Wreck and Order (30 page)

“Suriya, she would want you to keep studying, become a teacher.” My eyes reach for hers, but she turns her face away.

“No, El. I must not do everything. My mother does everything and she becomes sick.”

“What about money? Can you live off Ayya's salary?”

“Until my boyfriend comes, I can do something—sell fruits at the bus stand or something. I don't know. When I look the future, it is like a stone over my head.”

“Look at the future.” I speak to the table, where Suriya has piled up stones she's sifted out of rice.

“Look at the future,” she repeats in a whisper. “So I must not look at it.”

I hand her an envelope I've filled with thousand-rupee notes. She shakes her head and shuts her eyes tight. “Thank you, Akki. Please go now.”

“You know I'm always here for you, right? If you need money or you decide you want to go back to school or you want to visit me, you write me, okay? I'll help.”

She presses her lips together to steady them. “I know about you, El.”

I spin my ring in circles on my index finger, starting to panic. There must be something I can do. I pull the ring off my finger, lay it on my palm, hold it out to Suriya. “I want you to have this.” She is violently shaking her head, backing away from my outstretched hand.

“Please, it's no big deal, just something to remember me by.”

But to me the offering is difficult, meaningful. I bought the ring for ten bucks at a flea market, but it's the only piece of jewelry that I've had for years and wear every day. A selfish sacrifice that only emphasizes the distance between us. As if I believe Suriya will be thrilled to have this cheap jewelry that she has never commented on or expressed interest in, just because it's from America. The Israeli boy on the beach was right to call the ring weird—golden sticks of various lengths piled up inside a ball of resin. Probably Suriya doesn't even like it and now will have to wear it out of obligation. A selfish gift, not at all demanded of the situation. What is called for is a display of sorrow. But I cannot feel sad, not yet. I am still buoyed by the contentment that comes from easy love, hinging on nothing, expecting nothing. I leave the ring on the table next to the pot of rice and wrap my arms around Suriya. “Thank you,” she whispers. She hands me the package of food and tells me I must go, Colombo bus coming. “Yes, bus coming,” I say and heave my pack onto my shoulders.

The bus stop, about a mile from the airport entrance, is crowded with tuk-tuk drivers waiting for an easy fare. “Yes, madam, come, madam.” They nod and gesture to the backs of their rickshaws, which quickly fill up with luggage and tanned limbs. “I walk,” I say, pointing to the block of concrete in the distance. “It's just right there.”

The street to the airport is a one-lane highway of speeding vans, tour buses, and rickshaws. There is no sidewalk. Barbed-wire fences rise on both sides of the road. The sun quickly turns my clothes heavy, as if I'm draped in blankets drenched in hot water. I slip my hands under the shoulders of my pack to relieve the pressure of the straps. I'm plodding along with my elbows jutting out from my sides like chicken wings and sweat dotting my forehead and upper lip when a soldier in a watchtower calls down to me, “Hello. What happened?”

I stop walking and squint up at him. His camouflaged suit billows around his thin arms. “I guess I'm walking to the airport,” I call up.

The teenage soldier in the watchtower on the other side of the road leans over his own guardrail. “Why you are walking, madam?” I hear the grin in his voice.

“Because I thought I should. Because I'm silly.”

“Walking madam,” the soldiers call after me as I continue toward the airport. “Silly madam.” Their laughter jostles the rifles on their shoulders. Easy camaraderie borne of intractable boundaries. That time I passed a temple with Suriya and the Hindu holy man came toward us, chanting and waving incense about our faces and then smearing red paint on our foreheads with his thumb. When we passed a monk later that day, he peered out at me from under his umbrella and laughed so hard he had to wipe tears from his eyes, pointing at me and tapping his forehead. “White girl with red dot,” Suriya said. “Is funny for monk.” I basked in his inscrutable laughter as Suriya took my wrist in her fingers and continued leading me down the street. My love for Suriya wants nothing more than her presence. But now here I am, walking—without—my God—my Goad, as Suriya says. Her smooth fingers, her huge laugh—stop. Already my memory is turning her into a trinket. Waking up to her tea every morning, falling asleep beside her every night. Oh yes: the problem of sleep. The first time I came back from Sri Lanka, I did not properly lose consciousness for weeks, spent all day in a waking sleep, could barely wait until dusk so that I could get in bed and pass out, which I did, and then woke up two hours later and lay awake until dawn, almost hearing the koel birds and the pirith, almost seeing the enormous, flat, still clouds—holes in the sky whose periphery a person with scissor-feet spent one good, long life walking—almost smelling the curry leaves and jasmine plants, almost feeling the bumpety-bump of the train seat against my back, almost hearing the wide, exuberant Sinhala vowels, almost hearing strangers ask me my country, madam, my name, madam, welcoming me, oppressing me, taking me away from the parts of myself that can't seem to stop betraying the other parts. The sensual sterility of the U.S.—keep it quiet, don't talk to strangers, don't give money to beggars, don't make eye contact, don't invade personal space. How lonely. No wonder I need so much sex.

Why can't I stay here?

It's not my home.

Inside the airport, a scratchy Muzak rendition of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” hovers over the heads of tired-looking people pushing silver carts piled with luggage. I almost give in to the generic yearning. But my bangs are matted to my forehead and my pants are cleaved to my thighs and I will not be able to shower or change for the next twenty-four hours. I close myself in a bathroom stall, strip to my underwear, wash myself off with the toilet hose, mop the dirty residue off my lower back and thighs with wads of toilet paper, put my clothes back on, splash water on my face, pin my hair back with a barrette that is mercifully close to the top of my bag.

At my gate, Sri Lankan men in business suits and Teva-clad Europeans stand in line, waiting to walk out to the small plane that will take us to Delhi. A young man wearing a suit that's too big for him stands at the door, checking passports. When I hand him mine, he glances down at the startled twenty-six-year-old pictured there, and cries, “U.S.A.!” Clapping the passport shut, he belts out, “He was a buffalo soldier! In the heart of America! Stolen from Africa!” He beams and waves his hands back and forth in rhythm with the words. I join my voice to his, even though it's grating and off-key, even though I hate this song. It's only polite to sing along.

“When will you return to Sri Lanka?” he asks.

“I have no idea.”

“You won't even remember me.” He hands me my passport, looking to the passenger behind me, eager for the next round of jokes.

I walk onto the tarmac. The heat-softened asphalt makes a soft sucking sound with each step. Off-white clouds are pasted against the smoggy sky. There will be turbulence on the plane—maybe as we pass over Nepal, whose mountains I used to think I'd cross one day with a man I loved, the intensity of our sex life marking the distance we'd put between ourselves and the worldly—and as the plane shivers, I'll cross my legs and tighten my groin and close my eyes and feel almost really good; I always get wet when we hit a rough patch of air. A woman wearing an orange vest motions to me with small flicks of the wrist. I am meant to join a group of passengers standing between two planes. Not so long ago sleet was falling against the window of the bedroom I shared with the man I meant to marry, the ping of ice on glass punctuating my pleas—I want you to do everything to me, everything, everything. A roar bursts from the engine of the plane behind me, almost overwhelming the husky whir of the propeller in front of me. My hair flies upward into the space where one huge sound rests against another. Standing in this glut of white noise, I wait for someone in a uniform to motion me forward.

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