He stood under a bare light bulb in the moldy cement corridor lined with dormitory beds draped with torn mosquito nets. Not sitting, unpacking, doing anything, just standing dumb next to his backpack. Like a new kid, too big to be at camp. Dressed all wrong. Corduroy shorts in the sweltering back alleys of Jakarta, a shiny big watch on his wrist, and fine leather sandals on his feet. He had come straight from the airport in a becak, to the driver’s brother’s place. “Very nice, ” the driver had said, which was a red betel-nut-toothed lie. The becak headlamp dodged starving dogs and clusters of brown faces stooped away from the glare in filthy shadows over open sewers. Rat eyes gleamed from piles of garbage as they passed, and it all scared the shit out of him.
I leapt off my smelly bed and headed out the door. The new boy asked to come with me. To buy ganja in the market place. Not like at home in Palm Springs from a friend, but here in the sweet smoke of burning dung and peanuts, pigs rooting in shit, and thieves trotting in pursuit of him oozing sweat like skewered sauté over coals. Goaded on by angry elbows and knees, clutched by sticky hands in the perfumed laughter of prostitutes, he would squeeze past baskets of flies lifted by goiter-necked vendors, over elephantiasis legs and stubs pawing for rupees. Blocked by the crow footed cripple hanging on a stick, he would bow to chickens fighting for spit. He wanted to go with me, wearing crumbly plastic sandals that cost 5 rupees, my feet nearly hardened and cracked as a jungle Dayak’s, my ass squeezed on shit trickling down the backs of my legs. To go with me to buy opium for the rage in my guts. He imagined he was one of us, on the road to somewhere, but for many of us on the road in the 60”s nowhere was as close to home as we could get.
Palm Springs, that’s what I called him. That was where he was from. Well as he slipped and stumbled in the dark, news of our meeting to purchase drugs spread quickly. Young shive-pushers followed, scurrying along the alley ruts to join a clean white T shirt standing in front of a pile of crumbled mud bricks, a muscular young man with the sheen of oil in his black hair. I saw the others circling in his eyes, waiting for their footsteps to arrive. I spun around. Knocked the first man down, and jerked Palm Springs into a run. Back to the crowded marketplace they swarmed like bats, after his graduation watch. We leapt into a becak. But two or three swooped under the roof. They yanked his watch with hunks of pink flesh from his wrist. Unbeknownst to him they had also put a knife between his ribs.
Palm Springs gave chase like a footballer through the crowd. When I caught up, he was throwing punches with the surprising energy of the only person overfed. Outraged with blood spurting from his chest, he fell, clutching his graduation watch.
He would have gone mad in the hospital ward. Several hundred in one cavernous room, a dirt road entrance with relatives cooking on stoves made from mud. Stray cats roamed, lapping blood under blood-soaked mattresses. Patients screamed handcuffed to their beds. Those that slept had no breath. He would have died straight away. But I never left him, ate curries and rice folded in banana leaf. Slept in a chair with my forehead bent over his arm under his pillow, clutching his watch. Neither of us dreamed of home. He made me swear not to call his parents, even if he were almost dead.
Different doctors or interns passed by every day. Never knew which, or if they knew him. But I knew he constantly needed blood, bleeding from drains in a punctured lung. The American embassy’s state of the art medical facility was for personnel only, not for Palm Springs, they said. The lights were turned out in their fancy operating room. A woman employee told me to come back tomorrow. She organized a blood drive from Embassy volunteers. Every day for 10 days I rode a becak back through the screaming streets to Palm Springs, with jiggling sacks of plasma in my lap.
Then it happened. After the blood-drive woman offered me her apartment in the walled Embassy compound to rest and clean myself, I returned and found Palm Springs’s bed empty. The three divine hours I showered and prayed had been too long away. I ran down the emergency hallway past people crouched along the wall, suffering in silence body parts in hand, and found Palm Springs laid out, pale on a table. No response. He had awakened in my absence, and not finding his watch under his pillow, had plunged into the street. He had collapsed with his body tubes ripped and leaking in the dirt.
The local papers picked up the story, sent reporters who interviewed me. Front page headlines the next morning with more accounts of tourist nightmares, and suddenly a Japanese surgeon was on the plane. He must have heard something, because he reached over someone’s shoulder and invited me to the amphitheater for the surgery. He had already sliced Palm Springs from under his chin, all the way, before I could avert my eyes. They moved him to the VIP hospital bungalows, with pink and yellow rose gardens. I broke my promise, and telephoned his parents. They arrived, cursing the people and country at his bedside. Disgusted by the culture and filth. Repulsed by the scum, the inhumanity, the insanity. They asked me about the watch. Wanted to know what I had done with it.
When I heard Palm Springs would survive, I went to his fancy room to say goodbye. I was moving on. He held my eyes like footsteps beside me, and asked his brother for his fine leather sandals, the ones he brought from the States. He handed them to me. I walked away down the corridor outside, when I heard someone rush from up behind. Without a word, his brother reached around and snatched his fine leather sandals back.
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