Tash Aw - Map of the Invisible World

And suddenly he was on the ground, his head falling onto the dry earth with a dull thud. He pulled his chin into his chest but even as he did so he felt a sharp blow on the back of his skull — a heel crashing into his head. And another one, this time against his ear, filling his head with a hollow ringing that blanked out everything else. He raised both arms to cover his head: Din had let go. He drew his knees up to his face and curled into a ball, and it was better. He felt the heavy tread of feet on his hips and thighs and calves, and the rough jerk of people tripping over him. An immense pressure pushed outward from within his skull, as if his head was about to split open. The ringing in his ears had turned into a dull rushing noise; he no longer knew where he was.

Come on. Run . It was Din, lifting Adam by his arm, pulling roughly, his fingernails digging into the soft flesh of Adam’s armpit. Now it was he who stepped on prostrate bodies, tripping occasionally and landing heavily, elbows first, on someone’s back. A space appeared around him, and he could see blood on faces and bruises on bare chests and open mouths with split lips. He saw the expressions on these bloody faces: not fear or anger, but a mixture of exhilaration and emptiness, as if the people who inhabited these bodies had fled long ago. The terrible noise he had heard earlier still hung heavily in the air, but it was fractured now, broken by distinct screams of individual men and women, which Adam could hear even through the blank ringing in his ear. There was another noise too, something he thought he had heard before, a series of short, sharp cracks, a pop-pop-pop that came in rapid bursts. Gunfire, he thought to himself, and wondered how he knew that. Later Din would tell him that it was the sound of shots being fired into the air in celebration of the victory of the revolution, to mark this Year of Living Dangerously, but Adam was not so sure.

Adam concentrated on running. He focused only on following Din, who turned to look at him every so often with a wild-eyed exhilaration. It was too much for him to think of anything else; he ran as fast as he could, trying to keep up with Din on the streets of this vast city, his chest heaving with the effort. He could breathe again, he thought; he could breathe.

M argaret thought: This time I am finished. Done for. A goner. She could feel the car shaking violently, bouncing on its axle even though it was stationary: There were people running over the car, leaping onto the back of it, up over the roof and down onto the hood before carrying on down the road. The noise was horrible. It was as if the car had been caught in a rock slide and an avalanche of boulders was crashing against it and threatening to carry it away. Margaret looked up and saw the soles of bare feet and cheap rubber sneakers streaming down in front of the windshield in a rain of dull colors that obscured the light and turned the afternoon into twilight. I’m a goner . It was funny how she remembered that one line from a novel she had read a long time ago. It was about a girl who had fallen terribly in love with a twenty-year-old Spanish boy, a matador, even (or was she just imagining that?) — and she was so crazy with love that she knew her entire existence would be surrendered to the beautiful boy. Margaret remembered nothing of the rest of the story. She retained only a sense of ridicule and mild contempt at the thought that someone could fall so helplessly in love with a person she didn’t know and allow herself to become limp and silly like that. Falling in love is a matter of choice: If you fall in love like that it must mean that you want to; it means you want to lose your mind and self-control. You want to lose your sense of independent existence, yourself . The girl in the novel had been like that. She had known that she was losing her self-respect; she was a trembling wreck. I’m a goner, she had said. It was as if she was beyond salvation; and all due to events beyond her control. It had so irritated Margaret that she had rushed to the end of the book without paying much attention to it. So it was funny that she should remember it now, caught in this riot. Now it was she who was a “goner,” but unlike the girl in the novel she was really a goner, and it was due to events that really were beyond her control. And unlike the girl, she would die without knowing how it felt to be so in love that you could lose all sense of who you were.

Bill did not say anything. He sat with his hands on the steering wheel, staring straight ahead at the river of bodies flowing past and over them. Margaret could see patches of sweat seeping through his shirt, like the markings of deep water on maps of the ocean; he looked very calm, with only the slightest hint of a frown on his brow, as if they were merely caught in a traffic jam. The engine of the Buick was still running, and every so often it would rev up fiercely, a rasping growl that rose above the stampede of feet around them. Bill was doing it, of course, thought Margaret; he was scared too. It was very hot in the car. The windows were shut tightly and the doors were locked. Amid the torrent of bodies a face would occasionally appear: Someone would stop and press his nose to the window next to Margaret or throw himself across the windshield with a loud thud, his palms smacking against the glass as he hooted and screamed and jeered, his eyes staring and bloodshot, like some phantom from her sleep; and then he would disappear into the rushing stream once more, vanishing just like a nightmare. A young man stopped on Margaret’s side of the car. She knew that he was no more than twenty or twenty-two, even though his face was wizened and scarred, his complexion mottled. She could not read the expression on his face — not aggression, not hatred, not lust, not anything in particular, just a blankness that could have been all those things, or none of them. It was an emptiness that frightened Margaret, for there was nothing in his face she could relate to. There were thin veins crisscrossing his yellowed eyes, and his teeth were dark little stumps. He opened his mouth and shouted a word that sounded like BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA that seemed to go on for a whole minute, maybe more, and even through the window Margaret could feel the coarseness of his voice, which was not just a sound but a physical thing that she felt brushing the hairs on the back of her neck.

“Don’t look,” Bill said, “don’t look at him. Do not turn your head. Keep your eyes straight ahead.”

She looked at the hailstorm of feet on the windshield, but she could not help herself, and she turned once more to look at the face by her side, at the red and white bandana and the furry pink tongue. The boy pulled open his shirt to reveal something on his chest. With a knife, he had cut an uneven X across his bony breastbone; it had not fully scabbed over and she could see patches of bright moist blood where the ends of the X reached for his collarbone. He brandished a machete, drawing it across his chest in a gesture that Margaret did not understand, and she thought — again— I’m a goner . But then, after another BAAAA (shorter, this time), he was carried off by the surging tide of bodies. Without knowing why, Margaret suddenly thought of Adam, a boy no younger than the ones rampaging through the streets in front of her. She thought of him asleep in her house, peaceful and innocent, and she was glad he could not see the things that were happening in this city on this day.

Bill reached over to the glove compartment and drew out a revolver. It was just like a film, thought Margaret, a very stupid film in which she had the misfortune to have a minor role. She never knew that people actually kept guns in glove compartments. “What are you doing?” she said. “Is that legal?”