The PEN,O Henry Prize Stories 2011 Part 16

He put his arm around him-that tiny shoulder, tight as a nest-but, aware of the weight, didn't let it rest completely. And they were quiet. Thank you, he thought, then mouthed the words to himself in the dark.

The rain made sleep easy. The two of them lay side by side in their softly crackling sleeping bags like pods, identical but for size. When he crawled out of the tent in the middle of the night to pee, the rain had stopped and he could see stars through the missing places in the roof. Later he thought he heard the rain again, but he'd been dreaming something about rain, and with half the boy's rib cage cupped in his palm, he slept.

In the morning the ground was soaked but he managed to get up a fire anyway. There was a heavy mist on the meadow, and it rose and drifted across the sky in long smoky sweeps. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen something so beautiful. After breakfast they left their packs in the barn and went exploring. He'd promised he'd have him back that night. They didn't have to leave till noon.

The morning went too quickly, but he didn't mind. Better not to overdo it the first time. There would be other trips. He wanted to leave things undone. They walked a mile up the trail to a tributary of the river where they found a big track pressed into the mud that looked like it might have been a cat's, and then it was time to go.

They were about a mile from the river when he realized that coming back he'd have to hold the stick in his left hand: the current would be coming from the other side now. It didn't matter; his right shoulder was a little stiffer maybe, so sitting the boy on his arm would be a little less comfortable, but that was all. It shouldn't matter much.

He had thought the river sounded louder even before they came out of the trees, and it did. He understood right away. It wasn't the rain-there hadn't been enough to make a difference. It was the afternoon melt: in the mountains, forty miles away, the snowfields were melting in the sun. They'd slow in the evening cold, and not pick up again until the following day. He knew this. He'd forgotten.

Still, it didn't amount to all that much. Looking at the river, you could hardly tell the difference. The boy had run ahead; he could see him throwing sticks into the current. He'd just have to take it slow, that's all. Anyway, it wasn't as though they could wait till the next morning; he'd promised to have him back. There was no way of letting her know. But it didn't matter. Slow down, fella, he said to himself, but the sound of his own voice made him uncomfortable, so he didn't say anything more.

He walked in over the wet stones and splashed some water on his face, then pointed out where the current ran clear and flat over fist-size rocks, thigh deep. He was thinking too much. He took off his shoes and socks and pants, retied his shoes, and slipped on the two packs, the belt dangling free.

"Okay, kiddo," he said, "same thing as yesterday. You just stay put right here, and I'll wave from the other side."

The current was stronger-he could tell right away from the pull on his calves, the sound it made-not much stronger, but stronger. He worked slowly, picking his path, lifting the stick completely clear of the water and jabbing it down, leaning into the current, avoiding any rocks larger than a plate. It was a good track. With a river of any size, there was only one way-straight across, maybe slightly quartering upstream. You had to pick your path and go. You had to plan ahead, never take a step you couldn't move from.

Halfway across he stopped and rested his arm. It felt strange to be standing there, the current wrapping itself hard around his thigh. He looked at his watch. It was taking a little longer. So what? He'd crossed this thing a dozen times. More. Eight years was nothing. Same man, same river.

When he made it to the beach he dumped the packs and waved quickly and started back across. It had gone well. Well enough. His left arm was a little tired but he could rest it on the way back-the current was from the other direction now-and not having the packs made a difference. He tried not to look at the boy sitting where he'd left him on the opposite sh.o.r.e because there was something about the smallness of him in his blue shorts against the bank of stones he didn't like and because he wanted to keep his eyes on the water, and yet when he slipped, the toe of his right boot catching on the edge of something then sliding over rock as slick as any ice, he was looking straight down into the water. He floundered awkwardly, stumbled, thrust the stick with both hands into the current as if lunging at something under the water, and felt it catch. He hadn't seen it-whatever it was. He breathed, feeling his heart thrashing in his ribs. You never see it, he thought.

There was no point in waiting, so less than a minute after he'd slopped out onto the rocks and flexed his arms like Mr. Universe ("You ready, kiddo?"), he squatted down and the boy crawled onto his back. "You see how I almost fell back there?" he said. "You have to be careful. I got a little sloppy."

"I saw an eagle," the boy said. "It was enormous, and it flew right over the river."

