Happy Stories, Mostly E-Book

Norman Pasaribu

• Herausgeber: Tilted Axis Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 214

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Playful, shape-shifting and emotionally charged, Happy Stories, Mostly is a collection of twelve stories that queer the norm. Inspired by Simone Weil's concept of 'decreation', and often drawing on Batak and Christian cultural elements, these tales put queer characters in situations and plots conventionally filled by hetero characters. The stories talk to each other, echo phrases and themes, and even shards of stories within other stories, passing between airports, stacks of men's lifestyle magazines and memories of Toy Story 3, such that each one almost feels like a puzzle piece of a larger whole, but with crucial facts – the saddest ones, the happiest ones – omitted, forgotten, unbearable. A blend of science fiction, absurdism and alternative-historical realism, Happy Stories, Mostly is a powerful puff of fresh air, aimed at destabilising the heteronormative world and exposing its underlying absences.

Leseprobe

Happy Stories, Mostly

Epigraph

Dedication

Enkidu Comes Knocking on New Year’s Eve

A Bedtime Story for Your Long Sleep

So What’s Your Name, Sandra?

A Young Poet’s Guide to Surviving a Broken Heart

The True Story of the Story of the Giant

Three Love You, Four Despise You

Metaxu: Jakarta, 2038

Deep Brown, Verging on Black

Welcome to the Department of Unanswered Prayers

Ad maiorem dei gloriam

Our Descendants Will Be as Numerous as the Clouds in the Sky

Her Story

Acknowledgements

A Mostly Happy Chat About Happy Stories, Mostly

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Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Start of Content

Happy Stories, Mostly

“You’re pisces, it means you’re gay.” —Amy Winehouse

Enkidu Comes Knocking on New Year’s Eve

“With the rain, the river rises and rises, bringing brown water to our front door: the dry, yellow dust on the car browning in the damp; the blue welcome mat creeping out through the narrow garage, then the rusty green gate, able to return home only if we recall it should be there, only if we recall it exists; and the mayflies hovering over the surface of the water. From this black window do we eyeball it all. Then, faintly, the terrified yowl of a cat from who knows where. Then the widow who lives at the intersection, in a blue rain jacket, wading through the water, following its flow. We know the sun is watching us watching everything, with its eye bigger than this blue eye, this orb on which we all stand. But then, a tug at your T-shirt. A tiny hand and a summons to come down to breakfast. Someone is waiting for you below, they say. Someone who has been searching for you for a long time. An okay, and I’ll be down soon. Then a head peering in—your cue to get up from your seat and leave the movie theater, down the sloping path, like when you have to pee … But how swiftly it all flew by and is now no more,” they say, face shrouded by the blackout, opening the door to let in an end.

