The Wandering

by Intan Paramaditha

  ‘Then?’

  ‘She meets a handsome man from Peru and they get married.’

  ‘What, and then they have kids, and happy family holidays at the beach in Miraflores? Oh, how heteronormative can you get. Do you have any ideas that are even duller?’

  You laugh. Yvette knows you’re joking, but you really want to make a red-shoes movie someday. For the time being, you enjoy your holiday. Everything is perfect, except the cab from the airport. The price was absolutely outrageous. Even the most agile squirrel can fall into a tourist trap.

  FINIS

  You don’t know how long you’ve been floating in the dark. Five minutes? Half an hour? You’ve fallen into what seems to be a bottomless black hole.

  But no. There is light at its end, vague, enough to give hope. And that’s where you are eventually dumped, onto a cold floor. There are no lamps. The light comes from candles burning atop pillars.

  Hello!

  All you hear is the echo of your own voice. Not far from where you have landed are several long, empty benches. You see a ticket window, but there is no one on duty. A large black clock stands next to it, pointing to the number 12. Its needle does not budge. What is this place?

  You hear a far-off train.

  This is a station.

  You half break into a run as you look towards the tracks. A train is approaching from a distance, and you almost leap for joy. The train will save you. As it draws near, you can make out dark green paint and a golden colour around the train’s doors. On the carriage, beneath its windows, written in a classic font, it reads: City of New York.

  The train stops in front of you and the door opens. A conductor, a stocky woman with short hair, signals for you to enter. You leap in, and the doors close once more.

  Inside are several passengers, all looking towards the dewy windows as you search for an empty spot. A woman in a brown leather jacket almost collides with you as she walks towards her seat. She wears a brown aviator hat and large goggles. You study her.

  ‘Pretty cool, isn’t she?’

  The conductor beside you watches the woman in the hat with awe.

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘Ah, kids today.’ She shakes her head. ‘That’s Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly across the Atlantic.’

  Amelia Earhart? What’s she doing here? Has she been found? You glance at the faces of the passengers. All of them are women. You behold a woman with a beret and a floral shirt. Victoria. She is also on the train. You approach her, delighted.

  ‘Tante Victoria!’

  She doesn’t hear you. She is asleep. Her head is leaning against the window and her hands clasp her knitting.

  Where are we going?

  Victoria continues her slumber, and the other passengers also seem occupied. Some are asleep, while others are reading or staring out the window. You dart after the conductor as she makes her way to the next carriage. As soon as she opens the door, strains of jazz burst forth. A group of women sits on a shiny black leather sofa. The scarlet paint on the carriage ceiling and the golden yellow rug imbue the room with a sense of warmth. In front of the sofa are small tables and a bottle of wine. A bartender is busy mixing a drink in the corner of the carriage.

  ‘Sorry,’ you address Madam Conductor. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Central.’

  ‘Which Central?’

  ‘Does that matter, sweetie? Grand Central, New York. Amsterdam Centraal. Central do Brasil. Central is central is central. All trains go to Central.’

  She smiles broadly, oddly, like a Cheshire cat. You take a step back. Central. You are not referring to the same place. The conductor is talking about a generic Central, somewhere, but you’ve obviously never encountered a train like this before.

  ‘What’s the next station? I want to get off.’

  This time she turns and looks at you in surprise. For the first time you notice the name printed on her blue uniform. Gertrude. Her name is Gertrude.

  ‘They didn’t tell you?’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘We come to pick people up, but no one gets off.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, you can get off at the next station,’ Gertrude said. ‘But so far no one has ever done so.’

  ‘What do you mean? We can’t leave?’

  ‘Of course you can, sweetie. I just said that so far no one has wanted to.’

  ‘No one?’ Your voice rises in a panic. ‘But I want to get off. I want to go home!’

  ‘Sweetheart.’ She pats your shoulder gently. ‘No one on this train wants to go home. As you can see, all your fellow passengers are looking for adventure.’

