Though I Get Home Page 9

  He smoothed crisp imported paper out on his thighs, half listening to bamboos in the evening breeze making the sounds of many polite but insistent guests knocking to be let in.

  When he was done with his letter, he sealed it along with some choice leper notes, carefully wrapping them all up into a parcel addressed to a distinguished laboratory in London. And then he sat back and looked at the tropical night sky.

  A slim envelope was delivered after many weeks of waiting. It contained an official report accompanied by a letter expressing keen academic interest and excitement. It seemed the doctor had caused a mild ripple among the community of his peers back home. The esteemed pillars of that community were rather impressed by Dr. Berry’s unhesitating willingness to risk his own person for the advancement of science. Research using the finest instruments available in London had borne out his daring hypothesis: the quadrilingual paper bills and tin coins were conclusively proven to contain no leprosy bacteria. In other words, their particular materials were not and could not be disease carriers. It was declared impossible to contract leprosy through interactions such as commercial transactions.

  What a discovery! Dr. Berry, alone in a strange world, felt a surge of grandiosity. For the first time in his life he experienced history as a force, and he wished ardently to meld himself to it. But there was no colleague near at hand to clasp, no wife to write to. The doctor looked around him. From his window he could see overgrown trees, an expanse of them, almost ringing his cottage, all rough bark and knotty skin.

  That very night, the stars sleepily blinked through translucent fogs of humidity. There was barely any draft, but birds rustled leaves on behalf of breezes when it suited their avian nature. Far below, Dr. Berry strode from one end of the colony’s compound to the other, rousing and coaxing.

  Under his effort a crowd slowly grew, herded toward a patch of dirt and thin grass at the heart of the leprosarium. The doctor stood erect and gestured now and then with his shadow, which grew imposing, magnified by moonlight against dirt ground. With each swooping swathe of black, a leper shuffled toward the doctor, face full of defeat.

  “All,” the doctor said. His arm’s double swung again, as if embarking on a long journey to catch up with his body.

  “Semua,” he repeated.

  One by one, the lepers crossed in front of the doctor, surrendering what cash they had to the ground by the doctor’s feet. Now and then Dr. Berry scuffed the currency against dirt to bring it closer, bit by bit molding a hill of money. The first dozen or so coins given up by leprous hands plunked dully against stones and pebbles, but as the hill grew the coins stopped protesting as they dropped, muffled by paper notes that absorbed and carried the sound deep into the packed earth.

  “Semua?” the doctor asked. There was some murmuring, a movement in the shadowy crowd. Dr. Berry thought to look for his favorite patient then. He scanned faces, trying to catch as many as he could. Lesions, skin peels, discoloration, dark gaps, faces full of unmarked open graves.

  He could not see the man. Dr. Berry said to himself that he would remember to make an exception and give the poor soul some candy for free tomorrow to mark the occasion.

  Turning, the doctor sprinkled a fine powder over the hill of money. As the last grains dribbled away into the seams among notes and coins, he lifted his head to look at the moon. Sweat was already rolling down the side of his face. He knew that by the end of the night he would be soaked.

  From the inside of his coat he drew a matchbox. He struck and it caught. With a flourish, resisting the urge to check the faces around him for reaction, he smiled grimly and tossed the burning stick onto the hill of leper money. Without fanfare it caught fire and glowed, quickly doubling and tripling its own size, a monster of light and shadows.

  The deed done, the doctor surveyed his audience once more. His favorite patient’s head loomed from behind another leper’s hunched shoulder. The disfigured face, with its missing bits that gave it an appearance of permanent grimace, now looked stretched with a gentle smile, contours and gaps softened by fire.

  In town that night, healthy people came out of their houses and made signs for each other to look at the bright orb blinking beyond the screen of bamboos, a secret signal they could not understand. They wondered if they should.

  KAMUNTING II

  Over two weeks elapsed before Isa was told to expect her first visitor. Paperwork, the prison guard had explained regarding the delay.

