‘None at all.’
‘Ceram, Ambon, Kai Besar … they’re just islands like any other now.’
‘Safer than Mururoa.’
Prabir said, ‘Did I ever tell you about the time she debated the theory of evolution with a Texan creationist minister on
the net, and he publicly admitted that she’d changed his mind?’
Felix smiled and shook his head stoically. ‘No. Go on, tell me.’
‘He was a brave man, actually. He got excommunicated, or whatever it is they do to lapsed creationists.’
‘I believe the technical term is “lynching”.’
They sat talking until four a.m. When they staggered into bed, Felix was asleep within seconds. Prabir stared blearily at
the open door of his room; even with the apartment to themselves he felt exposed, but he was too cold to get up and close
it.
He dreamt that his father was standing in the doorway, looking in. Prabir couldn’t see his face in the darkness, and struggled
to decide whether his stare was reproachful. Everything he knew about Rajendra suggested that he wouldn’t have been angry,
but Prabir was still ashamed that he’d let his father stumble upon him like this, without warning.
But as the silhouette in the doorway took on more detail, Prabir realised that his father was oblivious to Felix. There were
more important things on his mind. Rajendra was holding an infant in his arms, rag-doll limp. He was rocking her back and
forth, weeping inconsolably with grief.
Prabir lay in the bath so long that he ran out of room to add hot water. He climbed out, shivering, and pulled the plug.
As the bath refilled, he picked up the paper knife, closed his eyes, rehearsed the strokes. He’d deliberately avoided testing
the blade on his skin; the only part of the knife he’d touched was the plastic handle. Anyone who could stick a kebab skewer
through his cheeks ought to be able to lull the relevant part of his brain into believing that there was no real threat from
a couple of scrapes with this toy.
He stepped into the bath again, scalding his legs, swearing irritably. He didn’t want to feel any discomfort at all now; he
wanted to die as pleasantly as possible. But every kind of potentially lethal legal pharmaceutical he could imagine getting
his hands on came with a dose-limiting enzyme, and he couldn’t bring himself to buy street drugs that would turn him into
a stranger as he went. Drain cleaner was even less attractive, and he didn’t trust himself to have the courage to jump from
a bridge.
He lay down in the bath, submerged up to his chin. He went over the message to Felix and Madhusree one more time; it was sitting
in his notepad in the kitchen, waiting to be sent, but Prabir knew it by heart. He was happy with the wording,
he decided. Neither of them were idiots: they’d understand his reasons, and they wouldn’t blame themselves.
He’d done what he’d set out to do: he’d carried her to safety. He was proud of that. But it wouldn’t do either of them much
good if he kept on going through the motions for another fifty years, just because it was the only thing that felt worthwhile
to him.
He’d very nearly kept her from joining the expedition, which would have ruined her whole career. Two days after she’d left,
he’d almost followed her, which would have humiliated her in front of all her colleagues. And though he knew that she’d be
safe, there was nothing he could do, nothing he could tell himself, to banish the feeling that he was standing idly by while
she walked across a minefield.
There was only one way to cut the knot.
Prabir dragged the blade across his left wrist. He barely felt it pierce the skin; he opened his eyes to check the extent
of the wound.
A red plume, already wider than his hand, was spreading through the water. The dark core looked almost solid, like some tightly
packed blood-rich membrane uncoiling from the space beneath his skin. For several long seconds he lay motionless and watched
the plume growing, observing the effect of his heartbeat on the flow, following the tongues of fluid at the edges as they
diffused into the water.
Then he declaimed loudly, to remove all doubt, ‘I don’t want to do this. I’m not going to do this.’
He scrambled to his feet and reached for a towel. The wound was even more shocking when it hit the air, spraying blood down
over his chest and legs. He wrapped it in the towel, almost slipping on the floor of the bath, his paralysis turning to panic.
He stumbled out of the bathroom.
It was only a cut, a paper-thin slit
. There had to be something he could do to stop the bleeding.
Tie a tourniquet
. But where, exactly? And how
tight? If he got it wrong, he could still bleed to death. Or lose his arm.
He knelt in front of the TV. ‘Search: emergency first aid.’
