The first time I rode in the front seat of an intercity bus in Indonesia was the last time I rode in the front seat of an intercity bus in Indonesia. In a land where roads often were but newly paved and lane lines, where they existed, ignored, the rule of the road was “Bigger wins.” Far better not to watch the cars and motorcycles and bicycles and pedestrians and chickens and water buffalo scattering from the path, to trust in the fact that you were riding in the bigger vehicle and would arrive safely, inshallah.
Including the ferry portion it was a 36-hour drive from Jakarta to Padang, the provincial capital of West Sumatra. Longer-term expats scoffed at the ease; I’d arrived after completion of the trans-Sumatran highway, which cut the trip length in half. (We were volunteers making about $100 a month; flying was out of the question. Ships, I was to learn, were the best method of inter-island travel.) Details of my long bus trips have merged: the sickly sweet odor of clove cigarettes; the sweat collecting in my clothing’s every fold, especially and weirdly behind my knees, which often became inflamed with what I unmedically called “rhino-skin disease”; the fights over opening a window (always won by old women fearful of airborne disease who, especially if they sat near a baby, would shout, “The wind will enter us!”; I never learned the idiom for “That’s the fucking idea”); the restaurant stops where passengers would disembark, gorge, embark, and spend subsequent hours vomiting into small plastic bags they’d tie complicatedly, then stow in larger plastic bags tucked beneath their seats.
My first trip’s most vivid memory came, I’d guess, somewhere in southern Sumatra, some time around 3 in the morning. (I had no watch; cell phones were a futuristic dream.) I awoke from fitful sleep as the bus barreled through a series of roadside villages. I watched for a while; with no traffic or streetlights, seeing greenery and clay-shingled houses flash in and out of headlight glow was narcoleptic. I was dropping back to sleep when a large animal scurried into the road covered by a green-and-black checkered sarong; as we neared it dashed to the side and raised up, dropping the cloth and revealing a person with a tumored, distorted face like the Elephant Man’s; he lifted his arms and, staring above the headlights with one visible eye, cocked his head, struck a pose like Jesus on the cross. The bus roared past. I sat up, turned — the bus’s rear window showed blackness. I was traveling alone. I thought of asking the driver, but my language was limited. And what would I ask? Was my vision real?
I consider myself a rational person, little inclined to the spiritual, to mystic woo-woo. But living in Indonesia made me more comfortable with the indeterminate, even the spectral. Partly this stemmed from not understanding what was going on; even when my Indonesian improved, people often spoke in local languages of which I was ignorant (Minangkabau, Batak, Balinese). When speaking to Mbak War, the Central Javanese woman who kept house at my organization’s Jakarta headquarters, I often understood every word but struggled to keep pace with her leaps of time, location, and logic. Wait: did this incident with the mangoes happen with a woman who looked like your sister at the market this morning, or with your actual sister in your village last year? When conducting business, if I tried to make things happen by force of will I usually ended up exhausted, defeated; when I relaxed, let things happen in their own time, I generally got what I needed. I became used to frustration, delay, uncertainty. Often I couldn’t find an answer because no answer was to be found. Also, everyone I knew who spent time in Bali came back with a ghost story.
Westerners I encountered often rejected such concepts. One businessman I met through the American Chamber of Commerce told me at the end of a 5-minute conversation, “Well, I can see you’ve gone tropico.” An Australian army officer recounted a story of Javanese grammar school children on a class outing along a river hit by a flash flood; several children drowned. The officer was enraged at what he took to be the fatalistic attitude of the parent who told him the story. He asked the parent, whose child had survived, what others would do to seek redress. Nothing, the parent had said; it had been an act of God. “These Indonesians,” the officer sputtered. “They just accept death.”
Maybe, I thought. Or maybe they’re just more familiar with it. In 1945, when the country won independence from the Dutch, the average life span was less than 40 years; by 1990, when I arrived, it was about 60. (Now it’s above 70.) Ask one of the eight in 10 adult Indonesian men who smoked if they worried about illness and they’d say, “You’ve got to die of something.” Didn’t Westerners not so long ago — say, Laura Ingalls’s family, or Charles Dickens’s characters — accept early death as part of their lot? One needn’t roll over in the face of social injustice; but it’s modern arrogance to think “untimely” death touches us only through forces we could alter, had we but the time and money. (Do the autopsy! Create a commission! Assign blame! Sue the bastards!)
I’ve been thinking about my years in Indonesia in the early time of CoronaWorld. For one thing, the gap between rich and poor seems starker now. In Jakarta, slums often sat across a road from gated compounds. In New York City this month many of the rich have escaped to vacation homes, while the busiest hospitals are in the poorer neighborhoods. The virus isn’t sparing the rich, but it’s laying greater waste to the poor and the working class (and, disproportionately, people of color).
In Indonesia the insane were visible, not locked in asylums but cared for in the community. Crazy and unstable people have always been part of New York City’s scenery, but in CoronaWorld, as most residents have gone indoors and sounds of traffic and construction have died, the unstable stand out like ambulance sirens or birdsong. No walk goes by when I don’t hear screamers, preachers, singers of wild tunes. Like most I’m avoiding the subways, but on north Brooklyn streets I see no panhandlers; the city is making efforts to feed people. (For instance, every public school is open every weekday to distribute up to three meals to any person who shows up, children and parents from 8:30-11:30 a.m., solo adults from 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m., no i.d. needed, no questions asked.) As I walk east into poorer neighborhoods more people are out on the streets, many wearing masks and clearly out for work or other necessity, others for reasons I can’t glean. The Girlfriend and I call one nearby bodega the Corona-dega: whenever we pass, morning or night, a group congregates near its front door, cracking jokes, cadging cigarettes, ignoring all notions of social distancing. If any has the virus, they’re all in trouble.
As I fight through what I imagine are the last stages of my extremely mild case of Covid-19 (tight chest, headaches, fatigue), I also fight what I imagine are the earliest stages of quarantine-itis — a mild sense of imbalance, uncertainty, declining ability to determine the solid from the flimsy. Lying on my bed this morning, I stare out the window of my 12th-floor apartment. Suddenly on a distant roof I see a tiny head darting back and forth, a bouncing dot in a video game. The head seems to belong to a man but the body is cut from view by the building’s brick facade. The head races to the north side of the roof, races back to the south, races back, vanishes. I stand up, walk to the window. There are no roof doors on the building’s north side; he hasn't gone inside. Has he fallen? If he jumped off I would have seen it. I watch for a while: no movement. I'm alone, have no one to ask. And what would I ask? Was my vision real?
I stand up, go to the bathroom, wash my hands. I think about the crumb cake I made this week, down to its last two pieces. Maybe today I'll make chocolate chip cookies; baking remains a tangible good in a world with precious few. If I keep my head maybe I can arrive safely, inshallah.
(New York state numbers as of Saturday: 113,704 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 10.5 percent; 3,565 dead, up 21.5 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 8,352, up 19 percent.)
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