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  This has been the longest day of my life.

  I got in this afternoon, bleary and buckled in the joints from twenty hours of flying. After Jonah and I said goodbye, I was so teary and freaked out, my sister gave me two cigarettes in case I should need them. I put them in the pocket of my gray wool pants, and when I got off the plane in Denpasar I realized they were both broken and my pocket was full of loose tobacco.

  Which was unfortunate. I could have used one last dose of home before hopping into a stranger’s Land Rover to drive north to Penestanan, a village outside of the town of Ubud, which, according to my travel guides, is Bali’s spiritual and artistic center.

  First impression of Bali? It’s hot. Like, steam-room hot. The tiny Denpasar airport is the size of Seattle’s ferry terminal, and as full of white people. These other white people were smart enough to wear linen, though. The Frenchwoman next to me in customs eyed me in my black turtleneck and then leaned into her husband. “Quelle idiote,” she said. “Elle est surement Americaine.”

  I would’ve been mad, except that she was right. I sifted the tobacco in my pocket.

  The hour-long drive to Penestanan made me wonder if I’d survived the flight from Seattle only to die right here in the middle of Indonesia. I mean, holy sweet mother Mary, these Indonesians drive like buzzing road insects looking to reincarnate as soon as possible. I honestly believed we would be lucky if we only killed a handful before we made it to the center of the island.

  (My travel books told me that the Balinese are a very sacred people, deeply reverent. There is no evidence of this on their highways.)

  And Holy Christ, the dogs! We were right in the middle of the freeway when a pack of mangy-looking dogs darted right in front of us. The driver, Made—who had the sweetest face and beautiful teeth—just laughed and swerved around them.

  “Puppies!” he said.

  I tried to be enthusiastic. “Cute! Love, love dogs. I really do.” But I was lying; this pack looked mean. They kept running alongside the Land Rover, barking hoarsely, clearly wanting nothing more than to spread fear and disease. Their backs were caked with dirt and more than one of them was missing an eye or a leg. But when we slowed down I also noted, against my will, that they were all—um. Virile. It’s shocking to see balls on a dog. It made my blood run cold: if these dogs aren’t fixed, then there will be ever so many more of them.

  We stopped at a light, and suddenly our car was surrounded by men waving newspapers in the windows. Made clucked his tongue and shook his head.

  “Jawa,” he said. “Never take ride from Jawanese driver.”

  “Why not?”

  “They will screw you. You are Australian?”

  “No, American.”

  “Oh!” His eyes lit up, and he pointed to my right. “We have your restaurants!”

  A McDonald’s loomed like a plastic castle against the horizon. As he pointed, he turned off the highway onto a narrow dirt road, nearly taking out three motorbikes in the process. Soon we were passing villages, thatched houses, women carrying huge piles of laundry or building materials on their heads, and more dogs.

  Lots of dogs.

  I am going to be here for two months. That’s what I kept telling myself as I looked around and tried not to imagine what those dogs smelled like. I tried to respond to Made’s chatter about McNuggets and milkshakes, but I was distracted. I was starting to wake up. I mean—until now, this had all been a fantasy. I had visualized this person, me but with better arms and clothes, in a charming National Geographic–meets-chic-import-store setting. But now all I could think was, I am going to be here, in this sticky, stinky heat for two months.

  Spring in Bali was starting to sound about as enticing as jumping into a sauna with a wet dog. I didn’t bring some Yoga Journal model to Bali, I brought myself here, and I couldn’t help but think that my pale, comfort-addicted body was not designed for roughing it. And the prospect of arriving at some mud-floored hut that was undoubtedly crawling with island creatures made me yearn for my cushy mattress and insect-free apartment.

  I was headed for a complete meltdown. Packs of rabid dogs, a mud-floored hut. I’d catch lice and ringworm and Japanese encephalitis. Come to think of it, it really hasn’t been all that long since Indonesia’s last civil war. Maybe they’re cooking up another one right now? At least if I’d gone ahead to New York, I’d only have had to deal with cockroaches. Which reminded me that Jonah is moving to New York in seven weeks. I missed my sister. I didn’t want to cry. I wanted to smoke.