  When the day of visit came, she did her best to tidy up with the limited tools available. They had yielded to her repeated requests for a mirror, which had been accompanied by sworn avowals not to kill herself. When the hardwon victory was finally delivered, she held in her hands a child’s mirror made of Plexiglas or similar, a toy with a skinny pink plastic handle.

  In this mirror she discovered cheekbones.

  Impossible to grant her makeup, Encik Yas’s emissaries had said. She might try to kill herself by eating lipstick or eye shadow; women products all contained toxic chemicals, they solemnly informed her.

  What about organic brands? she asked, almost—almost for the fun of it. She called out after their backs: “Did you know there are face creams made from fetus placenta?”

  At least she had been exempt from fretting about what to wear. The clothes available to her were all soft and shapeless, including the bras—no lining. No belt. On the inside of the shirts and pants, where a manufacturer’s tags usually went, were words rubber-stamped right onto the fabric: PROPERTY OF KAMUNTING DETENTION CENTRE. She had three changes of clothes, identical.

  She slowly swept the handheld mirror up and down her body, as if she were using a metal detector on herself. She wanted to know what she must look like to others these days. That was how she found four loose threads, two paint chips, and an unidentified substance that was slightly gooey ensnared in the insufficiently washed nooks and folds of her flesh.

  The guards came and escorted her out of her prison block. They walked past the ugly, squat office building. Even here, where the director and his staff worked and ate, the ground was arid.

  The entrance was marked with a sign saying “Visitors’ Block.” She made a point of glancing at the clock hanging crooked in the foyer. It was a full thirty-one minutes before the appointed visiting time. That was good. She wanted to be composed. Then again, her hair, slicked back with tap water from the bathroom, would not stay flat in place for too much longer.

  They sat her down in an empty chamber divided into halves by wire mesh screens. Of course, more fencing. The halves were uneven. The side she was ushered into was smaller. There were no windows anywhere, but on the other side was a door and she stared at it, waiting, trying to empty her mind.

  When she was eleven, her parents had sent her to the Buddhist equivalent of a summer camp. It was four days and three nights of prayers, mess halls, small group discussions, and sleeping on floors. Could it be—had it really been that long since she had last heard a person pray?

  Eyes closed, alone but for a guard standing right behind her, she tried hard to retrieve the passages of prayer spoonfed to them. Only two bits came: one word and a rhyming pair of phrases. Her eyes opened in dismay. She felt like a hunter who had found just a bloody paw, or a scrap of torn ear, lying limp in the traps by which she had set such store.

  The one bit of word was “sarira,” and it described bone fragments left over from cremation, the bits that wouldn’t burn away. She simply could not remember the connection between this macabre image and the holiness of the lesson she was taught.

  And the sole snippet of prayer she could recall went like this: Color is Emptiness, and Emptiness, Color. A woman with a gentle voice had decoded that phrase for the children. The word “Color” symbolized worldly possessions and concerns, as well as lust. Isa felt something shift, like a Jenga tower of memory giving way all at once when someone nudges a key piece that should have been left alone. But no more phrases or events materialized; what descended in an overpower
ing rush was a feeling that had visited her repeatedly back in her childhood. It was hard to describe, like yearning and scorn kneaded together, fingers throttling, furious mashing.

  The guard behind her made a noise. It sounded like he had scraped his shoe against the featureless gray floor. Then she heard it, too, sounds of an argument from the other side of the visitors’ door.

  She leaned forward in her chair and strained her ears, feeling her shoulders and back stiffen. She must look like a person fighting wind, tacking against invisible force. The harder she focused on the door across the airless room, the less she registered the wire separation in the foreground, her eyes blurring out the mesh.

  The medley of arguing voices separated into their components. She recognized the higher pitch as her mother, trying in her typical way of maintaining the upper hand by keeping up an unceasing torrent, as if by refusing to hear what her opponent had to say she would eventually exhaust the enemy into submission. The person she was bombarding was Encik Yas, the prison director, whose voice cut into hers now and then.

