‘…and after the battle, he’s in his tent and a girl comes in at night and…’
‘And…?’
‘…and does… what you just did… and it… blows his…’
‘Uhuh?’
‘…ah… his mind. And he wakes up next morning and sees that it’s the same girl, escaped from the burning brothel.’
‘And?’
‘…and he realizes the error of his ways and embraces true love.’
‘…’
‘Oh God, May…’
‘Okay…’
‘Don’t stop… keep going…’
‘That’s it. That’s it. Oh yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.’
‘Jesus… fucking… Christ… on a… fucking… bike…’
‘…’
‘…’
‘That was good.’
‘You’re not kidding.’
‘But you know what?’
‘What?’
‘Your story sucks.’
9. Alex
You have to be fucking kidding me. A dude?
10. Nong
She tucks her dick and balls between her legs and slips on the tight black trousers. Arranges her silicon tits inside purple lace. Practices her pout in the mirror. She is picked up and driven to the ambassador’s residence, showing her ID at the manned gate. ‘Hello Baby,’ she says to him.
They spend the evening doing all the things he likes, which are many and varied, and include, after the semen has dried on the sheets and used condoms litter the floor, talking about the international situation.
Over these last months, she has offered her advice on various matters, but this is the most important. Now the trouble has spread to several countries, including her own, and his country is considering sending in its military in support of its allies. Tomorrow’s negotiation is, as he puts it, the crunch.
She worries for him. She soothes him, says kind things, thoughtful things, insightful things. He will consider her advice, he says. Then she leaves, discreetly picking up the envelope of cash from the table on her way out to where a limousine is waiting, the driver trying not to make it obvious that he is staring from the side of his eyes in a fascination he would not admit to in front of his friends.
11. Charles
She asked him for a favour. There were so few flights, and her family were all back there, her children also, and she missed them, she was worried, and she was very sorry to ask and to bother him but she was due the vacation and he was so important and so smart, could he get her back home for Christmas?
No, he said, too dangerous, the jungle is full of terrorists, but when she wept, he couldn’t stand it. He relented and pulled a string or two. She was booked on one of the few flights still operating to Cebu City.
Now, in the quiet of the early evening, with the dark palms whispering outside in the garden and deep-throated bullfrogs honking in the trees like a broken accordion, the ambassador returns to his house with a heavy heart.
He sits in the leather armchair and rests his forehead in his hands. She brings him a glass of Highland Park with a single ice cube, and puts down a bowl of pistachio nuts.
He looks up at her. She has a kind face. ‘Thank you, Rosa,’ he says.
‘Is there anything else I can do, Sir?’ she asks. He says that there is not.
She steps forward, takes his hand and touches it to her forehead.
What follows could be construed as exploitation, as abuse of his power over her. This thought certainly crosses his mind briefly during the act, but he dismisses it. When he comes, it is with a strange feeling of peace, as if all his striving, all his work is doomed to futility, but that he doesn’t mind at all.
12. Rosa
Rosa is awake in the night. A gecko says “geck-oh” with the voice of a dog’s squeaky bone. Insects chorus and then cease in unison at the sound of a shot in the forest. The air is close, unstirred.
The moon has disappeared now, and through the uncurtained window, Rosa can see the silhouette of the volcano against a backdrop of stars. She wonders what the stars are. Are they angels in Heaven? Are they the souls of dead children? Are they the frozen tears of God?
She flies up to touch them.
She must have drifted into sleep because she did not notice him come in, but now a dark figure stands by her bed. She catches her breath, thinking that it is her husband, Reynante, come back from his hiding place in the forest. It is too dangerous, she thinks. If they catch him… but this, after all, is why she has come back.
She cannot bear to open her eyes fully, so she pretends to be asleep and watches through quivering lashes. Something metallic is lowered gently to the floor. He stands, not moving, but he is looking at her, she can tell. Go away, she thinks. Hide.
Stay, she thinks.
She is sure he can hear her thoughts.
His breathing can now be heard, with the merest edge of a wheeze. She tries to remember how her husband breathes. Is it like this?
He lies down on the bed next to her. After some more time, a rough knuckle barely touches the skin of her belly, withdraws, then comes back, stroking her skin below the T-shirt. Her heart beats fast.
She closes her eyes and lets the tip of one small finger stray to where he is.
In the darkness, with the sound of the ocean and the forest outside, he enters her. And as he enters her, her soul leaves her body and flies up, away from this small house, up to the million stars; and she looks down on their two bodies making love, on the wooden house with the vegetables growing outside and the fishing boat hauled up on the black-sand beach, on the forest stretching up the side of the smoking mountain and on the islands all around, the thousands of sand-fringed islands in this calm sea, dotted by human souls.
And as she feels him enter her again and again and clutches at him, she feels her soul rise higher, so that she can see the whole world, and every dwelling place in the world, and every couple who at that moment is making love; and for a moment, each couple is a fire, burning in the night, a flickering pinpoint of light on the curving dark map of the Earth.
And the sky above is a great mirror, stretching away to eternity all around, the fires reflected in its depths.
And suddenly she knows what the stars are.
THE POLITICIAN
Amirul B. Ruslan, Malaysia
Everything had to be discreet. This was the seventh time he had done this, but each time he still felt the usual pangs of worry, of guilt. Voices played out in his head. One of them was the monotone of a newsreader as she—he always envisioned it as a she, and so it must be a she—presented the lurid details of this scandal. One of them was the cruel chastising by his late mother, a voice gone from this earth over twenty years, but constantly returning to haunt his subconscious each time he performed this deviant act.
The hotel he was now staying in on the blissful, blisteringly hot island of Penang was a colonial relic. His father wouldn’t have approved.
His father hated all things colonial, and indeed gave up his life fighting colonial oppressors. First the Japanese, then the British. He fought proudly to Independence and marched into—no, the politician thought, no. He cut the thought there and then, questioning, pleading to his mind: Why do I have to reminisce on my father’s achievements now? Was it because he was a religious man? Was it because if he knew, he would call me a deviant, a pervert?
The hotel was grand and almost over-the-top in its pretension. Whatever British elegance it had in the 1920s when it was built was now hidden behind layers of coarse Malaysian ‘aesthetic’ of out-of-place Ionic pillars, tiled floors and wide, gold-painted door frames. The politician had been an architect before he became a politician, and even after decades of being in the country’s less-than-refined body politic, this vulgar so-called sophistication wounded his senses.