“I work for Parentis.”
“Oh, sure. I forgot. You don’t work for the little local crooks, you work for Mr Big. I’ve been trying to be polite about it, but I don’t know how you can defend the art of building synthetic human beings, Anna. Have you no respect for the environment? Don’t you know this planet is dying of the disease of human expansionist greed?”
If she’d been less drunk, Anna would have refused to be drawn. She groaned, dragging her fingers through her sweat-soaked hair, “Ramone, I accept my share of the blame along with everyone else, but we only make babies. I don’t believe in the population problem; the problem is distribution of resources. But if there was one, the number of people who resort to HAR and wouldn’t have children without it is miniscule. There’s no way a few tiny handfuls of ‘extra’ births impact on ‘the environment’.”
“Supposing one of the mad dictators decided to have his best lobotomized-violence bodyguard cloned a billion times in vats in a secret factory. That would impact.”
“Can’t stick that one on me. We wouldn’t take the job. We don’t do out of body gestation, it isn’t safe.”
“What about single parents? What about a single, male parent, totally infertile? Would you grow him a baby in a bag, from a cell from his scrotum or something?”
“This is an incredibly stupid conversation, Ramone. I don’t know. I don’t know what I’d advise; it never comes up. Parentis doesn’t work with single parents.”
“That’s disgusting. The bastards. The complete bastards.”
“God,” Anna hauled herself to her feet. “I’m not saying whether I agree with what Parentis does or not; I think there are points on both sides. What’s it to you? You don’t want to have a baby. Look, Ramone, suppose you want a new liver one day? That new liver will be grown from a politically correct culture of your own cells, but no one would have found out how without human cloning techniques. That’s what it’s about, not mad dictators or vanity-parenting. Medicine. Making people better.”
“Oh, I get it. You’re a doctor now, like Mummy. The lady in the white coat.”
“Wolfgang,” said Anna, “could you remind me where the toilets are? Ramone don’t you dare come with me, you’re not invited, you are giving me a migraine.”
Ramone had written another book. It was called The Parable of the Star. It concerned the socially and sexually constructed meaning of celebrity. Bach good, Wagner bad, and so on. She had told them it was an important feminist text, as there deliberately weren’t any famous women listed or discussed, and had become extremely annoyed, that afternoon in Nasser apartments, when Daz and Spence and Anna had questioned this approach. The reason she was in such a bad temper had patently nothing to do with women’s rights in Sungai. It was because her friends had not read her books, would never dream of reading her books… Agreed it was tough that Daz, of all people (ex-super model, ex-docile suburban girlfriend), had become the famous feminist, a speaker at this damned rally, while Ramone was merely someone who’d come an awful long way to heckle. Poor Ramone! But why did she have to be so violent, contentious, and unreasonable?
Time was, Anna thought, I used to sort-of believe in Ramone Holyrod.
Time was, she used to sort-of believe in me.
What had possessed Anna to argue with her about HAR? Partly it was impossible to refuse a fight with Ramone. Partly a mercenary’s loyalty. As long as she took their money, as long as she owed them for the time she spent with SURISWATI, she wouldn’t be such a hypocrite as to disown Parentis in public.
Why did Ramone have to turn up, stripping the smoothness from everything, tangling the combed out strands, forcing Anna to say things she didn’t mean?
She leaned against the tiled wall, gazing at the beautiful-girl Sungainese (of both chromosomal sexes) repairing makeup, sharing drugs, adjusting clubbing costumes so porny there’d be nothing for it but the whole chador when they returned to the street. Do I really think I’m a doctor like Mummy? Surely not, no, I’m sure I don’t.
But the woman in the white coat, counseling the Nasabahs…
Another sanctuary opens its gates, privileging me, controlling me—
Ramone watched Anna go and turned to Spence. “She’s pissed off because I’m right.”
Spence downed the end of a huge crystal flower vase of Korean lager. The Riverrun served beer in liters, European style—which was helping the evening along, especially at the speed Wolfgang was setting them up. “I think you just pissed her off. Period.”
