Eat, Pray, Love

73

I've never had less of a plan in my life than I do upon arrival in Bali. In all my history of careless travels, this is the most carelessly I've ever landed anyplace. I don't know where I'm going to live, I don't know what I'm going to do, I don't know what the exchange rate is, I don't know how to get a taxi at the airport-or even where to ask that taxi to take me. Nobody is expecting my arrival. I have no friends in Indonesia, or even friends-of-friends. And here's the problem about traveling with an out-of-date guidebook, and then not reading it anyway: I didn't realize that I'm actually not allowed to stay in Indonesia for four months, even if I want to. I find this out only upon entry into the country. Turns out I'm allowed only a one-month tourist visa. It hadn't occurred to me that the Indonesian government would be anything less than delighted to host me in their country for just as long as I pleased to stay.

As the nice immigration official is stamping my passport with permission to stay in Bali for only and exactly thirty days, I ask him in my most friendly manner if I can please remain longer.

"No," he says, in his most friendly manner. The Balinese are famously friendly.

"See, I'm supposed to stay here for three or four months," I tell him.

I don't mention that it's a prophecy-that my staying here for three or four months was predicted two years ago by an elderly and quite possibly demented Balinese medicine man, during a ten-minute palm-reading. I'm not sure how to explain this.

But what did that medicine man tell me, now that I think of it? Did he actually say that I would come back to Bali and spend three or four months living with him? Did he really say "living with" him? Or did he just want me to drop by again sometime if I was in the neighborhood and give him another ten bucks for another palm-reading? Did he say I would come back, or that I should come back? Did he really say, "See you later, alligator"? Or was it, "In a while, crocodile"?

I haven't had any communication with the medicine man since that one evening. I wouldn't know how to contact him, anyway. What might his address be? "Medicine Man, On His Porch, Bali, Indonesia"? I don't know whether he's dead or alive. I remember that he seemed exceedingly old two years ago when we met; anything could have happened to him since then. All I have for sure is his name-Ketut Liyer-and the memory that he lives in a village just outside the town of Ubud. But I don't remember the name of the village.

Maybe I should have thought all this through better.

74

But Bali is a fairly simple place to navigate. It's not like I've landed in the middle of the Sudan with no idea of what to do next. This is an island approximately the size of Delaware and it's a popular tourist destination. The whole place has arranged itself to help you, the Westerner with the credit cards, get around with ease. English is spoken here widely and happily.(Which makes me feel guiltily relieved. My brain synapses are so overloaded by my efforts to learn modern Italian and ancient Sanskrit during these last few months that I just can't take on the task of trying to learn Indonesian or, even more difficult, Balinese-a language more complex than Martian.) It's really no trouble being here. You can change your money at the airport, find a taxi with a nice driver who will suggest to you a lovely hotel-none of this is hard to arrange. And since the tourism industry collapsed in the wake of the terrorist bombing here two years ago (which happened a few weeks after I'd left Bali the first time), it's even easier to get around now; everyone is desperate to help you, desperate for work.

So I take a taxi to the town of Ubud, which seems like a good place to start my journey. I check into a small and pretty hotel there on the fabulously named Monkey Forest Road. The hotel has a sweet swimming pool and a garden crammed with tropical flowers with blossoms bigger than volleyballs (tended to by a highly organized team of hummingbirds and butter-flies). The staff is Balinese, which means they automatically start adoring you and complimenting you on your beauty as soon as you walk in. The room has a view of the tropical treetops and there's a breakfast included every morning with piles of fresh tropical fruit. In short, it's one of the nicest places I've ever stayed and it's costing me less than ten dollars a day. It's good to be back.

Ubud is in the center of Bali, located in the mountains, surrounded by terraced rice paddies and innumerable Hindu temples, with rivers that cut fast through deep canyons of jungle and volcanoes visible on the horizon. Ubud has long been considered the cultural hub of the island, the place where traditional Balinese painting, dance, carving, and religious ceremonies thrive. It isn't near any beaches, so the tourists who come to Ubud are a self-selecting and rather classy crowd; they would prefer to see an ancient temple ceremony than to drink pina coladas in the surf. Regardless of what happens with my medicine man prophecy, this could be a lovely place to live for a while. The town is sort of like a small Pacific version of Santa Fe, only with monkeys walking around and Balinese families in traditional dress all over the place. There are good restaurants and nice little bookstores. I could feasibly spend my whole time here in Ubud doing what nice divorced American women have been doing with their time ever since the invention of the YWCA-signing up for one class after another: batik, drumming, jewelry-making, pottery, traditional Indonesian dance and cooking… Right across the road from my hotel there's even something called "The Meditation Shop"-a small storefront with a sign advertising open meditation sessions every night from 6:00 to 7:00. May peace prevail on earth, reads the sign. I'm all for it.

By the time I unpack my bags it's still early afternoon, so I decide to take myself for a walk, get reoriented to this town I haven't seen in two years. And then I'll try to figure out how to start finding my medicine man. I imagine this will be a difficult task, might take days or even weeks. I'm not sure where to start with my search, so I stop at the front desk on my way out and ask Mario if he can help me.

Mario is one of the guys who work at this hotel. I already made friends with him when I checked in, largely on account of his name. Not too long ago I was traveling in a country where many men were named Mario, but not one of them was a small, muscular, energetic Balinese fellow wearing a silk sarong and a flower behind his ear. So I had to ask, "Is your name really Mario? That doesn't sound very Indonesian."

"Not my real name," he said. "My real name is Nyoman."

Ah-I should have known. I should have known that I would have a 25 percent chance of guessing Mario's real name. In Bali, if I may digress, there are only four names that the majority of the population give to their children, regardless of whether the baby is a boy or a girl. The names are Wayan (pronounced "Why-Ann"), Made ("mah-DAY"), Nyoman and Ketut. Translated, these names mean simply First, Second, Third and Fourth, and they connote birth order. If you have a fifth child, you start the name cycle all over again, so that the fifth child is really known as something like: "Wayan to the Second Power." And so forth. If you have twins, you name them in the order they came out. Because there are basically only four names in Bali (higher-caste elites have their own selection of names) it's totally possible (indeed, quite common) that two Wayans would marry each other. And then their firstborn would be named, of course: Wayan.

This gives a slight indication of how important family is in Bali, and how important your placement in that family is. You would think this system could become complicated, but somehow the Balinese work it out. Understandably and necessarily, nicknaming is popular. For instance, one of the most successful businesswomen in Ubud is a lady named Wayan who has a busy restaurant called Cafe Wayan, and so she is known as "Wayan Cafe"-meaning, "The Wayan who owns Cafe Wayan." Somebody else might be known as "Fat Made," or "Nyoman-Rental-Car" or "Stupid-Ketut-Who-Burned-Down-His-Uncle's-House." My new Balinese friend Mario got around the problem by simply naming himself Mario.

"Why Mario?"

"Because I love everything Italian," he said.

When I told him that I'd recently spent four months in Italy, he found this fact so stupendously amazing that he came out from behind his desk and said, "Come, sit, talk." I came, I sat, we talked. And that's how we became friends.

So this afternoon I decide to start my search for my medicine man by asking my new friend Mario if by any chance he knows a man by the name of Ketut Liyer.

Mario frowns, thinking.

I wait for him to say something like, "Ah, yes! Ketut Liyer! Old medicine man who died just last week-so sad when venerable old medicine man passes away…"

Mario asks me to repeat the name, and this time I write it down, assuming I'm pronouncing something wrong. Sure enough, Mario brightens in recognition. "Ketut Liyer!"

Now I wait for him to say something like, "Ah, yes! Ketut Liyer! Insane person! Arrested last week for being a crazy man…"

But he says instead, "Ketut Liyer is famous healer."

"Yes! That's him!"

"I know him. I go in his house. Last week I take my cousin, she needs cure for her baby crying all night. Ketut Liyer fixes it. One time I took American girl like you to Ketut Liyer's house. Girl wanted magic to make her more beautiful to men. Ketut Liyer draw magic painting, for help her be more beautiful. I tease her after that. Every day I tell her, 'Painting working! Look how beautiful you are! Painting working!' "

Remembering the image Ketut Liyer had drawn for me a few years ago, I tell Mario that I'd gotten a magic picture myself from the medicine man once.

Mario laughs. "Painting working for you, too!"

"My picture was to help me find God," I explain.

"You don't want to be more beautiful to men?" he asks, understandably confused.

I say, "Hey, Mario-do you think you could take me to visit Ketut Liyer someday? If you're not too busy?"

"Not now," he says.

Just as I'm starting to feel disappointed, he adds, "But maybe in five minutes?"

75

So this is how it comes to pass that-the very afternoon I have arrived in Bali-I'm suddenly on the back of a motorbike, clutching my new friend Mario the Italian-Indonesian, who is speeding me through the rice terraces toward Ketut Liyer's home. For all that I've thought about this reunion with the medicine man over the last two years, I actually have no idea what I'm going to say to him when I arrive. And of course we don't have an appointment. So we show up unannounced. I recognize the sign outside his door, same as last time, saying: "Ketut Liyer-painter." It's a typical, traditional Balinese family compound. A high stone wall surrounds the entire property, there's a courtyard in the middle and a temple in the back. Several generations live out their lives together in the various interconnected small homes within these walls. We enter without knocking (no door, anyway) to the riotous dismay of a some typical Balinese watchdogs (skinny, angry) and there in the courtyard is Ketut Liyer the elderly medicine man, wearing his sarong and his golf shirt, looking precisely the same as he did two years ago when I first met him. Mario says something to Ketut, and I'm not exactly fluent in Balinese, but it sounds like a general introduction, something along the lines of, "Here's a girl from America-go for it."

Ketut turns his mostly toothless smile upon me with the force of a compassionate fire hose, and this is so reassuring: I had remembered correctly, he is extraordinary. His face is a comprehensive encyclopedia of kindness. He shakes my hand with an excited and powerful grip.

"I am very happy to meet you," he says.

He has no idea who I am.

"Come, come," he says, and I'm ushered to the porch of his little house, where woven bamboo mats serve as furniture. It looks exactly as it did two years ago. We both sit down. With no hesitation, he takes my palm in his hand-assuming that, like most of his Western visitors, a palm-reading is what I've come for. He gives me a quick reading, which I am reassured to see is an abridged version of exactly what he said to me last time. (He may not remember my face, but my destiny, to his practiced eye, is unchanged.) His English is better than I remembered, and also better than Mario's. Ketut speaks like the wise old Chinamen in classic kung fu movies, a form of English you could call "Grasshopperese," because you could insert the endearment "Grasshopper" into the middle of any sentence and it sounds very wise. "Ah-you have very lucky good fortune, Grasshopper…"

I wait for a pause in Ketut's predictions, then interrupt to remind him that I had been here to see him already, two years ago.

He looks puzzled. "Not first time in Bali?"

"No, sir."

He thinks hard. "You girl from California?"

"No," I say, my spirits tumbling deeper. "I'm the girl from New York."

Ketut says to me (and I'm not sure what this has to do with anything), "I am not so handsome anymore, lost many teeth. Maybe I will go to dentist someday, get new teeth. But too afraid of dentist."

He opens his deforested mouth and shows me the damage. Indeed, he has lost most of his teeth on the left side of his mouth and on the right side it's all broken, hurtful-looking yellow stubs. He fell down, he tells me. That's how his teeth got knocked out.

I tell him I'm sorry to hear it, then try again, speaking slowly. "I don't think you remember me, Ketut. I was here two years ago with an American Yoga teacher, a woman who lived in Bali for many years."

He smiles, elated. "I know Ann Barros!"

"That's right. Ann Barros is the Yoga teacher's name. But I'm Liz. I came here asking for your help once because I wanted to get closer to God. You drew me a magic picture."

He shrugs amiably, couldn't be less concerned. "Don't remember," he says.

This is such bad news it's almost funny. What am I going to do in Bali now? I don't know exactly what I'd imagined it would be like to meet Ketut again, but I did hope we'd have some sort of super-karmic tearful reunion. And while it's true I had feared he might be dead, it hadn't occurred to me that-if he were still alive-he wouldn't remember me at all. Although now it seems the height of dumbness to have ever imagined that our first meeting would have been as memorable for him as it was for me. Maybe I should have planned this better, for real.

So I describe the picture he had made for me, the figure with the four legs ("so grounded on earth") and the missing head ("not looking at the world through the intellect") and the face in the heart ("looking at the world through the heart") and he listens to me politely, with modest interest, like we're discussing somebody else's life entirely.

I hate to do this because I don't want to put him on the spot, but it's got to be said, so I just lay it out there. I say, "You told me I should come back here to Bali. You told me to stay here for three or four months. You said I could help you learn English and you would teach me the things that you know." I don't like the way my voice sounds-just the teensiest bit desperate. I don't mention anything about the invitation he'd once floated for me to live with his family. That seems way out of line, given the circumstances.

He listens to me politely, smiling and shaking his head, like, Isn't it so funny the things people say?

I almost drop it then. But I've come so far, I have to put forth one last effort. I say, "I'm the book writer, Ketut. I'm the book writer from New York."

And for some reason that does it. Suddenly his face goes translucent with joy, turns bright and pure and transparent. A Roman candle of recognition sparks to life in his mind. "YOU!" he says. "YOU! I remember YOU!" He leans forward, takes my shoulders in his hands and starts to shake me happily, the way a child shakes an unopened Christmas present to try to guess what's inside. "You came back! You came BACK!"

"I came back! I came back!" I say.

"You, you, you!"

"Me, me, me!"

I'm all tearful now, but trying not to show it. The depth of my relief-it's hard to explain. It takes even me by surprise. It's like this-it's like I was in a car accident, and my car went over a bridge and sank to the bottom of a river and I'd somehow managed to free myself from the sunken car by swimming through an open window and then I'd been frog-kicking and struggling to swim all the way up to the daylight through the cold, green water and I was almost out of oxygen and the arteries were bursting out of my neck and my cheeks were puffed with my last breath and then-GASP!-I broke through to the surface and took in huge gulps of air. And I survived. That gasp, that breaking through-this is what it feels like when I hear the Indonesian medicine man say, "You came back!" My relief is exactly that big.

I can't believe it worked.

"Yes, I came back," I say. "Of course I came back."

"I so happy!" he says. We're holding hands and he's wildly excited now. "I do not remember you at first! So long ago we meet! You look different now! So different from two years! Last time, you very sad-looking woman. Now-so happy! Like different person!"

The idea of this-the idea of a person looking so different after a mere two years have passed-seems to incite in him a shiver of giggles.

I give up trying to hide my tearfulness and just let it all spill over. "Yes, Ketut. I was very sad before. But life is better now."

"Last time you in bad divorce. No good."

"No good," I confirm.

"Last time you have too much worry, too much sorrow. Last time, you look like sad old woman. Now you look like young girl. Last time you ugly! Now you pretty!"

Mario bursts into ecstatic applause and pronounces victoriously: "See? Painting working!"

I say, "Do you still want me to help you with your English, Ketut?"

He tells me I can start helping him right now and hops up nimbly, gnome-like. He bounds into his little house and comes back with a pile of letters he's received from abroad over the last few years (so he does have an address!). He asks me to read the letters aloud to him; he can understand English well, but can't read much. I'm his secretary already. I'm a medicine man's secretary. This is fabulous. The letters are from art collectors overseas, from people who have somehow managed to acquire his famous magic drawings and magic paintings. One letter is from a collector in Australia, praising Ketut for his painting skills, saying, "How can you be so clever to paint with such detail?" Ketut answers to me, like giving dictation: "Because I practice many, many years."

When the letters are finished, he updates me on his life over the last few years. Some changes have occurred. Now he has a wife, for instance. He points across the courtyard at a heavyset woman who's been standing in the shadow of her kitchen door, glaring at me like she's not sure if she should shoot me, or poison me first and then shoot me. Last time I was here, Ketut had sadly shown me photographs of his wife who had recently died-a beautiful old Balinese woman who seemed bright and childlike even at her advanced age. I wave across the courtyard to the new wife, who backs away into her kitchen.

"Good woman," Ketut proclaims toward the kitchen shadows. "Very good woman."

He goes on to say that he's been very busy with his Balinese patients, always a lot to do, has to give much magic for new babies, ceremonies for dead people, healing for sick people, ceremonies for marriage. Next time he goes to Balinese wedding, he says, "We can go together! I take you!" The only thing is, he doesn't have very many Westerners visiting him anymore. Nobody comes to visit Bali since the terrorist bombing. This makes him "feel very confusing in my head." This also makes him feel "very empty in my bank." He says, "You come to my house every day to practice English with me now?" I nod happily and he says, "I will teach you Balinese meditation, OK?"

"OK," I say.

"I think three months enough time to teach you Balinese meditation, find God for you this way," he says. "Maybe four months. You like Bali?"

"I love Bali."

"You get married in Bali?"

"Not yet."

"I think maybe soon. You come back tomorrow?"

I promise to. He doesn't say anything about my moving in with his family, so I don't bring it up, stealing one last glance at the scary wife in the kitchen. Maybe I'll just stay in my sweet hotel the whole time, instead. It's more comfortable, anyway. Plumbing, and all that. I'll need a bicycle, though, to come see him every day…

So now it's time to go.

"I am very happy to meet you," he says, shaking my hand.

I offer up my first English lesson. I teach him the difference between "happy to meet you," and "happy to see you." I explain that we only say "Nice to meet you" the first time we meet somebody. After that, we say "Nice to see you," every time. Because you only meet someone once. But now we will see each other repeatedly, day after day.

He likes this. He gives it a practice round: "Nice to see you! I am happy to see you! I can see you! I am not deaf!"

This makes us all laugh, even Mario. We shake hands, and agree that I will come by again tomorrow afternoon. Until then, he says, "See you later, alligator."

"In a while, crocodile," I say.

"Let your conscience be your guide. If you have any Western friend come to Bali, send them to me for palm-reading-I am very empty now in my bank since the bomb. I am an autodidact. I am very happy to see you, Liss!"

"I am very happy to see you, too, Ketut."

76

Bali is a tiny Hindu island located in the middle of the two-thousand-mile-long Indonesian archipelago that constitutes the most populous Muslim nation on earth. Bali is therefore a strange and wondrous thing; it should not even exist, yet does. The island's Hinduism was an export from India by way of Java. Indian traders brought the religion east during the fourth century AD. The Javanese kings founded a mighty Hindu dynasty, little of which remains today except the impressive temple ruins at Borobudur. In the sixteenth century, a violent Islamic uprising swept across the region and the Shiva-worshipping Hindu royalty escaped Java, fleeing to Bali in droves during what would be remembered as the Majapahit Exodus. The high-class, high-caste Javanese brought with them to Bali only their royal families, their craftsmen and their priests-and so it is not a wild exaggeration when people say that everyone in Bali is the descendent of either a king, a priest or an artist, and that this is why the Balinese have such pride and brilliance.

The Javanese colonists brought their Hindu caste system with them to Bali, though caste divisions were never as brutally enforced here as they once were in India. Still, the Balinese recognize a complex social hierarchy (there are five divisions of Brahmans alone) and I would have better luck personally decoding the human genome than trying to understand the intricate, interlocking clan system that still thrives here. (The writer Fred B. Eiseman's many fine essays on Balinese culture go much further into expert detail explaining these subtleties, and it is from his research that I take most of my general information, not only here but throughout this book.) Suffice it to say for our purposes that everyone in Bali is in a clan, that everyone knows which clan he is in, and that everyone knows which clan everyone else is in. And if you get kicked out of your clan for some grave disobedience, you really might as well jump into a volcano, because, honestly, you're as good as dead.

Balinese culture is one of the most methodical systems of social and religious organization on earth, a magnificent beehive of tasks and roles and ceremonies. The Balinese are lodged, completely held, within an elaborate lattice of customs. A combination of several factors created this network, but basically we can say that Bali is what happens when the lavish rituals of traditional Hinduism are superimposed over a vast rice-growing agricultural society that operates, by necessity, with elaborate communal cooperation. Rice terraces require an unbelievable amount of shared labor, maintenance and engineering in order to prosper, so each Balinese village has a banjar-a united organization of citizens who administer, through consensus, the village's political and economic and religious and agricultural decisions. In Bali, the collective is absolutely more important than the individual, or nobody eats.

Religious ceremonies are of paramount importance here in Bali (an island, don't forget, with seven unpredictable volcanoes on it-you would pray, too). It has been estimated that a typical Balinese woman spends one-third of her waking hours either preparing for a ceremony, participating in a ceremony or cleaning up after a ceremony. Life here is a constant cycle of offerings and rituals. You must perform them all, in correct order and with the correct intention, or the entire universe will fall out of balance. Margaret Mead wrote about "the incredible busy-ness" of the Balinese, and it's true-there is rarely an idle moment in a Balinese compound. There are ceremonies here which must be performed five times a day and others that must be performed once a day, once a week, once a month, once a year, once every ten years, once every hundred years, once every thousand years. All these dates and rituals are kept organized by the priests and holy men, who consult a byzantine system of three separate calendars.

There are thirteen major rites of passage for every human being in Bali, each marked by a highly organized ceremony. Elaborate spiritual appeasement ceremonies are conducted all throughout life, in order to protect the soul from the 108 vices (108-there's that number again!), which include such spoilers as violence, stealing, laziness and lying. Every Balinese child passes through a momentous puberty ceremony in which the canine teeth, or "fangs," are filed down to a flat level, for aesthetic improvement. The worst thing you can be in Bali is coarse and animalistic, and these fangs are considered to be reminders of our more brutal natures and therefore must go. It is dangerous in such a close-knit culture for people to be brutal. A village's entire web of cooperation could be sliced through by one person's murderous intent. Therefore the best thing you can be in Bali is alus, which means "refined," or even "prettified." Beauty is good in Bali, for men and women. Beauty is revered. Beauty is safety. Children are taught to approach all hardship and discomfort with "a shining face," a giant smile.

The whole idea of Bali is a matrix, a massive and invisible grid of spirits, guides, paths and customs. Every Balinese knows exactly where he or she belongs, oriented within this great, intangible map. Just look at the four names of almost every Balinese citizen-First, Second, Third, Fourth-reminding them all of when they were born in the family, and where they belong. You couldn't have a clearer social mapping system if you called your kids North, South, East and West. Mario, my new Italian-Indonesian friend, told me that he is only happy when he can maintain himself-mentally and spiritually-at the intersection between a vertical line and horizontal one, in a state of perfect balance. For this, he needs to know exactly where he is located at every moment, both in his relationship to the divine and to his family here on earth. If he loses that balance, he loses his power.

It's not a ludicrous hypothesis, therefore, to say that the Balinese are the global masters of balance, the people for whom the maintenance of perfect equilibrium is an art, a science and a religion. For me, on a personal search for balance, I had hoped to learn much from the Balinese about holding steady in this chaotic world. But the more I read and see about this culture, the more I realize how far off the grid of balance I've fallen, at least from the Balinese perspective. My habit of wandering through this world oblivious to my physical orientation, in addition to my decision to have stepped outside the containing network of marriage and family, makes me-for Balinese purposes-something like a ghost. I enjoy living this way, but it's a nightmare of a life by the standards of any self-respecting Balinese. If you don't know where you are or whose clan you belong to, then how can you possibly find balance?

Given all this, I'm not so sure how much of the Balinese worldview I'm going to be able to incorporate into my own worldview, since at the moment I seem to be taking a more modern and Western definition of the word equilibrium. (I'm currently translating it as meaning "equal freedom," or the equal possibility of falling in any direction at any given time, depending on… you know… how things go.) The Balinese don't wait and see "how things go." That would be terrifying. They organize how things go, in order to keep things from falling apart.

When you are walking down the road in Bali and you pass a stranger, the very first question he or she will ask you is, "Where are you going?" The second question is, "Where are you coming from?" To a Westerner, this can seem like a rather invasive inquiry from a perfect stranger, but they're just trying to get an orientation on you, trying to insert you into the grid for the purposes of security and comfort. If you tell them that you don't know where you're going, or that you're just wandering about randomly, you might instigate a bit of distress in the heart of your new Balinese friend. It's far better to pick some kind of specific direction-anywhere-just so everybody feels better.

The third question a Balinese will almost certainly ask you is, "Are you married?" Again, it's a positioning and orienting inquiry. It's necessary for them to know this, to make sure that you are completely in order in your life. They really want you to say yes. It's such a relief to them when you say yes. If you're single, it's better not to say so directly. And I really recommend that you not mention your divorce at all, if you happen to have had one. It just makes the Balinese so worried. The only thing your solitude proves to them is your perilous dislocation from the grid. If you are a single woman traveling through Bali and somebody asks you, "Are you married?" the best possible answer is: "Not yet." This is a polite way of saying, "No," while indicating your optimistic intentions to get that taken care of just as soon as you can.

Even if you are eighty years old, or a lesbian, or a strident feminist, or a nun, or an eighty-year-old strident feminist lesbian nun who has never been married and never intends to get married, the politest possible answer is still: "Not yet."

77

In the morning, Mario helps me buy a bicycle. Like a proper almost-Italian, he says, "I know a guy," and he takes me to his cousin's shop, where I get a nice mountain bike, a helmet, a lock and a basket for slightly less than fifty American dollars. Now I'm mobile in my new town of Ubud, or at least as mobile as I can safely feel on these roads, which are narrow and winding and badly maintained and crowded with motorcycles, trucks and tourist buses.

In the afternoon, I ride my bike down into Ketut's village, to hang out with my medicine man for our first day of… whatever it is we're going to be doing together. I'm not sure, to be honest. English lessons? Meditation lessons? Good old-fashioned porch-sitting? I don't know what Ketut has in mind for me, but I'm just happy to be invited into his life.