A Bedtime Story for Your Long Sleep

The first time I took a short story writing class, I was asked to tell the saddest true story that I’d ever heard. And so, I told the group how I had once been turned down for a job as a kindergarten teacher after being asked to tell the saddest of the sad true stories I’d heard, whereupon I’d responded with the story of Alarm Man. I’d heard about him from my late mother—she and Alarm Man came from the same town. I told the recruiter for the kindergarten job how Alarm Man, who couldn’t wake up without an alarm clock, had forgotten to set his alarm the night before his first date with my mother’s friend, whom he’d spent seven years loving desperately from afar. Alarm Man didn’t wake up that day, and my mother’s friend waited at the theme park ticket booth until sundown. My mother’s friend assumed it was all a big prank and ended up dating some other guy. Fifty years passed and Alarm Man slept on until, one day, for no clear reason, he was startled from sleep. He found his bed blanketed in hair, the roots of which he traced all the way back to his own head. He cut the hairs, and as his reflection revealed itself, he received another shock: he was now old and frail. He realized what had happened and remained at the mirror, weeping without end. Then he remembered the date with his beloved. Frantically, he dried his eyes, showered, dressed neatly, and left for the theme park. He got lost along the way, of course. Only hours later, and after stopping several people to ask for directions, did he find the place. It was now a shopping mall. He began crying again, on the roadside this time, filled with sorrow and regret. Once again, he thought of my mother’s friend and immediately set off to find out where his beloved lived––though of course, his beloved was in fact someone else’s beloved by now. Apparently, my mother’s friend had moved away and so Alarm Man went to my mother instead. Alarm Man began to tell her everything, broke down crying in the middle, continued his story, and eventually asked for my mother’s friend’s address. My mother told him the facts as they stood: her friend had died two years ago from prostate cancer. Alarm Man wept once more, this time on the divan in our sitting room. He felt he had nothing to live for anymore. “Then he said he was hungry, and after eating an enormous amount, he went home and was never seen again,” I told the recruiter, bringing my story to a close. The recruiter frowned and asked whether it was a true story, and I nodded, and he asked how Alarm Man could have possibly survived without eating or drinking anything for fifty years, and I replied that I, too, wasn’t sure about the scientific explanation behind it, but that was what had happened. The recruiter then asked about Alarm Man’s origin story and the time before Alarm Man had been called Alarm Man, and I answered truthfully that my mother had never told me anything about that. There was a long silence. “He couldn’t have survived,” the recruiter said, before informing me that I hadn’t got the position. I cried all the way home because I had really needed that job to pay for my mother’s medical treatment. Only when my mother died a month later, along with the full story of Alarm Man—I’d never felt it was the right time to ask her about it—did I realize that my rejection from the job had actually given me a story that was even sadder. Even worse than experiencing genuine misfortune, to my mind, was telling someone about it and being considered a liar; for isn’t the denial that a massacre happened even more tragic than the massacre itself? And I thought to myself: If I’d told the recruiter about how I’d been turned down for a job as a kindergarten teacher because my story about Alarm Man had been thought not only untrue, but utter nonsense as well, why then, I’d have gotten the job because at least one layer of the story would have made sense—that I’d been turned down for a job as a kindergarten teacher. But how could I have told it? After all, during the interview, I hadn’t been rejected yet. And I also thought to myself: If the tale of me telling the story of Alarm Man and being thought a liar was sadder than the story of Alarm Man itself, wouldn’t the tale of me being thought a liar after telling a story of me telling the story of Alarm Man and being thought a liar be even sadder still? I felt that such a story would prove useful someday—a bottomless pit of sorrow-bricks for me to mine, to build my Babel Tower of misery. Maybe one day I could tell the story to someone who could fall asleep only if they heard a sad tale. With my story’s help, they’d be able to slumber in peace for a very long time. Forever perhaps. And so, from that point on, in order to make the story even sadder, I decided to start taking writing classes—where questions like “What is the worst thing you’ve ever experienced?” and “What is your darkest secret?” are routinely trotted out to be answered by people, a portion of whom are sure from the start that it is they who have the most miserable experience, the strangest secret, the wildest imagination, to the point that, from the start, they won’t take much interest in the story I’ll tell them, much less in me.

So What’s Your Name, Sandra?

Four months after the death of her one and only son, Mama Sandra would take a trip to Mỹ Sơn, Quảng Nam, Vietnam.

She’d leave Jakarta on a Friday morning in early October, changing planes in Kuala Lumpur. The ticket was cheap. After the two “incidents” a few years back, Malaysian Airlines was always offering special deals, including on the KUL-HAN route. But having no privileges when it came to keeping well informed, Mama Sandra was ignorant of this fact. Instead, she saw the price and thought our Father in Heaven had given the idea His blessing. Receiving this divine signal with outstretched palms, Mama Sandra promptly liquidated what remained of her annual leave: nearly twenty whole days. Her supervisor, a thoroughly Javanese man from Solo, was aware some recent tragedy had befallen his underling. So he signed off on the matter without asking too many questions.

There wasn’t much that Mama Sandra knew about Vietnam: it was communist, and like Indonesia, a member of ASEAN. She’d only stumbled across the Hindu temple ruins of Mỹ Sơn, those remnants of the ancient kingdom of Champa, by chance—because she’d stayed up until three in the morning killing time online, lingering over search results for the English words, “my son.”

Her son’s name was Bison, and wouldn’t you know, she’d enjoyed calling him “Son” for short; even though Son also reminded her of Sonia, which was the name of some of her favorite big-screen Bollywood actresses.

