Morris, Alive - Chapter I
Five minutes of adventurous escapism for the world-weary reader...
Greetings from the End of the World - Argentina, that is… not a nuclear bunker or some post-apocalyptic, Cormac McCarthy-inspired hellscape (though that may come soon enough).
On a cheerier note, I’m going to resume my semi-regular communications through this channel. Over the past couple of months, I’ve been focused on a new project with friends and colleagues at Bonner Private Research. Some of you may know it - indeed, some of you have found your way here through that conduit. In any case, a hearty welcome to all readers, new and patient alike.
This space, as outlined in the description, is about “exploring the world, one idea at a time,” the way a flaneur might get to know a city, one café, one bistrot, one taverna at a time. Ordinarily, I do this through novels. They help me process whatever it is I’m reading, what I’m hearing and what I can’t stop thinking about. I’ve written a couple already - one I published last year; a second is currently in production (copyediting, cover design, layout etc.) A third infiltrates my headspace during morning strolls through the streets of Buenos Aires, along her generous boulevards, around the Rosedale and the nearby parks and plazas.
But first things first. That debut novel - Morris, Alive - is still dangling out there in space, somewhere between hardback and paperback editions. (There’s a Kindle version for the undecided.) A few people have suggested I post some fragments from the text here, by way of introduction. Herewith, a few of the opening pages…
Oh, if you’re among the (ahem…) “tens and tens” of people who have already purchased a copy, and you’re wondering (desperately, no doubt) what you can do to help support the starving artists among us, you can share this post… preferably with someone who enjoys reading novels and/or has a massive audience keen on devouring their bookclub recommendations…
Chapter I - Floreat Romance
Morris came to America in a trance. A grungy blonde with sand between his toes, he traveled not directly from his native terra australis, but by way of that common colonizing ancestor. And though England in general, and London in particular, had helped him sever the umbilical thread of his childhood, there existed a peculiar, unspoken allure in America that no other place could quite match. Not then and, in many ways, not since.
Standing there alone, on the cusp of a new and tumultuous century, the streets of New York City throbbing just a few miles away, indifferent to his presence and yet somehow expecting him, Morris felt a flush of adrenaline course through his wiry frame. He was not yet in his twenty-first year but he sensed, with the unassailable confidence so breezily familiar to youth, that this coming decade would make of him something remarkable, something thoroughly, wholly unique. As he imbibed of the atmosphere around him, wintry and lucent, he knew that this was the place to be, the setting against which his own narrative could begin to take shape.
As for history, Morris hadn’t a great deal to speak of…at least, not much he recalled at that very instant. If prompted, he might have remembered a soft, raven beauty who had stood with him on the beach near his parent’s house on the eve of his departure and the deep, oceanic longing in her eyes as she foretold of his future diverging from hers.
“You’re not coming back, are you.” It was not a question. “You want to get lost. No, you want to be lost.”
There were other moments, too, lingering just beyond the event horizon of his own recollection. Occasionally they would well up from deep within, morphing into vaguely familiar shapes or colors or sounds; a murmuring of conversation, sunlight painting the waves in rippling dawn hues, the scent of burned sugarcane suffused in the warm evening air.
But none of this occurred to him just now, for it was not the past that brought him to this moment as much as it was a desire to crystallize his own nascent reflection in the future. And so, not for the first time, a trembling soul focused on what lay before it and sought resolve on those shores of infinite possibility.
Yes, he repeated to himself. This was the place to be. Lost…or otherwise.
Unknown to those born in the United States, there exists a curious momentum in America apparent only to her visitors. In the widened eyes of these newcomers, the country appears to be hurtling forward in time at blistering, maniacal pace, her citizens unconsciously bound to a collective destiny of grand, mythological proportions, a mishmash of waiters and engineers and hookers and playwrights and teachers, of slick and desperate criminals and orange-hued T.V. evangelists, of frat boys and southern belles and Marlborough men and block-jawed G.I.s, of cowboys and surfers and poets and junkies, all marching arm in arm along a great concrete road that hasn’t quite set.
Morris felt it now in his chest, this dizzying speed. Standing outside the terminal at JFK, he smoked a cigarette, then another, acutely aware of his newfound anonymity. He was a nameless figure in a strange and unfamiliar place, an invisible actor who had wandered onto a set where everyone else knew their lines, their cues, their positions. Around him the hectic brotherhood of a raw and original New World landscape raced, their accents, regional dialects as yet indistinguishable to him one from the other, chorused in his ear. He stood, shivering a little though entirely transfixed, as planeloads of strangers teemed from the main building, carry-on rollers in tow, sleek attaché cases slung over winter coats, breath heavy in the young morning air. They hurried along, pouring into their waiting taxis and town cars, a loosely attired assembly of trench coats and baseball caps and shocking pink tracksuit pants, wave after wave of people who didn’t know his past and couldn’t guess his future.
For the first time in a long time, Morris felt calm. Not a sense of calm, merely, but a warm and deliciously numbing silence emanating from within, a private cavern of solace and comfort, halcyon in the eye of a human hurricane. He was a glorious nobody to nobody in particular.
Of course, there was one person here who knew him. At least, she knew as much as he had confided in his letters.