The entire screen was filled instantly with tiny icons; there must have been thirty thousand of them. It looked like a garden
of mutated red crosses, stylised flowers in some toy-world evolution program. Prabir swayed on his knees, appalled but mesmerised,
trying to think what to do next.
Help me, Baba
.
‘No sacred, no mystic, no spiritual.’ The garden thinned visibly. ‘No alternative. No holistic.’ The towel was turning red.
‘No
yin
, no
yang
, no
chi
, no
karma
. No nurturing, no nourishing, no numinous …’
The TV remarked smugly, ‘Your filtering strategy is redundant,’ and displayed a Venn diagram to prove its point. The first
three words he’d excluded had eliminated about a quarter of the icons, but after that he’d just been relassoing various sub-sets
of the New Age charlatans he’d already tossed out. Whatever pathology had spawned the remainder of the noise employed an entirely
different vocabulary.
Prabir was at a loss as to how to proceed. He pointed to an icon at random; a pleasant, neuter face appeared and began to
speak. ‘If the body is a text, as Derrida and Foucault taught us—’
Prabir closed the site then fell forward laughing, burying his face between his forearms, pressing down on the wound with
his forehead. ‘Thank you, Amita! Thank you, Keith!’ How could he have forgotten everything they’d taught him?
‘No
transgressive
.’
He looked up. Thousands of icons had vanished, but tens of thousand remained. Half a dozen new fads had swept the antiscience
world since Amita’s day.
Liberation Prosody. Abbess Logic. Faustian Analysis. Dryad Theory
. Prabir hadn’t bothered to track their ascent or learn their jargon; he was free of all that shit, it couldn’t touch him any
more.
He stared at the screen, light-headed. There had to be genuine help, genuine knowledge, buried in there somewhere. But he’d
die before he found it.
As
he’d meant to. So why fight it?
There was a comforting drowsiness spreading through his body, a beautifully numbing absence flowing in through the wound.
He’d made the whole business messier than it might have been, but in a way it seemed far less bleak, far less austere, to
die like this – absurdly and incompetently – than if he’d done it in the bath without a hitch. It wasn’t too late to curl
up on the floor and close his eyes.
No, but it was almost too late to do anything else.
He staggered to his feet and bellowed, ‘Call an ambulance!’
‘You might not find her,’ Felix warned him. ‘Are you prepared for that?’
Prabir glanced up nervously at the departure list; he’d be boarding the flight to Sydney in five minutes. Madhusree had covered
her tracks well, and no one at the university had been willing to provide him with the expedition’s itinerary. All he could
do was fly to Ambon, then start asking around.
He said, ‘I’m doing this to satisfy my own curiosity. It was my parents’ work; I want to know where it would have led them.
If I happen to run into my sister while I’m there, that will be a pleasant coincidence, nothing more.’
Felix replied drily, ‘That’s right: stick to the cover story, even under torture.’
Prabir turned to him. ‘You know what I hate most about you, Menéndez?’
‘No.’
‘Everything that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Everything that doesn’t kill
me
just fucks me up a bit more.’
Felix grimaced sympathetically. ‘Irritating, isn’t it? I’ll see if I can cultivate a few more neuroses while you’re away,
just to even things out a bit.’ He took hold of Prabir’s hand between
the seats, and stroked the all-but-vanished scar. ‘But if I’d met you when I was fucked up myself, it probably would have
killed us both.’
‘Yeah.’ Prabir’s chest tightened. He said, ‘I won’t always be like this. I won’t always be dragging you down.’
Felix looked him in the eye and said plainly, ‘You don’t drag me down.’
Prabir’s flight was called. He said, ‘I’ll bring you back a souvenir. Do you want anything particular?’
Felix thought about it, then shook his head. ‘You decide. Anything from a brand-new phylum will be fine by me.’
