Wreck and Order (16 page)

In the middle of the night, I shake Suriya awake and ask her to come with me to the outhouse, saying I'm afraid of the dark. It's not a lie. No longer surrounded by Suriya's bustling family and oppressive sunshine, Ayya feels like a real threat.

I have been promised a lake. Ayya and Suriya walk on either side of me, our towels tied around our waists. I have no swimming costume—the long-sleeved bodysuit and knee-length skirt that Suriya wears over her bra and underwear—so I've covered up my bikini with running shorts and a T-shirt emblazoned with a map of the U.S., something I'd never wear at home. My sandal straps dig into my feet, puffy from the heat. Furry grasses form an arc over the narrow entrance to the lake. Women scrub saris with large brushes and take turns washing themselves under their sarongs, resting the bar of sun-colored soap on a rock when they're finished. Their hands still as Suriya, Ayya, and I drape our towels over a tree branch. I hurry into the water to hide my Nike shorts, which I fear look ridiculous to the women and sexy to Ayya.

The shallows are frothy with laundry detergent and soap. But as the mouth of the passageway yawns into the open lake, the water becomes cool and clear. Tiny waves lap so rapidly against my chest that it feels like the same wave in endless dialogue with itself.
Where? Here. Where? Here.

Suriya turns to me as the water covers my shoulders. “Akki, this lake very danger, okay? Have crocodile, okay?”

“Right now?” I splash wildly, hopping toward shore.

“Not now. Sometimes have. It's okay. My brother knows crocodile mantra.” She smiles and gestures me into the body of the lake, where the stares that had felt hostile as I waded in become curious and open. I dive and place my palms on the sandy bottom. Sun washes my pointed toes. When I emerge, Ayya is grinning, wide-eyed. “Married?” he asks, the first time he's addressed me directly. I say no curtly and turn toward Suriya, floating on her back nearby. Surely he already knows from Suriya that I'm not married; this is just the come-on line that all Sri Lankan men use, usually followed by, “You come with me, madam.” Instead, Ayya shouts, “Single rocks forever,” the first English sentence I've heard him speak. My surprise makes me laugh. He imitates my handstand, his feet paddling the air. I wish I could relax and be friendly toward him. But he's made it impossible. I swim away. Water tickles my wrists. I lean backward, squint at the sky, go under.

Trust games were the only gym activity I was any good at when I was a kid. One time I let my partner walk so far behind me that the teacher came running, hands raised. “Whoa, whoa. That is a bit too trusting!” The whole class looked over at my partner, several feet behind me, poised to catch my shoulders just above the ground, and burst into the raucous group laughter of children, a rote response to anything out of sync with the rhythms of the world they've memorized so far. My cheeks burned even though I didn't understand yet what was wrong with trusting the body to be okay.

I kneel on the muddy bottom of the lake, letting the air out in small bubbles every few seconds. My hands come together, fingertips touching, thumbs at my chest, like Suriya pausing in front of a Buddha statue or bodhi tree. My impulse is to resist the explicitness of the gesture, but instead I bow my head. It feels good, I don't care why. When I come up, Suriya is moving through the water toward me with small, bouncing steps. Her hair is piled in a soapy mess atop her head, a stray tendril spilling shampoo into her eyebrow.

“Is fun, no? I think you love.”

Yes. I do love.

“Slowly, slowly, you become happy again.”

Heat presses against the walls of my chest. My eyes hold Suriya's eyes.

Oh. Fuck. She is thinking that slowly, slowly I will recover from the death of my beloved. My lower belly hardens. Why must I concoct events to explain my feelings? Why is being alive not sufficient justification for feeling lost and in pain?

New Year's Day begins at dawn, firecrackers raging through the village. Suriya and I brush our teeth at the pump in the yard while Ayya slices coconuts, holding the hairy spheres above his head and whacking them down the center with a long, curved knife. The milk chutes into a pot at his feet. Straddling a bench with a serrated blade on one end, he furiously scrapes the inside of the coconut. A bowl beneath the bench catches the baby-white pulp. Rajesh emerges from the woods dragging a stalk of bamboo as thick as his wrist and a banana leaf twice his height. He slices the leaf into four pieces and folds one of them into a cone. He separates the top of the bamboo stick into three even sections, which he peels back to make a container for the leaf cone.

