Tash Aw - Map of the Invisible World

“And what if you don’t?”

He turned up the collar of his coat and folded his arms against the chill. “Then marry a good man and bear good children.”

O ww.” Adam grimaced and flinched at Z’s touch.

“Sorry,” she said, withdrawing slightly. The rich smell of camphor mixed with other medicinal fragrances filled his nostrils. Z dipped her fingers into the jar of ointment and reached for Adam’s rib cage again. “Think of something else — your home, or the sea. Something nice.” She touched him lightly, resting her fingertips on his skin for a few moments to let him get used to her touch, waiting for him to calm down. When she felt the tenseness of his body ease and the rise and fall of his breathing return to a steady rhythm, she began to spread the ointment across his rib cage. At first it seemed she was barely touching him, her fingers skimming over the tautness of his skin. Adam held his breath; he held up his arm, bent at the elbow, his hand bunched into a fist, as if shielding himself from imminent danger. He tried to relax but the tickly, pleasurable sensation of Z’s fingers running lightly over his skin made him want to giggle and gasp at the same time. He knew that if he laughed his ribs would tense up and hurt him again, so he remained caught in this funny in-between state: He wanted desperately to be soothed but could not allow himself to be.

“I think you’ve cracked a rib,” said Z. “There’s a bad bruise just here.” She circled a forefinger softly on a patch of skin, and all of a sudden Adam recognized that she had alighted on the very epicenter of his pain, the precise root of the nausea that had filled his entire body. She continued to rub the ointment into his skin, more firmly now; a hot, comforting glow began to spread across his torso. He could still feel the pain in his ribs every time her hand passed over that spot, but it was duller, no longer sharp and surprising; it was isolated now, and he could anticipate how and when it would hurt him. Z’s fingers worked steadily in long, gentle strokes or in widening circles, away from the tenderness of his ribs, moving on to his back and the sides of his chest. He closed his eyes.

“Something’s definitely broken in there,” she said, and laughed; and Adam could feel the warmth of her breath curling onto his skin, tingling, curious. “You’re lucky not to have been seriously hurt. Did you know that nine people died in that riot? And that’s just the number released by the police — the ones they couldn’t deny because they had bullets in their backs. I don’t know how many more kids were trampled underfoot and left lying on the streets. You see? You were very lucky. Why on earth did you agree to go?”

Adam said nothing. He remembered the promises Din had made, and how he did not really have a choice: What do you do when someone offers you something you had lost and never thought you would regain? He shrugged and began to explain that he had not understood that it would all turn out that way. He remembered how Din had looked, kneeling in the street, surrounded by soldiers: thin, defeated, frail, kicked into the dirt. And although he realized that Din had never cared for him, he could not shake this feeling of guilt. He had abandoned Din and left him to suffer on his own.

He looked around him. The furniture in the bedroom was edged with scrolling gold shaped like waves curling into themselves; the floor was of clear, cool marble, and the high ceilings made everything seem silent and airy. And this was the problem: He liked being here, and he was glad, so very glad not to be out on the streets or in some prison cell or on the floor of another shanty; but he felt guilty that he was here and Din was not. Before this moment, guilt had been a concept, something he thought he understood when people spoke about it. He had never actually known what it was to feel responsible for someone else’s suffering.

“Keep still,” Z tutted. “I knew Din was dangerous, but I said to myself, Don’t worry, Z, that Adam is a clever guy, he isn’t going to believe what Din tells him, he can look after himself. I was wrong.”

“He was going to help me find my brother. All I had to do was help him with a worthy cause.”

Z sighed. It seemed to Adam that she was frowning, concentrating hard on not saying anything, as if trying to restrain her impatience with his reasoning. He could not see the expression on her face; he could only feel her rhythmic massaging and the gentle pressure of her hand that did not change in the slightest. An ornate clock caught Adam’s eye; it sat on a chest of drawers, a heap of molten gold cascading down the slopes of a mountain. The ticking of its pendulum seemed to fall in with the insistent kneading of Z’s hands, like the metronome perched on Karl’s broken piano. Adam had always thought it funny that the metronome should work when the piano itself was broken.

“Your problem,” she said after a while, “your problem is that you don’t know your own mind. You don’t know what’s in your head, you’ve never sat down and thought about what’s important to you, so you’re swayed by any passing notion. I don’t know you very well, but that’s how you seem to me: completely empty up here”—she lifted her finger momentarily and touched her temple, and then returned to massaging him. “Do you know what Din and his friends do? They put bombs in people’s cars, people whose views they don’t agree with. You heard about the assassination attempt on the president last year? We think it was Din’s group that was responsible, though we can’t be sure. They are trying to destabilize the country, which is already on the brink of complete collapse. The last thing we need is a full-scale civil war. But we will get it very soon. It’s coming. How can it not, with people like Din around? You weren’t stupid to have followed him — no, it was worse than that: You didn’t even think about it.”

This is strange, thought Adam: He was soothed by Z’s scolding, by the steady, chiding tone of her voice. He did not want her to stop talking, even though her words embarrassed him. He felt drowsy, as if he was ready to fall into a rich, deep sleep, the first for a long time.

Z shifted her weight on the bed slightly so that she was now sitting behind him, rubbing ointment into his shoulders, and Adam felt the mattress give way ever so slightly. He had never seen a bed as wide or as soft as this one. He imagined himself stretched out on it diagonally; he didn’t think his feet would hang over the edge. But then he found himself thinking of Din, crouching in a prison cell; and even worse, Karl, sitting with a dozen other people in a space no larger than Z’s bed, while Adam himself enjoyed such luxury.

“And this whole business with your brother,” Z continued. “Did you really think Din could have helped you? Let me tell you something, in case you haven’t worked this out. You come from way out there”—she waved a hand casually in no particular direction—“so you won’t understand. In this country, in this day and age, someone like Din is no one. I wish that were not the case, but it is. People like him can die in the thousands and no one would care. He has no power over anything, probably not even his own life. That is the harsh truth, Adam. You are the same now. From the moment you lost your adopted father you joined the masses — just like Din. Money is the only thing that counts. Money gives you power. This is the rule in our new republic. It’s really very simple. This is what I want to change, but until then …”

Over her voice he could hear the ticking of the clock encouraging her hands on his shoulders. “Until then what?”

Z sighed again. “Until then, I suppose I just have to accept that I’m part of the system. Part of this.” She lifted her hands from his shoulders, and although he could not see what she was indicating with them, Adam knew that she meant the beautiful, big house they were in. He was very drowsy now. He wanted her to keep talking.