The Girls From Corona Del Mar (20 page)

“That’s good,” Arman said, though he still seemed nervous. They kept walking along the seawall. The dargah was more than five hundred meters from shore and it seemed they might never get there.

“I don’t think we should keep going,” Arman said finally.

“What do you mean?”

They kept walking forward but they slowed their steps.

“People are looking,” Arman said. “I just don’t think we should be here.”

“The guidebook said we could—”

“I know, but—” he began to say, and right at that moment Lorrie Ann felt something hit the back of her head.

“Let’s go,” Arman took her by the arm and spun her around, walking her in the opposite direction.

“What was that?” Lorrie Ann asked, reaching to feel the back of her head.

“Don’t touch it. Don’t,” Arman said, but it was already too late. Her hand had found the huge wad of rapidly cooling mucus stuck to her hair. Lorrie Ann snatched her hand away, looked at her fingers.

“They spit on me?”

“Yes, don’t touch it,” Arman said. “You don’t want to get TB.”

“They spit on me?” she asked again, unable to understand. She shook her hand, not wanting to rub it clean on her pretty outfit, but desperate to get the slime off her fingers. She began to hyperventilate, but she wasn’t sure why. Another part of her was perfectly calm: So you were spit on, so what?

“Why would they do that?” she asked Arman, her voice quavery like a child’s.

“Because you’re an infidel,” Arman said gruffly. “Let’s go to McDonald’s.”

And so they went to McDonald’s, where they bought Maharaja Macs and where Lorrie Ann was able to wash the phlegm out of her hair in the women’s restroom. After frantically scrubbing her hands with the pale pink soap that seemed to be a staple of all bathrooms throughout the world, no matter what country you were in, she returned to the table and pretended to think it was funny and part of a great adventure that she had been spit on.

Arman laughed too. They giggled, eating their curried French fries, sipping their Diet Cokes. Neither of them commented on how odd it
was that Arman, with his shorts, his Metallica T-shirt, his pierced ears, and his long flowing hair, had not been spit on. Nor did Lorrie Ann broach the wild panic floating just beneath the surface of her mind that somehow the person had known what she had done, had spit on her not because of her blond hair and her inadequate scarf, but because of Zach, because of Dana, because of the drugs, because of the way she let Arman touch her body at night, even the way she let him hold her throat while they were kissing in a gentle parody of strangulation, as though it were essential for his eroticism that he toy with the idea of killing her. She believed, on some level, that the man who had spit on her had seen all of this and had known, known as Arman had said, that she was an infidel.

She did not belong in God’s house. That much she knew for sure, even as she ate the Maharaja Mac, even as she reached out a hand and snagged one of Arman’s huge brown fingers and squeezed, smiling in his eyes.

And so they decided, later that night, to head down to Goa and they bought bus tickets the very next morning. Goa: land of untariffed beer and white sandy beaches, nesting place of American hippies, wanton sprawl of spice farms traversed by elephants wearing garlands of flowers, the spring break destination of every young Indian student. Goa, surely, would be kind to them and would restore order to what had increasingly become a jumble of events they were unable to interpret. Things had stopped leading from one to another. A monkey could just swoop down from a tree and steal your bag of chips. A man could spit on you or take pictures of you when you were bleeding and nothing at all would happen except that later you might go to Leopold’s and drink what you thought was perhaps the best Long Island Iced Tea you’d ever had in your life. Imagine finding it in India! Of all places!

In other words, the proper scale of things was dangerously askew and reality was fraying. Goa was supposed to fix all of that, or at least Lorrie
Ann hoped it would. Between the malaria medication and the state of her life, she was having nightmares every night. She wasn’t the kind to wake up screaming, but the kind to wake up silent and paralyzed, and so she rarely woke Arman and instead spent many two a.m.’s watching Bombay flicker outside their hotel window, smoking a cigarette, piecing together dreams that seemed to be about her mother, about the Native Americans, about Iraq and Jim and gunfire amid the floating minarets of impossibly beautiful mosques, about Zach and a preacher who stood over him speaking in tongues and foaming at the mouth.

