects of this island had copied but not wholly succumbed to the Classics.
“We’ll split again,” Hector said. “There’s too much to cover. You guys take pictures of everything ’cause we need to put that up on the Institute’s website. Any questions?”
“I don’t care.” Kero shrugged.
Baxter extracted his Samsung Galaxy from his back pocket and flashed Hector a smile. “Anything you say, boss.”
Hector wasted no more time. He skipped the exhibitions and took his guide up the staircase to the fourth floor. The staircase ceased and a sign greeted them:
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WELCOME TO THE TIME MACHINE
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“Something is up,” Hector began. “I must—”
Paul muted him with an erect forefinger, his eyes rolling twice to indicate the ceiling cameras. He quickly made for a bald, elderly Chinese man standing behind a table carrying audio appliances set in numerical order. Paul picked a couple of headphones and returned to Hector. “Follow me,” he said.
Hector followed him through a pair of heavy bronze-clad doors and found himself under the Pantheon’s trademark: the perforated dome.
During his stint in Europe, Hector had visited the real Pantheon with his then-girlfriend, Maureen, and he recalled every word his Italian guide had told them at the time. The perforated dome was a wonder in itself, a solid proof that our ancestors were not behind us in brainpower. One of the major structural problems with building a dome, Hector recollected, was preventing it from falling under its own weight. So the Romans came up with a little trick: They gouged the dome. Besides the thirty-foot hole known as the “oculus,” the dome boasted five levels of indentations called “coffers.” These helped strip the dome of all unnecessary weight, making it lighter, helping it stand tall against time.
The museum’s Time Machine was nothing like the circular chamber of Rome’s Pantheon, however. It was circular all right, but the vaulted cornices, the holy shrines, the columns, even the veneered walls were absent here. A silver shaft of light descended from the oculus onto a clock engraved on the stone floor. The light hit the “X” mark, and visitors’ shadows shuffled around this sundial.
Tourists are too quick to be tingled by awe, and Hector was not an exception. And the moment he shrugged off his awe, he found that he’d lost his guide.
Then a metallic creak made him wince. A display started up. The smooth, cylindrical wall came alive with all varieties of color. The Time Machine had taken off.
A female British voice crooned into his ears:
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“Pulau: A Day in the Life is a geopolitical utopia in praise of the Pulaui miracle. It is a gift from the British people to the Pulaui people, a token of our enduring friendship. Copyright two thousand eight...”
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Images burst on the wall, circling around in tiles. There were no benches so everybody’s heads had to endure the dazzling lights. Paul was at the opposite end, Hector spotted him: filmed over by reeling frames of schoolchildren. He gestured to Hector to stay put. Patience.
Landscapes of barren rocks. Mountains lush with verdure. Huts. Skyscrapers. Barefoot children at the port. Snazzy businessmen. And throughout, a hypnotizing mantra interlaced with a Wagneresque soundtrack:
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Trrn trrn trrn ta, Pulau. Trrn ta, Pulau. Trrn ta, trrn ta, Pulau.
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So the mantra went, repetitive, hypnotic.
Date stamps or captions helped the time-travelers connect the dots, accompany Mermaid City from its cradle to the vigor of its current youth. And the pictures were often savage. Japanese soldiers shooting poor Pulauis in front of their own homes. Potbellied starved babies. Mutilated fishermen. Et cetera.
The Brits highlighted the kinks in the road, the bad stuff. Not much emphasis was put on the glamorous Sumatran past, for example. Even the island’s creation myth, which Yubi had related to him on the airplane, was not here.
* * *
“Asia is a funny place,” his wife had said in the air. “Everything starts and ends with a woman. I kinda like that. At least we have an appreciation for the feminine. So there is this sea goddess, Matsu, who is a mermaid. She has a fight with her husband, so she leaves him and goes up to the surface to stay alone for a while. She sprays some dust to make the water solid to stay and that’s the earth, how it becomes. But guess what? Her husband sends his ugly pet dragon after her, trying to get her back. And she isn’t going back now, no way. So what’s she do? She takes her knife and stabs it in the dragon’s back. The beast tosses and screams, but he wont’ die. So... Where was I? Oh, yeah, so she stabs the beast. But... Uh-unh. Just listen. Do you wanna hear the story or not?
“So a few days later, her husband comes up and he’s like crying and saying he’s changed and all that. She believes him, silly woman, and they have a very romantic night... Huh? What did you say? Yeah. Sorry. So they make love and have lots of kids. And these are the humans who fill the planet and multiply. And the mother-goddess goes back down with her husband, thinking he’s really changed.
“But that’s not how it ends. Did I really say that? Strange. Sometimes I get too far ahead of myself. Anyway, things go on as usual with her husband. He’s not taking care of her, and she’s not happy. And after a few centuries, a hottie Sumatran king called Sang Nila Utama crashes his ship into the sleepy dragon. You got it. Of course, you’re right. You’re always right. No, I’m not being sarcastic. Anyway, I’m kinda sleepy now...
“Oh, the dragon. His name is really funny. Gong-Bong or Gong-Gong or something. I’ll check the Lonely Planet. The knife is sticking out of his back, and he rages and tears the king’s crew to pieces. And he’s about to finish off with the king himself, this Nila Utama guy, ’cept then the mermaid comes up angry from the sea. And she grabs her knife from the dragon’s back and she pushes it deep and hard into his heart. And she kills the beast for ever.
