Bali is at the best of times a kind of vibrating altered state -- a different zone of consciousness, in which dancers are often in trances, and spirits appear at the foot of your bed, and always, at the edge of your mind, you can hear howling dogs and the tinkling gamelan; it is also a province of romance, like some Arcadian forest where bodies fall into couplings, by the light of a hundred temples. But I was entering both states at once, with a spirit that didn't seem earthly. Anyone who points out, quite rightly, that Bali is a paradise of angels and Edenic pleasures has to acknowledge that there must be demons there, too, and serpents in the garden.

When Wayan took me to the airport my last day there, she said, "Last night I dreamed I died. I dress all in white and go away." I tried to brush it off, but she was insistent, her gaze intense. I wouldn't see her again, she said; she would be in the realm of her ancestors.

I kept in touch with Wayan from afar, and sent her presents for her birthday; I often thought of her trembling form, shaking in the back lanes of Kuta. Yet I realized, too, that it wasn't wise to toy with what I couldn't fathom. The undertow in Bali carries several foreigners to their deaths each year.

The next year, when I returned to Kuta, I didn't tell Wayan when I crept into her village. But she found me, that first night back, in the same lane where she'd held onto me so fiercely I thought she'd draw blood. I heard the sound of her laughter again, saw her rolling eyes.

We went back to the full-moon beach, at noon, and walked along its unmagicked sands. I told her I had stumbled into a forest I had not sought and did not trust. She said almost nothing, her dress not flaming scarlet as before, but the blue of daytime skies.

She said almost nothing, and I went back to my hut. For three days after that farewell, I could not move. I lay, feverish and awake, in a room full of insects and crawling bodies. I heard cats yelping outside, and the gamelan incessantly. Dogs, more dogs, howled in the dark, and lizards stood on my walls till I could no longer tell them from the light switches. I couldn't move, I couldn't sleep, I couldn't think -- could only hear whispers and rustlings from next door, where a soft-limbed local sprite danced in and out of an Australian's arms.

When finally I could move, I went up into the hills, far away, to a village where I'd been with Wayan a year before. But something in me was lost; I was waterlogged and sluggish, a sleepwalker in a phantom state. It felt as if some guardian spirit had stolen away from me, leaving all the lights turned out.

I finally picked up enough strength to leave the island, and I never heard from Wayan again. But when I returned to New York, I put up on my wall an owl mask I'd bought in her village -- and instantly the Manhattan night was so full of chatterings and hauntings that I had to tear the mask down from the wall and stash it away, in a closet, behind a stack of boxes, where I'd never have to lay eyes on it again.
salon.com | April 17, 1999

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