"Really?" he said, already walking into the water.

The boy felt a little heavier than he had before, and thirty feet in he hoisted him up and shifted the weight. "Okay?" he said. He continued on, feeling for edges, probing ahead like a snail testing the air, then stopped and readjusted him again. When he stopped the third time, he knew it was going to be a push. He should have brought the boy across first. He wished he could switch him to his left, hold the stick with his right. He had to stretch his arm for a second, he said. He dropped his arm and the boy dangled from his neck, and then he caught him up and the pressure eased from his windpipe and they continued on. He tried not to look downstream. "How you doin' back there?" he said. He was strong. He could do this.

They didn't go down when it happened, but they should have. How he managed to stay up in that current, already sliding four, five feet downstream, slipping on one algae-slick rock, then another, he didn't know. How he managed not to turn upstream or down, which would have been that, he didn't know either. All he knew was that they were still up and the boy was still on his back and he was straightening up, still facing the sh.o.r.e, no more than a broomstick's length from where they'd been a moment earlier. The current was midthigh and strong.

He could hear himself, breathing hard. "I'm okay, kiddo. I'm okay. That wasn't good, but we're fine."

They weren't fine. Ignoring the quivering in his shoulder he tried to take stock. The rocks were bigger here. He couldn't get back to where they'd been. He couldn't quarter upstream and intercept the path because there was a flat pale rock the size of a small table in the way, and the water below it was too deep. "Do me a favor, kid," he said. "See if you can feel where my eyes are. That's it, don't worry-I've got you. Now when I count to three, I'll close my left eye and you wipe the sweat out with your thumb, okay?" He could feel the boy's thumb slide gently over his eyelid. "Good, now do it again."

There had to be a way-something he couldn't see. There was nothing. A step behind him, the rocks were smaller. It didn't matter. He couldn't step back. Crossing a river meant moving forward, holding the weight on the back leg while the front foot felt for purchase. Turning around was impossible. At some point he'd have to take the full weight of the current with his legs perpendicular to the sh.o.r.e like a tennis player antic.i.p.ating a serve; unbraced, he'd come off the bottom like nothing at all. A thin stream of panic started in his head, dulling the sound of water. He looked around stupidly, blinking back the sweat. The sh.o.r.e looked like it was behind a screen. He moved his right foot forward, felt it begin to slide, pulled back. f.u.c.k you, he whispered. f.u.c.k you.

They'd get out of this. They had to get out of this. My G.o.d, all his other f.u.c.kups were just preparations for this. This wasn't possible. He could feel the current-strong, insistent, pumping against his thigh like a drunken lover. Was this how it went? One stupid move? One stupid f.u.c.king move, and your son on your back? No. He could do this. He tried to remember the strength he'd felt, that rude, beautiful strength, felt it pushing back the curtain of fear. There was nowhere to go.

He could barely bring himself to speak. He couldn't move. The way ahead was impossible. Far below, he could hear the water sucking on the shallow cavity made by his hip. The river. It wanted to be whole, unbroken. It wanted him gone. He could see it, forming and re-forming, thick-walled jade, smoothing out its sides with its thumbs like a hypnotized potter. The water blurred. He wanted to scream for help. There was no one-just the rushing plain of the river, the trees. He couldn't move. A muscle in his shoulder was jerking like a poisoned animal. What combination of things? Everything had come together. He couldn't move. He was barely holding on. There was no way. The river ahead was smooth, deep, gliding over brown boulders trailing beards of moss in the deep wind. He wanted to laugh. For a second, he felt the hot, shameful fire of remorse and then unending pity-for himself, for the boy on his back, for the world-and at that moment he remembered hearing about a medieval priest who, personally taking the torch from the executioner, went down the line of victims tied to their stakes and kissed each one tenderly on the cheek before lighting the tinder.

"Dad, you okay?" he heard his son saying as if from some other place. There was nowhere to go. It didn't matter. They had to go.

And then he heard his own voice, answering. "I'm okay, buddy," it said. "You just hang on."

Lori Ostlund.

Bed Death.

