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Story
from EPOCH
THE
PULL
In the village of Padang Bai, I found a room in a homestay
with a little balcony overlooking the brightly painted
fishing boats in the harbor, their prows shaped like
"elephant-fish" with stylized trunks and painted
eyes. I considered myself lucky to find it, since all
the other homestays were full, until I discovered before
going to bed that the only toilet down the hall had
overflowed and there was nowhere to wash except in a
sink downstairs behind a door off its hinges. Even the
balcony was useless once the mosquitoes came out after
dark.
When I tried to sleep, after leaving my friend Anneka
in a bar drinking arak with some fishermen, I was not
only disgusted but scared enough by the moving shadows
on the wall of my room to leave on the twenty watt bulb.
Though my mosquito net saved me from insect bites, their
high-pitched whine kept me awake and was only drowned
out by the sharp blasts from ships' horns, which made
me jump up in bed, reminding me of how I had missed
my chance to travel with the Australian man Anneka and
I had met earlier. I was sorry that night I had ever
met Anneka in Ubud, a town of artists, popular with
tourists, and even sorrier about leaving my bungalow
in the nearby rice fields of Penestanan to come with
her to Padang Bai, where Anneka rented a room by the
month in a homestay that unfortunately was full like
the others.
That night I forgot the excitment I had felt, traveling
from Ubud with Anneka. It wasn't everyday that drivers,
who called me 'Mama,' pushed me inside small buses called
bemos, full of farmers and their produce, or shoved
me into larger buses where, in addition to regular seats,
the Balinese squeezed together on tiny stools in the
aisle, and where Anneka, who was a tall woman, joined
them, while I, more fortunate I thought, hung on to
the handrail by the open door and kept one foot on the
bottom rung, as the vehicle rattled down a rutted road
and careened around curves like a ride at Coney Island,
stopping, it seemed, only to pick up more passengers,
who pushed me inside.
That night in my room I wished I had flirted with the
large sweaty Australian who had just managed to fit
his bulky body inside one of the bemos where Anneka
and I, already crunched, pulled him a few feet further
so the driver could close the door. The closeness made
it impossible for him to ignore us completely.
"Where are you coming from?" Anneka asked.
"Borneo," he said.
"Oh, that must have been wonderful!" I said.
"Hot, it was hot," was his reply, followed
by silence.
I would have said more, but I didn't exactly feel like
a beauty, with sweat dripping down my face and my hair
as limp as old string, to say nothing of my smell which,
by the time the Australian arrived, had mingled with
the pungent sour fruit smells of the others, making
it hard to breathe and impossible to distinguish my
particular contribution to the general stench.
"Where are you going now?" asked Anneka.
"Timor," he said.
"Why Timor?" I asked.
"Just to see it, that's all."
In Padang Bai, which was ugly, apart from the fishing
boats, and dirty and loud with tourists en route to
other destinations, I kept thinking - except for the
brief time when I was excited about the room - that
I could've gone with the Australian to Timor, had I
opened my mouth and talked to him. After all, it was
Timor - not Padang Bai - that I really wanted to see,
ever since I had found a shop in Ubud selling wonderful
textiles and weavings made in villages on the western
side of the island, but I didn't want to go there alone.
The only person I met who had been to Timor, where a
civil war raged in the east, was an Irish student, who
said he only saw four foreigners in four days and none
of them were women. I was angry at myself: here had
been a man, and one alone and about my age - which was
a rarity - who was going to Timor and who wasn't half-bad
looking.
The Australian had leaped from the bemo - though he
seemed too large to leap - and run to the dock where
the overcrowded ferry was leaving. His destination was
two weeks away, but he would arrive on the island of
Lombok, his first stop, in a matter of hours. With what
envy I had watched him, as though I could never have
taken that ferry, though a week later I did, along with
hundreds of Indonesians and a few foreigners, but Lombok
never seemed to me as exotic and unreachable as it did
when the Australian was running toward the huge hulking
vessel and Anneka and I were walking into dirty, noisy
Padang Bai.
If I hadn't been angry at myself, I wouldn't have made
the reckless decision to hire a fisherman with a boat
and snorkling gear to take me out next morning, despite
my inexperience, to snorkle alone. As I saw it, I could
either return to Penestanan on an airconditioned tourist
bus, feeling I had failed, or while Anneka visited with
her Balinese friends, I could do something by myself
to compensate for the loss of the Australian.
In the rough sea near Padang Bai where high waves crashed
all around us, I was sure I had made a mistake, but
when the fisherman eventually brought the boat to a
calm and lonely spot, I slipped over the side and discovered,
simply by placing my face in the water, a world stranger
than anything I imagined, where life didn't look like
life but like something else for which I didn't have
any words but which pulled me in like a breath, a deep
sea breath, squeezing me, divesting me of thought and
feeling until my skin floated free of my bones and tissues
and organs and entered into an intimacy unlike any I
had known. I was only aware of life sighing, and of
creatures which were silent and still but not still
when I saw up close hairs and tendrils and finger-like
forms swaying back and forth or moving from side to
side, while other creatures, some in shadow, travelled
slowly over the reef, or rising, falling, opening, closing,
moved in rhythm to the water's music until something
made me look up.
For an instant, the light and air seemed strange, as
strange as the world below before it drew me in, and
I wanted to go back, which meant simply sticking my
face in the water, but I couldn't because I was suddenly
aware of the frothy white waves and the absence of the
boat in the same moment that I realized I was alone
and no longer part of the ocean's breathing. In my separateness,
I saw the boat, a little thing like a toy in the distance
and panicked as only something separate could do until
the body that was disengaged from me became my body
and moved me, almost without my knowing, almost without
my being there, to the boat and the fisherman who was
sleeping in the sun.
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