  You look towards the shiny leather sofa and observe how everyone is laughing and raising a wine glass. A dark-skinned woman in a sparkling dress passes you. Her short hair is adorned in a tiara with feather accents.

  ‘Hey, Mama,’ she greets Gertrude.

  ‘Dearest Josephine! Your show is tonight, isn’t it?’

  The woman, dazzlingly beautiful, give a thumbs up and walks towards the bartender. Is she a famous star? She looks very familiar.

  ‘Josephine –’

  ‘Yes, right. That Josephine. The Josephine,’ Gertrude says. ‘A fellow American in Paris. Enjoys travelling, just like you. Just like all of us.’

  ‘Oh,’ you murmur stupidly. ‘Sorry, Mrs Gertrude –’

  ‘Oh, don’t be so polite. Call me Mama.’

  ‘I have to go home!’ You start to become hysterical. ‘Wherever home is, I have to get there.’

  Gertrude nods with a motherly gaze, as if she understands what you’re going through. She then leans towards you and whispers, ‘The problem is that when you get there, there’s no there there.’

  Gertrude again smiles broadly, enigmatically. You don’t know what she means, but the statement rings in your ears like an incantation. She opens the door and enters the next carriage.

  You briefly lose yourself in thought. You feel you should try talking to her again. You attempt to open the door between carriages, but it’s closed tight. A sticker reads ‘Restricted Area’. You step back unsteadily, slowly, and sit yourself down on the sofa. Now you hear jazz coming at a faster tempo. The passengers on the sofa rise, ready to dance. For the first time you study them carefully. Their clothing is fine, like the outfits of your childhood fantasies: women who ride the Orient Express. Your gaze drifts downward, and the resemblance increasingly dawns on you. Red shoes.

  Yes, they’re all wearing red shoes, and this train will not stop.

  Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go wandering.

  FINIS

  ‘Have you really thought it over some more?’

  ‘Thought what over?’

  You answer your sister casually because you’re occupied with lifting your suitcase into the boot of a taxi. After ten days, you know it’s time to move out and find a new place to stay for the sake of your mental health. Your sister stands in front of the gate, baby in her right arm, left hand clutching her cell phone.

  ‘I’m serious, you know. You can stay,’ she says. ‘What will you do, anyway?’

  ‘I don’t know. I could go back to EGW,’ you hazard.

  ‘That Global English course? Man has been to the moon, and you’re still on Global English? That’s not going anywhere.’

  You freeze for a moment. Not going anywhere. Yes, maybe after all this you’re still not going anywhere.

  The taxi driver closes the boot. You take a deep breath. Once again, you glance at your sister’s house and car, this perfect picture of urban bourgeois domesticity, and you feel quite sad. A ten-day reunion doesn’t promise reconciliation. But we have to accept that we can’t hate our families. You hug your sister tightly and wave to her kids, lined up like dwarves.

  You swing the car door shut. The driver asks, ‘Where are we going?’

  The question gives you pause. Where are we going? Why ‘we’ and not ‘you’? Who are we? Are we going together?

>   ‘Pejaten,’ you answer.

  The taxi drives away from Bintaro, entering the toll road. You look at the driver’s ID on the left of the dashboard, and take your pen from your bag to jot down the details there, just in case. Miroto, 666.

  ‘Tired of travelling already?’

  The question surprises you, again. You feel as if you’re being interrogated. Growing apprehensive, you study the driver, seeking his reflection in the rear-view mirror, but all you see there is your face. He whistles, adding to your nervousness. From the back seat, you realise suddenly that his ears are pointed and hairy.

  ‘You can’t keep running from me. We’re destined to be together,’ says the man in front of you.

  His voice rings all too familiar in your ears. You’re aghast. The door is locked, and the taxi continues on an empty highway. Dammit, you’re trapped. You look again in the rear-view mirror. There is no one else visible. You are looking at yourself as you travel towards some unknown destination. Because each mirror is a door.