“Okay I didn’t express myself rationally, but it’s the Evil Empire. Turning the consumers themselves into consumer commodities; it’s the ultimate move in the most destructive social ethos the world has ever known. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Ghengis Khan was nothing on it. The Black Death was a pimple. You ought to know, Spence. The right to strip-mine this planet, to go through it like fat-boy teenagers robbing a fridge, is written into your Constitution.”
“No it isn’t.”
“Yes It Fucking Is!”
“You’re thinking of the Declaration of Independence.”
Ramone giggled, momentarily disarmed. “I hate where I am,” she confided, studying the bottom of her own vase. “Sexual Politics is a bust. I’m going to end up like fucking Camille Paglia: pack me up and take me down to the Antiques Roadshow. But how do I get out of it? It’s like: step one, get beyond the fucking battle of the sexes and get real. How d’you get beyond step one?”
Spence had no interest in this conversation. He shrugged, noncommittally. Ramone narrowed her eyes.
“Read any good email lately?”
“Oh yeah, email. I must let you have our address,” he said, without enthusiasm.
“S’okay. I’ve got it.”
She’d been giving him these evil, full-of-it glances ever since she arrived at Nasser apartments in her Lonely Planet drag. He’d assumed it was to do with Anna and had felt invulnerable with the Pasir Pacang week under his belt. He suddenly realized she had something different going on, some other form of attack.
“I’m not making a big thing of it,” disclosed Ramone, with openly fake reluctance. “But I’m not here on my own behalf. I’m representing Lavvy. I’m her secretary, I deal with her mail. The Sungainese have been appealing to her to take up their case. Of course we had to send the replies anonymously—”
“Is that a fact?”
“So you see, some of those secret messages you’ve been passing on were from me!”
She cackled in triumph.
Was this true? It had to be true, how else would she have known about the arrangement? Ramone, those poor kids’ hope in hell? Hideous thought! But much, much worse: the idea of his secret in her tender care… My God. If we get thrown out before she’s finished working with SURISWATI, Anna will never, ever forgive me…
Wolfgang was chatting up their waiter; Daz had been accosted by some Sungainese and was talking to them… I shredded everything. If they go through my hard drive bit by bit, they can’t pin anything on me.
Ramone sighed in satisfaction. “Spence you look terrified. Don’t worry. I won’t say a word. I won’t even let Anna know you were so careless that I found out. So, anyway, what are you going to do with the rest of your life? Since you’ve dropped out of the crypto-capitalist slacker-nerd lark. Are you settling for legalized prostitution?”
Spence glared. “Nope. I’m also working on making myself a beautiful soul.”
The effect of this sally was startling. She stared at him in furious amaze, as if he’d said your name is Rumpelstiltskin, as if he’d found the only chink in the monster’s armor, and abruptly turned away to plunge, uninvited, into the conversation of the group around Daz.
And la lutte continue, thought Spence. He had known the moment that postcard arrived that Ramone was still a threat. He guessed spiritual beauty was a card she thought she could play, somehow. Well, tough cookie sweet Ramone, because I’m in sexual possession AND I live a pure and holy life. Anna h
ad returned and was sitting quietly drinking with her “this is a time-out” face on. He would leave her in peace. Let Ramone make the bad mistake of coming on to that inviolable silence.
