| For Dead
(A Meditation on a Painting by George Grosz)
Too much red. And all the animals are leaving. Out of the frame. Probably home to watch TV. ***** Today, at the exhibition, he thought he’d seen
her again. He had followed what looked like the back of her head, hair
in a strict bundle, the fringed ends of a scarf trailing after her as
she rippled But of course it had not been her, as it had not been him following what had not been her. She had told him that her greatest fear in life is to grow old, all beauty gone, all curiosity gone, no more dreaming of another future. He is more fearful of there being a future. He’s lost count, but it’s been maybe two weeks, three weeks, that all he can do with some competence is to stare at this image while thinking of the end. His end. He stares again at death’s face. Maybe he was a stand-up comedian, the sort who walked into the single spotlight in a darkened room after the sad juggler, the awful singer and the pimply frat boys had made their exits. He probably had stood there, waiting for those spontaneous anecdotes, the ones that were supposed to rise within him unbidden, the ones that get written up in the papers as the hallmark of genius, only to find the lights melting, the minutes hanging heavy, and his knees going all wobbly. Maybe the audience was in on it: they’d heard his heart lurching, seen the purple hands of failure, were ahead of him each time. They had felt what he had probably come to feel too, something that nudged forward stunning feats: to kill, to die, to propose marriage to someone, anyone, just so that his life could change that very instant. Maybe that was what happened. Someone blurting, “You suck!” and him just crumbling like cheddar, and the splaying, well the splaying sort of happened too because he was still trying to think up, plump up, sex up, that joke about theSpartacus Rebellion, the one that got Liebknecht killed, and maybe someone had gotten tired and hurled a banana skin at him, and it landed right where his foot did, and even if the monarchy had collapsed and democracy had groaned to a halt, this was still the theatre of the people so there he was, splayed for all to see, with his mouth thrown open. By the way, you surely know that the manager’s dog had the final piss—there it is striding calmly past him, past his tumbling hat, out, out of the ring—for how could it be red and everything else be red at the same time? Surely you know it had seen too much of human drama, far too much. It knew that things would always bleed in the end, always bleed in the end—and not that they didn’t know it. ***** Of course, if the poor sod had not bothered to die such a public death, someone would have told him, probably right after the gig, backstage, outside or in the pub next door, that the real problem was that he was just trying too hard. Maybe if he had focused more on telling a story than telling a joke, if he had worried less about punch lines, an edge, a trademark, he could have gone with the flow. Maybe he could have relaxed a bit, downed a few beers, gotten himself laid while thinking of that woman, the one with the susurrous lips and pointy tits, holding a flower with open petals, and told himself that tomorrow is another day. But maybe he distrusted people who said go with the
flow because even you and I know that not all flow is equal. Trusting
nature has something to do with trusting man and neither deserves the
reams of shit that have been written about them. ***** In the beginning was equality: when the deed was done and they were in love with each other, they felt, like everybody else, that they were the only two people on earth this feeling had ever visited. The tears they saw at the corner of each other’s eyes were etched in their minds like pearls of the highest truth, and the promises that escaped their lips loaned the night the weight of eternity. They told themselves as they returned to their own marital beds at daybreak that what they shared afterwards was not the post-coital gaze of the unseeing, but an epiphaneia granted only to those favoured by God. And they knew He was taking note. ***** Soon, after they had done it more often, and tears were being replaced by butterflies, raindrops, hoarfrost on foreign windowpanes and other things that became their friends, she told him that life as she had known it was no more; surely from thereon her place, his place, the only place open for them, would be on that rainbow bridge between heaven and earth, where they would float, wanting but not knowing, soaring but not reaching, it was all so ethereal. She felt this gesture taking root inside her, like a seed, like a child, growing towards the sun. She told him she was ready to suffer, suffering might even be good, for all of this was like composing, and you would never know what you’d get at the end of the day, all you could really do was to find an appropriate system for the gesture, and follow the light between the vague movements of the wind. Where does the light come from? he asked. I don’t know, she said. What if it is misleading? he asked. Then we let