Map of the Invisible World: A Novel

by Tash Aw

  “You are a classic example of a badly educated orphan,” Din said. “It’s not your fault. You were abandoned and left to fend for yourself without any understanding of the world around you.”

  “That’s not true,” Adam said. “I am educated. My father taught me everything—literature, music, even politics.”

  Din curled his hand into a fist and punched his own forehead, hard enough to make a dull, thudding noise. He closed his eyes, and Adam thought maybe he had hurt himself. “A self-deluding orphan, I see. Right, tell me all about the conference that took place in ’fifty-five, right here in Indonesia. Don’t know? I’ll give you a clue. It happened in Bandung. No? I’ll tell you: the Conference of Newly Independent Asian and African Countries, hosted by the president. The start of the new world order, which we control. What about the Nonaligned Movement. No? Do you see what I mean?”

  Adam did not quite see what Din meant, and it frustrated him that he could not fully grasp what Din was talking about. It also disturbed him that Din had all this knowledge that he himself lacked. Part of him did not believe that it was all true. He thought he knew about Bandung. It was an elegant city in the hills where the air was cool, a place people fled to, hoping to escape the heat of Jakarta and stroll along elegant boulevards lined with noble, old buildings. He decided he would not say any of this to Din. Compared to what Din knew, all his learning suddenly felt insubstantial and flimsy—a child’s view of the world. The years of learning from and listening to Karl had not amounted to anything. He felt like an infant in the glare of Din’s brilliance.

  “You see the world through a European’s eyes,” Din continued before Adam had a chance to respond. “Your own eyes do not work. You can’t see how the world is changing around you. That little country just to the north of here, our neighbor—what’s that called?”

  Adam knew the answer. He had come across it in the papers and on the radio. “Malaysia,” he said, trying to sound casual, not too pleased with himself.

  “You see? How predictable.”

  “But it’s there,” Adam said, pointing ahead of him, as if Kuala Lumpur lay just beyond the horizon. “It exists, doesn’t it?”

  “No! That is the point—Malaysia does not exist!” Din shouted suddenly, his head jerking. “Malaysia”—he pronounced it as if speaking a foreign language, his voice squeaky, like a child’s, and Adam remembered the children’s voices at school, mocking his surname: De Willigen? De Willigen? and he remembered the hurt and the shame he’d felt, the shame for something that was not his fault—“Ma-lay-sia is a British construct! It is a work of pure fiction, created by the old Imperialist countries to destabilize Indonesia and all the newly independent countries of the world. It was created so that Britain and America and their cronies can continue to have a presence in this region, but I tell you, their time is finished, finished! We will invade them and crush them, all those Malaysian puppets. They look like us and even speak our language—but they do not know they are being used. This is why we beat them in the Thomas Cup: They are not masters of their own destiny. We are.”

  Din fell silent for a moment, his chest heaving with an exhausted satisfaction. In that instant the roar of the Jakarta traffic took over, seizing the initiative from Din’s monologue to fill Adam’s ears with its own rhythms. And yet Adam knew that Din would not, indeed could not, stay silent for long. “My brother,” he said, “is in Malaysia.”

  “What?” Din said, turning to look at him. “I thought you didn’t know where he was.”

  Adam shrugged. “I don’t know anything for certain.”

  “Oh god, this gets worse. Not only do you think like a white person, you have a brother who lives in a neo-Imperialist country. This becak driver must be lame. Why is he so damn slow? The speech will be starting soon. We’re going to listen to it with some of my friends. You’ll learn things. It will be good for you.”