The loft had the nostalgic decor of a Kuta beach cocktail bar—bamboo pole flooring, palm leaf mats, woven screens, daft Balinese Beach Bum art—everything signifying a romantic retreat, good times, sun and sea and sand. People were smoking dope, people were behaving as if the cruel world outside didn’t exist, while down below the slaves of the bass line went on pounding away to one of those complex Sungai DJ dance tracks, Classic English Acid House infused with North West African rhythms, what a melting pot, fractionally recursive, always doubling back, weaving more—
gimme one of those hearts that can’t be broken,
gimme one of those lies that can’t ever be found out,
gimme one of those
gimme one of those,
gimme one of those,
are you one of those—
Spence let himself drift. Ramone was right, it was getting obscene to stay here, earning money, making love, having drug experiences, when life for the real people dancing down there was a total road accident. We don’t belong, why do we stay, where am I going to…? At dinner he’d asked Daz—you revert to the past when you meet old friends—what did she ever see in that Tex character? “I don’t know,” she’d said, taking the question as seriously as if the affair was fresh in her mind, “He was a talented wanker, among a lot of untalented utter wankers, and he was sexy, to me then, though it was hard to believe afterwards. And I was unsure of myself, as usual. I was trying to be the kind of woman I felt I ought to be—” Spence could relate to that. Fractional recursion. The handful of things you know and feelings you feel keep on returning, you never get beyond them. You leave home first chance you get: I don’t belong here, this isn’t my kind of shit, sure you will find a world where you belong, some shit you will be proud to call your own. But like the first line of a novel, encapsulating the whole story, it keeps happening over and over. You can’t escape the spiral, you can only be in the same place further along the timeline, in Spence’s case always the place where I don’t belong, just don’t fit.
He sighed, and shook himself. It must be getting on for midnight.
“Come on, Anna Livia Plurabelle. Let’s dance.”
When he looked around, she was gone. So was Ramone. There was only Wolfgang, rolling another spliff, and a fresh pair of flower vases that appeared to be filled with milky coffee. He gave Spence a roguish smile, nodding at the two empty seats.
“Sparks flying there—”
Daz and her pals were gone too, the loft was nearly empty. “Where’s Anna?”
“She left with her friend, of course, to follow those sparks. Don’t worry, have a drink.”
“What is this stuff?”
“Brandy Alexanders.”
“Arrgh.”
“I’ve been buying your beer all night. I like cocktails. Don’t be coy: I know you ex-pats, there is nothing you will not drink. Share this nightcap with me, and then we’ll go on somewhere.” Wolfie’s eyes had a chilly brightness, a strange expression that made him look like a different person. “Be nice to me, or I won’t help you to find the lady.”
Ramone told the bicycle taxi driver to take them to medan meriam, reading the name carefully from a scrap of paper. Anna leaned back under the tattered hood and closed her eyes. After the chill of the Riverrun the air outdoors felt like a bath of warm, black milk. They were going on somewhere. It was all right, everything under control, she had her bag on her back, wallet in her pocket (touch it), headscarf tied. The medan meriam, sometimes known as the Parade Ground, was a broad, flat, open space to the east of the city center, where there had been a fortress or something in colonial days. There was a permanent children’s fun fair there and a market called the bird market where you could buy house plants, cage birds, pond fish… Suddenly she started up in alarm.
“Ramone! Have you put your headscarf on?”
“Yes I have. Feel it if you don’t believe me.”
The streetlights were few, the city night very dark. Ramone took her hand and guided it so she could feel the fabric; then, unexpectedly, came the soft touch of lips on Anna’s fingers.
“Why did you do that?”
“Felt like it. How’s your migraine.”
“Not so bad.”
All my problems, thought Ramone, come with the label, don’t start from here. Here she was, a fucking professional feminist, basically a sex-worker, a pornographer, making her living out of being female. She had achieved nothing.
“D’you remember when we lived on campus?”
“Yes.”
“All those famous people in Lavvy’s salon. We should have been taking notes.”
“I don’t remember. I only remember you and me and Lavvy, talking.”
Anna paid off the taxi.
“Why’d you give him such a massive tip?” Ramone, still fascinated by Anna’s spending habits, had watched the transaction carefully. “Taxi fares are supposed to be controlled.”
“Yeah, but the price of rice isn’t. Only stingy tourists pay the government fares.”
