Spin (30 page)

It was not surprising, then, that there were Minangkabau working at every level on the docks at Padang. Ina’s ex-husband, Jala, was only one of many in the import/export trade who organized
rantau
expeditions to the Arch and beyond. It was no coincidence that Diane’s inquiries had led her to Jala and thence to Ibu Ina and this highland village. “Jala is opportunistic and he can be mean in a petty way, but he’s not unscrupulous,” Ina said. “Diane was lucky to find him, or else she’s a good judge of character—probably the latter. In any case Jala has no love for the New Reformasi, fortunately for all concerned.”

(She had divorced Jala, she said, because he had formed the bad habit of sleeping with disreputable women in the city. He spent too much money on his girlfriends and had twice brought home curable but alarming venereal diseases. He was a bad husband, Ina said, but not an especially bad man. He wouldn’t betray Diane to the authorities unless he was captured and physically tortured… and he was far too clever to let himself be captured.)

“The men who burned your clinic—”

“They must have followed Diane to the hotel in Padang and then interrogated the driver who brought you there.”

“But why burn the building down?”

“I don’t know, but I suspect it was an attempt to frighten you and drive you into the open. And a warning to anyone who might help you.”

“If they found the clinic, they’ll know your name.”

“But they won’t come into the village openly, guns blazing. Things have not quite deteriorated to that degree. I expect they’ll watch the waterfront and hope we do something stupid.”

“Even so, if your name is on a list, if you try to open another clinic—”

“But that was never my plan.”

“No?”

“No. You’ve convinced me that the
rantau gadang
might be a good thing for a physician to undertake. If you don’t mind the competition?”

“I don’t understand.”

“I mean that there is a simple solution for all our problems, one I’ve been contemplating a long time. The entire village has considered it, one way or another. Many have already left. We’re not a big successful town like Belubus or Batusangkar. The land here isn’t especially rich and every year we lose more people to the city or other clans in other towns or to the
rantau gadang
, and why not? There’s room in the new world.”

“You want to emigrate?”

“Me, Jala, my sister and her sister and my nephews and cousins—more than thirty of us, all told. Jala has several illegitimate children who would be happy to assume control of his business once he’s on the other side. So you see?” She smiled. “You needn’t be grateful. We’re not your benefactors. Only fellow travelers.”

I asked her several times whether Diane was safe. As safe as Jala could make her, Ina said. Jala had installed her in a living space above a customs house where she would be relatively comfortable and safely hidden until the final arrangements were made. “The difficult part will be getting you to the port undetected. The police suspect you’re in the highlands and they’ll be watching the roads for foreigners, especially
sick
foreigners, since the driver who brought you to the clinic will have told them you’re not well.”

“I’m finished being sick,” I said.

The last crisis had begun outside the burning clinic and it had passed while I was unconscious. Ibu Ina said it had been a difficult passage, that after the move to this small room in this empty house I had moaned until the neighbors complained, that she had needed her cousin Adek to hold me down during the worst of the convulsions—that was why my arms and shoulders were so badly bruised, hadn’t I noticed? But I remembered none of it. All I knew was that I felt stronger as the days passed; my temperature was reliably normal; I could walk without trembling.

“And the other effects of the drug?” Ina asked. “Do you feel
different
!”

That was an interesting question. I answered honestly: “I don’t know. Not yet, anyway.”

“Well. For the moment it hardly matters. As I say, the trick will be to get you out of the highlands and back to Padang. Fortunately, I think we can arrange it.”

“When do we leave?”

“Three or four days’ time,” Ina said. “In the meantime, rest.”

Ina was busy most of those three days. I saw very little of her. The days were hot and sunny but breezes came through the wooden house in soothing gusts, and I spent the time cautiously exercising, writing, and reading—there were English-language paperbacks on a rattan shelf in the bedroom, including a popular biography of Jason Lawton called
A Life for the Stars
. (I looked for my name in the index and found it:
Dupree, Tyler
, with five page references. But I couldn’t bring myself to read the book. The swaybacked Somerset Maugham novels were more tempting.)

