by James Grady
“Lucky.”
“In America, do you hear poets on the radio?”
Russell was still in my future, so I said: “No.”
“How sad.” She dropped her gaze to sip her tea. “Are you really a poet?”
“Not if you count how many people have read me.”
“That’s not the count that matters.” Her lips curled up ever so slyly as she nodded towards my black shoulder bag. “Do you have your poems in there?”
I shrugged.
“Ahhh. I see. That’s right, American. You are supposed to, what? Invite me to your pad to see your—what-do-you-call-it?—like tattoos.”
“You mean ‘etchings’?”
“Yes! That is it! Etchings.” Laughter came from her heels. “But I think for that kind of rendezvous what we are talking about is really tattoos.”
“I don’t have any.”
“Can you imagine? Marking yourself with something until death. Who could be so certain about what would forever be important?” She sipped tea. “So is that what you were going to do? Invite me up somewhere to see your poems? Is that your trick?”
“I don’t have any tricks for you.”
“Prove it.”
The journal I gingerly pulled out of my black bag was genuinely well worn, with a torn blue cardboard-like cover: NORTHERN REVIEW. Unlike my fellowship to Asia, what it contained hadn’t needed to be orchestrated by the CIA.
Derya whispered: “I was only… No. I’m glad you didn’t have this somewhere else to take me to. That you knew about tattoos. Yet you brought this anyway.
“Show me,” she said.
So I turned to the first page with my by-line and she read ‘Home,’ my 24 lines about birds who absurdly built their nests in trees of doom.
“I was young,” I told her raised eyes. “Knew everything.”
“Then?” she asked.
I turned the page. “Wrote this a couple years later.”
And she read my 8 line ‘Mirror Blues’ about how ‘all the poems you never wrote have great titles, make sense.’
“The good news is you’re getting over believing you have so much important to say,” she told me. “But you are too young to have so many regrets.”
“You think?”
“For you, American… I think yes.” She closed the journal. Gave it back. Her smile was wide and sweet. “Now I’ve seen your tattoos.”
She stood to go. Put the three books of other people’s poems in her shoulder bag with her notebooks, textbooks, and the full body-and-face covering black burka she wore if she needed to visit strict Muslim neighborhoods.
“When can I see you again?”
“So soon you ask?” she asked.
“Not soon enough,” blurted truth from me before I could stop it. “And… my name is not American. It’s Victor.”
“I know,” she said, turned to walk away.
Turned back. Said: “Tomorrow. Right here. Right now.”
That tomorrow, she came alone.
For 20 minutes we talked about a million nothings until suddenly Bladerunners was too… confining. The rain stopped. City air brushed our bare arms with a chill of 76 degrees, invigorating enough to inspire us to take one bus, then another, getting off laughing at K.L.’s City Centre gardens in a business district called The Golden Triangle. As we walked amidst tropical flowers, the city glistened.
Two black steel and glass towers connected by a triangle-braced tube bridge rose to dizzying heights in the sky above the gardens and the hills of K.L.
“The Petronas Towers.”
“True,” said Derya. “They made the Japanese and Korean construction firms build them taller than those towers you have in New York.”
“The World Trade Center.”
“Yes. What a marvelous competition to win. So much more enlightened than seeing which culture can better feed and educate its people, and do so with justice.
“You recognize the design?” After I shook my head, she said: “The floor plan is based on Islam’s eight-sided star and the five tiers represent the five pillars of Islam. What is the design of your World Trade Towers based on?”
I shrugged. “Profit per square foot.”
“How odd.”
We walked in the cool shadows of two towers.
“Why Malaysia?” I asked. “For you.”
“If you’re going to leave home… Go.
“Besides,” she said, “after being in it for a few years, I realized that government is not about solving problems but administering them. About process, not solutions. Didn’t matter that I had a future in politics—Turkey is more progressive than the U.S.: we elected a woman Prime Minister, though not with my vote. But I wanted to… to…”
“To touch real life.”