  So I sort of did this meditation thing. Well—it’s not really a meditation, at least not one I’ve ever done in class. But it’s something I used to do on long car trips when I was bored or starting to get carsick. I look around at everybody else on the road, and I imagine them without their vehicles. It’s sort of like the trick of imagining everybody in the audience in their underwear, but it’s actually effective for calming me down. So all of us on the road, we’re still in our seated positions, holding invisible steering wheels or resting an arm on the door. The motorbikes are still packed two to a bike. But there is no bike. And there are no cars. All the vehicles are gone, and we’re all just zipping across the earth like this, just our bodies in space going very, very fast.

  But once we had arrived and I stepped down from Made’s elephant of a car, how very real it all became.

  YOU KNOW. IT’S funny how scared I was. That was only a few hours ago, and already I’m looking back at that person—that person who was me—and feel like I should have just relaxed and waited to see what would happen, instead of imagining all sorts of terrible things. I mean, what good does that imagining do, anyway? You won’t know what something’s like till you’re there.

  Take my roommate, for instance. The only thing I knew to expect when I got to my lodgings in Penestanan was that I would have a roommate waiting for me. We spoke on the phone a month or so ago, very briefly, but her voice on the line was light and airy and she said something about seeing where the spirit takes us on this journey of the self and that we would be on a wisdom quest or vision quest or something like that, and so I was pretty sure she was of the New Age. Indra had told me that Jessica was a massage therapist, but on the phone Jessica called herself a bodyworker. I had no idea what a bodyworker was, but I suspected that it was someone who did not wear deodorant.

  Made dropped me off in a parking lot, really just a gravel road. To my right, the gravel mixed with dirt until it became a trail leading into woods that looked as cool and damp as the woods at home. To my left, green rice paddies stretched to the horizon.

  Jessica, pink-cheeked and lion-headed, stood where the gravel parking lot met the sea of green. About my height, but smaller in build than me, more willowy. She wore a ballerina-pink sarong, a white camisole tank top, and ancient-looking Teva sandals. She’s very pretty, like a muse, and her blonde hair is something else—it was held off her heart-shaped face by tiny headbands of her own braids woven around her skull. My first thought was, I want that.

  As if I could buy her braids.

  The best news of the day? Jessica smells amazing. Like vanilla and amber. Not a dirty filthy hippie in sight! Feels like something to write home about. She doesn’t shave her legs, though. But you know, I went through my own experiment with hardcore feminism in high school, so I know all about it. I’m with ya, sister. At least Jessica has the balls to exhibit her hairy legs. When I stopped shaving, I wore lots and lots of tights. If I could’ve worn tights under my bathing suit, I would’ve. Since I couldn’t, I just never swam.

  Jessica had come to meet me with a Balinese girl named Su. Su is about sixteen, I think, maybe even younger, and she wears her jet-black hair in a long braid. Her family runs the compound where we’re staying. It was sort of funny to me that Jessica, this willowy blonde, was wearing a sarong while Su sported capris that could have come straight from the J. Crew catalogue. But just when I was thinking that perhaps Bali was going to be more westernized than I had imagined it would
be, Su bent down to pick up my enormous suitcase and placed it on her head.

  I couldn’t believe it. I tried to protest (holy colonialist, Batman!) but she wouldn’t hear of it. She just clasped either side of the suitcase in her smooth, brown arms, and lifted it onto her head. Talk about shame. Before I left Seattle, my friend Dan gave me a bumper sticker to put on my luggage (along with his advice to tell people I’m Canadian) and there it was, his bumper sticker screaming out at me from right above Su’s forehead: MARXISTS GET CRAZY LAID.

  Su giggled, clearly amused by the look on my face. “It’s not hard,” she said.

  And that was that.

  Next I found myself following Jessica and Su past the pavilion and into the hot green labyrinth of terraced rice paddies that stretched across the earth everywhere I looked. Some fields looked like wheat, with long, thin stalks shooting up around us. I ran my fingers through them as if they were hair. Others were clearly younger fields, just mud blanketed by a thin sheet of water, like acres of mirrors spread out across the earth. I caught our reflection in these mirrors as we leaped from one terrace to the next and navigated narrow pathways of mud and grass. Su could actually jump with my luggage on her head. Amazing.