En dropped in periodically to see that I was all right and to bring me sandwiches and bottled water from his uncle’s
warung
. He adopted a proprietary manner and made a point of asking after my health. He said he was “proud to be making
rantau”
with me. “You too, En? You’re going to the new world?” He nodded emphatically. “Also my father, my mother, my uncle,” and a dozen other close relations for whom he used Minang kinship words. His eyes glittered. “Perhaps you’ll teach me medicine there.”

Perhaps I would have to. Crossing the Arch would pretty much rule out a traditional education. This might not be the best thing for En, and I wondered if his parents had given their decision enough thought.

But that wasn’t my business, and En was clearly excited about the journey. He could hardly control his voice when he talked about it. And I relished the eager, open expression on his face. En belonged to a generation capable of regarding the future with more hope than dread. No one in my generation of grotesques had ever smiled into the future like that. It was a good, deeply human look, and it made me happy, and it made me sad.

Ina came back the night before we were due to leave, bearing dinner and a plan.

“My cousin’s son’s brother-in-law,” she said, “drives ambulances for the hospital in Batusangkar. He can borrow an ambulance from the motor pool to take you into Padang. There will be at least two cars ahead of us with wireless phones, so if there’s a roadblock we ought to have some warning.”

“I don’t need an ambulance,” I said.

“The ambulance is a disguise. You in the back, hidden, and me in my medical regalia, and a villager—En is pleading for the role—to play sick. Do you understand? If the police look in the back of the ambulance they see me and an ill child, and I say ‘CVWS,’ and the police become reluctant to search more thoroughly. Thus the ridiculously tall American doctor is smuggled past them.”

“You think this will work?”

“I think it has a very good chance of working.”

“But if you’re caught with me—”

“As bad as things may be, the police can’t arrest me unless I’ve committed a crime. Transporting a Westerner isn’t a crime.”

“Transporting a criminal might be.”

“Are you criminal, Pak Tyler?”

“Depends how you interpret certain acts of Congress.”

“I choose not to interpret them at all. Please don’t worry about it. Did I tell you the trip has been delayed a day?”

“Why?”

“A wedding. Of course, weddings aren’t what they once were. Wedding
adat
has eroded terribly since the Spin. As has everything else since money and roads and fast-food restaurants came to the highlands. I don’t believe money is evil, but it can be terribly corrosive. Young people are in a hurry nowadays. At least we don’t have Las Vegas-style ten-minute weddings... Do those still exist in your country?”

I admitted they did.

“Well, we’re headed in that direction as well.
Minang hiking, tinggal kerbau
. At least there will still be a
palaminan
and lots of sticky rice and
saluang
music. Are you well enough to attend? At least for the music?”

“I would be privileged.”

“So tomorrow night we sing, and on the following morning we defy the American Congress. The wedding works in our favor, too. Lots of traveling, lots of vehicles on the road; we won’t seem conspicuous, our little
rantau
group heading for Teluk Bayur.”

I slept late and woke feeling better than I had for a long time, stronger and subtly more alert. The morning breeze was warm and rich with the smell of cooking and the complaints of roosters and hammering from the center of town where an outdoor stage was under construction. I spent the day at the window, reading and watching the public procession of the bride and groom on their way to the groom’s house. Ina’s village was small enough that the wedding had brought it to a standstill. Even the local
warungs
had closed for the day, though the franchise businesses on the main road were staffed for tourists. By late afternoon the smell of curried chicken and coconut milk was thick in the air, and En dropped by very briefly with a prepared meal for me.

Ibu Ina, in an embroidered gown and silk head scarf, came to the door a little after nightfall and said, “It’s done, the wedding proper, I mean. Nothing left but the singing and dancing. Do you still want to come along, Tyler?”

I dressed in the best clothes I had with me, white cotton pants and a white shirt. I was nervous about being seen in public, but Ina assured me there were no strangers in the wedding party and I would be welcome in the crowd.

