Indonesia: Getting Back

Instructions for the use of this short story: 1. Start at the beginning: Indonesia: Getting Answers. 2. Start the music. 3. Read. 4. If you like what you've read, help spread the word!

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     The edge of the jungle came to me while I rested immobile at the base of the temple. I glided along like a boat on the water, unseen forces pushing irresistibly. In the thick of it once more, the sky above me flirted from behind towering palm tree fans. She blushed fuchsia whenever my eyes connected with her otherwise violet skin.

     The forest sucked me along and drew all the curtains so there was no longer any seeing out, or in. Each movement left me invisible to the place I’d inhabited only a moment ago. My existence was erased and rewritten every moment.

     Only trees and butterflies and thick-lipped amphibians with glass black eyes had ever seen this virgin forest. I floated along like a ghost in a museum; an uninvited and inconsequential tourist.

     The flavor of the insistently earthy tea repeated once more against the back of my tongue and I tried to swallow it again. On its way down, it had tasted like earth; on its way back up, it was all fire. I hiccupped searing flames.

     All around me, trees reached out to slide long, emaciated fingers against my skin, leaving a goose bump freeze in their wake. But there was no hostility in the grasp of the branches. The jungle just wanted to caress me as I glided through it. It couldn’t keep its fronds off me.

   
    I knelt in front of a snake. Turning her empty eyes to face me directly, she stopped and waited. There was no way to read her. The eyes are not the windows to the snake’s soul; they are only mirrors that you fall into in one last mistake.

     My throat burned and my skin itched.

     “You know where I need to go,” I accused her and she stuck out her tongue. I knew, even as she slipped once more beneath the undergrowth that the words that were babbling out of my mouth had been confused by more than just foul tasting tea. I was stoned out of my mind on mushrooms. I recognized the symptoms now.

     
     There had been something familiar in that flavor, indeed something dangerous: a cytotoxic undertone in the bouquet of rotting forest and earthworm medicine.

     My stomach rushed up against my throat without warning but there would be no relief from the journey now. I had no choice but to see it through to the end. When I recovered at last, I found myself moving again. How far had I come? How long until night? My feet did not belong to me.

     Everything went dim as I walked for what might have been many hours. My mind didn’t drift as it usually does, telling me stories about my journey; about where I might be going and what I might find when I got there. No, things got quiet inside me. Hushed like dying.

     A scream brought me back. My eyes swiveled up to the source of the noise: a tiny man with a nose like a water balloon and rainbow painted genitals. He pulled his lips back at me so I could get a better look at his teeth and rocked back and forth, tiny cherry red penis proudly displayed before me.

     Not a man, mushroom-self, a monkey.

     If he’s a monkey, why is he talking?

     “If you know you’re on drugs, why do you think this is real?”

     “Stop talking.”

      I did, I froze, mouth open in a perfect circle. My tongue scrapped against the roof of my mouth and crumbled away like sand in the wind. Holes in me.

     Shit.

     Monkey.

     “Your dick is red.”

     He grinned, canines long like swords.

     “You have blue balls.”

     He squatted down to hide them.

     “Get back in the fucking trees. You don’t belong here on the ground," I shouted with more anger than I knew I had. But it was more for myself, for telling this monkey how to live his life. “Swarthy man monkey.”

     He stepped aside at last, but there was nothing behind him except impenetrable forest. I could not move forward.

     Above me, the palms began to fold in on themselves like feathers, one by one tucked back neat in place along bent wings. But this wasn’t forest; these were wings and he was reaching out for me with them, to tuck me in safe against his cold body. Cold-blooded bird. He rested his spear-straight beak against my neck, to hug me tighter.

     The last thing I remember was the eye of the pterodactyl, black like a hole in my childhood.

     When I woke up in my hotel room Wednesday morning, Tuesday had never happened, as far as I could tell. I’d lost the day, somewhere out there in the forest of Indonesia, somewhere in the arms of a dream.

Photos courtesy of Connie Freeland

Mongolia: Getting Back

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     Standing between my house and my brother’s, there was a mountain. Monstrous, imperial, it climbed so far up into the sky that it must have been one of the last places you could still spring to the moon from. Back when the moon was closer. Back when we used to skip across the distance likes kids across the creek.

     On Tuesdays, I biked to my brother’s house, right over the mountain. The trail, in a foolish attempt to connect point A and point B with a straight line, folded over the top of it.  

