She must have drifted into sleep because she did not notice him come in, but now a dark figure stands by her bed. She catches her breath, thinking that it is her husband, Reynante, come back from his hiding place in the forest. It is too dangerous, she thinks. If they catch him… but this, after all, is why she has come back.
She cannot bear to open her eyes fully, so she pretends to be asleep and watches through quivering lashes. Something metallic is lowered gently to the floor. He stands, not moving, but he is looking at her, she can tell.
She is sure he can hear her thoughts.
His breathing can now be heard, with the merest edge of a wheeze. She tries to remember how her husband breathes. Is it like this?
He lies down on the bed next to her. After some more time, a rough knuckle barely touches the skin of her belly, withdraws, then comes back, stroking her skin below the T-shirt. Her heart beats fast.
She closes her eyes and lets the tip of one small finger stray to where he is.
In the darkness, with the sound of the ocean and the forest outside, he enters her. And as he enters her, her soul leaves her body and flies up, away from this small house, up to the million stars; and she looks down on their two bodies making love, on the wooden house with the vegetables growing outside and the fishing boat hauled up on the black-sand beach, on the forest stretching up the side of the smoking mountain and on the islands all around, the thousands of sand-fringed islands in this calm sea, dotted by human souls.
And as she feels him enter her again and again and clutches at him, she feels her soul rise higher, so that she can see the whole world, and every dwelling place in the world, and every couple who at that moment is making love; and for a moment, each couple is a fire, burning in the night, a flickering pinpoint of light on the curving dark map of the Earth.
And the sky above is a great mirror, stretching away to eternity all around, the fires reflected in its depths.
And suddenly she knows what the stars are.
THE POLITICIAN
Amirul B. Ruslan, Malaysia
Everything had to be discreet. This was the seventh time he had done this, but each time he still felt the usual pangs of worry, of guilt. Voices played out in his head. One of them was the monotone of a newsreader as she—he always envisioned it as a she, and so it must be a she—presented the lurid details of this scandal. One of them was the cruel chastising by his late mother, a voice gone from this earth over twenty years, but constantly returning to haunt his subconscious each time he performed this deviant act.
The hotel he was now staying in on the blissful, blisteringly hot island of Penang was a colonial relic. His father wouldn’t have approved.
His father hated all things colonial, and indeed gave up his life fighting colonial oppressors. First the Japanese, then the British. He fought proudly to Independence and marched into—no, the politician thought, no. He cut the thought there and then, questioning, pleading to his mind: Why do I have to reminisce on my father’s achievements now? Was it because he was a religious man? Was it because if he knew, he would call me a deviant, a pervert?
The hotel was grand and almost over-the-top in its pretension. Whatever British elegance it had in the 1920s when it was built was now hidden behind layers of coarse Malaysian ‘aesthetic’ of out-of-place Ionic pillars, tiled floors and wide, gold-painted door frames. The politician had been an architect before he became a politician, and even after decades of being in the country’s less-than-refined body politic, this vulgar so-called sophistication wounded his senses.
But what mattered most was not the furniture or the windows or the high ceilings or the grand piano in the lobby or the way the staff—Malays no less, good Malays playing submissive servants to the under-dressed hedonist tourist masses that flocked to this island paradise-shuffled around. What mattered most was that everything today stayed discreet. And as he walked along the corridor leading to the hotel lounge, brushing away an overeager bellboy asking, ‘Y.B., anything I can help you with?’ with that subservient tone in Malay, he saw her.
She was standing by the reception, looking busy. She had her BlackBerry out, and while it seemed like she was furiously tapping out a message, some important email, no doubt, the politician knew that she was paying attention to the lounge with her darting eyes. When their eyes met from across the hall, she pocketed her BlackBerry and gave a small nod. That was all. A small nod.
She looked good, just as she always did, this thirty-five-year-old woman who had been sneaking away to rendezvous with him for over four years now. She was a whore—he couldn’t bear calling her profession by any other name, as they all felt overly sanitized. Prostitute? Escort? Call girl?
Courtesan?
He met her at the elevator. He was already inside, the only person in there, when she rushed towards the closing doors. As if to show his potent chivalry, instead of pressing down on the Open button, he instead lodged himself into the doorway, letting her pass. Cunningly, he also sneaked a grope in as she squeezed past, one hand reaching out to feel the fine curvature of her ass. She didn’t seem to like it. He did.
His room was on the seventeenth floor, a luxurious suite that was overly indulgent, even to him, for someone who was only going to be staying on the island for one night. The elevator lurched upward. He idly whistled. She smoothed her blouse. She was standing at the corner, almost vulnerable as she seemed to hide away. A poster partitioned away by a cold glass pane sat beside her, promoting the latest Filipino house band that was playing at the hotel. He opened his mouth, and tilted closer to her. Fifth floor. ‘Dahlia…’
he began.
She didn’t even seem to pay any attention.
Sixth floor. He inched closer again, small inches growing to bigger inches. He cornered her where she was. She looked up at him. Finally, some eye contact. His hand tried for her thigh, the one wrapped in the fine black stocking under her skirt. He half-expected her to slap him. She didn’t. Her furious, cold stare still kept his gaze, as his fingers brushed up. Eighth floor.
Her skirt lifted just a bit…
Then she commanded him. ‘Step away right now.’ She spoke with such strength in her voice. Domination. He instinctively followed as she instructed. He moved back to his corner. Ninth floor. She turned to face him, brushing her skirt back to its previous meticulous, flawless state. Her voice softened, but there was no mistaking the vigor still within. ‘Are you stupid?
There’s a camera right there, up above where you’re standing.’
So there was. It wasn’t like he didn’t know that; of course he knew. He just couldn’t resist. He couldn’t resist being told off, being called stupid, the sort of verbal abuse he could only find from her, or in Parliament.
‘For someone who makes such a big deal about discretion…’ she trailed off, as if uninterested in continuing in that thread. The politician looked up at the ceiling, a smooth surface refashioned as a mirror. He saw the top of her head, the push of her bounteous breasts. It was like topography to him. A silence held. Thirteenth floor. He didn’t want to succumb to apologizing. He knew he would be doing a lot of that later, in the room.
Seventeenth floor. When the elevator doors opened, he stepped out with confident strides left, towards his suite. He shuffled through his coat pockets to find the keycard. Room 1726, there. A cleaning lady, Malay again, another deferential Malay with incessant bowing, stepped away as he passed, muttering, ‘Good evening, Datuk Haji.’ The last honorific was particularly ironic. They called him a Haji as if he were truly the religious man he appeared, even as he used their facilities for illicit pleasures.
He reached his door and craned his neck to see the corridor as he grasped the handle and slid the keycard in. His whore had not followed him yet. She was professional like that. His room, when he entered, was spotless. The