We met Mr. Mani because we paused on the footbridge that spanned Jalan Munshi Abdullah, a busy street near our hotel, for it was only from up there that the sign for his school, the un.o.btrusively named English Inst.i.tute, could be seen. The school, which occupied the second floor of the decrepit building just below us, did not look promising, and when we trotted back down the steps to the street and went inside, it seemed even less so. Still, we presented our resumes to the young woman at the front desk, and she, not knowing what to do with them or us, summoned Mr. Mani from cla.s.s.

Mr. Mani was a small Indian man in his sixties, no taller than either Julia or I, which put us immediately at ease, and when he smiled, he seemed at once boyish and ancient because he was missing his top front teeth. He did not speak Malaysian English, which we were still struggling to understand, but sounded in every way British, to the point that when he heard our American accents, he winced, which could have annoyed us but instead made us laugh. He studied our resumes at length before explaining, apologetically, that the school provided only enough work for him, though when we met him for dinner that evening, we learned that he rarely spent less than twelve hours a day at the school, teaching mornings and afternoons and then, at night, checking homework and attending to paperwork. The empty s.p.a.ce created by his missing teeth accommodated perfectly the neck of a whiskey bottle, which spent more and more time there as the night wore on, and after he had consumed a fair amount, he revealed that he stayed late at the school also as a way of hiding from his wife, whom he referred to as "my Queen."

I do not think that it occurred to him, ever, that Julia and I were a couple, yet he spoke to us without nonsense or innuendo, mainly about his marriage, which had been arranged, stating repeatedly that he did not question the matchmaker's thinking in putting together a poor but educated man from Kuala Lumpur and an illiterate woman from the rubber plantation. "After all, we have produced eleven children," he pointed out proudly, confessing that, given his long hours, he saw them only when they brought his meals or attended their weekly English lessons. His favorite was the fifth child, a girl by the name of Suseelah, who loved Orwell as much as he did and loathed d.i.c.kens almost as much. In fact, he spoke of d.i.c.kens often, always with contempt, and I could not help but view it as a cla.s.sic example of a man railing against his maker, for Mani was a character straight from d.i.c.kens, an affable, penniless fellow who bordered on being a caricature of himself.

When he had consumed the entire bottle of whiskey, he declared the evening complete and insisted on the minor gallantry of walking us back to our hotel, a seedy place that he promptly deemed "unsuitable for two ladies." At the door, he shook our hands sadly and said, as though the evening had been nothing more than an extended job interview, "My ladies, I am afraid that I cannot hire you."

"Thank you for meeting with us," I replied.

He turned to leave but stopped, saying, "I shall pa.s.s your resumes to my old friend Narayanasamy at Raffles College. If there are no objections, of course. The school is newly opened here in Malacca, though quite established in other areas of Malaysia, I a.s.sure you." We thanked him for his kindness, but I am ashamed to admit that we dismissed his offer as drunken posturing.

So, of course, we were surprised to return to our hotel the next day to find a note from him informing us that Mr. Narayanasamy wished to meet us. We left early for the interview the following morning, half expecting the directions that Mani had included to be faulty, which is how we came to be sitting in the overly air-conditioned office of Mr. Narayanasamy, briefcases on our laps, waiting for him to finish a heated telephone discussion regarding funds for a copy machine.

I leaned toward Julia. "What do you make of the bed?" I whispered.

"What bed?" she whispered back.

"What bed?" I repeated, indignation adding to my volume, for, simply put, Julia often overlooked the obvious.

"Welcome to Raffles College," Mr. Narayanasamy announced, putting down the phone and rising, hand extended to greet us, inquiring in the next breath what had brought us to Malaysia and, more specifically, to his school. When I answered that what had brought us to his school was his friend Mr. Mani, he paused before replying, "Ah yes, Mani," the way that one would refer to laundry on the line several minutes after it has begun to rain. I knew then that I would not like this Mr. Narayanasamy. Still, we spent the next hour convincing him that we were indeed up to the task of teaching business communications, a subject we knew little about, for I was a writing teacher and Julia, ESL, and as we stood to leave, he offered us the jobs.

In the process of making myself desirable and friendly, I forgot entirely about the bed, but as we pa.s.sed through the main lobby, there it was again-enormous and pristine, housed behind gla.s.s like a museum exhibit-and Julia had the good grace to look sheepish. We stood before it in silence, believing that it would not do to be overheard discussing any aspect of our new place of employment, but finally Julia could not contain herself.