“Yes! And help people right now not...”
“Not down some long road of negotiated maybe.”
She finger brushed strands of her cinnamon hair off her tan face to stare at me.
I couldn’t bear it, said: “So Malaysia…”
“A friend of a friend with a great idea, no money, and not enough hands.”
“And way, way away from home.”
We laughed.
“We don’t shuffle things around,” she said, “not for the women who come to us. We give them help and don’t make them jump through our hoops to get it. If that makes their lives a fraction better… Then at least we’ve done something.”
“All you can do is all you can do.”
“And sometimes you can and must, how you say… push it.”
My heart sank. The CIA psych evaluators were right and I was right on track.
We walked over a sandy path through the silence of too much to say.
Until she said: “I read your Dr. Williams. He’s not my favorite American poet.”
Her shoes crunched the sand.
Ten steps and I could stand it no more: “Are you going to make me ask?”
“Of course.”
We laughed so hard we staggered. Derya put her cool soft hand on my bare arm to steady us, our first touch. We stopped and she smiled at me.
Said: “Emily Dickinson.”
Our laughter cracked the sky.
A trimly bearded man wearing the leisure suit style popular in K.L. for business walked past us. Scowled. He could have been Malaysian, might have been Mexican or Jewish, Arab, Central European. He had a beard, a job, a firm step, and a stone heart.
Memorize him. For the hundredth time, I wished this Op could afford back-up and react teams. I watched the scowling stranger as I asked: “What’s his problem?”
“Laughter scares people. Laughing people are free from control—theirs, yours, the illusion that any of us are in control as this planet hurtles through space. And maybe, just maybe, they’re laughing at you.”
Derya looked away. “Or maybe it was just us. Westerners. Acting like equals.”
She didn’t disguise the question. “Are you a Christian?”
“Wasn’t me who filled out my birth certificate,” I told her. “And the choice I make now won’t fit in any label or rate a check mark in some form’s box.”
“Allah saves us all from men with guns and forms with boxes,” she said, proving the CIA psych evaluators had been right and thus breaking my heart.
“Are you going to ask me?” she said.
“I don’t care—not like that.”
She smiled. “But perhaps you need to know.
“Most Americans think all Muslims are one kind,” she said. “Can’t believe that I’m a woman and doing what I do and still think of myself as… A secular Muslim is what I’ve heard it called. More boxes. If indeed it is written, then I am where I should be, and I’ll be judged by the honor of my heart and hands.”
We quickened o
ur pace as the darkening sky rumbled.
“Victor? I don’t know with the Christmas coming, your plans…”
“The T’ai Chi teacher I came here to study with is taking a break until after New Year’s. Whatever feelings Christmas gives me… For that I need snow.”
We’d reached a covered bus stop. Both of us knew we had to eventually transfer to different lines if we were to get where we were supposed to sleep.
She stared toward me, not at me. “What I’m wondering is… Rain leaks into the school, more every day. We don’t own it, of course, and the landlord thing is very complicated, very not what’s up front. Our official landlord is a bumiputra—a ‘son of the soil,’ native Malaysian. His manager who we deal with is Indian, which is good because he has a soft spot in his heart for Shabana and even brought his daughters in so she could teach them about condoms and pap smears, but we think the real owner is Chinese, shrewd enough to know that if the answer to our pleas for repairs is no, we’ll make them ourselves and improve his property at our own cost.”
As the bus roared towards us, she said: “Can you work a hammer and nails?”
“If not,” I said as the bus groaned to a stop, the doors popped open, and thousands of miles away in Langley, CIA strategists gave each other high fives, “I’ll fake it.”
“We can’t pay you,” she said, reaching into her pocket for bus fare.
“Forget it,” I said climbing the bus steps behind her: “Merry Christmas.”
