SPIN

"Because of Wun Ngo Wen?"

"Basically."

"You were lucky to find her."

"It's not entirely luck."

"Still, we should get away as soon as possible."

"Soon as you're better. Jala has a ship lined up. The Capetown Maru. That's why I've been back and forth between here and Padang. There are more people I have to pay."

We were rapidly being transformed from foreigners with money to foreigners who used to have money. "Still," I said, "I wish—"

"Wish what?" She ran a finger over my forehead, back and forth, langorously.

"Wish I didn't have to sleep alone."

She gave a little laugh and put her hand on my chest. On my emaciated rib cage, on my skin still alligator-textured and ugly. Not exactly an invitation to intimacy. "It's too hot to cuddle up."

"Too hot?"

I'd been shivering.

"Poor Tyler," she said.

I wanted to tell her to be careful. But I closed my eyes, and when I opened them she was gone again.

* * * * *

Inevitably there was worse to come, but in fact I felt much better over the next few days: the eye of the storm, Diane had called it. It was as if the Martian drug and my body had negotiated a temporary truce, both sides rallying for the ultimate battle. I tried to take advantage of the time.

I ate everything Ina offered, and I paced the room from time to time, trying to cha

It also allowed in the face of a local schoolboy, whom I had caught on two occasions peering at me. When I mentioned this to Ibu Ina she nodded, disappeared for a few minutes, and came back with the boy in tow: "This is En," she said, practically throwing him through the curtain at me. "En is ten years old. He is very bright. He wants to be a doctor one day. He is also my nephew's son. Unfortunately he's cursed with curiosity at the expense of sensibility. He climbed on top of the trash bin to see what I was hiding in my back room. Unforgivable. Apologize to my guest, En." En hung his head so drastically low that I was afraid his enormous eyeglasses would drop off the end of his nose. He mumbled something. "In English," Ina said. "Sorry!"

"Inelegant but to the point. Perhaps En can do something for you, Pak Tyler, to make up for his bad behavior?"

En was clearly on the hook. I tried to let him off. "Apart from respecting my privacy, nothing."

"He will certainly respect your privacy from this moment onward—won't you, En?" En cringed and nodded. "However, I have a job for him. En comes by the clinic almost every day. If I'm not busy I show him a few things. The chart of human anatomy. The litmus paper that turns color in vinegar. En claims to be grateful for these indulgences." En's nodding became almost spastically vigorous. "So in return, and as a way of compensating for his gross negligence of common budi, En will now become the clinic's lookout. En, do you know what that means?"

En stopped nodding and looked wary.

"It means," Ibu Ina said, "that from now on you will put your vigilance and curiosity to good use. If anyone comes to the village asking about the clinic—anyone from the city, I mean, especially if they look or act like policemen—you will immediately run here and tell me about it."

"Even if I'm in school?"

"I doubt the New Reformasi will trouble you at school. When you're at school, pay attention to your lessons. Any other time, in the street, at a warung, whatever, if you see something or overhear something involving me or the clinic or Pak Tyler (whom you must not mention), come to the clinic at once. Understand?"

"Yes," En said, and he murmured something else I couldn't hear.

"No," Ina said promptly, "there is no payment involved, what a scandalous question! Although, if I'm pleased, favors might follow. Right now I am not at all pleased."

En scooted away, his oversized white T-shirt billowing behind him.

By nightfall a rain had begun, a deep tropical rain that lasted days, during which I wrote, slept, ate, paced, endured.

* * * * *

Ibu Ina sponged my body during the dark of a rainy night, scrubbing away a slough of dead skin.

"Tell me something you remember about them," she said. "Tell me what it was like growing up with Diane and Jason Lawton."

I thought about that. Or rather, I dipped into the increasingly murky pond of memory for something to offer her, something both true and emblematic. I couldn't fish out exactly what I wanted but something did float to the surface: a starlit sky, a tree. The tree was a silver poplar, darkly mysterious. "One time we went camping," I said. "This was before the Spin, but not by much."

It felt good to have the dead skin washed away, at least at first, but the revealed derma was sensitive, raw. The first stroke of the sponge was soothing, the second felt like iodine on a paper cut. Ina understood this.

"The three of you? Weren't you young for that, a camping trip, I mean, as they calculate such things where you come from? Or did you travel with your parents?"

"Not with our parents. E.D. and Carol vacationed once a year, resorts or cruise ships, preferably without children."

"And your mother?"

"Preferred to stay home. It was a couple from down the road who took us into the Adirondacks along with their own two boys, teenagers who didn't want anything to do with us."

"Then why—oh, I suppose the father wanted to ingratiate himself with E. D. Lawton? Beg a favor perhaps?"

"Something like that. I didn't ask. Nor did Jason. Diane might have known—she paid attention to those kind of things."

"It hardly matters. You went to a campground in the mountains? Roll on your side, please."

"The kind of campground with a parking lot. Not exactly pristine nature. But it was a weekend in September and we had the place almost to ourselves. We pitched tents and built a fire. The adults—" Their name came back to me. "The Fitches sang songs and made us come in on the choruses. They must have had fond memories of summer camp. It was pretty depressing, actually. The Fitch teenagers hated the whole thing and hid out in their tent with headphones. The older Fitches eventually gave up and went to bed."

"And left the three of you around the dying campfire. Was it a clear night or a rainy one, like this one?"

"A clear early autumn night." Hardly like this one, with its frog choruses and raindrops bulleting the thin roof. "No moon but plenty of stars. Not warm but not really cold, even though we were some ways up in the hills. Windy. Windy enough that you could hear the trees talking to themselves."

Ina's smile broadened. "The trees talking to themselves! Yes, I know what that sounds like. Now on your left side, please."

"The trip had been tedious but it started to feel good now that it was just the three of us. Jase fetched a flashlight and we walked a few yards away from the fire, to an open space in a poplar grove, away from the cars and tents and people, where the land sloped down to the west. Jason showed us the zodiacal light rising in the sky."

"What is the zodiacal light?"

"Sunlight reflecting on grains of ice in the asteroid belt. You can sometimes see it on a very clear, dark night." Or could, before the Spin. Was there still a zodiacal light or had solar pressure swept away the ice? "It came up from the horizon like breath in winter, far away, delicate. Diane was fascinated. She listened to Jase explain it, and this was back when Jason's explanations still fascinated her—she hadn't outgrown them yet. She loved his intelligence, loved him for his intelligence—"