Anna was puzzled that there was no amplified music at this outdoor rave, but soon she relaxed. The medan meriam was like a coral reef in darkness, teeming with life, sparkling with pockets and currents of quivering light. They explored the funfair, stopping to peer into hucksters’ booths and to watch the fairground rides. There were impromptu bars, food stalls, people everywhere. Faces glinted out of the gloom, smiling, solemn, or preoccupied. “You’re right about HAR,” confessed Anna suddenly. “I know you’re right. I hate the business. I still try to do my job well; it’s irrational but that’s the way I am. But I don’t want to be part of the rape of the planet, directly or indirectly. It just—”
“I know,” said Ramone. “Life gets in the way. I don’t want to be a feminist, either. But I’m doomed.” She took Anna’s hand and squeezed it. They wandered hand in hand, which was strange but pleasant. Anna was taller, it made her feel protective. An old man beckoned to them, they followed him into an open-sided hut where tanks of water stood on long wooden tables. He shone a torch into one of the tanks. They saw two beautiful slender creatures, twisting around each other, with silvery butterfly wings sprouting from their golden and dark barred bodies.
“What are they? Are they flying fish?” whispered Ramone.
“No. They’re sea moths. People use them in TCM, that’s traditional Chinese medicine.”
“Are they rare?”
“Not yet, they’ve only been a traditional medicine for a while. They soon will be.”
The old man wanted to show them some other tanks, but they left, disheartened.
“I thought traditional medicine was supposed to be ancient. Making up new ones is cheating. That means…nothing would be safe.”
Anna shrugged. “Tradition is what I point to when I say it. That’s always been the way, everywhere. It’s our tradition to eat hamburgers and drive cars.”
“Tradition means pillage, basically. I fucking hate it. Every bit of it.”
For a while they sat and watched a shadow puppet show, drinking tots of arak bought from a woman who was working the crowd with a yoke of cool boxes across her shoulders, which she would lay down and arrange into a counter in front of her customers: patiently, smilingly repeating the process every time she was beckoned over. The spirit was much better value than her Thai and Singaporean bottled beer, so they had several tots. Anna recalled that there was a spliff of Toba grass hidden in the lining of her bag. They shared it and talked fast: about the spirituality of the passing moment, fetishes, Balinese funeral rites, Japanese animism, the artificial consciousness debate, the way any mortal thing can be living and aware because we say so. Anna described working with SURISWATI. Well, how do I know you are conscious, Ramone, she demanded warmly. How will you prove to me that you’re not a complex biological automaton, saying an
d doing what I expect from another person, but for purely mechanical reasons? It’s not my field, but I don’t think there’s ever going to be a day when self-aware AI is announced. It’ll creep up on people, like abolishing slavery. Like women’s rights, come to think of it.”
“I’m not interested in rights for women,” gabbled Ramone. “Not ‘women are people too,’ pretty please, that’s no good. I’m looking for a new concept of humanity. Resurrecting forgotten heroines is dumb. It’s playing into the hands of the enemy to say, see, we were up to your standards all along. That’s crap. We need a whole different paradigm.”
“Isn’t the kind of change you want already happening?”
“It’s because it’s happening that I can write about it!”
“You can suppress the truth as often as you like,” said Anna, thinking of Galileo’s telescope. “If that’s all it is, abstract truth, because who cares? Nobody cares. You can’t suppress the facts because—well, there they are, all over the place—”
The night fell into confusion. They moved on, and joined another audience. Here there were shadow dancers, not puppets, performing behind what looked like a large white bed sheet, lit by coppery flares and stretched between bamboo poles. A beautiful young man, in a white sarong, flying thongs of black hair to his waist, leapt out to take his bow. Anna noticed as the applause began that she and Ramone were surrounded by a group of Sungainese Chinese, young women with round, rosy faces, and Ramone appeared to know these people. She was talking to them, in English, but Anna couldn’t follow the discussion. Then Daz appeared, coming into the open-sided canvas theatre with the friends she’d met in the Riverrun loft. She saw Ramone and Anna. She came over to them; but she was soon walking away again, after some kind of altercation with Ramone, picking out a path between the shadowy ranks of Sungainese, who were sitting on the ground like flare lit carved lumps of stone…
“We ought to have asked her where Wolfie and Spence have got to.”
“She doesn’t know,” said Ramone. “She’s pissed off with me, because I’m right.”
Life Page 25