He's got guests when I arrive. It's a small family of rural Balinese who have brought their one-year-old daughter to Ketut for help. The poor little baby is teething and has been crying for several nights. Dad is a handsome young man in a sarong; he has the muscular calves of a Soviet war hero's statue. Mom is pretty and shy, looking at me from way below her timidly lowered eyelids. They have brought a tiny offering to Ketut for his services-2,000 rupiah, which is about 25 cents, placed in a handmade basket of palm fronds, slightly bigger than a hotel bar's ashtray. There is one flower blossom in the basket, along with the money and a few grains of rice. (Their poverty puts them in stark opposition to the richer family from the capital city of Denpesar who will come to see Ketut later in the afternoon, the mother balancing on her head a three-tiered basket filled with fruit and flowers and a roasted duck-a headgear so magnificent and impressive that Carmen Miranda would have bowed down in humility before it.)

Ketut is relaxed and gracious with his company. He listens to the parents explain their baby's troubles. Then he digs through a small trunk on his porch and pulls out an ancient ledger filled with tiny writing in Balinese Sanskrit. He consults this book like a scholar, looking for some combination of words that will suit him, talking and laughing with the parents the whole time. Then he takes a blank page from a notebook with a picture of Kermit the Frog on it, and writes what he tells me is "a prescription" for the little girl. The child is being tormented by a minor demon, he diagnoses, in addition to the physical discomforts of teething. For the teething, he advises the parents to simply rub the baby's gums with pressed red onion juice. To appease the demon, they must make an offering of a small killed chicken and a small pig, along with a little bit of cake, mixed with special herbs which their grandmother should definitely have access to from her own medicine garden. (This food won't be wasted; after the offering ceremony, Balinese families are always allowed to eat their own donations to the gods, since the offering is more metaphysical than literal. The way the Balinese see it, God takes what belongs to God-the gesture-while man takes what belongs to man-the food itself.)

After writing the prescription, Ketut turns his back to us, fills a bowl with water, and keens a spectacular, quietly chilling mantra above it. Then Ketut blesses the baby with the water he has just infused with sacred power. Even at one year old, the child already knows how to receive a holy blessing in the traditional Balinese manner. Her mother holds her, and the baby puts out her little plummy paws to receive the water, sips it once, sips it again and splashes the rest on top of her head-a perfectly executed ritual. She could not be less frightened of this toothless old man who is chanting at her. Then Ketut takes the rest of the holy water and pours it into a small plastic sandwich bag, ties the bag at the top and gives it to the family to use later. The mother carries this plastic bag of water away with her as she leaves; it looks like she has just won a goldfish at the state fair, only she forgot to take the goldfish with her.

Ketut Liyer has given this family about forty minutes of his undivided attention, for the fee of about twenty-five cents. If they hadn't any money at all, he would have done the same; this is his duty as a healer. He may turn nobody away, or the gods will remove his talent for healing. Ketut gets about ten visitors a day like this, Balinese who need his help or advice on some holy or medical matter. On highly auspicious days, when everyone wants a special blessing, he might have over one hundred visitors.

"Don't you get tired?"

"But this is my profession," he tells me. "This is my hobby-medicine man."

A few more patients come throughout the afternoon, but Ketut and I get some time alone together on the porch, too. I'm so comfortable with this medicine man, as relaxed as with my own grandfather. He gives me my first lesson in Balinese meditation. He tells me that there are many ways to find God but most are too complicated for Westerners, so he will teach me an easy meditation. Which goes, essentially, like this: sit in silence and smile. I love it. He's laughing even as he's teaching it to me. Sit and smile. Perfect.

"You study Yoga in India, Liss?" he asks.

"Yes, Ketut."

"You can do Yoga," he says, "but Yoga too hard." Here, he contorts himself in a cramped lotus position and squinches up his face in a comical and constipated-looking effort. Then he breaks free and laughs, asking, "Why they always look so serious in Yoga? You make serious face like this, you scare away good energy. To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy. Even smile in your liver. Practice tonight at hotel. Not to hurry, not to try too hard. Too serious, you make you sick. You can calling the good energy with a smile. All finish for today. See you later, alligator. Come back tomorrow. I am very happy to see you, Liss. Let your conscience be your guide. If you have Western friends come to visit Bali, bring them to me for palm-reading. I am very empty in my bank since the bomb."

78

Here is Ketut Liyer's life story pretty much as he tells it:

"It is nine generations that my family is a medicine man. My father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather, all of them is a medicine man. They all want me to be medicine man because they see I have light. They see I have beautiful and I have intelligent. But I do not want to be medicine man. Too much study! Too much information! And I don't believe in medicine man! I want to be painter! I want to be artist! I have good talent with this.

"When I was still young man, I meet American man, very rich, maybe even New York City person like you. He like my painting. He wants to buy big painting from me, maybe one meter big, for lot of money. Enough money to be rich. So I start to painting this picture for him. Every day I painting, painting, painting. Even in night I painting. In this day, long time ago, no electric lightbulb like today, so I have lamp. Oil lamp, you understand? Pump lamp, have to pump it to make oil come. And I always make painting every night with oil lamp.

"One night, oil lamp is dark, so I pumping, pumping, pumping and it explode! Makes my arm on fire! I go to hospital for one month with burned arm, it make infection. Infection goes all the way to my heart. The doctor say I must to go to Singapore for cut off my arm, for amputation. This is not my cup of tea. But doctor says I must go to Singapore, have operation to cut arm off. I tell doctor-first I go home to my village.

"That night in village, I got dream. Father, grandfather, great-grandfather-all they come in my dream to my house together and tell me how to heal my burned arm. They tell me make juice from saffron and sandalwood. Put this juice on burn. Then make powder from saffron and sandalwood. Rub this powder on burn. They tell me I must do this, then I not lose my arm. So real this dream, like they in house with me, all of they together.

"I wake up. I don't know what to do, because sometimes dreams are just joking, you understand? But I make back to my home and I put this saffron and sandalwood juice on my arm. And then I put this saffron and sandalwood powder on my arm. My arm very infected, very ache, made big, very swell. But after juice and powder, become very cool. Became very cold. Start to feel better. In ten days, my arm is good. All heal.

"For that, I start to believe. Now I have dream again, with father, grandfather, great-grandfather. They tell me now I must be medicine man. My soul, I must give it to God. For do this, I must make fast for six days, understand? No food, no water. No drink. No breakfast. Not easy. I so thirsty from fast, I go to rice fields in morning, before sun. I sit in rice field with mouth open and take water from air. How you call this, the water in air in rice field in morning? Dew? Yes. Dew. Only this dew I eat for six days. No other food, only this dew. On number five day, I get unconscious. I see all yellow color everywhere. No, not yellow color-GOLD. I see gold color everywhere, even inside me. Very happy. I understand now. This gold color is God, also inside me. Same thing that is God is same thing inside me. Same-same.

"So now I must be medicine man. Now I have to learn medical books from great-grandfather. These books not made on paper, made on palm leaves. Called lontars. This is Balinese medical encyclopedia. I must learn all different plants on Bali. Not easy. One by one, I learn everything. I learn to take care of people with many problem. One problem is when someone is sick from physical. I help this physical sick with herbs. Other problem is when family is sick, when family always fighting. I help this with harmony, with special magic drawing, also with talking for helping. Put magic drawing in house, no more fighting. Sometimes people sick in love, not find right match. For Balinese and Western, too, always a lot of trouble with love, difficult to find right match. I fix love problem with mantra and with magic drawing, bring love to you. Also, I learn black magic, to help people if bad black magic spell on them. My magic drawing, you put in your house, bring you good energy.

"I still like to be artist, I like make painting when I have time, sell to gallery. My painting, always the same painting-when Bali was paradise, maybe one thousand years ago. Painting of jungle, animals, women with-what is word? Breast. Women with breast. Difficult for me to find time to make painting because of medicine man, but I must be medicine man. It is my profession. It is my hobby. Must help people or God is angry with me. Must deliver baby sometimes, do ceremony for dead man, or do ceremony for tooth-filing or wedding. Sometimes I wake up, three in morning, make painting by electric lightbulb-only time I can make painting for me. I like alone this time of day, good for making painting.

"I do true magic, not joking. Always I tell true, even if bad news. I must do good character always in my life, or I will be in hell. I speak Balinese, Indonesian, little bit Japanese, little bit English, little bit Dutch. During war, many Japanese here. Not so bad for me-I read palms for Japanese, make friendly. Before war, many Dutch here. Now many Western here, all speak English. My Dutch is-how you say? What that word you teach me yesterday? Rusty? Yes-rusty. My Dutch is rusty. Ha!

"I am in fourth caste in Bali, in very low caste like farmer. But I see many people in first caste not so intelligent as me. My name is Ketut Liyer. Liyer is name my grandfather gave me when I was little boy. It means 'bright light.' This is me."

79

I am so free here in Bali, it's almost ridiculous. The only thing I have to do every day is visit Ketut Liyer for a few hours in the afternoon, which is far short of a chore. The rest of the day gets taken care of in various nonchalant manners. I meditate for an hour every morning using the Yogic techniques my Guru taught me, and then I meditate for an hour every evening with the practices Ketut has taught me ("sit still and smile"). In between, I walk around and ride my bike and sometimes talk to people and eat lunch. I found a quiet little lending library in this town, got myself a library card, and now great, luscious portions of my life are spent reading in the garden. After the intensity of life in the Ashram, and even after the decadent business of zooming all over Italy and eating everything in sight, this is such a new and radically peaceful episode of my life. I have so much free time, you could measure it in metric tons.

Whenever I leave the hotel, Mario and the other staff members at the front desk ask me where I'm going, and every time I return, they ask me where I have been. I can almost imagine that they keep tiny maps in the desk drawer of all their loved ones, with markings indicating where everyone is at every given moment, just to make sure the entire beehive is accounted for at all times.

In the evenings I spin my bicycle high up into the hills and across the acres of rice terraces north of Ubud, with views so splendid and green. I can see the pink clouds reflected in the standing water of the rice paddies, like there are two skies-one up in heaven for the gods, and one down here in the muddy wet, just for us mortals. The other day, I rode up to the heron sanctuary, with its grudging welcome sign ("OK, you can see herons here"), but there were no herons that day, just ducks, so I watched the ducks for a while, then rode on into the next village. Along the way I passed men and women and children and chickens and dogs who all, in their own way, were busy working, but none so busy that they couldn't stop to greet me.

A few nights ago, on the top of one lovely rise of forest I saw a sign: "Artist's House for Rent, with Kitchen." Because the universe is generous, three days later I am living there. Mario helped me move in, and all his friends at the hotel gave me a tearful farewell.

My new house is on a quiet road, surrounded in all directions by rice fields. It's a little cottagelike place inside ivy-covered walls. It's owned by an Englishwoman, but she is in London for the summer, so I slide into her home, replacing her in this miraculous space. There is a bright red kitchen here, a pond full of goldfish, a marble terrace, an outdoor shower tiled in shiny mosaics; while I shampoo I can watch the herons nesting in the palm trees. Little secret paths lead through a truly enchanting garden. The place comes with a gardener, so all I have to do is look at the flowers. I don't know what any of these extraordinary equatorial flowers are called, so I make up names for them. And why not? It's my Eden, is it not? Soon I've given all the plants around here new monikers-daffodil tree, cabbage-palm, prom-dress weed, spiral show-off, tip-toe blossom, melancholy-vine and a spectacular pink orchid I have christened "Baby's First Handshake." The unnecessary and superfluous volume of pure beauty around here is not to be believed. I can pick papayas and bananas right off the trees outside my bedroom window. There's a cat who lives here who is enormously affectionate to me for the half hour every day before I feed him, then moans crazily the rest of the time like he's having Vietnam War flashbacks. Oddly, I don't mind this. I don't mind anything these days. I can't imagine or remember discontent.

The sound universe is also spectacular around here. In the evenings there's a cricket orchestra with frogs providing the bass line. In the dead of night the dogs howl about how misunderstood they are. Before dawn the roosters for miles around announce how freaking cool it is to be roosters.("We are ROOSTERS!" they holler. "We are the only ones who get to be ROOSTERS!") Every morning around sunrise there is a tropical birdsong competition, and it's always a ten-way tie for the championship. When the sun comes out the place quiets down and the butterflies get to work. The whole house is covered with vines; I feel like any day it will disappear into the foliage completely and I will disappear with it and become a jungle flower myself. The rent is less than what I used to pay in New York City for taxi fare every month.

The word paradise, by the way, which comes to us from the Persian, means literally "a walled garden."

80

That said, I must be honest here and relay that it takes me only three afternoons of research in the local library to realize that all my original ideas about Balinese paradise were a bit misguided. I'd been telling people since I first visited Bali two years ago that this small island was the world's only true utopia, a place that has known only peace and harmony and balance for all time. A perfect Eden with no history of violence or bloodshed ever. I'm not sure where I got this grand idea, but I endorsed it with full confidence.

"Even the policemen wear flowers in their hair," I would say, as if that proved it.

In reality, though, it turns out Bali has had exactly as bloody and violent and oppressive a history as anywhere else on earth where human beings have ever lived. When the Javanese kings first immigrated here in the sixteenth century, they essentially established a feudal colony, with a strict caste system which-like all self-respecting caste systems-tended not to trouble itself with consideration for those at the bottom. The economy of early Bali was fueled by a lucrative slave trade (which not only preceded European participation in the international slave traffic by several centuries, but also outlived Europe's trafficking of human lives for a good long while). Internally, the island was constantly at war as rival kings staged attacks (complete with mass rape and murder) on their neighbors. Until the late nineteenth century, the Balinese had a reputation amongst traders and sailors for being vicious fighters. (The word amok, as in "running amok," is a Balinese word, describing a battle technique of suddenly going insanely wild against one's enemies in suicidal and bloody hand-to-hand combat; the Europeans were frankly terrified by this practice.) With a well-disciplined army of 30,000, the Balinese defeated their Dutch invaders in 1848, again in 1849 and once more, for good measure, in 1850. They collapsed under Dutch rule only when the rival kings of Bali broke ranks and betrayed each other in bids for power, aligning with the enemy for the promise of good business deals later. So to gauze this island's history today in a dream of paradise is a bit insulting to reality; it's not like these people have spent the last millennium just sitting around smiling and singing happy songs.

But in the 1920s and 1930s, when an elite class of Western travelers discovered Bali, all this bloodiness was ignored as the newcomers agreed that this was truly "The Island of the Gods," where "everyone is an artist" and where humanity lives in an unspoiled state of bliss. It's been a lingering idea, this dream; most visitors to Bali (myself on my first trip included) still endorse it. "I was furious at God that I was not born Balinese," said the German photographer George Krauser after visiting Bali in the 1930s. Lured by reports of otherworldly beauty and serenity, some really A-list tourists started visiting the island-artists like Walter Spies, writers like Noel Coward, dancers like Claire Holt, actors like Charlie Chaplin, scholars like Margaret Mead (who, despite all the naked breasts, wisely called Balinese civilization on what it truly was, a society as prim as Victorian England: "Not an ounce of free libido in the whole culture.")

The party ended in the 1940s when the world went to war. The Japanese invaded Indonesia, and the blissful expatriates in their Balinese gardens with their pretty houseboys were forced to flee. In the struggle for Indonesian independence which followed the war, Bali became just as divided and violent as the rest of the archipelago, and by the 1950s (reports a study called Bali: Paradise Invented) if a Westerner dared visit Bali at all, he might have been wise to sleep with a gun under his pillow. In the 1960s, the struggle for power turned all of Indonesia into a battlefield between Nationalists and Communists. After a coup attempt in Jakarta in 1965, Nationalist soldiers were sent to Bali with the names of every suspected Communist on the island. Over the course of about a week, aided by the local police and village authorities at every step, the Nationalist forces steadily murdered their way through every township. Something like 100,000 corpses choked the beautiful rivers of Bali when the killing spree was over.

The revival of the dream of a fabled Eden came in the late 1960s, when the Indonesian government decided to reinvent Bali for the international tourist market as "The Island of the Gods," launching a massively successful marketing campaign. The tourists who were lured back to Bali were a fairly high-minded crowd (this was not Fort Lauderdale, after all), and their attention was guided toward the artistic and religious beauty inherent in the Balinese culture. Darker elements of history were overlooked. And have remained overlooked since.

Reading about all this during my afternoons in the local library leaves me somewhat confused. Wait-why did I come to Bali again? To search for the balance between worldly pleasure and spiritual devotion, right? Is this, indeed, the right setting for such a search? Do the Balinese truly inhabit that peaceful balance, more than anyone else in the world? I mean, they look balanced, what with all the dancing and praying and feasting and beauty and smiling, but I don't know what's actually going on under there. The policemen really do wear flowers tucked behind their ears, but there's corruption all over the place in Bali, just like in the rest of Indonesia (as I found out firsthand the other day when I passed a uniformed man a few hundred bucks of under-the-table cash to illegally extend my visa so I could stay in Bali for four months, after all). The Balinese quite literally live off their image of being the world's most peaceful and devotional and artistically expressive people, but how much of that is intrinsic and how much of that is economically calculated? And how much can an outsider like me ever learn of the hidden stresses that might loiter behind those "shining faces"? It's the same here as anywhere else-you look at the picture too closely and all the firm lines start to melt away into an indistinct mass of blurry brushstrokes and blended pixels.

For now, all I can say for certain is that I love the house I have rented and that the people in Bali have been gracious to me without exception. I find their art and ceremonies to be beautiful and restorative; they seem to think so, as well. That's my empirical experience of a place that is probably far more complex than I will ever understand. But whatever the Balinese need to do in order to hold their own balance (and make a living) is entirely up to them. What I'm here to do is work on my own equilibrium, and this still feels, at least for now, like a nourishing climate in which to do that.

81

I don't know how old my medicine man is. I've asked him, but he's not certain. I seem to remember, when I was here two years ago, the translator saying that he was eighty. But Mario asked him the other day how old he was and Ketut said, "Maybe sixty-five, not sure." When I asked him what year he was born, he said he didn't remember being born. I know he was an adult when the Japanese were occupying Bali during World War II, which could make him about eighty now. But when he told me the story about burning his arm as a young man, and I asked him what year that had happened, he said, "I don't know. Maybe 1920?" So if he was around twenty years old in 1920, then that makes him what now? Maybe a hundred and five? So we can estimate that he's somewhere between sixty and a hundred and five years old.

I've also noticed that his estimation of his age changes by the day, based on how he feels. When he's really tired, he'll sigh and say, "Maybe eighty-five today," but when he's feeling more upbeat he'll say, "I think I'm sixty today." Perhaps this is as good a way of estimating age as any-how old do you feel? What else matters, really? Still, I'm always trying to figure it out. One afternoon I got really simple, and just said, "Ketut-when is your birthday?"

"Thursday," he said.

"This Thursday?"

"No. Not this Thursday. A Thursday."

This is a good start… but is there no more information than that? A Thursday in what month? In what year? No telling. Anyway, the day of the week that you were born is more important in Bali than the year, which is why, even though Ketut doesn't know how old he is, he was able to tell me that the patron god of children born on Thursdays is Shiva the Destroyer, and that the day has two guiding animal spirits-the lion and the tiger. The official tree of children born on Thursday is the banyan. The official bird is the peacock. A person born on Thursday is always talking first, interrupting everyone else, can be a little aggressive, tends to be handsome ("a playboy or playgirl," in Ketut's words) but has a decent overall character, with an excellent memory and a desire to help other people.

When his Balinese patients come to Ketut with serious health or economic or relationship problems, he always asks on which day of the week they were born, in order to concoct the correct prayers and medicines to help them. Because sometimes, Ketut says, "people are sick in the birthday," and they need a little astrological adjustment in order to set them in balance again. A local family brought their youngest son to see Ketut the other day. The child was maybe four years old. I asked what the problem was and Ketut translated that the family was concerned about "problems with very aggressive this boy. This boy not take orders. Bad behave. Not pay attention. Everyone in house tired from the boy. Also, sometimes this boy too dizzy."

Ketut asked the parents if he could hold the child for a moment. They put their son in Ketut's lap and the boy leaned back against the old medicine man's chest, relaxed and unafraid. Ketut held him tenderly, placed a palm on the child's forehead, shut his eyes. He then placed a palm on the boy's belly, shut his eyes again. He was smiling and speaking gently to the child the whole time. The examination was quickly over. Ketut handed the boy back to his parents, and the people left soon after with a prescription and some holy water. Ketut told me he'd asked the parents about the circumstances of the boy's birth and had discovered the child had been born under a bad star and on a Saturday-a day of birth which contains elements of potentially bad spirits, like crow spirit, owl spirit, rooster spirit (this is what makes the child a fighter) and puppet spirit (this is what's causing his dizziness). But it was not all bad news. Being born on Saturday, the boy's body also contained rainbow spirit and butterfly spirit, and these could be strengthened. A series of offerings would have to be made and the child would be brought into balance once more.

"Why did you hold your hand on the boy's forehead and stomach?" I asked. "Were you checking for fever?"

"I was check his brain," Ketut said. "To see if he had evil spirits in his mind."

"What kind of evil spirits?"

"Liss," he said. "I am Balinese. I believe from black magic. I believe evil spirits come out rivers and hurt people."

"Did the boy have evil spirits?"

"No. He is only sick in his birthday. His family will make sacrifice. This will be OK. And you, Liss? You are practice Balinese meditation every night? Keep mind and heart clean?"

"Every night," I promised.

"You learn to smile even in your liver?"

"Even in my liver, Ketut. Big smile in my liver."

"Good. This smile will make you beautiful woman. This will give you power of to be very pretty. You can use this power-pretty power!-to get what you want in life."

"Pretty power!" I repeat the phrase, loving it. Like a meditating Barbie. "I want pretty power!"

"You are still practice Indian meditation, too?"

"Every morning."

"Good. Don't forget your Yoga. Beneficial to you. Good for you to keep practice both ways of meditation-Indian and Balinese. Both different, but good in equal way. Same-same. I think about religion, most of it is same-same."

"Not everybody thinks so, Ketut. Some people like to argue about God."

"Not necessary," he said. "I have good idea, for if you meet some person from different religion and he want to make argument about God. My idea is, you listen to everything this man say about God. Never argue about God with him. Best thing to say is, 'I agree with you.' Then you go home, pray what you want. This is my idea for people to have peace about religion."

Ketut keeps his chin lifted all the time, I've noticed, his head held a little bit back, sort of quizzical and elegant at the same time. Like a curious old king, he looks at the whole world from above his nose. His skin is lustrous, golden brown. He's almost totally bald, but makes up for it with exceptionally long and feathery eyebrows which look eager to take flight. Except for his missing teeth and his burn-scarred right arm, he seems in perfect health. He told me that he was a dancer in his youth, for the temple ceremonies, and that he was beautiful back then. I believe it. He eats only one meal a day-a typically simple Balinese dish of rice mixed with either duck or fish. He likes to drink one cup of coffee with sugar every day, mostly just to celebrate the fact that he can afford coffee and sugar. You, too, could easily live to a hundred and five on this diet. He keeps his body strong, he says, by meditating every night before sleep and by pulling the healthy energy of the universe into his core. He says that the human body is made of nothing more or less than the five elements of all creation-water (apa), fire (tejo), wind (bayu), sky (akasa) and earth (pritiwi)-and all you have to do is concentrate on this reality during meditation and you will receive energy from all of these sources and you will stay strong. Demonstrating his occasionally very accurate ear for English idiom, he said, "The microcosm becomes the macrocosm. You-microcosm-will become same as universe-macrocosm."

He was so busy today, crowded with Balinese patients who were stacked up all over his courtyard like cargo crates, all of them with babies or offerings in their laps. He had farmers and businessmen there, fathers and grandmothers. There were parents with babies who weren't keeping food down, and old men haunted by black magic curses. There were young men tossed by aggression and lust, and young women looking for love matches while suffering children complained about their rashes. Everyone out of balance; everyone needing equilibrium restored.

The mood of the courtyard of Ketut's home is always one of total patience, though. Sometimes people must wait for three hours before Ketut gets a chance to take care of them, but they never so much as tap their feet or roll their eyes in exasperation. Extraordinary, too, is the way the children wait, leaning up against their beautiful mothers, playing with their own fingers to pass the time. I'm always amused later when it turns out that these same tranquil children have been brought over to see Ketut because the mother and father have decided that the child is "too naughty" and needs a cure. That little girl? That little three-year-old girl who was sitting silently in the hot sun for four straight hours, without complaint or snack or toy? She's naughty? I wish I could say, "People-you want to see naughty, I'll take you to America, show you some kids that'll have you believing in Ritalin." But there's just a different standard here for good behavior in children.

Ketut treated all the patients obligingly, one after another, seemingly unconcerned by the passage of time, giving all exactly the attention they needed regardless of who was waiting to be seen next. He was so busy he didn't even get his one meal at lunchtime, but stayed glued to his porch, obliged by his respect for God and his ancestors to sit there for hours on end, healing everyone. By evening, his eyes looked as tired as the eyes of a Civil War field surgeon. His last patient of the day had been a deeply troubled middle-aged Balinese man complaining that he had not slept well in weeks; he was being haunted, he said, by a nightmare of "drowning in two rivers at the same time."

Until this evening, I still wasn't sure what my role was in Ketut Liyer's life. Every day I've been asking him if he's really sure he wants me around, and he keeps insisting that I must come and spend time with him. I feel guilty taking up so much of his day, but he always seems disappointed when I leave at the end of the afternoon. I'm not teaching him any English, not really. Whatever English he already learned however many decades ago has been cemented into his mind by now and there isn't much space for correction or new vocabulary. It's all I can do to get him to say, "Nice to see you," when I arrive, instead of "Nice to meet you."

Tonight, when his last patient had left and Ketut was exhausted, looking ancient from the weariness of service, I asked him whether I should go now and let him have some privacy, and he replied, "I always have time for you." Then he asked me to tell him some stories about India, about America, about Italy, about my family. That's when I realized that I am not Ketut Liyer's English teacher, nor am I exactly his theological student, but I am the merest and simplest of pleasures for this old medicine man-I am his company. I'm somebody he can talk to because he enjoys hearing about the world and he hasn't had much of a chance to see it.

