Fair Trade

The two year anniversary of her son’s death was just around the corner, and Maureen was not going to mark another “life celebration.” Even with the lithium, she’d need to find something truly numbing if she was to live on into another year. The holistic approach to healing hadn’t proven to be quite enough, but there was no stone she’d not upturn in her quest. Healing, Maureen Yates knew, was the only way forward.

Exactly one week before the anniversary, the insectile buzzing of her phone in her pocket shocked her out of her sertraline-induced daydreaming. It was early afternoon. The caller, her medium-turned-therapist, Skye, always brought a certain warmth. She’s such an amazing caregiver! Skye had guaranteed Maureen on several distinct occasions that Isaac, her son, was doing “well” in the veil beyond, only wanting his loved ones still living to have peace of mind. Skye, in her trance-like mumblings, used words that only her 22 year old son would use. Maureen was convinced. And, she wanted to be convinced. She had found the truth. Her husband would never be convinced; and Maurenn had found herself wondering lately if it was because he didn’t want to be.

“Hey there, Skye; how’re you doin’?” Maureen answered.

“Hon, I’m surviving…how're you?” replied the medium. And so the two women exchanged pleasantries and idioms; one drug-addled, the other-much younger-caffeinated and highly motivated.

“So, I have this contact-someone I’ve come across a couple of times before-who I think could really, really provide you with some sorely-needed relief. He’s an herbalist, an acupuncturist, and an all-around awesome guy; blessed with gifts of healing. Agus is his name; he’s Indonesian, from Java. He has a main office in Jakarta but also one here in Eugene!”

“Really?!”

“Hon, he’s got offices around the planet: New York, Atlanta, one in London and like, three in Australia; one in Dubai…He’s a legit practitioner, sweetie. But he doesn’t just own the traditional Chinese medicine; he’s skilled in the spirit realm, hon, I swear. I ran into him at the Eastern Med Con in Portland last week, and in our talks, I mentioned you and your journey.”

“Awww, Skye!”

“And he was so intensely concerned, after I told him about all the traditional Western methods you’d tried, all the Eastern and Interpersonal methods you’d tried; he told me about a contact of his who can heal grief-sickness like acne! So I have to give you his info, of course I do, right?!”

Agus Anung was docile-sounding and friendly over the phone, speaking with only a light-accent and elegant to boot. With slight dismay, Maureen came to realize Agus himself was not the “grief-healer,” and offered nothing in the way of her most dire need. In fact, the physician in question, a “dukun” called Dharma, was only accessible in-person. In Banyuwangi, a place she’d never heard of, some 700 miles from Jakarta; the latter being only a peripheral focus in her yawning ignorance of the archipelago. Agus could, and would, of course, get her to him. But, she had to go to Indonesia. There was no hint of sketchy dealings with Agus Anung; she was cycling through his very professional webpage as she spoke with him directly over the phone, looking through pictures of him and his staff members at various locations; reading testimonials. Maureen was in fact comforted by the lowering of Agus’s voice when he first called her-after she’d left a message with his secretary in the Oregon clinic-letting her know without so many words that this mysterious “grief-healing” was not advertised; and it was only for Skye’s connection that she was even speaking with him.

“Parlor tricks!” That’s what her estranged husband Edmund would be saying about this five-digit first class trip to Jakarta. That’s what he’d said about her seeking holistic healing; about Skye. A $12,000 one-way ticket to Jakarta wouldn’t even be noticeable in their statement, Maureen knew. Besides, she could care less what Ed thought. Even if they decided on divorce, she’d convince him to come to Agus too, if he was the real deal.

While the trip was grueling, including a stop and a layover in Seoul, Maureen found herself in Banyuwani’s international airport after what was an ambiguous two-day haze of light sleep, movie-binging, and heavily-dosed daydreaming. Agus had come to her in the airport, wearing silken black pants and a white v-neck tee shirt. He looked to be somewhere in his thirties. His smile seemed forced, and his English, though still accomplished, felt much more brisk and less grandiloquent in person.

