Oliver Benjamin
“Camouflage,” Roy replied, “Nobody can see me.”
“You wear green very danger,” the boy warned, “Loro Kidul like
green. She like man in green.”
Roy laughed. He was not about to remove his pants. The last time
he did that—at Kemukus—someone stole his wallet. He rubbed the
boy’s head and said, “Who’s this Loro Kidul? Is she nice?”
“Yes. She very beautiful,” the boy insisted.
“Well, if she wants half a man,” Roy told him, “she can have me.”
The boy shrieked and ran away. Roy assumed he was going to fetch
Loro Kidul. Roy stood there, stupidly, flowers in his hand. A moment
later he was flung about senseless in the clutches of an implacable
goddess.
There seemed a kind of intelligence in these waves. The majority
crashed upon the shore and then receded, as at most beaches. But
now and then a massive column of water might reach out like an
monstrous white arm and suck in anything in its path. A hundred
people were killed every year at Parangtritis beach, some of whom
never intended to go swimming at all. Roy realized he might well be
among them.
Weakened by drugs and malnourishment, he was unable to keep
his head above the surface. He swallowed mouthful after mouthful of
the foamy green saltwater and abandoned all sense of direction.
It was so much easier at that point just to stop fighting that he
closed his eyes and gave up. The force of the unruly impacts now felt
like a massage, a hundred hungry hands kneading his body toward a
tender release. There was indeed a divine presence there. He laid
down his arms and surrendered.
*
A few days earlier, Yak sat on a thick limb of a celebrated tree, the one
which stood guard over a gently slanting plateau near the top of
Mount Kemukus. The tree was said to have been fertilized by the
bodies of the love-struck couple buried there. Like an exhausted
vulture, he watched dispassionately from his perch.
The currents of bare Indonesian bodies undulated beneath him
like a polluted and choppy sea. At first blush their brown bottoms
seemed to churn randomly, but soon he began to see patterns in the
chaos. Swirling fabrics of resonance might emerge amongst the
unconnected couplings, the way random eddies on a riverbank could
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