In our hours together on this porch, Ketut has asked me questions about everything from how much cars cost in Mexico to what causes AIDS. (I did my best with both topics, though I believe there are experts who could have answered with more substance.) Ketut has never been off the island of Bali in his life. He has spent very little time, actually, off this porch. He once went on a pilgrimage to Mount Agung, the biggest and most spiritually important volcano on Bali, but he said the energy was so powerful there he could scarcely meditate for fear he might be consumed by sacred fire. He goes to the temples for the big important ceremonies and he is invited to his neighbors' homes to perform weddings or coming-of-age rituals, but most of the time he can be found right here, cross-legged upon this bamboo mat, surrounded by his great-grandfather's palm-leaf medical encyclopedias, taking care of people, mollifying demons and occasionally treating himself to a cup of coffee with sugar.

"I had a dream from you last night," he told me today. "I had a dream you are riding your bicycle anywhere."

Because he paused, I suggested a grammatical correction. "Do you mean, you had a dream that I was riding my bicycle everywhere?"

"Yes! I dream last night you are riding your bicycle anywhere and everywhere. You are so happy in my dream! All over world, you are riding your bicycle. And I following you!"

Maybe he wishes he could…

"Maybe you can come see me someday in America, Ketut," I said.

"Can't, Liss." He shook his head, cheerfully resigned to his destiny. "Don't have enough teeth to travel on airplane."

82

As for Ketut's wife, it takes me a while to align myself with her. Nyomo, as he calls her, is big and plump with a stiff-hip limp and teeth stained red by chewing on betel nut tobacco. Her toes are painfully crooked from arthritis. She has a shrewd eye. She was scary to me from the first sight. She's got that fierce old lady vibe you see sometimes in Italian widows and righteous black churchgoing mamas. She looks like she'd whup your hide for the slightest of misdemeanors. She was blatantly suspicious of me at first- Who is this flamingo traipsing through my house every day? She would stare at me from inside the sooty shadows of her kitchen, unconvinced as to my right to exist. I would smile at her and she'd just keep staring, deciding whether she should chase me out with a broomstick or not.

But then something changed. It was after the whole photocopy incident.

Ketut Liyer has all these piles of old, lined notebooks and ledgers, filled with tiny little handwriting, of ancient Balinese-Sanskrit mysteries about healing. He copied these notes into these notebooks way back in the 1940s or 1950s, sometime after his grandfather died, so he would have all the medical information recorded. This stuff is beyond invaluable. There are volumes of data about rare trees and leaves and plants and all their medicinal properties. He's got some sixty pages of diagrams about palm-reading, and more notebooks full of astrological data, mantras, spells and cures. The only thing is, these notebooks had been through decades of mildew and mice and they're shredded almost to bits. Yellow and crumbling and musty, they look like disintegrating piles of autumn leaves. Every time he turns a page, he rips the page.

"Ketut," I said to him last week, holding up one of his battered notebooks, "I'm not a doctor like you are, but I think this book is dying."

He laughed. "You think is dying?"

"Sir," I said gravely, "here is my professional opinion-if this book does not get some help soon, it will be dead within the next six months."

Then I asked if I could take the notebook into town with me and photocopy it before it died. I had to explain what photocopying was, and promise that I would only keep the notebook for twenty-four hours and that I would do it no harm. Finally, he agreed to let me take it off the porch property with my most passionate assurances that I would be careful with his grandfather's wisdom. I rode into town to the shop with the Internet computers and photocopiers and I gingerly duplicated every page, then had the new, clean photocopies bound in a nice plastic folder. I brought the old and the new versions of the book back the next day before noon. Ketut was astonished and delighted, so happy because he's had that notebook, he said, for fifty years. Which might literally mean "fifty years," or might just mean "a really long time."

I asked if I could copy the rest of his notebooks, to keep that information safe, too. He held out another limp, broken, shredded, gasping document filled with Balinese Sanskrit and complicated sketches.

"Another patient!" he said.

"Let me heal it!" I replied.

This was another grand success. By the end of the week, I'd photocopied several of the old manuscripts. Every day, Ketut called his wife over and showed her the new copies and he was overjoyed. Her facial expression didn't change at all, but she studied the evidence thoroughly.

And the next Monday when I came to visit, Nyomo brought me hot coffee, served in a jelly jar. I watched her carry the drink across the courtyard on a china saucer, limping slowly on the long journey from her kitchen to Ketut's porch. I assumed the coffee was intended for Ketut, but, no-he'd already had his coffee. This was for me. She'd prepared it for me. I tried to thank her but she looked annoyed at my thanks, kind of swatted me away the way she swats away the rooster who always tries to stand on her outdoor kitchen table when she's preparing lunch. But the next day she brought me a glass of coffee and a bowl of sugar on the side. And the next day it was a glass of coffee, a bowl of sugar and a cold boiled potato. Every day that week, she added a new treat. This was starting to feel like that childhood car trip alphabet-memory game: "I'm going to Grandma's house, and I'm bringing an apple… I'm going to Grandma's house and I'm bringing an apple and a balloon… I'm going to Grandma's house and I'm bringing an apple, a balloon, a cup of coffee in a jelly glass, a bowl of sugar and a cold potato…"

Then, yesterday, I was standing in the courtyard, saying my good-byes to Ketut, and Nyomo came shuffling past with her broom, sweeping and pretending not to be paying attention to everything that happens in her empire. I had my hands clasped behind my back as I was standing there, and she came up behind me and took one of my hands in hers. She fumbled through my hand like she was trying to untumble the combination on a lock and she found my index finger. Then she wrapped her whole big, hard fist around that finger and gave me this deep, long squeeze. I could feel her love pulsing through her power grip, right up into my arm and all the way down into my guts. Then she dropped my hand and limped away arthritically, saying not a single word, continuing her sweeping as though nothing had happened. While I stood there quietly drowning in two rivers of happiness at the same time.

83

I have a new friend. His name is Yudhi, which is pronounced "You-Day." He's Indonesian, originally from Java. I got to know him because he rented my house to me; he's working for the Englishwoman who owns the place, looking after her property while she's away in London for the summer. Yudhi is twenty-seven years old and stocky in build and talks kind of like a southern California surfer. He calls me "man" and "dude" all the time. He's got a smile that could stop crime, and he's got a long, complicated life story for somebody so young.

He was born in Jakarta; his mother was a housewife, his father an Indonesian fan of Elvis who owned a small air-conditioning and refrigeration business. The family was Christian-an oddity in this part of the world, and Yudhi tells entertaining stories about being mocked by the neighborhood Muslim kids for such shortcomings as "You eat pork!" and "You love Jesus!" Yudhi wasn't bothered by the teasing; Yudhi, by nature, isn't bothered by much. His mom, however, didn't like him hanging around with the Muslim kids, mostly on account of the fact that they were always barefoot, which Yudhi also liked to be, but she thought it was unhygienic, so she gave her son a choice-he could either wear shoes and play outside, or he could stay barefoot and remain indoors. Yudhi doesn't like wearing shoes, so he spent a big chunk of his childhood and adolescence life in his bedroom, and that's where he learned how to play the guitar. Barefoot.

The guy has a musical ear like maybe nobody I've ever met. He's beautiful with the guitar, never had lessons but understands melody and harmony like they were the kid sisters he grew up with. He makes these East-West blends of music that combine classical Indonesian lullabies with reggae groove and early-days Stevie Wonder funk-it's hard to explain, but he should be famous. I never knew anybody who heard Yudhi's music who didn't think he should be famous.

Here's what he always wanted to do most of all-live in America and work in show business. The world's shared dream. So when Yudhi was still a Javanese teenager, he somehow talked himself into a job (speaking hardly any English yet) on a Carnival Cruise Lines ship, thereby casting himself out of his narrow Jakarta environs and into the big, blue world. The job Yudhi got on the cruise ship was one of those insane jobs for industrious immigrants-living belowdecks, working twelve hours a day, one day off a month, cleaning. His fellow workers were Filipinos and Indonesians. The Indonesians and the Filipinos slept and ate in separate quarters of the boat, never mingling (Muslims vs. Christians, don't you know), but Yudhi, in typical fashion, befriended everybody and became a kind of emissary between the two groups of Asian laborers. He saw more similarities than differences between these maids and custodians and dishwashers, all of whom were working bottomless hours in order to send a hundred dollars or so a month back to their families at home.

The first time the cruise ship sailed into New York Harbor, Yudhi stayed up all night, perched on the highest deck, watching the city skyline appear over the horizon, heart hammering with excitement. Hours later, he got off the ship in New York and hailed a yellow cab, just like in the movies. When the recent African immigrant driving the taxi asked where he'd like to go, Yudhi said, "Anywhere, man-just drive me around. I want to see everything." A few months later the ship came to New York City again, and this time Yudhi disembarked for good. His contract was up with the cruise line and he wanted to live in America now.

He ended up in suburban New Jersey, of all places, living for a while with an Indonesian man he'd met on the ship. He got a job in a sandwich shop at the mall-again, ten-to-twelve-hour days of immigrant-style labor, this time working with Mexicans, not Filipinos. He learned better Spanish those first few months than English. In his rare moments of free time, Yudhi would ride the bus into Manhattan and just wander the streets, still so speechlessly infatuated with the city-a town he describes today as "the place which is the most full of love in the entire world." Somehow (again-that smile) he met up in New York City with a crowd of young musicians from all over the world and he took to playing guitar with them, jamming all night with talented kids from Jamaica, Africa, France, Japan… And at one of those gigs, he met Ann-a pretty blonde from Connecticut who played bass. They fell in love. They got married. They found an apartment in Brooklyn and they were surrounded by groovy friends who all went on road trips together down to the Florida Keys. Life was just unbelievably happy. His English was quickly impeccable. He was thinking about going to college.

On September 11, Yudhi watched the towers fall from his rooftop in Brooklyn. Like everyone else he was paralyzed with grief at what had happened-how could somebody inflict such an appalling atrocity on the city that is the most full of love of anywhere in the world? I don't know how much attention Yudhi was paying when the U.S. Congress subsequently passed the Patriot Act in response to the terrorist threat-legislation which included draconian new immigration laws, many of which were directed against Islamic nations such as Indonesia. One of these provisions demanded that all Indonesian citizens living in America register with the Department of Homeland Security. The telephones started ringing as Yudhi and his young Indonesian immigrant friends tried to figure out what to do-many of them had overstayed their visas and were afraid that registering would get them deported. On the other hand, they were afraid to not register, thereby behaving like criminals. Presumably the fundamentalist Islamic terrorists roaming around America ignored this registration law, but Yudhi decided that he did want to register. He was married to an American and he wanted to update his immigration status and become a legal citizen. He didn't want to live in hiding.

He and Ann consulted all kinds of lawyers, but nobody knew how to advise them. Before 9/11 there would have been no problems-Yudhi, now married, could just go to the immigration office, update his visa situation and begin the process of gaining citizenship. But now? Who knew? "The laws haven't been tested yet," said the immigration lawyers. "The laws will be tested on you." So Yudhi and his wife had a meeting with a nice immigration official and shared their story. The couple were told that Yudhi was to come back later that same afternoon, for "a second interview." They should have been wary then; Yudhi was strictly instructed to return without his wife, without a lawyer, and carrying nothing in his pockets. Hoping for the best, he did return alone and empty-handed to the second interview-and that's when they arrested him.

They took him to a detention center in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where he stayed for weeks amongst a vast crowd of immigrants, all of whom had recently been arrested under the Homeland Security Act, many of whom had been living and working in America for years, most of whom didn't speak English. Some had been unable to contact their families upon their arrests. They were invisible in the detention center; nobody knew they existed anymore. It took a near-hysterical Ann days to find out where her husband had been taken. What Yudhi remembers most about the detention center was the dozen coal-black, thin and terrified Nigerian men who had been found on a freight ship inside a steel shipping crate; they had been hiding in that container at the bottom of that ship for almost a month before they were discovered, trying to get to America-or anywhere. They had no idea now where they were. Their eyes were so wide, Yudhi said, it looked like they were still being blinded with spotlights.

After a period of detention, the U.S. government sent my Christian friend Yudhi-now an Islamic terrorist suspect, apparently-back to Indonesia. This was last year. I don't know if he's ever going to be allowed anywhere near America again. He and his wife are still trying to figure out what to do with their lives now; their dreams hadn't called for living out their lives in Indonesia.

Unable to cope with Jakarta's slums after having lived in the first world, Yudhi came to Bali to see if he could make a living here, though he's having trouble being accepted into this society because he isn't Balinese-he's from Java. And the Balinese don't like the Javanese one bit, thinking of them all as thieves and beggars. So Yudhi encounters more prejudice here-in his own nation of Indonesia-than he ever did back in New York. He doesn't know what to do next. Maybe his wife, Ann, will come and join him here. Then again-maybe not. What's here for her? Their young marriage, conducted now entirely by e-mail, is on the rocks. He's so out of place here, so disoriented. He's more of an American than he is anything else; Yudhi and I use the same slang, we talk about our favorite restaurants in New York and we like all the same movies. He comes over to my house in the evenings and I get him beers and he plays me the most amazing songs on his guitar. I wish he were famous. If there was any fairness, he would be so famous by now.

He says, "Dude-why is life all crazy like this?"

84

"ketut, why is life all crazy like this?" I asked my medicine man the next day.

He replied, "Bhuta ia, dewa ia."

"What does that mean?"

"Man is a demon, man is a god. Both true."

This was a familiar idea to me. It's very Indian, very Yogic. The notion is that human beings are born, as my Guru has explained many times, with the equivalent potential for both contraction and expansion. The ingredients of both darkness and light are equally present in all of us, and then it's up to the individual (or the family, or the society) to decide what will be brought forth-the virtues or the malevolence. The madness of this planet is largely a result of the human being's difficulty in coming into virtuous balance with himself. Lunacy (both collective and individual) results.

"So what can we do about the craziness of the world?"

"Nothing." Ketut laughed, but with a dose of kindness. "This is nature of world. This is destiny. Worry about your craziness only-make you in peace."

"But how should we find peace within ourselves?" I asked Ketut.

"Meditation," he said. "Purpose of meditation is only happiness and peace-very easy. Today I will teach a new meditation, make you even better person. Is called Four Brothers Meditation."

Ketut went on to explain that the Balinese believe we are each accompanied at birth by four invisible brothers, who come into the world with us and protect us throughout our lives. When the child is in the womb, her four siblings are even there with her-they are represented by the placenta, the amniotic fluid, the umbilical cord and the yellow waxy substance that protects an unborn baby's skin. When the baby is born, the parents collect as much of these extraneous birthing materials as possible, placing them in a coconut shell and burying it by the front door of the family's house. According to the Balinese, this buried coconut is the holy resting place of the four unborn brothers, and that spot is tended to forever, like a shrine.

The child is taught from earliest consciousness that she has these four brothers with her in the world wherever she goes, and that they will always look after her. The brothers inhabit the four virtues a person needs in order to be safe and happy in life: intelligence, friendship, strength and (I love this one) poetry. The brothers can be called upon in any critical situation for rescue and assistance. When you die, your four spirit brothers collect your soul and bring you to heaven.

Today Ketut told me that he's never taught any Westerner the Four Brothers Meditation yet, but he thinks I am ready for it. First, he taught me the names of my invisible siblings-Ango Patih, Maragio Patih, Banus Patih and Banus Patih Ragio. He instructed me to memorize these names and to ask for the help of my brothers throughout my life, whenever I need them. He says I don't have to be formal when I speak to them, the way we are formal when we pray to God. I'm allowed to speak to my brothers with familiar affection, because "It just your family!" He tells me to say their names as I'm washing myself in the morning, and they will join me. Say their names again every time before I eat, and I will include my brothers in the enjoyment of the meal. Call on them before I go to sleep, saying, "I am sleeping now, so you must stay awake and protect me," and my brothers will shield me through the night, stop demons and nightmares.

"That's good," I told him, "because I have a problem sometimes with nightmares."

"What nightmares?"

I explained to the medicine man that I've been having the same horrible nightmare since childhood, namely that there is a man with a knife standing next to my bed. This nightmare is so vivid, the man is so real, that it sometimes makes me scream out in fear. It leaves my heart pounding every time (and has never been fun for those who share my bed, either). I've been having this nightmare every few weeks for as long as I can remember.

I told this to Ketut, and he told me I had been misunderstanding the vision for years. The man with the knife in my bedroom is not an enemy; he's just one of my four brothers. He's the spirit brother who represents strength. He's not there to attack me, but to guard me while I sleep. I'm probably waking up because I'm sensing the commotion of my spirit brother fighting away some demon who might be trying to hurt me. It is not a knife my brother is carrying, but a kris-a small, powerful dagger. I don't have to be afraid. I can go back to sleep, knowing I am protected.

"You lucky," Ketut said. "Lucky you can see him. Sometimes I see my brothers in meditation, but very rare for regular person to see like this. I think you have big spiritual power. I hope maybe someday you become medicine woman."

"OK," I said, laughing, "but only if I can have my own TV series."

He laughed with me, not getting the joke, of course, but loving the idea that people make jokes. Ketut then instructed me that whenever I speak to my four spirit brothers, I must tell them who I am, so they can recognize me. I must use the secret nickname they have for me. I must say, "I am Lagoh Prano."

Lagoh Prano means "Happy Body."

I rode my bicycle back home, pushing my happy body up the hills toward my house in the late afternoon sun. On my way through the forest, a big male monkey dropped out of a tree right in front of me and bared his fangs at me. I didn't even flinch. I said, "Back off, Jack-I got four brothers protecting my ass," and I just rode right on by him.

85

Although the next day (protective brothers notwithstanding) I did get hit by a bus. It was sort of a smallish bus, but nevertheless it did knock me off my bicycle as I was cruising down the shoulderless road. I got tossed into a cement irrigation ditch. About thirty Balinese people on motorcycles stopped to help me, having witnessed the accident (the bus was long gone), and everyone invited me to their house for tea or offered to drive me to the hospital, they all felt so bad about the whole incident. It wasn't that serious a wreck, though, considering what it might have been. My bicycle was fine, although the basket was bent and my helmet was cracked. (Better the helmet than the head in such cases.) The worst of the damage was a deep cut on my knee, full of bits of pebbles and dirt, that proceeded-over the next few days in the moist tropical air-to become nastily infected.

I didn't want to worry him, but a few days later I finally rolled up my pants leg on Ketut Liyer's porch, peeled off the yellowing bandage, and showed my wound to the old medicine man. He peered at it, concerned.

"Infect," he diagnosed. "Painful."

"Yes," I said.

"You should go see doctor."

This was a little surprising. Wasn't he the doctor? But for some reason he didn't volunteer to help and I didn't push it. Maybe he doesn't administer medication to Westerners. Or maybe Ketut just had a secret hidden master plan, because it was my banged-up knee that allowed me, in the end, to meet Wayan. And from that meeting, everything that was meant to happen… happened.

86

Wayan Nuriyasih is, like Ketut Liyer, a Balinese healer. There are some differences between them, though. He's elderly and male; she's a woman in her late thirties. He's more of a priestly figure, somewhat more mystical, while Wayan is a hands-on doctor, mixing herbs and medications in her own shop and taking care of patients right there on the premises.

Wayan has a little storefront shop in the center of Ubud called "Traditional Balinese Healing Center." I'd ridden my bike past it many times on my way down to Ketut's, noticing it because of all the potted plants outside the place, and because of the blackboard with the curious handwritten advertisement for the "Multivitamin Lunch Special." But I'd never gone into the place before my knee got messed up. After Ketut sent me to find a doctor, though, I remembered the shop and came by on my bicycle, hoping somebody there might be able to help me deal with the infection.

Wayan's place is a very small medical clinic and home and restaurant all at the same time. Downstairs there's a tiny kitchen and a modest public eating area with three tables and few chairs. Upstairs there's a private area where Wayan gives massages and treatments. There's one dark bedroom in the back.

I limped into the shop with my sore knee and introduced myself to Wayan the healer-a strikingly attractive Balinese woman with a wide smile and shiny black hair down to her waist. There were two shy young girls hiding behind her in the kitchen who smiled when I waved to them, then ducked away again. I showed Wayan my infected wound and asked if she could help. Soon Wayan had water and herbs boiling up on the stove, and was making me drink jamu-traditional Indonesian homemade medicinal concoctions. She placed hot green leaves on my knee and it started to feel better immediately.

We got to talking. Her English was excellent. Because she is Balinese, she immediately asked me the three standard introductory questions-Where are you going today? Where are you coming from? Are you married?

When I told her I wasn't married ("Not yet!") she looked taken aback.

"Never been married?" she asked.

"No," I lied. I don't like lying, but I generally have found it's easier not to mention divorce to the Balinese because they get so upset about it.

"Really never been married?" she asked again, and she was looking at me with great curiosity now.

"Honestly," I lied. "I've never been married."

"You sure?" This was getting weird.

"I'm totally sure!"

"Not even once?" she asked.

OK, so she can see through me.

"Well," I confessed, "there was that one time…"

And her face cleared like: Yes, I thought as much. She asked, "Divorced?"

"Yes," I said, ashamed now. "Divorced."

"I could tell you are divorced."

"It's not very common here, is it?"

"But me, too," said Wayan, entirely to my surprise. "Me too, divorced."

"You?"

"I did everything I could," she said. "I try everything before I got a divorce, praying every day. But I had to go away from him."

Her eyes filled up with tears, and next thing you knew, I was holding Wayan's hand, having just met my first Balinese divorcee, and I was saying, "I'm sure you did the best you could, sweetie. I'm sure you tried everything."

"Divorce is too sad," she said.

I agreed.

I stayed there in Wayan's shop for the next five hours, talking with my new best friend about her troubles. She cleaned up the infection in my knee as I listened to her story. Wayan's Balinese husband, she told me, was a man who "drink all the time, always gamble, lose all our money, then beat me when I don't give him more money for to gamble and to drink." She said, "He beat me into the hospital many times." She parted her hair, showed me scars on her head and said, "This is from when he hit me with motorcycle helmet. Always, he was hitting me with this motorcycle helmet when he is drinking, when I don't make money. He hit me so much, I go unconscious, dizzy, can't see. I think it is lucky I am healer, my family are healers, because I know how to heal myself after he beats me. I think if I was not healer, I would lose my ears, you know, not be able to hear things anymore. Or maybe lose my eye, not be able to see." She left him, she told me, after he beat her so severely "that I lose my baby, my second child, the one in my belly." After which incident their firstborn child, a bright little girl with the nickname of Tutti, said, "I think you should get a divorce, Mommy. Every time you go to the hospital you leave too much work around the house for Tutti."

Tutti was four years old when she said this.

To exit a marriage in Bali leaves a person alone and unprotected in ways that are almost impossible for a Westerner to imagine. The Balinese family unit, enclosed within the walls of a family compound, is merely everything-four generations of siblings, cousins, parents, grandparents and children all living together in a series of small bungalows surrounding the family temple, taking care of each other from birth to death. The family compound is the source of strength, financial security, health care, day care, education and-most important to the Balinese-spiritual connection.

The family compound is so vital that the Balinese think of it as a single, living person. The population of a Balinese village is traditionally counted not by the number of individuals, but by the number of compounds. The compound is a self-sustaining universe. So you don't leave it. (Unless, of course, you are a woman, in which case you move only once-out of your father's family compound and into your husband's.) When this system works-which it does in this healthy society almost all the time-it produces the most sane, protected, calm, happy and balanced human beings in the world. But when it doesn't work? As with my new friend Wayan? The outcasts are lost in airless orbit. Her choice was either to stay in the family compound safety net with a husband who kept putting her in the hospital, or to save her own life and leave, which left her with nothing.

Well, not exactly nothing, actually. She did take with her an encyclopedic knowledge of healing, her goodness, her work ethic and her daughter Tutti-whom she had to fight hard to keep. Bali is a patriarchy to the end. In the rare case of a divorce, the children automatically belong to the father. To get Tutti back, Wayan had to hire a lawyer, whom she paid with every single thing she had. I mean- everything. She sold off not only her furniture and jewelry, but also her forks and spoons, her socks and shoes, her old washcloths and half-burned candles-everything went to pay that lawyer. But she did get her daughter back, in the end, after a two-year battle. Wayan is just lucky Tutti was a girl; if she'd been a boy, Wayan never would have seen the kid again. Boys are much more valuable.

For the last few years now, Wayan and Tutti have been living on their own-all alone, in the beehive of Bali!-moving from place to place every few months as money comes and goes, always sleepless with worry about where to go next. Which has been difficult because every time she moves, her patients (mostly Balinese, who are all on hard times themselves these days) have trouble finding her again. Also, with every move, little Tutti has to be pulled out of school. Tutti was always first in her class before, but has slipped since the last move down to twentieth out of fifty children.

In the middle of Wayan's telling me this story, Tutti herself came charging into the shop, having arrived home from school. She's eight years old now and a mighty exhibition of charisma and fireworks. This little cherry bomb of a girl (pigtailed and skinny and excited) asked me in lively English if I'd like to eat lunch, and Wayan said, "I forgot! You should have lunch!" and the mother and daughter rushed into their kitchen and-with the help of the two shy young girls hiding back there-produced sometime later the best food I'd tasted yet in Bali.

Little Tutti brought out each course of the meal with a bright-voiced explanation of what was on the plate, wearing a huge grin, generally just being so totally peppy she should've been spinning a baton.

"Turmeric juice, for keep clean the kidneys!" she announced.

"Seaweed, for calcium!"

"Tomato salad, for vitamin D!"

"Mixed herbs, for not get malaria!"

I finally said, "Tutti, where did you learn to speak such good English?"

"From a book!" she proclaimed.

"I think you are a very clever girl," I informed her.

"Thank you!" she said, and did a spontaneous little happy dance. "You are a very clever girl, too!"

