Tash Aw - Map of the Invisible World

I wish you’d left me there, Johan wanted to say. I wish you had left me and taken my brother. He would have made a good son for you. He would have loved and respected you because he was full of love, and he needed to be loved. Johan had wanted to say this all his life, he had waited for the right moment to say it, but now that the moment had arrived, he could not find the breath to say it. He felt sick and he still needed a bathroom.

Okay, I have to go now. I have to go to dinner. Can’t waste any more time with this. Just drop me off, then you can take the car. At least you won’t have to steal it.

They walked the length of the veranda, past men dressed in nice batik shirts sitting down to their dinners of chicken and oxtail soup. There was still no breeze in the night but Johan felt less sick. In a moment he would be in the car, moving again.

You’re right, Daddy, my place is here. This is my home. He tried to believe what he had just said, but he could not.

In the heavy shadows of the lane beyond the parking lot there were more shadows. Someone whistled at them from the dark, a high-pitched catcall.

Finally talking sense, young man. Where else do you want to go? Better stay put and make your mummy happy.

There’s nowhere else for me to go.

That’s right. Just swallow some pride once in a while. You’ll enjoy RMC. It will be very good for you, you’ll see.

They got into the Mercedes. The streets were brightly lit and there were many cars, for the evening was warm and still and young.

T here were not many things that Margaret did not understand about life. She understood quite well, for example, that love was not a constant thing, that it changed over time, drifting away from you and perhaps returning again when you had all but forgotten, that the inconstancies of love did not afflict one gender more than the other; women could be every bit as fickle and unpredictable as men.

And yet some things eluded her. She had not really been able to grasp the concept of children — why people felt the need to bring new life into the world, for it seemed to her something not just illogical but counterintuitive: Why sacrifice your life to something that is almost certainly going to turn out to be imperfect, something you will never be able to control? Why on earth had her parents decided to have her when they knew they would never be able to be good at parenting? Even now, at the age of forty-two, she had not yet figured it out. Yes, she had had a unique path through childhood and adolescence. Yes, it had brought (on balance) more good than harm and had prepared her for the harshness of life. But if she was honest, all she’d ever wanted was a normal childhood in a nice town, in Massachusetts, maybe, where the people had comfortable homes from which they never moved — someplace where people grew up, fell in love with the boy next door, and then raised happy families.

“Do you ever long to have kids, Mick?” she asked as they drove away from the hospital.

He smiled. “Of course. I’d love to have kids. I often dream of having a great big, noisy Greek family — you know, huge dinners with music and people arguing and laughing. Not like the miserable Christmases we used to have, just me and my parents, no one saying a word. Only problem is getting married. Don’t like the idea of that.”

Margaret smiled. In her hands she held five sheets of thin, crinkled paper, smoothing them with her fingers in the hope that the creases would disappear. She looked at the first sheet, at the lines of cursive handwriting that scrolled across the page; it was the kind of handwriting that seemed to emerge from a lost, earlier world, one in which typewriters and cheap newsprint did not exist. The letters were slightly spidery, the writer’s hand shaky, unsure. Most of the lines had been crossed out, though not thoroughly enough to obscure the words that lay underneath. It was not as if the writer had wanted to hide what he had written, Margaret thought, but rather to rehearse what he wanted to say. She reread the lines that had been struck through:

A long time ago, I made myself a promise.

When you were six years old, I promised

Before I die

Ten years ago, when you were six When you were six I vowed promised

vowed

Many years ago I promised vowed that on your sixteenth birthday

I would tell reveal

Only two lines survived intact in this jungle of barbed-wire deletions:

To my dear Adam

and

I always wanted a son like you .

The other four sheets of paper were blank, clinging to the first sheet with what Margaret considered a sort of desperation, as if they too wanted to be filled with deletions.

When the nurse named Cantik had given her those scrunched pieces of paper, she had allowed herself to think that this tangible link with Karl meant that he was still alive, still waiting for her to find him in this city. You can never predict what life is going to serve up. Always expect surprises. She tried to recall the times in her life when simply repeating phrases like these could cheer her up, when she could trick herself into believing that nothing was ever beyond salvation and once set on the right path she could make things happen by the sheer force of her will, turn a hopeless situation into at least something acceptable. It seemed such a recent thing, this blind confidence of youth, but now she had lost it — and she knew it was gone for good. What was worse, it had been replaced by an overdeveloped appreciation of reality, which now told her that she would never see Karl again.

“You’re right, Mick,” she said, “we just need to find Adam and take him back to his home, make sure he’s all right. If Karl’s not there, we’ll find him somewhere else to live. Maybe,” she paused, “maybe he could come and live with me.”

“You seem to like him a lot. I’ve never seen you so motherly.”

“I loathe that word.” She chuckled. “I mean, look at me. I couldn’t be Mummy if I tried. But there’s something about Adam that I understand — I don’t know what it is, I just feel I know what’s going through his head.”

“Let’s just see what happens. We might find his father, in which case it’ll be happy families all around.”

Margaret turned away from Mick. The highway in front of them dipped and curved slightly and offered a view of a shantytown, the tin roofs of the houses melding together to form a plain of rust and corroded metal. “I think we need to prepare ourselves for the worst, Mick. I have a feeling Karl’s not coming back.”

A group of students had gathered near the main gates of the campus. Over the last few months there had been ragged bands of protestors almost every day, sometimes as few as five or six, sometimes as many as a hundred, often consisting of more nonstudents than students. Margaret was never clear what they were protesting against (“In Indonesia today there is much to protest against,” Din had said not-so-casually one day). Sometimes they railed against the neodictators (meaning their teachers), sometimes against America and Britain, other times against the corrupt politicians, but mostly it was just the standard Ganyang Malaysia. Crush crush crush Malaysia , the chants would repeat tediously, and even the protestors themselves would seem bored. Today, however, the crowd was very large, two hundred or more, and relatively calm. This worried Margaret more than the usual rabble, who compensated for lack of serious intent by making as much noise as possible. Today’s gathering was different: a young woman was standing on a podium, speaking animatedly through a loudspeaker — not an incomprehensible stream of vitriol but what seemed to Margaret to be a sustained lecture of some sort. There was a cohesion in the way the students raised their fists to cheer every crescendo in the speaker’s voice, a sense of purpose that Margaret had seldom witnessed at these campus protests. Through the steady murmur of voices and the crackling static of the loudspeaker, Margaret discerned the words “… and so becomes dark, rotten, evil to the very core.” The woman’s voice was dramatic and clear, the emphasis on each word perfectly judged, like the formal speech of a lenong play. Margaret strained to hear more, but the words were drowned in a chorus of cheers and whistles.