The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011 (33 page)

He could hear himself, breathing hard. “I’m okay, kiddo. I’m okay. That wasn’t good, but we’re fine.”

They weren’t fine. Ignoring the quivering in his shoulder he tried to take stock. The rocks were bigger here. He couldn’t get back to where they’d been. He couldn’t quarter upstream and intercept the path because there was a flat pale rock the size of a small table in the way, and the water below it was too deep. “Do me a favor, kid,” he said. “See if you can feel where my eyes are. That’s it, don’t worry—I’ve got you. Now when I count to three, I’ll close my left eye and you wipe the sweat out with your thumb, okay?” He could feel the boy’s thumb slide gently over his eyelid. “Good, now do it again.”

There had to be a way—something he couldn’t see. There was nothing. A step behind him, the rocks were smaller. It didn’t matter. He couldn’t step back. Crossing a river meant moving forward, holding the weight on the back leg while the front foot felt for purchase. Turning around was impossible. At some point he’d have to take the full weight of the current with his legs perpendicular to the shore like a tennis player anticipating a serve; unbraced, he’d come off the bottom like nothing at all. A thin stream of panic started in his head, dulling the sound of water. He looked around stupidly, blinking back the sweat. The shore looked like it was behind a screen. He moved his right foot forward, felt it begin to slide, pulled back. Fuck you, he whispered. Fuck you.

They’d get out of this. They had to get out of this. My God, all his other fuckups were just preparations for this. This wasn’t possible. He could feel the current—strong, insistent, pumping against his thigh like a drunken lover. Was this how it went? One stupid move? One stupid fucking move, and your son on your back? No. He could do this. He tried to remember the strength he’d felt, that rude, beautiful strength, felt it pushing back the curtain of fear. There was nowhere to go.

He could barely bring himself to speak. He couldn’t move. The way ahead was impossible. Far below, he could hear the water sucking on the shallow cavity made by his hip. The river. It wanted to be whole, unbroken. It wanted him gone. He could see it, forming and re-forming, thick-walled jade, smoothing out its sides with its thumbs like a hypnotized potter. The water blurred. He wanted to scream for help. There was no one—just the rushing plain of the river, the trees. He couldn’t move. A muscle in his shoulder was jerking like a poisoned animal. What combination of things? Everything had come together. He couldn’t move. He was barely holding on. There was no way. The river ahead was smooth, deep, gliding over brown boulders trailing beards of moss in the deep wind. He wanted to laugh. For a second, he felt the hot, shameful fire of remorse and then unending pity—for himself, for the boy on his back, for the world—and at that moment he remembered hearing about a medieval priest who, personally taking the torch from the executioner, went down the line of victims tied to their stakes and kissed each one tenderly on the cheek before lighting the tinder.

“Dad, you okay?” he heard his son saying as if from some other place. There was nowhere to go. It didn’t matter. They had to go.

And then he heard his own voice, answering. “I’m okay, buddy,” it said. “You just hang on.”

W
e met Mr. Mani because we paused on the footbridge that spanned Jalan Munshi Abdullah, a busy street near our hotel, for it was only from up there that the sign for his school, the unobtrusively named English Institute, could be seen. The school, which occupied the second floor of the decrepit building just below us, did not look promising, and when we trotted back down the steps to the street and went inside, it seemed even less so. Still, we presented our résumés to the young woman at the front desk, and she, not knowing what to do with them or us, summoned Mr. Mani from class.

Mr. Mani was a small Indian man in his sixties, no taller than either Julia or I, which put us immediately at ease, and when he smiled, he seemed at once boyish and ancient because he was missing his top front teeth. He did not speak Malaysian English, which we were still struggling to understand, but sounded in every way British, to the point that when he heard our American accents, he winced, which could have annoyed us but instead made us laugh. He studied our résumés at length before explaining, apologetically, that the school provided only enough work for
him, though when we met him for dinner that evening, we learned that he rarely spent less than twelve hours a day at the school, teaching mornings and afternoons and then, at night, checking homework and attending to paperwork. The empty space created by his missing teeth accommodated perfectly the neck of a whiskey bottle, which spent more and more time there as the night wore on, and after he had consumed a fair amount, he revealed that he stayed late at the school also as a way of hiding from his wife, whom he referred to as “my Queen.”