How delightful it is to be inside this scene to which I will never belong. Until I become aware of my delight, and another, stronger part of my brain steals the simple enjoyment from me, characterizing the scene as an exotic spectacle worthy of noting, to be used later as a way to prove something about myself—that I'm interesting, brave, unusual. I am a parasite of my own experience.

Ayya lights a pile of sticks in the center of the stones. Rajesh places the pot of coconut milk on the fire, adds copious amounts of rice and sugar, and seals the pot with one section of the banana leaf. Fathers throughout Sri Lanka are doing the exact same thing at this very moment. The chronology of New Year's Day never changes, the beginning of each activity marked by a racket of firecrackers blaring from television and the street. “Do you have a New Year ritual in the U.S.A.?” Suriya asks me. Yes, we do. We stress out for weeks about where we're going to get drunk. When the pyrotechnic cacophony signals that it's time for everyone in the country to eat khir bhat, Rajesh removes the pot from the fire and places a bit of the steaming, sweet rice inside the leaf cone, around which he's arranged small cards bearing cartoonish images of Lord Buddha, Ganesh, and Shiva. Shiva rides atop a bull, in full command of his great sexual power. The cross-legged Buddha touches one hand to the ground, asking the earth for strength to resist the images of naked women clouding his mind, urging him to abandon his seat just as he's on the verge of enlightenment. My mother had a print of this image on her dresser. As a kid, I thought it was as ridiculous as the Irish dude intoning about inner peace. It was only on my first trip to Sri Lanka that I learned what the image represented—the courage to reject conventional ideas of pleasure and pain—and I found it moving. But imagining such an object in my parents' old bedroom makes it seem desperate, like covering over a rotted, moldy wall with a fresh coat of paint.

Rajesh scatters khir bhat on the ground in front of the images. Suriya points to the cone of rice: “For the gods.” Then to the ground: “For the demons.”

There are invisible beings around us all the time. Suriya knows this is true because she feels that when she is alone, there is always someone with her. And one time she had a ghost attached to her, an old man who breathed down her neck when she tried to sleep. The monks told her he was comforted by her long hair and taught her a mantra to make him go away. Gods and demons can protect us and help us, but some people use demons to hurt their enemies. That happened to Suriya's father when she was little. He got very weak and could not remember anything about the past. So he went to the hospital for two months and got electric shock treatments to make his mind work again. Suriya and her mother visited him; he did not remember them. The doctors said that they could not find his sick. So Suriya and her mother went to a Buddhist priest, and the priest talked with demons in her father's mind, who told the priest that one of Suriya's neighbors was jealous of her father's successful business and wished him to be poor. So he bound—“B-I-N-D,” Suriya says, “is this the right word?”—two dead people and one devil to Suriya's father. The priest told Suriya's mother to do offerings to the demons and to Lord Buddha to free her father. And then her father remembered his life and left the hospital and went home.

“So the monks here have magical powers?” I ask.

“Not all. Some. White magic.”

“Do they ever meditate?”

“Not all. Some. That is how they reach the magical powers.”

“Do you ever meditate?”

“Oh no, El. Meditating is too difficult for regular people.”

“Anyone can meditate. I meditate all the time. You just sit still.”

Suriya clamps down on a smile. I am a silly American girl. “Maybe there is a different kind of meditating in U.S.A. But in Sri Lanka only advanced people meditate. Regular people go to temple for chanting and offerings.”

Rajesh carries the steaming khir bhat inside. Everyone dips their hands into the pot, scoops out gooey palmfuls of sweet coconut rice, and feeds one another. I open my mouth wide whenever a cousin or parent or grandparent or niece approaches me. Their fingers touch my tongue. The porridge is warm and good. When the pot is empty, people begin kneeling and touching one another's feet. The standing person touches the kneeling person's head. The toddler touches my feet, I tickle the down on his head and kneel to touch his feet. An eruption of laughter. “El!” Suriya says. “You are big girl. You must not worship baby.” Hashini comes out of the cooking hut to worship her husband. I prepare to feel angry, but anger does not come. Rajesh runs his hand over her head. She smiles up. He takes a big breath and cups her ears in his cracked hands. What do I know about their life together?