ourselves be misled, she said. What is the point, then? Because it is the light that is the point, not the direction it leads us to. So he let her go with this, and they learned to read. They learned that the vase had a face, the room its own gloom, the glass some sort of quiet rage, and that white hen with its long and spindly legs—the one that ran around the back yard of their love nest daring the resident cock to hump her between her high torso—truly, a sex appeal. They learned to accept their separate lives too as the space between things, the long and short of it, like the lonely nights between earth and paradise; like the split second it takes for a piece of paper in Beijing to yield a piece of paper in Malang. They treated each other with the sureness we often see in children, their world in turmoil, minding themselves. They lived them with a knowing that true dignity starts from the dark, with the light that rises within. But after four months of this, or thereabouts, she said: But one day it will come to this. After a while, even metals will be so avid for oxygen that when they come out of hiding they will combine with it and turn to rust. ***** And the light was forced to lead. But the light, of course, remained the same: feeble, unambitious, simple, really—oil lamps that dance like schoolchildren at break time, tuned to the ticking of the clock. It was not the light of the masses, the incandescent bulb whose white-hot glow conquers the darkness. And so they learned to read closer, seek harder, so that they could tell the bat’s wing from the fish-tail, the cock-spur from the cock’s comb, their flames shaped different ways, meaning different things. Yet these gas flames were scarcely brighter than the blaze of candles. It needed something else to bring out the shine, something called calcia, for calcium oxide, the greenish of white heat, the lime of light. But they knew they were not for the limelight, their fate not unlike the magician who could not handle the beat. Words descended, the sky hung low with splinters, and they started to disintegrate like spirals of carbon, strangers to each other. But sex is a powerful thing and at the end of each come, after his third left finger had stoked her rims and met steady wetness and she launched her vulva into his mouth like an anemone’s foam-fizz body, they always remembered the first time and were embarrassed at their own fickleness. She thought she was the only one held in awe of this wetness eternal, moments born of the ceaseless movement of water whatever its source, him, love or fate she knew not the difference. But he knew that it was special, whatever it was, and he knew he had to do the only thing to do: keep the barge afloat. So they agreed to throw harsh words and petty society ***** And yet he did think that life would reward him with something more lasting, more dignified, than sexual love. Even she had felt it too, she who had been so terrified the first time he entered her, but who had wetted and popped like morning dew the minute he was inside her. This was what she said: I hate that our lovemaking often feels like the
highest form of expression of integrity and honesty in our feelings for
each other. I Even if he had imagined that one day love between them too could sicken, like flu that turned into sinusitis and later into a nuclear bomb, and the only antidote he could get was outside the city walls, and time, space, life would repeat itself. All over again. Just like old times. ***** But it could also have been the tail end of the magician’s long career, and that his death was as much a result of age as the failure of genetic material. While it may be true that age does not seem to stop some people, they still stand out whatever they do because they’re made up differently, they’re simply not one of us. We on the other hand are those carbon bulbs, fragile to begin with and even more so with use. We are ineffective at higher voltage, would never be the brilliant white light we secretly aspire to because we can’t, we just don’t have what it takes. So in fact the magician’s death was the best thing going, the greatest gig of all, for it made people think, why? Why did he finally show his teeth, all two rows of them, white in the ultimate darkness? ***** Once, when he was a boy, he had visions of being a roving pianist, and his worst nightmare was to walk onto a dark stage without practice, without his fingers’ consent. You think it was all about a higher connection, about that thing they call innate musicality? Wrong. Look at that piano: there it was, with its sharps and flats, its pointed edges, its snap-shut lids, almost otherworldly in the blinding light. Like a beast raring to be tamed, a killing machine. This was a very physical thing. But he would still stride forward anyway, not willing to admit defeat in public. He would not even blink, even if by this time panic had set in, panic at his splendid foolishness, because he knew there was no way out, not even for great talent, without sufficient preparation. His father had taught him that: preparation, son, preparation.
