Spent today in the market staring at dead squid eyes and cow skins. Studying how things look whole. Living in the states, I forget. I forget that fish aren’t swimming, glistening fillets, and squids aren’t disembodied legs, or naturally breaded into calamari. I caught a glimpse of what I thought was sausages, and I was excited, because sausages become available maybe once every two months, but they turned out to be tamarinds, the only fruit in the world that looks exactly like lots of little pieces of poo.

This is good for me. Not the pieces of poo. Seeing how animals look before we render them unrecognizable. I’ve always said I won’t eat anything that I would have a moral problem with killing myself. (That’s one of those confusing sentences that’s impossible to repair, so I’ll leave it.) It’s harder here. You become faced with it. Here, I’ve been offered dog. I turned it down. I couldn’t kill a dog. I’ve been offered deer. I could kill a deer. I ate it. It was delicious. And someone probably shot it wild. Not that wild means much where I live. Deep, dense jungle fades abruptly into city. The city is built right into the crannies, until it’s too steep to be built anymore. Deer emerge from behind one tree to dart to another tree, to dart to another tree, and find themselves in the middle of the main road. I never picture deer as a tropical animal. Do you?

Things I Didn’t Know One Could Eat Until Papua:
Cow backbone
Raw sea urchin

The list is short, but it’s intriguing.

Friday, January 13, 2007
Have you ever dreamt that you had been shot in the head, and then felt an enormous sense of relief that now you knew what it felt like to be shot in the head? (Like a lightning strike of terrible stinging, but at a safe distance, at maybe a memory’s distance, and then a cocoon of fading, like beginning to dream.)

Last night it was the Catholic bishop in my Level 10 class who shot me in the head. He shot me because I was gathering stolen diamonds from the common room floor to pile in his arms. He shouted through a megaphone for everyone to drop the diamonds. People were trying to make off with them. I was trying to consolidate them so that they could be easily returned. I said this to him as he approached. He shot me anyway. It must have had something to do with his English listening comprehension.

I woke up to someone outside blaring his car horn through the rain. He blared it for a good half hour, at unpredictable intervals. He was probably blaring it for someone to come out who most likely wasn’t even home, who most likely was unaware of any plans to pick him up. Don’t ever make plans with Indonesians. They aren’t plans. They’re vague ideas, what-ifs, and they rarely, if ever, come to fruition.

The man blared his horn anyway. He was persistent. Nick rolled over and opened his eyes.
“I dreamed that Father Y. shot me in the head,” I said.
“Mmm,” he replied, and rolled back.

A few weeks ago Dyah went into the bathroom at school to find the toilet closed and festooned with three little firecracker-shaped packages wrapped in newspaper. By the time I got there, there was a crowd of women, staring into the open bathroom door, everyone afraid to be the one to go in.
“What’s the matter, are you all in the qway-way?” I asked Dyah, because awhile ago someone’s student was late, and he wanted to impress his teacher to make up for it by using a hard word, so he used his dictionary to look up a synonym for ‘traffic jam’ and found ‘queue’. “Sorry I’m late,” he said to his teacher, “but I got caught in a qway-way in Entrop.” This has circulated. Now we say qway-way whenever possible. It never gets less funny. I don’t know why.
She didn’t laugh, though. “Look,” she said, pointing at the firecracker-shaped objects. “Maybe it’s bomb.”
Nobody touched them.
“I really have to go,” Enny said.
“So?” Dyah said, gesturing toward the bathroom and its possible bombs. “Go.”
Enny didn’t move.
“Ike?”
“Not me.”
“Hannah?”
“Never.”
The objects sat there, menacing. Students were starting to notice. Someone went to get Michael. He strode upstairs and opened one of the packages over the sink, wincing. Everyone’s hands strayed near their ears.
“BOOOM!” he shouted. The entire hallway shrieked. It was a tube of lipstick. Another. “BOOOOM!” It was a rolled up comic book. The last one. “BOOOOOM!” A plastic flute.