  Everything smelled like heat and duckshit. My eyes were blinded by the green.

  After about twenty minutes we arrived here, at Bali Hai Bungalows, my home for the next two months.

  And remember what I was saying about how it’s crazy to get all worked up in advance about something when you have no idea what you’re in for? Here’s why. My mud hut? It’s actually a mansion.

  MARXISTS GET CRAZY LAID.

  When I looked up the hill to see our house shimmering down at us, partly obscured by palm trees, I thought of that song from The Sound of Music, the one that goes, “So somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good.”

  And then I thought: When the people revolt, they string up the folks in these houses first.

  But then I became distracted by the pool.

  Actually, there are three pools. Three pools! One regular pool, one kids’ pool, and one that’s even smaller … the infants’ pool? The pet pool? I imagined the murderous pack of wild dogs lounging about in their own pool, sipping umbrella drinks.

  The compound is made up of five big houses, three just off the dirt road, two up another thirty stairs or so from there. We’re butted up against the forest, looking out over the rice paddies.

  Ours is the corner house, farthest from the road. Tiled veranda, shiny marble floors, teak furniture throughout the house. A vaulted ceiling on the first floor, where there’s a futon with a batik print bedspread, a cozy corner by the windows with a table and chairs. To the right, a steep staircase; to the left, a full kitchen with a refrigerator stuffed full of pineapples and papayas. And tucked at the bottom of the staircase? A bathroom that defies all expectations: gleaming gray and blue tile, a vase full of jasmine on the counter next to the sink. A long, deep bath with faucets for both cold and hot water.

  Upstairs, which is where I am now, is one big bedroom the size of my apartment in Seattle. In the center is a king-sized bed with mosquito netting cascading from a hoop in the ceiling, like a long and gauzy chandelier.

  I JUST WENT downstairs to use the bathroom, and on my way down, I stopped to stare at these incredible, bug-eyed monsters carved around a glassless window—the only light source on the dark steps—and I almost knocked into Su. She started giggling at once.

  I told her how beautiful I thought the bungalow was, and she just giggled.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I didn’t expect to have three pools on my yoga retreat!”

  Her brow furrowed and she picked at her lower lip. I thought maybe she didn’t understand me, so again, I said, “Three pools, it’s great.”

  “Two pools,” she said. Her expression grew serious as she gathered her words. “The smallest pool is reserved.”

  “Reserved,” I repeated.

  She nodded and pivoted around me to continue up the stairs.

  I turned and watched as she took the steps two at a time. She was almost buried in the shadows at the top when I called out for her to wait.

  “Who’s the smallest pool reserved for?”

  She barely turned around as she answered me. “For God,” she said.

  Midnight

  I think I’ve pinpointed the characteristic that makes Jessica so strange and new to me: she’s earnest. Like, really earnest. Most of my friends are funny, ironic, sarcastic types. Theater people, writers, readers. You know, um, smokers. Smokers are always ironic, aren’t they? (Although I’ve been hearing rumors that we’re all going to lose our irony soon, now that 9/11’s happened. Apparently the age we’ve been in was an ironic one, but now it’s over. Which is a weird thing, considering irony has survived most recorded wars, revolutions, and plagues, but whatever, we’re a sensitive nation these days.)

  No, Jessica’s earnest, and perpetually inspired. It’s like she’s piped into some incredibly moving radio channel that keeps telling her the Greatest News Ever. When she’s especially excited, her voice climbs to a silvery blue pitch and I start to wonder if she’s going to break into song. When she told me about the bodywork she does—something called craniosacral massage—she said, “It’s just! So! Amazing! That I get to do this incredible! Ah! Work.”

  After I unpacked my things, I went downstairs just as the sun was setting and found Jessica sitting at the table on the veranda, writing in a spiral-bound journal. I sat down across from her and we stared out over the darkening rice paddies and listened.