“Hello there, Maureen. You had a good trip?”

“Hey, Agus! Yes, it was fine,” Maureen replied, leaking some of her pre-trip enthusiasm.

“Very good. I’m glad to hear. We will go now to Banyuwangi, I have a cab waiting. But to get things out of the way first: Dharma will want cash in hand. He will demonstrate his authentic practices and show you that he is no charlatan. But before the cleansing ritual, he will tell you his price and it will need to be paid up front, in full.”

“Okay,” said Maureen, slowly.

You agree to this?”

“Of…course.”

“Very good. Again, he will expect his price paid up front, but he will tell you when you meet him the amount. Then, you can go from there. If you don’t want to go forward, no problem; you owe nothing.” Maureen felt, for the first time, that this had perhaps been a foolish move; as Ed would certainly contend. Following Agus Anung as he grabbed her other bag, out of the airport, Maureen rolled her eyes. Skye…this better be legit!

While Maureen had warmed up slightly on the cab trip throughout the hustle and bustle of the stretching villages and colorful houses comprising Banyuwangi; taking in its awesome size and splendor; she began to get nagging feelings of uncertainty again, as soon the populated sprawl began lessening to more and more open greenery.

The dukun’s house felt worrying, immediately worrying. As soon as the cab turned down the narrow dirt lane, the vegetation became oppressive on either side; and above. She’d noticed she was down to one bar before she spied the last house some ways off the road. It had a tin roof, which looked to’ve been painted a light blue, but was now rusting heavily. The bruised sky was darkening; what all she could see of it through the thick canopy of green. And the green leaves of the trees were swaying and upturning in the wind, in the manner Maureen’s mother had told her always meant a downpour was coming.

You idiot! He’s not even an American citizen! Not even from somewhere like the EU-he could be trafficking humans! Selling organs! Wow-he’s got locations in Eugene, Oregon?! There’s no way a human trafficker from Indonesia could swing something like that, right, Maureen?! Her gut was in toilsome motility, and she felt a filmy unpleasantness coating her mouth and throat; the harbingers of dire anxiety. “I swear, Skye…” she whispered, almost loud enough to be heard over the hum of the motor. She heard the pleather squeak as Agus beside her shifted to face her.

“Everything okay?” She became aware of some teen-sounding pop playing gravelly over the cabbie’s radio. She nodded. “You were in the airplane for a long time,” stated Agus; and Maureen was thankful for his pallid excuse. She grunted in agreement. In an almost cooing voice, Agus communicated to the cabbie that Maureen was from the United States. Both men smiled. She forced one.

The car came to an abrupt halt: the dirt road ended in less of a culdesac and more of a tapering mud sidewalk. The first few globs of rain began hitting the windshield as Agus opened the door holding her bags. Dharma’s house, if indeed it was his house, was at the bottom of a precarious hill, chunks of bricks and rocks making a jagged staircase down. “This is the place,” stated Agus, deadpan. He paid the cabbie a meaty bundle of rupiah through the passenger window, and as Maureen heard the car moan in reverse behind her, she heard also the cicadas seemingly awake to droning life, chorusing her alarming sense of seclusion.

The rain had turned into a downpour as they struggled down the sheer hill. As Agus was about to mention the gully wash, Maureen abruptly warned, “I have no service! No cell service!”

“There are telephone lines here, Mrs. Yates,” replied Agus. She found herself peering in the darkening jungle tops for lines and telltale wooden posts. But the small house before them, perhaps 1,000 square feet, was undeniably inviting; not just because they were getting doused. But in the green lightbulb’s glow beneath the awning of the porch, sat two women; one a good deal older. His wife and daughter?! And Maureen couldn’t deny, in the glances she chanced while ankling down the haphazard stairs, that there was a certain coziness and coziness in the tin-roofed place, nestled here in deep jungle.

