"Whose medicine, I hope, is also making me better."
"As it has already Diane, or so she said. This interests me. Is there really an adulthood beyond adulthood? How do you feel?"
"Could be better, frankly."
"But the process is not finished."
"No. The process is not finished."
"Then you should rest. Is there anything I can get for you?"
"I had notebooks—paper—"
"In a bundle with your other luggage. I'll bring them. Are you a writer as well as a physician?"
"Only temporarily. I need to put some thoughts down on paper."
"Perhaps when you're feeling better you can share some of those thoughts with me."
"Perhaps so. I would be honored."
She rose from her knees. "Especially about the little black wrinkled man. The man from Mars."
* * * * *
I slept erratically through the next couple of days, waking up surprised by the passage of time, the sudden nights and unexpected mornings, marking what I could of the hours by the call to prayer, the sound of traffic, by Ibu Ina's offerings of rice and curried eggs and periodic sponge baths. We talked, but the conversations washed through my memory like sand through a sieve, and I could tell by her expression that I occasionally repeated myself or had forgotten things she'd said. Light and dark, light and dark; then, suddenly, Diane was kneeling next to Ina beside the bed, both of them giving me somber looks.
"He's awake," Ibu Ina said. "Please excuse me. I'll leave the two of you alone."
Then it was just Diane beside me.
She wore a white blouse, a white scarf over her dark hair, billowy blue trousers. She could have passed for any secularized mall-dweller in downtown Padang, though she was too tall and too pale to really fool anyone.
"Tyler," she said. Her eyes were blue and wide. "Are you paying attention to your fluids?"
"Do I look that bad?"
She stroked my forehead. "It isn't easy, is it?"
"I didn't expect it to be painless."
"Another couple of weeks and it'll be over. Until then—"
She didn't have to tell me. The drug was beginning to work deep into muscle tissue, nervous tissue.
"But this is a good place to be," she added. "We have antispasmodics, decent analgesics. Ina understands what's going on." She smiled sadly. "Still… not exactly what we'd planned."
We had planned on anonymity. Any of the Arch Port cities should have been a safe place for a moneyed American to lose himself. We had settled on Padang not just for its convenience—Sumatra was the land mass closest to the Arch—but because its hyperfast economic growth and the recent troubles with the New Reformasi government in Jakarta had made the city a functioning anarchy. I would suffer through the drug regimen in some undistinguished hotel, and when it was finished—when I was effectively remade—we would buy ourselves passage to a place where nothing bad could touch us. That was how it was supposed to go.
What we had not counted on was the vindictiveness of the Chaykin administration and its determination to make examples of us—both for the secrets we had kept and the secrets we had already divulged.
"I guess I made myself a little too conspicuous in the wrong places," Diane said. "I had us booked with two different rantau collectives, but both deals fell apart, suddenly people weren't talking to me, and it was obvious we were drawing way too much attention. The consulate, the New Reformasi, and the local police all have our descriptions. Not entirely accurate descriptions, but close enough."
"That's why you told these people who we are."
"I told them because they already suspected. Not Ibu Ina, but certainly Jala, her ex. Jala's a very canny guy. He runs a relatively respectable shipping company. A lot of the bulk concrete and palm oil that transits the port of Teluk Bayur also passes through one or another of Jala's warehouses. The rantau gadang business nets less money but it's tax-free, and those ships full of emigrants don't come back empty. He does a brisk sideline in black-market cattle and goats."
"Sounds like a man who would be glad to sell us to the New Reformasi."
"But we pay better. And present fewer legal difficulties, as long as we're not caught."
"Does Ina approve of this?"
"Approve of what? The rantau gadang! She has two sons and a daughter in the new world. Of Jala? She thinks he's more or less trustworthy—if you pay him he stays bought. Of us? She thinks we're next door to sainthood."
"Because of Wun Ngo Wen?"
"Basically."
"You were lucky to find her."
"It's not entirely luck."
"Still, we should get away as soon as possible."
"Soon as you're better. Jala has a ship lined up. The Capetown Maru. That's why I've been back and forth between here and Padang. There are more people I have to pay."
We were rapidly being transformed from foreigners with money to foreigners who used to have money. "Still," I said, "I wish—"
"Wish what?" She ran a finger over my forehead, back and forth, langorously.
"Wish I didn't have to sleep alone."
She gave a little laugh and put her hand on my chest. On my emaciated rib cage, on my skin still alligator-textured and ugly. Not exactly an invitation to intimacy. "It's too hot to cuddle up."
"Too hot?"
I'd been shivering.
"Poor Tyler," she said.
I wanted to tell her to be careful. But I closed my eyes, and when I opened them she was gone again.
* * * * *
Inevitably there was worse to come, but in fact I felt much better over the next few days: the eye of the storm, Diane had called it. It was as if the Martian drug and my body had negotiated a temporary truce, both sides rallying for the ultimate battle. I tried to take advantage of the time.
I ate everything Ina offered, and I paced the room from time to time, trying to channel some strength into my scrawny legs. Had I felt stronger this concrete box (in which Ina had stored medical supplies before she built a more secure lock-and-alarm system adjoining the clinic) might have seemed like a prison cell. Under the circumstances it was almost cozy. I piled our hard-shell suitcases in one corner and used them as a sort of desk, sitting on a reed that while I wrote. The high window allowed in a wedge of sunlight.
It also allowed in the face of a local schoolboy, whom I had caught on two occasions peering at me. When I mentioned this to Ibu Ina she nodded, disappeared for a few minutes, and came back with the boy in tow: "This is En," she said, practically throwing him through the curtain at me. "En is ten years old. He is very bright. He wants to be a doctor one day. He is also my nephew's son. Unfortunately he's cursed with curiosity at the expense of sensibility. He climbed on top of the trash bin to see what I was hiding in my back room. Unforgivable. Apologize to my guest, En." En hung his head so drastically low that I was afraid his enormous eyeglasses would drop off the end of his nose. He mumbled something. "In English," Ina said. "Sorry!"
"Inelegant but to the point. Perhaps En can do something for you, Pak Tyler, to make up for his bad behavior?"
En was clearly on the hook. I tried to let him off. "Apart from respecting my privacy, nothing."
"He will certainly respect your privacy from this moment onward—won't you, En?" En cringed and nodded. "However, I have a job for him. En comes by the clinic almost every day. If I'm not busy I show him a few things. The chart of human anatomy. The litmus paper that turns color in vinegar. En claims to be grateful for these indulgences." En's nodding became almost spastically vigorous. "So in return, and as a way of compensating for his gross negligence of common budi, En will now become the clinic's lookout. En, do you know what that means?"
En stopped nodding and looked wary.
"It means," Ibu Ina said, "that from now on you will put your vigilance and curiosity to good use. If anyone comes to the village asking about the clinic—anyone from the city, I mean, especially if they look or act like policemen—you will immediately run here and tell me about it."