     Picking up speed was the only option. I’d dip beneath the overpass, hands clear of the brakes, riding like hell. My feet cranked against the pedals, my body floated above the seat and my chin jutted forward urging me onwards.

     No speed was ever enough. My legs inevitably began to burn beneath the strain of my furious peddling. I knew it was the wrong thing to do, even then, but I didn’t care. One by one I let the gears slip down, easing the pressure against my legs but making each revolution less and less significant. When there was no lower gear to ease down to, I had to get off the bike and walk it. This is how I always saw the summit.

     I moved away from that town when I was ten. The final score: Mountain 117, Crystal 0.

     Years later, I drifted back into town again and decided that I should tackle the mountain; beat it once and for all. So I borrowed a bike and struck out along the path, towards the house that used to be my brother’s. I didn’t need a map.

     I cascaded into the underpass, peddling like a maniac, ready for the fight. My legs raced under the adrenaline surge. I held my breath. Zipping along, I crested up and over the mountain at a coast. It wasn’t even a hill; it was barely a bump in the road.

     I didn’t take that as a win.

     The past is like that. It gets too big rattling around inside your mind and then you catch up with it and it’s not what you remembered. Not at all.

     I was eight the last time I was in Mongolia. I can recall looking out into the infinity of the country that swept away in all directions and it seemed as big as looking up through the Mongolian night. I saw the edge of the universe from this country, lying backwards on a horse. It made my heart stop.

     The most surprising thing about Mongolia, the second time around, was that I had been right all along. It really did stretch out forever. You could lay the Earth down map-flat on the plateau and you’d wind up with room around the edges.

Ecuador: Getting Back

I am the one your parents warned you about; the one who was forbidden in your house. "That one's trouble," your father would say to your mother and she would nod slowly in reply. I have invented the following games: Face-First Downstreet Toboggan, Dodge-Bike!, Fire Wars, Skate-Boxing. I have played none of these but slunk away like a sly raccoon post injury. I am the bad influence.

I'm winding my way along the equator, snaking north and south of this invisible division. Which way will the water whirl now? I wonder, but there is no time to circle a stick into a miniature maelstrom to find out; the rapids propel us onwards in a mad cocaine-infused rush. This river does not rest.

I grip the oar so tight I feel I might break it. My heart has not slowed down since morning and I find little comfort in the glaze that seems to eternally cover the eyes of my guide. Is he bored? High? Unaware of the danger? Undisturbed by it? Impervious perhaps? He sits on the back of the boat and steers in silence, leaving Iona and I to guess at when to paddle into danger and when to hide out against the floor of the boat.

Iona has a baby monkey stuffed into her shirt. We're smugglers, pirates; an unsavory lot with a bribed local guide and an inflatable boat. We sense danger all around us though no one knows what we're doing. This monkey is quiet. Sh. Sleep, baby, sleep through the class four rapids.

I haven’t a clue what I'm going to do with this monkey once I escape the country. Right now, I'm more concerned with that waterfall up ahead.

"Hold on to your monkey-baby, Iona, we're going over."

Kiribati: Getting Back

Hector is an SUV: sporty, tough, powerful and a fuel-guzzler. He gulps his power drink by the gallon and seems to keep going strong no matter how much of the hard stuff he has in his system. Shot for shot he has no rival. Hector is either drinking or sleeping.

I turned to reply but he was gone.

I teetered atop my stool, empty basket of shark tacos still in front of me. Cannon fire  blasted across the midline of my brain. The heat and the hangover played tricks on my eyes, splitting the Mai Tai before me into two wavering cups of alcohol.

“You’d better catch up,” Hector chastised, sucking down his own second drink and heading off to pee in the ocean, still wrapped in the bloodstained sail.

There really were two drinks sitting before me.

“You’ve really done some job on that boat,” announced the man who mounted the stool next to mine. It was the same gold-skinned beach-frolicker Hector and I had tried to flag down that morning while we drifted helplessly in the center of a pack of sharks. The man’s skin glowed through the fabric of his white swim shorts and I did my best to pretend I couldn’t see the shadow of his penis through them. Once you’ve noticed a penis, it’s all but impossible to unnotice it.