  Mirrodoor.

  ‘Make me your slave again. I’ll forgive all your betrayals. Mephistopheles Most Merciful, darling, at your service.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong,’ you say. ‘I don’t need your forgiveness.’

  ‘Still stubborn, I see!’

  Suddenly the car shakes violently. You clench your eyes shut, preparing for an overwhelming outburst of rage that may bring your life to an end. But nothing happens. No explosion of satanic wrath, only a car that passes you without signalling at an insane speed. Taxi Driver, aka Devil, opens the window and thrusts out an upraised middle finger, ‘Asshole!’

  You sigh, feeling a mixture of relief and fear. Devil remains silent for a long time, his eyes glued to the wide boulevard that stretches out in front of him. His voice softens.

  ‘So what now? Back to teaching at EGW?’ he asks. ‘Your red shoes are still pining for the road.’

  He grabs something from under the driver’s seat to fling rearward. The red shoes glitter, back in your hands once more. You look at him, confused.

  ‘You don’t want to stop here, do you? Take your shoes back. But once you wear them again, you’ll forget everything. A curse, even though I call it a blessing.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘The history of your red-shoes adventure will be erased. You won’t be able to remember it. And those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,’ Devil says, then hastily adds, ‘That last bit is a famous line, supposedly from George Santayana. He’s quoting me, of course.’

  You cradle the red shoes in your lap. They look tired but thirsty for travel, just like you. You always thought adventure forced you to look back, but maybe it’s also a circle – a vicious satanic circle, to be more exact – never-ending, unbroken. You’ll go the same way and fall in the same holes, a constant déjà vu, but maybe, once in a while, you’ll get lucky.

  If you have the courage, put on your red shoes and return to page 9, the beginning of your adventure.

  FINIS

  Tijuana

  Where were you then? Were you afraid?

  You’ve already asked that, you said.

  Yes, you said you didn’t dare leave the house. As for the rest, you didn’t remember. Maybe I just wanted to sweep up all the scraps of information you’d scattered. But we’d arrived at this question, and it’s important to note that fact. Most people don’t even get this far.

  How did we get to this question?

  I’d told you about the holes in my skin. I’d never told anyone about that damned disease. But on a journey people do the unthinkable. And you and I had crossed over. We had arrived in Tijuana.

  The border had set us astir.

  Somehow we just started talking about Tijuana, and we were bad planners. We were sitting on Pacific Beach in San Diego, our feet buried in the sand, and out of the blue you said: I’m bored. I laughed. This was already the second time since meeting you that I’d heard you say that. How could you get bored with all this, bathed by fine sand, watching surfers chase the waves? Nothing in New York could compare.

  Yes, but I’ve been living in LA for two years now, you said.

  Can we go back to La Jolla Cove? I prefer to walk high above the water too, and look down over the blue sea, the cliffs and the seals frolicking in the sand. Here everything is completely flat, not like in La Jolla where it’s hilly.

  But only rich people live in La Jolla, you said. San Diego is more exciting. Hey, how about getting some Mexican food?

  How about going to Mexico? I said.

  You thought I was crazy.

  The previous day, we had driven down I-5 from Los Angeles to San Diego in your car. I was at the wheel because you were still a little scared of driving long distances. You’d finished a driving course and at age thirty, you could drive through LA for the first time in your life, in the cheap car you’d just bought, with the warm wind in your hair. Maybe this is one of my greatest achievements, you said. What are we waiting for? We have to celebrate.

  We were working together in an Asian restaurant. Our manager, a sweet woman, had introduced us there. She always helped Indonesians find work, and they were always illegals, like me. We were friends too, though not overly close. You never invited me to your place or vice versa, and I never saw you when the Indonesian community got together for meals. Indos – yes, I hate the term too, but everyone uses it – always had a reason to gather and cook. Sometimes the conversations were really insipid; gossiping about famous celebrities they remembered from the nineties, long before they came to America. My main goal was to eat some Indo cooking and bring some home if I got lucky.