The flight from Toronto touched down in Los Angeles and Honolulu before terminating in Sydney. Prabir changed planes for Darwin
without leaving the airport. Choosing this route over Tokyo and Manila had been purely a matter of schedules and ticket prices,
but as the red earth below gave way to verdant pasture and great mirrors of water, it was impossible not to dwell upon how
close he was coming to retracing his steps away from the island. The boat full of refugees from Yamdena had landed in Darwin,
and he and Madhusree had been flown back there from Exmouth before finally leaving the country via Sydney. The more he thought
about it, the more he wished he’d gone out of his way to avoid these signposts; the last thing he wanted to do was descend
systematically through the layers of his past, as if he was indulging in some kind of deliberate act of regression. He should
have swooped down from Toronto by an unfamiliar route, and arrived in Ambon feeling as much like a stranger as possible.
He stepped out of the terminal at Darwin into a blast of tropical heat and humidity. It was barely half an hour later, local
time, than it had been in Toronto when he left; even with three stops along the way, he’d almost kept pace with the turning
of the Earth. The sky was full of threatening clouds, which seemed to spread the glare of the afternoon sun rather than diminish
it. February was the middle of the wet season here, as it was in most of the former Indonesia, but Madhusree’s expedition
wasn’t mistimed; in the Moluccas the pattern
of the monsoon winds was reversed, and there it would be
musim teduh
, the calm season, the season for travel.
The flight to Ambon left the next morning. Prabir slung his backpack over his shoulders and started walking, ignoring the
bus that was waiting to take passengers into the city centre. Once he checked into the hotel he’d probably fall asleep immediately,
but if he could hold off until early evening he’d be able to start the next day refreshed and in synch. With six hours to
kill and no interest in window shopping, the simplest method he could think of to stave off boredom would be to wander through
the city on foot. His notepad had already acquired a local street map, so he was in no danger of getting lost.
He headed north out of the airport precinct, past playing fields and a cemetery, into a stretch of calm green tropical suburbia.
At first he felt self-conscious when he passed other pedestrians – the size of his backpack marked him clearly as a tourist
– but no one gave him a second glance. It felt good to stretch his legs; the pack wasn’t heavy, and even the surreal heat
was more of a novelty than a hardship.
There was nothing on these serene, palm-lined streets to remind him of the detention camp two thousand kilometres away, but
as he passed what looked like the grounds of a boarding school, he recalled his parents discussing the possibility of sending
him to Darwin to study. If they’d had their way, he might have sat out the war here.
So why hadn’t he?
Had he dissuaded them somehow? Thrown some kind of tantrum? He couldn’t remember.
The afternoon downpour began, but the trees along the verge gave plenty of cover and his pack was waterproof. He kept walking
north, away from the hotel. The earthy smell of the air as it rained made him ache with a kind of frustrated nostalgia: he
couldn’t decide whether the scent of the storm reminded him of Calcutta, the island, or just Darwin itself.
The answer came a few minutes later, when the road ended
at a hospital. He stood in the rain, staring at the entrance. He would never have recognised the building by sight alone,
but he knew that he’d been here before.
His mother had been in labour for eight or nine hours, starting late at night. He’d been put to bed somewhere far enough away
from the delivery room that he couldn’t hear a sound, and he’d fallen asleep assuming – with a mixture of resentment and gratitude
– that he’d miss out on everything. But in the morning his father had woken him and asked, ‘Do you want to see your sister
being born?’
While the violence of the birth itself had unnerved him, even his mother’s suffering hadn’t been able to distract him entirely
from the strangest part of what he was witnessing. Two cells that might as easily have been shed from his parents’ bodies
like flakes of skin had instead succeeded in growing into an entirely new human being. That they’d done this deep inside his
mother was clearly of no small consequence to her, but what struck Prabir even more forcefully than the realisation that he’d
emerged in the same dramatic fashion himself was the understanding that he too had been built from nothing but air and food
and ancestry, just as this child had been built, month by month back on the island, right before his eyes.
He’d long ago accepted his parents’ account of his own growth. He was not at all like a child-shaped balloon, merely swelling
up with food; rather, he grew the way a city grew, with buildings and streets endlessly torn apart and reconstructed. A vast
collection of templates inside him was used to assemble, from the smallest fragments of each digested meal, the molecules
needed to repair and rebuild and extend every part of his body. Great fleets of microscopic couriers rode crystalline scaffolding,
swam rivers thicker than treacle, and negotiated guarded portals to carry the new material to the places where it was needed.