I picked up the Mai Tai with a renewed interest, both for the something it gave me to do with my hands and the excuse to stare down into it. “I don’t know what happened,” I said into the ice cubes, sneaking a quick leftward glance (yup, that’s his penis), “It’s hard to remember yesterday.”

His laugh was a quick burst of sound so loud it made me jump. “Ha! You don’t know how you busted your mast in half? Crack! Straight through! Pow!”

“Nope,” I replied. Was there a clearly marked escape route? Last thing I needed with this headache was to get trapped in a conversation that utilized sound effects.

“Well, Bunnie and I are headed back the main island in an hour or so. We can give you a lift, and tow you’re boat in. We woulda helped if we’d have known you were actually in trouble. You know, I could really go for a scotch. They got scotch here. Hey, barkeep. You got Chivas? Yeah? Get me one: on the rocks. Bam! What a beautiful day.”

I need to escape from this vacation.

“Hey, hey, hey, Bunnie, baby, this is that girl with that boat we saw. What’d you say your name was?”

“Uh, Crystal.” I turned back to him. A woman who could have passed as an anime character draped her twig-arms around his bare chest. She too was clad in white and her nipples poked out at me through the three-inch triangles of bikini she must have taped to them. Why bother, people?

“Name’s Paul Ketner, Venture Capitalist. This is Bunnie. She’s a model. What is it that you do?”

 “I’m a writer. Fiction and travel narrative, mostly. Occasionally film and television scripts.”

Bunnie sucked on her teeth and used Paul’s glasses as a mirror.

Grabbing on to his drink, Paul leaned back and  scratched his crotch, nodded at me. “So you’ll let us give you a lift?”

Bunnie and Paul or one last, long swim. I wanted to live. I really did.

“Hey, man, your balls are showing,” Hector announced, slapping Paul on the shoulder.

Paul laughed like a maniac. “I know it! WOO! South Pacific! You wearing a toga? What’s that? Blood? Fuck man! Awesome!”

Paul led us aboard his yacht and proceeded to give us the extended tour. There were many details and histories I won’t trouble you with now. It was worse than watching video of other people’s kids on an iPhone.

The good ship Venture Capitalist

Eventually, our broken shell of boat was tied to the stallion yacht and we were on our way, sailing away from a sinking sun and into the darkness of yet another night voyage. I let the evening wash over me thought back over the last few days and my incredible knack for getting into every sort of trouble with my swarthy man-friends. Hector had a knack for chaos. It was the reason that I despised traveling with him and the reason that I kept calling him up time and again. There is something exotic about him, something magnetic the way—

Hey.

Wait a minute.

Where’s Hector?

“Hector?”

I climbed the ladder to the bridge but Paul and the Bunnie were utilizing all the available space. This ship has autopilot right? Is that the word for it on a boat?

“Hector?” I repeated, opening the door to the lounge and stepping across the threshold.

Inside, the lights twinkled like a thousand stars in the glass of the fully stocked bar. Hector, now dressed in one of Paul’s suits, spun on top of one of the bar stools, grinning that crazed smile of his. I swallowed the urge to collapse into a panic attack and approached. That's when I saw that Hector sat in front of a pile of white powder.

“What the fuck?” The words flew out of my mouth like an autonomic reflex.

Hector slid down from the stool, pushing his fingers into my lips. “Sh. Sh, sh, sh sh,” the shooshing teetered on the edge of laugher for a moment, but then regained its composure, “Shhhhh. They have blow.” He whispered loudly into my face, his mouth incapable of closing. It was like staring down a lion.

“Yes, I can see that.”

“You totally have to do a line. Oh my god. Best idea ever. Come on, I'll get it ready for you.”

“Are you out of your mind? Did they share? Do they know you're down here?”

“Let me just get this nice and straight for you and then, whoosh, you can come to the party. Snort this cocaine. Do it. Best idea ever.”

“They're gonna come back down here. That guy say he was a venture capitalist? What the fuck does that mean?”

“Best. Idea. Ever.”

“Isn't a venture capitalist like a modern day gangster.  Is that an entire duffel bag full of coke? Holy shit. Are they trafficking? Put it back.”

Hector's teeth gleamed out at me from behind lips pulled too tight. A ring of white sparkled around his dark irises. He might have fallen out of a horror film and straight into my life. “Dude, you gotta do this blow with me.”

