Empathy

by Sarah Schulman

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the man said, pointing to a knife scar on his chest. “I got this wound from a mortar shrapnel in a battle on Christmas night, right outside of Kim Lee.”

  “What kind of Vietnamese name is Kim Lee?” Anna asked.

  “I think it’s a Chinese restaurant on Fourteenth Street,” Doc said.

  “At Jack’s service this morning,” Anna continued, as though all of this was normal, “I realized that when I first comprehended the enormity of what was happening to my community, I only anticipated that I would lose many people. But, I did not understand that those of us who remain, that is to say, those of us who will continue to lose and lose, would also lose our ability to fully mourn. I feel that I have been dehumanized by the quantity of death, and that now I can no longer fully grieve each person. How much I loved them and how much I miss them. Doc, you know that expression Silence=Death?”

  “Yeah,” Doc said.

  “I’m beginning to realize that at the same time that that is true, Voice does not necessarily equal Life.”

  By this time the beggar had finished up with their car, having collected about a dollar. He put his shirt back on, like he was backstage and preparing for his next entrance.

  “Do you ever think about leaving New York?” Anna asked.

  “What does that mean?” Doc said.

  “Oh,” Anna sighed. “You’re one of those.”

  Doc cleared his throat, trying not to pry.

  “Do you ever think about leaving New York, Anna?”

  “Well, there is always San Francisco. There are a lot of women there and my parents are here. I was visiting once and I went swimming in one of those great public pools they have there.”

  “Public pools?” Doc asked, amazed. “That actually work?”

  “Yeah, and locker rooms full of dykes. They are all there undressing and redressing very slowly in front of each other. I just sat down on a bench and watched this one. When she left she threw me a great smile. Gay people are normal there. There’s no shame.”

  “Why don’t you move?” Doc asked.

  “What? And give up my shame? Don’t you think it would get boring?”

  “Look at that,” Doc said, pointing to a public service announcement hanging in the ad strip over the windows. “When I was a kid they told us not to cross in the middle of the block. Now it says DON’T SHARE NEEDLES.”

  But Anna sighed again.

  “Let’s chat,” he said, getting back to work. “Let’s chat before we reach our destination.”

  “About what?”

  “Tell me about…a different relationship. The one before this one. Tell me about someone before Miss Bitch. How about the one from the small town in Pennsylvania?”

  “Not that one, Doc, I wouldn’t know what to say.”

  “Well, how about the opera singer?”

  “Too painful.”

  “The one from the Bronx?”

  “God, you’re a great listener, Doc, to remember all those details.”

  “Thanks. Let’s look at an old relationship so we can see if there are any patterns that you may want to look into on your own at some future time.”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Well, the train seems to be stopped between stations, so I guess I have the time.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “Being uncomfortable is being away but I feel okay because I know you’re listening. And no matter what goes on when I think alone, Doc, it is always different to announce it.”

  “I’m listening,” he said.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “I used to waitress at this place called Captain Mike’s Seafood Restaurant right near City Hall. I made between two-fifty and three hundred a week, so it was a good job. My girlfriend’s name was Lucy and she used to live in Indonesia. Ever since I met her she wanted to go back and visit. So, every week I put fifty dollars into the Dry Dock Savings Bank, scrimped on everything, and when I had enough saved up to make the trip, I quit.

  The flight time was too long. First it took eight hours to get to Amsterdam and then twenty-four more to get to Djakarta, with stopovers in Frankfurt, Rome, Abu Dhabi, and Bangkok. The major event of every international airport is that they’re all the same. There are duty-free shops in all of them and they all have the same stuff. There are former colonials in all the duty-free shops and they all like to smoke in the no-smoking section. Lucy and I survived the trip and were still friends. At two-thirty a.m. Abu Dhabi time I asked her what Indonesia was like.

  ‘It’s hot and very beautiful,’ she said.

  ‘But, I mean, what’s happening there?’ I said. ‘What are the current questions?’