Inside Dharma’s small house, the feeling Maureen kept shifting back and forth between was one of cloistering oppression, and endearingly cluttered. People, all adults, populated the indoors; smiling and nodding to the point of a slight bow, just as the two women on the porch had done. Maureen counted eight men and women, ranging from their tweens to twilight years of wrinkles and cream-white hair. They’re so elegant as they age. Maureen admired them each, smiling at them in turn.

“Dharma should be out shortly,” said Agus, pointing towards a small wooden armchair, conspicuously alone amidst the clutter. As Maureen sat, she heard Agus and the people in the main room chatting familiarly with one another in Indonesian; voices rising in crescendo and polite chuckles. Maureen wondered what they might be saying about her as she looked at the large sitting room she was in; jars on shelves containing pickled peppers and roots, quality wooden boxes of differing sizes, a lacquered chess set atop finely wrought wooden end table, and a long wicker couch. Crowding throughout the shelves were potted roses and brilliantly colored flowers. Where a TV might be set in a Western living room, there was instead a giant vase containing virtually an ecosystem of well-maintained flowers. This must be the primary business of this Dharma. She sighed, comforted that at least there was legitimacy in flowers. But something was eerily amiss, as she knew; she knew, some of the roses planted in their densely soiled pots, were swaying. She felt her arms and shoulders, instinctively. Is there a draft?! She leaned forward on the armchair, a look of concern drooping into a fantastical gasp. Are they actually swaying? Or not?! Her eyes, over-focused, became suddenly fatigued in the yellow-lit room.

“Aaah-haaa!” erupted the voices of all the standing adults, in that universal onomatopoeia of excitement and pleasure satisfied. Maureen’s gaze shot to the frameless door in the wall before her, which was all but covered in a zodiac calendar. There appeared Dharma, clad in a plain black longsleeved shirt, and loose-fitting, black silken trousers, connected to the shirt with a finely embroidered sarong about his waist. Over his head was a red, yellow and black headtie, with several intricate folds on the front and the right side.

“Stand up,” commanded Agus. Dumbly Maureen stood, and she felt his solemn presence still the room of his house like smoke clouding a small kitchen. She bowed from her waist, surprising herself at the humble gesture, along with Agus and everyone else. The two women from the porch had come in and made their prostrations as well, she noticed.

Dharma raised his hands and everyone sat; several sat on the floor, disciple-like. “I’ll be translating,” Agus said before addressing Dharma in Indonesian. Dharma’s unreadable gaze bored into Maureen as the quiet unfolded in the room; and Maureen could hear the cicadas outside as if there were no walls. His voice was gentle, almost too quiet, Maureen thought, as Agus asked “what is the nature of your grief?” Suddenly Maureen didn’t want to be surrounded by smiling strangers; being observed like an anesthetized patient in a Victorian operating theater.

“I…lost someone.” She thought about expounding, but the nakedness she felt was overbearing.

Agus spoke to Dharma; it didn’t sound like a simple translation. The only real link outside and beyond Banyuwangi, Agus then leaned in close to her.

“Maureen, you’re going to need to be detailed; tell him everything he needs-if you’re still wanting to go through with this.” She replied with a question as to who all the other people were at his house. Agus paused a length which made her uncomfortable, to the point that she turned away from Dharma’s deadpan stare and met the lightly sweating face of Agus just inches away. As he spoke she smelled a distinct aroma that was supposed to mask bad breath.

“This transference ritual, it’s a sight that people would travel miles to see. I told you, he will demonstrate first, yeah?” She nodded. Agus said something affirming to Dharma and Maureen took a ragged breath in, before salting the still raw burn two years throbbing. She talked about her son’s forthcoming 24th birthday, and she began saying his name, every opportunity available. “Isaac was an amazing photographer,” would follow with “Isaac loved to go backpacking all over the world.” She ceased using pronouns, and ceased calling him her son; he was her Isaac.