All of this was astonishing and unsettling enough, but he’d always shied away from pursuing it to its logical conclusion.
Only once Madhusree had emerged, staring uncomprehendingly into a room full of faces and lights that he knew she’d never remember,
had Prabir finally seen beyond the vanishing point of his own memories. The thing he knew first-hand about her was equally
true of himself: he had once not existed at all. He’d been air and water, crops and fertiliser, a mist of anonymous atoms
spread across India, across the whole planet. Even the genes that had been used to build him had been kept apart until the
last moment, like the torn halves of a pirate’s map of an island yet to be created.
While his mother cradled the child in her arms, his father had knelt by the bed, kissing them both, laughing and sobbing,
delirious with happiness. Prabir had been relieved that his mother was no longer in agony, and quite smitten with his newborn
sister, but that hadn’t stopped him from wondering what she’d actually done to deserve all this adoration. Nothing he hadn’t
done himself. And that would always be true: however precocious she turned out to be, he’d had too much of a head start to
be overtaken. His position was unassailable.
Unless he was working from the wrong assumptions. He’d always imagined that he’d somehow earned his parents’ love, but what
if his sister’s reception was proof that you began life not with a blank slate, devoid of either merit or blame, but with
a kind of unblemished record that could only be marred? In that case, the best he could hope for would be to slip no further
while he waited for her to fall as far.
He’d felt ashamed of these thoughts immediately, and though that wasn’t enough to quash his jealousy, he’d resolved, there
and then, never to take it out on Madhusree. If his parents continued to favour her – once the understandable fog of emotions
brought on by the birth itself had cleared – then that would be their fault entirely. It was obvious that she’d played no
part in it.
Nineteen and a half years later, Prabir wasn’t sure that any of these thoughts really had run through his head in the
delivery room. He didn’t trust memories of sudden revelations or resolutions; it seemed more likely that he’d reached the
same conclusions over a period of months, then grafted them on to his memories of the birth. Still, it made him cringe to
think that he could have been so calculating and smug, however absurd it was to judge himself in retrospect by adult standards.
And in one sense he couldn’t even claim to have advanced much beyond that child’s perspective: he still couldn’t untangle
the reasons for his parents’ love.
On one level it seemed utterly unmysterious: caring for your children was as indispensable as every other drive for reproduction
or survival. It might be a struggle to raise a family, the way it was a struggle to gather food or find a mate, but the end
result was as unequivocally satisfying as eating or fucking, as self-evidently right as breathing.
The only trouble was, this was bullshit. Even writing off as aberrations the vast number of parents who never came close to
that ideal, no one’s love was unconditional. Children could gain or lose favour through their actions, just like any stranger.
Had the possibility of rejection itself been fine-tuned by natural selection, to improve the child’s prospects of survival
by instilling a suitably pragmatic moral code? Or was it all a thousand times subtler than that? Human parents weren’t bundles
of twitching reflexes; they agonised over every decision. And yet, you could reflect and reason all you liked, mapping out
an elaborate web of consequences that might not have occurred to you if you’d acted in haste, but in the end you still had
to decide what was right, and the touchstone for that was as primal as it was for any gut feeling.
Felix would have told him that none of this mattered – however fascinating it was, scientifically. In the end
we were what we were
, and it made no difference how we’d got there. But that wasn’t such an easy mantra to recite when you’d travelled halfway
around the planet, with no clear idea why. Prabir had resigned himself to his inability to reason away the
dread he felt at the thought of Madhusree setting foot on the island; whether or not it was out of all proportion to any real
risk she faced, he couldn’t expect to shake off the past so lightly. But he wasn’t even sure what fear, or what drive, the
fulcrum of Teranesia had rendered so powerful.
Was he still trying to impress his dead parents with his dedication?
He’d always relied on his memory of them for guidance – and their imagined approval had always been the one sure sign that
he’d done something right – but he didn’t believe that he’d reduced Madhusree to a pawn in some game with the ghosts in his
head. Still less could he accept that everything between them revolved around the obscure Mendelian fact that she was the
only living person who could carry half his genes into the future. Madhusree wasn’t only his sister; she was his oldest friend
and staunchest ally. Why wouldn’t he take a few weeks’ vacation from a job he hated to look out for her in a dangerous corner
of the world?
