More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere. So we rented a room on the third floor of a colonial-style hotel in Padang where we wouldn’t be noticed for a while.
“Is he good for her?” “He’s exactly what she wants. He’s the last thing she needs.”
Where would you rather spend eternity? In an earthly paradise or a sterile laboratory?”
Heaven, for the climate. Hell, for the company.
There is a prejudice imposed on us by our brief window of consciousness: things that move are alive; things that don’t are dead. The living worm twines under the dead and static rock. Stars and planets move, but only according to the inert laws of gravitation: a stone may fall but is not alive, and orbital motion is only the same falling indefinitely prolonged. But extend our mayfly existence, as the Hypotheticals had, and the distinction blurs. Stars are born, live, die, and bequeath their elementary ashes to newer stars.
But the thing about the sex trade, Giselle had told me, was that even at the semi-amateur level it begins to define your life. You become, she said, the kind of person who carries condoms and Viagra in her purse. So why do it, when she could have taken, say, a night job at Wal-Mart? That was a question she didn’t welcome and which she answered defensively: “Maybe it’s a kink. Or maybe it’s a hobby, you know, like model trains.” But I knew she had run away from an abusive stepfather in Saskatoon at an early age, and the ensuing career arc wasn’t difficult to imagine. And of course she had the
...more
I told her names were like clothes: either you wore them or they wore you. She said, “Is that right, Tyler Dupree?” and I smiled sheepishly.
Her accent was lilting Indonesian but her diction was primly correct. “You speak very well,” I said, the only compliment I could come up with on short notice. “Thank you. I studied at Cambridge.” “English?” “Medicine.”
The Minangkabau of West Sumatra knew how to duck and weave in the face of oppression. They had survived the coming of Islam in the sixteenth century, the Padri War, Dutch colonialism, Suharto’s New Order, the Negari Restoration and, post-Spin, the New Reformasi and their thuggish national police.
This is New Reformasi. Street thugs hired out of the slums of Jakarta and dressed in government uniforms.”
“I envy you that,” Simon said quietly. “What? What could you possibly envy?” “Your faith,” he said.
“That’s why you want to keep the letters? Because they’re part of your history with her?” She smiled as if at a slow-witted child. “No, Tyler. I told you. They’re mine.”
“Don’t be upset. The world is full of surprises. We’re all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we’re seldom formally introduced.”