I do not think that it occurred to him, ever, that Julia and I were a couple, yet he spoke to us without nonsense or innuendo, mainly about his marriage, which had been arranged, stating repeatedly that he did not question the matchmaker’s thinking in putting together a poor but educated man from Kuala Lumpur and an illiterate woman from the rubber plantation. “After all, we have produced eleven children,” he pointed out proudly, confessing that, given his long hours, he saw them only when they brought his meals or attended their weekly English lessons. His favorite was the fifth child, a girl by the name of Suseelah, who loved Orwell as much as he did and loathed Dickens almost as much. In fact, he spoke of Dickens often, always with contempt, and I could not help but view it as a classic example of a man railing against his maker, for Mani was a character straight from Dickens, an affable, penniless fellow who bordered on being a caricature of himself.

When he had consumed the entire bottle of whiskey, he declared the evening complete and insisted on the minor gallantry of walking us back to our hotel, a seedy place that he promptly deemed “unsuitable for two ladies.” At the door, he shook our hands sadly and said, as though the evening had been nothing more than an extended job interview, “My ladies, I am afraid that I cannot hire you.”

“Thank you for meeting with us,” I replied.

He turned to leave but stopped, saying, “I shall pass your
résumés to my old friend Narayanasamy at Raffles College. If there are no objections, of course. The school is newly opened here in Malacca, though quite established in other areas of Malaysia, I assure you.” We thanked him for his kindness, but I am ashamed to admit that we dismissed his offer as drunken posturing.

So, of course, we were surprised to return to our hotel the next day to find a note from him informing us that Mr. Narayanasamy wished to meet us. We left early for the interview the following morning, half expecting the directions that Mani had included to be faulty, which is how we came to be sitting in the overly air-conditioned office of Mr. Narayanasamy, briefcases on our laps, waiting for him to finish a heated telephone discussion regarding funds for a copy machine.

I leaned toward Julia. “What do you make of the bed?” I whispered.

“What bed?” she whispered back.

“What bed?” I repeated, indignation adding to my volume, for, simply put, Julia often overlooked the obvious.

“Welcome to Raffles College,” Mr. Narayanasamy announced, putting down the phone and rising, hand extended to greet us, inquiring in the next breath what had brought us to Malaysia and, more specifically, to his school. When I answered that what had brought us to his school was his friend Mr. Mani, he paused before replying, “Ah yes, Mani,” the way that one would refer to laundry on the line several minutes after it has begun to rain. I knew then that I would not like this Mr. Narayanasamy. Still, we spent the next hour convincing him that we were indeed up to the task of teaching business communications, a subject we knew little about, for I was a writing teacher and Julia, ESL, and as we stood to leave, he offered us the jobs.

In the process of making myself desirable and friendly, I forgot entirely about the bed, but as we passed through the main lobby, there it was again—enormous and pristine, housed behind glass
like a museum exhibit—and Julia had the good grace to look sheepish. We stood before it in silence, believing that it would not do to be overheard discussing any aspect of our new place of employment, but finally Julia could not contain herself.

“It’s huge,” she said authoritatively, as though the bed were her find, an oddity that she was deigning to share with me but did not trust me to fully appreciate.

“Yes,” I agreed. “I don’t know how you missed it.” Then, to press my point, I added, “Julia, sometimes I think you could get into bed at night and not notice that a car had been parked at the foot of it.” I said this in an intentionally exasperated tone, a tone so exaggerated that I knew I could dismiss it as playful if need be, but Julia, pleased by our employment, merely laughed.