  ‘I don’t know how to describe it,’ Lucy said.

  We got off in Djakarta and stepped into this incredible heat. We were in it. There were loud motorbikes and clove cigarettes. The city had these massive dull white buildings, half postmodern Moslem, half Hyatt hotel. They stick up here and there. People jump onto overflowing double-decker buses. Entire families get on one zooming Honda bike. There are people in sarongs, in blue jeans, selling fried bananas and TDK receivers. One thousand rupiah equals one dollar. The hotel room cost five thousand including fan, mosquito net, and papaya. Our first meal of Nasi Goreng with hot sauce and shrimp cracker was sixty cents. I took out my Indonesian phrase book.

  ‘The people here are so beautiful,’ Lucy said.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Some of them are very beautiful. How do you pronounce this, Apu Kabar or Apu Kabar?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘How are you. Didn’t you learn any Indonesian during the year that you stayed here?’

  ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘The family I lived with spoke English.’

  ‘Oh.’

  It started getting dark and we were walking along the railroad tracks. We were in a slum, I guess. There were lots of small shacks crowded together, garbage everywhere, naked children, and howling, mangy, mongrel dogs. Every other shack had a TV set. It was like Avenue C with no winter and not being afraid of your neighbor.

  We walked along until a kid came up and said, ‘Hello, mister.’

  ‘Hello, mister,’ said another kid.

  ‘Hello, mister.’

  ‘They think we’re men,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ Lucy answered. ‘They think that means hello.’

  ‘I guess there have been too many misters here,’ I said.

  The next day we took a thirteen-hour train trip across Java to Surabaja - eighteen thousand rupiah for second-class with air-conditioning. Third-class sat on bamboo benches sweating, and the last car carried refrigerators and color TVs. In Surabaja there was a stifling two-hour wait for the bus so we ate some more Nasi Goreng and smoked clove cigarettes.

  ‘That man looks so much like Mansur,’ Lucy said. ‘So many men here remind me of him. I have to be firm with his family and tell them as honestly as possible that I am not going to marry him and I’m not going to Australia to visit him. I wonder if we can extend our return tickets. I love it here so much I want to stay forever.’

  The bus ride was nine hours to Denpasar including a lunch stop for Nasi Goreng and a Kung Fu movie shown on the bus’s TV. It was a reject film called Gambling for Head from Hong Kong in English with Indonesian subtitles. The bus stopped when the film was playing so the driver could watch it too. The whole time I was thinking about Vietnam and how hot it must have been, how totally hot for those guys in uniforms with pounds of equipment. How hot with no relief.

  After the bus we rode the ferry, standing on the front deck staring down the mountains of Bali, and suddenly we were there. We were in Bali where people put dried flowers on the street and the shrines were wrapped in cloth and jasmine burned. We drove from the dock in a bus to the terminal which was chaotic. Even before stepping out into the crowd we were surrounded by van drivers.

  ‘Bimo.’

  ‘Taxi.’

  ‘Charter.’

  ‘
Minibus.’

  ‘Kuta.’

  ‘Kuta, five thousand.’

  Lucy bartered to three thousand and rode along relaxed but I couldn’t help noticing that all the Indonesian riders paid two hundred.

  The bimo drivers posed with their cigarettes like American movie stars. They leaned back into their tight, tight jeans and flashed practiced I know you want to fuck me smiles. I understood it all better later, walking down main street on Kuta Beach surrounded by white girls clinging to Indonesian men, zipping by on their motor bikes.

  There was something grotesque about Kuta. There were shops with Italian fashions. There were beer gardens advertising drinking competitions. There were swarms of sunburnt Australians wearing I HAD A BALL IN BALI T-shirts.

  ‘Isn’t it fun?’ Lucy said.

  We found a hotel for three thousand and went back out on the street. Someone handed us a flyer.

