Dancing with Death

I’ve been writing in crimson ink lately. Crimson the color of red hibiscus in a Bali dusk. Also the color of blood in Bali, blood that’s dark because it has pooled and sucked up the oxygen and is now drying slowly in a pool on a black pavement under the hot sun.

I’ve been trying to find the words about the monsters I know in my dreams. These are my words as I try to meet them again. (My ink faded against the cream page as I wrote this, and I had to pause to recharge my Namiki Falcon.)

So. Hello. Welcome to the jungles of the mind. Do you believe in ghosts? Vengeful ones? I do. I’ve seen them kill a man. I’ve buried his body in the sand and watched the little the little bougainvillea grow slowly along the sand not ten yards from the eternally pounding surf.

I’ve been to pools and murks and places in the woods in New Guinea where I would be willing to believe a Diplodocus still lurked, perhaps wizened and dwarfed by the years, as the very people have been on these islands in the not-too-distant past.

There were elephants here the size of ponies. There were people the size of hobbits. There are dragons the size of a small car still. And birds the height of a man. Bright blue in the crest, they can eviscerate with a single kick. There are two foot coconut rats. I don’t know what science calls them. Google doesn’t seem to believe they exist. But I have seen them.

I lived by the open sea. I lived by the swamp. I lived in crocodile country. The great ones. Sobek was not known by that name in that place, but I grew up fearing the salty ones, for I have been to their temples in the murk. I have heard the stories about them whispered to children. Where they permit, I have swum in the water with them.

Science, like any realm, has edges. I have seen at sunset a snake with gashes longer than a man’s thigh being dragged down a beach dead. A snake longer than science approves of and measures. I will say having been among them I do not believe crocodiles top out around 20 feet. Not the ones that flip boats in the open sea and eat the children first.

There are things, Horatio, etc. There was a crocodile well—a Lobang Buaya—that fascinated me in Jakarta. Middle of a city, built on a swamp, infested with mosquitos and Dutch colonials since the 1600’s. Regularly plagued by malaria, and in the old days the great Death’s henchmen smallpox, or yellow fever. Or plain old bloodletting of the other.

Jakarta is built on blood. I have been in houses so thick with ghosts that no one will leave their beds in the night. The television blaring stories of werewolves and forest demons to a cold, empty kitchen while the air itself whispers and things move in the closets, things brush against your foot. Things creak. The very mold has ghosts, for it eats the memories of the dead past built by the Dutch.

The genteel whorehouses, and the genteel half-caste women who inhabited them. It eats the palace of the first president of Indonesia and remember his women for him, for he is no more. It eats away underneath the decaying dioramas at the base of Monas, the monument to national freedom built taller than the Washington Memorial in a wide green park in the center of the city.

They say there is a log buried beneath the city of Jakarta, a magic centerpost of teak buried by Suharto, around which the city and the country turn. They say it, and it’s certainly true that his son-in-law, instead of being locked up for murdering women and children in Timor in the 70’s, is a perennial candidate for president.

They say it and I believe it. Just as I believe the wife of the Sultan of Yogyakarta is the Goddess of the Southern Seas, and she will take you if it pleases her, particularly if you wear green in her waters. I noticed, traveling to the south coast of Java in the 1990’s and the 2000’s, that even the missionaries did not wear green in those waters.

I noticed. I noticed, I noticed. I am respectful, but I’m not afraid. I cannot separate the murders and blood from the ghosts, but I’m not sure the ghosts particularly want those separated, so I leave them to it. I have dreams of being hunted regularly, and I like them. Hunted in the darkness. Hunted in the jungle. Hunted by the thing I cannot see. I go into the caves, the concrete abandoned caves of a world war that passed over this land like a tidal wave, and I hide there because in the shells of concrete ambition, in the darkness at the center of nothing where dreams have faded away, there I am in command and I am safe.

I become the hunter. I know the caverns of abandonment like the back of my hand. I invented a goddess—I should say I gave a name to a goddess I knew in Jakarta that no one has written about before. Her book is called Skins of Puppets and she asked me to write about her. Maybe someday her story will come out.

She is thirsty, and she wears red. She has been thirsty a long time. Her back is an open wound. On the internet you can find stories about her relatives, the kuntilanak, but they are her relatives, not herself. The jungle-haunting kuntilanak have become the glances behind you in the dusk in the alleyways, just out of sight of the noodle vendors.

You can meet ghosts in Jakarta, alright. I have met them. And the death adder that spared me, the numerous engines that restarted so I would not drift to my death in crocodile seas. Those stories also are my friends. The monster may pass over, but only because blood has been or will be spilt elsewhere. The pilot died, soon after the flight where the engine quit.

A price was extracted. The plane flew into the side of a great jungle-clad mountain. An offering, I thought. A tragedy, my missionary parents said. And also: God’s Will. (They forgot to insert ineffable but after decades of Douglas Adams I insert it for them.)

Strange, I thought. The Timing. The ghosts and the demons took the eldest and the youngest, the children of the translator who dedicated his life to working with my parents and bringing the New Testament to life in his language. Thus are missionary stories formed and reinforced, but also this one happens to be quite quite true.

The man who died killed by a ghost in the jungle? The one I wrote about at the start of this story, whom we buried by the sea on a cloudy morning in about 1986? He was the first translator in that community.

The first and the last. Ghosts and demons playing their part in the great story.

With stories like that in your eyes, other stories (like hell) really don’t seem that far-fetched as a child.

It took awhile before I realized hell was 30 million years old, mixed up with heaven, and flowing in streams and rivulets, through swamps and across rotten crocodile mouths to the sea. Heaven was the jungle, hell was the darkness beneath the trees, where the great boars lay. One gash from their tusks and blood poisoning was inevitable. (I’ve had blood poisoning, from other sources. Your body goes sort of numb. It can see the end coming and freezes like a deer in the headlights. There is an overwhelming urge to lie down, but if you do so you only speed the infection, which desires, like a lover, to reach your heart, and which like sex, does so more efficiently lying down.)

The blood pooling on the side of the road? Just an accident, a silly road accident, says science. But it’s Bali. It’s the home of the Balinese spirits. One of the places in the world where the air is alive with good spirits and bad. It was a clear sunny day. The road was open. And BLAM the motorcycle and a tree took a life.

Had that tree had an offering lately, I wondered to myself.

And we drove on.