Map of the Invisible World: A Novel

by Tash Aw

  They stepped into the hot swell of bodies: the sour smell of old clothes on unwashed bodies. Din forced his way through the crush, pushing people aside with one hand, holding on to Adam’s wrist with the other, as if fighting through dense foliage. The bodies around them gave way with only minimal resistance; all eyes were fixed on some invisible point in the distance. As they waded deeper into this swamp Adam heard the same voice he had heard before: rhythmic, cajoling, powerful. It was impossible to tell where the speaker was—his voice seemed to be coming from all around them, becoming louder as they pushed farther forward. It was more urgent than before, quickening as the beautiful baritone dropped to little more than a whisper, each syllable compressed for emphasis, as insistent as a torrent of water forcing its way through a crack in a wall. It had been more than two hours since the speech had begun, but the voice did not seem to tire.

  Adam could see the palace now, the brilliant white stone coming into view over the heads of the people in front of them; they were slowing down; the bodies were no longer giving way but standing firm: a wall of slick smooth shirtless torsos. “ … we approach the moment when each and every individual who cares for the future of humanity must fight… .” Din continued to grip Adam’s wrist even though they had ceased to move; Adam pulled away slightly, taking half a step back, but he was trapped by someone else pressing against him. Suddenly the space around him had disappeared; there was no air, just the stale, salty smell of skin and hair that forced its way into his nose and mouth and filled his lungs. There was a movement in the crowd, a tremor that Adam could feel working its way toward him, and then someone stepped on his foot, crushing his toes even as an elbow caught him in the rib cage; and yet he could not fall, for there were bodies around him, pressing tightly on all sides. “… we must rise up, rise up and fight, fight, to live as free human beings as God intended… .” There was a cry in the crowd, an indistinct roar of a thousand different words being shouted at once; and again, rising and then dying away sharply like a sudden squall out at sea, when the rains come from nowhere and bear down upon you, churning the waves into a froth before disappearing, leaving everything calm again. Adam found that he could not breathe. He knew that his mouth was open, that his chest rose and fell; but he knew, nonetheless, that he was not breathing. Maybe I am going to die, he thought; I am going to die alone, in this sea of skin. He looked for Din but glimpsed only part of his face, for someone was obscuring him. He could still feel Din’s hand on his wrist, though, gripping tightly. Yet he could not locate his wrist—his arm was outstretched, pulled far from his body, and he could not see it. I am going to die, he thought. He felt calm about it. There was nothing he could do about it now. Another cry punctured the air and this time it did not fade away but grew louder: the sound of one million people cheering and shouting. Adam felt his bones vibrate with this noise; he felt quite unable to distinguish it from his own body.

  And suddenly he was on the ground, his head falling onto the dry earth with a dull thud. He pulled his chin into his chest but even as he did so he felt a sharp blow on the back of his skull—a heel crashing into his head. And another one, this time against his ear, filling his head with a hollow ringing that blanked out everything else. He raised both arms to cover his head: Din had let go. He drew his knees up to his face and curled into a ball, and it was better. He felt the heavy tread of feet on his hips and thighs and calves, and the rough jerk of people tripping over him. An immense pressure pushed outward from within his skull, as if his head was about to split open. The ringing in his ears had turned into a dull rushing noise; he no longer knew where he was.

  Come on. Run. It was Din, lifting Adam by his arm, pulling roughly, his fingernails digging into the soft flesh of Adam’s armpit. Now it was he who stepped on prostrate bodies, tripping occasionally and landing heavily, elbows first, on someone’s back. A space appeared around him, and he could see blood on faces and bruises on bare chests and open mouths with split lips. He saw the expressions on these bloody faces: not fear or anger, but a mixture of exhilaration and emptiness, as if the people who inhabited these bodies had fled long ago. The terrible noise he had heard earlier still hung heavily in the air, but it was fractured now, broken by distinct screams of individual men and women, which Adam could hear even through the blank ringing in his ear. There was another noise too, something he thought he had heard before, a series of short, sharp cracks, a pop-pop-pop that came in rapid bursts. Gunfire, he thought to himself, and wondered how he knew that. Later Din would tell him that it was the sound of shots being fired into the air in celebration of the victory of the revolution, to mark this Year of Living Dangerously, but Adam was not so sure.

  Adam concentrated on running. He focused only on following Din, who turned to look at him every so often with a wild-eyed exhilaration. It was too much for him to think of anything else; he ran as fast as he could, trying to keep up with Din on the streets of this vast city, his chest heaving with the effort. He could breathe again, he thought; he could breathe.

