My New Friend

There's a small man praying to my stomach. Little black bowl of hair over a too-large navy t-shirt and he has thin, cola-colored limbs. In the millimeter between his palms and my belly, static electricity, standing hairs, something else.

“Hi.”

No answer. Last night’s ocean now merely bubbles ashore. The trees twitter and hum.

I tap him on the shoulder. “Hi. Thanks.”

“Mai pan rai. Gop chi ni lat, mark bai.”

Ah. Right.

He stands, paunch pushes a Penn State logo from an American-sized t-shirt. From the waist red pants fall like a divided dress, dark to the knee and flapping wetly against his calves. A Swiss Army rucksack sits at his feet. “Mi jaat nuk, di mai lai,” he says, pointing down the beach towards two black suitcases beached on a snowy plain. Holes in my sun-bleached sight like flies on white silk.

“Di mai lai,” I say. “Okay.”

He flicks thumb from wrist towards the cases and sings, “eeehnn.” Then, “tang cha ni lat. Lak bai?”

“Lak bai. Okay.”

“Okay.” His smile is eerily genuine.

Older and fatter than I’d thought, the little man exudes the energy of a child, but his words are clipped, controlled, didactic. Eyes alive he stands planted in the sand, staring at the alien luggage with a faint smile, as if looking into a memory or a dream. “Lak bai,” he repeats, blinks, then turns and leaves.

“Wait!”

“Lak bai!” Let's go.

We go, he talks. Points out the sky and sea, sand crabs crawling on a soaking mound of clothes and hair. Maybe he's telling me how things work in his country. Luggage and white people fall out of the sky. We wear the t-shirts and the crabs get the meat.

I show him how to pull out the handles, and we drag the suitcases westward down the beach. For the woman's corpse he leaves a shrug and a smile.

We go, he talks. A lot. Points out the stones where the beach cuts its teeth. We climb the great grey bluff, stand on the lip of a bowl filled with soil and trees. The island like mound of emerald wax cooling on itself. This is the westernmost point of a peninsula. Across the bay, another shore, hills bouncing down and down the coast to the end of the sea. “Mi muk, mai mai. Bai nai.”

I think he said that his is a giant nation.
“Doramir,” he says, and throws open his arms like releasing a flock of sparrows over the land.

I'm going to die here.

*

It’s cooler under the trees. Leaves shield my tingling skin. My companion names the trees and the birds. Demonstrates the bass resonance in the tented, exposed root of a hundred-foot tree. A jungle drum. He breaks open a pod from a tall blade of grass, and out crawl ants. They taste like lemon. I let them crawl on my tongue and the roof of my mouth. He twists a cluster of white berries from beneath a broad white leaf. They have the aftertaste of pure vodka, send vibrations into my fluids. Sunlight enters my fingertips. With enough of these berries, I could walk home.

The trees require translation. They are too tall, too thin, too tied by moss-covered vines. Coconuts like cannonballs wait for a favorable wind. The ground is bare and sunspeckled, shade incomplete and soil overly sandy. The air is clean and full of sea.

He talks. Miles through the trees and spiderwebs, footprints flanked by suitcase moraines. The trail opens on another empty beach, empty sea, empty sky. Waves drag back a stony shore, clacking like an abacus. In the sand, two suitcases lying dead on their sides, one spilling white cotton guts.

My friend has a bow of twine stuck under the tie which holds up his pants. He loops and leashes three cases, leaving one and the rucksack for me, and he trundles off like a beetle with his load slung over his back.

The fatter, older man talks while I fight my lungs. “Okay?” he turns around to ask.

“Okay,” I smile. I feel an ancient, foreign pride.
He’s left a horse and cart tucked between wax-leaved bushes. It’s loaded with suitcases, purses, duffels, sleeping bags and, twine-mounted on the front, an airplane seat. Maybe 24-A.

My friend waves me into the cart. I put down the armrests and press the drink button. The horse heaves, wooden wheels climb out of the sand. My friend gives me a wineskin. The water inside is hot and perfect. He walks with his animal, turns around to give me short, pointed explanations apparently meant to answer any of the questions I might have regarding my surroundings. “Telephone?” I say, gesturing with pinky and thumb. Furrowed brow, he imitates and laughs. “Tell la fun.”

In the afternoon we share a mango and a fist-sized ball of glutinous rice. I watch him mold cakes of rice, chew the with bites of the wet fruit. Juice and starch make sweet soup of my spit. We eat sitting on the cart, looking down the packed dirt path. An orange and green lizard crosses the road. A breeze rises and falls. He smiles at me, and I realize I must have been smiling.

The things I have lost: my money and my passport. My shoes. Ten t-shirts and a bottle of sunscreen. A bad magazine. Katie. The ability to communicate.

I could use the sunscreen. Otherwise I’ve lost the money that ruled me, a passport to a life I despised. My job, my home, my parents. What have I lost? I am here. I breathe. I even have a friend.

