Crossing Allenby Bridge

by Michael Looft

  “I heard you were sick, so thought I’d stop by and drop off a home cooked meal.” He laid a covered basket on the side table. “I hope you like it.”

  “You make it?”

  “No, my wife, actually.”

  “Wife? I didn’t know you were married.”

  “Yeah, I came here two years ago. Wasn’t planning on staying long, but you know what Lennon said about life happening while you’re busy making other plans?”

  “You can say that again.” He startled me with a quote I hadn’t heard in a while. “I appreciate it. A home-cooked meal sounds really good right about now. Do you have time to stay a little while?”

  “Unfortunately, I can’t stay long today. I’m sorry. You’re probably bored stiff cooped up here all this time.” He sat down on the corner of the bed as I lifted the cloth from the basket, looking at several bowls of local rice and fish dishes. He sat down, not as someone uncomfortable and looking to head out at the first opportunity, but rather as if he had all the time in the world.

  “Well, thank you for bringing this food–and please thank your wife. I haven’t eaten much, mostly coconuts. My fever seems to have broken, so your timing is perfect. Do you mind if I eat it now?”

  “Please, go ahead! That’s why it’s here, Harry.”

  He had a pleasant way about him, both wholesome and strong, and I couldn’t help asking how he came to Adipala–amused pride on his face as he watched me devouring the bowls of food. “You say you got here two years ago? Where were you coming from?”

  “West Africa.”

  “Really? What were you doing there?”

  “Similar kind of stuff as here – financial inclusion.”

  “I guess you’ve been to a lot of places.”

  “A few.” He gave me a modest smile and for some reason I got the feeling he’d been all over the world.

  “By the way, this stuff is really good. Some of the best food I’ve eaten in Southeast Asia.”

  “Now you know one of the reasons I stayed here.”

  “And the other reasons?”

  “Oh, that’s for another time, maybe. I’ve gotta run. Father Jack let me believe you were on your deathbed, but you seem to be getting your energy back. That’s great. Dengue is rough going, but usually passes by the end of a week or two. So, maybe when you’re up and around you can stop by the office, and even come out to the villages with me?”

  “Sure, I would love that. You mentioned Father Jack? But he wasn’t here.”

  “Of course he was.” Zach pointed to the picture beside my bed. “That’s his calling card. Laughing Jesus. He always complains that the pictures of Jesus don’t show his fun side. So, he gives those out. He even gave one to the bishop when he was here. I think it pissed the guy off.”

  “Figures.”

  CHAPTER 6 | under the rubble

  I devoured the entire meal before Zach left. It gave me enough strength to stand up and wash the past few days off me in the shower. I felt a layer of slime sliding off me under the hot water, dousing myself with enough soap in hopes of killing off the still itchy blisters covering my backside. My body continued its fight and I lasted ten minutes before collapsing back onto my bed in a heap of exhaustion, but I felt lighter, like a new man. I had been scared, more scared than I’d ever been, in fact. Maybe it was because I wasn’t sure whether the dengue would kill me off or not. I thought about being stuck in a strange place with people I didn’t know. The more they cared for me, Lia and her crew and then Zach and even Fr. Jack leaving his calling card, the more I felt loved in a way that I hadn’t in a long time. I can’t imagine too many of the folks back at the bank even stopping by to say hello–everyone was always too busy. Perhaps Mark would have come, though I thought of him less as a former colleague and more a friend. I wondered how he was doing in his own little jungle on that other island chain. I fell asleep thinking of Mark and Sarah and that dinner we had at the Shangri-La and the weekend in Dumaguete. I woke up the next morning to a flood of light into my room.

  “So nice to see you, Mr. Harry,” Lia said to me, as I approached her desk in the lobby. She came around when she saw me wobble a bit, trying to hide a look of concern. “You are feeling better? You are almost smiling, no?”

  “Yes, much better, but I do need some breakfast this morning.”

  “Of course, please come with me. I will take you to your table.”

