The Heliograph Bid

The ferry to Pulau Biawak left from a dock that was mostly a plank and a guy named Sudar who collected money with one hand and smoked with the other. I paid him, found a seat next to a crate of live crabs, and watched Jakarta disappear behind me.

My name is Kelsey. I'm thirty-four years old, I live alone in a rented apartment with a dying fern, and I have been single for so long that my friends have stopped asking. That's not self-pity. It's inventory. When your whole life is standing in front of a crowd and talking faster than anyone can think, you don't leave a lot of room for a second person in the apartment. The fern barely survives. A boyfriend would not.

But I'm good. I'm really good. Twelve years in the trade, started at twenty-two, had one stupid wild fling with a fellow auctioneer named Alanna when we were both at a conference at twenty-four, and it ended fine, the way flings do, with a handshake and a promise to text that neither of us kept. Since then it's been lots, paddles, and hotels with bad pillows. I wanted this sale on Pulau Biawak the way other men want boats.

A heliograph. A real fire lookout mirror signaling rig, from a defunct watchtower on the island, bronze and glass and over a century old. Collector bait. Career bait. My bait.

Sudar killed the engine and the island slid up to meet us. Rocky cliff on the north side, green scrub everywhere else, a smell of salt and hot stone. A man was waiting at the little jetty with a wide straw hat and the patient face of someone who has been retiring things his whole life.

"Kelsey?" he said.

"Craig." We shook hands. Craig, forty-five, retired fire lookout, the seller. He looked as though he had spent decades alone with a mirror and a shutter and liked it.

"Solar furnace first," he said. "Auction's there. You'll see."

The solar furnace was exactly what he'd described over the phone and nothing my brain was ready for. A circular concrete pad at the base of the cliff, a ring of parabolic mirrors, each one big as a dinner table, all aimed inward at a central kiln. It was built decades ago and half abandoned, and even now, with only a few mirrors aligned, the air above the kiln shimmered like water.

"It still works?" I asked.

"Barely. Enough to melt tin. Nobody uses it." Craig shrugged. "But the mirrors are the best seats on the island. So we auction there."

He'd set up a canvas awning near the furnace, a plywood podium, and a wooden crate holding the heliograph. It was beautiful. Two mirrors on an articulated frame, a shutter key, brass fittings gone green at the edges. Signaling by flashes of sunlight. Morse code shot across the sea at the speed of light.

"It ran messages from this tower to the mainland for forty years," Craig said, resting a hand on the crate. "Storms, shipwrecks, one war. My father kept it after the tower closed. I kept it after him. Time to let it go. I'm moving to Lombok."

"Reserve?"

"Reserved."

At a folding table under the awning, a woman was bent over a hotel robe, sewing a belt loop back on with tiny, vicious stitches. She didn't look up.

"That's Emmy," Craig said. "Local. She does repair work for the small hotel up the hill. Belt loops, zippers, hems."

"Interesting sideline for a bidder."

"She's not a sideline. She's the competition." Craig's mouth did something dry. "You'll see."

I walked over. She finished a stitch, tied off, bit the thread, and then looked up at me like I was a problem on her desk.

"You're the auctioneer from the city," she said. Emmy, twenty-nine, sharp-eyed, hair tied back with what I swear was dental floss.

"I'm the auctioneer, period. For this sale."

"Uh huh. You've handled a heliograph before?"

"I've handled a dodo egg, a lighthouse lens, and a fakir's eating sword. A heliograph is a day off."

"Then you know it belongs in a museum, not in some collector's dark hallway."

"And I know collectors pay more." I smiled at her. "You bidding?"

"I'm bidding."

"Then may the best wallet win."

Her smile was small and had a lot of edges in it. "May it."

I turned to go check the podium and heard her snip another thread. Behind me Craig laughed once, quietly, at nothing.

The registration sheet filled up over the afternoon. Eleven bidders, mostly local collectors, two flown in from Surabaya, one German who kept photographing the mirrors instead of the heliograph. Emmy had signed the sheet in handwriting so neat it looked printed. Her registered number was seven. Mine was nine.

At sundown Craig called me and Emmy and the German over to the crate. He had a bottle of arrack and three plastic cups, and he poured like a man starting a long story.

"Two things before tomorrow," he said. "First, the history, so you can sell it right."

He talked. The tower was built in the colonial era, the heliograph installed to relay weather and shipping news to the mainland station. His father manned it through the fifties and sixties. Once, in a storm, the flashes from the tower guided a fishing boat past the reef, eleven men aboard. Craig had been a boy then, holding the shutter key while his father shouted the code. The eleven men came back every year with fruit until the tower shut down.

