Tash Aw - Map of the Invisible World

No. Anyway I have to watch my figure.

I’m sorry, Mummy. I won’t ask you about all that stuff again. Promise.

Across the room the Chinese couple who had been in the elevator were reaching out to each other, fingertips brushing against fingertips, barely touching, just seeking reassurance that the other person was there, wanting to know that they could grab hold of each other and never let go if the restaurant started to spin out of control. Johan wished that the room would revolve faster and faster. He wanted to see what the couple would do, because he knew that they would not remain together.

I’m just going to the ladies’ room to freshen up, then we should go, darling. I’m tired all of a sudden, I don’t know why. I feel so hot, oh, I think it’s age. My son is nearly a man now, what do I expect? I must be an old woman! Give me five minutes, then home.

Alone at the table Johan looked at the Chinese girl. She was wearing a slim-fitting flowery blouse with a mandarin collar and very short sleeves that showed off her arm, her still-extended arm that lay flat on the table from elbow to fingertips. They were getting ready to leave, heading back out into the night, and Johan felt calm because he knew that soon he too would be driving through the city.

The elevator doors opened and a man and a woman stepped out. Their faces were obscured by a bouquet of orchids on the bar, but Johan could see that their arms were linked, elbow locked comfortably into elbow, and he could hear the waiters’ voices, servile and nervous and twittering, and he could discern the color and tone of a young woman’s taut calf, the slenderness of her hips contrasting with the stoutness of her middle-aged partner as they were shown to a table at the far end of the restaurant, hidden in a niche perfectly made for secret lovers.

Johan got up and went to the shiny marble desk at the front of the restaurant. Please take my bill to my father, he said. He’s over at that table there. Yes, Dato’ Zainuddin. Just tell him it’s from his son. Johan, yes. He’ll settle the bill for me.

In this new, rich city, Johan thought, people’s lives were like currents out in the open sea, pulling them to places they could not resist. It was no use swimming, you just had to surrender to the waves and see where they took you. A long time ago, when he was small, he’d imagined himself borne away by the sea. He wanted to be dragged away by the waves, which would leave no trace of him. If he had done so, his brother would be in this expensive restaurant, the perfect happy son for Mummy and Daddy. But Johan had not dared, and so he was still here.

Come on, Mummy, let’s go. I’ve taken care of everything. Please don’t say that, it’s nothing, really, it’s nothing. You give me so much pocket money anyway. Take my arm. Careful, the doors are closing. Look at the time. It’s late. Don’t worry, I’ll drive carefully.

W hen the telephone rang, Margaret knew it would be Bill Schneider. He said, “I’ve got news.”

She listened for a few minutes without speaking. Bill was always quite precise about what he knew, and what he wanted. For a very brief moment she remembered all the things he had said to her when she first met him, many years ago. He had been very direct, and she very gullible. It was a time she did not care to remember, but she could not stop remembering. She said “yes” and “mm” several times, then she hung up. All in all, it was not a very long conversation.

“You were trying to keep your voice down,” Mick said. He had not moved from his reclining position; his eyes were still closed. His body was too wide for the modest Asian sofa and he had to lean slightly on his side, pushed up against the cushions in what looked like an extremely uncomfortable position. “You sounded very shifty indeed.”

“Not at all,” Margaret said, sitting down. “I was just trying not to wake anyone up.” She realized that she, too, had fallen into a too-deep sleep in the armchair, waking up with the crick in her neck that brought with it nagging aches and pains. She thought of some of the places she had slept: on the bare boards of a Dayak longhouse, listening to the snuffling of pigs under the house; on the mud floor of a Sepik dwelling; on the back of a truck traveling toward Bromo, propped up against sacks of rice, surrounded by cages of defecating chickens. She had managed to sleep quite happily then, and she had never woken up with a bad back or a stiff neck or a cramped arm as she did so often these days. She could not remember ever waking up from a night in a jungle lean-to feeling out of sorts, plagued by a mild sense of dread, wondering how she would fill the day ahead of her. The days seemed to take care of themselves back then; the hours went by and there was never enough time to do all she wanted. Now there was only time, and time created space — and nothing could occupy the space that it created.

“Do you ever wake up afraid of what the day has in store for you, Mick?” she asked.

“Usually I have a bad hangover and all I want to do is find an aspirin. Or another drink. So, no, I’m not afraid, just desperate to clear my head. But don’t try and change the subject. What did Schneider say?”

“Shh.” Margaret lifted a finger to her lips. “You’ll wake Adam.” Night was turning quickly into dawn but in those twilight moments there was still a heavy calm, troubled only by the bored halfhearted yap of a dog in the distance. “Bill thinks Karl is being repatriated. It seems he got picked up in an army raid on Communists. They weren’t expecting to find a Dutch guy, he just got trawled up in the net — you know, like some prehistoric fish that everyone thought was extinct but gets hauled up with a big catch of sardines. Sheer accident that they got ahold of him — he was so far off the radar that he would have got away, but it seems nowhere is out of reach these days, Mick. The army has its tentacles everywhere.”

More dogs were barking now, calling idly to one another across the rubbish heaps that littered the streets. The air smelled fresh and moist, but in a few hours it would be hot and dusty again, and the memory of last night’s rain would evaporate into the ocher sky. “It seems that Karl is still here, in Indonesia. At first they kept him with the farmer-fishermen Communists from the islands. You know what they’re like, they’re rednecks. They panic at the sight of a white guy — either they try and marry their daughter off to him or they lock him up. Then he got moved to Surabaya, then the trail begins to get fuzzy. There have been one or two repatriation flights from East Java, but Bill can’t find any trace of him on those lists. He thinks Karl is here in Jakarta, waiting to be flown back to Holland. Bill’s contacts are trying to find out more, but it’s not easy. U.S. dollars can’t buy everything nowadays, and besides, no one’s really interested. There are bigger things on the horizon. Even Bill says so. He was honest about our chances of finding Karl. There’s big trouble not far away, he says. You were right, Mick. Something terrible is about to happen.”

“It’s the Communists, isn’t it? They’re falling out of favor and Sukarno doesn’t know if he should get in bed with them or chop their balls off.”

“That’s what Bill says. The Soviets and the Chinese are pumping money into Indonesia and no one knows where it’s going, or what they’re doing. The army’s getting very nervous about the whole thing — they don’t know what’s going to happen.”

“No one knows anything anymore.”

Margaret watched Mick reach for his long-empty bottle of beer and scratch at the last remnants of the label with his fingernail. “I just cannot accept that there is a white guy wandering around Java and we can’t find him,” she said. “No, I will not accept it.”