  As on the first morning, I was the only guest in the breakfast room. I had a small buffet of local fare all to myself. “Lia?”

  “Yes sir?” She helped me sit down as if I were an invalid, sliding a cloth napkin into my lap.

  “I’ve been here about a week now, albeit mostly in my room. Tell me, have there been any other guests here?”

  “Sir, only one. But he is gone now. So, it is just you.”

  “Nice! I have the place all to myself.”

  “Yes, but a conference is coming next week, so the hotel is getting booked up. You will stay another week?”

  “Why not? You’ve been so hospitable. I was planning to go to Bali, but Bali can wait. Besides, Adipala is growing on me.”

  “You’re welcome, sir.”

  “By the way, I brought my laptop. Is your Wi-Fi working now?”

  “Yes sir. It is a bit slow, but it should be working now.”

  After a breakfast of chicken, porridge, eggs, and fried bananas, I opened my laptop feeling a deep energetic anticipation akin to Christmas morning. The Internet connection chugged away as I watched my home page trying to load. I had been thinking of Elena, missing her and hoping to see a message in my inbox, though I doubted it. Maybe I’d get some news from Mark or Sarah or even Edwin, to whom I didn’t get a chance to say a proper good-bye. Who knows, perhaps my friends in Mongolia had something to share about how my investment was doing. All those thoughts took a back seat to the stunning front-page story of the New York Times: “For Stocks, Worst Single-Day Drop in Two Decades.” What the hell was happening? As I read through the story, I recalled the crash of ’87 earlier in my career, which rattled many of the old timers. This felt different. This crash was tied into the housing market and its underlying property values, homes. So, losses seemed real instead of just on paper. The more I read about a trillion dollars vanishing into thin air, the more I felt dread at my own financial position. I should have paid more attention to Kyle’s warning, but what could I have done?

  With shaking fingers, I forced them to override the urges from a little voice, perhaps a scared one, begging me to bury my head in the sand and forget about my accounts. It took a few minutes to open and access my brokerage website where I kept my retirement account. I cursed the slowness of the Internet, gazing at pages struggling to open and warding off my own concerns of accessing my financial data over an unsecured network. I looked around the room. There was nobody else there. Who could possibly access my account out there in a jungle town with few people owning a computer, much less possessing the capability of using one? Heck, the front desk still did everything through paper and those old sliding credit card machines that made carbon copy impressions of the card. I was lucky to have a connection out there, much less needing to worry about people accessing my account. When I saw my balance, that didn’t matter anymore. Nothing mattered. It looked like a mistake at first. My retirement had shrunk to less than a tenth of its value.

  I scanned my emails for anything from Don. The sale of the bank was supposed to happen within days. With trepidation, I opened a single email with the subject line: Notice to Investors. The message was to the point. The bank was under pressure to mark to market their loan assets. I’d already read about this in the Times article, that banks both large and small were fighting for their lives and needed to report the actual value of their assets rather than the inflated ones before the crisis–or risk having them set to zero. So, it wasn’t surprising that the sale was on hold. What surprised me was that Don had finished his email with an ominous warning about the potential of having to
wind down operations. “I will send regular updates where appropriate.” I thought about responding to him with questions, but I knew him well enough to step back and let him do his job and not waste time answering anxious pleas for reassurance. Besides, something told me that the bank was doomed and nothing I could do would change that. Time would prove my intuition accurate.

  I looked around the room again. This time not as Harry Stone the retired, wealthy philanthropist traveling the world doing good. No, I felt like Job, the one person in the Bible who seemed real and to whom I felt more akin to than at any other time in my life. In ten short minutes I was transformed into Harry Stone the aging, unemployed man who’d slept through the financial crisis and lost everything. He was broke, and I was him. Damn! Damn! Damn! Damn! I took a deep breath and looked up for some god who could help me, my energy sagging and mind circling down to the bottom of an abyss. I closed the laptop and wiped my face. How could this be happening? What was I going to do? That bachelor pad I rented on Telegraph Hill would be too expensive to go back to. I’d have to give that up. Besides a few thousand in my checking account, I had nothing else save a baseball card collection worth maybe five thousand, a motorcycle, and a summer home in once desirable, but now crime-infested Acapulco. Nice going, Harry! Loser! My life was over.