"It's huge," she said authoritatively, as though the bed were her find, an oddity that she was deigning to share with me but did not trust me to fully appreciate.

"Yes," I agreed. "I don't know how you missed it." Then, to press my point, I added, "Julia, sometimes I think you could get into bed at night and not notice that a car had been parked at the foot of it." I said this in an intentionally exasperated tone, a tone so exaggerated that I knew I could dismiss it as playful if need be, but Julia, pleased by our employment, merely laughed.

We settled quickly into a routine, teaching from eight in the morning until that same hour of the evening, with blocks free for eating and preparation. Business communications was tedious but not complicated, and we soon developed a system for teaching it, which we modified slightly for each of the three departments that we served: marketing, business, and hospitality management. The bed, we learned, belonged to the latter department, and we often saw its students huddled around it, notebooks open, as an instructor made and remade it, stopping to gesture at folds and even, with the aid of a meter stick, measuring the distance from bedspread to floor. Students visiting the college with their parents stopped to gaze at the bed as well, the entire family standing with a quiet air of expectation as though watching an empty cage at the zoo, and I came to realize that not only did these families consider it perfectly normal to have a bed on display but they actually seemed impressed by it, impressed and rea.s.sured, as though the bed gave them a sense that the school was for real and not some place where one did nothing but stare at books. Never did I see a student touch the bed, however, and when I asked one of the hospitality instructors why this was, she explained that what the students needed to know was theoretical, information that could be quantified via a multiple-choice exam-which meant there was no reason for them to touch it.

The hospitality management students were, ironically, the most timid of the lot; I was hard-pressed to imagine any of them behind the desk of an actual hotel, greeting guests and making them feel at home. "Do you even understand what 'hospitality' means?" I blurted out one day, fed up with the way they sat in their stiff blue uniforms, red pocket kerchiefs peeking out with an almost obscene jauntiness, eyes turned downward whenever I asked a question. I turned and wrote "HOSPITALITY" across the board in large letters, and as I did, I heard behind me a low, scornful chuckle. I knew that it could only be coming from Shah, a corpulent young man who ignored the uniform policy and generally chose to wear purple, perhaps in keeping with the regal connotations of his name. Shah was an anomaly in the cla.s.s-fat where the others were thin, the only Malay in a cla.s.s full of Chinese, more often absent than present. He spent his days loitering around campus, attending cla.s.ses sporadically, which was fine with me, for I had taken a thorough dislike to him and found it tiring to conceal the depth of my feelings. It bothered Julia greatly that I allowed myself to harbor such animosity toward a student, particularly one whom she saw as awkward and pathetic, one whose neediness, she claimed, was so wholly transparent that to respond to it as anything but neediness was to be purposely disingenuous. I mention this only so that one can see how it appeared from her perspective, for I believe (and have all along) that her position was the logical one, the one with which, in theory, I would have agreed had I never met Shah and discovered what it was like to be so utterly repelled by a student.

Already, I had been visited by his father, who was a datuk, a minor dignitary of the sort that made appearances at local events, speaking a few words to commemorate the occasion, generally after arriving late. He came unexpectedly during my lunch hour, and, to the horror of the colleague sent to find me, I insisted on finishing my noodles first. When I finally entered the room where Shah and the datuk waited, it was ripe with the smell of Shah, an oppressively musky odor that I suspected was caused by some sort of biological malfunction, but that did nothing to make me better disposed toward him. His father was visibly annoyed at being made to wait, and I could see that this would only make things worse for Shah, which struck me as unfair but did not particularly bother me, for Shah had already caused me an inordinate amount of work and worry, and that also struck me as unfair.

Shah's father did not speak English, but not trusting his son to translate, he had brought along a translator, through whom I explained that Shah rarely attended cla.s.s and never turned in homework but that I often saw him lounging around the cafeteria. When I spoke to him about his absences, he replied, with an annoying lilt to his voice, that he had not been feeling well. "Upset stomach," he would say coyly, patting his very large stomach as though it were a kitten he had not yet tired of. Once I sent another student to fetch him, but the boy returned alone. "He says that he is feeling faint," the boy reported, and the others looked at me hopefully, for the students enjoyed being surprised by my behavior, which they attributed to my being American. I sensed that Shah wanted me to find him and demand his presence, and so, unwilling to give him that pleasure, I did nothing.