Prabir turned away from the hospital and started back towards the city. However much he might have loved, admired and respected
her if they’d met for the first time under Amita’s roof – if she’d been adopted from some other family entirely, but still
chosen to flee that madhouse with him at the first opportunity – he was almost certain that he would never have been willing
to follow her all the way to Teranesia.
Prabir had flown into Ambon once before, but he had no clear memory of the descent. This time, at least, it was startlingly
apparent – as it had never been from sea level, approaching in the ferry – that the mist-shrouded island was actually a pair
of distinct volcanic bodies, connected in geologically recent times by a narrow isthmus of silt. Ambon Harbour was the largest
part of what had once been the strait between these two separate islands; if it had penetrated any deeper it would have come
out the other side.
Pattimura Airport lay on the north-west shore of the
harbour; Ambon City was ten kilometres due east. Prabir watched one speedboat crossing the water, overloaded with people and
luggage, and decided to take the long way round.
Waiting on the highway for the bus, he felt self-conscious in a very different way than he had in Darwin; he was almost afraid
that someone might recognise him and ask him to account for his long absence. That wasn’t very likely; the people they’d met
here had been friendly enough, but with his broken Indonesian and the family’s infrequent visits, he’d never really had the
chance to get to know anyone.
The trip around the harbour took almost an hour. The water looked much cleaner than he remembered; there’d usually been a
plume of oil and floating garbage stretching out to surround the ferry before it had even entered the harbour.
He alighted in the city and set out for the hotel. The streets were cobblestone, recently refurbished, lined with tall palm
trees at regular intervals; the whining scooters he remembered being everywhere had apparently been banished from the city
centre. There were no billboards, and no intrusively modern signs on the shops; an almost uniform row of white stone façades
shone in the sun. The whole thing was probably a calculated attempt to re-create the style of the Dutch colonial period for
the tourists, most traces of the real thing having been comprehensively bombed into dust during World War II.
He’d never learnt his way around Ambon as a child, relying on his parents to shepherd him. He recognised none of the buildings
he passed, and he had no real sense of where he was in relation to the shops and markets where they’d bought provisions. But
the angle of the light, the scent of the air, were enough to evoke a discomforting sense of reconnection. He didn’t need to
see the past re-created brick by brick to feel the tug of it inside him.
A small group of people in brightly coloured, formal-looking clothes stood at the edge of the main square, arms
outstretched at their sides, eyes half closed, perspiring heavily, singing. Behind them, a sagging cardboard sign bore a few
dozen words in Indonesian. Prabir was too tired to dredge his memory for an uncertain translation, and when he saw a citation
at the bottom – book, chapter and verse – he decided not to bother fishing out his notepad for help.
Hordes of evangelical Christians from the US had descended on the region in the wake of the civil war, but they’d had far
more success in West Papua, where even the current President had been converted to born-again psychosis. Prabir wasn’t sure
why the Moluccans had proved so resistant this time round; they’d been a pushover for Spanish Catholicism, then chucked it
all in for Dutch Protestantism – though that must have been at least partly a matter of trying to get along with whoever held
the guns to their heads from year to year. Maybe the Americans hadn’t tried hard enough to conceal their phobia of Islam,
which would not have gone down too well here. Relations between Christians and Muslims on Ambon had suffered almost irreparable
damage in the early years of the post-Suharto chaos, with provocateur-led riots claiming hundreds of lives. A decade later,
entire villages had been wiped out under cover of war. With independence, the government of the Republik Maluku Selatan had
set about reviving a five-hundred-year-old tradition of alliances between Christian and Muslim villages; these
pela
alliances had once been famously successful at defusing inter-religious tensions, and still ran so deep on some outlying
islands that Christians built mosques for their neighbours, Muslims built churches. The return of
pela
, with the opportunity it provided to write off the years of violence as an aberration, was probably the main reason the RMS
hadn’t torn itself apart in an endless cycle of revenge killing.