hitchhiking games

DUST SWIRLS AT HER FEET like small hurricanes the colour of honey, the same hue as the sky above the trees on both sides of the road. Behind her looms the huge green of the mountain from which she flees. In a few minutes, the summer night would swallow everything whole. She has been walking since morning.

The sound of a car comes behind her, tires crunching small stray rocks on the pavement. A few steps away, in a clump of creaking bamboo, the noises of crickets keep time.

She stops on her shoulder of the road, waiting, her heart beating inside her chest. She could already smell the car’s air freshener. Pine. When the car finally stops to let her in, she does not look at the man behind the wheel. She slumps on the passenger seat, sullen and afraid.

The driver studies her, the windswept hair, the white frilled blouse, the ragged jeans that hugged her hips. She smells of mingled perfume and sweat.

“I'm lucky today. I've been driving for years, but I've never given a ride to such a pretty hitchhiker.”

She remains silent for a while, and then finds the right words to say next. "You're very good at lying."

"Do I look like a liar?"

"You look like you enjoy lying to women."

"Does it bother you?"

"If I were your girlfriend, then it would bother me."

"Things about her own man always bother a woman more than things about a stranger." He struggles to keep his eyes on the road, fights back the urge to look at her face. "So seeing that we are strangers, we could get along well together."

"What does it matter, since we'll part company in a little while?"

“Why?” he asks.

“I’m only hitching as far as the next city.” She savours the words in her mouth, the way she moulds the right words to fit her purpose.

“And what are you going to do there?”

“I have a date there—my boyfriend.”

“It’s a bit strange that you’re going to a date without a car. For a while there, I thought you were bent on walking all the way to wherever your cruel boyfriend will meet you.” He waits for her, curious to find out how she will take this. When she remains silent, he continues. “What will happen if you don’t turn up for that date?”

He smoothly turns the car left into a gravel path that skids away from the main road. He stops in front of a rickety box of a house made of bamboo, plywood, a thatch roof. An eatery.

“It would be your fault, and you would have to take care of me.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you,” he says, killing the engine without explaining. He gets out of the car and walks toward the house. Then she, too, gets out of the car to follow him, the nearby scent of homemade meals reminding her that she is hungry.

The moon hung in the dark sky above, young and smooth, the stars missing.

***

In the days before she became a mild celebrity, she had been someone whose name you can hardly recall, and only as a murmur, an assembly of letters that you used to call a long-lost friend. As a child, visiting relatives always forgot her name and had to ask her parents.

She knew secrets and stories because nobody noticed her, while she noticed and remembered everything. Once, when she was in high school, she was responsible for the sudden disappearance of two young teachers.

She had come from the library one late afternoon and was walking along the hallway when she spied two figures in a quiet corner of the building. The gym instructor and the music teacher hurriedly broke away from each other, only when one of her books fell to the floor. The next morning, fearing to be found out and disgraced by possible rumours, they had left the town without a word.

In her sleep, she often dreamed she was a ghost. She would look at mirrors and would wonder why she could see her reflection. She was never wooed by anyone nor felt anything for anyone yet. She had very few friends.

She went to college to study literature, and her trouble began when, in a creative writing class, she had written a slim romance novel. She would never again talk to the professor who swayed her into having the book published. She had been desperate with her tuition fees at the time, and the old man told her the book’s royalties would help tide her over her remaining years in school.

The money came, and so did crowds of strangers who knew her all of a sudden, who mentioned her name and her book in discussions of contemporary literature. She received letters. She went to see a play and someone would recognize her. There were job offers from universities. Men began to take an interest in her. Swiftly, she no longer lived inside a delicate conch shell. She was suddenly outside, the fierce sea winds howling at her ears.

She began longing for the days of her namelessness, the grey years of being a shadow that belonged to no one, not even to herself. By the time she had met him, she already felt blinded by the harsh, garish lights her celebrity had thrown against her. She saw in him a chance to return to her anonymity by burrowing beneath his dull, dreary habits, his astonishing confidence within which she could fade or blur.

They had met in the late evening train. They ended up sipping coffee together in a 24-hour fast-food joint.

***

The eatery was empty except a man who has just finished his meal. He smokes a cigarette while he watches them disinterestedly. Just another couple from the city, he must have thought.

“What do you do for a living?” she asks him, over their fried fish, stewed vegetables, and bowls of steaming beef broth, trying to ignore the man at the other table.

“I’m a doctor. I meet a lot of strangers, like you.” The steam from his bowl of broth fogging his eyeglasses. He removes them, wipes the lenses with a corner of his shirt. Young wrinkles at the corners of his deep bespectacled eyes as he squints at her.

“It’s better to be with strangers, you agree?” She is surprised at her boldness but realizes how much she means her words, how they gain power when spoken out loud.