  There’s a gamelan orchestra that practices in a pavilion in the middle of the rice paddies. All women, Jessica said. The sounds they make are incredible, like a delicate silver web hanging in the air one minute and the next, medieval knights in chain mail and armor start slam-dancing. I’d bet you can hear them throughout the village. My first boyfriend after high school—the one who liked to read my journal—used to say that the gamelan was the most transcendent and mystical of all musical forms. He would point out the percussive clanginess of it all as if it were a direct link to the divine. At the time, in his smoky apartment, I listened to it and hated its lack of melody, its unpredictable noise.

  But in this environment, this dark green night, it makes perfect sense.

  Jessica disappeared into the house for a while, and when she came back out she had a plate of rice cakes and tahini, jam, and avocados. I dug around in my straw bag and pulled out all the hippie snacks I bought at Whole Foods last week: unsalted almonds, soy crackers, hemp seeds.

  And then, with the courage of a dozen resistance fighters, I added a few pieces of the German-style beef jerky I had swiped from the pub after my last shift a few nights ago.

  “Oh, heavens to Betsy!” Jessica cried.

  Naturally, I started to move the contraband back into my bag, figuring Jessica’s a vegetarian who can’t eat in the presence of my jerky. She was looking at me with wide blue eyes, her lips puckered in disgust.

  “There are ants in the tahini!”

  She pushed the jar aside and I tried to keep from laughing. I’ve never heard anybody say “heavens to Betsy” before, especially not over tahini. But mostly I was just so relieved. I could keep my meat. After tonight, I’m pretty sure I won’t be allowed to eat animals for two months. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even go home a vegetarian?

  Um, I can actually hear my brothers laughing at that last thought, from ten thousand miles away. They like to say that they are meatatarians. In their preferred diet, the only food other than meat that isn’t verboten is butter, or anything that can be dipped or drowned in butter. I suspect Jessica would probably pass out if she had to eat dinner on their terms.

  She’s sleeping next to me right now. We’re sharing a king-sized bed that could sleep an entire family, it’s so big. She’s lying on her back, with her head propped between two pillows to keep her spine straight.

  I don’t want to slee
p. The darkness here is so heavy and warm, and the mosquito netting is distracting. It reminds me of the forts the sibs and I used to make when we were little. Like I should be wearing Underoos or something. How can I sleep? Being under a canopy is too thrilling. And I’m in such good company; Bali’s wide awake, like me.

  Crickets. Frogs. Dogs. A rooster—isn’t it a bit early for a rooster? Sounds of the women packing up their gamelan instruments. A clang, a gong, chatter. It’s all perfect. More perfect than I ever could have imagined.

  I wonder what everyone at home is doing. Jonah, is he at work? At home? God knows what time it is there. Or if he’s thinking of me, here on an island I hardly knew existed a year ago, with no responsibilities to anyone but myself. I’m absolutely on my own.

  February 25

  Morning

  It’s 7 a.m. I’m up at 7 a.m. This is incredible. I wish I could call everybody back home and tell them SEE? I CAN GET UP EARLY.

  Especially if I’m insanely jet-lagged, I guess.

  We have class in two hours. I’m sitting on our tiled veranda, watching Jessica. I’m eating papaya with lime and drinking ginger tea, even though it’s about four thousand degrees out here. I would love some coffee, but Indra told me before I left Seattle to prepare for a “cleansing” two months. Which means no coffee, no sugar, no alcohol, and no meat.

  Oh, and no sex. I told Indra that wouldn’t be a big deal, since I was leaving the boyfriend at home, and she gave me this funny look and then said, “No sex of any kind. You can just as easily drain your own battery as another’s.”

  Exclamation point!

  Jessica is sitting lotus-style on the edge of the veranda, her head tilted back, eyes closed. She’s pressing a large Starbucks travel mug against her chest, and every few minutes she lowers her head to the mug and sips from it, then she raises her face back up to the sun, smiling slightly, as if in worship.

  I don’t blame her. For worshiping this place, I mean. Except that I don’t want to close my eyes, I don’t even want to blink, I just want to take it all in. It’s spectacular. Palm trees, papaya trees, a slice of the turquoise pool sparkling below us. It’s like eating breakfast in a glinting emerald sanctuary.