Chapter One - Richard Lewis

warung, packaged in banana-leaf. Reed didn't touch his, but sipped steadily at a bottle of
arak. The rain finally stopped, leaving a sticky mist hanging in the air. Rusty crept out of
the garage to mop up the puddles on the verandah and scoop out the water that had
flooded into the kitchen. Reed feel into a sweaty, half-drunken nap.
Rusty shook him awake, saying he had guests.
On the side steps to the verandah, Catra held a woman swaddled in clothes. A
sedan from the Bali Hotel was pulled up to the end of the driveway, nosed into the
garden.
Catra said, "She's sick. Malaria."
For a moment Reed thought the woman was Arini, but then Arini came from
around the corner, holding young papaya leaves she'd just plucked. Catra guided the
swaddled woman across the verandah. Her hood fell back. It was Naniek, her eyes
glazed, her body wracked with shivers.
Reed's mild hangover vanished. "Here, in the bedroom," he said, opening the
door.
They laid her down on the bed. She moaned and trembled. Reed piled blankets on
top of her.
"I'm boiling up some of the papaya leaves," Arini said. "You can feed it to her
when it's cool. It will help."
Reed wrote a note for Father Louis. "Go to his clinic," he told Arini. "He should
have some chloroquine to give you."
Catra squeezed Naniek's hand, and Arini bent to kiss her forehead.
"How did she get here?" Reed asked.
"I got word she was at Banyuwangi," Arini said. "I went over and got on her on a
fisherman's boat and smuggled her across." She tucked the note away. "I'll get the
medicine and be back later."
Reed spoon fed the papaya leaf juice to Naniek, who threw up most of it. She
babbled incoherently in Javanese. She stopped shivering and began to burn with fever,
rivulets of sweat running down her face. He stripped off her clothes and sponge bathed
her. Her ribs showed like sticks.
She was here. She was in his arms.
If this was the blackwater fever form of malaria, then she was dying.
As a heavy gray dusk coagulated, Arini returned on her scooter with the
chloroquine and two changes of clothes and said she'd spend the night to nurse Naniek.
Reed slept on the verandah and at dawn, with the cocks crowing and Naniek's
fever still not broken, he drove to Father Louis's bamboo cathedral. The faithful and the
fearful crowded the pews and the confessionals. Reed said Mass and argued with God.
You're not a cosmic jokester. You will not do this to me. Heal her. No promises from me,
that's not how this works, I'm not bargaining, I'm just reminding You of who You are.
Driving back, at Sukawati the road was blocked by another demonstration,
farmers now joining the students. Gerwani are whores! Kill the snake Ludhe Srikandi!
As they paraded past the jeep, something fluttered into Reed's brain.
Back at his house, Naniek's fever had at last broken and she was conscious, but
Reed knew that malaria was cyclical, that the parasites would flood back into her
bloodstream. God hadn't necessarily heard him. Or He had, and was toying with him.
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