Going Native (28 page)

"You okay?" he asked in the backseat safety of their hotel-bound cab as she hovered over him, trying to inspect the damage in the glare of oncoming lights.

"I'm fine." She touched a swell of angry skin over his cheek. "You'll live."

"The woman who hit me," said Drake, watching the driver's dark eyes flitting across the mirror, "I think she was a man."

When he woke the next morning, he found himself not in his bed, either at home or at the hotel, but sprawled in open air among the straps and stirrups of this bizarre chair, being baked in his epidermal jacket by a ruthless sun, dazed, headachy, oozing juice. He sat up amid a changed set, the greenery gone, replaced by an endlessly gliding progression of stubble and ash, black acres of unharvested soot, residue from the world's longest-running forest fire, the smoke heavy enough for months to alter flight paths in and out of Singapore. Darting about the river like minnows around an old bass were motorized longboats with neat cannonball piles fore and aft of astonishingly green squash and melons. Nothing he was looking at made any sense.

Down on the main deck he found Amanda among the suffocating crowd where he had left her, now studiously applying Tiger Balm to her latest collection of insect bites. "Your face," she remarked, "it looks like chicken tandoori."

"I fell asleep." He took the bottle of water from her hand and guzzled it down.

"I wanted to come searching, but somebody's got to guard our treasures."

Drake was staring beyond her, at the world outside the boat. "Strange shit," he muttered.

Amanda had her mirror out and was looking at her face as if to see it was still as she remembered. "I was beginning to feel abandoned here on the lido deck."

"Our pervert pal lurking around again?"

"No, thank God. Not that I noticed, anyway."

"Wonder where he went. The boat's not that big."

"Big enough for you to get lost in."

"I told you, I fell asleep. Up on the roof."

"I was thinking about you."

"Yeah? I was thinking about you, too."

They were looking at one another through their matching dark sunglasses.

"What you're thinking," he said, "is, I believe, a severe social faux pas, if not an outright felony, in these latitudes."

"Fuck the law. I wanna feel good."

This trip had certainly been a boon to their erotic life. In the last ten days they'd had more sex than in the previous ten months. Travel was indeed, as Drake liked to proclaim, an aphrodisiac. New scents, new tastes, new anatomies. They had barely closed the door of their first hotel room in Jakarta before they were stripping off their clammy, wrinkled airplane clothes and falling as one between cool, clean laundered-to-be-defiled sheets. The whole country was their bedroom; they got aroused within the ornate structures of Hindu candi; they stole kisses behind a pillar during the performance of a royal gamelan orchestra whose music (a dense, flowing pattern of percussive sound rising treelike out of low, deep rhythms, up through melody's swaying trunk into a twittering canopy of upper-register complexities) was said to confer immortality upon all who heard it, and yet, despite the care Drake and Amanda took to be circumspect in their behavior, even the least, most routine of their actions provided skit material for the ongoing show of Crazy White Foreigners, as Amanda was rudely reminded when she dared to engage the boat's "rest room," tiptoeing, roll of pink tissue in hand, across the crowded deck, apologies all around, to the cramped stall at the stern and the decaying wooden bench with a round hole a mere foot above the foaming current where she had barely settled herself down when a cluster of giggling children appeared beneath the insufficiently dangling blue terry cloth towel that pretended to be a curtain. Without a sense of humor, their hotel manager had tersely informed them, Indonesia will surely defeat you.

"Get away, you little brats!" Amanda screamed, lunging at her tormentors. It was like shooing flies. In an instant they were back again.

"At least fame in America doesn't entail intense curiosity about your toilet habits," she protested to Drake.

"Waaall," he drawled.

"Go away," she said, pushing at her husband. "Get out of here. You're the worst of the worst."