“Peace now, right? No dragon, the earth is happy. But not really. Things don’t end up good for her at all. The mermaid-goddess, this miserable wife, she kinda... takes a liking to the hot king. He’s been super nice to her, and she’s been having a difficult time with her husband. Her husband won’t spend time with her or take her places or anything. And she’s so lonely...
“So after many years, her husband finally remembers her existence. He comes up, and he sees them together. So he loses his head. He takes out his sword, and he stabs his own wife and throws her body into the sea. So cruel. And her lover, he runs away. That’s what they always do, they run away.
“And this is how Pulau is born, from the body of the mermaid-goddess. She was so full of life, this island, but now she’s just a piece of rock. So empty. So dead. So lonely in the cold China Sea...”
* * *
Between one bleak picture and the next was a balmy snapshot. Mount Victoria, for example, first bald and creepy then exploding with verdure. THE FORBIDDEN HILL, read the caption in all caps. It was something to do with having been a sacred burial site for the ancient Malays. Not anymore, not in this Chinese Las Vegas, this secular Olympus. (Besides, cremation was a faster way to heaven.)
The Japanese occupation, interestingly, got the lion’s share of the show. Why this was in a British documentary was a question political scientists would spar over. Postcolonial guilt? Globalist apologia? Stressing the obvious so it lost its poignancy?
Everyone knew how hideous this episode of Pulau’s history was. In late 1942, Imperial Japan had attacked one peripheral British colony called Pulau. Although local Loyalists had raised the Union Jack and refused to bow to the emperor, the British did not respond to Pulau’s repeated calls for help. And by 1945, Pulau’s population had shrunken to a third of its prewar size.
This was something the Malays would never forget, for it’d cost them what counted for everything in Asia: their demographic majority.
Thus Hector’s sly theory for the film: The R-rated Japanese content was but a wink from one colonist to another. We made you into a demographic majority of this geopolitical utopia, the Brits were saying to the Chinese.
Suddenly the music stopped in his ears. Hector started. He jerked his head. None of the other time-travelers looked troubled. Wide-hulled boats and luxury yachts, hot girls in bikinis, Victorian brick mansions fading into wiggly skyscrapers, winding overpasses. They watched with uninterrupted absorption.
“I’m here,” said a new voice in his head.
Saint Paul the Invisible. Hector couldn’t see him anywhere.
“Stop searching for me,” Saint Paul said. “You’ll just attract attention. How can I help you?”
“Paul, I need to see someone.”
“Who?”
“Your boss, Tommy Lee. I must see him in private. ASAP.”
“I don’t think I can do that, Mr Kane. Ambassador Lee is fully booked.”
“Tell him it’s about my wife, then.”
Silence.
Steamers edged along the coast, followed by a bird’s eye view of one of the city’s large parks. THE JUNGLE FLAME, the caption read. Red-orange bushes made up a massive Twitter logo.
“I can only arrange a meeting with our middle-middle man,” said Saint Paul, the Invisible. “You’re asking for too much. I don’t understand. This is not standard policy.”
“Screw the policy,” Hector said. “I’ll take my chances, man.”
A picture of the Royal Botanic Gardens’ SUPERTREE GROVE flashed on the wall. Giant escalators of genetically engineered oaks stood in a circle, brilliant in all sorts of colors against a somber sky. Up between the supertrees stretched a skyway of fortified glass: Passers were hilariously terrified.
“May I ask what the problem is?” Paul said. “I might be able to help you.”
“By doing what? Praying for me? Hook me up with someone dirty, Paul. You’re too clean for my taste. And for the love of your God get me outta here!”
“A category to file your request under, sir?”
“Emergency!” Hector nearly bellowed, sickened to his stomach by the sappy pictures of Pulau’s Royal Flying Club, equally stocked with bi-planes and street-children.
“The show is almost over,” Paul said. “Please be patient.”
“Now! Now, Paul!” Hector stormed about in the room, bumping into shoulders and jaws. “Get me outta here, now!”
Hey, mister!
Aw!
What’s wrong with you!
“You’re panicking.” Paul’s voice rolled over a picture of Deng Xiaoping’s hand shaking Fei Guo’s at the airport. “Sir... Sir...?”
* * *
Hector opened his eyes to the network of steel trusses keeping the dome from coming down on the thousands milling about.
He was lying on his back. His legs were flexed. Something hard was pressed against the back of his head.
And then someone gently slapped his cheeks. “You all right?” A tanned Chinese face. Bald. Gray tufts on the sides. Wrinkles. Must be over eighty.
The Time Machine operator. Hector recognized him after a few blinks.
Hector slowly sat up then sniffled and looked around him. He was in some kind of busy balcony. The stone balustrade’s lower ridge was his hard pillow. Hector could see the chessboard court below. He turned to his rescuer and thanked him.
“You have medication?” the operator said.
Hector shook his head.
A new voice said something in patois. “Ah-chek”—which Hector knew meant “Uncle”—followed by a string of guttural compliments. Paul, then, replaced the operator, knelt at Hector’s right side. “We’ll get you back to the residence.”
“No, I’m okay.”
“I’m not a physician but this guy is.” Paul referred to the elderly operator. “He’s a retired cardiologist volunteering here. He thinks you had a breakdown.”
“Vasovagal attack,” corrected the retired doctor.
Using the balustrade, Hector rose to his feet. He avoided looking down at the low ground. It wasn’t so bad: His legs were solid. He pawed around his chest and neck but didn’t feel his jacket. He asked for it, and a moment of shuffling feet went by. Then a young boy wearing a baseball hat came and handed him his jacket.
In a gush of tears, Hector kissed the kid’s hand.