  · 15 ·

  Margaret thought: This time I am finished. Done for. A goner. She could feel the car shaking violently, bouncing on its axle even though it was stationary: There were people running over the car, leaping onto the back of it, up over the roof and down onto the hood before carrying on down the road. The noise was horrible. It was as if the car had been caught in a rock slide and an avalanche of boulders was crashing against it and threatening to carry it away. Margaret looked up and saw the soles of bare feet and cheap rubber sneakers streaming down in front of the windshield in a rain of dull colors that obscured the light and turned the afternoon into twilight. I’m a goner. It was funny how she remembered that one line from a novel she had read a long time ago. It was about a girl who had fallen terribly in love with a twenty-year-old Spanish boy, a matador, even (or was she just imagining that?)—and she was so crazy with love that she knew her entire existence would be surrendered to the beautiful boy. Margaret remembered nothing of the rest of the story. She retained only a sense of ridicule and mild contempt at the thought that someone could fall so helplessly in love with a person she didn’t know and allow herself to become limp and silly like that. Falling in love is a matter of choice: If you fall in love like that it must mean that you want to; it means you want to lose your mind and self-control. You want to lose your sense of independent existence, yourself. The girl in the novel had been like that. She had known that she was losing her self-respect; she was a trembling wreck. I’m a goner, she had said. It was as if she was beyond salvation; and all due to events beyond her control. It had so irritated Margaret that she had rushed to the end of the book without paying much attention to it. So it was funny that she should remember it now, caught in this riot. Now it was she who was a “goner,” but unlike the girl in the novel she was really a goner, and it was due to events that really were beyond her control. And unlike the girl, she would die without knowing how it felt to be so in love that you could lose all sense of who you were.

  Bill did not say anything. He sat with his hands on the steering wheel, staring straight ahead at the river of bodies flowing past and over them. Margaret could see patches of sweat seeping through his shirt, like the markings of deep water on maps of the ocean; he looked very calm, with only the slightest hint of a frown on his brow, as if they were merely caught in a traffic jam. The engine of the Buick was still running, and every so often it would rev up fiercely, a rasping growl that rose above the stampede of feet around them. Bill was doing it, of course, thought Margaret; he was scared too. It was very hot in the car. The windows were shut tightly and the doors were locked. Amid the torrent of bodies a face would occasionally appear: Someone would stop and press his nose to the window next to Margaret or throw himself across the windshield with a loud thud, his palms smacking against the glass as he hooted and screamed and jeered, his eyes staring and bloodshot, like some phantom from her sleep; and then he would disappear into the rushing stream once more, vanishing ju
st like a nightmare. A young man stopped on Margaret’s side of the car. She knew that he was no more than twenty or twenty-two, even though his face was wizened and scarred, his complexion mottled. She could not read the expression on his face—not aggression, not hatred, not lust, not anything in particular, just a blankness that could have been all those things, or none of them. It was an emptiness that frightened Margaret, for there was nothing in his face she could relate to. There were thin veins crisscrossing his yellowed eyes, and his teeth were dark little stumps. He opened his mouth and shouted a word that sounded like BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA that seemed to go on for a whole minute, maybe more, and even through the window Margaret could feel the coarseness of his voice, which was not just a sound but a physical thing that she felt brushing the hairs on the back of her neck.

  “Don’t look,” Bill said, “don’t look at him. Do not turn your head. Keep your eyes straight ahead.”

  She looked at the hailstorm of feet on the windshield, but she could not help herself, and she turned once more to look at the face by her side, at the red and white bandana and the furry pink tongue. The boy pulled open his shirt to reveal something on his chest. With a knife, he had cut an uneven X across his bony breastbone; it had not fully scabbed over and she could see patches of bright moist blood where the ends of the X reached for his collarbone. He brandished a machete, drawing it across his chest in a gesture that Margaret did not understand, and she thought—again—I’m a goner. But then, after another BAAAA (shorter, this time), he was carried off by the surging tide of bodies. Without knowing why, Margaret suddenly thought of Adam, a boy no younger than the ones rampaging through the streets in front of her. She thought of him asleep in her house, peaceful and innocent, and she was glad he could not see the things that were happening in this city on this day.

  Bill reached over to the glove compartment and drew out a revolver. It was just like a film, thought Margaret, a very stupid film in which she had the misfortune to have a minor role. She never knew that people actually kept guns in glove compartments. “What are you doing?” she said. “Is that legal?”

  “Sure,” Bill said. “Don’t worry, we won’t need it. It’s just … policy.” He held the gun firmly but quite calmly, and Margaret got the impression it was not the first time he had held one. She felt reassured, and hated herself for feeling reassured: Did she actually enjoy being protected by a man with a gun? It was his fault they were in this mess in the first place. No, no, no: It was hers. Today was just the latest episode in the bad comedy that was her life. She wondered if today would be the long overdue finale of this fine farce.

  She had woken up very early that morning, with none of the dreadful lassitude of the previous days and weeks. The crick in her neck had disappeared; her shoulders were not stiff and her joints did not ache.

  It had been a long time since she had appreciated twilight in Jakarta in this way: blue and mysterious, and full of murky promise. She remembered how she had felt when she first came here after the long years of winter in the States and Europe: lithe and unencumbered by the weight of woolen clothing. On the crossing from Rotterdam she had given away her winter clothes, article by article, to whoever would have them: Her serge overcoat was the first to go, just after Aden, donated gleefully to a Lebanese mother of five; three sweaters disposed of on the Indian Ocean to Indonesian crew members. When she arrived in Jakarta her suitcase was virtually empty. She bought some blouses made from thin cotton, cut in the local style, which reminded her of the clothes she had worn as a child: cheap, functional, and not very elegant.