Balinese kids aren't normally like this, by the way. They're usually all quiet and polite, hiding behind their mother's skirts. Not Tutti. She was all show-biz. She was all show and tell.

"I will see you my books!" Tutti sang, and hurtled up the stairs to get them.

"She wants to be an animal doctor," Wayan told me. "What is the word in English?"

"Veterinarian?"

"Yes. Veterinarian. But she has many questions about animals, I don't know how to answer. She says, 'Mommy, if somebody brings me a sick tiger, do I bandage its teeth first, so it doesn't bite me? If a snake gets sick and needs medicine, where is the opening?' I don't know where she gets these ideas. I hope she can go to university."

Tutti careened down the stairs, arms full of books, and zinged herself into her mother's lap. Wayan laughed and kissed her daughter, all the sadness about the divorce suddenly gone from her face. I watched them, thinking that little girls who make their mothers live grow up to be such powerful women. Already, in the space of one afternoon, I was so in love with this kid. I sent up a spontaneous prayer to God: May Tutti Nuriyasih someday bandage the teeth of a thousand white tigers!

I loved Tutti's mother, too. But I'd been in their shop now for hours and felt I should leave. Some other tourists had wandered into the place, and were hoping to be served lunch. One of the tourists, a brassy older broad from Australia, was loudly asking if Wayan could please help cure her "godawful constipation." I was thinking, Sing it a little louder, honey, and we can all dance to it…

"I will come back tomorrow," I promised Wayan, "and I'll order the multivitamin lunch special again."

"Your knee is better now," Wayan said. "Quickly better. No infection anymore."

She wiped the last of the green herbal goo off my leg, then sort of jiggled my kneecap around a bit, feeling for something. Then she felt the other knee, closing her eyes. She opened her eyes, grinned and said, "I can tell by your knees that you don't have much sex lately."

I said, "Why? Because they're so close together?"

She laughed. "No-it's the cartilage. Very dry. Hormones from sex lubricate the joints. How long since sex for you?"

"About a year and a half."

"You need a good man. I will find one for you. I will pray at the temple for a good man for you, because now you are my sister. Also, if you come back tomorrow, I will clean your kidneys for you."

"A good man and clean kidneys, too? That sounds like a great deal."

"I never tell anybody these things before about my divorce," she told me. "But my life is heavy, too much sad, too much hard. I don't understand why life is so hard."

Then I did a strange thing. I took both the healer's hands in mine and I said with the most powerful conviction, "The hardest part of your life is behind you now, Wayan."

I left the shop, then, trembling unaccountably, all jammed up with some potent intuition or impulse that I could not yet identify or release.

87

Now my days are divided into natural thirds. I spend my mornings with Wayan at her shop, laughing and eating. I spend my afternoons with Ketut the medicine man, talking and drinking coffee. I spend my evenings in my lovely garden, either hanging out by myself and reading a book, or sometimes talking with Yudhi, who comes over to play his guitar. Every morning, I meditate while the sun comes up over the rice fields, and before bedtime I speak to my four spirit brothers and ask them to watch over me while I sleep.

I've been here only a few weeks and I feel a rather mission-accomplished sensation already. The task in Indonesia was to search for balance, but I don't feel like I'm searching for anything anymore because the balance has somehow naturally come into place. It's not that I'm becoming Balinese (no more than I ever became Italian or Indian) but only this-I can feel my own peace, and I love the swing of my days between easeful devotional practices and the pleasures of beautiful landscape, dear friends and good food. I've been praying a lot lately, comfortably and frequently. Most of the time, I find that I want to pray when I'm on my bicycle, riding home from Ketut's house through the monkey forest and the rice terraces in the dusky late afternoons. I pray, of course, not to be hit by another bus, or jumped by a monkey or bit by a dog, but that's just superfluous; most of my prayers are expressions of sheer gratitude for the fullness of my contentment. I have never felt less burdened by myself or by the world.

I keep remembering one of my Guru's teachings about happiness. She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you're fortunate enough. But that's not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don't, you will leak away your innate contentment. It's easy enough to pray when you're in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.

Recalling these teachings as I ride my bike so freely in the sunset through Bali, I keep making prayers that are really vows, presenting my state of harmony to God and saying, "This is what I would like to hold on to. Please help me memorize this feeling of contentment and help me always support it." I'm putting this happiness in a bank somewhere, not merely FDIC protected but guarded by my four spirit brothers, held there as insurance against future trials in life. This is a practice I've come to call "Diligent Joy." As I focus on Diligent Joy, I also keep remembering a simple idea my friend Darcey told me once-that all the sorrow and trouble of this world is caused by unhappy people. Not only in the big global Hitler-'n'-Stalin picture, but also on the smallest personal level. Even in my own life, I can see exactly where my episodes of unhappiness have brought suffering or distress or (at the very least) inconvenience to those around me. The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.

At the moment, the person I'm enjoying the most is Ketut. The old man-truly one of the happiest humans I've ever encountered-is giving me his full access, the freedom to ask any lingering questions about divinity, about human nature. I like the meditations he has taught me, the comic simplicity of "smile in your liver" and the reassuring presence of the four spirit brothers. The other day the medicine man told me that he knows sixteen different meditation techniques, and many mantras for all different purposes. Some of them are to bring peace or happiness, some of them are for health, but some of them are purely mystical-to transport him into other realms of consciousness. For instance, he said, he knows one meditation that takes him "to up."

"To up?" I asked. "What is to up?"

"To seven levels up," he said. "To heaven."

Hearing the familiar idea of "seven levels," I asked him if he meant that his meditation took him up through the seven sacred chakras of the body, which are discussed in Yoga.

"Not chakras," he said. "Places. This meditation takes me seven places in universe. Up and up. Last place I go is heaven."

I asked, "Have you been to heaven, Ketut?"

He smiled. Of course he had been there, he said. Easy to go to heaven.

"What is it like?"

"Beautiful. Everything beautiful is there. Every person beautiful is there. Everything beautiful to eat is there. Everything is love there. Heaven is love."

Then Ketut said he knows another meditation. "To down." This down meditation takes him seven levels below the world. This is a more dangerous meditation. Not for beginning people, only for a master.

I asked, "So if you go up to heaven in the first meditation, then, in the second meditation you must go down to…?"

"Hell," he finished the statement.

This was interesting. Heaven and hell aren't ideas I've heard discussed very much in Hinduism. Hindus see the universe in terms of karma, a process of constant circulation, which is to say that you don't really "end up" anywhere at the end of your life-not in heaven or hell-but just get recycled back to the earth again in another form, in order to resolve whatever relationships or mistakes you left uncompleted last time. When you finally achieve perfection, you graduate out of the cycle entirely and melt into The Void. The notion of karma implies that heaven and hell are only to be found here on earth, where we have the capacity to create them, manufacturing either goodness or evil depending on our destinies and our characters.

Karma is a notion I've always liked. Not so much literally. Not necessarily because I believe that I used to be Cleopatra's bartender-but more metaphorically. The karmic philosophy appeals to me on a metaphorical level because even in one lifetime it's obvious how often we must repeat our same mistakes, banging our heads against the same old addictions and compulsions, generating the same old miserable and often catastrophic consequences, until we can finally stop and fix it. This is the supreme lesson of karma (and also of Western psychology, by the way)-take care of the problems now, or else you'll just have to suffer again later when you screw everything up the next time. And that repetition of suffering-that's hell. Moving out of that endless repetition to a new level of understanding-there's where you'll find heaven.

But here Ketut was talking about heaven and hell in a different way, as if they are real places in the universe which he has actually visited. At least I think that's what he meant.

Trying to get clear on this, I asked, "You have been to hell, Ketut?"

He smiled. Of course he's been there.

"What's it like in hell?"

"Same like heaven," he said.

He saw my confusion and tried to explain. "Universe is a circle, Liss."

I still wasn't sure I understood.

He said. "To up, to down-all same, at end."

I remembered an old Christian mystic notion: As above, so below. I asked. "Then how can you tell the difference between heaven and hell?"

"Because of how you go. Heaven, you go up, through seven happy places. Hell, you go down, through seven sad places. This is why it better for you to go up, Liss." He laughed.

I asked, "You mean, you might as well spend your life going upward, through the happy places, since heaven and hell-the destinations-are the same thing anyway?"

"Same-same," he said. "Same in end, so better to be happy on journey."

I said, "So, if heaven is love, then hell is…"

"Love, too," he said.

I sat with that one for a while, trying to make the math work.

Ketut laughed again, slapped my knee affectionately with his hand.

"Always so difficult for young person to understand this!"

88

So I was hanging out in Wayan's shop again this morning, and she was trying to figure out how to make my hair grow faster and thicker. Having glorious thick, shiny hair herself that hangs all the way down to her butt, she feels sorry for me with my wispy blond mop. As a healer, of course, she does have a remedy to help thicken my hair, but it won't be easy. First, I have to find a banana tree and personally cut it down. I have to "throw away the top of the tree," then carve the trunk and roots (which are still lodged in the earth) into a big, deep bowl "like a swimming pool." Then I have to put a piece of wood over the top of this hollow, so rainwater and dew don't get in. Then I will come back in a few days and find that the swimming pool is now filled with the nutrient-rich liquid of the banana root, which I then must collect in bottles and bring to Wayan. She will bless the banana root juice at the temple for me, then rub the juice into my skull every day. Within a few months I will have, like Wayan, thick, shiny hair all the way down to my butt.

"Even if you are bald," she said, "this will make you have hair."

As we're talking, little Tutti-just home from school-is sitting on the floor, drawing a picture of a house. Mostly, houses are what Tutti draws these days. She's dying to have a house of her own. There's always a rainbow in the backdrop of her pictures, and a smiling family-father and all.

This is what we do all day in Wayan's shop. We sit and talk and Tutti draws pictures and Wayan and I gossip and tease each other. Wayan's got a bawdy sense of humor, always talking about sex, busting me about being single, speculating on the genital endowments of all the men who pass by her shop. She keeps telling me she's been going to the temple every evening and praying for a good man to show up in my life, to be my lover.

I told her again this morning, "No, Wayan-I don't need it. My heart's been broken too many times."

She said, "I know cure for broken heart." Authoritatively, and in a doctorly manner, Wayan ticked off on her fingers the six elements of her Fail-Proof Broken-Heart Curing Treatment: "Vitamin E, get much sleep, drink much water, travel to a place far away from the person you loved, meditate and teach your heart that this is destiny."

"I've been doing everything but the vitamin E."

"So now you cured. And now you need a new man. I bring you one, from praying."

"Well, I'm not praying for a new man, Wayan. The only thing I'm praying for these days is to have peace with myself."

Wayan rolled her eyes, like Yeah, right, whatever you claim, you big white weirdo, and said, "That's because you have bad memory problem. You don't remember anymore how nice is sex. I used to have bad memory problem, too, when I was married. Every time I saw a handsome man walking down the street, I would forget I had a husband back home."

She nearly fell over laughing. Then she composed herself and concluded, "Everybody need sex, Liz."

At this moment, a great-looking woman came walking into the shop, smiling like a lighthouse beam. Tutti leapt up and ran into her arms, shouting, "Armenia! Armenia! Armenia!" Which, as it turned out, was the woman's name-not some kind of strange nationalist battle cry. I introduced myself to Armenia, and she told me she was from Brazil. She was so dynamic, this woman-so Brazilian. She was gorgeous, elegantly dressed, charismatic and engaging and indeterminate in age, just insistently sexy.

Armenia, too, is a friend of Wayan's, who comes to the shop frequently for lunch and for various traditional medical and beauty treatments. She sat down and talked with us for about an hour, joining our gossiping, girlish little circle. She's in Bali for only another week before she has to fly off to Africa, or maybe it's back to Thailand, to take care of her business. This Armenia woman, it turns out, has had just the teensiest bit of glamorous life. She used to work for the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees. Back in the 1980s she had been sent into the El Salvadoran and Nicaraguan jungles during the height of war as a negotiator of peace, using her beauty and charm and wits to get all the generals and rebels to calm down and listen to reason. (Hello, pretty power!) Now she runs a multinational marketing business called Novica, which supports indigenous artists all over the world by selling their products on the Internet. She speaks about seven or eight languages. She's got the most fabulous pair of shoes I've seen since Rome.

Looking at us both, Wayan said, "Liz-why do you never try to look sexy, like Armenia? You such a pretty girl, you have good capital of nice face, nice body, nice smile. But always you wear this same broken T-shirt, same broken jeans. Don't you want to be sexy, like her?"

"Wayan," I said, "Armenia is Brazilian. It's a completely different situation."

"How is it different?"

"Armenia," I said, turning to my new friend. "Can you please try to explain to Wayan what it means to be a Brazilian woman?"

Armenia laughed, but then seemed to consider the question seriously and answered, "Well, I always tried to look nice and be feminine even in the war zones and refugee camps of Central America. Even in the worst tragedies and crisis, there's no reason to add to everyone's misery by looking miserable yourself. That's my philosophy. This is why I always wore makeup and jewelry into the jungle-nothing too extravagant, but maybe just a nice gold bracelet and some earrings, a little lipstick, good perfume. Just enough to show that I still had my self-respect."

In a way, Armenia reminds me of those great Victorian-era British lady travelers, who used to say there's no excuse for wearing clothes in Africa that would be unsuited for an English drawing room. She's a butterfly, this Armenia. And she couldn't stay for too long at Wayan's shop because she had work to do, but that didn't stop her from inviting me to a party tonight. She knows another Brazilian expat in Ubud, she told me, and he's hosting a special event at a nice restaurant this evening. He'll be cooking a feijoada-a traditional Brazilian feast consisting of massive piles of pork and black beans. There will be Brazilian cocktails, as well. Lots of interesting expatriates from all over the world who live here in Bali. Would I care to come? They might all go out dancing later, too. She doesn't know if I like parties, but…

Cocktails? Dancing? Piles of pork?

Of course I'll come.

89

I can't remember the last time I got dressed up, but this evening I dug out my one fancy spaghetti-strap dress from the bottom of my backpack and slithered it on. I even wore lipstick. I can't remember the last time I wore lipstick, but I know it wasn't anywhere near India. I stopped at Armenia's house on the way over to the party, and she draped me in some of her fancy jewelry, let me borrow her fancy perfume, let me store my bicycle in her backyard so I could arrive at the party in her fancy car, like a proper adult woman.

The dinner with the expatriates was great fun, and I felt myself revisiting all these long-dormant aspects of my personality. I even got a little bit drunk, which was notable after all the purity of my last few months of praying at the Ashram and sipping tea in my Balinese flower garden. And I was flirting! I hadn't flirted in ages. I'd only been hanging around with monks and medicine men lately, but suddenly I was dusting off the old sexuality again. Though I couldn't really tell who I was flirting with. I was kind of spreading it around everywhere. Was I attracted to the witty Australian former journalist sitting next to me? ("We're all drunks here," he quipped. "We write references for other drunks.") Or was it the quiet intellectual German down the table? (He promised to lend me novels from his personal library.) Or was it the handsome older Brazilian man who had cooked this giant feast for all of us in the first place? (I liked his kind brown eyes and his accent. And his cooking, of course. I said something very provocative to him, out of nowhere. He was making a joke at his own expense, saying, "I'm a full catastrophe of a Brazilian man-I can't dance, I can't play soccer and I can't play any musical instruments." For some reason I replied, "Maybe so. But I have a feeling you could play a very good Casanova." Time stopped solid for a long, long moment, then, as we looked at each other frankly, like, That was an interesting idea to lay on this table. The boldness of my statement hovered in the air around us like a fragrance. He didn't deny it. I looked away first, feeling myself blush.)

His feijoada was amazing, anyway. Decadent, spicy and rich-everything you can't normally get in Balinese food. I ate plate after plate of the pork and decided that it was official: I can never be a vegetarian, not with food like this in the world. And then we went out dancing at this local nightclub, if you can call it a nightclub. It was more like a groovy beach shack, only without the beach. There was a live band of Balinese kids playing good reggae music, and the place was mixed up with revelers of all ages and nationalities, expats and tourists and locals and gorgeous Balinese boys and girls, all dancing freely, unself-consciously. Armenia hadn't come along, claiming she had to work the next day, but the handsome older Brazilian man was my host. He wasn't such a bad dancer as he claimed. Probably he can play soccer, too. I liked having him nearby, opening doors for me, complimenting me, calling me "darling." Then again, I noticed that he called everyone "darling"-even the hairy male bartender. Still, the attention was nice…

It had been so long since I'd been in a bar. Even in Italy I didn't go to bars, and I hadn't been out much during the David years, either. I think the last time I'd gone dancing was back when I was married… back when I was happily married, come to think of it. Dear God, it had been ages. Out on the dance floor I ran into my friend Stefania, a lively young Italian girl I'd met recently in a meditation class in Ubud, and we danced together, hair flying everywhere, blond and dark, spinning merrily around. Sometime after midnight, the band stopped playing and people mingled.

That's when I met the guy named Ian. Oh, I really liked this guy. Right away I really liked him. He was very good-looking, in a kind of Sting-meets-Ralph-Fiennes's-younger-brother sort of way. He was Welsh, so he had that lovely voice. He was articulate, smart, asked questions, spoke to my friend Stefania in the same baby Italian that I speak. It turned out that he was the drummer in this reggae band, that he played bongos. So I made a joke that he was a "bonga-leer," like those guys in Venice, but with percussion instead of boats, and somehow we hit it off, started laughing and talking.

Felipe came over then-that was the Brazilian's name, Felipe. He invited us all to go out to this funky local restaurant owned by European expatriates, a wildly permissive place that never closes, he promised, where beer and bullshit are served at all hours. I found myself looking to Ian (did he want to go?) and when he said yes, I said yes, also. So we all went to the restaurant and I sat with Ian and we talked and joked all night, and, oh, I really liked this guy. He was the first man I'd met in a long while who I really liked in that way, as they say. He was a few years older than me, had led a most interesting life with all the good resume points (liked The Simpsons, traveled all over the world, lived in an Ashram once, mentioned Tolstoy, seemed to be employed, etc.). He'd started his career in the British Army in Northern Ireland as a bomb squad expert, then became an international mine-field detonation guy. Built refugee camps in Bosnia, was now taking a break in Bali to work on music… all very alluring stuff.

I could not believe I was still up at 3:30 AM, and not to meditate, either! I was up in the middle of the night and wearing a dress and talking to an attractive man. How terribly radical. At the end of the evening, Ian and I admitted to each other how nice it had been to meet. He asked if I had a phone number and I told him I didn't, but that I did have e-mail, and he said, "Yeah, but e-mail just feels so… ech…" So at the end of the night we didn't exchange anything but a hug. He said, "We'll see each other again when they"-pointing to the gods up in the sky-"say so."

Just before dawn, Felipe the handsome older Brazilian man offered me a ride home. As we rode up the twisting back roads he said, "Darling, you've been talking to the biggest bullshitter in Ubud all night long."

My heart sank.

"Is Ian really a bullshitter?" I asked. "Tell me the truth now and save me the trouble later."

"Ian?" said Felipe. He laughed. "No, darling! Ian is a serious guy. He's a good man. I meant myself. I'm the biggest bullshitter in Ubud."

We rode along in silence for a while.

"And I'm just teasing, anyway," he added.

Then another long silence and he asked, "You like Ian, don't you?"

"I don't know," I said. My head wasn't clear. I'd been drinking too many Brazilian cocktails. "He's attractive, intelligent. It's been a long time since I thought about liking anybody."

"You're going to have a wonderful few months here in Bali. You wait and see."

"But I don't know how much more socializing I can do, Felipe. I only have the one dress. People will start to notice that I'm wearing the same thing all the time."

"You're young and beautiful, darling. You only need the one dress."

90

Am I young and beautiful?

I thought I was old and divorced.

I can barely sleep at all this night, so unaccustomed to these odd hours, the dance music still thrumming in my head, my hair smelling of cigarettes, my stomach protesting the alcohol. I doze a bit, then wake as the sun comes up, just as I am accustomed to. Only this morning I am not rested and I am not at peace and I'm in no condition whatsoever for meditation. Why am I so agitated? I had a nice night, didn't I? I got to meet some interesting people, got to dress up and dance around, had flirted with some men…

MEN.

The agitation gets more jagged at the thought of that word, turning into a minor panic assailment. I don't know how to do this anymore. I used to be the biggest and boldest and most shameless of flirts when I was in my teens and twenties. I seem to remember that it was once fun, meeting some guy, spooling him in toward me, spooning out the veiled invitations and the provocations, casting all caution aside and letting the consequences spill how they will.

But now I am feeling only panic and uncertainty. I start blowing the whole evening up into something much huger than it was, imagining myself getting involved with this Welsh guy who hadn't even given me an e-mail address. I can see all the way into our future already, including the arguments over his smoking habit. I wonder if giving myself to a man again will ruin my journey/writing/life, etc. On the other hand-some romance would be nice. It's been a long, dry time. (I remember Richard from Texas advising me at one point, vis-a-vis my love life, "You need a droughtbreaker, baby. Gotta go find yo'self a rainmaker.") Then I imagine Ian zooming over on his motorbike with his handsome bomb-squad torso to make love to me in my garden, and how nice that would be. This not-entirely-unpleasant thought somehow screeches me, however, into a horrible skid about how I just don't want to go through any heartache again. Then I start to miss David more than I have in months, thinking, Maybe I should call him and see if he wants to try getting together again… (Then I receive a very accurate channeling of my old friend Richard, saying, Oh, that's genius, Groceries-didja get a lobotomy last night, in addition to gettin' a little tipsy?) It's never a far leap from ruminating about David to obsessing about the circumstances of my divorce, and so soon I start brooding (just like old times) about my ex-husband, my divorce…

I thought we were done with this topic, Groceries.

And then I start thinking about Felipe, for some reason-that handsome older Brazilian man. He's nice. Felipe. He says I am young and beautiful and that I will have a wonderful time here time in Bali. He's right, right? I should relax and have some fun, right? But this morning it doesn't feel fun.

I don't know how to do this anymore.

91

"What is this life? Do you understand? I don't."

This was Wayan talking.

I was back in her restaurant, eating her delicious and nutritious multivitamin lunch special, hoping it would help ease my hangover and my anxiety. Armenia the Brazilian woman was there, too, looking, as always, like she'd just stopped by the beauty parlor on her way home from a weekend at a spa. Little Tutti was sitting on the floor, drawing pictures of houses, as usual.

Wayan had just learned that the lease on her shop was going to come up for renewal at the end of August-only three months from now-and that her rent would be raised. She would probably have to move again because she couldn't afford to stay here. Except that she only had about fifty dollars in the bank, and no idea where to go. Moving would take Tutti out of school again. They needed a home-a real home. This is no way for a Balinese person to live.

"Why does suffering never end?" Wayan asked. She wasn't crying, merely posing a simple, unanswerable and weary question. "Why must everything be repeat and repeat, never finish, never resting? You work so hard one day, but the next day, you must only work again. You eat, but the next day, you are already hungry. You find love, then love go away. You are born with nothing-no watch, no T-shirt. You work hard, then you die with nothing-no watch, no T-shirt. You are young, then you are old. No matter how hard you work, you cannot stop getting old."

"Not Armenia," I joked. "She doesn't get old, apparently."

Wayan said, "But this is because Armenia is Brazilian," catching on now to how the world works. We all laughed, but it was a fair breed of gallows humor, because there's nothing funny about Wayan's situation in the world right now. Here are the facts: Single mom, precocious child, hand-to-mouth business, imminent poverty, virtual homelessness. Where will she go? Can't live with the ex-husband's family, obviously. Wayan's own family are rice farmers way out in the countryside and poor. If she goes and lives with them, it's the end of her business as a healer in town because her patients won't be able to reach her and you can pretty much forget about Tutti ever getting enough education to go someday to Animal Doctor College.

Other factors have emerged over time. Those two shy girls I noticed on the first day, hiding in the back of the kitchen? It turns out that these are a pair of orphans Wayan has adopted. They are both named Ketut (just to further confuse this book) and we call them Big Ketut and Little Ketut. Wayan found the Ketuts starving and begging in the marketplace a few months ago. They were abandoned there by a Dickensian character of a woman-possibly a relative-who acts as a sort of begging child pimp, depositing parentless children in various marketplaces across Bali to beg for money, then picking the kids up every night in a van, collecting their proceeds and giving them a shack somewhere in which to sleep. When Wayan first found Big and Little Ketut, they hadn't eaten for days, had lice and parasites, the works. She thinks the younger one is maybe ten and the older one might be thirteen, but they don't know their own ages or even their last names. (Little Ketut knows only that she was born the same year as "the big pig" in her village; this hasn't helped the rest of us establish a timeline.) Wayan has taken them in and cares for them as lovingly as she does her own Tutti. She and the three children all sleep on the same mattress in the one bedroom behind the shop.

How a Balinese single mother facing eviction found it in her heart to take in two extra homeless children is something that reaches far beyond any understanding I've ever had about the meaning of compassion.

I want to help them.

That was it. This is what that trembling feeling was, which I'd experienced so profoundly after meeting Wayan for the first time. I wanted to help this single mother with her daughter and her extra orphans. I wanted to valet-park them into a better life. It's just that I hadn't been able to figure out how to do it. But today as Wayan and Armenia and I were eating our lunch and weaving our typical conversation of empathy and chopsbusting, I looked over at little Tutti and noticed that she was doing something rather odd. She was walking around the shop with a single, small square of pretty cobalt blue ceramic tile resting on the palms of her upturned hands, singing in a chanting sort of way. I watched her for a while, just to see what she was up to. Tutti played with that tile for a long time, tossing it in the air, whispering to it, singing to it, then pushing it along the floor like it was a Matchbox car. Finally she sat upon it in a quiet corner, eyes closed, singing to herself, buried in some mystical, invisible compartment of space all her own.