Whatever the procedure may have been for boarding the bus to Goa, Lorrie Ann and Arman were unable to determine what it was. They stood in a mob of anxious people with suitcases late at night, where they repeatedly asked others if they were in the right place. They were told that they were, but neither Lorrie Ann nor Arman felt at all sure that they would make it onto a bus, which was why when a man beckoned them to board, they simply got on, even though the bus he put them on was not the first-class, air-conditioned bus with sleeping bunks they had been promised and had paid for, but a stifling tour bus where the AC was broken and the seats did not recline. As soon as they ascertained from their neighbors that the bus was indeed going to Goa, they decided it was worth it to just stay on and not make a fuss.

The drive, they soon discovered, was through a series of switchbacks in the mountains that the bus took at far above what seemed a safe speed. In fact, the bus was so loaded down that the brakes were not actually fully functioning, or at least this was Arman’s interpretation of the frantic way the bus driver would punch the horn as he headed into each curve, warning all other cars to get out of the way. Traffic lanes in India were also more of a suggestion than a mandate, and so the bus driver handled the wild fishtailing of his vehicle with aplomb by making use of both his own lanes and the lanes reserved for oncoming traffic. It was hot inside the bus and it smelled strongly of exhaust. They had boarded
at ten at night and were expected to arrive at their destination in Goa at seven in the morning.

For about the first two hours, Lorrie Ann felt she was having an adventure. By two in the morning, she felt trapped in a nightmare. She was unable to sleep, yet unable to stay awake. The floor of the bus was burning hot from the engines, and so she couldn’t let her sandaled feet touch the floor without the skin of her feet starting to blister. She actually started crying at one point, silent tears just slipping down her face, both because she was uncomfortable and because she was ashamed that being uncomfortable was proving to be too much for her. At a rest stop she peed and then managed to beg two Valium off some British tourists, young men who agreed that this bus ride was one of the worst things that had ever happened to them.

The Valium helped, but it still seemed to be an eternity before they arrived in Goa and the bus ride came to an end. Lor realized that the fact that she was in such psychological distress from a simple nine hours of discomfort—not even pain, just discomfort—was a sign of how radically different she was from the Indians around her, who accepted this trial as nothing more than an ordinary part of life. All of the Indians were laughing and excited as they exited the bus, stretching their limbs joyfully, ready for a day of touristing in sunny Goa. Arman, even, had taken it a bit better than she had, and it made her understand more fully how much one is changed by war. Lor, of course, had never fought in a war. She had never even run an obstacle course. The most that she had done, really, was birth a child—even that she had done with an epidural and, in the end, while unconscious.

It made her think that all of Arman’s talk about fat-fuck Americans being somehow unworthy of their status as world megapower was more justified than she had at first thought.

Despite the hellish ambiance of the journey, Goa was all they had been promised and more. Their hotel was located in a tiny and little-touristed village called Mandrem and was a large two-story circular green building like a beautifully frosted layer cake. She and Arman took
a room on the ground floor that contained a platform bed, a small bathroom where the water that came out of the tap was a deep umber brown, and a small niche in the wall that housed a pure white statue of Ganesh, the plaster never having been painted. Their room smelled faintly of incense. The walls were painted purple and green. The tile floor was a mosaic of different colors of marble.

The other guests of the hotel were largely British or Australian. Most were families, the parents in their thirties or so, their children naked and brown with suntan, running around the terraced gardens like some kind of hippie fantasy. If it was taboo to bare your shoulders in Bombay, white women in Goa worried about no such thing, and wandered about in shocking states of undress, naked under thin silk dresses, or else topless at the beach. No one ever worried about anything, not even about what time it was, and businesses had no set hours of operation. If a business was closed, you could just continue to knock at the door and someone might come who could help you. If not, you would try again later, or else you wouldn’t. You could rent a motorcycle on the strength of your word and a promise to bring it back sometime in the next week. You could pay a young man in a music shop to teach you how to build a guitar. You could get vegetable fritters by the fistful for ten cents American. You could spend all afternoon drinking beer and roasting on the sand, not being bothered by anyone except, at one point, a curious little calf the color of coffee with lovely black eyes as shiny as lacquered boxes.

