A Death in Bali. Nancy Tingley
and fried noodles, pizza and ice cream. They had embraced the Western need for choice, though they called themselves warung, those individual stalls that traditionally served a single dish—fried fish, roast chicken, suckling pig.
If I could transport myself from the events of this day, get some distance . . . I stopped walking, closed my eyes, tried to visualize Ubud that summer twenty years ago when my family visited. The color green flashed before me—trees, rice—a lushness only intermittently interrupted by yellow or a splash of red. I didn’t recall this busy scene.
I opened my eyes. Unable to hold the memory of Ubud a lifetime ago, I stopped and read one menu after another, my finger underlining the words, as if by this mundane act I could reverse time. As if I were on my way to Flip’s, ready to eat. As if I would arrive early to find a living man. As if I didn’t have this sack in my pocket.
My stomach roiled with hunger. Yet the hunger battled with a queasiness. The officer’s abrupt, threatening questioning at the police station had done nothing to calm me. If only it had been Tyo.
I recalled his warmth when he’d explained who he was. But then he’d been abrupt as I left. I sighed, looking blindly into the café before me. “Come in, come in,” said a waiter.
The cafés wanted me to eat, but I couldn’t, so I moved on to a row of boutiques. They insisted I buy. Flowing garb, gaudy jewelry, carvings in multiples of twenty or forty. I stared in at a jewelry store window, not at the displays, but at my reflection. Me in Ubud, me alive. I held the image in my mind, but only for an instant. Flip with a spear through his chest, blood haloing his body, gazed back at me. I closed my eyes.
A stranger, I consoled myself. A man I never met. A man whose last moment was etched on my mind forever. The spear, the blood . . .
“Come in, come in,” said a young shopkeeper. “Very pretty earrings for you.”
“Taxi,” said a man to my right.
“Taxi,” said his friend.
I turned and walked on.
One day soon, when the world righted itself, I would go through the shops, searching for a bargain. I’d enjoy the back and forth, the foreplay and the consummation of making the deal, of the haggling. Not today. I needed to get back to my hotel. I needed to curl up on my bed. I needed to sleep. I concentrated on navigating a path through the throng of tourists. A man’s elbow jabbed my ribs. A woman yammering to her husband collided with me, then glared.
I stopped to take my bearings. The distraction of stores and restaurants, the art galleries with their gaudy abstract paintings bursting with hints of Bali—half-visible sheaves of rice, Rangda the witch’s bared teeth, the thatched roof of a temple—was not enough. Not enough to wipe Flip, the wisps of his hair, the arc of his arm, the arch of his back, from my eyes.
I stepped off the curb to avoid being run over by a group of jostling Australians.
I felt like Alice in some overwrought version of Wonderland. The roar of motor scooters and horns honking, the jostling of tourists and hawkers, a visual and aural onslaught. I reached my turnoff and was within five minutes of my hotel when I noticed a small building set back from the road, a little retreat from the madness. A discreet sign read “textiles,” and in a bid to escape I turned down the short path. Tactile textiles were a soothing promise, a reprieve from that pool of blood.
“Selamat siang,” the young shopgirl said.
“Siang,” I answered, and automatically asked her how she was. “Apa kabar?”
She smiled. “Baik. Can I help you with anything?”
“Just looking.” I knew a little Bahasa Indonesia, the national language, and to practice, I said, “Lihat-lihat saja.” I didn’t know any Balinese, but knew she would understand the Bahasa.
She stepped back behind the small counter and sat, pulling out her cell phone.
Along the walls textiles hung on wooden rods that stuck out like tree limbs, haphazard and bristling. Piles of new textiles sorted by the island of production filled the center table. Batiks from Java, natural-colored ikats from Timor and Flores, and the ikats of Sawu and Roti, with their greater concentrations of blues and reds. I stared at a Roti sarong, so similar to one thrown over the back of Flip’s couch that they could have been woven by the same hand. Red the color of dried blood. Shaking myself, I looked up to the old textiles hanging on the wall.
“Do you have other examples of old tapis?” I asked, turning from Roti and Flip and blood to a fine Sumatran piece framed and hanging above the others on the wall. I had always wanted one of these skirts, with its combination of ikat ground—the pattern dyed into the thread before weaving—and the entire field embellished with embroidery.
“Yes, we do,” she said, but made no move to go to get the other tapis. I riffled a pile of cloths on the table, thinking she was just finishing a text, a game. The seconds became a minute, two. I had lost any interest, feigned or otherwise, in the textiles in the pile, and irritation bubbled up. “Can you show them to me?”
“No, madam. I am not able.” She kept looking at her screen.
I waited for her to explain and when she didn’t I said edgily, “And why is that?”
She looked up, but her fingers continued to move over her phone. “They are locked in the back and only my boss has the key. She is not here today.”
I asked as calmly as I could, “When will she return?”
“Tomorrow afternoon, I think. Can you come back then?” She poked at the keys.
“Yes. Do you have a business card?”
“Yes, sorry, Bu.” She handed me the card. She was addressing me as an older woman, though she didn’t look any younger than me.
Outside on the step, woolly-headed from jet lag, disoriented by death, I determined not to make any more stops. Murder had made me angry.
A hundred yards down the road my determination dissolved. I was drawn by the familiar. Row upon row of bicycles, and at the back, a Giant ATX Pro, red and just my size. An entry-level mountain bike that couldn’t compare to my bike at home, but it would work. I entered the shop. A young man, dressed in biking clothes, came around the counter to greet me. “Sorry, are you about to go out?” I asked.
He looked puzzled. “Out?”
I realized he wore his biking clothes around the shop. His prerogative. “I want to rent this bike.” Together we walked outside, where I pointed at the Giant that I wanted.
“Sorry, we use that bike for our tours. You can rent any of those.” He pointed to a row of inferior bikes.
“No. I want that bike. How much is it?” All the emotion that I’d felt, the distress at the murder, the anger at Flip for dying in that macabre fashion, my disgust at myself for taking the silk sack, welled up. For an instant, irritation surged at Ubud—at the Westernized cafés, the curio shops, men who wore their biking gear when they weren’t biking, shopgirls who texted rather than paying attention to their customers.
“I can’t rent you that one.” He pointed at another one. “This is a very good bike. I think you will like it.”
He didn’t know me, so he didn’t see me switch from irritation to determination, my jaw set, my feet become grounded. “Where’s your boss?”
“He’s out in the shop repairing a bike for a tour.” He waved his arm in the direction of a building behind the small curio shop next door. “He does not want to be disturbed.”
I felt the need for control, for something to happen as I wanted it to happen, and I headed in the direction he’d indicated. I needed a single transaction, a single event, to occur in a manner I understood. Not a murder. Not a dead man at my feet. I needed the security of having a bike I would enjoy riding, a touchstone that related to my life at home.
“Excuse