Her decision to go to Vietnam hatched several hours later, when she woke up, head heavy and throbbing. She made straight for the kitchen, with all its clutter and its colonies of cockroaches hiding beneath the washing machine’s plywood board base. She put a pot of water to boil over a low flame, lifted the blue plastic food cover on the dining table, and reached for a banana so ripe it verged on black, twisting till it came off the stem.

She chewed deliberately, then rose slowly to her feet and retrieved the first aid kit on top of the fridge. She needed Panadol—the extra strength ones that Bison used to take. They came in red strips, sheathed in plastic blisters that glinted like glass. The texture of the plastic-welded foil reminded her of the small metal file attachment on nail clippers. The pills looked like bloated grains of white rice and tasted bitter, like medicine should. Of all the painkillers she’d tried, Mama Sandra had found that these were the most effective.

When the caffeine in the pills began to kick in, clearing her head, she began her daily ritual, her usual routine—at least, since that fateful middle-of-the-night when a friend of Bison’s, another college student from the kos where he was staying, kept calling until she finally got out of bed to answer the phone. The ritual was this: sob uncontrollably over the death of her child, her firstborn, her only, her beloved anak siakkangan.

After about twenty minutes, Mama Sandra dragged herself from the table to the stove and made some instant coffee. While waiting for the sugar to dissolve, she picked up the mountain of dirty clothes on the floor and stuffed them into the washing machine. She took out Bison’s old suitcase from the storeroom—a seventy-two-litre-capacity American Tourister that the kid had taken with him when he’d left for college, fifty-five kilometers away in Tangerang. Then, as she sipped her coffee, she phoned Betris, her promising young niece who worked at the ministry of foreign affairs. Mama Sandra declared her intention to get a passport.

◊

Mama Anton’s jaw dropped when she heard about the travel plans. She and Mama Sandra came from the same small town in North Sumatra and were both active members of the women’s choir at the local Batak Protestant Church. Mama Sandra, like practically everyone else Mama Anton knew, had never been abroad. Mama Anton herself had only ever heard tell of what lay yonder from her twins, Anton and Antonia, who would take weekend excursions around Southeast Asia and return with tales of how everything was cleaner elsewhere, and more orderly, and more expensive, and so on. Mama Anton suspected her kids of exaggeration. They knew she had a fear of flying. She’d even have made her occasional pilgrimages back to their hometown, Harianboho, by bus if she could.

Post-funeral, however, Mama Anton had been staying over at Mama Sandra’s a lot and she’d seen with her own eyes how Mama Sandra, curled up like a kitten, would cry in her sleep. How she’d call out for her late son—“Bison! Bison!”—her hands clutching at empty air, just how Mama Anton imagined Job from the Old Testament grieving for the loss of his children. And so Mama Anton pronounced herself in support of her friend’s crazy plan.

“I’ve already picked up the passport, Ma Anton, but what should I tell Amang Pendeta?” asked Mama Sandra, recalling their pastor. They were at choir practice and the director had just begun talking about the church party that coming weekend in celebration of Gotilon, the Batak harvest.

“I hope Amang Pendeta won’t mind,” Mama Sandra murmured uneasily. Lucky for her, Mama Anton was at her side. The woman had known Bison when he was no bigger than the joint of her pinkie. And they’d been friends since Mama Sandra had first moved to Bekasi in 1992—all alone and anemia-pale, baby in a sling wound around her right shoulder, skin and bones from a diet consisting mainly of rice with saltwater “soup,” sleepless with fretting about how to pay the rent on her home in the Snug and Simple Housing Subdivision (a.k.a. SSHS).

◊

It was Mama Anton who’d fetch little Bison from school whenever Mama Sandra had to work an afternoon shift; who picked up his report cards every once in a while and who let him bathe with her kids whenever the water from their faucets ran brown; who presented Bison with an envelope containing 500,000 rupiah when he graduated high school; who let him use her computer and dial-up internet to check the results of his university entrance exams; and because of all that, Mama Anton understood.

◊

She took Mama Sandra’s hand in hers and squeezed.

“Eda, just go, dammit,” she said. “Better not tell him, or he won’t let you leave.”