Throughout the course of our exchange, the datuk and I made no eye contact, and when the meeting was finished, we stood, but even in parting, he did not acknowledge me, instead averting his eyes until I realized that he was waiting for me to leave first. I did, and as I closed the door behind me, I could hear him yelling and then a sound like a pig snuffling at a trough, which I suspected was Shah crying.

That night as I pa.s.sed through the dark lobby of the school, I was startled by what appeared to be a shape atop the bed, a shape not unlike that made by a supine body, albeit a very large one. I drew close to the gla.s.s, quite sure that once my eyes adjusted to the dim glow of the night lights, I would find nothing more than a hefty stack of linens awaiting the next day's lesson, but it was clearly a person and, judging from the size, I knew that it could only be Shah. Slowly, the details of his face grew more p.r.o.nounced, and I could not help but feel that lying there with his eyes closed, hands clasped high atop the mound of his stomach, he looked defenseless, almost benign. I had never been that close to him, so close that I could have reached out and touched his brow were it not for the gla.s.s between us. His lids began to flutter, his eyes rolling slowly open, casting about nervously until they settled on my face, recognition hardening them into two bits of coal that burned with unmitigated contempt.

The next morning, the bed looked as it always did, neatly made, ready for service. I mentioned the encounter to no one, certainly not Julia, who would have pursued one of her usual melodramatic interpretations-bed as performance s.p.a.ce or sacrificial altar-rather than simply a comfortable place to snooze.

Mr. Narayanasamy had warned that our work permits might take a week, even two, suggesting that we "stay put" at our hotel until they were issued. We agreed, though we had already been living at our seedy hotel for two weeks by then, two long weeks during which a man of indeterminate age, wearing only a pair of shorts, lay upon a plastic chaise longue in the hallway just outside our door, groaning day and night, no doubt from the pain caused by the gaping wound that ran from one of his nipples to his navel. Although we never saw anyone attending to him, we knew that somebody was because some days the wound was concealed by an unskillfully applied bandage, while other days it was exposed, flies gathering on it like poor people lined up along a river to bathe.

We had no idea what had happened to the man and did not ask, primarily because n.o.body had even acknowledged the man's presence to us, but the wound resembled a knife cut, approximately eight inches long and jagged with a suggestion of violence to it, though we understood that the shabbiness of the hotel, combined with the fact that blood still seeped from the wound, contributed to this effect. Since he was directly outside our door and p.r.o.ne to groaning, particularly at night, we often found it difficult to sleep, but it was unthinkable that we ask him to groan less, to keep his misery to himself. There was also the issue of whether to greet him as we paused to lock or unlock our door. Julia felt that we should, that a h.e.l.lo was in order; otherwise, it was like treating him as though he were invisible, dead in fact, but as I prefer to pa.s.s my own illnesses without interference, I maintained that we should not ask him to engage in unnecessary politenesses when he so obviously needed his energy for mending. Of course, this quickly became an argument not about the wounded man but about me, or, more specifically, about what Julia termed my stubborn disbelief in the world's ability to maintain a position at odds with my own, which I felt was overstating the case.

The day after we were hired, a Sat.u.r.day, we walked out toward the sea along a road cramped with vehicles that blew sand and oily exhaust into our faces. We returned to our room filthy and went together into our little bathroom, which was equipped with a traditional mandi, a large, water-filled tank from which one scooped water for bathing. There, we stripped down, laughing and lathering ourselves and each other and then shrieking at the water's coolness, welcome but startling nonetheless. We felt amazingly clean afterward and lay on the bed, naked and wet, enjoying the flutter of the fan across our bodies, our hands touching.

We could hear the wounded man shifting repeatedly on his chaise longue, the fact that he was moving so much suggesting that he felt stronger, perhaps even bored, and while the possibility of this cheered us greatly, for we had actually pondered what to do if we rose one morning to find him dead, there was something unsettling about the sound of his skin ripping away from the vinyl each time he moved. The thought began to creep into each of our heads that he was not feeling better at all but was instead flailing out in desperation against the narrowly defined, joyless s.p.a.ce he now occupied. Furthermore, we worried that we had caused his agitation, that the sounds of pleasure we made as we bathed had led to his sudden despair. For the first time, we felt that the man was aware of us-even worse, that he had been aware of us all along, an intimacy that was too much to bear. It was ironic, for we had put up with so much-the sight of him, b.l.o.o.d.y and damaged, as we came and went, the groaning throughout the night-but somehow this, the feeling that our pleasure intensified his pain, this had overwhelmed us, so we packed our bags and escaped down the street to the Kwee Hang Hotel, which was more expensive by far but did not involve a wounded man outside our door.