  There were about a dozen people in the wood-and-tin shack that stood at the far end of the collection of flimsy structures that formed a courtyard. They were on the edge of a sprawling shantytown bordering Kebon Jeruk, where the houses still seemed solid and at least semipermanent, built more from timber than pieces of rusty corrugated iron: They would at least weather this rainy season, and maybe also the next one. Deeper in this labyrinth, away from tarmac roads and running water, the houses were a patchwork of salvaged scrap: flattened oil drums, biscuit tins, fragments of tarpaulin, splintered lengths of wood, torn mosquito nets—anything that would bring momentary respite from the rain and the sun. But even here, on the fringes of the kampung, Adam had seen a tiny house with walls made from pieces of advertising boards. In front of this house a young woman was fanning a wood fire that refused to light properly. Next to her was a child, a girl, no more than three or four years old, naked except for a dirty ribbon in her hair; she looked up at Adam as he walked past and retreated shyly into the shade of the house. There was no front door, just a gap in the walls that read … kes you ten times stron … mous all over the world, now avai …

  “Of course these houses will not last very long,” Din shrugged, “but they can be quickly rebuilt. We are strong, practical people, remember,” he said.

  They came upon a circle of men and women not much older than Adam; Din had explained that they were all students at UI. “This is the orphan I told you about,” Din announced casually to his friends, as if he had simply said “Sundanese” or “Torajan.” Adam felt angry with himself because he did not have the courage to explain and modify this description to a group of strangers (he did have a father, after all). But then again, maybe Karl was dead, and now he was an orphan twice over.

  “Your orphan doesn’t look very happy,” one girl said. She was about Adam’s age, perhaps slightly older, and spoke in a voice similar to Din’s—steeped in a confidence that suggested formal education, with proper articulation tempered by a casual Jakarta accent. Their sharp, clever voices were a code, thought Adam, a method of conspiracy; he did not belong with these people. And yet this girl was not exactly like Din. She had a relaxed quality, a self-assuredness that ran deeper than mere education. It came from something else, something that Adam thought he could recognize: privilege, that sense of being special. He didn’t know if he could even call her a girl. She looked his age, but everything about her—her poise, her stylish hair (short and falling in soft curves on either side of her face, like a movie star’s, unlike the severe and functional hairdos of the other girls present), her easy vowels, the way she sat, legs crossed, one elbow propped on the table—made her seem like a mature woman.

  “Orphans never are,” someone else added, and suddenly everyone was speaking.

  “How can they be?”

  “It’s impossible to find true happiness if you’re an orphan.”

  “That’s not true. Orphans are the only ones who are free to find their own happiness; they don’t have their own history so they create it for themselves.”

  “But, Z, that’s just an illusion. Their lives are determined for them by people who have no relation to them whatsoever—total strangers dictate their future. They have no attachment to anything, they stumble around in the dark until one day something happens to set them on a different, random path. I don’t call that freedom.”

  “But that’s just what it’s like for all of us!”

  There was laughter, either cold and scoffing or shrill and juvenile.

  “We run a revolutionary magazine called-Z,” said the girl with the stylish hair. Her name was Zubaidah, she explained, but she was known only as Zu, or even just Z. “I hate my full name. It’s too … pretty. When we started the magazine it needed a name, something that was not crass and obvious like the other dull, dogmatic pamphlets you see—Revolusi, Time for Change, The People’s Voice, and so on. It’s not easy to come up with a name for an underground literary newspaper, you know, so we just named it after me, just to give us something to get started.”

  “But then I had a brainstorm,” a youth of p
erfect complexion said. He had long hair that hung in fine strands almost to his shoulders; he was trying to grow a beard, but he’d managed only a meager mustache and a straggly goatee. “‘Z!’ I said—the last letter of the alphabet, ignored, mysterious, underutilized. Perfect!”

  “Awie is the poet among us, you see,” said Z.

  “In fact, Z stands alone at the end of the alphabet, lonely, without any prospects in life, abandoned by all the others. It is the orphan of the alphabet—it should appeal to you.”

  He slid a flimsy, shoddily bound magazine across the table toward Adam. “Our latest issue.”

