Wanderlust (20 page)

Rob, a crew cut English salvage diver, explained the deal. There was a wreck out there in deep water, a Chinese vessel that had sunk hundreds of years before. But there was a problem with the Malaysian archaeological authority. Rather than risk losing his booty, Captain Lars and his crew had plundered the wreck without permission, sweating and waiting on the estuary for the paperwork to arrive from Kuala
Lumpur. They'd retrieved hundreds of pieces of pottery, bundled them in heavy tarps and rope, and sunk them again in shallower water.

It's not easy to find things on the floor of the sea, even if you know where you put them. The loads were scattered, the better to avoid detection. Once we'd found the first one, Rob said, they would leave me there while he and Stefan moved on to the next, then Rob would surface and return with a cable. Rob explained all this while the three of us bobbed on the surface, holding on to the anchor line. I set the bezel on my new watch, Rob pointed his thumb down, and we dropped away from the sun.

The water was brown and murky; we were where the estuary met the sea. I could barely see the sand below me approach before I bumped it with my knees. Rob attached the end of a line to a rock near the anchor, and spooled it out while we followed him through the dark haze. I thought of Hansel and Gretel and their disappearing bread crumbs, trying to find their way back home. We came to a roped bundle, a foot tall and two feet wide, and Rob signaled me to stay put. He and Stefan kicked a few times and disappeared.

The current was strong as the sea sucked out the tide. I pointed myself into the onrush and held on. I breathed in and floated up, breathed out and floated down. I had no sense of passing time, couldn't tell after a while if it had been a couple of minutes or fifteen. I held my watch to my face and saw that it had stopped.
I'm on the bottom of the sea,
I told myself, prodding the soft areas of my mind to see if I felt fear. But fear requires imagination, and I wasn't imagining anything now. Mostly I felt calm.

I hadn't even noticed the clouds gathering, but as we docked a rainstorm burst down. The dry clothes I'd just put back on, a sleeveless cotton shirt
and a long flowered skirt, were immediately plastered to my body. I ran along the wharf, careful not to step into any of the gaps. My cheeks hurt, either from gripping the air regulator with my teeth or from smiling so hard. Everything was going the way it was meant to go.

Later that night I examined my watch and confirmed it was permanently stilled. I threw it away. It was the last watch I would own for ten years.

Ah Chung was a diffident host, quietly generous in that way that makes you ask yourself why we aren't like that in the West, or if we are, why we outgrow it so soon. I'd never invited strangers to stay in my home or driven them around town.

I asked vaguely about the
orang asli,
the indigenous people who live in the jungle, and Ah Chung took me into the woods, to a witch doctor with a face like a walnut. The old man squatted in the doorway to his hut, which sat on stilts with a little ladder leading up. He asked me if I would like him to cast a spell, and, with Ah Chung translating, I said sure. Since I was a young woman, the witch doctor figured I would want a love spell. “He needs a food item on which to cast,” Ah Chung said. Perhaps a teaspoon of sugar, the witch doctor suggested, which I would then have to feed to the object of the spell. I scrounged in my bag and found half a package of cough drops, purchased for the dry air on the plane. On whom would I like to cast the spell? I shrugged and thought of Stu. “I want him to love me forever,” I blithely told Ah Chung. The witch doctor did his hocuspocus, and I tossed the cough drops back into my bag. More magic and potions, like Tristan and Iseult.

I couldn't stay in place. Movement had brought me here, so movement, it stood to reason, would bring me more good things.

Tioman Island was the kind of place billed as a tropical paradise. When I disembarked I walked down a sandy road, and checked into a beach hut alone. I was at a loss as to what to do. As I walked along the beach I felt watched and self-conscious, all the more so because there were few people around, and so I couldn't hide in a crowd. I sat and looked at the water—turquoise, sparkling—and a solitary four-foot-long monitor lizard lumbered into view, lazily swinging her reptilian tail before coming to a complete halt. She seemed to calmly consider the landscape, at ease in her habitat. I wondered how people got that comfortable with themselves.