And yet, reality here proved not to be any more lucid than reality in Bombay. In fact, with each passing day, Lorrie Ann felt she was falling deeper and deeper into some sort of terrible, unending dream.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Part of the problem was that they had no plan. When they had first decided to go to India, it was “for a few months” and “to bum around.” They assumed they would have some kind of enlightening experience that would allow them to discover what the next part of their lives should be. They were counting on India to be the mystical experience that would save them from their secular, Western nightmare, allow them to find their true selves, etc., etc. And yet, it turned out, India was a real place. It wasn’t just a fantasy. And they had a set amount of money and a set amount of drugs, both of which were slowly running out.

What would they do when they ran out of pills? They had been in India only a month and already the pills were more than half gone. “We should start conserving,” Arman said when Lorrie Ann pointed this out, and yet neither of them did anything to begin cutting back. They continued budgeting three pills a day each, but almost always having four. Lor wondered if she would get sick when they ran out. In a way, she was looking forward to it: a few cleansing days of fever and then a fresh start, sober, clear eyed. Perhaps then India would do its work on her. Perhaps India was failing to affect her because she was too high.

Obviously she did not think these things consciously; one does not think such stupid things consciously. Only assumptions, which are by nature unexamined, are allowed to be this stupid. Lor assumed these things as they lay naked on the sand or naked under their mosquito netting, as they ate Starbursts filled with drugs and drank lukewarm soda, as they befriended a dog outside a restaurant, or watched a man carrying
a giant bag full of eggs on his head: perhaps two hundred eggs, balanced there atop his head in the bulging see-through garbage bag, magically not breaking.

Running out of drugs was not as worrisome to Lor as what would happen when they ran out of money. They had started the trip with roughly six thousand dollars. Three thousand had been eaten up by airfare, vaccines, and visas. (They had not exactly gotten all of the vaccines, but they had gotten some of them and they had bought the malaria medication. It was just that hepatitis B vaccine—you had to get it over the span of six months!) Luckily, India was incredibly cheap, and so they had spent only a thousand dollars in their first month. But eventually they would have to do something to generate money; eventually they would have to stop being tourists and start living lives. It was the slowly depleting tally of her bank account that made Lor know this.

In a way, it would have been better if they had had less money. There would have been a distinct call to action, an end in sight. It was worse to know they could go on this way, aimlessly vacationing, for months.

She sent her mother a postcard of the Taj Mahal, even though they hadn’t been to see it. The card read, “Dear Mom, I miss you and Zach every day. I still don’t understand how you could let them take him like that. It must mean that you think I’m some kind of monster. It must make it worse that I ran off to India. Perhaps it will make you hate me even more, but I am happy here. Much love, Monster.”

But she wasn’t happy. Not at all.

And then, one day, they met a woman.

They had been living for two weeks in the pretty green hotel that looked like a layer cake, where every morning they would sit on the veranda and play with the pug dog, Rosa, who had a lame back leg but who did not seem to mind, and where they would drink a pot of delicious French press coffee and eat a bowl of mango, coconut, papaya, and strawberries. The veranda overlooked a river that led out to the ocean,
and Arman and Lorrie Ann would watch passively as it emptied itself unceasingly before them, a scintillating python of coppery brown-blue. The proprietor of the hotel was a small Afghani man named Rinoo, who never wore any shoes and who also never frowned. He was always smiling, calling Lorrie Ann Princess of the West and calling Arman Baba G, both in seeming sincerity. If they wanted to do something, it was Rinoo they asked where they ought to go or how it could be arranged.