PERABUMULIH, SUMATRA, INDONESIA 1962
Maybe he was lucky. He was the one child to have emerged from his mother’s womb and survived. Two of his younger siblings never survived the birth, another died after three days. His mother, of noble lineage, was a figure that couldn’t always be understood through the intellect. She often seemed as if she wasn’t really in the place where she was, or rather that she was off someplace that didn’t exist. At times like those it was difficult to get her to talk, because she didn’t seem to realize people around her were saying anything. Sometimes her silences would end with her wandering off somewhere no one knew about. Maybe nowhere at all: a void. But if she was present in the place where she was, then she was an incredibly warm woman who could fill a room with her love in a way that baffled her husband and the others she had previously neglected. In bed she would listen to her husband resting his head softly on her chest, talking to her in a way that sounded almost as if he was muttering in his sleep. In the mornings she would sing a folk song about orioles to her young son, Wis, and also to the neighbor kids, the birds, and other wildlife around the house. Wis would curl up in her lap like a breastfeeding kitten. If she was currently in the place where she was, in the place where you could see her, she was like the sun. Planets rotated around her. That’s the way Wis remembers his mother. His father did not have noble blood, and chose the common name Sudoyo when he reached adulthood. He came from Muntilan, Java, and was strictly religious, quite in contrast to his wife who, even though she went to the Catholic chapel every Sunday, also held tight to her Keris (a Javenese dagger believed to have mystical powers in Indonesian Folklore) and other ancient objects with sincerity. Sudoyo was the son of a paramedic, he became a clerk at the Indonesian Citizen’s Bank in Yogyakarta at the same time he started studying economics at Gadjah Madah University. That’s where Wis was born. When he was four years old his father moved him to Perabumilih, a town across the water with a main road only about 2 miles long. Perabumulih was still an oil town, in the middle of South Sumatra which was quite desolate at that time. There was only one movie theater, so people usually just brought their children on excursions to the oil rigs outside of the town to see the giant oil pumps nodding up and down like dinosaurs. Another exciting form of entertainment involved the sudden appearance of gibbons or silver-leaf monkeys from the forest. The bank hadn’t been there long. His father became the head of the branch. They occupied the upper floor of a decently large wooden house on the side of Kerinci road, the town’s main route. The lower floor of the house functioned as an office. Other than a few employees who would come throughout the workday, there was a young man who lived there. Somir is what Wis’s father called him. Behind the house was a garden and a forest that grew thicker the deeper it got. Wis’s father forbade him from playing too far in. He asked if it was because there are ghosts in there. No, said his father. There are things much scarier than ghosts, there are snakes coiled up everywhere. The Devil. Lucifer. Beelzebub. Leviathan, all of them slithering snakes. Coiled up