“Give me that,” I squeaked, snatching the duffel from the bar top and sliding the loose powder into it. “The last thing we need right now is for the two of them to come down here and realize you're stealing their coke.” I looked around for a place to stash the bag, now zipped up tight. Over in the corner next to the other couple dozen seemed like a good place for it. “Damn it, Hector.”

“No, I'm serious. I'm totally serious. Look at me. Am I serious? Yes. Snort that.”

“Fuck me.”

“If you don't do this line of coke, nobody will and then they really will come down here and know that we stole their drugs and kill us and have sex with our skulls.” He laughed, more hyena than man and balled and unballed his hands in the neurotic need to continue moving. “That's why you totally gotta do that coke.”

“You make a compelling argument,” I lied, but I knew I’d have to humor him.

“Can I tell you something?”

“No.”

I leaned over the edge of the bar and stared down at the line of cocaine. I’d seen it done once before, and even then the jester who attempted it failed. That wouldn’t stop me, though. I blew at the line with my mouth while pretending to snort it into my nose. Definitely not as easy as it sounds. About half of the drug ended up in my face, and though I jumped up and tried to wipe it away, it was too late. My nose was going numb.

“Ha ha ha ha ha!!!” the hyena cackled.

I quickly brushed the rest of the powder from the counter and, grabbing Hector by the arm, fled the scene of the crime.

In the soft glow of evening, Hector put his arms around me, more half-Nelson than hug. “You're my best friend ever,” he said, “I just want you to know that.”

“I sincerely hope not.” I couldn't seem to stop brushing my face off. Would they see the telltale dust littering my skin, confessing in my stead? There’s still more on me. Still more drugs. Have to get them off.

“We should go swimming.”

“No.”

“Not now. Later.”

“Okay, later.”

A few hours later, safe in the hotel lobby, Hector and I returned what was left of the catamaran. Hector kept dipping his fingers into his pockets, rubbing them against his gums each time and sucking powder out from under his nails.

“I’m really sorry about this,” I told the man who held my credit card as collateral, “I’ll pay for whatever repairs you need to make.”

“She’ll pay for it,” Hector confirmed, “The mast is broken. She’ll pay for it.”

“I’m really sorry. I’m not sure what happened.”

“The mast broke,” Hector reminded me.

“I’m sorry.”

I signed the credit card slip and agreed again to pay for all the repairs. When I looked up, Hector was gone.

Paris: Getting Back

Wilde dreams swept on throughout the night. I tumbled restless, captured by the sheets: my face on fire, my fingers frantic to rip the offending fabric from me; my skin in shivery icicle bumps, piling on blanket after blanket. Hot-cold-hot-cold commenced my first night in Paris, trying to find rest in the room Oscar Wilde died in. In the impression he left behind, I dreamt in satire.

Our shared love of language had drawn me first to Paris. I'd pined over her for as long as I knew the word "expat," reminiscing over high school English class discussions of authors gone rogue. That will be me one day, I'd decided: I will be like Hemmingway, like Pound, like Wilde. Paris was the welcoming arms of a public who loved my stories never mind that my books were not yet translated into French. To the city, to Paris itself, it only matters that I am a writer. In time I would learn to write in the language of the city of light. Until then, commence en anglais. T'apprendrait.

I'd received an advance for a novel I'd written some time ago and I flew to Europe to spend it all on a dream. It wasn't exactly a whim but neither was it my most carefully laid out of plans. I hadn't arrived on Wilde's deathbed by accident, either. No, the price was far too unreasonable for that. I'd arranged three nights to absorb the spirit of my childhood hero, before I moved into an apartment just over the hill and out of the tourists, across the street from Joyce's old haunt. I would surround myself with ghosts, suck their stories up against my consciousness. I was a writer living in Paris. The Greats had paved the way.

"How romantic," my agent declared, though I could tell from her distraction that she was answering e-mails while she pressed me for a word count, "Now, as to your next project, I'm going to need a proposal soon. Your publisher is interested in a multi-book deal, but we need an idea to sell them."

I dangled myself off the railing of the bridge and Paris held me up. I am in love.

"Hello? Crystal? are you there?"

"Mmm. Jetlag. What?"

"Have you started your new book?"

"Uh... yeah, well not exactly but I have some prewriting. It's about poker, look, can I call you back, le tour eiffel est.. lighting up. I have a desperate need to stare unblinkingly into it."

