A policeman stood in the police station's open doorway, smoking, staring at the streaking orange of passing headlights. He had changed from his uniform and wore a gray T-shirt, a pair of blue shorts showing his thin, hairless calves and dirty, rubber sandals.

"Pak? Selamat malam." Viktor stood at the foot of the police-station steps.

The policeman turned his head towards Viktor. He had a lean, chiseled face, slightly hollowed cheekbones and a crop of bristled hair. He raised the cigarette to his lips and titled his head.

Viktor shifted the rucksack on his shoulder. He could feel a strip of sweat oozing down his back.

"Pak, I lost my ticket. They told me to come and report it."

The policeman turned his head and slowly blew out smoke. The room behind him was a hollow of sickly yellow light. Viktor could see a cloud of mosquitoes milling around a 40-watt bulb.

"Where are you going?" the policeman asked.

"To Semarang. I'm going home."

He flicked the cigarette away and the little orange spark arced into the blue-black darkness. He narrowed his eyes for a moment and peered at Viktor. A small smirk showed and he turned into the room, muttering, "From Semarang." He drew the S out and ran it hard into the rest of the word.

Viktor followed him up the steps. The room was bare and the walls were dirty and cracked. In a recess to the left of the door was a desk. On the desk was a typewriter. Above the desk, framed behind dirt-speckled glass, was a piece of paper stained with mildew proclaiming Indonesian policemen were honest, patriotic and helpful. The mosquitoes swarmed above the typewriter.

The policeman dragged his feet across the floor so his sandals slapped against the grubby concrete. "Which train?"

"Bromo Anggrek. Nine-thirty."

The police station was wide open. Its back windows gaped out on Merdeka Square's blackness. The place seemed quiet, even though the trains squealed and the car and bikes' bleated.

The policeman looked in the top drawer of a gray filing cabinet in the corner. The metal beneath its gray lacquer had rotted and an acne of rusty boils bubbled through. He took out a form, a limp, yellow photocopied sheet, and came slowly back across the room. He sat behind the desk with the typewriter. Viktor sat on a dirty, orange plastic chair opposite with his back to the door. His clothes felt clammy.

The policeman took out another cigarette. "Better to go by airplane," he said.

Viktor looked at him. There was gray under his black eyes - a sign of too much drinking and not enough sleeping, but his face was strong and hard. He narrowed his eyes and lit his cigarette. A rope of blue smoke spiraled upward in front of the framed "honest and helpful" proclamation.

"Flying is expensive," Viktor said quietly.

Even more quietly, the policeman said, "Don't be stingy, ya," looking down at the photocopied form. Then he looked up, and smirked, "Semarang, eh? Originally from Semarang?"

"Yes." Viktor could feel his armpits sticking to his shirt with sweat.

The policeman shrugged. "Your ticket, it was stolen?"

***

He couldn't find his ticket. Viktor had been standing in the station, on the lower level under the tracks, where voices washed from the walls in waves. He had two-and-a-half hours until his train departed. But his ticket had gone.

The little blue sheet, with perforated edges, printed with the time, date and seat number, wasn't in his hand. It wasn't in the wallet attached to a keychain in his baggy short pockets either. Or in his short-sleeved shirt's breast pocket. Or in his rucksack on top of his folded jeans.

Suddenly the hall seemed very noisy. The bright lights shined harshly above stalls selling chocolate bread, water and peanuts, where pink-headscarved girls laughed with each other. The ticket wasn't on the floor. It wasn't in Viktor's pockets, and no one had brushed against him - at least he didn't think so.

Viktor phoned his mother and the roaring mass of Gambir Station spun around in a whirl of dull colors.

"Ma," he said, cell phone clamped to one ear, finger pressed into the other. "My ticket - I can't find it."

Five hundred kilometers away in Semarang she showed him some empathy and then told him to buy another ticket.

"I don't have enough money, Ma." He felt lonely, and near hysteria. He wanted badly to be at home. Over the phone he heard voices in the background, coming, he guessed, from the porch where his mother kept pot plants and sat in her nightdress drinking coffee late into the evening.

"What. wait a minute." And then, "Tante Susan says they'll give you another ticket if you tell them your seat number."

"I remember it. It was 13c in coach six."