I asked Wayan what this was all about. She said that Tutti had found the tile outside the construction site of a fancy hotel project down the road and had pocketed it. Ever since Tutti had found the tile, she kept saying to her mother, "Maybe if we have a house someday, it can have a pretty blue floor, like this." Now, according to Wayan, Tutti often likes to sit perched on that one tiny blue square for hours on end, shutting her eyes and pretending she's inside her own house.

What can I say? When I heard that story, and looked at that child deep in meditation upon her small blue tile, I was like: OK, that does it.

And I excused myself from the shop to go take care of this intolerable state of affairs once and for all.

92

Wayan once told me that sometimes when she's healing her patients she becomes an open pipeline for God's love, and she ceases even thinking about what needs to be done next. The intellect stops, the intuition rises and all she has to do is permit her God-ness to flow through her. She says, "It feels like a wind comes and takes my hands."

This same wind, maybe, is the thing that blew me out of Wayan's shop that day, that pushed me out of my hung-over anxiety about whether I was ready to start dating again, and guided me over to Ubud's local Internet cafe, where I sat and wrote-in one effortless draft-a fund-raising e-mail to all my friends and family across the world.

I told everyone that my birthday was coming up in July and that soon I would be turning thirty-five. I told them that there was nothing in this world that I needed or wanted, and that I had never been happier in my life. I told them that, if I were home in New York, I would be planning a big stupid birthday party and I would make them all come to this party, and they would have to buy me gifts and bottles of wine and the whole celebration would get ridiculously expensive. Therefore, I explained, a cheaper and more lovely way to help celebrate this birthday would be if my friends and family would care to make a donation to help a woman named Wayan Nuriyasih buy a house in Indonesia for herself and her children.

Then I told the whole story of Wayan and Tutti and the orphans and their situation. I promised that whatever money was donated, I would match the donation from my own savings. Of course I was aware, I explained, that this is a world full of untold suffering and war and that everyone is in need right now, but what are we to do? This little group of people in Bali had become my family, and we must take care of our families wherever we find them. As I wrapped up the mass e-mail, I remembered something my friend Susan had said to me before I left on this world journey nine months ago. She was afraid I would never come home again. She said, "I know how you are, Liz. You're going to meet somebody and fall in love and end up buying a house in Bali."

A regular Nostradamus, that Susan.

By the next morning, when I checked my e-mail, $700 had already been pledged. The next day, donations passed what I could afford to match.

I won't go through the entire drama of the week, or try to explain what it feels like to open e-mails every day from all over the world that all say, "Count me in!" Everyone gave. People whom I personally knew to be broke or in debt gave, without hesitation. One of the first responses I got was from a friend of my hairdresser's girlfriend, who'd been forwarded the e-mail and wanted to donate $15. My most wise-ass friend John had to make a typically sarcastic comment, of course, about how long and sappy and emotional my letter had been ("Listen-next time you feel the need to cry about spilled milk, make sure it's condensed, will ya?"), but then he donated money anyway. My friend Annie's new boyfriend (a Wall Street banker whom I'd never even met) offered to double the final sum of whatever was raised. Then that e-mail started whipping around the world, so that I began to receive donations from perfect strangers. It was a global smothering of generosity. Let's just wrap up this episode by saying that-a mere seven days after the original plea went out over the wires-my friends and my family and a bunch of strangers all over the world helped me come up with almost $18,000 to buy Wayan Nuriyasih a home of her own.

I knew that it was Tutti who had manifested this miracle, through the potency of her prayers, willing that little blue tile of hers to soften and expand around her and to grow-like one of Jack's magic beans-into an actual home that would take care of herself and her mother and a pair of orphans forever.

One last thing. I'm embarrassed to admit that it was my friend Bob, not me, who noticed the obvious fact that the word "Tutti" in Italian means "Everybody." How had I not realized that earlier? After all those months in Rome! I just didn't see the connection. So it was Bob over in Utah who had to point it out to me. He did so in an e-mail last week, saying, along with his pledge to donate toward the new house, "So that's the final lesson, isn't it? When you set out in the world to help yourself, you inevitably end up helping… Tutti."

93

I don't want to tell Wayan about it, not until all the money has been raised. It's hard to keep a big secret like this, especially when she's in such constant worry about her future, but I don't want to get her hopes up until it is official. So for the whole week, I keep my mouth shut about my plans, and I keep myself occupied having dinner almost every night with Felipe the Brazilian, who doesn't seem to mind that I own only one nice dress.

I guess I have a crush on him. After a few dinners, I'm fairly certain I have a crush on him. He's more than he appears, this self-proclaimed "bullshit master" who knows everyone in Ubud and is always the center of the party. I asked Armenia about him. They've been friends for a while. I said, "That Felipe-he's got more depth than the others, doesn't he? There's something more to him, isn't there?" She said, "Oh, yes. He's a good, kind man. But he's been through a hard divorce. I think he's come to Bali to recover."

Ah-now this is a subject I know nothing about.

But he's fifty-two years old. This is interesting. Have I truly reached the age where a fifty-two-year-old man is within my realm of dating consideration? I like him, though. He's got silver hair and he's balding in an attractively Picassoesque manner. His eyes are warm and brown. He has a gentle face and he smells wonderful. And he is an actual grown man. The adult male of the species-a bit of a novelty in my experience.

He's been living in Bali for about five years now, working with Balinese silversmiths to make jewelry from Brazilian gemstones for export to America. I like the fact that he was faithfully married for almost twenty years before his marriage deteriorated for its own multicomplicated plethora of reasons. I like the fact that he has already raised children, and that he raised them well, and that they love him. I like that he was the parent who stayed home and tended to his children when they were little, while his Australian wife pursued her career. (A good feminist husband, he says, "I wanted to be on the correct side of social history.") I like his natural Brazilian over-the-top displays of affection. (When his Australian son was fourteen years old, the boy finally had to say, "Dad, now that I'm fourteen, maybe you shouldn't kiss me on the mouth anymore when you drop me off at school.") I like the fact that Felipe speaks four, maybe more, languages fluently. (He keeps claiming he doesn't speak Indonesian, but I hear him talking it all day long.) I like that he's traveled through over fifty countries in his life, and that he sees the world as a small and easily managed place. I like the way he listens to me, leaning in, interrupting me only when I interrupt myself to ask if I am boring him, to which he always responds, "I have all the time in the world for you, my lovely little darling." I like being called "my lovely little darling."(Even if the waitress gets it, too.)

He said to me the other night, "Why don't you take a lover while you're in Bali, Liz?"

To his credit, he didn't just mean himself, though I believe he might be willing to take on the job. He assured me that Ian-that good-looking Welsh guy-would be a fine match for me, but there are other candidates, too. There's a chef from New York City, "a great, big, muscular, confident fellow," whom he thinks I might like. Really there are all sorts of men here, he said, all of them floating through Ubud, expatriates from everywhere, hiding out in this shifting community of the planet's "homeless and assetless," many of whom would be happy to see to it, "my lovely darling, that you have a wonderful summer here."

"I don't think I'm ready for it," I told him. "I don't feel like going through all the effort of romance again, you know? I don't feel like having to shave my legs every day or having to show my body to a new lover. And I don't want to have to tell my life story all over again, or worry about birth control. Anyway, I'm not even sure I know how to do it anymore. I feel like I was more confident about sex and romance when I was sixteen than I am now."

"Of course you were," Felipe said. "You were young and stupid then. Only the young and stupid are confident about sex and romance. Do you think any of us know what we're doing? Do you think there's any way humans can love each other without complication? You should see how it happens in Bali, darling. All these Western men come here after they've made a mess of their lives back home, and they decide they've had it with Western women, and they go marry some tiny, sweet, obedient little Balinese teenage girl. I know what they're thinking. They think this pretty little girl will make them happy, make their lives easy. But whenever I see it happen, I always want to say the same thing. Good luck. Because you still have a woman in front of you, my friend. And you are still a man. It's still two human beings trying to get along, so it's going to become complicated. And love is always complicated. But still humans must try to love each other, darling. We must get our hearts broken sometimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something."

I said, "My heart was broken so badly last time that it still hurts. Isn't that crazy? To still have a broken heart almost two years after a love story ends?"

"Darling, I'm southern Brazilian. I can keep a broken heart going for ten years over a woman I never even kissed."

We talk about our marriages, our divorces. Not in a petty way, but just to commiserate. We compare notes about the bottomless depths of post-divorce depression. We drink wine and eat well together and we tell each other the nicest stories we can remember about former spouses, just to take the sting out of all that conversation about loss.

He says, "Do you want to do something with me this weekend?" and I find myself saying yes, that would be nice. Because it would be nice.

Twice now, dropping me off in front of my house and saying goodnight, Felipe has reached across the car to give me a goodnight kiss, and twice now I've done the same thing-allowing myself to be pulled into him, but then ducking my head at the last moment and tucking my cheek up against his chest. There, I let him hold me for a while. Longer than is necessarily merely friendly. I can feel him press his face into my hair, as my face presses somewhere against his sternum. I can smell his soft linen shirt. I really like the way he smells. He has muscular arms, a nice wide chest. He was once a champion gymnast back in Brazil. Of course that was in 1969, which was the year I was born, but still. His body feels strong.

My ducking my head like this whenever he reaches for me is a kind of hiding-I'm avoiding a simple goodnight kiss. But it's also a kind of not-hiding, too. By letting him hold me at all during those long quiet moments at the end of the evening, I'm letting myself be held.

Which hasn't happened for a long time.

94

I asked Ketut, my old medicine man, "What do you know about romance?"

He said, "What is this, romance?"

"Never mind."

"No-what it is? What this word means?"

"Romance." I defined. "Women and men in love. Or sometimes men and men in love, or women and women in love. Kissing and sex and marriage-all that stuff."

"I not make sex with too many people in my life, Liss. Only with my wife."

"You're right-that's not too many people. But do you mean your first wife or your second wife?"

"I only have one wife, Liss. She dead now."

"What about Nyomo?"

"Nyomo not really my wife, Liss. She the wife of my brother." Seeing my confused expression, he added, "This typical Bali," and explained. Ketut's older brother, who is a rice farmer, lives next door to Ketut and is married to Nyomo. They had three children together. Ketut and his wife, on the other hand, were unable to have any children at all, so they adopted one of Ketut's brother's sons in order to have an heir. When Ketut's wife died, Nyomo began living in both family compounds, splitting her time between the two households, taking care of both her husband and his brother, and tending to the two families of her children. She is in every way a wife to Ketut in the Balinese manner (cooking, cleaning, taking care of household religious ceremonies and rituals) except that they don't have sex together.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Too OLD!" he said. Then he called Nyomo over to relay the question to her, to let her know that the American lady wants to know why they don't have sex with each other. Nyomo about died laughing at the very thought of it. She came over and punched me in the arm, hard.

"I only had one wife," Ketut went on. "And now she dead."

"Do you miss her?"

A sad smile. "It was her time to die. Now I tell you how I find my wife. When I am twenty-seven years, I meet a girl and I love her."

"What year was that?" I asked, desperate as always to figure out how old he is.

"I don't know," he said. "Maybe 1920?"

(Which would make him about a hundred and twelve by now. I think we're getting closer to solving this…)

"I love this girl, Liss. Very beautiful. But not good character, this girl. She only want money. She chase other boy. She never tell truth. I think she had a secret mind inside her other mind, nobody can see inside there. She stop to loving me, go away with other boy. I am very sad. Broken in my heart. I pray and pray to my four spirit brothers, ask why she not anymore love me? Then one of my spirit brothers, he tell me the truth. He say, 'This is not your true match. Be patient.' So I be patient and then I find my wife. Beautiful woman, good woman. Always sweet for me. Never once we argue, have always harmony in household, always she smiling. Even when no money at home, always she smiling and saying how happy she is to see me. When she die, I very sad in my mind."

"Did you cry?"

"Only little bit, in my eyes. But I do meditation, to clean the body from pain. I meditate for her soul. Very sad, but happy, too. I visit her in meditation every day, even to kissing her. She the only woman I ever make sex with. So I do not know… what is new word, from today?"

"Romance?"

"Yes, romance. I do not know romance, Liss."

"So it's not really your area of expertise, eh?"

"What is this, expertise? What this word means?"

95

I finally sat down with Wayan and told her about the money I'd raised for her house. I explained about my birthday wish, showed her the list of all my friends' names, and then told her the final amount which had been raised: Eighteen thousand American dollars. At first she was shocked to such an extent that her face looked like a mask of grief. It is strange and true that sometimes intense emotion can cause us to respond to cataclysmic news in exactly the opposite manner logic might dictate. This is the absolute value of human emotion-joyful events can sometimes register on the Richter scale as pure trauma; dreadful grief makes us sometimes burst out laughing. This news I had just handed to Wayan was too much for her to take in, she almost received it as a cause for sorrow, so I sat there with her for a few hours, telling her the story repeatedly and showing her the numbers again and again, until the reality began to sink in.

Her first really articulate response (I mean, even before she burst into tears because she realized she was going to be able to have a garden) was to urgently say, "Please, Liz, you must explain to everyone who helped raise money that this is not Wayan's house. This is the house of everyone who helped Wayan. If any of these people comes to Bali, they must never stay in a hotel, OK? You tell them they come and stay at my house, OK? Promise to tell them that? We call it Group House… the House for Everybody…"

Then she realized about the garden, and started to cry.

Slowly, though, happier realizations come to her. It was like she was a pocketbook shaken upside down and emotions were spilling all over the place. If she had a home, she could have a small library, for all her medical books! And a pharmacy for her traditional remedies! And a proper restaurant with real chairs and tables (because she had to sell all her old good chairs and tables to pay the divorce lawyer). If she had a home, she could finally be listed in Lonely Planet, who keep wanting to mention her services, but never can do so, because she never has a permanent address that they can print. If she had a home, Tutti could have a birthday party someday!

Then she got very sober and serious again. "How can I thank you, Liz? I would give you anything. If I had husband I loved, and you needed a man, I would give you my husband."

"Keep your husband, Wayan. Just make sure Tutti goes to university."

"What would I do if you never came here?"

But I was always coming here. I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen.

"Where are you going to build your new house, Wayan?" I asked.

Like a Little Leaguer who's had his eye on a certain baseball glove in the shop window for ages, or a romantic girl who's been designing her wedding dress since she was thirteen, it turned out that Wayan already knew exactly the piece of land she would like to buy. It was in the center of a nearby village, was connected to municipal water and electricity, had a good school nearby for Tutti, was nicely located in a central place where her patients and customers could find her on foot. Her brothers could help her build the home, she said. She'd all but picked out the paint chips for the master bedroom already.

So we went together to visit a nice French expatriate financial adviser and real estate guy, who was kind enough to suggest the best way to transfer the money. His suggestion was that I keep it easy and just wire the money directly from my bank account into Wayan's bank account and let her buy whatever land or home she wants, so I don't have to mess around with owning property in Indonesia. As long as I didn't wire over amounts bigger than $10,000 at a time, the IRS and CIA wouldn't suspect me of laundering drug money. Then we went to Wayan's little bank, and talked to the manager about how to set up a wire transfer. In neat conclusion, the bank manager said, "So, Wayan. When this wire transfer goes through, in just a few days, you should have about 180 million rupiah in your bank account."

Wayan and I looked at each other and sparked off into a ridiculous riot of laughter. Such an enormous sum! We kept trying to pull ourselves together, since we were in some fancy banker's office, but we couldn't stop laughing. We stumbled out of there like drunks, holding on to each other to not fall over.

She said, "Never have I seen a miracle happen so fast! All this time, I was begging God to please help Wayan. And God was begging Liz to please help Wayan, too."

I added, "And Liz was begging her friends to please help Wayan, too!"

We returned to the shop, found Tutti just home from school. Wayan dropped to her knees, grabbed her girl, and said, "A house! A house! We have a house!" Tutti executed a fabulous fake faint, swooning cartoonishly right to the floor.

While we were all laughing, I noticed the two orphans watching this scene from the background of the kitchen, and I could see them looking at me with something in their faces that resembled… fear. As Wayan and Tutti galloped around in joy, I wondered what the orphans were thinking. What were they so afraid of? Being left behind, maybe? Or was I now a scary person to them because I'd produced so much money out of nowhere? (Such an unthinkable amount of money that maybe it's like black magic?) Or maybe when you've had such a fragile life as these kids, any change is a terror.

When there was a lull in the celebration I asked Wayan, just to be sure: "What about Big Ketut and Little Ketut? Is this good news for them, too?"

Wayan looked over at the girls in the kitchen and must have seen the same uneasiness I had seen, because she floated over to them and herded them into her arms and whispered some reassuring words into the crowns of their heads. They seemed to relax into her. Then the phone rang, and Wayan tried to pull away from the orphans to answer it, but the skinny arms of the two Ketuts clung on to their unofficial mother relentlessly, and they buried their heads in her belly and armpits, and even after the longest time they refused-with a fierceness I'd never seen in them before-to let her go.

So I answered the phone, instead.

"Balinese Traditional Healing," I said. "Stop by today for our giant close-out moving sale!"

96

I went out with Brazilian Felipe again, twice over the weekend. On Saturday I brought him to meet Wayan and the kids, and Tutti made drawings of houses for him while Wayan winked suggestively behind his back and mouthed, "New boyfriend?" and I kept shaking my head, "No, no, no."(Though I'll tell you what-I'm not thinking about that cute Welsh guy anymore.) I also brought Felipe to meet Ketut, my medicine man, and Ketut read his palm and pronounced my friend, no fewer than seven times (while fixing me with a penetrating stare), to be "a good man, a very good man, a very, very good man. Not a bad man, Liss- a good man."

Then on Sunday, Felipe asked me if I'd like to spend a day at the beach. It occurred to me that I'd been living here in Bali for two months already and had not yet seen the beach, which now seemed like sheer idiocy, so I said yes. He picked me up at my house in his jeep and we drove an hour to this hidden little beach in Pedangbai where hardly any tourists ever go. This place that he took me to, it was as good an imitation of paradise as anything I'd ever seen, with blue water and white sand and the shade of palm trees. We talked all day, interrupting our talking only to swim and nap and read, sometimes reading aloud to each other. These Balinese women in a shack behind the beach grilled us freshly caught fish, and we bought cold beers and chilled fruit. Dallying in the waves, we told each other whatever was left of the life story details which we hadn't yet covered in the past few weeks of evenings spent out together in the quietest restaurants in Ubud, talking over bottles and bottles of wine.

He liked my body, he told me, after the initial viewing at the beach. He told me that Brazilians have a term for exactly my kind of body (of course they do), which is magra-falsa, translating as "fake thin," meaning that the woman looks slender enough from a distance, but when you get up close, you can see that she's actually quite round and fleshy, which Brazilians consider a good thing. God bless Brazilians. As we lay out on our towels talking, he would reach over sometimes and brush sand off my nose, or push a mutinying hair out of my face. We talked for about ten solid hours. Then it was dark, so we packed up our things and went for a walk through the not-very-well-lit dirt road main street of this old Balinese fishing village, linked comfortably arm-in-arm under the stars. That's when Felipe from Brazil asked me in the most natural and relaxed of ways (almost as if he were wondering if we should get a bite to eat), "Should we have an affair together, Liz? What do you think?"

I liked everything about the way this was happening. Not with an action-not with an attempted kiss or a daring move-but with a question. And the correct question, too. I remembered something my therapist had said to me over a year ago before I'd left on this journey. I'd told her that I thought I wanted to remain celibate for this whole year of traveling, but worried, "What if I meet someone I really like? What should I do? Should I get together with him or not? Should I maintain my autonomy? Or treat myself to a romance?" My therapist replied with an indulgent smile, "You know, Liz-all this can be discussed at the time the issue actually arises, with the person in question."

So here it all was-the time, the place, the issue and the person in question. We proceeded to have a discussion about the idea, which came out easily, during our friendly, linked arm-in-arm walk by the ocean. I said, "I would probably say yes, Felipe, under normal circumstances. Whatever normal circumstances are…"

We both laughed. But then I showed him my hesitation. Which was this-that as much as I might enjoy to have my body and heart folded and unfolded for a while in the expert hands of an expat lover, something else inside me has put in a serious request that I donate the entirety of this year of traveling all to myself. That some vital transformation is happening in my life, and this transformation needs time and room in order to finish its process undisturbed. That basically, I'm the cake that just came out of the oven, and it still needs some more time to cool before it can be frosted. I don't want to cheat myself out of this precious time. I don't want to lose control of my life again.

Of course Felipe said that he understood, and that I should do whatever's best for me, and that he hoped I would forgive him for bringing up the question in the first place. ("It had to be asked, my lovely darling, sooner or later.") He assured me that, whatever I decided, we would still keep our friendship, since it seemed to be so good for both of us, all this time we spent together.

"Although," he went on, "you do need to let me make my case now."

"Fair enough," I said.

"For one thing, if I understand you correctly, this whole year is about your search for balance between devotion and pleasure. I can see where you've been doing a lot of devotional practices, but I'm not sure where the pleasure has come in so far."

"I ate a lot of pasta in Italy, Felipe."

"Pasta, Liz? Pasta?"

"Good point."

"For another thing, I think I know what you're worried about. Some man is going to come into your life and take everything from you again. I won't do that to you, darling. I've been alone for a long time, too, and I've lost a great deal in love, just like you have. I don't want us to take anything from each other. It's just that I've never enjoyed anyone's company as much as I enjoy yours, and I'd like to be with you. Don't worry-I'm not going to chase you back to New York when you leave here in September. And as for all those reasons you told me a few weeks ago that you didn't want to take a lover… Well, think of it this way. I don't care if you shave your legs every day, I already love your body, you've already told me your entire life story and you don't have to worry about birth control-I've had a vasectomy."

"Felipe," I said, "that's the most appealing and romantic offer a man has ever made me."

And it was. But still I said no.

He drove me home. Parked in front of my house, we shared a few sweet, salty, sandy day-at-the-ocean kisses. It was lovely. Of course it was lovely. But still, and again, I said no.

"That's fine, darling," he said. "But come over to my house tomorrow night for dinner, and I'll make you a steak."

Then he drove off and I went to bed alone.

I have a history of making decisions very quickly about men. I have always fallen in love fast and without measuring risks. I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential. I have fallen in love more times than I care to count with the highest potential of a man, rather than with the man himself, and then I have hung on to the relationship for a long time (sometimes far too long) waiting for the man to ascend to his own greatness. Many times in romance I have been a victim of my own optimism.

I married young and quick, from a place of love and hope, but without a lot of discussion over what the realities of marriage would mean. Nobody advised me on my marriage. I had been raised by my parents to be independent, self-providing, self-deciding. By the time I reached the age of twenty-four, it was assumed by everyone that I could make all my own choices, autonomously. Of course the world was not always like this. If I'd been born during any other century of Western patriarchy, I would've been considered the property of my father, until which time he passed me over to my husband, to become marital property. I would've had precious little say in the major matters of my own life. At one time in history, if a man had been my suitor, my father might have sat that man down with a long list of questions to establish whether this would be an appropriate match. He would have wanted to know, "How will you provide for my daughter? What is your reputation in this community? How is your health? Where will you take her to live? What are your debts and your assets? What are the strengths of your character?" My father would not have just given me away in marriage to anybody for the mere fact that I was in love with the fellow. But in modern life, when I made the decision to marry, my modern father didn't become involved at all. He would have no more interfered with that decision than he would have told me how to style my hair.

I have no nostalgia for the patriarchy, please believe me. But what I have come to realize is that, when that patriarchic system was (rightfully) dismantled, it was not necessarily replaced by another form of protection. What I mean is-I never thought to ask a suitor the same challenging questions my father might have asked him, in a different age. I have given myself away in love many times, merely for the sake of love. And I've given away the farm sometimes in that process. If I am to truly become an autonomous woman, then I must take over that role of being my own guardian. Famously, Gloria Steinem once advised women that they should strive to become like the men they had always wanted to marry. What I've only recently realized is that I not only have to become my own husband, but I need to be my own father, too. And this is why I sent myself to bed that night alone. Because I felt it was too soon for me to be receiving a gentleman suitor.

That said, I woke up at 2:00 AM with a heavy sigh and a physical hunger so deep I didn't have any idea of how to satisfy it. The lunatic cat who lives in my house was howling mournfully for some reason and I told him, "I know exactly how you feel." I had to do something about my longing, so I got up, went to the kitchen in my nightgown, peeled a pound of potatoes, boiled them up, sliced them, fried them in butter, salted them generously and ate every bite of them-asking my body the whole while if it would please accept the satisfaction of a pound of fried potatoes in lieu of the fulfillment of lovemaking.

My body replied, only after eating every bite of the food: "No deal, babe."

So I climbed back into bed, sighed in boredom and commenced to…

Well. A word about masturbation, if I may. Sometimes it can be a handy (forgive me) tool, but other times it can be so acutely unsatisfying that it only makes you feel worse in the end. After a year and half of celibacy, after a year and a half of calling my own name in my bed-built-for-one, I was getting a little sick of the sport. Still, tonight, in my restless state-what else could I do? The potatoes hadn't worked. So I had my way with myself yet again. As usual, my mind paged through its backlog of erotic files, looking for the right fantasy or memory that would help get the job done fastest. But nothing was really working tonight-not the firemen, not the pirates, not that pervy old Bill Clinton standby scene that usually does the trick, not even the Victorian gentlemen crowding around me in their drawing room with their task force of nubile young maids. In the end, the only thing that would satisfy was when I reluctantly admitted into my mind the idea of my good friend from Brazil climbing into this bed with me… on me…

Then I slept. I woke to a quiet blue sky and an even quieter bedroom. Still feeling unsettled and unbalanced, I took a long stretch of my morning and chanted the entire 182 Sanskrit verses of the Gurugita-the great, purifying fundamental hymn of my Ashram in India. Then I meditated for an hour of bone-tingling stillness until I finally felt it again-that specific, constant, clear-sky, unrelated-to-anything, never-shifting, nameless and changeless perfection of my own happiness. That happiness which is better, truly, than anything I have ever experienced anywhere else on this earth, and that includes salty, buttery kisses and even saltier and more buttery potatoes.

