Tash Aw - Map of the Invisible World

“What took you so long?” Din said when Adam returned. “Hurry up, I want to take you somewhere.”

“Back to Margaret’s house?”

“No, Margaret has gone out. She told me to look after you for a few days.”

“But I need some clean clothes,” Adam protested. “Why can’t we just go back and wait there for her? I want to go home.”

Din approached him and sniffed theatrically. “You smell okay,” he said. “And did you say home? Margaret’s house is not your home. Perdo is not your home, not as long as you share it with that white man. This is your home”—he waved his arms in the air, drawing a large semicircle above his head—“the revolutionary Republic of Indonesia. And you are going to be one of its new heroes, a true revolutionary, like me.”

“You?” Adam said. “Me?” His ribs began to hurt again — a nasty twinge that ran down the side of his body every time he breathed. He felt tired, and he did not wish to be a revolutionary. All he wanted was to go home, wherever that was.

“Yes,” Din replied, lowering his voice as if about to divulge a secret. His face, which had been set firmly in a scowl, softened into a smile. He put his arm around Adam’s shoulders and guided him back to the house. “I will look after you, don’t worry. I know you’re confused, but trust me: Everything will turn out okay. I know it’s difficult, but you must try and believe in me.”

Adam wished the pain in his rib cage would go away. It made him feel weak and slightly teary, and his head was beginning to spin. He thought he heard the crackle of static, a fuzzy hum punctuated by low voices, a snatch of a soaring coloratura, the news, hail, hail, we progress, pride in our nation. He began to feel nauseous, his knees suddenly weak. The sounds hovered at the edge of his consciousness. He did not know what was happening to him. He leaned against Din’s wiry, surprisingly solid frame as they made their way back to the house.

“Hey, hey,” Din said, “you’re looking pale. You need to sit down for a minute. It’s very hot today. You’re probably starving too. Let’s go to Glodok and get some Chinese food — how about that, huh?”

Adam nodded weakly. The hum of the radio came back again, calmer and clearer now. This time Adam knew it came from his life with Karl. He remembered the songs on the radio, patriotic ones sung by children’s choirs: “The earth upon which my blood is spilt, that is where I stand.” He thought of the music playing in the sitting room and Karl’s out-of-tune humming. Independence Day: He recalled the small feast they would have each year in the village, red and white flags hanging from the eaves of houses; and later, a present from Karl.

Yesterday was his birthday, Adam remembered, and he began to feel an emptiness in his chest. He was suffering, and it was because of someone he loved. Maybe if he hated Karl he would feel less bad. He considered telling Din about his birthday, but then, without knowing exactly why, decided not to.

“And then, when you’re feeling better,” Din continued, his voice still low, almost gentle, “I am going to show you how to be a true revolutionary.”

T o be honest, I’m not even surprised. This is a perfect illustration of everything that is wrong with you — a classic Mick Matsoukis mess of the highest order.” Margaret half-raised her hands in exasperation and then let them fall heavily on the arms of the rattan chair. It was shaped like a bowl, half a hollowed-out coconut shell set at an angle so that she was neither sitting nor reclining, her toes barely touching the floor. She tried not to think of Adam, for each time she did so she began to panic in a way that was completely foreign to her. She tried instead to remain perfectly still as she spoke, making no attempt to raise her voice or her body for emphasis; it was not worth the effort. She sounded tired, she thought, and she knew she looked dirty, inelegantly slumped in that awkward chair in Mick’s office. She wanted to tell Mick about the riot, about how she and Bill had finally man aged to escape just by staying still. She would have told him what her father had told her when he was teaching her to swim: Just let the waves wash over you, and you’ll be fine. It had been like that in the riot. They had remained perfectly motionless and let the sea of people flow over them, and when the tide receded they were still there, like two pieces of debris stranded on the shore. Sure, Bill was so badly traumatized that he could only speak in monosyllables, but she knew he would recover his composure soon enough and be the same old appalling show-off. She wanted to say to Mick, You know what? We survived, and it really wasn’t that bad at all. We can do this; we can find Karl and reunite him with Adam; we can face life and win.

But then she had arrived at Mick’s and discovered this mess, and all the things she had wanted to say had rapidly dissipated into nothingness.

“It’s not my fault,” Mick said, stubbing out a cigarette that was only half-smoked and reaching into his shirt pocket for another. “You said you were going to ask Din to look after Adam.”

“But I didn’t, did I? I thought about it and it seemed like a bad idea — What if Bill’s right, I thought, what if Din really is a criminal of some sort? I didn’t want to risk it. If I had rung him, don’t you think I would have told you?”

“I came by to look for you — out of my own initiative, I might add — and to check on Adam. How was I to know that he’d been kidnapped by your colleague?”

Margaret shook her head weakly. “This is precisely why you’re in a back-street office in Jakarta, filing the odd report for second-rate newspapers instead of gracing the cover of Time magazine. No instinct. Life isn’t an academic paper, Mick. It isn’t theory. It’s real. You have to know things.” Next to her there was a bookshelf fashioned from planks of wood and blocks of concrete. She looked at the spines on the row level with her head: Desire and Tragedy: French Painting in the Eighteenth Century; Romantic Failure: Jacques-Louis David and the Classical Spirit; Verlaine et Rimbaud: ou, La Fausse Evasion; Le Poète Qui s’Enfuit; La Vie Passion-née d’Arthur Rimbaud; The Peloponnesian War , Vol II.

“But how? How could I know Din wasn’t telling the truth? He said, ‘Margaret told me to look after the boy,’ and I believed him. It’s called trust, Margaret. It’s called not being cynical. It’s called humanity. I haven’t lost that. I don’t want to lose it. Unlike,” he paused and drank a mouthful of beer, sluicing it around in his mouth as if cleaning his teeth, his cheeks puffing out.

“Unlike me. That’s right. Sad, cynical, dried-up Margaret. Look at her, all bitter and washed up. But at least I would have known that there was something fishy about Din’s behavior. He comes out of my house with a bag of Adam’s things and you don’t think anything’s amiss? My cynicism, as you call it, would have saved a poor boy from being abducted.” This time she could not stop herself from imagining Adam being dragged around the city by Din. She saw him in some terrible slum, hungry and lonely and confused — and, worst of all, angry with her for having failed him. He had trusted her and she had promised to help, but in the end she had let him down.

“But do you or Bill Schneider actually know Din is up to no good? This knowledge or instinct or whatever you keep talking about — what’s it based on? You’re being too suspicious. After all, you work with the guy and you’ve never had any reason to believe he’s a criminal.”

Margaret shrugged. The glow of the table lamp made Mick’s face look broad and puffy, the deep lines in his skin accentuated by the shadows, his four-day-old beard fuzzy and indistinct. “It’s based on intuition, Mick, on understanding how people behave. You can’t just open some arcane textbook and find the answer. If you live in the real world, chances are you’ll have this instinct. If, on the other hand, your life is rooted in the past, you almost certainly won’t.”