  Adam flicked through it, pausing occasionally, pretending to read; he nodded, feigning comprehension and appreciation. The dense text was punctuated by several cartoon drawings. There was one of the president in bed with a busty European woman, their huge feet protruding from the tangle of sheets, toothy grins etched across their faces. It was set next to another drawing of the president gnawing on a gargantuan chicken drumstick in a field of wilting rice; in the background a farmer surveyed the cracked mud, his shoulders hunched. The caption under both drawings read: OUR HERO.

  “Shh, quiet—the speech is about to start,” said Din. He had not lost his frown, which seemed, if anything, to have deepened, creating little crevasses across his forehead. He glared at Adam and jabbed his index finger in the direction of the radio that sat on a chair, all on its own in the middle of the group. They all shuffled their chairs toward it, leaning forward, elbows resting on knees, chins cradled in palms, ready to fall deep into concentration. Adam copied their movements. He remembered the tales of ancient philosophers that Karl had told him about and felt as if he were a pupil or scribe at the feet of some electronic preacher. There was a moment of near-complete silence; they could not hear even the faintest crackle of static from the radio. In the distance there was a baby’s cry, a thin wail that started and then stopped; there was no other noise from the slums around them. Adam wondered if the radio had failed at the crucial moment. He held his breath, listening. No one moved. And then the voice began speaking in a tone at once urgent and measured. He had never heard a voice like this before: rich with calm strength and intonations that seemed both foreign and familiar. He felt a hot surge running through his body, filling his head with a sudden, giddy excitement he could not explain. He remembered wading into the sea for the first time, into the warm gentle surf, with Karl standing in the shallows; he remembered the brilliant reflection of the sun on the water, the wild feeling of danger when he uncurled his toes and surrendered his body to the waves, his arms and legs moving with a freedom he had never known, as if he had only just discovered his body; he remembered too dipping his head under water and finding an entire watery world whose depth and enormity he had never discerned from land, a place in which he was powerless and small. He was gasping when he resurfaced, afraid of being dragged away; but part of him had wished, secretly, to be taken by the sea. “…fellow countrymen and revolutionaries, the twentieth century has been a time of terrific dynamism, but also of great fear. Yes, we are living in a world of fear. The life of man is corroded and made bitter by fear—fear of the future, of the hydrogen bomb, of ideologies, of everything, but especially of the loss of man’s safety and morality. Perhaps this fear is a greater danger than the danger itself, because it is fear that drives men to act foolishly, to act thoughtlessly… .”

  “Just get to the point,” Din muttered. A sharp chorus of shushing started and died down with equal swiftness, and once again the voice on the radio was the only sound to be heard.

  “… nowadays to hear people say, ‘Colonialism is dead.’ Let us not be soothed or deceived by this. I say to you, friends and fellow revolutionaries, that colonialism is NOT dead. How can it be, so long as vast areas of Asia and Africa are not yet free? I beg of you not to think of colonialism only in the classic form we in Indonesia have known—it is a skillful and determined enemy that warps, viruslike, into its modern form of economic and intellectual control… .”

  Din sighed; it seemed very loud in the unnatural silence around them. “How many times have we heard this before?” he whispered in Adam’s ear. Instinctively, Adam moved away from his hot, sour breath. In those few seconds he had missed what the voice had said, and he too began to wish that Din would keep quiet.

  “… the Indonesian Revolution has become a rocky mountain shooting fire amid the ocean of mankind’s struggle to build a new world free of exploitation of man by man, free of exploitation of nation by nation. My fellow revolutionaries, there is a phrase in Italian, Vivere Pericoloso. This means, To Live Dangerously. Yes, my brothers! You have understood me. For Indonesia and every other country that strives to be free, this is the Year of Living Dangerously. It is our duty as revolutionaries to do so.”

  “At last we’re getting somewhere,” Din said. He was about to continue when Z lifted a finger to her lips, slowly, almost theatrically; Din’s mouth lay half-open, his chin lifted in defiance, but he fell silent nonetheless. Adam looked at Z’s curiously masculine index finger, poised lightly in front of—but not touching—her delicate lips. Her gaze lit briefly on Adam before returning to the radio, as if instructing him to resume listening to the speech.