Despite Ina’s reassurances I felt painfully conspicuous as we walked together down the street toward the stage and the music, less because of my height than because I had been indoors too long. Leaving the house was like stepping out of water into air; suddenly I was surrounded by nothing substantial at all. Ina distracted me by talking about the newly-weds. The groom, a pharmacist’s apprentice from Belubus, was a young cousin of hers. (Ina called any relative more distant than brother, sister, aunt or uncle her “cousin”; the Minang kinship system used precise words for which there were no simple English equivalents.) The bride was a local girl with a slightly disreputable past. Both would be going
rantau
after the wedding. The new world beckoned.

The music began at dusk and would continue, she said, until morning. It was broadcast village-wide through enormous pole-mounted loudspeakers, but the source was the raised stage and the group seated on reed mats there, two male instrumentalists and two female singers. The songs, Ina explained, were about love, marriage, disappointment, fate, sex. Lots of sex, couched in metaphors Chaucer would have appreciated. We sat on a bench at the periphery of the celebration. I drew more than a few long looks from people in the crowd, at least some of whom must have heard the story of the burned clinic and the fugitive American, but Ina was careful not to let me become a distraction. She kept me to herself, though she smiled indulgently at the young people mobbing the stage. “I’m past the age of lament. My field no longer requires ploughing, as the song has it. All this fuss. My goodness.”

Bride and groom in their embroidered finery sat on mock thrones near the platform. I thought the groom, with his whip-thin mustache, looked shifty; but no, Ina insisted, it was the girl, so innocent in her blue and white brocaded costume, who was the one to watch. We drank coconut milk. We smiled. Coming on toward midnight many of the village’s women drifted away, leaving a crowd of men, young men mobbing the stage, laughing; older men sitting at tables gambling studiously at cards, faces blank as aged leather.

I had shown Ina the pages I had written about my first meeting with Wun Ngo Wen. “But the account can’t be entirely accurate,” she said during a lull in the music. “You sounded much too calm.”

“I wasn’t calm at all. Just trying not to embarrass myself.”

“Introduced, after all, to a man from Mars…” She looked up at the sky, at the post-Spin stars in their frail, scattered constellations, dim in the glare from the wedding party. “What must you have expected?”

“I suppose, someone less human.”

“Ah, but he was
very
human.”

“Yes,” I said.

Wun Ngo Wen had become something of a revered figure in rural India, Indonesia, southeast Asia. In Padang, Ina said, one sometimes saw his picture in people’s homes, in a gilded frame like a watercolor saint or famous mullah. “There was,” she said, “something extraordinarily attractive in his manner. A familiar way of speaking, even though we only heard him in translation. And when we saw photographs of his planet—all those cultivated fields—it looked so much more rural than urban. More Eastern than Western. The Earth visited by an ambassador from another world, and he was one of
us
! Or so it seemed. And he chastised the Americans in an enjoyable way.”

“The last thing Wun meant to do was scold anyone.”

“No doubt the legend outpaces the reality. Didn’t you have a thousand questions, the day you were introduced to him?”

“Of course. But I figured he’d been answering the obvious questions ever since he arrived. I thought he might be tired of it.”

“Was he reluctant to talk about his home?”

“Not at all. He loved to talk about it. He just didn’t like being interrogated.”

“My manners aren’t as polished as yours. I’m sure I would have offended him with countless questions. Suppose, Tyler, you had been able to ask him anything at all, that first day: what would it have been?”

That was easy. I knew exactly what question I had been suppressing the first time I met Wun Ngo Wen. “I would have asked him about the Spin. About the Hypotheticals. Whether his people had learned anything we didn’t already know.”

“And
did
you ever discuss that with him?”

“Yes.”

“And did he have much to say?”

“Much.”

I glanced at the stage. A new
saluang
group had come on. One of them was playing a
rabab
, a stringed instrument. The musician hammered his bow against the belly of the
rabab
and grinned. Another lewd wedding song.