Knowing what’s ahead puts you ahead, it’s just the way of
the world. Not that it saved him: one day, outside the Senayan sports
complex, his father was hit by a thirtyeight thousand pound bus that ran
the red light and sent him smashing into a lamp-post headfirst, snapping
his neck, and suddenly, there he was, the first son, the family’s
torchbearer. It was then that he knew for certain that he was, and always
would be, son in the name of father, eternally one. There was no reason for this, he thought, as he sat on the stool, hurled himself towards it in fact, towards time and its mockery, the moment when the notes started to twist and buckle and flail and he could not get them to hold their chins up. People were listening. People were listening. Until something buzzed through his chest and into his
fingers and they too gave way. Just gave way and whatever it was he felt,
boiling like gas through the veins up and through the skin all the way
to the temple shot with premature grey, could not stop the sensation of
everything ticking, everything pulsing, everything still alive, when really
what he needed was for everything to stop, like that scene in Sleeping
Beauty when a wave of the wand rendered everyone cook stableboy dog petrified
and frozen in time Maybe that image, too, was make-believe—he was, after all, a magician, was he not, and so he could fake his own death. Who was to know? The point is, at that moment, people know you, as you will never anymore be known. ***** Whenever he told her of this recurring nightmare, she told him it didn’t mean a thing because the minute people knew him, he no longer recognised him as he. Each time she told him this he told her she was taking the easy way out. “You worry too much,” she would reply. And worry too little, she added, about “things that matter”. Like what to do with “us”. Who can tell you about too-littleness or too-muchness? How do you tell yourself? When he threw this on her, she snapped, “Don’t insult me. Whatever you may think of yourself, you will always have more than I do.” As if that should instantly make him a winner. ***** But she had been taught to look at the water carefully, so as not to misread its deceptions. The sea that bears Phlebas and his sailors brings us trade and the modern alphabet, but we remain unseeing under the darkness of empire. The thunder may point us towards nirvana and turn damp gust into rain, but we fear death by water, as sustained downpours wash away dwellings and lives. Hot water brings soup, tea and domestic stability, but we’d rather burn money for the commercial comforts of spa and sauna. Young girls dare not bathe in the fresh sweet water they are sent out to strain from soft sandy shores, but every day we use water to wipe blood, sex stains and traces of guilt from our faces. We see impurity in tainted water, but we also know that those occasional palm fronds and flotsam shelter many a fish from predators and help preserve sea life. Wagner launches and ends his operas on water, yet we know the woman, in his misogynistic logic, is not just healer and seducer—she is often the true slayer. Religious myths have the gods burned or drowned in effigy so that they may be reborn for our benefit, but we ask ourselves, every time we look at the debris: “That corpse you planted last year in your garden,/ Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?” This was the way she had been taught to look at men. ***** Most of the restaurants that opened that year were about being proud of their local heritage: waiters in neo-Ziggurian cafes with sharply slanted planes came up to you with smiles as broad as Jalan Sudirman and said, “Maybe you’d care to sample our sop buntut or our pempek?” Or: At the entrance of an Italian restaurant known for its black cuttlefish pasta you were greeted by giant pyloxed gold Balinese parasols. Welcome to Indonesia. Or: Sunday noon in Pasar Gelap, a crew of earnest foodies from the other side of town found a door so fabled, hoping to gorge on breaded eel soaked in fermented red rice, only to find parasols! grinning in the background, just by the menu board. Life seemed to have come to that: proliferating, out of itself and AWOL, like rabbits. ***** And there he was, spewed up, like a runt, weltering in the gunk of his own inadequacy. Right there, in the cold of the shingled platform. That was the only possible story, it seems. He had walked out onto the stage that night with a bit of courage, a bit of renewed faith, in God the All-Seeing, in humans and in much else besides, and he was clean, or cleaner at any rate, and shouldn’t he be applauded for it? Okay, so occasionally he sneaked out for a few snorts and belts on the side, but that night he had felt so new even his thrice-told jokes felt new, and even if he knew the light dented him in a big way, highlighted everything that was wrong about him, he felt the world was finally ready for him. After all, does not talent require time to open and everybody loves a good sport? But the laughter never came … ***** Pawing through the traffic, one Monday morning, 97.8FM: “So, Dini, what do you think of Irma Rosidi’s new novel? Is it realist or minimalist?” “Well, first of all we need to define …” “Yes. A definition. That is very important. And you, Iyo, what do you think?” “I think it sort of tries to do both. She