◊

So Mama Sandra flew to Hanoi, the heavens rolling out a red carpet of sunny sky. She sat in seat 58C, only one narrow aisle away from a white woman who kept her eyes glued to the monitor embedded in the seatback in front. She could see clouds,likemattresses floating in the sky. And just like that, clouds became her new favorite thing.My, don’t they look sweet from up here, she thought with a smile.

Then—despite the complex multistep procedure required for a memory to emerge from a human consciousness, and without the memory even bothering to get a second opinion about whether it should surface—Mama Sandra was reminded of pink cotton candy. Bison’s favorite treat when he was little, when he was alive.

Mama Sandra would bring some home for him whenever she worked the morning shift, before she returned in the evening. The cart she bought it from could usually be found at the intersection by the clothing factory in Bojong Menteng where she used to work. The vendor liked to hang around the middle school nearby. From there, she’d walk back to their house in Rawalumbu, a bag of sweet fluffy cloud swinging from one hand. Once home, she’d recline on the mat in front of the TV, her head propped up on one elbow, cradled in her palm. Bison would sit nearby, leaning against the wall. Pinching off pieces of cotton candy, they’d watch the family quiz show that came on every evening, laughing at impatient fathers and miscommunicating siblings. The last hundred times she’d recalled this ritual they’d shared, mother and child, Mama Sandra had cried. This time, possibly due to the small dosage of terror she felt as a first-time flyer, she could only sit helpless, frozen in her seat.

Just a few hours ago, she’d navigated her way through Kuala Lumpur airport with some difficulty, especially when using the monorail to change terminals, even though Betris had given her directions for every possible situation she might encounter on the journey. Twenty sheets of A4 paper!—but only after Betris’s father, Mama Sandra’s eldest brother, had given her an earful for aiding and abetting her aunt—completewith a cover page, on which her niece had drawn a pointing hand. Betris had advised her aunt to rest for two or three days in Hanoi upon arrival so she could adjust to the climate, which was generally more humid. Then she could continue her journey to the city of Hội An, before finally pulling into port in Mỹ Sơn. Mama Sandra had agreed.

When the in-flight meal was served, the sight of the fruit salad on her tray reminded Mama Sandra of Mama Anton. She thought of how busy her friend must be at that moment, preparing harvest parcels for Gotilon (even though the bitter reality was that all the fruit was bought in bulk from the market—sorry, Amang, we’re in Bekasi now, not back home on the farm!). Then she managed not to think about Bison anymore for the rest of the flight.

◊

Names were a baffling matter to Mama Sandra now. “Mama Sandra”—no one ever used to call her that. Her relatives back in Harianboho had called her “San” or “Sandong.” The people she’d met when she moved to Bekasi called her Bison’s mother, Mama of Bison, “Mama Bison,” submitting to the nationwide norm of calling a mother by her firstborn’s name.

The other mothers in the Batak circle, the parsautaon, sometimes jokingly called her “Borneng,” which was short for “Boru Nainggolan.” Because her father had been Nainggolan, even though her mother’s father was Hutahaen. And since Bison’s father was of Sinaga stock, of course that made her son a Sinaga too. Then her husband had run off with another woman, and all that remained was her, the solitary Borneng, with Bison her Sinaga son. The Sinaga sweat and tears that had gone into that boy’s blood didn’t amount to a shallow bowlful. Oh, but never mind that. He’d stay Sinaga for life.

Now Bison was no more, and with him Mama Bison. The reason: If her friends kept calling her Mama Bison, a newcomer to their church might ask about Bison to make small talk—What boru does his wife come from? How many children do they have?—though after the funeral and dozens of He’s at peace with our Heavenly Father now, Eda,all that was left was “Sandra”—Sandra the Borneng, the Boru Nainggolan.

Ise goarmu?—What’s your name? Let’s hear your name.

That’s what all the aunties back in her hometown would teasingly ask Mama Sandra when she was just a little thing, cute as a candlenut. She’d come home from Sunday school and they’d be there, faces beaming.

“Sandra,” she’d answer shyly.

“And what boru, Sandra?”

“Boru Nainggolan, Inanguda.”

Now she would always be Mama Sandra, even if this name had its complications too. Wasn’t someone likely to ask, “So how’s your daughter Sandra doing?”