  Monkey mind then went to work on me. I couldn’t seem to shake off the self-criticism that reached a fever pitch, browbeating me without mercy over how I’d bungled my life. I should have fought harder in the divorce instead of rolling over and giving up so much just to get it over with. I should have taken my own risk-averse investment advice and not been so bold in putting my retirement savings into such risky positions. I should have heeded Kyle’s advice sooner, should have called the brokerage and transferred everything into gold. Isn’t that what smart bankers do? I should have done a lot of things. Now, I’d lost the nest egg I spent a lifetime amassing. Perhaps it would have been easier had I just gone the way of Thomas, fallen with him. The hotel didn’t have a second story, or that instant I would have jumped off it to break my neck.

  But Fr. Jack did have a nine-story building–tall enough to do the trick. No one would miss me. While my appetite had returned, I was still too tired and achy to leave the hotel. No way I’d make it up all those flights of stairs. So, I slunk off to my room and lay in my bed, staring up at the ceiling and plotting out when I could muster the energy to head over to the Academy and get it over with. After a few hours of shock and boredom, I called Lia to send for a massage. A strapping bodybuilder came in and worked me over like he was finishing his daily workout.

  As lethargic as I felt, I tried to get out of my room for meals and to walk around a bit for the rest of the day. I had begun to detest my room and its isolation long before I was feeling better. So, now that I could mobilize the energy to leave it, I did as much as I could. Later in the day I made my way over to the coconut lady, who greeted me with a concerned, but pleasant smile. I tried to give her several thousand Rupiah to show my appreciation for bringing over the coconuts, but she would have none of it. She only took five thousand and handed me a fresh one, letting me sit back down again in the same chair as the last time. When I sat down, I shot her an expectant look, and she caught my joke and laughed, patting me on the arm as if I were seven years old. Fortunately, I did’t pass out again before saying goodbye and heading back to the hotel. After a few refreshing coconuts in my system and plenty of food at dinner I went to bed early and woke up feeling ready to go to the Academy to kill myself.

  After breakfast, I asked Lia if she could set me up with a motorbike. As it turned out, Lia’s cousin had a 150cc Kawasaki Moto Baki he rented to me for a “good price” of around seven dollars a day. It was a dirt bike without a lot of power, but enough to have some fun. An hour later I was zooming away from the hotel and splashing through mud puddles on my way to the Academy. The wind whipping through my shirt soothed the still-itching sores on my sides and back, though many of those sores were starting to heal and recede a bit. In fact, my body felt much better, though my psychological pain had shifted the focus away from corporeal concerns.

  Along the way, I passed by a fisherman casting his circular net into a small waterway. He was about my age. I’d seen him before when I was riding with Fr. Jack, who stopped to show me a small dam above the road that he’d been responsible for building. I remember feeling a pang of guilt at tuning him out while entranced by the slow steady motions of the fisherman. He would gather up the netting material and in a grand motion send it spinning out fifty feet in front of him. Then, with steady hands he pulled the net in, emptying his meager catch into a large plastic bucket beside him. He wore one of those traditional conical hats made of bamboo that one often sees in rural pictures of Southeast Asia.

  In fact, I stopped this time and took a picture of him, laughing at myself for wanting to retain a memory at this late stage of my life–in less than an hour I’d be dead. He seemed so content out there, despite working hard. Surrounded by green fields and lush forests, standing out over water, I envied his life even though I knew little of it. I sat down on the bridge, my legs dangling over the side, entranced by his graceful movements that seemed to transform me from an anxiety-ridden curmudgeon to a ball of peace. Every few minutes, he’d yell back and forth to a friend of his, another fisherman further down the riverbank. Sometimes they’d both laugh, and then continue casting and pulling in their white nets. I wondered what they were talking about–perhaps something mundane or maybe even swapping jokes about the creepy old white guy lurking around up at the bridge.