We settled quickly into a routine, teaching from eight in the morning until that same hour of the evening, with blocks free for eating and preparation. Business communications was tedious but not complicated, and we soon developed a system for teaching it, which we modified slightly for each of the three departments that we served: marketing, business, and hospitality management. The bed, we learned, belonged to the latter department, and we often saw its students huddled around it, notebooks open, as an instructor made and remade it, stopping to gesture at folds and even, with the aid of a meter stick, measuring the distance from bedspread to floor. Students visiting the college with their parents stopped to gaze at the bed as well, the entire family standing with a quiet air of expectation as though watching an empty cage at the zoo, and I came to realize that not only did these families consider it perfectly normal to have a bed on display but they actually seemed impressed by it, impressed and reassured, as though the bed gave them a sense that the school was for real and not some place where one did nothing but stare at books. Never did I see a student touch the bed, however, and when I asked one of the hospitality instructors why this was, she explained that what the students
needed to know was theoretical, information that could be quantified via a multiple-choice exam—which meant there was no reason for them to touch it.

The hospitality management students were, ironically, the most timid of the lot; I was hard-pressed to imagine any of them behind the desk of an actual hotel, greeting guests and making them feel at home. “Do you even understand what ‘hospitality’ means?” I blurted out one day, fed up with the way they sat in their stiff blue uniforms, red pocket kerchiefs peeking out with an almost obscene jauntiness, eyes turned downward whenever I asked a question. I turned and wrote “HOSPITALITY” across the board in large letters, and as I did, I heard behind me a low, scornful chuckle. I knew that it could only be coming from Shah, a corpulent young man who ignored the uniform policy and generally chose to wear purple, perhaps in keeping with the regal connotations of his name. Shah was an anomaly in the class—fat where the others were thin, the only Malay in a class full of Chinese, more often absent than present. He spent his days loitering around campus, attending classes sporadically, which was fine with me, for I had taken a thorough dislike to him and found it tiring to conceal the depth of my feelings. It bothered Julia greatly that I allowed myself to harbor such animosity toward a student, particularly one whom she saw as awkward and pathetic, one whose neediness, she claimed, was so wholly transparent that to respond to it as anything but neediness was to be purposely disingenuous. I mention this only so that one can see how it appeared from her perspective, for I believe (and have all along) that her position was the logical one, the one with which, in theory, I would have agreed had I never met Shah and discovered what it was like to be so utterly repelled by a student.

Already, I had been visited by his father, who was a
datuk
, a minor dignitary of the sort that made appearances at local events, speaking a few words to commemorate the occasion, generally after arriving late. He came unexpectedly during my lunch hour,
and, to the horror of the colleague sent to find me, I insisted on finishing my noodles first. When I finally entered the room where Shah and the
datuk
waited, it was ripe with the smell of Shah, an oppressively musky odor that I suspected was caused by some sort of biological malfunction, but that did nothing to make me better disposed toward him. His father was visibly annoyed at being made to wait, and I could see that this would only make things worse for Shah, which struck me as unfair but did not particularly bother me, for Shah had already caused me an inordinate amount of work and worry, and that also struck me as unfair.

Shah’s father did not speak English, but not trusting his son to translate, he had brought along a translator, through whom I explained that Shah rarely attended class and never turned in homework but that I often saw him lounging around the cafeteria. When I spoke to him about his absences, he replied, with an annoying lilt to his voice, that he had not been feeling well. “Upset stomach,” he would say coyly, patting his very large stomach as though it were a kitten he had not yet tired of. Once I sent another student to fetch him, but the boy returned alone. “He says that he is feeling faint,” the boy reported, and the others looked at me hopefully, for the students enjoyed being surprised by my behavior, which they attributed to my being American. I sensed that Shah wanted me to find him and demand his presence, and so, unwilling to give him that pleasure, I did nothing.

Throughout the course of our exchange, the
datuk
and I made no eye contact, and when the meeting was finished, we stood, but even in parting, he did not acknowledge me, instead averting his eyes until I realized that he was waiting for me to leave first. I did, and as I closed the door behind me, I could hear him yelling and then a sound like a pig snuffling at a trough, which I suspected was Shah crying.