  Then one day, when we went out for a break, you asked how long I’d been working at the restaurant. I’d lost count of the time, but it was the job where I’d lasted longest. I got decent tips there. Before that I’d worked at a clothing store for eight dollars an hour, without any chance of bonuses. That’s when the words came out your mouth: I’m bored. It sounded like a slogan of rebellion.

  I asked if you wanted to change jobs. Maybe Walmart, you said, because you were bored with working in a restaurant. I laughed, like I laughed at you at Pacific Beach. You’re kidding, right? We get better pay here. Besides, a few years ago Walmart had to pay a huge fine for hiring illegal aliens. There’s no way they’d take the risk now. Later on I learned about the ambiguity of your own situation. Your visa had expired, but maybe, if you could straighten out your marital status, you’d be able to fix that. You’d had an Islamic wedding ceremony but hadn’t been able to register it officially yet. Why bother to get hitched to an American, only to end up with a marriage that wasn’t recognised? Were you romantic, or just stupid? And where was your husband now?

  Missing, you said.

  You talked about losing your husband as casually as losing a wallet. Of course, it wasn’t easy, especially in the early days, you said. You felt sad in a strange way because you didn’t love him. You had tied your life to a thread, not firmly, but still you wailed when the kite broke. I listened to your whole story. No, not all of it. A lot of things confused me. You never told me how you got to New York, for example. Maybe that’s why I kept asking questions. There was always something you hadn’t told me.

  Where were you then? Were you afraid?

  When was the first time these questions came up?

  As we were driving down the I-5 from Los Angeles to San Diego, you asked why I always wore long sleeves. I have holes in my skin, I said. You didn’t believe me.

  We agreed to San Diego because we were both bored. Maybe we just needed a holiday. Yes, a holiday, something that would give us the illusion that we were free. After that we would return to work, work, who knows why. We’d get drunk in a topsy-turvy world, but then the world would return to normal and we’d cooperate in reaffirming its order. But everyone needs a midsummer night’s dream. You agreed.

  You opened the car window wide to let your hair blow in the wind. Like in the movies,
you said. You took off your jacket and applied sunscreen. From behind my sunglasses, I stared at the highway stretching out under endless blue sky, desert on either side. Here it was, the American road. We were like cowboys riding our horses in the wilderness – except we were women, free, in a car, rolling down the highway.

  The holes, you said. What happened?

  The American road – where would it take you? I’d travelled the highway many times and I’d never seen the future on the horizon. On that American road, I never turned around, but the past always managed to catch me.

  May 1998. Where were you then?

  You fell silent and thought. Was everyone like you, trying to remember a string of events for that month? In my head there is only one.

  Rioting. That’s all my father said. We rushed to cram a bunch of clothes into a small suitcase and turned off all the lights. I squeezed in a Nirvana CD, but Mother took it out and replaced it with biscuits. Father drove frantically to a hotel. From behind the windshield, we saw smoke rising. Shops were engulfed in flames. I was curious, and might have wanted to see if I could smell the fumes, but Father snapped at me. Don’t open the window! I asked: the police, where are the police? We have to report this to the police! My parents didn’t answer. Since then I’ve never looked for the police again.

  For three days we ate and drank in our room. This is like a concentration camp, I said. Shut your mouth! I’d never heard my father so hysterical. Do you know what’s happening out there? These are anti-Chinese riots. And like an idiot I asked: anti-us? On the fourth day, at dawn, we went to the airport and flew to Singapore.

  You queried again, this time more softly:

  Were you a victim of the masses? The holes – were they the cause?

  They? Who are they? We’re used to using the words mass, the masses – people in numbers, a faceless mob, ready to attack. Don’t screw around or the masses will run amok. For years, the word masses has terrorised us. But who moves the masses – the ‘they’ who give orders to burn and kill?