I was so glad I had made the decision to stay alone.

97

So I was kind of surprised the next night when-after he'd made me dinner at his house and after we'd sprawled on his couch for several hours and discussed all manner of subjects and after he'd unexpectedly leaned into me for a moment and sunk his face toward my armpit and pronounced how much he loved the marvelous dirty stink of me-Felipe finally put his palm against my cheek and said, "That's enough, darling. Come to my bed now," and I did.

Yes, I did come to his bed with him, in that bedroom with its big open windows looking out over the nighttime and the quiet Balinese rice fields. He parted the sheer, white curtain of mosquito netting that surrounded his bed and guided me in there. Then he helped me out of my dress with the tender competence of a man who had obviously spent many comfortable years getting his children ready for bathtime, and he explained to me his terms-that he wanted absolutely nothing from me whatsoever except permission to adore me for as long as I wanted him to. Were those terms acceptable to me?

Having lost my voice somewhere between the couch and the bed, I only nodded. There was nothing left to say. It had been a long, austere season of solitude. I had done well for myself. But Felipe was right-that was enough.

"OK," he replied, smiling as he moved some pillows out of our way and rolled my body under his. "Let's get ourselves organized here."

Which was actually pretty funny because that moment marked an end to all my efforts at organization.

Later, Felipe would tell me how he had seen me that night. He said that I seemed so young, not in the least bit resembling the self-assured woman he'd come to know in the daylight world. He said I seemed terribly young but also open and excited and relieved to be recognized and so tired of being brave. He said it was obvious I hadn't been touched in such a long time. He found me teeming with need but also grateful to be allowed to express that need. And while I can't say that I remember all that, I do take his word for it because he seemed to be paying awfully close attention to me.

What I mostly remember about that night is the billowy white mosquito netting that surrounded us. How it looked to me like a parachute. And how I felt like I was now deploying this parachute to escort me out the side exit of the solid, disciplined airplane which had been flying me during these few years out of A Very Hard Time in My Life. But now my sturdy flying machine had become obsolete right there in midair, so I stepped out of that single-minded single-engine airplane and let this fluttering white parachute swing me down through the strange empty atmosphere between my past and my future, and land me safely on this small, bed-shaped island, inhabited only by this handsome shipwrecked Brazilian sailor, who (having been alone himself for far too long) was so happy and so surprised to see me coming that he suddenly forgot all his English and could only manage to repeat these five words every time he looked at my face: beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful and beautiful.

98

We didn't sleep at all, of course. And then, it was ridiculous-I had to go. I had to go back to my house stupidly early the next morning because I had a date to meet my friend Yudhi. He and I had long ago planned that this was the very week we were going to leave on a big cross-Balinese road trip together. This was an idea we'd come up with one evening at my house when Yudhi said that, aside from his wife and Manhattan, what he most missed about America was driving-just taking off with a car and some friends and going on an adventure across those great distances, on all those fabulous interstate highways. I told him, "OK, so we'll go on a road trip here in Bali together, American-style."

This had struck us both as irresistibly comic-there's no way you can do an American-style road trip in Bali. There are no great distances, first of all, on an island the size of Delaware. And the "highways" are horrible, made surreally dangerous by the dense, mad prevalence of Bali's version of the American family minivan-a small motorcycle with five people crowded on it, the father driving with one hand while holding the newborn infant with the other (football-like) while Mom sits sidesaddle behind him in her tight sarong with a basket balanced on her head, encouraging her twin toddlers not to fall off the speeding motorbike, which is probably traveling on the wrong side of the road and has no headlight. Helmets are rarely worn but are frequently-and I never did find out why-carried. Imagine scores of these heavily laden motorcycles, all speeding recklessly, all weaving and dodging across each other like some kind of crazy motorized maypole dance, and you have life on the Balinese highways. I don't know why every single Balinese person hasn't been killed already in a road accident.

But Yudhi and I decided to do it anyway, to take off for a week, rent a car and drive all over this tiny island, pretending that we are in America and that both of us are free. The idea charmed me when we came up with it last month, but the timing of it now-as I am lying in bed with Felipe and he's kissing my fingertips and forearms and shoulders, encouraging me to linger-seems unfortunate. But I have to go. And in a way, I do want to go. Not only to spend a week with my friend Yudhi, but also as a repose after my big night with Felipe, to get my head around the new reality that, as they say in the novels: I have taken a lover.

So Felipe drops me off at my house with one last passionate embrace and I have just enough time to shower and pull myself together when Yudhi arrives with our rental car. He takes one look at me and says, "Dude-what time'd you get home last night?"

I say, "Dude-I didn't get home last night."

He says, "Duuuuuuude," and starts laughing, probably remembering the conversation we'd had only about two weeks earlier wherein I'd seriously posited that I might never, actually, have sex again for the rest of my life, ever. He says, "So you gave in, huh?"

"Yudhi," I replied, "let me tell you a story. Last summer, right before I left the States, I went to visit my grandparents in upstate New York. My grandfather's wife-his second wife-is this really nice lady named Gale, in her eighties now. She hauled out this old photo album and showed me pictures from the 1930s, when she was eighteen years old and went on a trip to Europe for a year with her two best friends and a guardian. She's flipping through these pages, showing me these amazing old photographs of Italy, and suddenly we get to this picture of this really cute young Italian guy, in Venice. I go, 'Gale-who's the hottie?' She goes, 'That's the son of the people who owned the hotel where we stayed in Venice. He was my boyfriend.' I go, 'Your boyfriend?' And my grandfather's sweet wife looks at me all sly and her eyes get all sexy like Bette Davis, and she goes, 'I was tired of looking at churches, Liz.' "

Yudhi gives me a high five. "Rock on, dude."

We set off for our fake American road trip across Bali, me and this cool young Indonesian musical genius in exile, the back of our car filled with guitars and beer and the Balinese equivalent of American road trip food-fried rice crackers and dreadfully flavored indigenous candies. The details of our journey are a bit blurry to me now, smudged over my distracting thoughts of Felipe and by the weird haziness that always accompanies a road trip in any country of the world. What I do remember is that Yudhi and I speak American the entire time-a language I hadn't spoken in so long. I'd been speaking English a lot during this year, of course, but not American, and definitely not the sort of hip-hop American Yudhi likes. So we just indulge it, turning ourselves into MTV-watching adolescents as we drive along, razzing each other like teenagers in Hoboken, calling each other dude and man and sometimes-with great tenderness- homo. A lot of our dialogue revolves around affectionate insults to each other's mothers.

"Dude, what'd you do with the map?"

"Why don't you ask your mother what I did with the map?"

"I would, man, but she's too fat."

And so forth.

We don't even penetrate the interior of Bali; we just drive along the coast, and it's beaches, beaches, beaches for a whole week. Sometimes we take a little fishing boat out to an island, see what's going on out there. There are so many kinds of beaches in Bali. We hang out one day along the long southern California-style groovy white sand surf of Kuta, then head up to the sinister black rocky beauty of the west coast, then we pass that invisible Balinese dividing line over which regular tourists never seem to go, up to the wild beaches of the north coast where only the surfers dare to tread (and only the crazy ones, at that). We sit on the beach and watch the dangerous waves, watch the lean brown and white Indonesian and Western surf-cats slice across the water like zippers ripping open the backs of the ocean's blue party dress. We watch the surfers wipe out with bone-breaking hubris against the coral and rocks, only to go back out again to surf another wave, and we gasp and say, "Dude, that is totally MESSED UP."

Just as intended, we forget for long hours (purely for Yudhi's benefit) that we are in Indonesia at all as we tool around in this rented car, eating junk food and singing American songs, having pizza everywhere we can find it. When we are overcome by evidence of the Bali-ness of our surroundings, we try to ignore it and pretend we're back in America. I'll ask, "What's the best route to get past this volcano?" and Yudhi will say, "I think we should take I-95," and I'll counter, "But that'll take us right through Boston in the middle of rush-hour traffic…" It's just a game, but it sort of works.

Sometimes we discover calm stretches of blue ocean and we swim all day, permitting each other to start drinking beer at 10:00 AM ("Dude-it's medicinal"). We make friends with everyone we encounter. Yudhi is the kind of guy who-when he's walking down the beach and he sees a man building a boat-will stop and say, "Wow! Are you building a boat?" And his curiosity is so perfectly winning that the next thing you know we've been invited to come live with the boat-builder's family for a year.

Weird things happen in the evenings. We stumble on mysterious temple rituals in the middle of nowhere, let ourselves get hypnotized by the chorus of voices, drums and gamelan. We find one small seaside town where all the locals have gathered in a darkened street for a birthday ceremony; Yudhi and I are both pulled out of the crowd (honored strangers) and invited to dance with the prettiest girl in the village. (She's enveloped in gold and jewels and incense and Egyptian-looking makeup; she's probably thirteen years old but moves her hips with the soft, sensual faith of a creature who knows she could seduce any god she wanted.) The next day we find a strange family restaurant in the same village where the Balinese proprietor announces that he's a great chef of Thai food, which he decidedly is not, but we spend the whole day there anyhow, drinking icy Cokes and eating greasy pad thai and playing Milton Bradley board games with the owner's elegantly effeminate teenage son. (It occurs to us only later that this pretty teenage boy could well have been the beautiful female dancer from the night before; the Balinese are masters of ritual transvestism.)

Every day I call Felipe from whatever outback phone I can find, and he asks, "How many more sleeps until you come back to me?" He tells me, "I'm enjoying falling in love with you, darling. It feels so natural, like it's something I experience every second week, but actually I haven't felt this way about anyone in nearly thirty years."

Not there yet, not yet to that place of a free fall into love, I make hesitant noises, little reminders that I am leaving in a few months. Felipe is unconcerned. He says, "Maybe this is just some stupid romantic South American idea, but I need you to understand-darling, for you, I am even willing to suffer. Whatever pain happens to us in the future, I accept it already, just for the pleasure of being with you now. Let's enjoy this time. It's marvelous."

I tell him, "You know-it's funny, but I'd been seriously thinking before I met you that I might be alone and celibate forever. I was thinking maybe I would live the life of a spiritual contemplative."

He says, "Contemplate this, darling…," and then proceeds to detail with careful specificity the first, second, third, fourth and fifth things he is planning to do with my body when he gets me alone in his bed again. I wobble away from the phone call a little woozy in the knees, amused and bamboozled by all this new passion.

The last day of our road trip, Yudhi and I lounge on a beach someplace for hours, and-as often happens with us-we start talking about New York City again, how great it is, how much we love it. Yudhi misses the city, he says, almost as much as he misses his wife-as if New York is a person, a relative, whom he has lost since he got deported. As we're talking, Yudhi brushes off a nice clean patch of white sand between our towels and draws a map of Manhattan. He says, "Let's try to fill in everything we can remember about the city." We use our fingertips to draw in all the avenues, the major cross-streets, the mess that Broadway makes as it leans crookedly across the island, the rivers, the Village, Central Park. We choose a thin, pretty seashell to stand for the Empire State Building, and another shell is the Chrysler Building. Out of respect, we take two sticks and put the Twin Towers back at the base of the island, back where they belong.

We use this sandy map to show each other our favorite spots in New York. This is where Yudhi bought the sunglasses he's wearing right now; this is where I bought the sandals I'm wearing. This is where I first had dinner with my ex-husband; this is where Yudhi met his wife. This is the best Vietnamese food in the city, this is the best bagel, this is the best noodle shop ("No way, homo-this is the best noodle shop"). I sketch out my old Hell's Kitchen neighborhood and Yudhi says, "I know a good diner up there."

"Tick-Tock, Cheyenne or Starlight?" I ask.

"Tick-Tock, dude."

"Ever try the egg creams at Tick-Tock?"

He moans, "Oh my God, I know…"

I feel his longing for New York so deeply that for a moment I mistake it for my own. His homesickness infects me so completely that I forget for an instant that I am actually free to go back to Manhattan someday, though he is not. He fiddles a bit with the two sticks of the Twin Towers, anchors them more solidly in the sand, then looks out at the hushed, blue ocean and says, "I know it's beautiful here… but do you think I'll ever see America again?"

What can I tell him?

We slump into silence. Then he pops out of his mouth the yucky Indonesian hard candy he's been sucking on for the last hour and says, "Dude, this candy tastes like ass. Where'd you get it?"

"From your mother, dude," I say. "From your mother."

99

When we return to Ubud, I go straight back to Felipe's house and don't leave his bedroom for approximately another month. This is only the faintest of exaggerations. I have never been loved and adored like this before by anyone, never with such pleasure and single-minded concentration. Never have I been so unpeeled, revealed, unfurled and hurled through the event of lovemaking.

One thing I do know about intimacy is that there are certain natural laws which govern the sexual experience of two people, and that these laws cannot be budged any more than gravity can be negotiated with. To feel physically comfortable with someone else's body is not a decision you can make. It has very little to do with how two people think or act or talk or even look. The mysterious magnet is either there, buried somewhere deep behind the sternum, or it is not. When it isn't there (as I have learned in the past, with heartbreaking clarity) you can no more force it to exist than a surgeon can force a patient's body to accept a kidney from the wrong donor. My friend Annie says it all comes down to one simple question: "Do you want your belly pressed against this person's belly forever-or not?"

Felipe and I, as we discover to our delight, are a perfectly matched, genetically engineered belly-to-belly success story. There are no parts of our bodies which are in any way allergic to any parts of the other's body. Nothing is dangerous, nothing is difficult, nothing is refused. Everything in our sensual universe is-simply and thoroughly-complemented. And, also… complimented.

"Look at you," Felipe says, taking me to the mirror after we've made love again, showing me my nude body and my hair that looks like I just came through a NASA space-training centrifuge. He says, "Look how beautiful you are… every line of you is a curve… you look like sand dunes…"

(Indeed, I do not think my body has looked or felt this relaxed in its life, not since I was maybe six months old and my mother took snapshots of me all blissed-out on a towel on the kitchen counter after a nice bath in the kitchen sink.)

And then he leads me back to the bed, saying, in Portuguese, "Vem, gostosa."

Come here, my delicious one.

Felipe is also the endearment master. In bed he slips into adoring me in Portuguese, so I have graduated from being his "lovely little darling" to being his queridinha. (Literal translation: "lovely little darling.") I've been too lazy here in Bali to try to learn Indonesian or Balinese, but suddenly Portuguese is coming easily to me. Of course I'm only learning the pillow talk, but that's a fine use of Portuguese. He says, "Darling, you're going to get sick of it. You're going to get bored of how much I touch you, and how many times a day I tell you how beautiful you are."

Try me, mister.

I'm losing days here, disappearing under his sheets, under his hands. I like the feeling of not knowing what the date is. My nice organized schedule has been blown away by the breeze. I finally do stop by to see my medicine man one afternoon after a long hiatus of no visiting. Ketut sees the truth on my face before I say a word.

"You found boyfriend in Bali," he says.

"Yes, Ketut."

"Good. Be careful not get pregnant."

"I will."

"He good man?"

"You tell me, Ketut," I said. "You read his palm. You promised that he was a good man. You said it about seven times."

"I did? When?"

"Back in June. I brought him here. He was the Brazilian man, older than me. You told me you liked him."

"Never did," he insisted, and there was nothing I could do to convince him otherwise. Sometimes Ketut loses things from his recollection, as you would, too, if you were somewhere between sixty-five and a hundred and twelve years old. Most of the time he's keen and sharp, but other times I feel like I've disturbed him out of some other plane of consciousness, out of some other universe. (A few weeks ago he said to me, completely out of nowhere, "You good friend to me, Liss. Loyal friend. Loving friend." Then he sighed, stared off into space and added mournfully, "Not like Sharon." Who the hell is Sharon? What did she do to him? When I tried asking him about it, he would give me no answer. Acted suddenly like he didn't know who I was even referring to. As if I were the one who'd brought up that thieving hussy Sharon in the first place.)

"Why you never bring boyfriend here to meet me?" he asked now.

"I did, Ketut. Really I did. And you told me you liked him."

"Don't remember. He a rich man, your boyfriend?"

"No, Ketut. He's not a rich man. But he has enough money."

"Medium rich?" The medicine man wants details, spreadsheets.

"He has enough money."

My answer seemed to irritate Ketut. "You ask this man for money, he can give to you, or not?"

"Ketut, I don't want money from him. I've never taken money from a man."

"You spend every night with him?"

"Yes."

"Good. He spoil you?"

"Very much."

"Good. You still meditate?"

Yes, I do still meditate every day of the week, slithering out of Felipe's bed and over to the couch, where I can sit in silence and offer up some gratitude for all of this. Outside his porch, the ducks quack their way through the rice paddies, gossiping and splashing all over the place. (Felipe says that these flocks of busy Balinese ducks have always reminded him of Brazilian women strutting down the beaches in Rio; chatting loudly and interrupting each other constantly and waggling their bottoms with such pride.) I am so relaxed now that I kind of slide into meditation like it's a bath prepared by my lover. Naked in the morning sun, with nothing but a light blanket wrapped over my shoulders, I disappear into grace, hovering over the void like a tiny seashell balanced on a teaspoon.

Why did life ever seem difficult?

I call my friend Susan back in New York City one day, and listen as she confides to me, over the typical urban police sirens wailing in the background, the latest details of her latest broken heart. My voice comes out in the cool, smooth tones of a late-nite, jazz-radio DJ, as I tell her how she just has to let go, man, how she's gotta learn that everything is just perfect as it is already, that the universe provides, baby, that it's all peace and harmony out there…

I can almost hear her rolling her eyes as she says over the sirens, "Spoken like a woman who already had four orgasms today."

100

But all the fun and games caught up with me after a few weeks. After all those nights of not sleeping and all those days of too much lovemaking, my body struck back and I got attacked by a nasty infection in my bladder. A typical affliction of the overly sexed, especially likely to strike when you're not used to being overly sexed anymore. It came up as fast as any tragedy can strike. I was walking through town one morning doing some chores when suddenly I was buckled over with burning pain and fever. I'd had these infections before, during my wayward youth, so I knew what it was. I panicked for a moment-these things can be awful-but then thought, "Thank God my best friend in Bali is a healer," and I ran into Wayan's shop.

"I'm sick!" I said.

She took one look at me and said, "You sick from making too much sex, Liz."

I groaned, buried my face in my hands, embarrassed.

She chuckled, said, "You can't keep secrets from Wayan…"

I was in godawful pain. Anyone who's ever had this infection knows the dreadful feeling; anyone who hasn't experienced this specific suffering-well, just make up your own torturous metaphor, preferably using the term "fire poker" someplace in the sentence.

Wayan, like a veteran firefighter or an ER surgeon, never moves fast. She methodically started chopping some herbs, boiling some roots, wandering back and forth between her kitchen and me, bringing me one warm, brown, toxic-tasting concoction after another, saying, "Drink, honey…"

Whenever the next batch boiled, she would sit across from me, giving me sly, dirty looks and using the opportunity to get nosy.

"You careful not to get pregnant, Liz?"

"Not possible, Wayan. Felipe has a vasectomy."

"Felipe has a vasectomy?" she asked, in as much awe as if she were asking, "Felipe has a villa in Tuscany?" (I feel the same way about it, by the way.) "Very difficult in Bali to get a man to do this. Always the woman problem, birth control."

(Although it is true that the Indonesian birth rates are down lately due to a brilliant recent birth control incentive program: the government promised a new motorcycle to every man who would volunteer to come in for a vasectomy… though I hate to think the guys had to ride their new bikes home the same day.)

"Sex is funny," Wayan mused as she watched me grimacing in pain, drinking more of her homemade medicine.

"Yeah, Wayan, thanks. It's hilarious."

"No, sex is funny," she went on. "Make people do funny things. Everyone gets like this, at the beginning of love. Wanting too much happiness, too much pleasure, until you make yourself sick. Even to Wayan this happens at beginning of love story. Lose balance."

"I'm embarrassed," I say.

"Don't," she said. Then she added in perfect English (and perfect Balinese logic), "To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life."

I decided to call Felipe. I had some antibiotics at the house, an emergency stash I always travel with, just in case. Having had these infections before, I know how bad they can get, even traveling up into your kidneys. I didn't want to go through that, not in Indonesia. So I called him and told him what had happened (he was mortified) and asked him to bring me over the pills. It wasn't that I didn't trust Wayan's healing prowess, it's just that this was really serious pain…

She said, "You don't need Western pills."

"But maybe it's better, just to be safe…"

"Give two hours," she said. "If I don't make you better, you can take your pills."

Reluctantly, I agreed. My experience with these infections is that they can take days to clear, even with strong antibiotics. But I didn't want to make her feel bad.

Tutti was playing in the shop and she kept bringing little drawings of houses over to cheer me up, patting my hand with an eight-year-old's compassion. "Mama Elizabeth sick?" At least she didn't know what I'd been doing to get sick.

"Did you buy your house yet, Wayan?" I asked.

"Not yet, honey. No hurry."

"What about that place you liked? I thought you were going to buy that?"

"Found out not for sale. Too expensive."

"Do you have any other places in mind?"

"Not worry about it now, Liz. For now, let me make you quickly feel better."

Felipe arrived with my medicine and a face full of remorse, apologizing to both me and Wayan for having inflicted me with this pain, or at least that's how he was seeing it.

"Not serious," said Wayan. "Not worry. I fix her soon. Quickly better."

Then she went into the kitchen and produced a giant glass mixing bowl full of leaves, roots, berries, something I recognized as turmeric, some shaggy mass of something that looked like witches' hair, plus eye of what I believe might have been newt… all floating in its own brown juice. There was about a gallon of it in the bowl, whatever it was. It stank like a corpse.

"Drink, honey," Wayan said. "Drink all."

I suffered it down. And in less than two hours… well, we all know how the story ends. In less than two hours I was fine, totally healed. An infection that would have taken days to treat with Western antibiotics was gone. I tried to pay her for having fixed me up, but she only laughed. "My sister doesn't need to pay." Then she turned on Felipe, fake stern: "You be careful with her now. Only sleep tonight, no touching."

"You're not embarrassed to fix people for problems like this, from sex?" I asked Wayan.

"Liz-I'm healer. I fix all problems, with women's vaginas, with men's bananas. Sometimes for women, I even make fake penises. For making sex alone."

"Dildos?" I asked, shocked.

"Not everyone has Brazilian boyfriend, Liz," she admonished. Then she looked at Felipe and said brightly, "If you ever need help making stiff your banana, I can give you medicine."

I was busily assuring Wayan that Felipe needed not one bit of help with his banana, but he interrupted me-always the entrepreneur-to ask Wayan if this banana-stiffening therapy of hers could perhaps be bottled and marketed. "We could make a fortune," he said. But she explained, no, it's not like that. All her medicines must be made fresh each day in order to work. And they must be accompanied by her prayers. Anyway, internal medicine is not the only way Wayan can firm up a man's banana, she assured us; she can also do this with massage. Then, to our lurid fascination, she described the different massages she does for men's impotent bananas, how she grips around the base of the thing and kind of shakes it around for about an hour to encourage the blood to flow, while incanting special prayers.

I asked, "But Wayan-what happens when the man comes back every day and says, 'Still not cured, Doctor! Need another banana massage!' " She laughed at this bawdy idea, and admitted that, yes, she has to be careful not to spend too much time fixing men's bananas because it causes a certain amount of… strong feeling… within her, which she isn't sure is good for the healing energy. And sometimes, yes, the men get out of control. (As you would, too, if you'd been impotent for years and suddenly this beautiful mahogany-skinned woman with long black silky hair gets the engine to turn over again.) She told us about the one man who leapt up and started chasing her around the room during an impotency cure, saying: "I need Wayan! I need Wayan!"

But that's not all Wayan can do. Also, she told us, she is sometimes called upon to be a teacher of sex for a couple who are either struggling with impotence or frigidity, or who are having trouble making a baby. She has to draw magic pictures on their bedsheets and explain to them which sexual positions are appropriate for which time of the month. She said that if a man wants to make a baby he should make intercourse with his wife "really, really hard" and should shoot "water out from his banana into her vagina really, really fast." Sometimes Wayan has to actually be there in the room with the copulating couple, explaining just how hard and fast this must be done.

I ask, "And is the man able to shoot water out of his banana really hard and really fast with Dr. Wayan standing over him watching?"

Felipe imitates Wayan watching the couple: "Faster! Harder! You want this baby or not?"

Wayan says, yes, she knows it's crazy, but this is the job of the healer. Though she admits it requires a whole lot of purification ceremonies before and after this event in order to keep her sacred spirit intact, and she doesn't like to do it very often because it makes her feel "funny." But if a baby needs to be conceived, she will take care of it.

"And do these couples all have babies now?" I asked.

"Have babies!" she confirmed with pride. Of course they do.

But then Wayan confides something extremely interesting. She said that if a couple is not having any luck conceiving a child, she will examine both the man and the woman to determine who is, as they say, to blame. If it's the woman, no problem-Wayan can fix this with ancient healing techniques. But if it's the man-well, this presents a delicate situation here in the patriarchy of Bali. Wayan's medical options here are limited because it is beyond the pale of safety to inform a Balinese man that he is sterile; it cannot possibly be true. Men are men, after all. If no pregnancy is occurring, it has to be the woman's fault. And if the woman doesn't provide her husband with a baby soon, she could be in big trouble-beaten, shamed or divorced.

"So what do you do in that situation?" I asked, impressed that a woman who still calls semen "banana water" could diagnose male infertility.

Wayan told us all. What she does in the case of male infertility is to inform the man that his wife is infertile and needs to be seen privately every afternoon for "healing sessions." When the wife comes to the shop alone, Wayan calls some young stud from the village to come over and have sex with her, hopefully creating a baby.

Felipe was appalled: "Wayan! No!"

But she just calmly nodded. Yes. "It's the only way. If the wife is healthy, she will have baby. Then everybody happy."

