Deincarnation
My new house down the road was not yet finished. I would have moved in anyway, but living in a house in Bali that has not been properly consecrated with an appropriate ceremony was impossible.
I did, however, gather every file and document I could find and move them immediately to a secure room in the new house.
Here the narrative breaks down. In Eleven Demons I try to present it in sequence, each event as it happened, but without a book length to explain, it would only lead to as much confusion as I experienced at the time.
I gradually came to feel it as a kind of deincarnation. Everything I had understood about my family, my wife, my life, and my friends was falling away. And not by accident, but with full and increasingly obvious intent.
Had I really just been forced to present evidence for my existence to the court, prove my marriage, the birth of my children, the results of my nearly 20 years of work?
People I had known as friends for years had become suddenly cold over the last months, for no reason I could understand. Then I ran into Kim in a parking lot and he said "I've been hearing lots of terrible things about you!" Then he laughed, "but don't worry, I only believe half of them!" The reason for Made's relentessly active social life was beoming clear.
The only people who did not seem to turn against me were the house staff who actually lived with us.
In my new unfinished office I began to go through whatever I had salvaged. Made Artini and Nyoman Sudana often joined me. They remembered things, had witnessed or overheard things that I was unaware of. The gardener I Wayan Dharma overheard revealing conversations between Made and her lawyer Wiantara.
Other staff reported things they had seen and overheard. Made often discounted their presence and probably forgot they could listen. They suffered her angers and sudden shifts of temper, but she had not endeared herself to them. When Wayan Pugri had forgotten to put out a candle one night, Made found a burn spot on the table in the morning and flew into a rage and screamed "this table is worth more than you are!" The staff seemed to recognize this as her general attitude towards them.
It took months for us to pull things together, assembling memories, photos, videos, witnesses, emails, scraps of documents including many that Made herself entered into court as evidence. We combed through old documents and computer files that I had once meant to throw away. I found that all our photos from 1994 through 1996 were gone, but Made had missed destroying the negatives, and I printed them again.
Even now after all this time I am occasionally surprised by some new piece of information as it falls into place.
Going throught the documents, I realized that I had been married to one Made Jati, but there was another Made Jati, someone I did not know.
The other Made Jati had been hard at work to deincarnate me from even the first months of our marriage, and that Made Jati was living as a single unmarried woman in another city.