Working on the roof meant I kept a wary eye on the sky. Finding other tasks was easy in that three-story concrete “school” with holes in the walls and dripping pipes. I was supposed to stay out of sight in this all-women institution, but that impossibility let me walk through Derya’s word processing class my first day ‘on the job.’
Tension crackled as I tip-toed into that room. Everyone pretended I didn’t exist. Her students sat at plank tables that held computers qualified to be dinosaurs.
Half a dozen of Derya’s all-women students were Indian, some with red caste dots on their foreheads, some in saris. Four were Chinese who saw their time as respected elders fast approaching and hoped learning new skills would stall that inevitability. Other women dressed in slacks or skirts or Malay wear that showed they flowed from bumiputras fathers. Six women in full head-to-ankle sack like black burkas with only slits for their eyes could have been anybody. One wore green shoes.
By Day Five of my Op, the teachers and I were a team. We ate together, went to Bladerunners, watched pirated movies on their VCR. My spot was always beside the warmth of Derya. She’d use her fingers to brush hair off her face and the air filled with her musk.
Confirm progress, e-mailed Op Control.
Progress confirmed, was all I e-mailed back. Fuck it, I knew what I was doing.
Day Seven’s schedule held only two morning classes. Shabana came up to the roof after the last class, told me to come down for an early meal.
“But we’ve got maybe three hours until it rains,” I said.
“We’ve always got maybe three hours until it rains,” she told me. “Come on.”
Shabana led me to the cluttered office. A card table stood in the room; on it was a sprig of a plastic pine and newspaper-wrapped bundles. Carry-out food from a kedai kopi café covered the table: kabob sticks of steaming chicken satay, the flat fried bread with curry dipping sauce called roti canai, mee goring fried noodles. The red rubber bucket used to catch drips from roof leaks sat filled with vendor’s ice and bottles of Thai beer.
Derya led Julia into the room.
“Bloody Hell,” snapped Julia. “What’s all this?”
“Happy Christmas!” said Derya.
“Merry,” corrected Shabana.
Julia grouched over tears: “Shouldn’t have done all this for a couple bloody heathens like the lanky Yank and me. Neither of us are keen on that manger and cross stuff. Shouldn’t have, all this trouble, ’n’… And is this all you could bloody manage?”
Everyone laughed.
“Thank you,” I told the two women. To Derya, I said: “Thank you.”
She blushed.
“Open presents!” ordered Shabana as she passed out beers. “Two gifts each.”
“Julia first,” I insisted.
Derya passed her a newspaper bundle that unwrapped as a Gortex rain jacket.
“This… this is…”
“Most likely completely stolen,” said Shabana, “given that it cost us less than one dinner. Now you have no more excuses for being all wet.”
Julia’s second gift unwrapped as two VHS tapes, pirates labeled 1 and 2.
Derya told her: “We know you’ve got the fires for that actor Sam Neill, even if he is old and Australian. This is a TV show he did when we were kids. About some British spy before the First World War.”
“Ah, the good old days,” said Julia, toughing out a grin. “Back when Britain ruled out here. And bossed your hometown, too, Shabana, all the way up through Afghanistan and over to all those oil fields in places we made up like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq, Israel to Africa, even over the pond to your place, you bloody Yank.”
We clinked beer bottles, a Christmas tinkle that rang only good things.
“Rule Britania,” she said. “The sun sets on the British empire. Us and the Romans, Alexander and Genghis Khan. Gotta say, while I miss the glory and goodies, I’m glad it’s gonna be some other blokes’ blood ’n’ guts that pretends to keep this old world spinning. Though if we’re lucky, we’ve seen the last of empires.”
“Of either arms or ideas,” said Shabana, who’d lectured me about billboards for Coke and Pepsi, for half-naked plastic pop starlets and cigarettes, for Microsoft.
“Now Victor,” whispered Derya.
My first newspaper bundle unwrapped as a thin, battered, first edition hardback book: Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams.
“In the used books store’s bargain bin for two ringgits,” said Shabana, protesting my stunned ’s too much thanks. “Not everyone values American poets out here.”