kind of uses minimalism as a quick way to achieve the façade of heavy truth.” “Absolutely, it’s like, whoosh, a shortcut to Deep Meaning. You know, a dysfunctional family here, a few skeletons from the past there, a pop-philosophical, anti-everything, primordial instinct big moment before everything melts away into raw nothingness again, and voilà, there you go, Deep Meaning.” “Deep Meaning. That is very interesting. But it is experimental, is it not?” “Again, one has to be very careful before using those big words …” “I agree with Dini. Experiment for experiment’s sake is not literature’s objective …” “But is it even a novel?” “Mmm … maybe more like MTV moments.” “Like, bad MTV moments.” “Are you guys thinking of writing your own novels some day? Maybe even a joint novel?” (A pause) “Oh yeah. (Laughing) We are writing it every day, every step of the way. We are writing it even as we speak.” ***** In the middle of May, a sudden burst of rain slowed the city down, drugging it with a kind of wheezy sorrow. There were colds everywhere, coughing fits in hospitals, in cinemas and at schools. People seemed to be avoiding the main streets, ebbing instead into alleys and quiet lanes, not unlike a stubborn sinusitus. In the market, they dodged each other as though they were lepers, preferring the stench of shrimp paste and rotten papayas; meanwhile, at the next traffic light, you could find the same kids with red eyes, mucus glistening over lips the colour of shale, who were moments ago weighing your chillies. If around this time you had visited one of the public
cemeteries, Karet or Tanah Kusir for instance, you’d notice that
the women who sold you rose petals in plastic bags had scarves around
their neck, to hide the pus oozing from the wound on their throats. They
would watch you with sucked-in breaths as you looked over your shoulder
for the usual graveyard hand who, after you slipped a ten thousand note
into his hand, would throw two pails of water onto the tombstone, palm
lids scraping on marble. The light, you would And even as he knew that the minute you went away they would go back at each other, trading bloom for bloom, germ for germ, until someone died, someone died in the street, and they would dig a hole late in the night so that come morning everything would be all right, he failed to see what he touched what he smelled what he entered in all his pulsating hotness twice a week, and it was so late in the year that he finally realised. Was he anxious? Was he upset? Of course he was anxious, of course he was upset. He had never felt so, well, cheated. No, not from the question marks that ran through him about the real her—whether in the deepest down she still cared for a past, whether she did not often fantasize about a different body, a different feeling, a different future, whether she did not sometimes wake up forgetting it was not him sleeping by her side. Whether history always weighed more than the present, what was tainted what was amoral what was just life. Things that weren’t supposed to make him jealous but did. What frazzled him was the fact that she had felt all this and made her moves when he thought he was the one who was having the easier time of it—for wasn’t he supposed to be the man in this whole man and woman thing? ***** In the beginning, of course, there was equality and this: Sex and the about-to-be newly single. Look at her, he thought, what a stunning bird of prey, all desir and latent wetness, soft lines in need of defining. A perch was what she needed, to sink her claws into, to lower her ruby redness in, a place to go after a life of being caged in. I am it, in flagrante delicto, the sun, the moon, the earth, the spar and mainsail, the vessel of life. But he was ... what was it again he was called once, a “half-artist”, was he not—as if a person could be split precisely into two parts: an artist and a non-artist, whatever they are. And that was precisely his opening line. “People tell me I’m a half-artist,” he had told her. “Whatever that means.” She was quiet as she regarded him. “Being half-something usually means less of both things,” she finally managed as he stared into the yellow and red spokes of her irises. Anyway, being a “half-artist”, he stroked, nurtured, anchored, never pushing, never hectoring, never doing all those things terrorists do to hog-tie an elusive emotion. He even allowed himself to return the gesture, and fell in love with her. Sometimes. Mostly when they were together, physically, in one place. ***** Now when he thinks about it, the signs were obvious. Instead of an answer within two or three rings, he would get her voicemail; in place of breathless anticipation of their next liaison, there were her brief but unexplained disappearances. Suddenly she had time for the things she always used to throw aside for him: “paperwork”, overseas correspondence, meetings with friends he had never heard of. More time spent at the bank, the mall, the supermarket. This increased need for “quiet time”, to be left unsullied, often with her cellphone mysteriously dead. Reading this and that, books, magazines, journal articles, not of the abstract kind. And praising other men openly—men, not an abstract thing. And before that, conversations that started to sound like accusations, like this: “You think you have nothing. But you