After some thirty minutes of a constant stream of expatiating and translating, Dharma nodded knowingly.

“Isaac,” the shaman repeated with finality. He then stood up and walked to one of the boxes on the shelf. From the wooden box, he produced a rose, freshly cut apparently. Maureen could see droplets of water on its stem. Speaking at a quickened pace now, though still softly, Agus began translating; and his accent became all the stronger: “focus on the red bulb, don’t move your eyes away from it; you must not look away! Whatever else I do, do not take your eyes off this red rose until I command!” Fear welling through Maureen’s nerves and organs brought her to the final precipice; the image of Isaac as a young boy. Okay mommy! Okay! Those impossibly precious early words from his toddling ages; immortalized in pictures-many still in albums and reels catalogued in her smart phone. “Okay!” she quietly acquiesced, wiping tears from her cheeks.

Dharma’s hands shook violently, and Maureen found her eyes looking at a red blur. Whispering in a language sounding more guttural, older than Indonesian, the dukun produced something; Maureen couldn’t tell from where. She fought against every human instinct to look at what it was; but the picture of a six year old Isaac holding a birthday cupcake kept her watering eyes fixed. “Stay looking at the rose,” Agus would remind her every so often; and Maureen deduced the language the shaman uttered was ancient and forgotten by most. After an incalculable tract of time, Agus said, exasperated “alright!” She could take her eyes off of the rose, which Dharma dropped to the ground. In his left hand, now still as a statue, Maureen finally could sate her furious curiosity. A little stick? She thought it was a green stem, perhaps from a rose bush; but she noticed it had smaller little branches that writhed and flicked. She slowly gasped in realization that it was a mammoth stick insect; perhaps a foot long!

“Look at what your sadness does to it,” instructed Agus. The bug stood on its hind arched legs, bipedal, and outstretched its forelimbs in a silent display of gross abnormality. “Something never meant to house a mortal’s burden,” Agus translated, as the stick insect suddenly dropped to the ground. Maureen took it for dead, when sluggishly, it began dragging its limp body with only its front forelegs-towards the rose just a foot before it. The insect suddenly began geysering its insides; they quietly flitted into the still air, black ooze and solid gobbets of its innards, all vacating the crawling thing like a vacuum cleaner had sucked a dirty crevice clean. There were no sounds at all; the cicadas were no longer heard. With the deathly noiselessness, there were now approving sighs and chuckles from the gathered strangers. And in an instant, Maureen realized she felt no sadness towards her dead son. She burst into ravenous laughter.

Agus had told her Dharma’s price. She had continued laughing through the night, long after the cab had been called; long after buying drinks for Agus and five of his employees at the hotel’s bar. The delight she felt was permanently fixed to her face, and her face ached from its involuntary smile. Her eyes burned, as each laughing bout brought tears; tears which had been changed into some semblance of giddiness, of lightheartedness. Maureen remembered, in a patch where she wasn’t giggling, assuring Agus that she’d wire the money to an account Agus had set up; she’d do it the next day. Agus had smiled, and clinked tumblers full of gin with her. “Why should I believe you?” He smiled toothily at her. What fools! She stifled a laugh, marveling at the newfound disdain-nascent and intriguing as it felt-rising within her.

As Agus Anung walked to the men’s room, he made a phone call at the urinal. In few words, he told the dukun what they’d both suspected. Maureen had booked her flight for 11 the next morning; though she thought no one would be the wiser. After a heavy sigh, the dukun said only the words “my collection grows.” Dharma hung up.

The flight had to be turned around before leaving Java airspace; the ghastly incident of an American woman’s inexplicably becoming disemboweled in the bathroom became an unsolved murder mystery, the most macabre of conspiracy theorists’ favorites. In his small hut, with dissatisfaction etched on his face, Dharma watched a slightly swaying rose.