  “In the last few hours, brave Indonesian soldiers have begun to strike at the heart of this Malaysia that British Imperialists are so proud of. Here is proof of Living Dangerously. Our forces are now just a hundred miles from Kuala Lumpur, where the lackeys of Imperialism cower from us. They thought we were afraid. They thought we would not dare. They thought that the might of America would save them, but it will not. The British and Americans who seek to control the free world will be crushed in Southeast Asia. They will meet the same fate as the French in Vietnam. In the last few weeks a mighty fleet of British aircraft carriers and destroyers was forced to flee from us. Why? Because I will not allow the enemy’s foot to step on the proud rampaging Indonesian Bull. It is no longer time to be conciliatory. Our revolution has foes everywhere. We have a duty to attack, to destroy every power, whether foreign or not, native or not, that endangers the security and the continuation of the revolution.”

  Z shifted in her seat. “I don’t like the tone of this,” she said. Her brow was only faintly troubled by a frown, but it was enough of a signal for the others to start a debate.

  “The country is starving—let’s fight expensive wars with the Americans!”

  “What a convenient excuse to suppress anyone who dares to oppose him!”

  “Revolution? What revolution? He has no ideology. Listen, listen …”

  “… I know a science that is efficacious, namely, Marxism. As you know, I am a friend of Communists because Communists are revolutionary people, and I am a friend of all revolutionary people, whatever their cause, be it religion or ideology… .”

  Z spoke again, more firmly this time. “This man is unbelievable. He has no idea what Marxism is. It’s just a word he’s heard. He wants to keep everyone happy but he can’t do so any longer. He shouldn’t be allowed.”

  “As I wrote in my satirical epic poem in last month’s Z,” said the long-haired poet, “our dear president has supplanted the state in controlling the means of production in a classless society.”

  “It makes me so angry,” someone else added, “because the economics and demographics of Indonesia would make it an ideal Communist state. That’s what my thesis is all about.”

  There were more voices competing for attention now; the radio was forgotten. Din pushed his chair back quietly and tugged at Adam’s elbow. “Let’s go,” he said. Adam did not want to leave. He wanted to hear the things being said. It surprised and excited him to have understood the things they were saying—not everything, of course, but the general sense of it. They were people his own age, people who were not too dissimilar from him, he thought; they were not unschooled kids from the Moluccas but people whose complexities he thought he could understand. He wanted to stay.

  “Come on,” Din said, c
ontinuing to pull at him. Adam did not resist; he did not want to make a scene.

  Once they were out in the narrow alleys of the kampung, Din began to speak with his usual fervor. “It’s always the same with those guys—all talk, no action. PhD this, modern Marxist theory that. What good does Z magazine do for Indonesia? It’s just toilet paper. I wrote one article for them on the need for regime change. Good, very good, that Zubaidah girl says. Then I wrote another one, saying the only way to do this is by forceful means, and she says”—he mimicked her smooth voice and smart vowels—“‘We do not subscribe to such things.’ What use is a Communist revolutionary magazine that doesn’t subscribe to action? Twenty years of independence and look where we are. Come on, you’re going to see what real revolutionaries look like.”

  From a distance Adam did not recognize the crowd as being made up of people. He saw a dark, amorphous band that seemed to hover just above where he thought the ground should be, erasing all detail of life and obscuring the buildings beyond it. The flags atop the presidential palace were just visible above this band of noncolor, but otherwise the city seemed to have disappeared. Perhaps it was the heat that induced this mirage, he thought, or maybe there was something wrong with him. He was very tired. He could not hear anything either, not even when they were quite close to the edge of the mass, this inhuman gathering of humans. The same silence he had experienced with Z surrounded him again, an absence of noise that acquired a weight of its own, like the soundlessness of being under water. When he dipped his head beneath the waves and kicked until his body skimmed the top of the reef, it was this that he felt: a noiseless void pressing against his temples.