Letter from the Editor

From the Desk

Perspectives

Touched by the Hands of God

Pilgrimage

Rousing Requiem Ritual

Chen Shuei Bian and the Dragon King

On Assignment

Pastor Lu

A Man from Malta

Tang-Ki

By D. Eply
Artwork by Kent Dylan

All my life I’ve been faithful to all of my partners. Not once have I cheated on a lover. In fact, I’d never been party to infidelity in any form until I met Ariana.

I met Ariana while writing an article about the bakery where she worked. She was the resident English-speaker,

She looked like a descendent of oriental royalty. Her features were flat and angular and her mouth petit. A fountain of shimmering black hair flowed from her scalp, the tips of the flaxen strands grazing her hips. But, as with all exotic beauty, the strength of her magnetism lay in her eyes – two large droplets of oily night on dual cream canvasses. Her small stature and traditional beauty coupled with an unassuming manner bathed her in an aura of angelic innocence.

I interviewed the manager while Ariana translated with impressive proficiency. After we finished the interview the boss left, but we continued talking.

The conversation turned to traveling. She’d been to Europe. She spoke two languages other than English and Chinese. German was her favorite, but she picked an Italian name.

She told me that she would be studying in Australia the following autumn.

Now, I admire a cultured person. I also have a serious weakness for intellectual women. But the fact that she would be leaving, above all her other desirable traits, caused my gut to corkscrew with a painful longing.

You see, I’d recently separated from my longtime girlfriend and wasn’t eager to start another serious relationship. But, a fling with a sensuous intellectual goddess was exactly what I needed to lift me from the pit of self-deprecation resulting from my relationship withdrawal. Unfortunately, during our conversation she mentioned that she had a boyfriend (hence the British accent).

It was too much for me. I had to escape the lusty torture that was being near this incredibly desirable, yet unavailable, creature. I suddenly announced that I had to leave right away to meet my deadline. As I turned to complete my desperate evasion, she calmly inquired, “How long have you been in Hsinchu?”

“I dunnno. About eight months.”

“Maybe I could show you around sometime,” she said.

“Sure.” I replied and gave her my phone number.

When I told my roommate Denise, she was shocked.

“She has a boyfriend?” She asked. “Are you really going to see her?”

My recklessness later turned out to be illusory. On our first date Ariana explained that she didn’t actually have a boyfriend. They’d recently broken up. Her reference to him had been a slip of the tongue.

Even though she didn’t have a boyfriend, my hopes of drama, as you will see, were more than realized.

The first surprise was Ariana’s age.

The assuredness with which she carried herself and the knowledge of language she displayed in our first encounter convinced me that she was a university graduate. But, a couple of weeks after we started seeing each she told me that she’d recently completed high school. She was eighteen. I, pushing thirty, had reservations about continuing the affair but, as it was to be temporary anyways, I let it slide. Besides, after the first time we slept together (before I knew her age), I could hardly consider breaking it off. She was an insatiable vixen in bed.

From the beginning I made it very clear to Ariana that, because I was on the rebound from a long-term relationship, and she would be leaving, we could not be a serious couple. She wouldn’t be my girlfriend.

She seemed, to my surprise, to be fine with this arrangement. She actually thought it was novel. She’d gleefully refer to me as her ‘sex buddy’. I figured this was because she was still hung-up on her ex-boyfriend. They still spent time together occasionally and she spoke of him often. I asked her once or twice if she was still sleeping with him.

“No,” she would reply simply. “He’s given up sex.”

Ariana started dating Ahmed when she was sixteen. He was her German tutor. He was forty-two years old.

The reason they’d broken up was because over the two years they were together he gradually became more immersed in his Muslim heritage. After he returned from his pilgrimage to Mecca (about a month before I met Ariana) he announced that he would no longer sleep with her unless they were married.

Ariana wouldn’t stand for that. She enjoyed sex too much. She demanded to get married. But because he was black, Ariana’s parents hated Ahmed. Marriage was out of the question. Locked within the boundaries of three bull-headed adults, Ariana found the lifeblood choked from their relationship. Still, she wanted the union to continue, but he, being older and more practical minded, saw the irreconcilable nature of their problems and put an end to it.

