Tash Aw - Map of the Invisible World

Wait; she got up and pulled the curtains apart, throwing the windows open as wide as she could. There was a thin breath of air in the room now, and Adam could hear the distant barking of dogs. That’s better, she said, it was so airless before.

She eased her head onto the pillow next to his so that her mouth brushed against his chin. And when she kissed him he surprised himself by knowing how to respond, moving his torso slightly to press against hers. Her body had surprised him because it felt so foreign, unlike anything he had ever imagined, but also familiar, like his. Her belly was flat but fleshy, not at all like his own; her thighs were very lean and when he squeezed them with his fingers, he could feel the long sinews running down to her knee. He had been fully awake for those few minutes during which they had clung to each other tightly, urgently, like sea swimmers to a raft. When she moved on top of him he could feel every part of his body with a clarity he had never experienced before, as if each muscle was an articulated word or thought.

Afterward, when they lay side by side in the darkness, she asked him about his brother, and he told her the few things he knew.

His brother was older and stronger than he; his brother had left the orphanage first, leaving Adam alone. And those moments of aloneness were filled with a blankness that seemed to expand all the time, until he found he was not terrified by it but reassured by its constant presence.

He told her about the long, low shack where everyone slept, about the leaky roof and the rats that ran along the foot of the walls and the sound of boys crying in their sleep. He was very calm. He wanted to talk, he wanted to tell Zubaidah what he knew. He could remember, now, how it felt to be alone, just as he could recall the warmth of Johan’s body against his when he woke up in the middle of the night. He had been afraid all the time, afraid of everything, and the only thing that made him less afraid was being near Johan, who was not afraid of anything. But once Johan told him, If we ever get separated I will not be able to live. And that had surprised Adam because Johan could deal with everything. It was he who would not survive without Johan, he thought.

What did he look like? she asked in the darkness. Did he look like you? Adam did not answer. The precise features of Johan’s face still eluded him, but he remembered someone who did not look at all like him, someone who was taller and fairer and stronger. An almond-shaped face cast in permanent half shadow. For the moment, this was the best he could remember.

Sorry, said Zubaidah, it must be painful to remember these things.

No, he said. If someone stays with you often it is painful when they go away. But that is all it is. Pain. When someone is there next to you every second of the day and night their sudden absence does not cause pain, it creates a vacuum, an emptiness with which you have to live every day thereafter. So it is not painful; it is worse than pain.

She put her hand between his legs and left it there, even though he was not hard. She asked if he missed his brother and he said no, he didn’t. It was the truth. You can’t miss something you can barely remember. He tried to feel a longing for Johan, but all that came to him was a calm that was slowly replacing the yawning emptiness that had been there before.

We can find him, Zubaidah said, we can find him if you want to. Nothing is impossible. But Adam said no, he did not want to. Why? she asked, but he was unable to answer. There is a time for everything, he thought, and the time for finding Johan had passed, or maybe it had never been the right time. Maybe that time would come in the future, or maybe it never would. He was no longer sure if he wanted to find Johan. My father used to say that you can’t control your future, you just have to let fate run its course. I’m not going to find my brother. It wasn’t meant to happen. Why should it? He doesn’t even know I exist.

Rubbish, Zubaidah said. If you want to do something, if you want to find someone, you can. He could feel her fingers in his pubic hair. He did not argue with her; it was no use.

So what do you want to do? You can’t stay in Jakarta. He said, I want to find my father. Okay, she said in the dark. We will find him. Not long afterward, as they were talking, he felt himself harden in her hand, and he propped himself up with one arm so that he could kiss her. It was, he thought, the first time he had ever done anything with such clarity of purpose.

He rose from the bed and pulled the curtains open; Z must have drawn them before she left to protect him from the harsh light of the morning. He squinted into the sudden sunlight, looking around the room. There were things he hadn’t noticed in his exhausted state last night: a picture of Che Guevara pinned to a corkboard, next to a photo of a Western film star Adam did not recognize. He could not tell if this was Z’s bedroom.

He dressed and made his way slowly downstairs, pausing momentarily at the top of the staircase that curved elegantly in a horseshoe of gold and marble. The floor was cool and smooth underfoot, and in the kitchen he found a box of European pastries — pretty squares and triangles with colorful cream toppings. He was not sure if they were meant for him, but his hunger was greater than his caution, and he ate one, then two, until he had eaten half the box. They were very sweet and tasted of cinnamon. There was a large mustard-colored refrigerator of the kind he’d only seen in magazines, but when Adam opened it he found it to be empty except for a few bottles of beer and the remains of a celebratory cake, the icing hardened into a crust by the cold.

“Good morning, sir.” A man dressed in a bush jacket and pressed trousers came into the kitchen. Adam recognized him as the driver who had brought them home yesterday. “Miss Zubaidah has asked me to take you wherever you want to go today. If you’d like to stay here, you’re most welcome, she said, and we should go and buy you some clothes and food or whatever you need. However, she said she had the feeling you might want to go home immediately.”

Adam paused and looked at the birthday cake. He could make out scrolling pink letters that read … ppy birth … love from … “I haven’t made up my mind,” he said. “I need to think about it for a while.”

* * *

They were a long way from the city now, in a place where there were no lights and the dirt roads were hard to see, for they snaked through the jungle where the foliage was thick and did not let the moonlight through to the ground. Sometimes the trees would give way to a palm oil estate or a rubber plantation and there would be a little more light, maybe even a single kerosene lamp hanging from the low branches of a tree, and in the pool of light Johan and Farah would be able to discern the outlines of branches, or the fragile roof of a rubber tapper’s hut. Warm wind came through the open windows, eddying and swirling and blowing wisps of hair across their faces.

Farah said, I’m glad you can’t drive like a maniac out here.

The moment the clouds part I’m going to put my foot down, you wait and see, said Johan. Country road or no country road, I’m going to drive fast.

No you won’t. She laughed. You can’t.

The Merc jolted over the potholes and sharp gullies where the rain had swept away the surface of the road, and sometimes it seemed to Johan that they were on a little boat on a choppy sea where you never got the sense of moving forward and you could no longer discern where you had come from or where you were going. It had been like that on the ferry to this country, to his new home. The boat had rocked on the waves and did not advance, and all the while Johan’s new mummy kept saying, Don’t worry, not long to go, we aren’t far away. But when he looked over the side of the boat he could not see the land they had left or the land they were traveling to, and beyond the misty haze of rain there was only sea and sky and a boat that was going nowhere. And he had thought, maybe they would spend all that time traveling and end up where they had begun, back in Indonesia, back near Adam.