I’ve lost the freedom to choose the terms of my enslavement. The chance to shovel my life into the engine of a self-perpetuating war. To take the side of justice in a massacre of innocents. I’ve gained from those losses.

I’ve lost debt collectors, the military police who’d eventually have knocked down the door. A job I didn’t want. I’ve lost the urge to kill myself. Circumstances will try that for me. I’ll resist.

My money and my passport. Someone speaks a voice I know. Noises blend. A dream of Remy, asleep on Katie's feet. Her body next to my body. A dry wind, a dream of falling.
I wake on a beachgrass plain. The sun hangs like a fat, red fruit over the break of world's end, low scrub and red earth rising on breaths of loam. Swaying grass bled by the setting sun. The earth stretches, waking for the night. No noise, no trees to cover the high, mango-streaked clouds and the endless bleached blue. Nothing but a breeze, the cart's progress and humid heat like cream coating the skin. Yellow flowers scattered among the low, waxy leaves. Soft dirt parting for rough wheels. In front, my new friend dozes. His horse knows the way home.

*

The jungle is black when we stop at a small wooden house among the trees. There's glass in the window frames, a kerosene lantern hanging on a hook beside a green door, sunflowers in a garden. Palm fronds and banana leaves top the house like a fat green hat. The trees are loud and alive.

My friend gives me the Swiss Army rucksack, child's face folded on the faultlines of his smile. “For you,” he says. “For helping.” He understands when I thank him.

Down a short gravel path, a shed hung over a stream. He holds the lantern over a hole in the wooden floor, the water beneath catching some of the flame. He holds the lantern over a cistern in the opposite corner. On its rim, a pink plastic bucket and a cake of soap. No toilet paper.

His house speaks a language I partially understand. The living room smells of old leather and earth. Low wooden tables surrounded by cushions. On the polished surface, water rings and a half empty mug of tea. A long, low leather futon, shelves with knick-knacks, candles and ceramic elephants. A reed mat spread across the packed dirt floor. The timber-braced ceiling gives me a foot of clearance.

He shows me a room with a mosaic floor, blue and orange diamonds. Another cistern, another pink plastic bucket, the kind a child would carry to the beach. He mimes scooping the water, dumping it over his head. There is a drain in center of the floor.

His stove is an iron hook planted in the dirt. From it hangs an iron pot over the embers of an old fire. The kitchen smells like wood smoke. There are black stains on the ceiling.

My friend scoops two bowls of couscous. We eat on the back porch, in hammocks, spooning food from the bowls in our laps. Trees, water and dark, the air thick with breathing green and the sorrowful howling of monkeys. In warm couscous, caramelized onions and raisins cooked sweet and soft. Garlic and oil. My stomach and throat open again. Hot belly. My guts still work.

He tells me something and leads me inside. Points at the shower, points at the outhouse. I nod. “Thank you.” He goes into his room, returns with an armful of sheets, a blanket and a pillow. Aligns cushions on the floor, covers them with a white sheet, its sides spread over the dirt. Over that, a blanket, and over that another blanket. I wonder if he's cold.

“Sabai nui,” he says. “Goodnight,” I repeat. He goes into his room again and slides shut the white wooden door.

I cry for a while, then open up the rucksack. Black lace underwear, but big enough to fit me. T-shirts and a towel among dresses and shoes. Toilet paper, thank god. Toothpaste and a toothbrush. A wallet with a few euros, a German driver's license with the smiling face of a dead lady. I accidentally read her name. It's Caroline Zurbe.

I make two piles. In the first, things I can use: the t-shirts and towel, jeans, a pair of pyjamas that will fit, a pack of Larks and a lighter, toothpaste, floss, and a toothbrush, a nearly empty sketchbook and a bag of vine charcoal, a box of pastels rubberbanded shut. TP. Then, things I might be able to sell: make-up, dresses, shoes, underwear, dead Caroline's passport, paperbacks in German and a hairdryer, in the event that I come upon a place with electricity or Germans.

I brush my teeth in another language. The tea-stained foam I spit on the floor makes no sense beside the screen-covered hole in the floor and the smell of wet earth. I undress in a corner, am chalk white except for my hands and arms, which are purple and throb. Neither color belongs.

Dumping the water over my head is like being electrocuted. A dull throb in the top of my head, and the rest of me goes stiff and brittle as ice as the burn travels down my neck to my belly and back.

The soap is a cornered yellow cake. It smells and lathers exactly like any other soap, which surprises me.

I scrub the waxy sweat out of my armpits and crotch. The cold water sluices away a wave of my old life. I was off my face, pour a layer of cold onto each eye, another directly in the center of my forehead.

I forget English, though I know I speak it. I forget my parents, though I know they had me. Forget Katie, though I’m sure I love her. All the things that made me a me disappear, but I remain. The parts I wash are mine, and the thing that does that washing must be me.

Legally, I am a dead German woman. In reality, I am the same deaf-mute thing that sucked life from the circumstances of its birth. That crept through the dirt towards the buried sun.

I sleep three inches above the earth. It fills my nose and steadies my dreams.