To tell you the truth, I would’ve preferred that they had still been sleeping together. Then I could’ve slept around without concern for Ariana’s feelings.

Ariana’s faithfulness, though, didn’t stop me from finding another lover. She was a beautiful Indonesian girl attracted by my glossy complexion. It was the closest I ever came to cheating on a girlfriend and it was disgraceful. The sex was uncomfortable and awkward and the next morning, hung-over and exhausted, a chasm of regret erupted inside my chest.

I deplored what I had done to the pit of my nauseous stomach for the hurt it would cause Ariana. I knew then that I didn’t want to sleep with anyone else. I only wanted to be with Ariana, but I was unsure about how to handle the situation. I wouldn’t lie, but I didn’t want to volunteer the information either. So, I decided to keep quiet until she forced my hand. Quite predictably, three days later (the next time I saw her) Ariana came bounding into my apartment. She gleefully announced that it was her birthday and tore off my clothes. Later, while lying exhausted in bed, she inquired whether I had slept with anybody else.

I told her I had.

I felt like a disgusting masochist as I sat there, watching her begin to quiver, eyes wide with disbelief, and lower her face into the comforter and erupt into orgiastic sobs.

I apologized fervently. I told her that I didn’t want to sleep with anybody else again -- I only wanted her. But the damage was done. Until our final day she never forgave me for what she referred to for the remainder of our relationship as her ‘birthday present’.

But, as time passed, things returned to normal. In fact, they improved. Guilt over my quasi-infidelity spurred me to start doing special things for Ariana: bring her chocolates when I’d pick her up, cook her extravagant dinners, or put off work to spend more time with her. My tryst actually brought us closer.

Then, one day, I received a queer email. The name on it was Mike. The e-mail subject line read, “Your new whore” and the body read: “be sure to use rubbers with this one lol.” It contained a video attachment. The video was of Ariana, alone in her parents washroom, showing Mike what she’d like him to do to her. The next day I received a second email, which contained pictures.

She showed me some of their correspondence. He was grossly abusive. He called her a ‘filthy slut’, ‘whore’, and talked about her ‘sucking my infected cum’. The guy was obviously a basement dwelling, Twinkie eating, Internet addicted loser.

He e-mailed me regularly. He told me she was sleeping around and that I shouldn’t trust her. He said that she was still with her ex-boyfriend and that he was out looking for me. He was obviously trying to break us up.

Finally, I told Ariana to email Mike and tell him that I’d broken up with her because of his e-mails, and that she hated him and wouldn’t talk to him any more. That way he’d think he got what he wanted and leave us alone. I also told her that if she talked to him again our relationship would be over.

It worked. The e-mails stopped.

After that we started seeing each other more. Two or three nights a week we’d stay up talking the travels I’d fund with the money I was making teaching English, and Ariana’s future studies in Australia, and make voracious love. It was an immaculate time. It was a warm spring, we both had prospects for the future, and our relationship was expanding like a galaxy.

We made plans to take a final trip together at the end of July before she left. We were going to load up my motorbike and spend nine days touring the island. But, three days before our trip, as is common to field mice, artistic hobos, and couples planning adventures, our plans were violently skewed.

Wednesday night we watched a movie on my laptop in my bedroom. Afterwards I went to sleep. Ariana stayed up to check her email. When I woke up in the morning my computer was still on. I usually keep my desktop clean – nothing except for the recycling bin – but this morning there was a single white and blue text document icon. I opened it. I almost puked. It was a transcript of the chat conversation that Ariana had with Mike the night before. During the conversation he got jealous and let fly a string of his trademark grotesque abuses. To calm him, Ariana told Mike that she was only with me “for some cock”.

I felt duped. How could I have let this girl play me so easily? I woke her up and confronted her.

“What the fuck is this?”

“What?”

“What do you think? Don’t you remember me telling you that it would be over if you talked to this guy again?”

“No,” she replied with giant worried eyes. “No, I don’t remember. I’m sorry.” A thin film coated her eyes making them glisten in the dark.

“What about these things you wrote here?” I opened the file on my computer. “You’re only with me for some cock?”

“I was just trying to calm him down.”

“Why do you even care about this guy anyways? Look at the shit he calls you: slut, whore, cunt. Why the fuck do you talk to this guy?”