Felipe immediately wanted to know, since he lives in this town, "Who? Who do you hire to do this job?"

Wayan said, "The drivers."

Which made us all laugh because Ubud is full of these young guys, these "drivers," who sit on every corner and harass passing tourists with the never-ending sales pitch, "Transport? Transport?" trying to make a buck driving folks out of town to the volcanoes, the beaches or the temples. Generally speaking, this is a fairly good-looking crowd, what with their fine Gauguin skin, toned bodies and groovy long hair. You could make a nice bit of money in America operating a "fertility clinic" for women, staffed with beautiful guys like this. Wayan says the best thing about her infertility treatment is that the drivers generally don't even ask any payment for their sexual transport services, especially if the wife is really cute. Felipe and I agree that this is quite generous and community-spirited of the fellows. Nine months later a beautiful baby is born. And everyone is happy. Best of all: "No need to cancel the marriage." And we all know how horrible it is to cancel a marriage, especially in Bali.

Felipe said, "My God-what suckers we men are."

But Wayan is unapologetic. This treatment is only necessary because it's not possible to tell a Balinese man that he is infertile without risking that he will go home and do something terrible to his wife. If men in Bali weren't like this, she could cure their infertility in other ways. But this is the reality of the culture, so there it is. She doesn't have the tiniest shred of bad conscience about it but thinks it's just another way of being a creative healer. Anyway, she adds, it's sometimes nice for the wife to make sex with one of those cool drivers, because most husbands in Bali don't know how to make love to a woman, anyway.

"Most husbands, it's like roosters, like goats."

I suggested, "Maybe you should teach sex education class, Wayan. You could teach men how to touch women in a soft way, then maybe their wives would like sex more. Because if a man really touches you gently, caresses your skin, says loving things, kisses you all over your body, takes his time… sex can be nice."

Suddenly she blushed. Wayan Nuriyasih, this banana-massaging, bladder-infection-treating, dildo-peddling, small-time-pimp, actually blushed.

"You make me feel funny when you talk like that," she said, fanning herself. "This talking, it makes me feel… different. Even in my underpants I feel different! Go home now, you both. No more talk like this about sex. Go home, go to bed, but only sleeping, OK? Only SLEEPING!"

101

On the ride home Felipe asked, "Has she bought a house yet?"

"Not yet. But she says she's looking."

"It's been over a month already since you gave her the money, hasn't it?"

"Yeah, but the place she wanted, it wasn't for sale…"

"Be careful, darling," Felipe said. "Don't let this drag out too long. Don't let this situation get all Balinese on you."

"What does that mean?"

"I'm not trying to interfere in your business, but I've lived in this country for five years and I know how things are. Stories can get complicated around here. Sometimes it's hard to get to the truth of what's actually happening."

"What are you trying to say, Felipe?" I asked, and when he didn't answer immediately, I quoted to him one of his own signature lines: "If you tell me slowly, I can understand quickly."

"What I'm trying to say, Liz, is that your friends have raised an awful lot of money for this woman, and right now it's all sitting in Wayan's bank account. Make sure she actually buys a house with it."

102

The end of July came, and my thirty-fifth birthday with it. Wayan threw a birthday party for me in her shop, quite unlike any I have ever experienced before. Wayan had dressed me in a traditional Balinese birthday suit-a bright purple sarong, a strapless bustier and a long length of golden fabric that she wrapped tightly around my torso, forming a sheath so snug I could barely take a breath or eat my own birthday cake. As she was mummifying me into this exquisite costume in her tiny, dark bedroom (crowded with the belongings of the three other little human beings who live there with her), she asked, not quite looking at me, but doing some fancy tucking and pinning of material around my ribs, "You have prospect to marrying Felipe?"

"No," I said. "We have no prospects for marrying. I don't want any more husbands, Wayan. And I don't think Felipe wants any more wives. But I like being with him."

"Handsome on the outside is easy to find, but handsome on the outside and handsome on the inside-this not easy. Felipe has this."

I agreed.

She smiled. "And who bring this good man to you, Liz? Who prayed every day for this man?"

I kissed her. "Thank you, Wayan. You did a good job."

We commenced to the birthday party. Wayan and the kids had decorated the whole place with balloons and palm fronds and handwritten signs with complex, run-on messages like, "Happy birthday to a nice and sweet heart, to you, our dearest sister, to our beloved Lady Elizabeth, Happy Birthday to you, always peace to you and Happy Birthday." Wayan has a brother whose young children are gifted dancers in temple ceremonies, and so the nieces and nephews came and danced for me right there in the restaurant, staging a haunting, gorgeous performance usually offered only to priests. All the children were decked out in gold and massive headdresses, decorated in fierce drag queen makeup, with powerful stamping feet and graceful, feminine fingers.

Balinese parties as a whole are generally organized around the principle of people getting dressed up in their finest clothes, then sitting around and staring at each other. It's a lot like magazine parties in New York, actually.("My God, darling," moaned Felipe, when I told him that Wayan was throwing me a Balinese birthday party, "it's going to be so boring…") It wasn't boring, though-just quiet. And different. There was the whole dressing-up part, and then there was the whole dance performance part, and then there was the whole sitting around and staring at each other part, which wasn't so bad. Everyone did look lovely. Wayan's whole family had come, and they kept smiling and waving at me from four feet away, and I kept smiling at them and waving back at them.

I blew out the candles of the birthday cake along with Little Ketut, the smallest orphan, whose birthday, I had decided a few weeks ago, would also be on July 18 from now on, shared with my own, since she'd never had a birthday or a birthday party before. After we blew out the candles, Felipe presented Little Ketut with a Barbie doll, which she unwrapped in stunned wonder and then regarded as though it were a ticket for a rocket ship to Jupiter-something she never, ever in seven billion light-years could've imagined receiving.

Everything about this party was kind of funny. It was an oddball international and intergenerational mix of a handful of my friends, Wayan's family and some of her Western clients and patients whom I'd never met before. My friend Yudhi brought me a six-pack of beer to wish me happy birthday, and also this cool young hipster screenwriter from L.A. named Adam came by. Felipe and I had met Adam in a bar the other night and had invited him. Adam and Yudhi passed their time at the party talking to a little boy named John, whose mother is a patient of Wayan's, a German clothing designer married to an American who lives in Bali. Little John-who is seven years old and who is kind of American, he says, because of his American dad (even though he himself has never been there), but who speaks German with his mother and speaks Indonesian with Wayan's children-was smitten with Adam because he'd found out that the guy was from California and could surf.

"What's your favorite animal, mister?" asked John, and Adam replied, "Pelicans."

"What's a pelican?" the little boy asked, and Yudhi jumped in and said, "Dude, you don't know what a pelican is? Dude, you gotta go home and ask your dad about that. Pelicans rock, dude."

Then John, the kind-of-American boy, turned to say something in Indonesian to little Tutti (probably to ask her what a pelican was) as Tutti sat in Felipe's lap trying to read my birthday cards, while Felipe was speaking beautiful French to a retired gentleman from Paris who comes to Wayan for kidney treatments. Meanwhile, Wayan had turned on the radio and Kenny Rogers was singing "Coward of the County," while three Japanese girls wandered randomly into the shop to see if they could get medicinal massages. As I tried to talk the Japanese girls into eating some of my birthday cake, the two orphans-Big Ketut and Little Ketut-were decorating my hair with the giant spangled barrettes they'd saved up all their money to buy me as a gift. Wayan's nieces and nephews, the child temple dancers, the children of rice farmers, sat very still, tentatively staring at the floor, dressed in gold like miniature deities; they imbued the room with a strange and otherworldly godliness. Outside, the roosters started crowing, even though it was not yet evening, not yet dusk. My traditional Balinese clothing was squeezing me like an ardent hug, and I was feeling like this was definitely the strangest-but maybe the happiest-birthday party I'd ever experienced in my whole life.

103

Still, Wayan needs to buy a house, and I'm getting worried that it's not happening. I don't understand why it's not happening, but it absolutely needs to happen. Felipe and I have stepped in now. We found a realtor who could take us around and show us properties, but Wayan hasn't liked anything we've shown her. I keep telling her, "Wayan, it's important that we buy something. I'm leaving here in September, and I need to let my friends know before I leave that their money actually went into a home for you. And you need to get a roof over your head before you get evicted."

"Not so simple to buy land in Bali," she keeps telling me. "Not like to walk into a bar and buy a beer. Can take long time."

"We don't have a long time, Wayan."

She just shrugs, and I remember again about the Balinese concept of "rubber time," meaning that time is a very relative and bouncy idea. "Four weeks" doesn't really mean to Wayan what it means to me. One day to Wayan isn't necessarily composed of twenty-four hours, either; sometimes it's longer, sometimes it's shorter, depending upon the spiritual and emotional nature of that day. As with my medicine man and his mysterious age, sometimes you count the days, sometimes you weigh them.

Meanwhile, it also turns out that I have completely underestimated how expensive it is to buy property in Bali. Because everything is so cheap here, you would assume that land is also undervalued, but that's a mistaken assumption. To buy land in Bali-especially in Ubud-can get almost as expensive as buying land in Westchester County, in Tokyo, or on Rodeo Drive. Which is completely illogical because once you own the property you can't make back your money on it in any traditionally logical way. You may pay approximately $25,000 for an aro of land (an aro is a land measurement roughly translating into English as: "Slightly bigger than the parking spot for an SUV"), and then you can build a little shop there where you will sell one batik sarong a day to one tourist a day for the rest of your life, for a profit of about seventy-five cents a hit. It's senseless.

But the Balinese value their land with a passion that extends beyond the reaches of economic sense. Since land ownership is traditionally the only wealth that Balinese recognize as legitimate, property is valued in the same way as the Masai value cattle or as my five-year-old niece values lip gloss: namely, that you cannot have enough of it, that once you have claimed it you must never let it go, and that all of it in the world should rightfully belong to you.

Moreover-as I discover throughout the month of August, during my Narnia-like voyage into the intricacies of Indonesian real estate-it's almost impossible to find out when land is actually for sale around here. Balinese who are selling land typically don't like other people to know that their land is up for sale. Now, you would think it might be advantageous to advertise this fact, but the Balinese don't see it that way. If you're a Balinese farmer and you're selling your land, it means you are desperate for cash, and this is humiliating. Also, if your neighbors and family find out that you actually sold some land, then they'll assume you came into some money, and everyone will be asking if they can borrow that money. So land becomes available for sale only by… rumor. And all these land deals are executed under strange veils of secrecy and deception.

The Western expatriates around here-hearing that I'm trying to buy land for Wayan-start gathering around me, offering cautionary tales based on their own nightmarish experiences. They warn me that you can never really be certain what's going on when it comes to real estate around here. The land you are "buying" may not actually "belong" to the person who is "selling" it. The guy who showed you the property might not even be the owner, but only the disgruntled nephew of the owner, trying to get one over on his uncle because of some old family dispute. Don't expect that the boundaries of your property will ever be clear. The land you buy for your dream house may later be declared "too close to a temple" to allow a building permit (and it's difficult, in this small country with an estimated 20,000 temples, to find any land that is not too close to a temple).

Also you must take into consideration that you're quite probably living on the slopes of a volcano and you might be straddling a fault line, as well. And not just a geological fault line, either. As idyllic as Bali seems, the wise keep in mind that this is, in fact, Indonesia-the largest Islamic nation on earth, unstable at its core, corrupt from the highest ministers of justice all the way down to the guy who pumps gas into your car (and who only pretends to fill it all the way up). Some kind of revolution will always be possible here at any moment, and all your assets may be reclaimed by the victors. Probably at gunpoint.

Negotiating all this dodgy business is not something I have any qualifications whatsoever to be doing. I mean-I went through a divorce proceeding in New York State and everything, but this is another page of Kafka altogether. Meanwhile, $18,000 of money donated by me, my family and my dearest friends is sitting in Wayan's bank account, converted into Indonesia rupiah-a currency that has a history of crashing without notice and turning to vapor. And Wayan is supposed to get evicted from her shop in September, which is around the time I leave the country. Which is in about three weeks.

But it's turning out to be almost impossible for Wayan to find a piece of land she deems appropriate for a home. Setting aside all the practical considerations, she has to examine the taksu-the spirit-of each place. As a healer, Wayan's sense of taksu, even by Balinese standards, is supremely acute. I found one place that I thought was perfect, but Wayan said it was possessed by angry demons. The next piece of land was rejected because it was too close to a river, which, as everyone knows, is where ghosts live. (The night after she saw that place, Wayan says, she dreamt of a beautiful woman in torn clothes, weeping, and that did it-we could not buy this land.) Then we found a lovely little shop near town, with a backyard and everything, but it was located on a corner, and only somebody who wants to go bankrupt and die young would ever live in a house located on a corner. As everyone knows.

"Don't even try talking her out of it," Felipe advised me. "Trust me, darling. Don't get between the Balinese and their taksu."

Then last week Felipe found a place that seemed to fit the criteria exactly-a small, pretty piece of land, close to central Ubud, on a quiet road, next to a rice field, plenty of space for a garden and well within our budget. When I asked Wayan, "Should we buy it?" she replied, "Don't know yet, Liz. Not too fast, for making decisions like this. I need talk to a priest first."

She explained that she would need to consult a priest in order to find an auspicious day upon which to purchase the land, if she does decide to buy it at all. Because nothing significant can be done in Bali before an auspicious day is chosen. But she can't even ask the priests for the auspicious date upon which to buy the land until she decides if she really wants to live there. Which is a commitment she refuses to make until she's had an auspicious dream. Aware of my dwindling days here, I asked Wayan, like a good New Yorker, "How soon can you arrange to have an auspicious dream?"

Wayan replied, like a good Balinese, "Cannot be rushed, this." Although, she mused, it might help if she could go to one of the major temples in Bali with an offering, and pray to the gods to bring her an auspicious dream…

"OK," I said. "Tomorrow Felipe can drive you to the major temple and you can make an offering and ask the gods to please send you an auspicious dream."

Wayan would love to, she said. It's a great idea. Only one problem. She's not permitted to enter any temples for this entire week.

Because she is… menstruating.

104

Maybe I'm not getting across how fun all this is. Truly, it's so much odd and satisfying fun, trying to figure all this out. Or maybe I'm just enjoying this surreal moment in my life so much because I happen to be falling in love, and that always makes the world seem delightful, no matter how insane your reality.

I always liked Felipe. But there's something about the way he takes on The Saga of Wayan's House that brings us together during the month of August like a real couple. It's none of his concern, of course, what happens to this trippy Balinese medicine woman. He's a businessman. He's managed to live in Bali for five years without getting too entwined in the personal lives and complex rituals of the Balinese, but suddenly here he is wading with me through muddy rice paddies and trying to find a priest who will give Wayan an auspicious date…

"I was perfectly happy in my boring life before you came along," he always says.

He was bored in Bali before. He was languid and killing time, a character from a Graham Greene novel. That indolence stopped the moment we were introduced. Now that we're together, I get to hear Felipe's version of how we met, a delicious story I never tire of hearing-about how he saw me at the party that night, standing with my back to him, and how I did not even need to turn my head and show him my face before he had realized somewhere deep in his gut, "That is my woman. I will do anything to have that woman."

"And it was easy to get you," he says. "All I had to do was beg and plead for weeks."

"You didn't beg and plead."

"You didn't notice me begging and pleading?"

He talks about how we went dancing that first night we met, and how he watched me get all attracted to that cute Welsh guy, and how his heart sank as he saw the scene unfolding, thinking, "I'm putting all this work into seducing this woman, and now that handsome young guy's just going to take her from me and bring so much complication into her life-if only she knew how much love I could offer her."

Which he can. He's a caregiver by nature, and I can feel him going into a kind of orbit around me, making me the key directional setting for his compass, growing into the role of being my attendant knight. Felipe is the kind of man who desperately needs a woman in his life-but not so that he can be taken care of; only so that he can have someone to care for, someone to consecrate himself to. Having lived without such a relationship ever since his marriage ended, he's been adrift in life recently, but now he is organizing himself around me. It's lovely to be treated this way. But it also scares me. I hear him downstairs sometimes making me dinner as I am lounging upstairs reading, and he's whistling some happy Brazilian samba, calling up, "Darling-would you like another glass of wine?" and I wonder if I am capable of being somebody's sun, somebody's everything. Am I centered enough now to be the center of somebody else's life? But when I finally brought up the topic with him one night, he said, "Have I asked you to be that person, darling? Have I asked you to be the center of my life?"

I was immediately ashamed of myself for my vanity, for having assumed that he wanted me to stay with him forever so that he could indulge my whims till the end of time.

"I'm sorry," I said. "That was a little arrogant, wasn't it?"

"A little," he acknowledged, then kissed my ear. "But not so much, really. Darling, of course it's something we have to discuss because here's the truth-I'm wildly in love with you." I blanched in reflex, and he made a quick joke, trying to be reassuring: "I mean that in a completely hypothetical way, of course." But then he said in all seriousness, "Look, I'm fifty-two years old. Believe me, I already know how the world works. I recognize that you don't love me yet the way I love you, but the truth is that I don't really care. For some reason, I feel the same way about you that I felt about my kids when they were small-that it wasn't their job to love me, it was my job to love them. You can decide to feel however you want to, but I love you and I will always love you. Even if we never see each other again, you already brought me back to life, and that's a lot. And of course, I'd like to share my life with you. The only problem is, I'm not sure how much of a life I can offer you in Bali."

This is a concern I've had, too. I've been watching the expatriate society in Ubud, and I know for a stone-cold fact this is not the life for me. Everywhere in this town you see the same kind of character-Westerners who have been so ill-treated and badly worn by life that they've dropped the whole struggle and decided to camp out here in Bali indefinitely, where they can live in a gorgeous house for $200 a month, perhaps taking a young Balinese man or woman as a companion, where they can drink before noon without getting any static about it, where they can make a bit of money exporting a bit of furniture for somebody. But generally, all they are doing here is seeing to it that nothing serious will ever be asked of them again. These are not bums, mind you. This is a very high grade of people, multinational, talented and clever. But it seems to me that everyone I meet here used to be something once (generally "married" or "employed"); now they are all united by the absence of the one thing they seem to have surrendered completely and forever: ambition. Needless to say, there's a lot of drinking.

Of course, the precious Balinese town of Ubud is not such a bad place to putter away your life, ignoring the passing of the days. I suppose in that way it's similar to places like Key West, Florida, or Oaxaca, Mexico. Most expats in Ubud, when you ask them how long they've lived here, aren't really sure. For one thing, they aren't really sure how much time has passed since they moved to Bali. But for another thing, it's like they aren't really sure if they do live here. They belong to nowhere, unanchored. Some of them like to imagine that they're just hanging out for a while, just running the engine on idle at the traffic light, waiting for the signal to change. But after seventeen years of that you start to wonder… does anybody ever leave?

There is much to enjoy in their lazy company, in these long Sunday afternoons spent at brunch, drinking champagne and talking about nothing. Still, when I am around this scene, I feel somewhat like Dorothy in the poppy fields of Oz. Be careful! Don't fall asleep in this narcotic meadow, or you could doze away the rest of your life here!

So what will become of me and Felipe? Now that there is, it seems, a "me and Felipe"? He told me not long ago, "Sometimes I wish you were a lost little girl and I could scoop you up and say, 'Come and live with me now, let me take care of you forever.' But you aren't a lost little girl. You're a woman with a career, with ambition. You are a perfect snail: you carry your home on your back. You should hold on to that freedom for as long as possible. But all I'm saying is this-if you want this Brazilian man, you can have him. I'm yours already."

I'm not sure what I want. I do know that there's a part of me which has always wanted to hear a man say, "Let me take care of you forever," and I have never heard it spoken before. Over the last few years, I'd given up looking for that person, learned how to say this heartening sentence to myself, especially in times of fear. But to hear it from someone else now, from someone who is speaking sincerely…

I was thinking about all this last night after Felipe fell asleep, and I was curled up beside him, wondering what would become of us. What are the possible futures? What about the geography question between us-where would we live? Then there's the age difference to consider. Though, when I called my mother the other day to tell her I'd met a really nice man, but-brace yourself, Mom!-"he's fifty-two years old," she was completely non-flummoxed. All she said was, "Well, I've got news for you, Liz. You're thirty-five." (Excellent point, Ma. I'm lucky to get anyone at such a withered age.) Truthfully, though, I don't really mind the age difference, either. I actually like that Felipe is so much older. I think it's sexy. Makes me feel kind of… French.

What will happen with us?

Why am I worrying about this, by the way?

What have I not yet learned about the futility of worry?

So after a while, I stopped thinking about all this and just held him while he slept. I am falling in love with this man. Then I fell asleep beside him and had two memorable dreams.

Both were about my Guru. In the first dream, my Guru informed me that she was closing down her Ashrams and that she would no longer be speaking, teaching or publishing books. She gave her students one final speech, in which she said, "You've had more than enough teachings. You have been given everything you need to know in order to be free. It's time for you to go out in the world and live a happy life."

The second dream was even more confirming. I was eating in a terrific restaurant in New York City with Felipe. We were having a wonderful meal of lamb chops and artichokes and fine wine and we were talking and laughing happily. I looked across the room and saw Swamiji, my Guru's master, deceased since 1982. But he was alive that night, right there in a snazzy New York restaurant. He was eating dinner with a group of his friends and they also seemed to be having a merry time of it. Our eyes met across the room and Swamiji smiled at me and raised his wineglass in a toast.

And then-quite distinctly-this small Indian Guru who had spoken precious little English during his lifetime mouthed this one word to me across the distance: Enjoy.

105

I haven't seen Ketut Liyer in so long. Between my involvement with Felipe and my struggle to secure a home for Wayan, my long afternoons of aimless conversation about spirituality on the medicine man's porch have long since ended. I've stopped by his house a few times, just to say hello and to drop off a gift of fruit for his wife, but we haven't spent any quality time together since back in June. Whenever I try to apologize to Ketut for my absence, though, he laughs like a man who has already been shown the answers to every test in the universe and says, "Everything working perfect, Liss."

Still, I miss the old man, so I stopped by to hang out with him this morning. He beamed at me, as usual, saying, "I am very happy to meet you!" (I never was able to break him of that habit.)

"I am happy to see you, too, Ketut."

"You leaving soon, Liss?"

"Yes, Ketut. In less than two weeks. That's why I wanted to come over today. I wanted to thank you for everything you've given me. If it wasn't for you, I never would've come back to Bali."

"Always you were coming back to Bali," he said without doubt or drama. "You still meditate with your four brothers like I teach you?"

"Yes."

"You still meditate like your Guru in India teach you?"

"Yes."

"You have bad dreams anymore?"

"No."

"You happy now with God?"

"Very."

"You love new boyfriend?"

"I think so. Yes."

"Then you must spoil him. And he must spoil you."

"OK," I promised.

"You are good friend to me. Better than friend. You are like my daughter," he said. (Not like Sharon…) "When I die, you will come back to Bali, come to my cremation. Balinese cremation ceremony very fun-you will like it."

"OK," I promised again, all choked up now.

"Let your conscience be your guide. If you have Western friends come to visit Bali, bring them to me for palm-reading. I am very empty in my bank since the bomb. You want to come with me to baby ceremony today?"

And this is how I ended up participating in the blessing of a baby who had reached the age of six months, and who was now ready to touch the earth for the first time. The Balinese don't let their children touch the ground for the first six months of life, because newborn babies are considered to be gods sent straight from heaven, and you wouldn't let a god crawl around on the floor with all the toenail clippings and cigarette butts. So Balinese babies are carried for those first six months, revered as minor deities. If a baby dies before it is six months old, it is given a special cremation ceremony and the ashes are not placed in a human cemetery because this being was never human: it was only ever a god. But if the baby lives to six months, then a big ceremony is held and the child's feet are allowed to touch the earth at last and Junior is welcomed to the human race.

This ceremony today was held at the house of one of Ketut's neighbors. The baby in question was a girl, already nicknamed Putu. Her parents were a beautiful teenage girl and an equally beautiful teenage boy, who is the grandson of a man who is Ketut's cousin, or something like that. Ketut wore his finest clothes for the event-a white satin sarong (trimmed in gold) and a white, long-sleeved button-down jacket with gold buttons and a Nehru collar, which made him look rather like a railroad porter or a busboy at a fancy hotel. He had a white turban wrapped around his head. His hands, as he proudly showed me, were all pimped out with giant gold rings and magic stones. About seven rings in total. All of them with holy powers. He had his grandfather's shining brass bell for summoning spirits, and he wanted me to take a lot of photographs of him.

We walked over to his neighbor's compound together. It was a considerable distance and we had to walk on the busy main road for a while. I'd been in Bali almost four months, and had never seen Ketut leave his compound before. It was disconcerting watching him walk down the highway amid all the speeding cars and madcap motorcycles. He looked so tiny and vulnerable. He looked so wrong set against this modern backdrop of traffic and honking horns. It made me want to cry, for some reason, but I was feeling a little extra emotive today anyway.

About forty guests were there already at the neighbor's house when we arrived, and the family altar was heaped with offerings-piles of woven palm baskets filled with rice, flowers, incense, roasted pigs, some dead geese and chickens, coconut and bits of currency that fluttered around in the breeze. Everyone was decked out in their most elegant silks and lace. I was underdressed, sweaty from my bike ride, self-conscious in my broken T-shirt amid all this beauty. But I was welcomed exactly the way you would want to be if you were the white girl who'd wandered in inappropriately attired and uninvited. Everyone smiled at me with warmth, and then ignored me and commenced to the part of the party where they all sat around admiring each other's clothes.

The ceremony took hours, Ketut officiating. Only an anthropologist with a team of interpreters could tell you all that occurred, but some of the rituals I understood, from Ketut's explanations and from books that I had read. The father held the baby during the first round of blessings and the mother held an effigy of the baby-a coconut swaddled to look like an infant. This coconut was blessed and doused with holy water just like the real baby, then placed on the ground right before the baby's feet touch earth for the first time; this is to fool the demons, who will attack the dummy baby and leave the real baby alone.