They passed a major timber camp, wide swaths of land stripped and bared, aprons of mud descending down to the riverbank, roar of diesel engines as the huge yellow machines continued chewing at the far fringes of the forest, the mouths of modern civilization eating away at the tasty wood, the plants, the insects, the birds, the mammals. The boat chugged on and by midday had entered upon the mirrored surface of a lake so clean, so still, it might have been a section of the sky itself fallen to earth here in the middle of the equatorial jungle. The shore was an impenetrable wall of vegetation, graceful nipa palm leaning out curiously over the glassy lake; the boat's progress attended by a chirping escort of freshwater dolphins romping deliriously in its wake. Country of perpetual wonder. The boat docked at a place called Tanjung Panjoy, an idyllic picture-postcard simulacrum of an authentic tribal village, the centerpiece on Jimmy Sung's Travel Tours into Primitive World, wealthy gangs of disoriented Westerners run up and down the river for a quick sampling of archaic man. The hotel manager had warned them, the Harrelsons had warned them, don't waste your time or your money on this Asian equivalent of a Potemkin village, pass on. The sole remaining longhouse, once home to more than twenty families, was now maintained as a profitable cultural museum and theater in which rather bored members of the Kenyah tribe dressed up in grandpa's colorful garb and pranced about for the cameras of paying visitors. Today's Kenyahs lived in separate buildings, neat secluded rows of boxlike suburban homes, one house one family, in accordance with the current government's coercive modernization campaign, full entré
e into the high-tech, mass-consumption order of the future requiring the dismemberment of the social body into smaller and smaller pieces more and more dependent upon the structures of control. Community was systematically broken down into isolated individuals, and then the individuals themselves into contending fragments of confusion and desire, modular selves, interchangeable units for the new, interchangeable people of the masses' millennium. And as even the most rudimentary sense of wholeness was fading into extinction, the vitality of an entire culture was being processed for cash and entertainment. This late in our epoch, an old, old story. How deep into the interior did one have to press to escape the spectacle of such cannibalism?

They were standing at the rail, studying the painted bungalows with corrugated steel roofs, the sheltering palms, the vegetable gardens, the village actors in traditional dress wandering the tended dirt paths like costumed extras in Colonial Williamsburg, the souvenir stand sporting the traditional bright yellow Kodak sign, when drums began to sound from the direction of the longhouse. The 2 p.m. show was about to begin.

"Shall we go ashore for a howl and a dance?" asked Amanda.

" 'Never get out of the boat,' " replied Drake, and, at the sound of the famous fictional movie line echoing in the relevant air of this real place, they both laughed, the levels of self-consciousness attendant upon a contemporary journey like this were positively Piranesian in number and involution, the pertinent dialogue had already been spoken, the images already photographed, the unsullied, unscripted experience was practically extinct, and you were left to wander at best through a familiar maze of distorting mirrors -- unless somewhere up ahead the living coils of this river carried one down and out of the fun house.

Amanda noticed the reflecting moon of a satellite dish rearing up over a distant rice barn. She wondered, "Do you think they have a telephone?"

"No," said Drake, "and even if they do, you're not using it."

"But you heard what Barry said," she persisted, Barry Stone being her agent at Global Artists Management, his loopy confidential voice penetrating twelve thousand miles of bristling static to burst at her ear during yesterday's obligatory phone check to her answering machine back home in L.A.: "Amanda, charmer, I know you're monitoring, so hold on to your coconut for this flash, just got a buzz from Ritchie Holderman, who says Trellis -- you remember Trellis, Lemming's assistant? -- she says that you are being seriously considered for a major role in
Dead End,
Lemming's epic about a senator who rapes and kills his own mother. You play a cop. I told Trellis that with your looks and your talent consideration couldn't last longer than five seconds, but no decision yet, you know Warner. Bring me a blowpipe. From the office window here -- if I could even pry the damn thing open -- I think I might be able to plant a poison dart in the Universal back lot. Okay, gotta go. Cheers to Drake. Keep your powder dry, you two -- or whatever it is that shouldn't get wet."

"Yes," agreed Drake, "it's wonderful, you deserve the part, but there's nothing you can do about it from here, and until we get back there I don't want the business in my head. This trip is supposed to serve as sherbet, we're cleaning the palate for the next round."

"If this were Nebetz calling about your
Mr. Smith Goes to Pluto
project, the homilies would be running down a different track."

"Amanda."

"Yes?" she replied, the brightest girl in the class.

"So," said the boat's captain, who had come up unexpectedly behind them, "mister and missus are preparing to enjoy the opportunities of Tanjung Panjoy?"

"No," said Drake.

The captain laughed. He was a big man with a little head and a proud mouthful of gold teeth he couldn't cease displaying. "Everyone goes ashore at Tanjung Panjoy."

"We're not like everyone."

"Do they have a phone?" asked Amanda.

The captain laughed.

"We wish to go farther," explained Drake. "Where there are no phones."

"Ah," said the captain, "I understand. American headhunters." He laughed. "Want to go
ulu
."