“My girlfriend would agree with you,” he says, placing his eyeglasses back.

“And would you?”

She felt him weigh words, ponder possible answers. “I used to work in a far-flung coastal province in the south where I was the only doctor for many miles. I did not know anyone and the village people did not at first trust me. They started to let me treat them, only after I began going out to the sea with the fishermen.”

She does not reply to this, feels herself avoiding his eyes. She notices the man from the other table leaving. The old woman who runs the eatery comes out of the kitchen and starts cleaning, pushing the chairs beneath tables, gathering leftovers from the plates.

“We should ask if we could rent a room here for tonight. I never liked driving in the dark,” he tells her when she still does not say anything.

She plays with the melting ice in her glass of water, clunking the chunks against each other.

***

The first few months after they had met, he hardly understood her. They had gone out on dates and, always, she avoided conversations that led to stories about her.

He understood her reservations better after he had read her book, but he was hardly surprised. The slim volume, Hitchhiking Games, was only less than three hundred pages. The kind of book whose title on the spine you cannot read if you stood too far from the shelves. It was a surprise how it charmed thousands of readers in a place where usually, only the university-bred middle-class read.

Although it was a romance novel, it was not even a book with a mainstream idea. At best, it was a well-written spin-off of Milan Kundera’s short story The Hitchhiking Game. In Kundera’s original version, a girl pretends to hitch a ride in her boyfriend’s car. The game allows both of them to step out of their intimacy and pretend that they are strangers to each other. The unspoken deal allows them a chance at crude honesty, to show each other hidden parts of their selves. The game and the story end, disastrously, in mutual disgust.

In her novel, the story ends differently. The couple end up unable to stop the game, because it allowed them a chance to reclaim privacies that their relationship had violated. They find out that, as strangers, they loved each other more—not necessarily because they could finally be honest with each other, but because there are things that became unnecessary to talk about.

He noticed her effort to thoroughly believe in her book, claimed her version of the ending as her own explanation of why she preferred to maintain a distance, to remain a stranger even to him.

He learned to expect nothing from her. He would introduce her to his family and friends, and she would neither remember their names nor would she expect to be remembered. Once, a friend of his asked her if she was the novelist, and she had answered no. Later, she told him it was not exactly a lie. “I just happened to write one small book. It hardly makes me a novelist,” she reasoned.

He knew that she stayed with him not only because he allowed her freedom and solitude, but also because of an unspoken affection that she did not know how to express. He could sense that she was someone who grew up alone, and when, suddenly, everybody seemed to know her intimately, she retreated further behind the shadows of her privacy.

When he had convinced her that a weekend vacation would be best for her (and for the both them), it was almost exactly two years since they had first met. She finally said yes after a week, and it made him trust his belief that she was beginning to let go of her inhibitions.

They rented a house atop the mountains in a seaside town. It reminded him of his days as a village doctor fresh from medical school. For a while, even she looked happy and without a worry. They spent the whole day lounging in chairs that they brought out in the garden shade, staring at the fierce blue of the sea.

But they both had not thought about what the evening might hold for a young couple like them, the dangers of an intimate bed. After dinner, she became quiet and morose. They went to sleep with their backs to each other, a sea of ruffled blankets between them.

In the morning when he woke up, he found her gone.

***

The room they were given for the night is almost dark and naked apart from the bed, a pair of dusty wooden chairs, a mirror hanging beside a wide window with moonlit curtains. The scent of kerosene from a flickering lamp on a low table. There is no light bulb they could switch on.

She sits on the edge of the bed, gazing blankly at herself in the mirror. Outside the window, the bustle of wind among the trees, the creaking of bamboo.

Behind her, he begins to undress. There is patience in his smooth movements. As he places his glasses on the table beside the lamp, as he removes his shoes, as he peels off his socks, as he unbuttons his shirt, as he unbuckles his belt with a soft click of metal. Denim rustling down his legs. She watches him silently, their eyes meeting each other wordlessly.

She turns away from the mirror and looks at him directly behind her. She studies him as he sits on one of the dusty chairs—the flickering candlelight playing shadows on his face, the shallow hollows in his shoulders that cupped beads of sweat, his chest gleaming with skin.

Fully clothed, she felt a desire to feel such bareness across her own skin, to discover her own body through his. Suddenly, she understands that she is wrong to have feared familiarity. For intimacy, after all, does not always mean surrender, the mere taking off of clothes for someone else, the plain loss of loneliness. It also means the new idea of understanding her own self better through him, the idea of her hand on his hot nape, or her hair sweeping across his chest.

He calls her by her name for the first time since they began their hitchhiking game. For the first time since she met him on a night train two years ago, she responds to her name with something like a smile. ■