There were hours of chants, though, before that real baby's feet could touch ground. Ketut rang his bell and sang his mantras endlessly, and the young parents beamed with pleasure and pride. The guests came and went, milling about, gossiping, watching the ceremony for a while, offering their gifts and then taking off for another appointment. It was all strangely casual amid all the ancient ritualistic formality, sort of backyard-picnic-meets-high-church. The mantras Ketut chanted to the baby were so sweet, sounding like a combination of the sacred and the affectionate. While the mother held the infant, Ketut waved before the child samples of food, fruit, flowers, water, bells, a wing from the roast chicken, a bit of pork, a cracked coconut… With each new item he would sing something to her. The baby would laugh and clap her hands, and Ketut would laugh and keep singing.

I imagined my own translation of his words:

"Ohhhh… little baby, this is roast chicken for you to eat! Someday you will love roast chicken and we hope you have lots of it! Ohhhhhhh… little baby, this is a chunk of cooked rice, may you always have all the chunks of cooked rice you could ever desire, may you be showered with rice for always. Ohhhhh… little baby, this is a coconut, isn't it funny how this coconut looks, someday you will eat lots of coconuts! Ohhhhhh… little baby, this is your family, do you not see how much your family adores you? Ohhhhh… little baby, you are precious to the whole universe! You are an A-plus student! You are our magnificent bunny! You are a yummy hunk of silly putty! Ooohhhhh little baby, you are the Sultan of Swing, you are our everything…"

Everyone was blessed again and again with flower petals dipped in holy water. The whole family took turns passing the baby around, cooing to her, while Ketut sang the ancient mantras. They even let me hold the baby for a while, even in my jeans, and I whispered my own blessings to her as everyone sang. "Good luck," I told her. "Be brave." It was boiling hot, even in the shade. The young mother, dressed in a sexy bustier under her sheer lace shirt, was sweating. The young father, who didn't seem to know any facial expression other than a massively proud grin, was also sweating. The various grandmothers fanned themselves, got weary, sat down, stood up, fussed with the roasted sacrificial pigs, chased away dogs. Everyone was alternately interested, not interested, tired, laughing, earnest. But Ketut and the baby seemed to be locked in their own experience together, riveted to each other's attention. The baby didn't take her eyes off the old medicine man all day. Who ever heard of a six-month-old baby not crying or fussing or sleeping for four straight hours in the hot sun, but just watching someone with curiosity?

Ketut did his job well, and the baby did her job well, too. She was fully present for her transformation ceremony from god-status to human-status. She was handling the responsibilities marvelously, like a good Balinese girl already-steeped in ritual, confident of her beliefs, obedient to the requirements of her culture.

At the end of all the chanting, the baby was wrapped in a long, clean white sheet that hung far below her little legs, making her look tall and regal-a veritable debutante. Ketut made a drawing on the bottom of a pottery bowl of the four directions of the universe, filled the bowl with holy water and set it on the ground. This hand-drawn compass marked the holy spot on earth where the baby's feet would first touch.

Then the whole family gathered by the baby, everyone seeming to hold her at the same time, and-oop! there goes!-they lightly dipped the baby's feet in this pottery bowl full of holy water, right above the magic drawing which encompassed the whole universe, and then they touched her soles to the earth for the first time. When they lifted her back up into the air, tiny damp footprints remained on the ground below her, orienting this child at last onto the great Balinese grid, establishing who she was by establishing where she was. Everyone clapped their hands, delighted. The little girl was one of us now. A human being-with all the risks and thrills which that perplexing incarnation entails.

The baby looked up, looked around, smiled. She wasn't a god anymore. She didn't seem to mind. She wasn't fearful at all. She seemed thoroughly satisfied with every decision she had ever made.

106

The deal fell through with Wayan. That property Felipe had found for her somehow didn't happen. When I ask Wayan what went wrong, I get some fuzzy reply about a lost deed; I don't think I was ever told the real story. What matters is only that it's a dead deal. I'm starting to get kind of panicked about this whole Wayan house situation. I try to explain my urgency to her, saying, "Wayan-I have to leave Bali in less than two weeks and go back to America. I can't face my friends who gave me all this money and tell them that you still don't have a home."

"But Liz, if a place has no good taksu…"

Everybody has a different sense of urgency in this life.

But a few days later Wayan calls over at Felipe's house, giddy. She's found a different piece of land, and this one she really loves. An emerald expanse of rice field on a quiet road, close to town. It has good taksu written all over it. Wayan tells us that the land belongs to a farmer, a friend of her father's, who is desperate for cash. He has seven aro total to sell, but (needing fast money) would be willing to give her only the two aro she can afford. She loves this land. I love this land. Felipe loves this land. Tutti-spinning across the grass in circles, arms extended, a little Balinese Julie Andrews-loves it, too.

"Buy it," I tell Wayan.

But a few days pass, and she keeps stalling. "Do you want to live there or not?" I keep asking.

She stalls some more, then changes her story again. This morning, she says, the farmer called to tell her he isn't certain anymore whether he can sell only the two-aro parcel to her; instead, he might want to sell the whole seven- aro lot intact… it's his wife that's the problem… The farmer needs to talk to his wife, see if it's OK with her to break up the land…

Wayan says, "Maybe if I had more money…"

Dear God, she wants me to come up with the cash to buy the whole chunk of land. Even as I'm trying to figure out how to raise a staggering 22,000 extra American dollars, I'm telling her, "Wayan, I can't do it, I don't have the money. Can't you make a deal with the farmer?"

Then Wayan, whose eyes are not exactly meeting mine anymore, crochets a complicated story. She tells me that she visited a mystic the other day and the mystic went into a trance and said that Wayan absolutely needs to buy this entire seven-aro package in order to make a good healing center… that this is destiny… and, anyway, the mystic also said that if Wayan could have the entire package of land, then maybe she could someday build a nice fancy hotel there…

A nice fancy hotel?

Ah.

That's when suddenly I go deaf and the birds stop singing and I can see Wayan's mouth moving but I'm not listening to her anymore because a thought has just come, scrawled blatantly across my mind: SHE'S FUCKING WITH YOU, GROCERIES.

I stand up, say good-bye to Wayan, walk home slowly and ask Felipe point-blank for his opinion: "Is she fucking with me?"

He has not ever commented upon my business with Wayan, not once.

"Darling," he says kindly. "Of course she's fucking with you."

My heart drops into my guts with a splat.

"But not intentionally," he adds quickly. "You need to understand the thinking in Bali. It's a way of life here for people to try to get the most money they can out of visitors. It's how everyone survives. So she's making up some stories now about the farmer. Darling, since when does a Balinese man need to talk to his wife before he can make a business deal? Listen-the guy is desperate to sell her a small parcel; he already said he would. But she wants the whole thing now. And she wants you to buy it for her."

I cringe at this for two reasons. First of all, I hate to think this could be true of Wayan. Second, I hate the cultural implications under his speech, the whiff of colonial White Man's Burden stuff, the patronizing "this-is-what-all-these-people-are-like" argument.

But Felipe isn't a colonialist; he's a Brazilian. He explains, "Listen, I grew up poor in South America. You think I don't understand the culture of this kind of poverty? You've given Wayan more money than she's ever seen in her life and now she's thinking crazy. As far as she's concerned, you're her miracle benefactor and this might be her last chance to ever get a break. So she wants to get all she can before you go. For God's sake-four months ago the poor woman didn't have enough money to buy lunch for her child and now she wants a hotel?"

"What should I do?"

"Don't get angry about it, whatever happens. If you get angry, you'll lose her, and that would be a pity because she's a marvelous person and she loves you. This is her survival tactic, just accept that. You must not think that she's not a good person, or that she and the kids don't honestly need your help. But you cannot let her take advantage of you. Darling, I've seen it repeated so many times. What happens with Westerners who live here for a long time is that they usually end up falling into one of two camps. Half of them keep playing the tourist, saying, 'Oh, those lovely Balinese, so sweet, so gracious…," and getting ripped off like crazy. The other half get so frustrated with being ripped off all the time, they start to hate the Balinese. And that's a shame, because then you've lost all these wonderful friends."

"But what should I do?"

"You need to get back some control of the situation. Play some kind of game with her, like the games she's playing with you. Threaten her with something that motivates her to act. You'll be doing her a favor; she needs a home."

"I don't want to play games, Felipe."

He kisses my head. "Then you can't live in Bali, darling."

The next morning, I hatch my plan. I can't believe it-here I am, after a year of studying virtues and struggling to find an honest life for myself, about to spin a big fat lie. I'm about to lie to my favorite person in Bali, to someone who is like a sister to me, someone who has cleaned my kidneys. For heaven's sake, I'm going to lie to Tutti's mommy!

I walk into town, into Wayan's shop. Wayan goes to hug me. I pull away, pretending to be upset.

"Wayan," I say. "We need to talk. I have a serious problem."

"With Felipe?"

"No. With you."

She looks like she's going to faint.

"Wayan," I say. "My friends in America are very angry with you."

"With me? Why, honey?"

"Because four months ago, they gave you a lot of money to buy a home, and you did not buy a home yet. Every day, they send me e-mails, asking me, 'Where is Wayan's house? Where is my money?' Now they think you are stealing their money, using it for something else."

"I'm not stealing!"

"Wayan," I say. "My friends in America think you are… a bullshit."

She gasps as if she's been punched in the windpipe. She looks so wounded, I waver for a moment and almost grab her in a reassuring hug and say, "No, no, it's not true! I'm making this up!" But, no, I have to finish this. But, Lord, she is clearly staggered now. Bullshit is a word that has been more emotionally incorporated into Balinese than almost any other in the English language. It's one of the very worst things you can call someone in Bali-"a bullshit." In this culture, where people bullshit each other a dozen times before breakfast, where bullshitting is a sport, an art, a habit, and a desperate survival tactic, to actually call someone out on their bullshit is an appalling statement. It's something that would have, in old Europe, guaranteed you a duel.

"Honey," she said, eyes tearing. "I am not a bullshit!"

"I know that, Wayan. This is why I'm so upset. I try to tell my friends in America that Wayan is not a bullshit, but they don't believe me."

She lays her hand on mine. "I'm sorry to put you in a pickle, honey."

"Wayan, this is a very big pickle. My friends are angry. They say that you must buy some land before I come back to America. They told me that if you don't buy some land in the next week, then I must… take the money back."

Now she doesn't look like she's going to faint; she looks like she's going to die. I feel like one-half of the biggest prick in history, spinning this tale to this poor woman, who-among other things-obviously doesn't realize that I no more have the power to take that money out of her bank account than I have to revoke her Indonesian citizenship. But how could she know that? I made the money magically appear in her bankbook, didn't I? Couldn't I just as easily take it away?

"Honey," she says, "believe me, I find land now, don't worry, very fast I find land. Please don't worry… maybe in next three days this is finish, I promise."

"You must, Wayan," I say, with a gravity that is not entirely acting. The fact is, she must. Her kids need a home. She's about to get evicted. This is no time to be a bullshit.

I say, "I'm going back to Felipe's house now. Call me when you've bought something."

Then I walk away from my friend, aware that she is watching me but refusing to turn around and look back at her. All the way home, I'm offering up to God the weirdest prayer: "Please, let it be true that she's been bullshitting me." Because if she wasn't bullshitting, if she's genuinely incapable of finding herself a place to live despite an $18,000 cash infusion, then we're in really big trouble here and I don't know how this woman is ever going to pull herself out of poverty. But if she was bullshitting me, then in a way it's a ray of hope. It shows she's got some wiles, and she might be OK in this shifty world, after all.

I go home to Felipe, feeling awful. I say, "If only Wayan knew how deviously I was plotting behind her back…"

"… plotting for her happiness and success," he finishes the sentence for me.

Four hours later-four measly hours!-the phone rings in Felipe's house. It's Wayan. She's breathless. She wants me to know the job is finished. She has just purchased the two aro from the farmer (whose "wife" suddenly didn't seem to mind breaking up the property). There was no need, as it turns out, for any magic dreams or priestly interventions or taksu radiation-level tests. Wayan even has the certificate of ownership already, in her very hands! And it's notarized! Also, she assures me, she has already ordered construction materials for her house and workers will start building early next week-before I leave. So I can see the project under way. She hopes that I am not angry with her. She wants me to know that she loves me more than she loves her own body, more than she loves her own life, more than she loves this whole world.

I tell her that I love her, too. And that I can't wait to be a guest someday in her beautiful new home. And that I would like a photocopy of that certificate of ownership.

When I get off the phone, Felipe says, "Good girl."

I don't know whether he's referring to her or me. But he opens a bottle of wine and we raise a toast to our dear friend Wayan the Balinese landowner.

Then Felipe says, "Can we go on vacation now, please?"

107

The place we end up going on vacation is a tiny island called Gili Meno, located off the coast of Lombok, which is the next stop east of Bali in the great, sprawling Indonesian archipelago. I'd been to Gili Meno before, and I wanted to show it to Felipe, who had never been there.

The island of Gili Meno is one of the most important places in the world to me. I came here by myself two years ago when I was in Bali for the first time. I was on that magazine assignment, writing about Yoga vacations, and I'd just finished two weeks of mightily restorative Yoga classes. But I had decided to extend my stay in Indonesia after the assignment was up, since I was already all the way over here in Asia. What I wanted to do, actually, was to find someplace very remote and give myself a ten-day retreat of absolute solitude and absolute silence.

When I look back at the four years that elapsed between my marriage starting to fall apart and the day I was finally divorced and free, I see a detailed chronicle of total pain. And the moment when I came to this tiny island all by myself was the very worst of that entire dark journey. The bottom of the pain and the middle of it. My unhappy mind was a battlefield of conflicted demons. As I made my decision to spend ten days alone and in silence in the middle of exactly nowhere, I told all my warring and confused parts the same thing: "We're all here together now, guys, all alone. And we're going to have to work out some kind of deal for how to get along, or else everybody is going to die together, sooner or later."

Which may sound firm and confident, but I must admit this, as well-that sailing over to that quiet island all alone, I was never more terrified in my life. I hadn't even brought any books to read, nothing to distract me. Just me and my mind, about to face each other on an empty field. I remember that my legs were visibly shaking with fear. Then I quoted to myself one of my favorite lines ever from my Guru: "Fear-who cares?" and I disembarked alone.

I rented myself a little cabin on the beach for a few dollars a day and I shut my mouth and vowed not to open it again until something inside me had changed. Gili Meno Island was my ultimate truth and reconciliation hearing. I had chosen the right place to do this-that much was clear. The island itself is tiny, pristine, sandy, blue water, palm trees. It's a perfect circle with a single path that goes around it, and you can walk the whole circumference in about an hour. It's located almost exactly on the equator, and so there's a changelessness about its daily cycles. The sun comes up on one side of the island at about 6:30 in the morning and goes down on the other side at around 6:30 PM, every day of the year. The place is inhabited by a small handful of Muslim fishermen and their families. There is no spot on this island from which you cannot hear the ocean. There are no motorized vehicles here. Electricity comes from a generator, and for only a few hours in the evenings. It's the quietest place I've ever been.

Every morning I walked the circumference of the island at sunrise, and walked it again at sunset. The rest of the time, I just sat and watched. Watched my thoughts, watched my emotions, watched the fishermen. The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I'm a failure… I'm lonely… I'm a failure… I'm lonely…) and we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras.

It took me a while to drop into true silence. Even after I'd stopped talking, I found that I was still humming with language. My organs and muscles of speech-brain, throat, chest, back of the neck-vibrated with the residual effects of talking long after I'd stopped making sounds. My head shimmied in a reverb of words, the way an indoor swimming pool seems to echo interminably with sounds and shouts, even after the kindergartners have left for the day. It took a surprisingly long time for all this pulsation of speech to fall away, for the whirling noises to settle. Maybe it took about three days.

Then everything started coming up. In that state of silence, there was room now for everything hateful, everything fearful, to run across my empty mind. I felt like a junkie in detox, convulsing with the poison of what emerged. I cried a lot. I prayed a lot. It was difficult and it was terrifying, but this much I knew-I never didn't want to be there, and I never wished that anyone were there with me. I knew that I needed to do this and that I needed to do it alone.

The only other tourists on the island were a handful of couples having romantic vacations. (Gili Meno is far too pretty and far too remote a place for anyone but a crazy person to come visit solo.) I watched these couples and felt some envy for their romances, but knew, "This is not your time for companionship, Liz. You have a different task here." I kept away from everyone. People on the island left me alone. I think I threw off a spooky vibe. I had not been well all year. You can't lose that much sleep and that much weight and cry so hard for so long without starting to look like a psychotic. So nobody talked to me.

Actually, that's not true. One person talked to me, every day. It was this little kid, one of a gang of kids who run up and down the beaches trying to sell fresh fruit to the tourists. This boy was maybe nine years old, and seemed to be the ringleader. He was tough, scrappy and I would have called him street-smart if his island actually had any streets. He was beach-smart, I suppose. Somehow he'd learned great English, probably from harassing sunbathing Westerners. And he was on to me, this kid. Nobody else asked me who I was, nobody else bothered me, but this relentless child would come and sit next to me on the beach at some point every day and demand, "Why don't you ever talk? Why are you strange like this? Don't pretend you can't hear me-I know you can hear me. Why are you always alone? Why don't you ever go swimming? Where is your boyfriend? Why don't you have a husband? What's wrong with you?"

I was like, Back off, kid! What are you-a transcript of my most evil thoughts?

Every day I would try to smile at him kindly and send him away with a polite gesture, but he wouldn't quit until he got a rise out me. And inevitably, he always got a rise out of me. I remember bursting out at him once, "I'm not talking because I'm on a friggin' spiritual journey, you nasty little punk-now go AWAY!"

He ran away laughing. Every day, after he'd gotten me to respond, he would always run away laughing. I'd usually end up laughing, too, once he was out of sight. I dreaded this pesky kid and looked forward to him in equal measure. He was my only comedic break during a really tough ride. Saint Anthony once wrote about having gone into the desert on silent retreat and being assaulted by all manner of visions-devils and angels, both. He said, in his solitude, he sometimes encountered devils who looked like angels, and other times he found angels who looked like devils. When asked how he could tell the difference, the saint said that you can only tell which is which by the way you feel after the creature has left your company. If you are appalled, he said, then it was a devil who had visited you. If you feel lightened, it was an angel.

I think I know what that little punk was, who always got a laugh out of me.

On my ninth day of silence, I went into meditation one evening on the beach as the sun was going down and I didn't stand up again until after midnight. I remember thinking, "This is it, Liz." I said to my mind, "This is your chance. Show me everything that is causing you sorrow. Let me see all of it. Don't hold anything back." One by one, the thoughts and memories of sadness raised their hands, stood up to identify themselves. I looked at each thought, at each unit of sorrow, and I acknowledged its existence and felt (without trying to protect myself from it) its horrible pain. And then I would tell that sorrow, "It's OK. I love you. I accept you. Come into my heart now. It's over." I would actually feel the sorrow (as if it were a living thing) enter my heart (as if it were an actual room). Then I would say, "Next?" and the next bit of grief would surface. I would regard it, experience it, bless it, and invite it into my heart, too. I did this with every sorrowful thought I'd ever had-reaching back into years of memory-until nothing was left.

Then I said to my mind, "Show me your anger now." One by one, my life's every incident of anger rose and made itself known. Every injustice, every betrayal, every loss, every rage. I saw them all, one by one, and I acknowledged their existence. I felt each piece of anger completely, as if it were happening for the first time, and then I would say, "Come into my heart now. You can rest there. It's safe now. It's over. I love you." This went on for hours, and I swung between these mighty poles of opposite feelings-experiencing the anger thoroughly for one bone-rattling moment, and then experiencing a total coolness, as the anger entered my heart as if through a door, laid itself down, curled up against its brothers and gave up fighting.

Then came the most difficult part. "Show me your shame," I asked my mind. Dear God, the horrors that I saw then. A pitiful parade of all my failings, my lies, my selfishness, jealousy, arrogance. I didn't blink from any of it, though. "Show me your worst," I said. When I tried to invite these units of shame into my heart, they each hesitated at the door, saying, "No-you don't want me in there… don't you know what I did?" and I would say, "I do want you. Even you. I do. Even you are welcome here. It's OK. You are forgiven. You are part of me. You can rest now. It's over."

When all this was finished, I was empty. Nothing was fighting in my mind anymore. I looked into my heart, at my own goodness, and I saw its capacity. I saw that my heart was not even nearly full, not even after having taken in and tended to all those calamitous urchins of sorrow and anger and shame; my heart could easily have received and forgiven even more. Its love was infinite.

I knew then that this is how God loves us all and receives us all, and that there is no such thing in this universe as hell, except maybe in our own terrified minds. Because if even one broken and limited human being could experience even one such episode of absolute forgiveness and acceptance of her own self, then imagine-just imagine!-what God, in all His eternal compassion, can forgive and accept.

I also knew somehow that this respite of peace would be temporary. I knew that I was not yet finished for good, that my anger, my sadness and my shame would all creep back eventually, escaping my heart, and occupying my head once more. I knew that I would have to keep dealing with these thoughts again and again until I slowly and determinedly changed my whole life. And that this would be difficult and exhausting to do. But my heart said to my mind in the dark silence of that beach: "I love you, I will never leave you, I will always take care of you." That promise floated up out of my heart and I caught it in my mouth and held it there, tasting it as I left the beach and walked back to the little shack where I was staying. I found an empty notebook, opened it up to the first page-and only then did I open my mouth and speak those words into the air, letting them free. I let those words break my silence and then I allowed my pencil to document their colossal statement onto the page: "I love you, I will never leave you, I will always take care of you."

Those were the first words I ever wrote in that private notebook of mine, which I would carry with me from that moment forth, turning back to it many times over the next two years, always asking for help-and always finding it, even when I was most deadly sad or afraid. And that notebook, steeped through with that promise of love, was quite simply the only reason I survived the next years of my life.

108

And now I'm coming back to Gili Meno under notably different circumstances. Since I was last here, I've circled the world, settled my divorce, survived my final separation from David, erased all mood-altering medications from my system, learned to speak a new language, sat upon God's palm for a few unforgettable moments in India, studied at the feet of an Indonesian medicine man and purchased a home for a family who sorely needed a place to live. I am happy and healthy and balanced. And, yes, I cannot help but notice that I am sailing to this pretty little tropical island with my Brazilian lover. Which is-I admit it!-an almost ludicrously fairy-tale ending to this story, like the page out of some housewife's dream. (Perhaps even a page out of my own dream, from years ago.) Yet what keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years-I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue.

My thoughts turn to something I read once, something the Zen Buddhists believe. They say that an oak tree is brought into creation by two forces at the same time. Obviously, there is the acorn from which it all begins, the seed which holds all the promise and potential, which grows into the tree. Everybody can see that. But only a few can recognize that there is another force operating here as well-the future tree itself, which wants so badly to exist that it pulls the acorn into being, drawing the seedling forth with longing out of the void, guiding the evolution from nothingness to maturity. In this respect, say the Zens, it is the oak tree that creates the very acorn from which it was born.

I think about the woman I have become lately, about the life that I am now living, and about how much I always wanted to be this person and live this life, liberated from the farce of pretending to be anyone other than myself. I think of everything I endured before getting here and wonder if it was me-I mean, this happy and balanced me, who is now dozing on the deck of this small Indonesian fishing boat-who pulled the other, younger, more confused and more struggling me forward during all those hard years. The younger me was the acorn full of potential, but it was the older me, the already-existent oak, who was saying the whole time: "Yes-grow! Change! Evolve! Come and meet me here, where I already exist in wholeness and maturity! I need you to grow into me!" And maybe it was this present and fully actualized me who was hovering four years ago over that young married sobbing girl on the bathroom floor, and maybe it was this me who whispered lovingly into that desperate girl's ear, "Go back to bed, Liz…" Knowing already that everything would be OK, that everything would eventually bring us together here. Right here, right to this moment. Where I was always waiting in peace and contentment, always waiting for her to arrive and join me.

Then Felipe wakes up. We'd both been dozing in and out of consciousness all afternoon, curled in each other's arms on the deck of this Indonesian fisherman's sailboat. The ocean has been swaying us, the sun shining. While I lie there with my head pillowed on his chest, Felipe tells me that he had an idea while he was sleeping. He says, "You know-I obviously need to keep living in Bali because my business is here, and because it's so close to Australia, where my kids live. I also need to be in Brazil often, because that's where the gemstones are and because I have family there. And you obviously need to be in the United States, because that's where your work is, and that's where your family and friends are. So I was thinking… maybe we could try to build a life together that's somehow divided between America, Australia, Brazil and Bali."

All I can do is laugh, because, hey-why not? It just might be crazy enough to work. A life like this might strike some people as absolutely loony, as sheer foolishness, but it resembles me so closely. Of course this is how we should proceed. It feels so familiar already. And I quite like the poetry of his idea, too, I must say. I mean that literally. After this whole year spent exploring the individual and intrepid I's, Felipe has just suggested to me a whole new theory of traveling:

Australia, America, Bali, Brazil = A, A, B, B.

Like a classic poem, like a pair of rhyming couplets.

The little fishing boat anchors right off the shore of Gili Meno. There are no docks here on this island. You have to roll up your pants, jump off the boat and wade in through the surf on your own power. There's absolutely no way to do this without getting soaking wet or even banged up on the coral, but it's worth all the trouble because the beach here is so beautiful, so special. So me and my lover, we take off our shoes, we pile our small bags of belongings on the tops of our heads and we prepare to leap over the edge of that boat together, into the sea.

You know, it's a funny thing. The only Romance language Felipe doesn't happen to speak is Italian. But I go ahead and say it to him anyway, just as we're about to jump.

I say: "Attraversiamo."

Let's cross over.