SPIN

But one night I woke out of a frantic, labyrinthine dream to the sound of the side door shuddering as someone turned the knob in an attempt to open it. Not Ina. Wrong door, wrong hour. It was midnight by my watch, only the begi

The knob-turning stopped.

Quietly, I levered myself up and pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. The clinic was dark, my cell was dark, the only light was moonlight through the high window… which was suddenly eclipsed.

I looked up and saw the silhouette of En's head like a hovering planet. "Pak Tyler!" he whispered.

"En! You scared me." In fact the shock had drained the strength out of my legs. I had to lean on the wall to stay upright.

"Let me in!" En said.

So I padded barefoot to the side door and threw the latch.

The breeze that rushed in was warm and moist. En rushed in after it. "Let me talk to Ibu Ina!"

"She's not here. What's up, En?"

He was deeply disconcerted. He pushed his glasses up the bump of his nose. "But I need to talk to her!"

"She's at home tonight. You know where she lives?"

En nodded unhappily. "But she said to come here and tell her."

"What? I mean, when did she say this?"

"If a stranger asks about the clinic I have to come here and tell her."

"But she's not—" Then the significance of what he'd said pierced the fog of incipient fever. "En, is someone in town asking about Ibu Ina?"

I coaxed the story out of him. En lived with his family in a house behind a warung (a food stall) in the heart of the village, only three doors away from the office of the mayor, the kepala desa. En, on wakeful nights, was able to lie in his room and listen to the murmur of conversation from the warung's customers. Thus he had acquired an encyclopedic if poorly understood store of village gossip. After dark it was usually the men who sat talking and drinking coffee, En's father and uncles and neighbors. But tonight there had been two strangers who arrived in a sleek black car and approached the lights of the warung bold as water buffalo and asked without introducing themselves how to find the local clinic. Neither was ill. They wore city clothes and behaved rudely and carried themselves like policemen, and so the directions they received from En's father were vague and incorrect and would send them in exactly the wrong direction.

But they were looking for Ina's clinic and, inevitably, they would find it; in a village this size the misdirection was at best only a delay. So En had dressed himself and scooted out of the house unseen and come here, as instructed, to complete his bargain with Ibu Ina and to warn her of the danger.

"Very good," I told him. "Good work, En. Now you need to go to the house where she lives and tell her these things." And in the meantime I'd gather my possessions and exit the clinic. I figured I could hide myself in the adjoining rice fields until the police had been and gone. I was strong enough to do that. Probably.

But En crossed his arms and backed away from me. "She said to wait here for her."

"Right. But she won't be back till morning."

"She sleeps here most nights." He craned his head, looking past me down the darkened clinic hallway as if she might step out of the consulting room to reassure him.

"Yeah, but not tonight. Honest. En, this could be dangerous. These people might be Ibu Ina's enemies, understand?"

But some fierce i

I chased him, switching on lights as I went.

Trying at the same time to think coherently about this. The rude men looking for the clinic could be New Reformasi from Padang, or local cops, or they might be working for Interpol or the State Department or whatever other agency the Chaykin administration chose to swing like a hammer.

And if they were here looking for me, did that mean they had found and interrogated Jala, Ina's ex-husband? Did it mean they had already arrested Diane?

En blundered into a darkened consulting room. His forehead collided with the extended stirrups of an examination table and he fell back on his rump. When I reached him he was crying soundlessly, frightened, tears rolling down his cheeks. The welt above his left eyebrow was angry-looking but not dangerous.

I put my hands on his shoulders. "En, she's not here. Really. She's really, really not here. And I know for a fact she didn't mean for you to stay here in the dark when something bad might happen. She wouldn't do that, would she?"

"Uh," En said, conceding the point.

"So you run home, okay? You run home and stay there. I'll take care of this problem and we'll both see Ibu Ina tomorrow. Does that make sense?"

En attempted to exchange his fear for a judicial look. "I think so," he said, wincing.

I helped him to his feet.

But then there was the sound of gravel crunching under tires in front of the clinic, and we both crouched down again.

* * * * *

We hurried to the reception room, where I peered through the slatted bamboo blinds with En behind me, his small hands knotted into the fabric of my shirt.

The car idled in the moonlight. I didn't recognize the model but judging by the inky shine it looked relatively new. There was a brief flare from the interior darkness that might have been a cigarette lighter. Then a much brighter light, a high-beam spotlight sweeping out from the passenger-side window. It came through the blinds and cast rolling shadows over the hygiene posters on the opposite wall. We ducked our heads. En whimpered.

"Pak Tyler?" he said.

I closed my eyes and discovered it was hard to open them again. Behind my eyelids I saw pinwheels and starbursts. The fever again. A small chorus of interior voices repeated, The fever again, the fever again. Mocking me.

"Pak Tyler!"

This was very bad timing. (Bad timing, bad timing …) "Go to the door, En. The side door."

"Come with me!"

Good advice. I checked the window again. The spotlight had winked out. I stood and led En down the corridor and past the supply cupboards to the side door, which he had left open. The night was deceptively quiet, deceptively inviting; a span of pressed earth, a rice field; the forest, palm trees black in the moonlight and tossing their crowns softly.

The bulk of the clinic was between us and the car. "Run straight for the forest," I said.

"I know the way—"

"Stay away from the road. Hide if you have to."

"I know. Come with me!"

"I can't," I said, meaning it literally. In my present condition the idea of sprinting after a ten-year-old was absurd.

"But—" En said, and I gave him a little push and told him not to waste time.

He ran without looking back, disappearing with almost alarming speed into the shadows, silent, small, admirable. I envied him. In the ensuing quiet I heard a car door open and close.

The moon was three-quarters full, ruddier and more distant than it used to be, presenting a different face than the one I remembered from my childhood. No more Man in the Moon; and that dark ovoid scar across the lunar surface, that new but now ancient mare, was the result of a massive impact that had melted regolith from pole to equator and slowed the moon's gradual spiral away from the Earth.

Behind me, I heard the policemen (I guessed two of them) pounding at the front door, a

I thought about ru