Everybody talked about finding themselves, but maybe you had to get lost first. Any teenager of any intelligence, who is exposed to more than one culture, sooner or later asks the anthropological question: How much of who I am is defined by the world around me, and how much is something more innate? Is it ten to one ? Fiftyfifty? The obvious way to find out is to move from one context to another. Putting myself in new situations, I thought, would act as a purifying fire, charring away all the dross and leaving some essential self. Philosophers and travel writers down the ages have explored the question. In his collection
Fresh Air Fiend,
Paul Theroux writes, “On my own, I had a clearer sense of who I was. . . . ”

I wanted that clarity. Without my own culture, would there still be something left? Or would I burn away to nothing? Now that I was alone on the beach, nothingness seemed possible. With people around, there was always some obvious way to manifest yourself. You got dressed, got on the boat, tried a word or two of Malay. Alone I didn't know what I did. I watched myself watch the monitor lizard, who I bet didn't have this kind of problem. She was at peace,
living her lizardy life. Far away down the beach, a few people ambled in and out of view. I feared that one of them might come close, not because I thought someone would harm me, but because I felt like there was no one at home in my body. I had no self to present; there was no one to show the world. She—I—had gone off to reformulate and was hopefully coming back. Sometimes you're at a loss for words; I was at a loss for self.

I thought of a book I'd once toted around in my backpack, one that Mona, during our travels in the Middle East, had given to me as a gift. In Jack Kerouac's
On the Road,
Sal Paradise reflects on the moment he woke up, around sunset, in a hotel in Des Moines. He thinks:

When I got to Kota Bahru, a city on the northeast coast, I was relieved to be alone in a crowd instead of alone-alone. I checked into my own room in a cheap hotel with walls that didn't go quite to the ceiling, and went out at dusk. A night market of food stalls was just opening up, and near it, I sorted out coins and dialing codes to make my first call to Stu since I'd left. There was a delay on the line, but we worked with the rhythm. He told me he was fixing up
the terraces in the backyard, and I tried to describe the scene around me: The women wore the most colorful head scarves, in pink, yellow, and poppy red. The stalls served spicy noodles with fried eggs on top. When I got off the phone I felt like a lifeline to comfort and company had been cut off. I jangled around in my pockets, counted out more change, and placed a call to my parents.

“Grandma died,” my mother said, and I could hear the quaver in her voice. Grandma Celia had been eighty-three years old and ill for many months, since well before I left. I felt sad mostly for my mother, but I didn't know how to express it. Being far away is a boon for people who are bad at expressing things. I heard myself say, “Oh no, oh no,” but the din of the night market rose up around me. They were planning the funeral; I wondered if my mother wished I would return for it, but neither of us raised the possibility.

Recently I'd seen my grandmother only a few times a year. Because I missed seeing my family go through the loss, and missed the ceremony, her death would never seem real to me; it would just feel like a longer and longer stretch since I'd seen her last. From my distance the loss was theoretical, and though I couldn't have said so, I preferred it that way. I felt relieved to be so far away, because I was excused from grieving. I felt nothing but tenderness for her, but there was an emotional emancipation to being here and not there. Even though I didn't believe in God or heaven, I could childishly go on believing that she was still around.

When it happened, the specific timing of my grandmother's death seemed like a footnote: She died just after I went away. But a lesson would persist as I formed and unformed long-distance relationships over the years. Going away could free you from feeling too much.

chapter sixteen

I
found Kristin, as agreed,
in front of Singapore's luxurious Raffles Hotel, which didn't allow our scruffy kind into its lobby. She'd been to Indonesia with her boyfriend, Jeremy, and was now marveling at the scope and variety of her bug bites. She held up her welted limbs for me to see.

Kristin was home, comfort, familiarity. We'd been best friends from the age of fifteen, and we'd stayed close even after I left for college and she started university in Vancouver. Our birthdays were a month apart. She knew about every romance and sexual adventure, knew all the things that my boyfriends and parents did not. We'd snuck out to downtown nightclubs in her father's Gran Torino, and snuck off to the birth control clinic on the bus.

We never fought but we misunderstood each other often, so different were our tastes and goals. We almost never liked the same boys, and for a career she wanted to do something with money. She hadn't moved away from Vancouver but she took big trips; she had visited me in Egypt and would visit other places I lived. We both regarded our buddy trip to Australia as a sort of last hurrah, a bachelorette party before we got old, which, with the wisdom of our twenty-three years, looked like it was going to happen very soon.