"So it's not just brass and glass," Emmy said. "It's the reason half the old families on this island exist."

"Which is why it goes to whoever values it," Craig said. "But second thing." He poured himself more arrack. "Island custom. The winning bidder presents a symbolic offering at the furnace before they take the lot. It's old. It's mostly theater. But it's the custom."

"What kind of offering?" the German asked.

Craig grinned, and I didn't like the grin.

"Everyone who has ever won a sale at this furnace has done it. The offering is a kebaya. Traditional dress. You wear it. You stand at the furnace, you make your claim, the crowd approves, the lot is yours."

The German laughed. "No!"

"Then you can't bid," Craig said, pleasant as milk.

I looked at Emmy. She was not laughing. She was doing arithmetic, same as me.

"Wait," I said. "Everyone. Ever."

"Everyone. Including my father. There's a photograph."

"There's a photograph," Emmy confirmed. She'd seen it, apparently, at the village hall. "Black and white. He's wearing a green one. Peplum and all."

"And you?" I asked her. "You're still bidding?"

"I'm still bidding." She said it flat, like a fact about the tide.

"So am I," I said, before my mouth could consult my brain.

Emmy looked at me then, properly, the way she'd looked at the robe loop, sizing up the stitch. "You'd wear a kebaya."

"I'd wear a gorilla suit to win this sale. It's fabric. The heliograph is a hundred years of light."

"Huh," she said. Something in the huh was not hostile for the first time all day.

Craig refilled my cup. "It's not punishment," he said. "It's humility. The furnace gave light. You give it a bit of grace. The old men say the mirrors like it."

"The mirrors like it," I repeated.

"Nobody knows what mirrors like," Emmy said. "That's the point of the custom. You do something silly and public and harmless so the island remembers the sale was fair." She threaded her needle again, faster than I could follow. "It's actually a good custom. Better than most."

"The hotel up the hill has kebayas," Craig said. "Rental. Emmy knows the sizes, she fixes their robes, she's over there all the time."

"Convenient," I said.

"Everything on an island is convenient," Emmy said. "It's a small island. That's what small means."

I went back to the podium and ran the numbers on my sheet, and thought about the kebaya, and thought about the heliograph, and the second thought ate the first one completely. I wanted it. Badly. The kind of wanting that makes an auctioneer dangerous to himself.

The German dropped out at dinner, announced it over fried fish and left on the next boat. Ten bidders left. Emmy sat across the fire from me and ate her fish the way she sewed, precisely, nothing wasted.

"Why a museum?" I asked her. "Really. Not the speech. The real reason."

She thought about it. "When I was twenty-two I dated a tourist. He lasted one season. Everything here that lasts is because somebody decided it should." She wiped her fingers. "The heliograph lasted. Somebody should decide again."

"That's a better reason than mine."

"What's yours?"

"Career. I want the sale record. I want to be the guy who handled the Biawak heliograph." I shrugged. "It's honest, anyway."

"It is," she said, and almost smiled. Almost.

Morning came hot and bright, which I supposed was the whole point of a solar furnace auction. The crowd gathered under the awning. The mirrors threw their pooled light at the empty kiln. Craig set the heliograph on the crate and opened the little shutter once so the crowd could see it flash, a single white blink across the yard, and people made a sound like they'd seen a magic trick.

I took the podium. Ten bidders. Emmy with her neat handwriting. Me with my number card and my heart doing its thing. Craig leaned against the crate with his arrack bottle and his patient face.

"One more thing," he announced, loud enough for the crowd. "The custom. All bidders who intend to win may wish to arrange their kebaya for this afternoon. The hotel up the hill rents them."

Emmy raised her number seven immediately.

I raised mine.

I raised mine, and the crowd enjoyed that. Somebody near the back laughed into his hand.

"Number nine is arranging a kebaya," Craig announced, delighted. "Noted for the record."

"Noted," I said, "and can we please start the bidding."

We started the bidding. But Craig had done his job, because now everyone knew I was going to be standing in front of the furnace in a dress, and the whole island had decided to be entertained. It's hard to run a clean auction when the crowd is already grinning at you.

"Eight hundred thousand," called one of the Surabaya men.

"Nine," said the other.

"One million," Emmy said, without looking up from her notebook.

"One point two," I said.

She looked up at that. "One point four."

"One point six."

"Two million," she said, and finally turned her whole body toward me. "You said yourself your reason is career. I told you mine. You're going to outbid a museum?"

"You're going to outbid a professional?"

"You're the one renting a dress."

The crowd loved that. I called three million and she took it to three and a half