"Yes," Drake agreed, "that's us."

"Okay," said the captain, "okay." As he turned to go, he flashed his strange passengers the peace sign.

"What does
ulu
mean?" Amanda asked.

"The end of the world. Funny, I think it means head, too."

"Do you suppose our friend takes a commission on each tourist he drops off at good ol' Tanjung Panjoy?"

"Every place on the planet is not run like Hollywood."

"True. Most are even worse."

The boat moved on, a big noise bullying its way upstream. In the afternoon the fierce eye of the sun clouded over and the sky turned gray, draining the color from the land, and without fanfare the rain began to fall in loud thick torrents and continued to fall without drama or variation for the next hour and the hour after that with the insistent doggedness of an event that, like it or not, had to be endured and brought to completion, like a fever or the phases of the moon. And, as Drake and Amanda soon discovered, it was an event requiring frequent repetition over the next several days and the impossibility, on an open boat like this, of avoiding the weather. This was their indoctrination into the dampness of exotic places; they would never be wholly dry again until they were back home in sunny California.

The boat moved on through a silvery curtain of rain that dimpled the river and rattled the roof, the obscure scenery so indistinguishable they might as well have been revolving in a blind circle. The Copelands tried hard to distract themselves, Drake with his guidebooks, his repositories of fun facts, assuming the role of color commentator on this trip, pleasure for him residing in the activity of seeing a thing, then reading about it, or reading, then glancing up to see what you have just read, the equation between word and object seemingly real and direct, knowledge was instantly practice, and vice versa. Amanda contented herself with a cheap paperback edition of
Paradise Lost,
one of those big, "deep," important books she had always meant to read, but in another life perhaps, the one she was inhabiting now too distracting to sustain an extended thought on any subject more elaborate than her career, its highways and byways, unless she physically removed herself from the systems, the culture, the peculiar heat and light supporting it. A country like Indonesia was supposed to be a relief. Time, in these quaint distant lands without clocks, was neither motion nor force but a static ground peopled with strange beings who wandered its contours in a metamorphosing dance of terrible beauty. According to Hindu legend, every thousand years a bird flies over the peaks of the Himalayas, trailing a scarf of silk in its beak. When the friction of silk upon stone has finally worn the mountains away, then one cosmic day shall have passed. Live within such a conception of time and you might be able to free yourself from the fetters of useless impatience. Why hurry? The present moment is a journey as rich and fabulous as any overseas excursion. Why pant on, lusting after your own death?

She realized she'd been reading the same eight verses over and over again. The construction of Hell was a process interminable. With melancholy pleasure she watched the rain, a virtual wringing out of the air, until abruptly, without a single cue, it simply stopped, as if the handle on the spigot had been smartly turned, and the clouds dissolved and the sky showed its skin, blue as Krishna's body, and the boat chugged on. Villages appeared with the easy regularity of telephone poles along a country road, each with its school, its clinic, its church, the progression of identical white crosses atop their steeples charting the course of the Light into the dank interior. The sun slipped westward and broke across the horizon's keen edge and spilled and the vault of heaven came open upon staggered banks of kindled treasure as between the halves of darkening land slid the boat, the river breaking from its bow in long slow aching waves of pure gold.

They slept fitfully that first night, fending off the careless arms and legs of their packed-in neighbors, experiencing more intimacy than they wished with strangers and none at all with each other. The second night the boat, for reasons as mysterious as most events on this trip, tied up at a nondescript dock in the middle of nowhere and Drake and Amanda dutifully followed their fellow travelers down a narrow path into the enveloping darkness and the surprise of a modest river town containing a
pengingapan,
lodgings for the night, a small three-dollar room in which, after bathing in a closed shed with a cement floor, ladling dubiously clean buckets of cold water over their lathered bodies, they could lie privately together on a cramped bed, listening to the scampering feet of small animals on the roof, the nagging unintelligible chatter of the Indonesian couple in the next room behind walls as thin as their mattress, the slow unwinding smoke of a mosquito coil curling and eddying in the soft light of a kerosene lamp. Without a word, they eased themselves into one another and proceeded to enjoy the sweetest, quietest, most intense, most prolonged coupling either had ever known. Voices babbled on behind the wall. Flying brown beetles buzzed and bumped against the ceiling. All of Borneo lay about them in the darkness. They began again. They felt like high school virgins.