At the Kwee Hang Hotel, the long, sunny foyer was mopped twice daily, our toilet paper was monitored, and when we returned each night, the bathroom smelled pleasantly medicinal and the beds stood neatly made with sheets that bore the fresh smell of a dryer. The only thing that we had to complain about really was that the owner and his son sat for hours behind a desk at the end of this long, sunny foyer with their eyes glued to the television, across which ran the ticker-tape information for the Malaysian stock exchange during the day and international exchanges during the night, but even this we could not really form a complaint around, for they kept the sound muted, day and night, making, only occasionally, some sort of quiet comment to one another, a low chuckle of pleasure or a disgusted ay-yoh when things presumably had not gone their way. Of course, it made no sense for us to be paying by the day an amount that, each month, added up to half our salaries. Even the old man and his son began to tell us as much. "Find an apartment and stop paying like tourists," they said, but week after week, our visas were delayed, a state of affairs that we protested in only the most cursory fashion, for we were content.

Still, one feature of the room did bother us (though to call it a feature is misleading, for "feature" implies something added to make life more pleasant for hotel guests rather than less): there existed, on the inside of the wardrobe door, a crudely rendered drawing of two p.e.n.i.ses, both erect and facing one another as though, I could not help but think, they were about to duel. It had been made with a thick-tipped black marker, hastily so that one of the p.e.n.i.ses had unevenly sized scrota and black slashes of hair, while the other was symmetrical but hairless. Beneath the picture, in a more controlled hand, somebody, presumably the artist, had written: I am waiting every night on the footbridge. Since we generally opened only the left door and the drawing was on the right, we did not discover it for weeks, but once we had, we began to feel different about the room, which we now understood to have a history, a life that was separate from us, yet not entirely. It sounds naive to say that we had never considered this before, for it was a hotel after all, but until then, we had never stopped to imagine that things had been said and done in this room, upon these beds, prior to our arrival. Worse, I began to feel sheepish around the father and son, the drawing inserting itself into the conversation each time I spoke to them about something as ordinary as getting an extra towel or received a warning that the stairs were wet.

We knew the referred- to footbridge, of course. From it, we had first spotted Mr. Mani's school, and we crossed it often as we made our way to and from our favorite food stalls. But once we had learned of its secret, we found ourselves increasingly drawn there, particularly at night, when a handful of men gathered and spread out across it, maintaining their posts as vigilantly and nervously as sentries. Each time we climbed the stairs, they turned toward us, their faces momentarily hopeful, hungry for something that we could not provide. Still, we felt comfortable there among men who regarded us with so little interest, and as we crossed, I sometimes glanced surrept.i.tiously at a face and wondered what the man was thinking, wondered whether he had ever been in love.

Descending the steps of the footbridge one evening, we noticed that the light in Mr. Mani's office was on and decided to pay him a visit, a long-overdue visit, for although we had been teaching at the school some two months, we had not yet thanked Mr. Mani for securing us the positions. It was after eight, but the outer door was unlocked, and we went in, calling his name. We found him reclining on an unmade cot that was wedged into one corner of his tiny office, whiskey bottle in hand.

"My American ladies," he announced, smiling his toothless smile and struggling like an overturned c.o.c.kroach to sit up. "Kindly join me for a nightcap." He thrust the bottle toward us, tipping forward with the weight of it.

"Perhaps we should return another time," I said, but he looked hurt at the suggestion and, focusing deeply, stood and wobbled to his desk.

"Please, have a seat," he said, gesturing at the cot.

The room, I had noticed as we entered, possessed a rank odor, attributable, I thought, to its smallness and the fact that its one window was closed. It was the sort of smell to which one adjusted quickly, unlike the overwhelming stench that rose up, surrounding us, as we settled on the cot, its dominant feature sourness-sour in the way of sheets that have been sweated in for nights on end and never washed-and beneath this, a secondary stink, a unique blend that included but was not limited to the following: clove cigarettes, spices, whiskey, unwashed feet, urine, and moldy books. Next to me, Julia gagged, covering it with a cough, and I, holding my breath so that my voice came out nasally, said, "We've come to thank you for your help."

