"It pains me, sir, to inform you that unfortunately you are almost certainly shit out of luck."
One of those times you just can't see clearly. Eyes open under chlorinated water. Fresh pollen from blooming stems. I bull my suitcase through a stuck turnstile, catch scowls from the crowd as it churns around me. Smell of damp curries. To my right bustles a mass of silk, draped folds like Halloween prank ghosts bobbing in hypnotic patterns. Garish fire-flower hues. Deep shadows. A flock of Malay women, raisin-faced, chattering. In the back corner of the room a woman on a Celcom banner gazes at her phone, thumbs primed. The white text next to her narrates, "He's angry at me. He didn't want to talk to me. So I said sorry via SMS." The ceiling looms. And it is at one of these times these senses failing times with pressure at my back and clicking in my ears and the roil groundswell of feet hundreds and hundreds of escaping feet welling like spilled marbles into the KL Sentral Ground Level Lobby that suddenly it hits me: my backpack is on the train. My backpack with my laptop and passport and toothbrush and dental floss and silver-sealed antihistamine caplets and the little pencil-loops in a mesh flap on the side has been left behind on the same train that even now bullets back the twenty-six-minute-thirty-five-second journey to Kuala Lumpur International Airport. So I dig up the attendant, and that is what he tells me. Out of luck. No hope. Gone.
Welcome to Malaysia.
***
Wade in the water. Wade in the water. Wade in the water. God's gonna trouble the water. She is singing a blues that is fuller than she is, red lips and white eyelids and also red fingernails, her dress preschool-red, hips knotting and spiraling their hurricane swirls, kneecaps almost pale. Cheeks like sheer cliffs. The program bills her as "Altercation." Before the show I am sharing a pipe with Benjamin Theolonius "IQ" Sanders on the stone steps outside and she walks up to us and sort of leans down and extends her hand and says Hi pleased to meet you I'm Altercation. IQ looks up from the steps at her, runs a hand through his braids, looks down again. Then says Good to see you too and passes her the pipe. Behind us the Mississippi snores and rumbles. She calls the piece Soggy Muffaletta. On her left shoulder sits a tattoo of a Care Bear with a piece of cake on its tummy. It holds a cross and on the cross hangs Jesus and he is bleeding there right there on her shoulder on the cross. The date is October 25, 2005, in the city of Memphis.
***
Exactly two times in my life have I known rain. The kind of rain where each drop has its own identity, its own personality. Its own exquisite formation. The kind of rain that spreads amoebic as it hits, its tendrils dipping to your eyebrows ears and lips until its wetness wraps you in its cold. Not the angry tempered drizzle of a Memphis summer, petulant and swift. Or the sad and sagging saunter of a late Seattle nimbus, lazy and droll and pallid like age. Rain for its own sake. Rain as an end. Welcome to Malaysia, Tech says. We are driving in the Batmobile, an '86 Proton Waja whose doors can't close and whose windshield fails to shield the wind. Both of us sit snugly inside the car. Both of us are drenched. We have been rerouted onto the Federal Highway because when the city floods they hang little orange cones from the insides of KL's transit tunnels and use them for drainage instead. Inside the tunnels stands shit-brown water high as a Toyota van. Mucous-yellow the reflections off the tunnel lights, square up the road's center like a fetid spine. Bile in esophagus. Stuck on the exit ramp, Tech lays on the horn. No one moves. Below us floats an island of garbage. Red plastic cups, plastic bags like eerie gills, cigarettes. All of it caught in the current of the Klang. The brown and stagnant runoff of the Klang. Kuala Lumpur called Kuala Lumpur because of the Klang. Kuala Lumpur. "Muddy Confluence." The muddy confluence of the Gombak and the Klang.
***
Who's that, yonder, dressed in red? God's gonna trouble the water. Must be the children that Moses led. God's gonna trouble the water. She has cut her background accompaniment. The man at the bass wears a slack black patterned tie. His bow hangs limply, pendulums, kisses the surface of the stage. He checks for a watch at his wrist but there is no watch at his wrist. Wade in the water. I am frozen. I am cold. Every chair in the auditorium is filled. God's gonna trouble the water. Not one single person blinks. She grips the microphone like the edge of a precipice. One strap of her dress dangles into nothing. Cascades down like billowing curtains. Snowcap-white her exposed breast. Wade in the water. She leans forward as if hung from the ceiling by a string. You can point at the bones of her ribcage. Even her toenails are painted red. Each and every one of them meticulously fire-red. God is gonna trouble the water. Then the man in front of me is filled. Hallelujah he shouts. Falls on his knees. Hallelujah he shouts. And suddenly the first row down, hands clenched, clasping knees, every person down and sundered and hunched like kidney-bean fetuses, broken like bones or levees, their torsos bobbing in hazy circles and their mouths mumbling infant monosyllables and suddenly too I am down, and IQ next to me, ashamed to look up, ashamed to look ahead, forward, ashamed to stare, to watch, to gape at her. Her words become dust. Avalanche of dust. Swept up and lost in the murmurs of the crowd, drifting, like shingles from her drowned roof, along in the tide.
Zac Hill is a 2008-2009 Luce Scholar working as a policy analyst for the Centre for Independent Journalism in Kuala Lumpur. Previously he wrote features and ate food for the Memphis Flyer before herding cats as a policy advisor for the Shelby County Mayor's Office. His works have appeared in the Southwestern Review, the Blue Collar Review, The Asia Foundation's monthly magazine inAsia, and other publications. He recently concluded a three-year tenure as a Featured Columnist for the internet's premier collectible card game website, StarCityGames.com.