It was a rhetorical question. I knew the answer. From what little she told me I deduced that Ariana had a disgustingly twisted family. Her mother was manic-depressive and her father abusive. Ariana told me that one day when they were out her father pointed to a tall apartment building and told her that he wanted to drop her off of it because she was so much trouble. He told her he could get away with it because he had friends in the police department. She said that he hit her occasionally. I found out later that her father beat her regularly, sometimes even in public. When Ariana was six years old her mother, by her own admission, held a meat cleaver over her head and threatened to chop it off. And these are only the few examples that I was privy too. I could only imagine the other torments her psychotic family had subjected her to all these years.

In some morbid way Ariana probably felt that Mike’s outbursts were normal -- that they showed that he cared. Because of her father’s unyielding abuse Ariana yearned for male acceptance. The more a man degraded her the more she vied for his approval.

But, after reading that conversation, and seeing her lie, I could muster no sympathy.

“Fucking Christ, Ariana. Go home. I’m going on the trip alone,” I said.

I pulled her out of bed, carried her things down to the parking garage, and put them on her scooter.

“Can you forgive me?” She asked, weeping.

“I have to think about it.”

That weekend I rode my bike up to Taichung and then across the mountains to Toroko Gorge. I wandered through the gargantuan crevice in contemplative silence. “She’s just a kid.” I decided. “Of course she’s going to make mistakes. Besides, she’s leaving soon.”

I called her from my cell and told her that she could still join me if she wanted to. She took the train to Hualien the next day.

Those days together cruising carefree down the coastal highway were among the happiest I’ve known since I landed on this overgrown reef. Having abandoned my anger, and knowing that we had little time left, my affection for Ariana swelled. We spent nights in my tent wrapped in each other’s heat and our days exploring the spots that piqued our fancy along the sun-drenched coast. Our need to forget the past and ignore the future forced us to live in the sublime present of beaches, jungles, and late summer nights, driving our relationship to an ecstatic peak.

But it couldn’t last. The night we returned, as Ariana prepared to go home, her mother called. She told Ariana not to come home. Her father was furious that she had left for so long. If she went back he was going to beat her.

Moreover, he was determined to ruin Ariana’s trip. He told her he wouldn’t allow her to go to Australia. He demanded her ticket, passport, and traveler’s checks. He said he was going to go to the police and tell them that she wasn’t allowed to leave the country. We knew that he couldn’t legally stop her, but we had to get into her house and get her luggage and documents, so we snuck in the next day when he was at work and smuggled her things back to my apartment.

It seemed that things were going to be okay…until that fateful Friday three days before her departure. That evening I went out for a beer with friends at a bar near my house and Ariana stayed home. I came home a couple of hours later but Ariana didn’t hear me come in. I walked into my office where she was using my computer. On the screen was a chat conversation. It was Mike. He was letting loose with one of his usual verbal assaults. I stood there a moment before Ariana turned and saw me and quickly closed the window.

I was fuming. Ariana fuelled my anger by denying that she was talking to him. For hours she cried, pleaded, and lied. Finally, I told her to get her things.

I carried her luggage to her scooter and loaded it, again. She was sobbing so profusely that I drove alongside her to make sure she didn’t crash. At her house I told her we were through and left her weeping in the street, clutching her luggage.

But that’s not the end of the story. Oh, no. It gets better.

A week later a friend pulled me aside at a party. He told me solemnly that he’d met a guy that said he knew Ariana because he was a friend of her boyfriend. The guy hadn’t been talking about me. He was talking about her ‘ex’.

By way of acquaintances I got a hold of Ariana’s boyfriend’s phone number and called him. He was taken aback. The conversation was oddly friendly. We shared a strange bond. We had a long talk about Ariana and why she did what she did. It was he who told me about her family.

I pictured her leaving my house early on Sunday evenings (as she always did because I go to sleep early) and zipping on her scooter across the deserted streets of Hsinchu to his house. I thought about all the crying, hurt, and guilt of the Indonesian-girl episode. But most of all I remembered what I’d told my roommate about my decision to date Ariana despite the fact that she had a boyfriend:

“I could use some drama. Besides, what will I ever write about if I don’t act a little reckless?”