  I got back on the bike, and just before I zoomed away I noticed the man I’d been watching nod to me and I nodded back to him. The road led straight to the Academy building, and I pulled up to the side, around the corner from the entrance. Fr. Jack’s Isuzu was nowhere around, and I sighed in relief. I didn’t want to see him. I eased myself off the bike and nudged out the kickstand, leaving her resting on an angle. Like a cat burglar, my movements were measured so as not to draw any attention to myself as I made my way to the open stairwell and up the levels. I was forced to stop and rest after the first flight, feeling lightheaded and achy. I had to continue at a slow pace if I were going to be able to make it to the top.

  At one point I had an excuse to sit down, feeling the painful twinge of a pebble stuck in one of my sandals, or so I thought. The leather around the outside edge had come loose and when I pulled it off the entire shoe disintegrated. So much for expensive sandals! No wonder the locals wore rubber as it held up better against the humidity. I tore off the other sandal and in a flash of anger threw them both out one of the openings that led to the bottom of the building.

  A gruff voice inside my head lashed out at me–reminding me how I’d long lost the ability to make wise choices with so many signs that I had become a useless void taking up space. I could no longer walk my path. My abandonment of prudence bore the symptoms of a larger theme at play. If there was a God, he, she or it was pulling me in and punishing me for decades of transgressions dating back to the fateful day with Thomas. Luck had carried me far, but I tried flying too close to the sun for sure. I remembered that voice, more like a dark force: the same one at the cliff’s edge, the sinister hand reaching up in my dream, pulling me into the abyss. I knew that voice quite well. It has always been in me, lurking about in the shadows, always waiting to pounce when my mood turned sour. I drew comfort from the fantasy it spun in my mind of a quick death to seek out and wrestle my maker, forcing him to pay for the miseries he caused me. I wanted to punch God in the face.

  CHAPTER 7 | zach

  “Harry! What are you doing here?” I heard Zach’s cheery voice from behind me. It startled my core. He’d been coming down the stairs and had it not been for the broken sandal, I might have just missed him on the way up. Damn! I stood up in my bare feet as he passed by and looked up at me from a few steps below, carrying what looked like a metal shoeshine box. “You’re looking a bit better than last time I
saw you, I must say.”

  “I came to, uh…”

  “To see me? Your timing’s great. I’m just headed out to a few communities. It would be awesome if you could join me. That is, if you’re up for it.”

  “Sure.” I let out a deep breath and Zach instinctively grabbed my elbow to steady me. I guess I could always die tomorrow.

  “You didn’t have to go up all these stairs, Harry. You could have called me or told the people downstairs and I’d have come down.”

  I didn’t say much on the way back down, just glanced at Zach a few times. He seemed excited to have me join him. He had a moto too, and hesitated as we approached it. I noticed the concern washing over his face.

  “Don’t worry, I rented a bike. It’s over there.”

  “Great. You’ll need shoes, by the way.”

  “Oh yeah, I just had a sandal strap break. Damn thing fell apart. Any ideas?”

  “There’s a little shop around the corner. Let’s head over there and get you fixed up.”

  Zach strapped the box he’d been carrying to a small rack on the back of his bike using a bungee cord. He waited for me as I walked over to my own bike and started her up. I followed him out of the lot and we made our way over to a small store, shoes lining the walls and spilling out into the street in small heaps. A thin young woman saw us pull up and spit out what she was eating, making her way from the back of the small plywood store to the street. I pointed to a cheap pair of flip flops, and watched her frown at my choice, guessing she was hoping I would buy a pair of shiny expensive dress shoes. Zach seemed impressed at my negotiating skills as I haggled her down several thousand less than her initial price. Of course, I knew I was still paying over the local price, as usual.