Off her rocker, thought Kent with an unpleasant jolt. With every visit he had made on this trip, there had come a moment of severe disappointment. The moment when he realized that the person he was talking to, the person he had made a point of seeking out, was not going to give him whatever it was he had come for. The old friend he had visited in Arizona was obsessed with the dangers of life, in spite of his expensive residence in a protected community. His old friend’s wife, who was over seventy, wanted to show him pictures of herself and some other old woman dressed up as Klondike dance-hall girls, for a musical show they had put on. And his grown-up children were caught up in their own lives. That was only natural and not a surprise to him. The surprise was that these lives, the lives his sons and daughter were living, seemed closed in now, somewhat predictable. Even the changes in them that he could foresee or was told were coming-Noelle was on the verge of leaving her second husband-were not very interesting. He had not made any admission of this to Deborah-hardly even to himself-but it was so. And now Sonje. Sonje whom he hadn’t particularly liked, whom he’d been wary of in some way, but whom he’d respected, as a bit of a mystery-Sonje had turned into a talkative old woman with a secret screw loose.
And he’d had a reason for coming to see her that they were not getting any closer to, with this rant about Cottar.
“Well to be frank,” he said. “It doesn’t sound like such a sensible thing to do, to be frank about it.”
“A wild-goose chase,” said Sonje cheerfully.
“There’s a probability he might be dead now anyway.”
“True.”
“And he could have gone anywhere and lived anywhere. That is if your theory is correct.”
“True.”
“So the only hope is if he really died then and your theory isn’t correct, then you might find out about it and you wouldn’t be any further ahead than you are now anyway.”
“Oh, I think I would.”
“You could do just as well then to stay here and write some letters.”
Sonje said she disagreed. She said you couldn’t go through official channels regarding this sort of thing.
“You have to make yourself known in the streets.”
In the streets of Jakarta-that was where she meant to start. In places like Jakarta people don’t shut themselves up. People live in the streets and things are known about them. Shopkeepers know, there’s always somebody who knows somebody else and so forth. She would ask questions and word would get around that she was there. A man like Cottar could not have just slipped by. Even after all this time there’d be some memory. Information of one sort or another. Some of it expensive, not all of it truthful. Nevertheless.
Kent thought of asking her what she planned to use for money. Could she have inherited something from her parents? He seemed to remember that they’d cut her off at the time of her marriage. Perhaps she thought she could get a fat price for this property. A long shot, but maybe she was right.
Even so, she could fling it all away in a couple of months. Word would get around that she was there, all right.
“Those cities have changed a lot” was all he said.
“Not that I’d neglect the usual channels,” she said. “I’d go after everybody I could. The embassy, the burial records, the medical registry if there is such a thing. In fact I’ve written letters already. But all you get is the runaround. You have to confront them in the flesh. You have to be there. Be there. Keep coming around and making a nuisance of yourself and finding out where their soft spots are and be prepared to pass something under the table if you have to. I don’t have any illusions about its being easy.
“For instance I expect there’ll be devastating heat. It doesn’t sound as if it has a good location at all-Jakarta. There are swamps and lowlands all around. I’m not stupid. I’ll get my shots and take all the precautions. I’ll take my vitamins, and Jakarta being started by the Dutch there shouldn’t be any shortage of gin. The Dutch East Indies. It’s not a very old city, you know. It was built I think sometime in the 1600s. Just a minute. I have all sorts of-I’ll show you-I have-”
She set down her glass which had been empty for some time, got up quickly, and after a couple of steps caught her foot in the torn sisal and lurched forward, but steadied herself by holding on to the door frame and didn’t fall. “Got to get rid of this old matting,” she said, and hurried into the house.
He heard a struggle with stiff drawers, then a sound as of a pile of papers falling, and all through this she kept talking to him, in that half-frantic reassuring way of people desperate not to lose your attention. He could not make out what she was saying, or didn’t try to. He was taking the opportunity to swallow a pill- something he’d been thinking about doing for the last half hour. It was a small pill that didn’t require him to take a drink-his glass was empty too-and he could probably have got it to his mouth without Sonje’s noticing what he was doing. But something like shyness or superstition prevented him from trying. He did not mind Deborah’s constant awareness of his condition, and his children of course had to know, but there seemed to be some sort of ban against revealing it to his contemporaries.
The pill was just in time. A tide of faintness, unfriendly heat, threatened disintegration, came crawling upwards and broke out in sweat drops on his temples. For a few minutes he felt this presence making headway, but by a controlled calm breathing and a casual rearrangement of his limbs he held his own against it. During this time Sonje reappeared with a batch of papers-maps and printed sheets that she must have copied from library books. Some of them slipped from her hands as she sat down. They lay scattered around on the sisal.
“Now, what they call old Batavia,” she said. “That’s very geometrically laid out. Very Dutch. There’s a suburb called Weltevreden. It means ‘well contented.’ So wouldn’t it be a joke if I found him living there? There’s the Old Portuguese Church. Built in the late 1600s. It’s a Muslim country of course. They have the biggest mosque there in Southeast Asia. Captain Cook put in to have his ships repaired, he was very complimentary about the shipyards. But he said the ditches out in the bogs were foul. They probably still are. Cottar never looked very strong, but he took better care of himself than you’d think. He wouldn’t just go wandering round malarial bogs or buying drinks from a street vendor. Well of course now, if he’s there, I expect he’ll be completely acclimatized. I don’t know what to expect. I can see him gone completely native or I can see him nicely set up with his little brown woman waiting on him. Eating fruit beside a pool. Or he could be going around begging for the poor.”
As a matter of fact there was one thing Kent remembered. The night of the party on the beach, Cottar wearing nothing but an insufficient towel had come up to him and asked him what he knew, as a pharmacist, about tropical diseases.
But that had not seemed out of line. Anybody going where he was going might have done the same.
“You’re thinking of India,” he said to Sonje.
He was stabilized now, the pill giving him back some reliability of his inner workings, halting what had felt like the runoff of bone marrow.
“You know one reason I know he’s not dead?” said Sonje. “I don’t dream about him. I dream about dead people. I dream all the time about my mother-in-law.”
“I don’t dream,” Kent said.
“Everybody dreams,” said Sonje. “You just don’t remember.” He shook his head.
Kath was not dead. She lived in Ontario. In the Haliburton district, not so far from Toronto.
“Does your mother know I’m here?” he’d said to Noelle. And she’d said, “Oh, I think so. Sure.”
But there came no knock on the door. When Deborah asked him if he wanted to make a detour he had said, “Let’s not go out of our way. It wouldn’t be worth it.”