My second gift was a clear plastic globe encapsulating New York city’s skyline—the Empire State building, Statue of Liberty, World Trade Towers. The globe filled Derya’s hand, and when she shook it, a blizzard of white flakes covered the tiny city.
“Merry Christmas,” she told me. “Snow.”
She turned the globe over in her hand to show me the Made In Malaysia sticker.
“Did you think all they manufactured out here were high tech parts for American defense contractors and drugs for your sick people?”
My whisper said: “I don’t know what to think.”
“What I think,” said Shabana, “is that you two should get out of here before the rain. Go see a movie in a real theater like you’re always talking about. Let us daughters of the Queen have some privacy to drool over an actor with a funny accent—and don’t be shushing me, you wild Turk girl: you watched these already to be sure they worked. And hammer man: what do you care about spy stories starring good looking men?”
They wouldn’t let us help clean up. ‘Time is running out, and so should you!’ Julia told us the bus to take to get to a cut-rate movie theater in Bangsar, sent us on our way. As we hurried out the door, she smacked my ass.
“Why’d she do that?” I asked Derya as we ran out carrying our shoulder bags.
“She’s British.”
Which made no sense, but started us laughing so hard we couldn’t stop—nearly died crossing the intersection with the green light, not paying attention until I heard a clattering roar and saw a swarm of killer bees—mopeds & motorcycles—racing through the lanes of cars like they always did, but now on slick streets, tires skidding those bikes towards us, towards Derya…
I swooped her off her feet and she worked with me like a ballet partner as I leapt and swung her safe to the
other sidewalk while killer bees skidded over the pavement where we’d just stood. Carnage averted through alert intelligence and decisive action.
Her blue eyes were wide and the pulse pounded in her smooth neck.
Rain drops spit at us as we scampered onto the bus.
We shared a plastic seat amidst bus riders who read newspapers and books. Bad music from boom boxes echoed off the metal walls. Her thigh glowed beside mine. Every lurching block thickened our air with diesel fumes and humid smells of strangers. We looked everywhere but at each other. Shoulder bags filled our laps; our bare arms didn’t touch. We rode the bus. The rain turned from a patter to a pounding. Traffic crawled. Cars turned on their lights. Thunder rumbled. I rubbed mist off the window, saw we were in K.L.’s Bangsar neighborhood.
Derya’s eyes locked to mine: “If we don’t get off this bus I’ll explode!”
“I… I know a place. Not far. Repair store, my friend’s, he’s gone and pays me a few bucks to check it and… It’s empty. I know the key code.”
She pulled a collapsible umbrella from her shoulder bag. Jerked the signal chord. Bus stopped, rear doors jumped open. We leapt out to a liquid world. Pressed together. The umbrella barely sheltered our heads. Our shoes soaked through in five steps. We had to breathe with our mouths open to keep from drowning in the crashing rain.
Sheer will navigated us through the downpour to a side street. A concrete box of a store showed an unlit neon sign that read TV FIX above a door mounted with a flapped key pad lock. Derya held the metal flap off the lock as with my free hand I tapped in the code. The lock clicked, I pushed the heavy door open and we were in.
Later she’d notice that ground floor’s tables of gutted television sets, shelves of parts, workboxes of tools. She’d smell oil and sodder and rubber, grease, electricity singed dust, and in the depths of that cavern, see a kick-standed motorcycle.
Later she’d wonder how we made it up rickety stairs to the loft with a curtained bathroom. A bed waited beneath the meshed skylight that rumbled with the drumming rain, a skylight now gray with muted sun and at night prismed with the red neon.
Later.
In, the heavy door locking behind us as we lunged together, more a collision than a clutch. The umbrella rolled on the shop floor. My hands crushed cinnamon hair, her mouth worked up my shirt. We pulled apart to see our reflections in the others’ eyes. Then, oh then we kissed, her mouth burning hungry against mine.