have everything.” He could tell she too was fighting not to become a cliché, not, for instance, to qualify “everything” as “you have the best of both worlds.” Because that’s what people say when they feel wronged by another, when they feel they have the worst of both worlds. And because in the beginning they were two people joined in an understanding beyond intimacy, beyond any faith, that the point of all this was how not to feel and be like the rest of the world. But she had left her husband in a single act of valour that put him to shame and was now renting an apartment at 4.5 million rupiah a month; a third from her salary, a third from alimony, and the rest from his contribution every other month because that was all he could afford to do penance for this sudden imbalance. Her family and friends had begun to leave her, or so she felt, for which she also seemed to blame him, for being the face and the name to the way of life she was raised to avoid. By the end of the year, the city had its own Idol series, not just one, but lots, and suddenly it became almost illegal for people not to have dreams. Suddenly it was illegal for people to have dreams but not to show how they get there, how they get to the top, from nothing to everything. Suddenly it was okay, you deserve a chance, but we have to see it, how it’s done, each eensy weensy step of the way, each rage, each smile, each confession, the parts that make you whole. And when you fuck up, we have the right to humiliate you, in that editless, hair-raisingly extended, but necessary way, because when you are a family there should really be no secrets between us. We’re not even sure who’s eating who, television eating reality or reality eating television, but this is called Reality TV and it’s hot it’s truth it’s what matters because it fills the bottomless void of our short attention span; it’s part instant gratification, part lottery jackpot mentality, part tabloid appetite; and each week we cry, curse and croon; celebrate, corroborate, certify, all in your name, you, just you, you alone, our choice, the people’s choice. Each week we see different names going up in lights, different shiny new objects, but with faces indistinguishable from the next, with the same shelf life. We want to see it all, the good and the bad, the up and the down, the toil and the reward, all that happens in between. Give us every teardrop, every choke, every sigh, of he who walks out into the night, a shining leather Delsey in tow. Down with adjudication of the few, long live democracy. Down with high culture, long live mass entertainment. It is illegal not to help people reach the stars. It is illegal for kids not to help each other reach the stars. It is illegal for parents not to help their kids help people reach the stars. Give power back to the people. Give entertainment back to the people. Give the future back to the people. Long live SMS. Long live Telkomnet, Indosat and IM3. Long live RCTI, SCTV and Indosiar. Long live Fremantle. Saksikan Tanggal Mainnya. Wait for D-Day; Menyongsong Maha Bintang, Greeting Lord of All Stars. Like dance and drugs, wine and whisky, the race for people’s power tapped and twisted into the desire of people wanting to be more, only to find that more is just that, more like other people. More of other people. More in other people. But who cares? It was illegal not to cast your vote for somebody else’s future, not just yours. What ideology can be more powerful than that? And so life obliged at every turn, and they all started to look the same. ***** The magician’s last joke, in fact, was about money: coins shining with certainty, an idea claiming universality, something to be accepted and embraced the world around. And it was true: someone in the audience just lost it and threw a coin at him. It flew so fast it lodged at the back of his open throat: a punch line, at last. ***** Thus it was as she saw herself increasingly in the image of others, that he came home one day to find his wife of twenty years, alone in her room, hunched up and disgraced like she was before he picked her up from obscurity, like she was nowadays, after he had broken her up. Even if she was alwaysa certain way, listless and spacy, he knew instantly this was different. Something had happened. A point, reached, from which there were only traces of things that were. Even if the hospital tried its best to keep death at bay, he could see the morgue in his wife’s eyes, and something akin to a promise lost, and things had never been so chrysoberyl clear: all of life had led him here, to this moment, after which everything, even his life with the other, too, would be slipping and unlifelike, something for immortals, not for you and me. Whereupon the city writhed, a huge, I-told-you-so writhe. And locked its doors. ***** And yet he should have known, the way she always had:
“Why is it that you cannot be like other people? Nowadays nobody
has the patience, I don’t have the patience, for delayed payoffs.”
The next thing he heard she was seeing somebody who looked like somebody
on TV, who followed her around on all fours, in and out of exhibition
openings and receptions like a dog on a leash. He heard, also, that the
dog, all tongue and no bite, was going to marry her. And she was probably
right: nowadays who has time for time? August 2004 |