He then shouted his seat number through the information counter's rough-cut glass slats, and was told to go to another office. He then entered a low-ceilinged room with brown walls and a soccer match playing on TV. There were two tall, glossy-haired girls arguing with a man behind the low counter. Another official with a moustache and a white skullcap watched the TV while speaking into a heavy green phone.Viktor sat there. Other people came and went, the girls continued to argue with the man behind the counter, and the skullcap man made more phone calls while he watched the soccer. Three times he raised a finger to Viktor and said, patronizingly, "Be patient, ya."

When Viktor's train was due to depart in an hour and a quarter, he sat forward and said, as firmly as he could, "Pak." The man looked up from the TV. He sat back in his chair, tilted his white skullcap to show a threadbare hairline and a purple bruise, and asked, "What?"

Tante Susan was right: They could give him a slip to replace the ticket, but first he needed to tell the police and bring a report back to the office.

***

The policeman sighed and pulled himself upright, cigarette fuming between his lips. He slotted the photocopied form into the typewriter. The mosquito mob above the desk shifted closer to Viktor. Some of them broke off and he could feel the frantic nettling where they bit his bare legs. He rubbed his calves with the edge of his sandals. The policeman was also wearing shorts, but he was not scratching.

"ID card," the policeman spoke from the corner of his mouth.

Viktor passed it to him. He glanced at it and began to type, very slowly, in a stabbing motion.

The policeman read out the details, speaking more slowly when he typed in Viktor's details. "Today - Fri-day Dec-em-ber se-ven - an Indonesian citizen-slash-foreign national..." There was a clatter from the typewriter as he deleted something.

"Name - Vik-tor Tan-jo-no." There was a punching noise as the keys smacked the paper. "Place-of-birth - Sem-ar-ang. Date of birth - Mar-ch-nine-19-89."

Thwack, thwack, thwack.

The policeman punched the keys harder as he worked down the page. The mosquitoes went wild. "Religion - Chris-ti-an. Occupation - stu-dent."

THWACK, THWACK, THWACK.

Outside the night roared. A uniformed policeman came through the doorway. He was fat and his shoulders slumped beneath his epaulettes. He looked at Viktor then tilted his head questioningly at his colleague.

"Lost ticket," he said.

The new policeman shrugged. "Better to go by airplane."

The other sniggered. "Didn't want to. Stingy."

Viktor felt the same hysteria he had felt when he stood on the station concourse and called his mother. He scratched his legs frantically.

The uniformed policeman walked through the room and out the open backdoor. "Up to him," he said as he stepped outside. Viktor could see the orange-firefly of light where he stood smoking in the gloom.

The policeman began filling in "lost baggage" details.

"It wasn't baggage," said Viktor. "It was a ticket."

"No problem." The policeman took his cigarette again. He unrolled the sheet of paper from the typewriter and laid it on the desk. He signed on the right and then, with a backward nod and pursed lips, he twisted it towards Viktor. Viktor glanced over the form as he signed on the left. The policeman had spelt his name wrong and the details didn't align with the printed lines.

The policeman took the form and straightened it. He then took a chunky rubberstamp and a bleeding inkpad, and laid them delicately alongside it, like a doctor preparing for surgery. He did not stamp the sheet, but folded his hands together, leaned forward and looked directly at Viktor's sweaty face for the first time.

"Now," he said, gently. "I can't give you the form until you show me the station office's replacement ticket."

"But they said at the station they can't give me the ticket until I have the report!" Viktor shrilled.

The policeman leaned back in his chair and smiled slowly. "What can I do?" He opened his palms. "What if I give you the report, and you didn't lose the ticket?"

"But Pak, why would I do that? They told me I had to get the report first because the ticket can't be replaced until I have it." The mosquitoes had worked their way down to Viktor's thin-skinned ankles.

"You have no evidence."

"Evidence?"

"Better to go by plane." The voice came from behind him. Viktor hadn't seen the flabby, uniformed policeman come back. "Flying's small money - for you. But you were stingy." He sniggered.

"I want to know how I can get a replacement ticket without a report."

The policeman rocked back so far the chair leant against the wall under the framed sign and his knees hooked under the desk's lip. He slotted his hands behind his head and repeated, "What can I do?"

Viktor understood, but he was angry now. He said again, "How can I get a replacement without a report?"

The policeman repeated, "What can I do?"

"Better to go by plane," said the policeman at the back of the room.

There was 45 minutes until Viktor's train departed. The policeman leaned against the wall. Viktor remained on the grubby, plastic chair. The mosquitoes swarmed around him. The report form, unstamped, lay on the table between them. And the police station floated alone in the city like a candle in the night.

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