  There was this nature documentary Isa had seen once, alone in the dark. It was about the ocean, and there was a scene, played out over unnecessarily dramatic music, that depicted a few huge tunas torpedoing into whirling schools of tiny silver fish. The tuna seemed to be head-butting the twister made up of thousands of the little fish, which had looked playful until the documentary revealed the end of the carnage: a whole tribe of sardines swallowed whole, eaten with their kin, nothing left but scattered scales.

  She tried to rehearse how she would behave with her mother. More than anything, Isa wanted to portray a woman holding her head high under the tyranny of injustice, a poet warrior persevering in the face of dark forces. But it stabbed at her now, the idea that she could apply her free will and choose to react this way or that way, given any scenario. Color is Emptiness, and Emptiness, Color. She was in prison garb clutching her head and shifting uncomfortably on a metal folding chair. What was the point of trying to outsmart the future? Forever, always, there was only one outcome. The choice was between seeing that lone option as choosing, and not.

  The door yawned, then hesitated. She could see a loose fist around the outside knob. The volume of arguing voices dialed up sharply midsentence.

  “. . . doing this to us?” her mother wailed.

  “We will be including this in our affidavit to the court,” said a third, male voice.

  Encik Yas jutted his head in, jerked his chin a few times, then left, slamming the door behind him. Isa froze in terror, not knowing what the chin jerks meant. Then she realized that he must have been giving a signal to the guard behind her.

  “Mei!” her mother cried out before she reached the wire mesh screen. It was a nickname she’d used when Isa was a child, a generic label that meant nothing more than “little sister.” Isa had not heard anyone call her that for many years, and now she was sobbing. She felt ashamed and broken. She hadn’t cried like this in front of other people, not since the rattan-cane thrashing, that awful snap of the instrument. Had she lost even her sense of pride? Would it never end, this taking away of her bit by bit? The acceptance of loss itself a loss, the broken spirit’s brand of Zen.

  “The director would not let us all see you at once,” the stranger beside her mother said. “It’s the rules, he said. One person at a time, only. But we convinced him.”

  She stared at him, still crying.

  “My name is Surendran Subramaniam. I’m your lawyer.”

  “But I didn’t hire you,” she said stupidly.

  Her mother curled the fingers of one hand through the wire mesh, looking as though she were hooking on for support. Without thinking, Isa covered those fingertips she could touch with her own palm.

  Mr. Subramaniam leaned sideways and came back up with a folder of papers. His eyeballs were not white but dull yellow, made the more pronounced by swells of purplish folds creased under those eyes. His jowls were fleshy and loose, and yet he was a thin man when he stood up.

  When speaking at high speed he seemed experienced enough, briskly explaining that they didn’t have much time due to visiting limitations, which was why he chose not to go through the trouble of dismissing the eavesdropping guard this time—he delivered this with a glare at the guard, whose presence Isa had forgotten.

  The lawyer started discussing next steps and plans, both short- and long-term. These were the first strands of hope that had been extended to her, yet Isa’s eyes kept straying and locking onto her mother’s while he walked through actions and counter-actions, sounding for all the world like he was in control. She could see that her mother wanted an entirely different kind of conversation.

  “Luckily you don’t live far away,” she said, addressing her mother when the lawyer wrapped up.

  “Can’t you just say you’re sorry and ask for forgiveness?” her mother blurted out, her fingers’ grip tightening. The screen’s wire bit into Isa’s finger pads. She winced.

  “Can’t she just say sorry?” Isa’s mother turned now, appealing to the lawyer.

  Before Mr. Subramaniam could answer, Isa said, “No, I have to do this. I know I can encourage other people to fight this way. We cannot give in to evil, Ma! Let them do what they want to me. For every me, there are many other people waiting to stand up for what’s right! I can inspire them!”

  Her voice echoed in the closed room. Mr. Subramaniam nodded solemnly, while right next to him, Isa’s mother shook her head in spasmodic, violent jerks. It would have been an almost comical sight.

