Morton

By Tim Paterson

He was an Englishman and proud of it. As a young man he had been considered handsome -- more than one female admirer from his youth had described him as "dashing". But over the years, he had more and more come to resemble some sort of prehistoric creature.

One thought of a sea turtle. His head looked like it had just emerged from beneath a shell. His spotty scalp contained only the merest traces of hair, wispy tendrils of fine white thread that he would insist on combing whenever he went outside, particularly on windy days. Once ram rod straight, his 71 years had bent him forward, as if they were trying to push him head first into the grave.

But morbidity was the furthest thing from Morton Busby's mind. His outlook was perennially cheerful and optimistic, or so he liked to tell himself. People attributed this to his rich internal life. He scoffed whenever anyone told him they felt bored -- Morton could barely imagine such a thing. His head buzzed with ideas, fantastic theories and amusing stories.

He had arrived in Jakarta two days before to visit his son and his beautiful, perennially silent Indonesian wife, whose name he could neither remember nor pronounce. When asked what his son did, he would talk vaguely about him "doing something very clever with computers" but he really had no idea. Computers and such weren't Morton's bag.

So here he was, Morton Busby, 71, retired antiques salesman, walking the streets of Jakarta, blending in with his surroundings like a pork chop in a synagogue. The trinket sellers around the Monas, who were used to the absurdities of Western tourists, their multicolored baggy shorts, the sweaty pink faces, were nonetheless taken aback by Morton.

Despite the heat, and ignoring his son's advice that morning, he had insisted on wearing long trousers, a shirt and tie, and, most ridiculous of all, his favorite hounds-tooth jacket. Within a minute of leaving the taxi he had begun to wilt; a minute later he had started to stagger.

Morton desperately needed to sit down, but where? There didn't seem to be any benches, such as you'd find in an English park. He couldn't very well just lie down on the ground -- neither his creaky bones, nor his dignity, would allow it. Things weren't made any easier by the insistent cries of the local vendors, asking him to buy all manner of useless things, leather bracelets, post cards, fried bananas, pony rides for crying out loud!

Morton had begun to resemble the silver ball in a pinball machine, buffeted on all sides, turning away from one vendor only to be faced by another, their toothless gums, their leathery brown skin, their sore-infested legs, oh, it was all too much for Morton!

He simply had to sit down. Mounting the steps of the monument, he finally conceded defeat and lowered his bony backside onto one of the lower steps. He had desperately wanted to place his handkerchief on the concrete before sitting, but had not had the energy.

Morton's equanimity had begun to desert him. He didn't know what was happening. The vendors' cries suddenly sounded very far away. His field of vision began to shrink. It was like he was looking into a tunnel. And what did he see? Not the dead grass, the begrimed locals lying under plastic tarpaulins, the emaciated ponies clip-clopping mournfully by.

No. Suddenly he was seeing his wife, Lynn. But not as she had been when he'd last looked at her, a skeleton wrapped in waxy skin, barely a person any more. This was Lynn as a young woman, in a park on a crisp London day, laughing, falling playfully backwards onto a bed of brown and gold autumn leaves, beckoning to him coquettishly. He reached out to her. He wanted to touch her soft wavy hair. But as he moved towards her she began to shrink away from him, still smiling and laughing but getting further and further away. He was desperate to touch her. He kept moving forward.

Then he was tumbling, tumbling, down, down, down, and Lynn had shrunk to a tiny dot in the middle of an endless black emptiness.

* * * *

The next thing Morton knew he was lying face down in the grimy concrete at the foot of the steps leading up to the monument. He must have fallen down somehow. He realized he was lying on his side, like a haggard, world-weary fetus.

Forcing himself into the sitting position, the first thing he saw was a small boy, not three feet away, staring at him intently. Morton guessed the lad to be eight or nine, and he was wearing the unofficial uniform of all poor, Jakartan boys: the colorful oversized T-shirt emblazoned with an incongruous logo, in this case the silhouette of a kangaroo in mid-hop, above large green and yellow letters that spelled out "AUSTRALIA." This was set off by a pair of baggy red shorts that the lad was clutching to his waist, as if afraid they would fall down. With his other hand he scratched a thick thatch of wild black hair that looked like it had been cut by a set of garden shears.

They looked at each other with a mixture of wonderment and fear. Imagine two species encountering each other for the first time. They looked ready to sniff one another.

Instead, the young boy spoke. "Mister, you fall down."

At first, Morton didn't register what the boy had said. He shuffled forward and placed a tiny hand on Morton's shoulder. "Mister, you fall. You fall down."

"Yes. Yes, I suppose I did," Morton replied, still bewildered.

The boy took Morton by the hand and coaxed him to his feet. He had the wobbles, but found to his surprise that he was able to walk.

And walk he did, side by side with this young boy, who seemed to be exerting a mysterious power over him. Morton became a dumbstruck earthling being beamed into the mothership. Having walked for a short time along a busy road choked with early evening traffic, the boy guided Morton down an embankment and into a small gully, overgrown with banyan trees and dotted with miniature garbage dumps of crumpled plastic bottles, old newspapers and burned coconut husks.

Morton hadn't realized such a world existed. It wasn't visible from the street and certainly not from the gated compound where his son lived. It was like the city was ashamed of itself. Jakarta's festering, heaving, muddy heart lay beating just behind the barbed wire and the 10-foot-high walls of the city's rich.

All of the homes in the kampong appeared to be on a slight tilt, something that lent the place a strange and paradoxical kind of symmetry. Some of them were little more than huts, constructed of thin plywood and corrugated iron. Others were made of brick and gave a greater impression of permanence.

It was into one of the rude, hut like dwellings that the boy now led Morton. Pushing aside a hessian curtain, Morton found himself in a small room lit by a single globe dangling from the ceiling. Around a rickety wooden table sat a teenaged girl and a slightly older boy, presumably the lad's brother and sister. Morton heard the boy talking to an older woman in a neighboring room. He didn't speak a word of Indonesian but the language was pleasing to his ears -- its staccato rhythms sounded like a friendly, well-intentioned machine gun.

A minute or so later, the boy reappeared, shadowed by a woman of perhaps 40, with a leathery but handsome face. They each carried a tray piled with steaming bowls. The woman motioned to Morton that he should sit down. He did so, and looked at the boy. All he could think to say was, "Thank you. But why?"

The boy replied: "You fall down mister. You look hungry. You good man. I want to help."

There was a brief pause as the family waited for Morton to begin eating. After he had slurped a spoonful of spicy broth into his mouth, the boy turned to Morton. "Mister, what is lean?" Morton shook his head, confused. "Sorry old chap, I'm not with you."

"When you fall down, you say over and over,'lean, lean."

Then it clicked. "Oh, you must mean Lynn."

The boy looked at him expectantly. "She was my wife."

With that, the family began eating solemnly.

There they sat, the family and this strange elderly man, sharing a meal together like old friends. And so they ate, and it was good. Amen.