When the firecrackers announce that it's time to visit friends and relatives, I splash water on my face and change into a long skirt and baggy T-shirt. The road throbs with the desperate joy of arrack. Glassy-eyed men clap and sing as they stumble past, arms slung around each other's shoulders. They look grossly disheveled and unmoored, but still I envy their temporary madness, the longing for wild nights such a strong reflex of my personality, even though I know by now that wildness is a luxury in concept only. The monk at Shirmani explained what the Buddha meant by austerity. I jotted it down in my notebook: “Once you have gone through an experience, to not need it again.”

Our first Halloween together, Jared and I dressed up as Sid and Nancy. He scrawled “God Save the Queen” across a ripped T-shirt and squeezed into a pair of my jeans. I rented a platinum wig and wore a see-through black dress with red stilettos so high I couldn't walk. Jared had to carry me on his back from my apartment to the bar, and then, once inside, walk me to a chair and plant me there while he ordered drinks. We ran into some friends of his, and they started a game of pool. I couldn't even hit the white ball. I crossed my legs on my corner stool. “She's like Kate Moss, Jared,” one of the girls said, motioning to me with her cue. “Supermodel thin.” She glowered at me as she enunciated each syllable of the dumb thing girls were supposed to want to be. But I felt better to be sitting alone in my fishnets and silver bra now that I was supermodel thin. A stupid feeling. It was a relief to be comforted by stupidity.

After the bar closed, we piled into a stupid graffiti-covered van and drove back to Jared's, where his roommate was throwing a party. I wanted Jared to come to bed and fuck me in my red stilettos, but it was impossible. He was belting out Sex Pistols songs and making everyone laugh with his perfect British accent. I took off my shoes and had a vodka tonic. Then I went in his bedroom and puked out his window. Sometime later, he was pulling me to a sitting position. “Come here, beautiful girl. I drew us a bath.” I could tell right away that he was high on blow, as he taught me to call it. His navy comforter was mottled with early-morning light falling through the pines outside his window. I let him lead me to the mildewy bathtub, my eyes trained on my shuffling feet. I was mad not because he'd left me alone to vomit in his bedroom but because he let me sleep through sunrise instead of sharing his drugs with me. We faced each other in the lukewarm water.

“You look melancholy,” he said. “I'm sorry I make you melancholy.” He turned away and slapped his palm on the surface of the water. “Stop being sad! Why can't you be fucking happy?”

Brian used to ask me the same thing. It killed me. I think of myself as someone with an unusually high capacity for happiness, just not from the right things. I feel it here, inside these days of sitting and eating with such singleness of purpose—parsing the garlic from the cumin from the cinnamon, watching earth-size clouds dissolve into hot white space—that I feel sure sitting and eating in this village is as worthwhile an activity as any. But when I'm bloated and sleepy after the noonday meal and doze off facedown on the bed, my filthy feet dangling off the end, terror jerks me awake a few minutes later: What have I been doing all this time? Shouldn't I be doing something else? Like jogging or knitting or finding a husband or going back to school? Instead, I'm wiping my ass with my left hand and eating fried vegetables smeared in chili paste with my right. Which makes me much happier than it should.

To try to assuage the should-feeling one afternoon, I ask Suriya if she ever goes running. She looks at me strangely. “I must. If I am late.”

“That makes sense.” I settle back in my lawn chair to watch the evening's first pink-tinged clouds take shape.

Until I met Brian, I'd been averse to the gym—all those people exerting all that effort for nothing. They didn't need their flat stomachs and bulging biceps to carry well water or dig ditches or climb coconut trees. But when I grew quiet and sedentary in the middle of our second winter together, Brian got us a joint membership and insisted I try it. I went to a class called Total Surrender. An inverted triangle with a human head made me surrender to a series of sit-ups, push-ups, squats, and leg lifts while hip-hop music blared and he shouted, “Six, five, four—let's go! Higher! Three, two—aaaand new count! Ten, nine, eight…” Across the street, a fast-food restaurant advertised a free soda with any weekday lunch special. The storefront was decorated with paper hearts for Valentine's Day. When a chubby woman tried to leave, the instructor bounded to the door. One arm shot out from his body like the limb on a Lego policeman. “Back on your mat! No one is leaving!”