A Death in Bali. Nancy Tingley
with her clearly seemed Australian.
I looked to the opposite side of the pavilion. A man was staring at me. A tall, gangly, wild-looking man with deep-set eyes, hair run amok, and a mobile, twitching mouth. I stared back, and he abruptly turned away. I shivered, seeing that lance once again, this time imagined in this wild man’s hands, moving forward, toward me rather than Flip. I shook my head. But this man hadn’t killed anyone, he was just doing the same thing I was doing, looking at the people, guessing. It’s what we do when we travel: gauge our surroundings, the strangers, try to find our place. I looked back to the performance.
Barong entered through the middle of three doorways that led onto the stage.
“Pretty silly, if you ask me,” Randall said.
From a Western perspective, he was right. Barong’s shuddering jaw, his inability to get through the door, and the fact that there was no threat in sight to bring on his exaggerated acting combined to make him seem silly, a silliness to us because of our different relationship to time. Barong’s movement wasn’t so different from one of those long rhythmic passages in the gamelan that, to a Western ear, sounds repetitive. We want to say, get on with it, what’s the next note, the next dance step? While the Balinese is content to stay in the moment.
I tried to sink into it, to the tempo of the music, the simplicity of the action onstage, but maybe my day had been too filled with adrenaline. Maybe I just felt off-center, disoriented. “Too bad,” I said to Randall as Barong left the stage.
“What is?” Seth leaned toward us.
“No battle. There’s usually a terrific battle.” Though you would think that I had had enough violence for the day. I was cranky and tired, wondering what had brought me to this performance with these men. If my intention had been to find escape, it wasn’t working.
Seth’s arm had found its way over the back of my chair, and I thought of Alam, his arm draped over my chair at a different performance. I leaned forward slightly, not really shrugging it away, but sending a signal. He didn’t seem to get it.
Glancing back at the sidelines, I saw the Wild Man once more staring at me. Did I know him? Again he pretended to be perusing the crowd. “Is that man over there staying at our hotel?” I asked Randall.
He looked at him. “I haven’t seen him, but we only got to the hotel a few hours before you.”
“I thought you’d been in Bali a few days.”
“We have, but Seth made us change hotels. He said the place we were in was too noisy. They made a big fuss because we were checking out ten minutes past checkout time. They wanted to charge us for the night.” He shook his head in exasperation. “I didn’t think it was particularly noisy.”
I leaned back, wondering why Seth had suddenly wanted to change hotels. The music quieted. A legong dance based on the great Indian epic the Mahabharata, began. It was beautifully done, calming, the dancer’s gestures reason enough to have come to the performance. Though her feet moved little, her hands and facial expressions told an elaborate tale, and I found myself relaxing, enjoying the soothing moment.
Then a man dressed in white appeared, flicking water out of a small pot with the tips of his fingers. Suddenly fifty men dressed in checkered sarongs rushed onto the stage, their shaking arms raised along with their voices as they grunted loudly. The grunting became the rat-a-tat chorus of the kecak dance, a drama developed in the early twentieth century as a scene from the Ramayana. The men sat in a circle and adopted casual poses, muting their voices until one of them shouted out a command and they began to jiggle their shoulders as their arms shot forward. The rat-a-tat-tat increased in speed and volume.
The kecak dance was brief but powerful, with its choreographed postures and stances and the aggressive chorus. Monkeys in the forest, machine guns, verbal violence. And there I was again, standing over Flip, the mourners keening, the monkeys’ voices surging forth from the nearby Monkey Forest. I shivered.
I looked for the Wild Man, but he’d gone.
6
“Let’s get a beer,” Randall said as we walked out. “That place we went last night?”
“Good idea,” said Seth. “You up for it, Jenna?”
I hesitated, but, with the picture of that spear in my mind, didn’t want to walk to the hotel alone.
Seth reached for me. I stepped off the curb to avoid his reach and the hole in the sidewalk in front of me. I wasn’t sure which offered a greater threat.
He smiled. “I was trying to steer you away from that hole. I wasn’t sure if you saw it.”
“Oh, thanks. I did.” Embarrassed by my suspicious and libidinous mind, I answered the opposite of what I really wanted to say. “Sure, why not?”
The bar wasn’t far, and as we entered I laughed at the cliché—the bamboo walls, rattan furniture, palm trees in the corners and separating tables. Christmas lights illuminated all, while a pulsing beat announced the dance floor at the back of the club. “Is this your kind of place?” I asked them.
“When in Bali . . .” Seth responded, smiling.
“I think I’m overdressed,” I said. I was wearing a T-shirt and pants, but halter tops and skimpy shorts about the size of butt floss seemed to be the costume of choice.
Seth said, “If it makes you feel better about fitting in, you could—”
I cut him off, “Don’t go there. You could, too.” I pointed. A number of the men, clearly those who worked out, didn’t wear shirts. Some had T-shirts thrown over their shoulders. Others had them tied around their waists. Some had clearly left their clothing behind in their hotels. The weather was hot, but not that hot.
“That looks pretty tasty,” I said. Seth looked over his shoulder. I smiled. “Must be a margarita. What did you think I meant?”
He didn’t respond, but said, “More likely a rum drink. Seems to be their specialty.”
“What do you want?” Randall shouted over the noise.
“I’ll have one of those,” pointing at the blended, icy drink, “but without the rum.”
“Better with the rum,” Seth said.
“Not tonight.”
“Maintaining control?” He had a twinkle in his eye, which I both liked and simultaneously wanted to quash.
“Trying to stay awake. Rough day.”
“In Bali? How does one have a rough day in Bali?”
“You’d be surprised.” I scanned the room, which was not quite packed. There were empty tables, but people were standing three deep at the bar—pickup time. I pointed to a table and we headed that way, while Randall went toward the bar. Two young women who appeared to have taken lessons from their hippie mothers were the only dancers, their sarongs psychedelic, their arms flung upward, their hips rotating at half-speed.
“He didn’t ask you what you wanted.”
“We’ve been traveling together for a few weeks already. He knows what I want.”
I had a momentary thought that maybe they were a couple, though Seth’s flirtation with me didn’t seem to get a rise from Randall. I watched the people coming through the door, probably an influx from the performance. I suddenly remembered the bombing at the Balinese nightclub in 2002, and the thought made me place Flip here, rather than in his home.
“So, why a rough day?”
I ignored the question, watching Randall struggling to pick up the three drinks. Most of his troubles were caused by my oversized blended monstrosity. Practically an entire fruit bowl hung from the rim of the glass. I jumped up and ran over to help him. The glass in my hands was full, so I stopped to take a sip. As I raised my head