  CELEBRATE NEW YEAR’S EVE AT CASABLANCA

  A REAL AUSSIE BAR

  BEST LEGS IN KUTA COMPETITION AT MIDNIGHT

  Eventually we figured out that that very night was the Hindu New Year, as crowds started to gather along the streets waiting and talking until drums started banging, gunpowder exploding, and a parade of giant paper monsters came marching down the street.

  ‘Come on,’ Lucy said, pulling me off in the opposite direction toward a field behind the beach. ‘Mansur showed me a guy who hung out here with a cow. He had great Buddha sticks for five thousand. I know it’s been years but maybe he’s still there.’

  We walked through an empty field looking for drugs and found nothing. Then Lucy took me back to the street, down an alley, and into a tiny bamboo restaurant, empty except for a parrot. Everyone else could be heard in the background cheering the puppets, clanging and stamping, chasing away evil spirits.

  ‘Mansur took me here. They sell psychedelic mushroom soup.’

  But the woman sweating out the New Year shift said the police had cracked down long ago on the magic side of Bali and there was no more blue mushroom soup in Kuta. As a last resort Lucy went to the Casablanca to look for likely dopers, preferably twenty-year-old Australian boys who seemed manageable.

  ‘Do you know where we can get some smoke?’

  ‘I can get you cocaine,’ two different bearded dudes said. ‘But no smoke. There isn’t any more. Besides you’re better off not asking because they’ll sell it to you and then turn you in.’

  One New Zealander with a STONED AGAIN T-shirt warned her to give up the idea completely.

  ‘My friend just got eleven months for buying three thousand worth. Just have a beer. It’s cheap.’

  The next morning the sun was full by five-thirty. There were roosters, dogs, and, naturally, backlit green palm leaves. There were enormous red and yellow flowers. Lucy and I sat underneath them to drink the tea and bananas left out by the manager. Then we prepared to walk down to the beach. The cabin’s steps were covered with dried flowers and burning jasmine.

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked the manager.

  ‘To the beach.’

  ‘No good,’ he said. ‘No good to go outside today. Today is silent day in Bali. No go out. No electricity.’

  So we sat peacefully and dutifully in our room, sweating, watching through the window as the sun got hotter and hotter. We sang songs and made love and took endless showers in the mandi and finally, after eight hours of blistering heat and carefully rationing out a can of mackerel and some leftover stroop waffles from the Amsterdam airport, the sky began to cool and get darker through those same huge palm leaves and the same red and yellow flowers.

  The next morning we decided to go to the beach again before setting out to find Lucy’s Indonesian friend Dorothy. Ten minutes into our walk to the water, my shoulders started sizzling. I could hear them. Then I had this small realization. I realized that this trip was an exercise in which I would take Lucy’s description of people and things and match them with the reality, thereby learning more about her than I ever could at home.

  This guy came up to me and said, ‘Hello, I love you. You want a bikini, cheap?’

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘No thank you.’

  Then another guy. ‘Hello, where do you come from?’

  ‘New York.’

  ‘Then another guy. ‘Silver, silver.’

  ‘No thank you.’

  ‘Very cheap.’

  ‘No thank you.’

  Then another guy. ‘Hello.’

  ‘No, nothing. No thank you.’

  ‘Hello, where do you come from?’

  ‘Look,’ Lucy said, turning toward the water. ‘How beautiful.’

  The beach was wide and hot and bordered that blue Pacific. Australians surfed. Germans tanned in their string bikinis and Japanese swam in their fluorescent trunks. It was so hot that the sand stung through my sneakers. Neither of us had bathing suits so we each took turns going in in our underwear while the other guarded the stuff. I dove in.

  Then it was Lucy’s turn.

  As I sat watching her wade out, a skinny dark woman came over in a sarong and T-shirt that said KUTA MASSAGE TEAM.

  ‘Massage?’

  ‘No thank you.’

  ‘Good massage, cheap.’

  ‘No thank you.’

  ‘Bikinis?’

  ‘No thank you. Nothing. I don’t want anything.’

