"Even if I'm in school?"
"I doubt the New Reformasi will trouble you at school. When you're at school, pay attention to your lessons. Any other time, in the street, at a warung, whatever, if you see something or overhear something involving me or the clinic or Pak Tyler (whom you must not mention), come to the clinic at once. Understand?"
"Yes," En said, and he murmured something else I couldn't hear.
"No," Ina said promptly, "there is no payment involved, what a scandalous question! Although, if I'm pleased, favors might follow. Right now I am not at all pleased."
En scooted away, his oversized white T-shirt billowing behind him.
By nightfall a rain had begun, a deep tropical rain that lasted days, during which I wrote, slept, ate, paced, endured.
* * * * *
Ibu Ina sponged my body during the dark of a rainy night, scrubbing away a slough of dead skin.
"Tell me something you remember about them," she said. "Tell me what it was like growing up with Diane and Jason Lawton."
I thought about that. Or rather, I dipped into the increasingly murky pond of memory for something to offer her, something both true and emblematic. I couldn't fish out exactly what I wanted but something did float to the surface: a starlit sky, a tree. The tree was a silver poplar, darkly mysterious. "One time we went camping," I said. "This was before the Spin, but not by much."
It felt good to have the dead skin washed away, at least at first, but the revealed derma was sensitive, raw. The first stroke of the sponge was soothing, the second felt like iodine on a paper cut. Ina understood this.
"The three of you? Weren't you young for that, a camping trip, I mean, as they calculate such things where you come from? Or did you travel with your parents?"
"Not with our parents. E.D. and Carol vacationed once a year, resorts or cruise ships, preferably without children."
"And your mother?"
"Preferred to stay home. It was a couple from down the road who took us into the Adirondacks along with their own two boys, teenagers who didn't want anything to do with us."
"Then why—oh, I suppose the father wanted to ingratiate himself with E. D. Lawton? Beg a favor perhaps?"
"Something like that. I didn't ask. Nor did Jason. Diane might have known—she paid attention to those kind of things."
"It hardly matters. You went to a campground in the mountains? Roll on your side, please."
"The kind of campground with a parking lot. Not exactly pristine nature. But it was a weekend in September and we had the place almost to ourselves. We pitched tents and built a fire. The adults—" Their name came back to me. "The Fitches sang songs and made us come in on the choruses. They must have had fond memories of summer camp. It was pretty depressing, actually. The Fitch teenagers hated the whole thing and hid out in their tent with headphones. The older Fitches eventually gave up and went to bed."
"And left the three of you around the dying campfire. Was it a clear night or a rainy one, like this one?"
"A clear early autumn night." Hardly like this one, with its frog choruses and raindrops bulleting the thin roof. "No moon but plenty of stars. Not warm but not really cold, even though we were some ways up in the hills. Windy. Windy enough that you could hear the trees talking to themselves."
Ina's smile broadened. "The trees talking to themselves! Yes, I know what that sounds like. Now on your left side, please."
"The trip had been tedious but it started to feel good now that it was just the three of us. Jase fetched a flashlight and we walked a few yards away from the fire, to an open space in a poplar grove, away from the cars and tents and people, where the land sloped down to the west. Jason showed us the zodiacal light rising in the sky."
"What is the zodiacal light?"
"Sunlight reflecting on grains of ice in the asteroid belt. You can sometimes see it on a very clear, dark night." Or could, before the Spin. Was there still a zodiacal light or had solar pressure swept away the ice? "It came up from the horizon like breath in winter, far away, delicate. Diane was fascinated. She listened to Jase explain it, and this was back when Jason's explanations still fascinated her—she hadn't outgrown them yet. She loved his intelligence, loved him for his intelligence—"
"As did Jason's father, perhaps? On your stomach now, please."
"But not in that proprietary way. It was pure goggle-eyed enchantment."
"Excuse me, 'goggle-eyed'?"
"Wide-eyed. Then the wind started to pick up, and Jason turned on the flashlight and pointed it into the poplars so Diane could see the way the branches moved." With this came a vivid memory of young Diane in a sweater at least a size too big for her, hands lost in knitted wool, hugging herself, her face turned up into the cone of light and her eyes reflecting it back in solemn moons. "He showed her the way the biggest branches tossed in a kind of slow motion, and the smaller branches more quickly. That was because each branch and twig had what Jase called a resonant frequency. And you could think of those resonant frequencies as musical notes, he said. The tree's motion in the wind was really a kind of music pitched too low for human ears, the trunk of the tree singing a bass note and the branches singing tenor lines and the twigs playing piccolo. Or, he said, you could think of it as pure numbers, each resonance, from the wind itself to the tremor of a leaf, working out a calculation inside a calculation inside a calculation."
"You describe it very beautifully," Ina said.
"Not half as beautifully as Jason did. It was like he was in love with the world, or at least the patterns in it. The music in it. Ouch."
"I'm sorry. And Diane was in love with Jason?"
"In love with being his sister. Proud of him."
"And were you in love with being his friend?"
"I suppose I was."
"And in love with Diane."
"Yes."
"And she with you."
"Maybe. I hoped so."
"Then, if I may ask, what went wrong?"
"What makes you think anything went wrong?"
"You're obviously still in love. The two of you, I mean. But not like a man and woman who have been together for many years. Something must have kept you apart. Excuse me, this is terribly impertinent."
Yes, something had kept us apart. Many things. Most obviously, I supposed, it was the Spin. She had been especially, particularly frightened by it, for reasons I had never completely understood; as if the Spin were a challenge and a rebuke to everything that made her feel safe. What made her feel safe? The orderly progression of life; friends, family, work—a kind of fundamental sensibility of things, which in E.D. and Carol Lawton's Big House must already have seemed fragile, more wished-for than real.
The Big House had betrayed her, and eventually even Jason had betrayed her: the scientific ideas he presented to her like peculiar gifts, which had once seemed reassuring—the cozy major chords of Newton and Euclid—became stranger and more alienating: the Planck length (beneath which things no longer behaved like things); black holes, sealed by their own imponderable density into a realm beyond cause and effect; a universe not only expanding but accelerating toward its own decay. She told me once, while St. Augustine was still alive, that when she put her hand on the dog's coat she wanted to feel his heat and his liveliness—not count the beats of his heart or consider the vast spaces between the nuclei and the electrons that constituted his physical being. She wanted St. Dog to be himself and whole, not the sum of his terrifying parts, not a fleeting evolutionary epiphenomenon in the life of a dying star. There was little enough love and affection in her life and each instance of it had to be accounted and stored up in heaven, hoarded against the winter of the universe.