  After a long, painful silence, her mother started telling her about a tiger that had escaped from the zoo not far from Isa’s old house.

  “What happened to the tiger?” Isa asked.

  “They should have shot and killed it!” her mother suddenly burst out. Isa’s heart beat faster; she didn’t know why.

  “They chased it into an abandoned taman and cornered it there,” Mr. Subramaniam said.

  “Which one?”

  “The one with all the, uh, prostitutes at night.”

  “And then?”

  “And then they sent some soldiers in, but they were worried they would accidentally shoot each other because of their camouflage uniforms—you know, they also got jungle stripes like a tiger?”

  Isa nodded, mouth open. “Then what happened in the end? Did they catch it?”

  “Yeah. They didn’t have to do anything. The tiger got hungry and just walked out by itself.” He even shrugged.

  “Nothing to eat in the taman mah,” her mother said, sounding wise. “Just like how the communists eventually walked out of the jungles all by themselves, back when I was a little girl growing up. By the time they surrender they were all skinny skeletons. You can’t eat bullets, you know.”

  A MALAYSIAN MAN IN MAYOR BLOOMBERG’S SILICON ALLEY

  Howie Ho knelt in front of a stacked row of dryers. The floor was cold, but the air smelled of warmth. He tried to look busy clawing clothes out of the bottom dryer. From the corner of one eye, he tracked the movement of the only other person in the dormitory’s basement laundry room. The dude was rocking out to his iPod or whatever, stuffed deep into his sweater that had the college’s acronym in block letters across the front.

  After a few minutes, the dude shuffle-danced out of the laundry room. Howie Ho straightened up and glanced quickly around. The coast was clear. He peered curiously into the dryer above his. It was at eye level, and within it he could catch occasional, rotational glimpses of a lacy bra, playing a game with gravity, resisting it then giving in, over and over.

  He had no idea her boobs were so huge. She was always wearing loose-fitting tops. Plus, she was Asian, and everybody knew most Asian girls were flat.

  The next dryer over made a knocking sound. In it tumbled what looked like a giant, shaggy rug with glints of two glass eyes now and then. Howie Ho made it out to be a bear, but couldn’t tell if it was Smokey or Pedo or what. That shit looked heavy. Who washed their Halloween costum
es anyway? Were they planning on wearing the same one every year for the rest of their lives? Howie Ho scoffed.

  Halloween had been a whole week ago, and he had been a changed man since. He had tasted absinthe for the first time. Also for the first time he had seen a real live naked girl, up close. A white one.

  He had no idea how he’d gotten an invite for such a hip Halloween party. The theme was “subversion.” Howie Ho, a computer science major, had somehow assumed it was a geeky joke, and so he’d shown up with dead tree branches and fallen twigs taped willy-nilly to his body. Nobody got the reference.

  At the party, he took in the room. A gun-toting nun put down her (his?) weapon to pour a drink. In one corner were two people wearing army fatigues and ushankas emblazoned with hammers and sickles, making out.

  “Excuse me.” Someone pushed past him from behind, snapping one of his brittle tree parts.

  Ultimately it was a very good thing indeed that Howie Ho had chosen to stay despite his discomfort. He had barely grimaced his way through his first red Solo cup before there was a commotion near the apartment entrance. He looked up in time to see a coat leave a girl’s shoulders and free fall to the floor. She was naked, entirely naked. She had been walking outside in the cool autumnal air with nothing but a coat around her, and now that she was indoors, at this hip party, she revealed her subversive costume.

  The room drifted cautiously toward her as if she had stronger gravitational pull than anything else. Tentative offers to get her drinks were made. Stupid, nervous jokes flew, more than one involving an orgy. Howie Ho did not move. He stood rooted, sipped his drink, and watched. After a while the girl started dancing, a loose circle of people around her. Now it seemed her gravitational pull was really a deflecting force of some kind because even though the circle was clearly dancing with her and smiling at her, no one came within four feet of her in that crowded space.