Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

“What a good cook you are,” I say.

“You only say that because you are my friend. I have so much to learn.” She nibbles the crisp lip of a hopper. “Can I ask you for a help, Akki?”

“Of course.”

“I would like to talk to my boyfriend. He wrote me that we can talk with the Skype. You can help?”

At the house with a computer, I check my email while Suriya plays with the owners’ baby. Joe from Carp Weekly has written back. He has cancer—“of the goddamned tongue! What a fuckin’ wanker God is”—and he’s taking time off from work. The good news is that Donnie will do pretty much whatever Joe asks—“you don’t cross a cancer patient”—and Joe was happy to call in a favor for me. As usual, the paper is in dire need of good editors. Donnie would be glad to have me back on staff, and I’d be salaried. Starting at $40,000 with benefits, a number that sounds to me like success. I’ll have to edit the What’s Hot? section in addition to the In Memoriams—“ladies’ handbags and cocktail recipes and the like. At least that’s what it is now. Let’s just say, there is ample room for improvement.” I hear the words in Joe’s determined, self-contained tenor. So. That’s what I’ll do.

But — Jared. I cannot live in his town. I would never escape my thoughts about him. Anyway, I ought to be teaching impoverished children how to farm or trying to make plastic out of recycled fingernail clippings or becoming the first Buddhist nun who is also a sex educator or biking across the U.S. to raise awareness about Tamil oppression. I wish I would do any one of those things, I really do. But I won’t. Maybe I could move to Montreal, finally get good at speaking French, work at a bookstore or coffee shop or something. My forehead drops into my hand. Enough ideas. Do what is before you. Take the newspaper job, but don’t live in Carpinteria, live in a nearby town — maybe that tiny, gorgeous one with brightly colored cottages and vegetable gardens in the yards and cheap rents because the cliff above it is inching year by year closer to landslide. Return to the work you had when you were twenty-two, knowing now that no greater life is beckoning from afar. I’ve always been right here.

After I set up a Skype account for Suriya, I sit outside with the owner of the Internet café, as Suriya calls this house with a computer. He has a large, silly chin. “Your name?” he asks me.

“Elsie.”

“Your country?”

“U.S.A.”

Time passes. Whorls of dust agitate the pale sky.

“Your name?” he says.

“Elsie.”

“Your country?”

“U.S.A.”

I am an ordinary person with an ordinary life. Even my acceptance of ordinariness is ordinary, the undercurrent of so many “big books.” Madame Bovary, War and Peace, Freedom . The mistake is always the same: trying to live the life one has in one’s head instead of the life before one, which is endlessly generous if you humble yourself to it as the only possible means of fulfillment. But isn’t there something condescending about being told by great artists that ordinariness leads to happiness? Those who create art that preserves their lives from the dull, repetitive labors to which the masses are confined tell these same masses to labor joyfully. Plato’s Noble Lie, retold endlessly. But that kind of ordinariness is not what the man in white robes was talking about in the meditation center in the mountains as the candles flickered and the insects sang and my ass went numb on a thin, hard, overused cushion. What was he talking about? Stopping. Wondering. What am I doing right now. Is it necessary. He was not talking about doing any particular thing. I could stay at the newspaper until I’m old and gray, or come back to Sri Lanka and teach English, or write a novel about a totally imaginary person who has nothing to do with me, or translate a French book that even a non-suicidal person might enjoy. The point is to pay attention to what’s real, not to my imagination. To remember that it’s enough just to sit on a train, seeing, hearing, bouncing, dozing, thinking, letting the mind go blank. That’s love, too, a kind of love. It seems possible to love like that all the time, but then — Suriya walks out of the house. I stand and ask if she was able to reach her boyfriend. Seeming not to hear, she loosens the bun at the nape of her neck to let her hair fall down to her knees, shakes her head, reins the stringy, black mane back in. I offer to bike home and she barely nods, just hops onto the handlebars, the same way I glided into my dad’s car after spending the afternoon in Dan’s attic in high school, when he sang me radio love songs and made me believe I was the most beautiful girl in the world.

Suriya leans over my shoulder as we bike past the swampy lake. “El, that is the first time I have seen my boyfriend in two years. And I will see his real face soon. He is coming back to Sri Lanka. In six months or one year. We will be married.”

I backpedal to a stop in Suriya’s yard. “And you are sure he will be a good husband?” As if that question has an answer. Suriya walks the bike to the back of the house. She cannot know everything of her husband until they marry. But she knows some things. She runs her hand down the side of her face and lets it rest on her neck. She takes the broom leaning against the house and starts sweeping trash and dead frangipani flowers toward the street. Ayya pulls up on his motorbike and throws anxious words at Suriya. The machine coughs dust around our ankles as he roars off.

“The funeral takes Ayya’s money,” Suriya says. “So he goes to find money in the village. One man, he owes my father money from some years ago. Maybe Ayya can find that man.” Suriya stares at the crosshatched line Ayya’s bike leaves in its wake. His military leave was extended for the funeral. It will be awhile before he returns to his sentry point in Colombo and gets a paycheck.

“Ayya is such a kind person,” I say, following Suriya to the backyard. “Does he ever feel bad supporting—” Stop this right now, says a calm, male voice in my head. Suriya’s mother just died. “I mean, ruling over the Tamils, helping to keep them down?”

“The soldiers must rule.” She sounds bored. “LTTE was so bad. We cannot let them come again.”

“The way to stop the LTTE from beginning again is to give equal rights. Treat the Tamils well. Your president has done the opposite.” Suriya’s father is sitting alone on a pink lawn chair, a plate of untouched food resting on his lap.

“Maybe you are right, El. I cannot say. The rulers have the power. We cannot fight our ruler. We do not have this power.” In my head, a chorus of imaginary activists groans, “Speak truth to power! Fight the good fight! Don’t give in to injustice!” But Suriya is not an activist; she is something else. She takes the plate from her father’s lap. “Why did you come to Sri Lanka, El.”

She says it as if it’s an answer she understands for the first time and she feels sorry for me. There is no particular person or event I’m running from, no tidy past tragedy to justify my current desperation. I am a confused American who came to a land of poor, dark-skinned, war-scarred people hoping to learn how to be simple and happy. I am aware of the cliché of my journey and so have diminished in the retelling of it even the parts that did truly change me — if change means relinquishing the habitual markers by which one measures the progress of one’s life — because I am loathe to turn the real goodness I felt in the lake, in the sky palace above the cave temple, on the handlebars of Suriya’s bike, into a self-congratulatory moral, yet another way to manipulate the minute smudge of my personality. So if I ever do manage to make anything out of these notes, it will be the story not of who I am but of who I fear I am.