My Indonesian adventure: Chapter 1, in which my plans are thwarted by Allah

This is my first morning in Soroako, a small town on the edge of a large, deep lake in the hills of central Sulawesi. I'm here with a colleague for two weeks to start work on a year-and-a-half-long agronomic project that we've been planning for months. My journey began four days ago in Washington, D.C., which is now thirteen time zones behind me. My sleep pattern has been disrupted and I've been waking at 3 to 4 a.m. every morning. This morning while I lay on my bed in the dark, thinking, I heard, over a distant loudspeaker, the muezzin's song calling the faithful to prayer, accompanied by fainter, garbled music. I got up and turned on the light so I could check the time. It was a quarter after 4. An hour later the first cock crowed.

My room in our host company's (they provide a raw material to China's booming manufacturing sector) dormitory is like a small hotel room. There is an air conditioner, a small refrigerator, and a TV (which brings me, via CNN World News and the cover of the Washington Post, glimpses of further humiliation of Muslim prisoners at Abu Ghraib), but as yet no hot water. I showered and shaved this morning without it--the cool water was not unpleasant.

After my shower, I go upstairs to our local contact's room to call my daughter (there's no phone in my room), then Clark and I go back down to look at my water heater.

We find my front door wide open and a group of Indonesian men sitting outside. I go in and see painting equipment--roller, tray, a brush--on the bed's headboard. Evidently a higher power has decreed that my room is in dire need of a new coat of paint. I pack up my stuff and move it into my colleague's room. (Later in the day I'm assigned another room.)

We visit our field sites. Driving back in the afternoon, we find our way blocked by a three-foot-long lizard that is holding its body above the road on four sinewy legs. As we get closer, it waddles lithely off into the jungle.

At 6 we go to dinner at the company canteen. The parking lot outside is full, and a woman coming out tells us that a meeting is going on about the "evacuation," pursuant to the "increased security" level that had been instituted three days previously. In the lobby of the building stands a soldier in fatigues holding a submachine gun. Clark goes into the crowded meeting room while Dr. Chang and I proceed to dinner. Several minutes later a grave-faced Clark appears and asks us to step into an adjoining room, as he wants to speak to us privately. He tells us that the company's president has received death threats, and that the company has "credible intelligence" that as-yet-unknown elements in the area are plotting to kill westerners. Wives and children of expat employees are going to be evacuated in the morning, and it is likely that "nonessential personnel" (that would be me) will also be evacuated in the next day or two.

I go to bed before 10 and doze fitfully. Sounds in the night: a gecko's crisp chirping...the loud, rhythmic breathing of an upstairs neighbor...voices of two men walking past the back window. I am awoken by knocking at my front door. I lie in the dark, wondering what to do. Three more knocks. I get up, turn on the light. It's just after 11. I call out, "Who's there?"

"It's Clark."

I pull on some shorts and open the door.

"We have to leave tomorrow at 3. They'll come to get us at 2. Stay in the dormitory till then."

Farewell Soroako! Farewell to your hot green hills, your giant lizards, your sapphire-and-smoke lake. I'll see you again, perhaps, during a Kerry administration.

I'm starting to get worried

Something strange has been happening to me. Every day, without fail, I experience an episode of what I'm afraid may be temporary insanity. It usually happens in the evening, a few hours after dark. I become weak and lethargic, my mind becomes sluggish and confused, and I have to lie down. The slightest bit of light irritates my eyes, so I turn off all the lights and close my eyes to shut out annoying bits of light that come in through the windows from the street and neighboring houses. Sounds also become irritating. For a while, random thoughts flit through my brain, but then it happens. Or, rather, without being aware of exactly when it happens, I slip helplessly into an altered state of consciousness in which I lose contact with the outside world. In place of reality, my mind constructs a bizarre farrago of adventures that I experience purely subjectively, involving encounters with imaginary characters and severe contraventions of the laws of physics. I eventually return to my senses, to discover that hours have elapsed, and that I am still lying in roughly the same spot where I was when the frightening lapse in self-control began.

Tom rides a bike to town

My father's lust lasted until he was at least 65. He lived with me for a year then. He met one of my wife's friends--a 22-year-old woman--who lived in town, ten miles away over a formidable hill. One day, without telling anyone, he took an old rickety bicycle out of the garage and rode it over the mountain, on a narrow road that cars barreled along at top speed. Close to town, the road crosses a river on a bridge that is not built to accommodate bicycles. When he got back home, hours later, in the dark, he looked half dead. I believe that was his last escapade.

Now he's 79 and feels death very near. I've been after him for the last year or two to tell me more about his sexual history. I knew a lot, but there was a lot more I'd only heard rumors of. He would always refuse, until one night, not long ago, we were on the phone and he began to tell me things. One of them was that he had almost decided to sleep with my wife, back then. I was amazed that he thought she would have accepted his advances. But he seemed quite confident. He'd always had great success along those lines.

Battered

Iraq wakes from her post-rape coma, bats her long eyelashes, and says,

"He was so sincere! You should have heard him go on and on about how much he respected me. How all he wanted was to hold me in his arms and smother me with his love. Now he keeps me locked in my room, won't let me visit my friends, beats me when I complain. What did I do to deserve this? Should I leave him? But he NEEDS me! I can tell by the way he gets so angry when I do anything that makes him feel like I don't love him anymore. The big baby! Oh, how strong he is! Oh, I just don't know anymore! Am I going crazy?"