Sandra’s not my daughter, Inanguda, it’s me. I have a kid named Bison, but he poisoned himself.

Poisoned himself? But why?

Because I told him he was no child of mine. And then I kicked him out.

But why did you kick him out?

I found out he had a boyfriend, Inanguda.

◊

So, ise goarmu, Sandra?—So what’s your name, Sandra?

Ise … ise goarku, Inanguda?—Sorry, Inanguda. I’m sorry, but … my name?

◊

In keeping with Betris’s instructions, Mama Sandra boarded the number 86 bus from Nội Bài airport to Hanoi’s city center. Throughout the ride she could hear women’s voices, a ceaseless rising and falling in a drowsy lilt. They went over a big bridge and it reminded her of the Ampera Bridge in Palembang, which she had crossed long ago, also by bus, as a young woman bound for Jakarta to seek work. She showed the conductor the printed sheet of paper and pointed to her destination. When they arrived, he tapped Mama Sandra on the shoulder. She disembarked at Long BiênBus Transit Terminal. Everything was going according to plan.

Taxi drivers were calling out to her. She kept repeating, Sorry, like a mantra. She crossed the street, entered a café, and ordered an egg coffee, which Betris had directed her to do as well. The girl had made her aunt practice using a taxi app.

“If you value your life, Namboru, do as I say!” This was what Betris had exclaimed just a few days before Mama Sandra’s departure, since she seemed to regard a woman in her fifties travelling abroad alone to be on some sort of suicide mission. So did Mama Sandra, but what could be done now? It was too late. Here she was. After entering the wifi password into her phone, “12345678,” she sent an update to her brother and Betris, and ordered a taxi.

◊

In keeping with her aunt’s budget, Betris had booked Mama Sandra a room at the Real Hanoi Hotel, which was cheap and near Hoàn Kiếm lake, but she had trouble finding it. She walked the length of the street seeing only a building under construction, until she realized that the alley beside the construction was actually the route to her hotel. Warily, Mama Sandra ventured down the narrow lane. Thankfully at the first bend she was greeted by the sight of a tall, narrow shophouse—which was what all the buildings in Hanoi looked like—bearing a sign with the hotel name.

A man in a white collared shirt opened the glass doors for Mama Sandra. On the wall behind the reception desk hung a framed award from a flight and accommodation booking website. Affixed to the surface of the desk were laminated sheets bearing the wifi network name and password—maria1234—which Mama Sandra took as a sign that the owners were Christian, like her.

She gasped, realizing that she’d forgotten to pray before her plane had taken off. If they’d exploded in midair, thought Mama Sandra in horror, if hundreds of someone’s someones had died that day, it would have been all her fault.

The receptionist put her in room 601. One of the porters standing in the lobby hoisted Mama Sandra’s suitcase into his arms and began carrying it up the stairs. I guess there’s no lift, thought Mama Sandra, hurrying after him. When she reached the second level, she saw the doors, numbered 101 and 102. So the ground floor was zero! She was exhausted.

When they finally reached 601, there was a Buddha statue and some incense on a little table in the corridor. But Mama Sandra was too tired to notice. For now she was steeped in relief that the proprietor was Christian, though the sight of the altar the next day would come as a shock. Once inside, she didn’t even check whether the room was deluxe enough to have windows. Completely worn out, she fell fast asleep.

◊

Initially, Mama Sandra tried to enjoy her time in Hanoi—wouldn’t anyone after all? Morning came and she stood in front of the mirror, pulling brightly colored clothes from her suitcase and trying them on. The plan was to take the first train to Hội An when day four rolled around. In the meantime, she thought it beneficial to adapt to her new environment. She selected a hibiscus-print blouse, which Betris had given her for Christmas two years back.

She decided to stroll around Hoàn Kiếm Lake with her Vietnamese pocket phrasebook in hand. As instructed by Betris, she visited a temple to see the corpse of a giant turtle behind glass. This was unwise because her mind immediately saw Bison in the glass case instead. Beating a hasty retreat, she left to sob on a bench by the lake. For lunch, she went to a nearby KFC, then to the Thăng Longwater puppet show along with all the other tourists.