  ‘Listen, I’ll give you a cheap price.’ The woman sat down on the sand and started unloading a pile of polyester T-shirts that read I’VE BEEN IN BALI TOO.

  ‘No, nothing. I don’t want anything.’

  ‘Look,’ she said, holding up a hot-pink crocheted bikini. ‘Only ten thousand. I’ll give you a good price.’

  ‘I don’t want anything. I don’t want anything. I don’t want anything. No thank you.’

  ‘Okay, what you pay? What’s your last offer? Nine thousand?’

  ‘No, I didn’t even make a first offer. I don’t want anything.’

  ‘American very rich, much money. Seven thousand.’

  But I didn’t want a pink bikini and I’m not rich and I would never buy anything for more than five dollars anyway. I buy all my clothes at the Salvation Army. But I ended up with a hideous blue and gray belt worth twenty-five cents at Lamston’s. I paid one thousand.

  ‘Lucy, thank God you’re back.’

  Just as she sat down to dry in the sun, I heard another voice behind me.

  ‘Silver?’

  ‘No, I don’t want anything. Please go away. I don’t want anything. No.’

  ‘Why you no buy?’ he said, squatting down so close I could feel his breath.

  ‘Because I don’t want anything.’

  ‘You must buy. You have money. We need blue jeans, forty thousand. Just one ring.’

  ‘No, really. I don’t want a ring.’

  ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘I love you.’

  All this time Lucy was sitting about one yard away, staring at the sea in her baggy sandy underpants. I ran into the water and he didn’t talk to her at all, just moved on to a Swiss couple farther down the beach. I knew they weren’t German. It didn’t take long in Kuta to learn to tell a German by his string bikini.

  That night I sat waiting in a restaurant while Lucy finished putting on her makeup. At the next table was a fashionable, clean-cut Japanese man dressed exactly like a fashionable clean-cut American man circa 1962. Only now that look has come back. You know, the nerd look. Tortoiseshell eyeglasses, khaki Bermuda shorts, and white sneakers.

  ‘You like Bali?’

  ‘Some things are beautiful. Some things are not so beautiful.’

  ‘Oooh,’ he said, nodding his head. ‘Bali is baguse.’ And he held up his thumb.

  Then I understood why there was Hotel Baguse and Café Baguse and thousands of T-shirts worn by tourists and Indonesians alike all saying “BAGUSE.” It means cool. And the main message of Bali’s public relations is that Bali is cool.

  ‘You could say that,’ I answered, and then turned to my copy of
The Djakarta Post.

  According to the front page, two ganja dealers had been sentenced to ten years each. The government was cracking down on factories that hired women for night work without their husband’s permission. A court sentenced two Indonesians to four years in prison for instigating anti-Chinese riots resulting in the deaths of nine Chinese. The paper expressed outrage at these ‘extreme’ sentences.

  Lucy came to the table then and we looked at the menu. The only Indonesian dish was Nasi Goreng. The other options were submarine sandwich, T-bone steak, and pizza. The waiter sat down at our table to take the order because it was too hot to stand.

  ‘Where do you come from?’

  ‘America,’ I said. ‘Where do you come from?’

  ‘Java. Jojokarta. I’m a painter. See my paintings on the wall? I teach batik class. You like Bali?’

  ‘It’s complicated,’ I said. ‘Everywhere they advertise that Bali is baguse, but I think Bali is …’

  ‘Bullshit,’ he said and leaned back in the bamboo chair.

  The next morning at six a.m. we started looking for Dorothy. After endless haggling with bimos and endless consultations with people about the return address on Lucy’s crumpled envelope, we ended up walking a bunch of unshaded kilos along a country road.

  ‘I met her on the ferry from Java, the first time,’ Lucy said. ‘She invited me to her house and I stayed there for a year. Mansur was a friend of the family.’

  ‘What’s she like?’

  The sun was stomping down on our heads. I could barely breathe, like I was trapped in a vacuum-sealed jar.

  ‘Hello, mister.’