Michael Harris - The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection

1996Malaysia

, Linda Jimi, was fourteen years old and ready to leave.

There was a box with four little legs in their house, and in the box was a black-and-white television. There was no electricity (Linda was tasked with gathering firewood for the kitchen stove each day), but on special occasions, Lindas father would take the car battery that powered the TV into the village and have it charged. Then Linda could watch Sesame Street, which was senseless but wonderful, with its American children and Muppets prattling in confounding English, playing out their deeply foreign antics.

Big Bird was yellow, Linda learned. The village children had electricity and color televisions; they would brag about their colors. Linda said, I know, and told the other children that her family had colors, too.

Sesame Street was baffling, but Lindas family believed intrinsically in spirits and ghosts, so the apparitions that flashed on the television screen could be folded into a larger trust in magic, in brushes with the unknowable.

Besides, more magical by far was the komburongoh that Lindas grandmother Sukat wielded. Linda never touched the sacred object herself, for fear of angering the spirits and growing sickbut she could look across the hut at the thing in her grandmothers hands, a tight bundle of teeth taken from several animals, knotted together with a collection of small bones. Sukat, who could handle the komburongoh with impunity, had access to the spirit of an ancestor, and she could call upon the spirit for help when attempting to heal members of the Dusun tribe.

Once, before the village was abandoned, Linda watched her grandmother work her magic over a child whod been stricken with fever. This was only a small ritual, so Sukat hadnt bothered to dress in the full garb of a bobolian (high priestess)shed worn an ordinary sarong and a long-sleeved blouse. Sukat had moved her komburongoh over the sickly childs head, shaking her bundle of teeth for five full minutes while the infant sweated beneath. Sukat had told the spirit to undo this childs illness, and the spirit had asked for a sacrificea chicken or a few cups of rice.

Sukats healing powers were meant to be passed on to her daughterLindas motherbut Sukat died too early, and then, like many Malaysians, Lindas mother converted to Catholicism. When the family finally left Batu Lima and moved to town, Lindas mother left behind Sukats mystical equipment.

Linda, too, was taking steps away from that miniature settlement, away from the mythical past of Malaysia. She wanted something more, though she couldnt say what more might look like. At eighteen, she ran away from home and moved to the city of Sabah (a relative metropolis with its two thousand people). There she worked at a KFC restaurant (much the same setup as the American version, though minus the American pay). She saved her meager wages for months before purchasing a mobile phone, which became precious to her. She wanted badly to enter the modern world, to live, at last, in the full glow of the worlds future. Eventually, Linda worked her way up to the far classier Little Italy restaurant in Kota Kinabalu. The pay was the same, but at least tourists dined there, which meant Linda could practice her English.

Tourists like Nate, a Canadian whod just graduated from college and was backpacking around the region. Come hang out in Singapore with me, he offered.

Sure, said Linda, and she went a little farther afield. The couple had their affair and Nate left for home, promising to return in the fall. Linda hoped, rather than believed, that the promise would be fulfilled. And when Nate did return, eventually inviting Linda to come live on the other side of the world, in Vancouver, she might well have undergone severe culture shock. The Canadian city was almost a letdown, though, since Linda had assumed that every city in North America looked like the city shed seen, in black and white, on