  It was this feeling that she had woken up with: a feeling of newness, of change, even though she did not know what that change would involve: the sensation of purity and possibility that she thought she had forgotten. The predawn air was fresh and gave her arms goose bumps as she stood in the yard drinking strong, muddy black coffee. She had dressed nicely, putting on a skirt (something she was now regretting) and a vaguely matching blouse. She checked her appearance in the mirror and, for a moment, even considered putting on some makeup, but the lipstick she salvaged from the back of a drawer was so old and neglected it had become as cracked as mud beds after a long drought. Never mind, she thought, brushing her hair: She looked absolutely fine; her eyes had even lost their recent puffiness. Before leaving she checked on Adam and found him in deep sleep, one hand raised to his brow, palm outward as if shielding his eyes from bright light. His head was turned slightly to one side as if avoiding an invisible sun and his jaw twitched every so often, but otherwise he lay perfectly still. The thin sheet had become entangled under his body, and Margaret gently extricated it before drawing it up to his chest. She left a note on the table in the kitchen that said simply, “Stay and Wait.”

  On her way to meet Bill she had gone past groups of people performing their daily drills—star jumps, good-morning stretches, squats, thrusts, lunges, and arm blocks, feigning combat. A group of women marched briskly down the street, almost more quickly than the already heavy traffic. They were dressed in the standard uniform of volunteers—oversized khaki shirts, buttoned to the neck, and austere men’s trousers—and their heads were held high, chins lifted in defiance of the unseen enemy that was everywhere. It was always like this on Independence Day. Every other vehicle on the road seemed to be a public bus, commandeered to transport students and people from the outlying villages to the center of town so that they could hear the president’s address. Everyone else was left to negotiate the city on foot. There was a sudden explosion: mortar shells in the distance, and rifle shots and the piercing shrillness of whistles. A van nearby had broken down, its failing engine filling the air with thick smoke. Margaret lifted the collar of her shirt to cover her mouth and nose. Through the haze she saw figures making their way through the maze of cars. She knew she was not hallucinating: soldiers dressed in full army fatigue, crouching behind cars, their rifles trained on imaginary foes. One of them brushed past her becak, the twigs in his helmet rustling noisily, his radio crackling on and off as he stooped to avoid his mystery foe. She looked around her—people were watching with expressions of boredom; they knew these exercises would soon be over.

  “What is it this time?” she shouted through the veil of her shirt.

  Her driver laughed. “I think they’re trying to recapture the telephone exchange. But you know, if we were actually invaded I think we should teach our enemies a real lesson and give them the telephone exchange.”

  Bill had just finished a meeting when Margaret arrived. He was standing in the shadow of a giant column in the shape of a crowbar crowned by a shaft of lightning.

  “Come and have a look inside,” Bill said, taking her by the hand. “You’ll be amazed.”

  Each of the floors of the building celebrated the vision of modern, independent Indonesia, Bill explained; each story was seventeen meters high (“Independence Day—today—August 17, geddit?”), light and airy, made of polished concrete set in curves and angles. Everywhere Margaret looked she saw beautifully made models of highways, railways, waterways, hydroelectric dams, irrigation schemes, hospitals, factories, war planes, spaceships, nuclear plants, and luxurious hotels: entire worlds captured in glass cabinets. A modern port—quite unlike the ratinfested docks of Tanjong Priok—bustled with happy workers and angular, futuristic ships. In a Western-style living room, a smiling family sat on an orange sofa, pointing at a TV the size of a small cinema screen, their comfortable home filled with an array of electrical appliances Margaret could not identify. A bridge in the shape of a clover leaf—exactly the same as the one downtown—sat astride a network of streamlined highways, but the city around these roads was not the city Margaret knew. Here, in this other city that was Jakarta and yet not Jakarta, the famous clover-leaf bridge was surrounded by buildings of uniform modernity, and the people were well dressed and clean and healthy, carrying smart briefcases as they went to work. The cars were shiny and the roads tree-lined and clean, and there were children playing next to the canal,
which did not look black and slimy like the one she knew. There were no slums in this city.

  “Officially we’ve stopped all aid to Indonesia, and relations between our countries are at meltdown, but on a personal level nothing’s changed,” Bill said. He was wearing a light blue shirt, open at the neck to reveal strawberry blond chest hairs unfurling toward the base of his throat. His sleeves were rolled up to the elbow and he did not look as if he had been in the office. “My friends in town still want to see me—there’s still work to be done.”

  “I like the way you see friends as work,” Margaret laughed. “Is there ever a moment when you let your guard down? I mean, do you ever not think of how everything fits into your master plan of world domination?”

  Bill chuckled; she had forgotten how he looked when he laughed in this way, his cheeks shiny and blushed with red, almost cherubic and certainly unsophisticated. All of a sudden he was an Idaho farmer’s son once more. She could imagine him growing up on a prairie, sitting on the back of a tractor amid bales of hay. “Don’t tease me, Margaret Bates. You know I’m defenseless against your wit.”