Birthdays, visas, and other impolite fictions

I remember learning to write fiction. I wrote it for the first time at about twelve, and learned at about eight, watching my father perjure himself on visa documents as we landed through warm blue clouds on runways that smelled like home and fear and the inexpressible jungle. I watched because I knew that I, too, needed to know the nuances of official concision that made a lie both plausible and eminently ignorable.

Or you could say I learned even earlier, kicking my short legs at five in the police chief’s office, sipping tea, surprising spider looks from his eyes. Who is this child? He is American and untouchable. My father was the model of rectitude. He would not even entertain in his vaguely east coast mouth the gentle little white lies that most of us send off swimming every day in the flow of give and take. I like to think of lies as little dolphins. Sometimes they hurt you. Sometimes they protect you. Always, they are shiny and frolicking in a sea of words.

I like to think of fiction that way too. I think I like to think of it that way because lies that are also truths are the only thing I know how to write. More and more, as I think I’ve written here before, I see memories as this kind of fiction. Because I no longer speak to my father, I will have to rely on catching these kinds of slippery dolphin memories to find some kind of story here. I remember his gray hairs. How they come on after he entered the lying portion of his life: his career as director of the mission in Indonesia, charged with keeping the watch for 300-some Christian missionaries in Indonesia, preserving enough of the polite fiction behind which they lived their lives to enable them to continue to translate the Bible into various languages.

The agents of BIN and BAIS, the officials behind the teak desks in DIKNAS and DEPSOS, sleepy after a big official lunch, looking forward to the mistress, the big new TV set, the vacation in Bali or (in some cases) the kids in school in Switzerland. I struggle to explain the idea of corruption as a kind of god in a place where bribing cops not to beat you would be anathema (although they beat you anyway here). Corruption has as much of a place in the Mahabharata of the nation’s story as anything else. And corruption is just lies told with money.

So my father acquired gray hairs and wore safari suits (like his lying counterparts), entering the teak rooms as a kind of self-identified champion, looking to do combat in words of peace, smooth words that carefully buried meaning in the back yard of the mind when you weren’t looking. That’s the kind of lie he specialized in, and it’s important to note that his interlocutors in army intelligence and the departments of social welfare and education were masters at lying in their own way. They knew the score, to varying degrees. They were not fooled. But the lies were enough to give them stories they needed to tell inside the palace of lies that was the Suharto administration.

And so my father was both a functionary, a feeder of lies in the palace of the Master of Lies, and also a faithful missionary protecting the simultaneous transition of 300 or so New Testaments. I am convinced he learned to lie in this way from listening to the officials I sat with as a child. As I learned to read my first stories, he was learning to read the profuse and obfuscating pleasantries, the subtle body language, the vast unsaid spaces, the silent sideways obliqueness of Javanese officialdom. I have wondered if he felt safer in these spaces. I know I did, and do.

And the tortures, and the disappearances, they continued, of course. The fictions were thin and veiled, and in particular allowed army intelligence enough room to operate and ignore the occasional white Americans dotted in remote outposts across the jungles of occupied Papua. My father knew this, and we spoke of this once or twice when I was a teenager. This was after I learned the word torture, but before colonialism became en vogue as a descriptor for white activity in post-independence former colonial territories. He acknowledged it—the torture and disappearances of Papuans—and said the best he could do was to not bring worse trouble upon them by speaking for them to their torturers, some of whom he knew personally (some of whom I knew personally). This was around the time my essay on the Suharto regime was censored by my private school as potentially dangerous and destabilizing to the regime. I was 15 and the rupiah was at 15,000 heading toward 20 and regime seemed to be destabilizing itself nicely by then. But I was white and my words mattered.

What are all these dolphins I see floating up in the memory? Little gray hairs lost in the floods (our home would indeed flood a year or two later, a thousand miles, another coup, a different story). I remember how elevated the highway felt, running to the airport under a storm cloud, running from the riots, running to a flight that was pre-planned and desperate at once. Running out of lies, out of time. Running to the TV monitors in LAX that would be blaring the news of Suharto’s fall in 15 short hours. I was 15. I lost my first kiss to Suharto. I was 15, I was old enough to ask my father about the torture he enabled. I was old enough to know about the torture he prevented. I was old enough to be afraid of the torture my friends would suffer. I remember the highway seemed a million miles into space, running like an infinite schwing of grease and grace over the swamp and slums, taking the foreigners out. Saving the girl I wanted to kiss a day before. Two days, maybe. Getting her to Singapore. Getting her away from the men my father had talked to who were busy orchestrating the burning of Jakarta in a last desperate attempt to protect the enigmatic man who dwelt in the center of their palace of lies.

And then history jerking into gear, the news in LAX. Everything since for 23 years a denouement, a post-, wars and voting and wars over voting. Rumors still fly like bats around the palace of lies. New inhabitants, surely. A few new windows. A claim to transparency. But palaces outlast monarchs. Torture outlasts torturers. Pain must continue so that memory has something to feed on in old age.

I will, I am sure. I have seen Papuan teak in the offices of DIKNAS. I have seen the gray fading walls of Dutch colonial buildings, the expensive deer herd paid to browse the grass in Sukarno’s Versailles in Bogor, a place he could study, a place he could reflect, a place that was also occasionally home to his truly French preference for mistresses. Suharto preferred the center of things, and left Bogor to the deer. Let the trees be. It was the post- era that saw those trees cut down by a greedy Bogor mayor. I cried. The single palace fractal, a thousand little Suhartos instead of one. That was the post-era. People talked about it that way, openly wondered if the old way was better. At least centralized greed left a few corners.

We are watching the corrupt trial of Kyle Rittenhouse now, here in America. My father is passing his 68th year, his first birthday not speaking to me. My brother is celebrating veteran’s day where eagles rest, in Germany. He is concerned for the family’s reputation. I am a problem for the family’s reputation. My penchant for prying under things, examining patterns, has led me to conclusions that do not necessarily sit comfortably with the ongoing triumph of the 2,000 year old mission of the Christian church. I have seen the bloody ticket stub triumph leaves with the sleepy guard at the entrance to life’s all night fair. My father’s job, I suppose, was to be that sleepy guard. To watch the tickets, to wipe the blood stains carefully, to bundle them and give them to the official supervisors of the Indonesian regime. To corral and game-keep the Christian mission there in Indonesia. I hope the cut up trees with printed words are enough. I hope the blood on the Bibles doesn’t keep him up at night.

Did I tell you my brother lost his oldest child to the great god Malaria before the dedication of the New Testament in his language? My parents openly talked about the verse in Joshua where you will lay the foundation at the cost of your eldest. Deaths at the inception and end of Bible translation projects were known, accepted, expected as sufficient and somber evidence for the importance of the Christ-work. The devil, went the line, would malaria, would maul and malify anyone who got involved. It was a badge of honor.

I can still hear his screams at the grave. I can smell the cut flowers and the earth. The jungle cut back and growing already. My father’s lies protected him too. I see them: my father’s lies. An umbrella over our little village, invisible in the sticky air. Invisible like his prayers. He prayed for the child’s life. I remember that. Nothing happened except death.

So anyway, this is how I learned to write fiction.