"I'm happy to be of service," said Mani, looking, in fact, about to cry.

"Mr. Mani, are you living here?" I asked.

"Yes," he replied mournfully. "My Queen has banned me from our dwelling. My clothes and the bed were delivered two months ago, shortly after our splendid evening together. I have not seen her since. Of course, she still sends my meals twice daily, and while I know that her hands prepared them, it is not the same."

"But why?" I asked.

He shrugged. "I cannot explain to you the mind of a woman," he said, as though Julia and I were not women, and then he took a small sip from his bottle. "Ladies, do you know the story of the British man and the snake? It is a famous Malaysian tale." When we shook our heads, he gathered himself up and said, "Then I shall tell you, but be warned: it is a story about love." I acknowledged this with a nod.

"A British man," he began, "lived on his tea plantation up in the highlands, all alone save for the servants who attended to his fairly simple needs. Each afternoon, he took a lengthy walk, disappearing with his hat and walking stick for hours, going where and doing what, no one knew. This remained his habit for many years.

"Eventually, he became engaged, but just two days before the wedding was to transpire, the man went out for his walk and did not return. A search party was formed. He was found the next morning, his legs protruding from the mouth of a large snake, both man and snake dead by the time that this strange union was discovered. The snake had to be hacked apart with machetes in order to extricate the man's body. Later, it was determined that the man had died of asphyxiation, which meant that the snake had attempted to swallow him while he was still alive."

"Should we be worried about snakes, Mr. Mani?" asked Julia, speaking for the first time. She was afraid of snakes, even more so because a pair of paramedics with whom we had chatted soon after arriving told us that they spent an inordinate amount of time removing snakes from houses.

"No, ladies, you are missing the point. I mean, yes, the snake's behavior is the point, but only because it is highly unusual. And so there is no way to explain it, as any Malaysian will tell you, except that the snake was in love with the man, and-"

"In love?" I interrupted.

"Yes," Mr. Mani replied firmly. "They were in love with each other, and that day the man had finally come clean-he had informed the snake of his impending marriage. But the snake could not bear the news, and so ..." He shrugged, brought his hands together as though to pray, and then thrust them outward, away from each other, away from himself. "That is jealousy, you see. Everything destroyed."

"And you believe this also, Mr. Mani?" I asked, though I could see that he did.

Mr. Mani regarded us for a moment. "Well," he said at last, "with love, there are always two: there is the snake who devours, and there is the one who cooperates by placing his head inside the snake's mouth."

The next afternoon as we were leaving the school, Miss k.u.mar, who handled payroll, approached us. "I hear that you require an apartment," she whispered. "I know one. Cheap. Not too big. It belongs to my sister-in-law."

This, we knew, was Mr. Mani's doing, for as we stood to leave the night before, he had requested our address and, upon learning that we still lived in a hotel, shook his head in horror. "It is not right, and it is not proper," he said repeatedly as I explained about the visas, and then, "I am surprised by my old friend Narayanasamy."

We recognized the building that Miss k.u.mar stopped in front of immediately-Nine-Story Building, which we had pa.s.sed numerous times, commenting on how much taller it was than everything around it and how this made it seem awkward and defenseless, like a young girl who had shot up much faster than her cla.s.smates. We entered near the courtyard, a large asphalt area around which rose the four sections that collectively made up Nine-Story Building and which Miss k.u.mar herded us past, saying, "Please, my sister-in-law is waiting." But she was not waiting, and we stood outside the apartment for ten minutes until she stepped off the elevator at a trot, speaking Tamil rapidly into a cell phone. She was, in every way, a hurried woman, and when she stooped to unlock the door-knees bent primly, phone wedged against her ear with an upraised shoulder-and wiggled her fingers impatiently, we took on her sense of urgency, which is to say that we found ourselves the tenants of a dark, one-bedroom, squat-toilet apartment on the fourth floor of Nine-Story Building, closer to the bottom than the top, which was apparently considered desirable, for she mentioned it repeatedly.