When I left America I had my cat, a healthy bank account, and a mind so full of stories that I was sure to have something written about soon. In time, the distractions of the city would dwindle and I would lock myself in for furious hours behind a writing desk. Paris was, after all, the perfect place to craft a new story. Writing and Paris went together like peanut butter and bananas, two things that, six weeks into my move I was dying to munch. You see, writing is hungry work. Personally I don't believe in writer's block, but I do believe in difficult passages that require hours of pondering and multiple snack breaks. And if that snack break takes one, two, three hours, all the better to get this ecrieuse back on track and working hard.

I push back from my desk, troubling over my main character's last name. Perhaps a snack will help me think of one, I say to ma chat. Twelve blocks, four courses and a bottle of wine later I'd be ready to get back to work. Paris facilitates extended snack breaks.

And then perhaps a nap and a bubble bath as well.

I wasn't my most productive in Paris. I was not madly scribbling out a 55,000 word novel in six weeks, letting go of my friends, mon petit ami and my personal hygiene in the urgency that pressed my story onward. Ici, there was really no rush to continue working on the travel writing, or on that ever elusive poker novel: my own white whale. I started to let my agent go through to voicemail.

It was on my fourth month in Paris when the tens hit me all at once, like a gang of muggers in an ally. My agent had given me ten weeks to write a new proposal: time's up. Depressed by my lack of even an idea, I decided to console myself with, yes, food, and held my breath to squeeze into my black skirt. This same skirt had enough slack back in California that it sometimes slipped dangerously down close to my panty line when I danced. That was ten pounds, at least. I traded clothes, opting for a wrap around and stopping once more to consider the work I'd managed since the move. Ten journal pages, all of it useless ramblings on politics or my take on comparative world religion or something equally as non-salable.

Furthermore, I was ten days into an expired visa and not really sure what that meant.

Ever the pragmatist, my new friend Evelyn pondered my story of the tens over a glass of red wine. "Aren't you afraid to be deported?" she asked at last.

Deported? Deported was something that happened to illegal immigrants, hoping to find a new life in a new country but not willing or able to go through the proper naturalization process; refugees attempting to make the swim to Florida when the Coast Guard draweth near; high school English teachers with foreign accents in Arizona. Deportation was not on the radar for Euro-mutt Americans like myself. I told her as much.

"Yes, but you are not French. You are an illegal immigrant to the EU."

I hadn't considered that, as true and as stupidly obvious as it was. "I am an illegal immigrant." I said the words, made them real. Evelyn shrugged and nodded her confirmation.

Now what?

I play the role of the fearless adventurer. I jet off around the world to attempt daring feats. I come armed with equal amounts of pluck, open-mindedness and total ignorance. Well, at least, that's who I am when I return to my comfy office chair to type up the stories. That's who I am after I've picked all the bugs out of my hair and I no longer have to ride my bike through an African prison. In real life, my fearlessness is directly proportional to how safe I feel at any given moment. This was not a safe place to be and a thick, syrupy wave of panic coursed through my body. I had a vision of myself, the door to the warehouse kicked in, us illegals gathered up, forced at gunpoint from the country that we had grown to love, but who had not learned to love us back. I would babble a tearful goodbye to my friends, the ones with proper working papers. They would see me off as the police escorted me to the airport, forced me aboard an Air France flight where I would be crying too hard to taste the complimentary champagne through all the salt water spilling into my glass. France was abandoning me at LAX.

"I don't think that is what will happen."

"How then, Evelyn, how. How will your people deport me back to the US."

"I think, you will be simply asked to leave."

My plan to defect to Paris was drowning. I am not cut out to be a rule breaker, and I spent the next few days pouring over my fate on the consulate's website, where I learned that one couldn't just show up on France's doorstep without the proper paperwork. And this paperwork had to be delivered in person, in quadruplicate, in San Francisco. I also needed a letter from my mom saying that it was okay for me to stay in France and that she would give me $800 a month. Or, oh, wait, that was for the extended-stay-student visa not the extended-stay-writer-pretending-to-be-James-Joyce visa. It wasn't this hard for Laertes. Merde.

I'd arrived with an idea, a seed of a plan wherein I would appear in Paris with a round trip ticket and simply not get back on the airplane. Well, I did that part of it, and figured, who's going to tell me to go home.

The French government, it turns out.

And I had to pay for my own one-way ticket back.