The Cuckoo Colloquium

Nini - 31

Had the boy just given up? Puso floated there in the gunk looking like a mucky, one-armed lawn jockey ready to die.

"You have to monkey swim!" Nini still held his one hand, squeezing it, hoping to inject life.

"Pardon me for not knowing how a monkey swims."

"For crying out loud!" She threw open her bird book and spread the pages on the quicksand behind him. "You have to back-float to get out of quicksand, everybody knows that!"

It was as if he wasn't hearing her; he just didn't care anymore.

"Monkey swim, back-float-it's the same thing, lie back and distribute your weight evenly over the surface. Use the book to push against in order to pull yourself out."

Nini waded in, and the sand consumed her ankles.

"Wanna see a tata?"

He raised his eyes, and she saw a flicker of life.

"Then do what I say-rock back and forth, make air bubbles."

The tussling went several hours, but with his back as a counterweight, and with Nini's cheerleading, Puso gradually pulled his legs out to his knees, and then he was able to flip onto his belly and crawl out of the quicksand.

"Sorry about your bird book," he said, flat on his stomach in the dirt.

She winced at the grime-smudged "Birds of Borneo", half submerged in the slop; it didn't look like a book at all, more like a big dirt clod.

"There are nine species of hornbill, and I think we've spotted them all." Sacrificing the book didn't seem as big a deal as she thought it would be.

"I'm only going to show you one, okay? I said tata-singular..."

She turned away, undid the strap of her green brassiere. "They're just mammary glands. I don't know why boys go so crazy." She faced him again, revealing one perky breast. "Go party out with a cow's udder, same thing..."

Face down in the dirt, he was snoring like a small motor.

She nodded and put herself away, having fulfilled the promise. She didn't feel sexy, anyway-Her hair stood up in filthy spikes, and they both had pasty gray, mud-caked faces and arms. Even the mosquitoes showed no interest in them, and this, actually, was marvelous-They had discovered a secret to being insect-free!

"We must've missed the air field," he said when they roused at dawn.

But they began walking, and the flora again became green. They came to a clear stream and she bent over and examined her reflection.

"I look like a charred croissant somebody forgot in the oven-toaster."

"There you go again, talking about food."

She took a closer look at herself and gasped-Her face was gaunt, her eyes were sunken, even her hairline had receded.

"Am I balding?"

But in Puso's face she saw marks of age, too-He looked several years older than the boy who had kissed her at the longhouse.

"You look wholesome," he answered as they entered the water, "it's good, natural dirt."

"My face looks like a scuffed up gourd."

He gave her a reproving look -Any talk of food genuinely disturbed him. Then he ran off again to poop behind a wild copse of leafy rattan, and she could hear the poor boy trying to have a decent bowel movement, but not having much luck. Oh, what a noise! It sounded like somebody in one of those narrow Malaysian alleys throwing out bowls of slop water.

Nini wondered who was worse off-he with the stomach from hell that wouldn't stop; days and nights of the squirts, splattering on his boots, his legs. Or she, with some insidious worm eating at her eyeball? Nini thought she could hear the foul thing munching away on her, and she wondered briefly if it preferred the sclera or the cornea, and how sick was that? Her vision from the eye had become worse, like some bleak pall had descended the earth.

She loitered about looking at the trees-There were skyscrapers in every direction she turned. She felt like a little ant under the mighty towers that went all the way to the clouds. It was like being in the Redwoods of Sequoia again, except nothing around her was red, but a few birds. There was no shortage of the color green - So many varieties, so many classes of green, that it dumbfounded her: effervescent greens, grave greens, happy greens, greedy greens, the greenest in the universe. And the myriad textures of the leaves: glossy, hairy, thick, translucent, woody, plastic-y, cotton-y, metallic. She would like to bathe in a tub full of all the varying make-ups of the tropical leaves around her.

"Maybe they're like snowflakes," she whispered, "no two leaves are the same".

Nini was getting used to keeping the right eye closed under the handkerchief, except when it came to the birds; then she felt compelled to fine-tune her depth of field so that she could better file in her head the whats, wheres and whens of her sightings.

"Is that a green iora?"

"A what?" He sounded irritated.

"It could be a green iora, though I'm unable to reference it ... Never mind."

"You don't want to know what I'm looking at."

That was when the bees came, as if overwhelming her from some sudden, new dimension of space. They swooned in quickly, attracted to the salt of her perspiration, dozens at first, and then hundreds, then thousands of the small bugs, with tiny wings that glowed in metallic blues, greens and purples under the sunlight.

'Hold out arms, and don't get stung,' went her disciplined thoughts. She wouldn't panic, this wasn't like the spider-these bees only wanted her sweat...

They flew into Nini's eyes and ears, and she had to clamp her mouth shut, frozen in her arms-out position of crucified-like terror.

"All I wanted was a Paul's Boutique jacket for Christmas," she mumbled, mouth sealed, "that's all I wanted ... besides the Subaru."

She stumbled over a small vine and almost fell, and that would've been dreadful; it wasn't a good idea to make them anxious ...

That's when she saw Puso standing there next to the rattan, eyes bugged-out as if Nini had morphed into some kind of hideous, alien shrubbery.

He ran, leaving her there with the things swarming on her, sucking.

'The nerve of that complete wuss!' She had saved his life twice, and he runs away from a few bees like they're killer locusts from the apocalypse!

And as the teeming clumps of bees grew on her, and she looked more and more like a big, colorful cauliflower, Nini felt, more than anything, molested....

'I showed that little creep my tata!'