Our colleagues considered our move to Nine-Story Building strange, though perhaps no stranger than the fact that we had continued to live in a hotel for months, and in the weeks that followed, they inquired frequently about our new lodgings. When we answered, "Everything is fine," they appeared skeptical, and so we began complaining about the elevator, which smelled of urine masked by curry and made noises suggesting that it was not up to the task of carrying pa.s.sengers up and down day after day. Soon we began using the stairs, which we generally had to ourselves because the other tenants seemed not to mind the elevator's strange noises, or minded more the certainty of the exertion that the stairs required than the mere possibilities suggested by the noise, and so we went back to answering that everything was fine, dismissing our colleagues' interest as yet another example of the unsolicited attention that we received in Malacca, where we were the only westerners in residence.

In fact, as we walked around town, people whom we had never met called out, "h.e.l.lo, Miss Raffles College," greeting us both in this same way. We were regarded as the American spinsters, teachers so devoted to our work that it had rendered us s.e.xless, left us married to the school, thought of in this way because we were strict with healthy expectations-that students study and not cheat, that they arrive on time, that they not take on the disaffected pose that teenagers find so appealing-but also, I suspect, because we were women without men.

As spinsters, we were thought to possess a certain prudishness, a notion that was clearly behind the request that Mr. Narayanasamy made of us one day after summoning us to his office. "We have a grave situation requiring our expeditious attention," he began, gesturing grandly at the produce market visible from the window to the left of his desk. "That is the produce market," he said, a.s.suming that American spinsters would be unfamiliar with such a dirty, chaotic place, though, in fact, we stopped there often to buy vegetables and practice our Malay because the vendors rarely tried to cheat us.

"I have just this morning received an upsetting visit from several of the vendors. It seems that two of our students have been observed holding hands and even"-he cleared his throat-"kissing." He looked at us apologetically, as though explaining that we would not be receiving raises, and we nodded because we knew the couple to whom he referred.

"You must speak to them," he declared, slapping his hand down on his desk.

"And tell them what?" Julia asked.

"Tell them that they must stop," he explained in a reasonable tone. "Tell them that they are discrediting the school, their families, and themselves."

"But they're adults," Julia said.

"Very well," said Mr. Narayanasamy, looking back and forth between the two of us. "Then I shall speak to them, though I too am busy. Still, it is my duty to attend to the duties for which others lack time." He reached up as though to tighten his tie, but the knot already sat snugly against his throat, and Julia and I departed, allowing our refusal to stand as an issue of time constraints.

"You let me do all the talking," said Julia several minutes later as we sat outside a cafe, waiting for our orange juice to arrive. We had become a bit obsessed with orange juice, for no matter how carefully we stressed that we did not want sugar, we had yet to receive juice that met this simple specification. "You made me seem like the unreasonable one."

I knew that Julia hated to appear unreasonable, and so I considered apologizing. "Care to bet on the sugar," I said instead, hoping to redirect her ire, to remind her that I was an ally, at least when it came to sugar.

The waitress, a young Malay woman with a prominent black tooth, appeared, balancing two very full gla.s.ses of orange juice on a tray. As she drew near, she seemed to lose speed, as though she sensed the depth of our thirst and was overwhelmed by the power she held to alleviate it, finally stopping altogether, resting the tray on the back of a nearby chair. As we watched, she picked up one of the gla.s.ses and took a sip before placing it back on the tray and continuing toward us. Smiling, she set the sipped-from gla.s.s in front of me, the untouched one in front of Julia.

"Excuse me," I said politely. "I believe you drank from my gla.s.s."

She smiled at me. "Is fine," she replied, and departed gracefully.

"What did she mean by that?" I asked Julia. "Did she mean, 'Yes, I did drink from your gla.s.s and the fact that I did so is fine,' or did she simply mean that the juice is fine, as in 'I took a sip of your juice just to make sure, and it's fine.' "

We studied the juices for a moment. I knew that Julia wanted to drink hers, and why shouldn't she? n.o.body had sipped from her gla.s.s.

"Well," I said peevishly. "Go ahead."

"Maybe she was just smelling it," she suggested, once she had taken two very long drinks.

"Smelling it?" I said.

"Yes, you know. Just sniffing it."

"You saw her drink from it."