Katelyn had traveled to London to visit a friend of a friend. Or rather, she had ventured to Cambridge to do so, but serendipitously dislocated from the college town click to pass a day in the capital, feeding pigeons at Viscount Nelson’s feet, wandering amid the Parthenon’s transplanted fragments and surrendering a mid-afternoon’s eternity to Vermeer’s extravagant pigments and masterful brush-strokes. It was a heady time for the eager young Marylander who, just a few months older than Morris, had until this very trip never before met the need to present her passport. So London came alive to her, in museum scenes both indoors and out. As she walked the sites of her art and history textbooks, letting the works and days of bygone centuries wash over her, she felt a welling of self-satisfaction for having decided to make the trip after all. It seemed only yesterday she had been staring blankly at the submission forms for the coming school term, wondering where her life was going so fast without her and how on earth she had be-come so numbly estranged from it.
She was determined, however, not to let her mind dwell, to sink into the familiar, brooding comfort that she knew so well. Feeling accomplished after a full and independent day touring the city, she decided a celebratory libation was in order. One of those infamously warm ales, perhaps.
A half dozen blocks to the southeast, a wanderlusting antipodean was laboring through the late shift; the only one his habitual evening revelry would reasonably permit him to perform. When at 4pm that Thursday afternoon a satisfied young American strolled into his bar with a beaming smile that asked, in those chipper, Mid-Atlantic tones, for “a pint of something local, something you would drink on a triumphant afternoon,” Morris was already starting to feel the legacy of the previous night’s excesses fading away.
“Well, I’m not exactly local.” He paused to let his own accent linger for a second, exotically backlit (so he reckoned) against the monotonous hum of Estuary English otherwise filling the room. “But I’m sure we can find you something for the occasion.”
Katelyn smiled, first with her eyes then, as she watched the expression returned from across the bar, her whole being. Morris noted her posture, her confidence. With a ballerina’s poise, she rose to just above average height, her thinnish carriage moving gracefully under a ripple of maple gold hair, fastened now with a dragonfly clip. Her deep green eyes flickered intelligently whenever she spoke.
“You might just be the cheeriest bartender in all of London,” she remarked when he returned, still grinning, with her pint.
“Oh no,” he protested from under a raised eyebrow. “I’m as surly as they come.”
“I somehow find that hard to believe.” She raised her glass and took a satisfying sip.
Acknowledging a threesome of regulars entering through the side doors, Morris started on a fresh round. “Oh yeah,” he glanced back toward the smiling foreigner. “Ask anyone here. I’m a right bore. Stubborn. Moody. Well, ordinarily I am, anyway.”
“Ordinarily?”
He nodded as if to say “I’m afraid so,” but his continuing smile betrayed this guilty plea.
“So what’s different about today, then?” she pressed coyly, sensing herself somewhere in the answer. “Why so chipper now?”
Morris topped the pints off and, taking them three in hand, ferried the glasses the length of the bar to where the regulars were taking their familiar seats.
“Maybe it’s not ‘what’s’ different,” he said when he returned. “Maybe it’s ‘who.’”
She smiled again, this time all at once.
In between patrons Morris and Katelyn joked about the English weather and the warm beer, and about the patrons themselves. Playfully mocking the airs and pomp of the Old World around them, they fell easily into a silly, flirtatious banter.
“You see that woman over there,” Morris nodded with pseudo seriousness toward a dowdy, septuagenarian tea-drinker by the door, her beige pinafore scant protection against the lurking urges of their sophomoric humor. “I used the ‘Down Under’ line on her just last week. She’s been in here every day since, poor dear. I haven’t the heart to tell her it’s not on…”
Katelyn drew her hand to her mouth just in time to muffle an involuntary gasp, equal parts horror and exhilaration. Then, wearing a mischievous expression of her own that seemed perfectly tailored for the occasion, she dove headlong into the repartee.
“Would you like me to have a word?” Her widened eyes teased at Morris’ attention when she continued. “I can tell her you’re spoken for, if you think that’s best. A pretty young American traveler has stolen your heart. Or,” she made to roll her cashmere sleeves up over a pair of delicate, softly downed arms, “I could just put the fear of God in her right this moment.”
“Hmm… as tempting as that is,” Morris drew his lips back over clenched teeth and shook his head slowly,” there’s a darned lot of paperwork to be done whenever there’s a death in the pub. If she drops from sheer shock, you know, on account of your ferocious threat, I’ll have to stay back after work and fill in a mountain of forms. Awfully tedious, as the Brits would say.”
“It seems there’s nothing else for it, then,” Katelyn’s softened expression surrendered to the pitiful impotence of defeat. “I’ll just have to give in. And you, you’ll have to make good on your ‘Down Under’ promise, then marry the dear old woman and move into her flat. I bet she’s got a fascinating doily collection. And you’ll get used to the early bird menus and the sponge baths in no time at all.”
“Oh, I don’t mind an early dinner. Nor a good sponge bath given the right company. Although,” he teetered on the edge of a thought, “I’d just as soon go with that pretty young American you were talking about a moment ago.”
“Oh, I doubt your lady friend there is open to polyamorous arrangements,” Katelyn sighed. “You know that generation, such…” and she finished the sentence by tracing the proverbial parallelogram in the quickening air between them.
“Right, I was afraid you’d say that. And here I was imagining the possibility of dining this evening with you both.”
“Well, I’m not much one for sharing either.” Her gaze was drunk with unmistakable intent. “I guess you’ll just have to choose.”
And so the whirlwind gathered its first surge of energy, frenetic from the start, then intensifying exponentially, hurtling its contents toward an unknown destiny sensed, but not understood, by them both. Giddily they spilled out of Morris’ pub during his half hour break shortly thereafter, instinctively clasping hands as they crossed the street to grab a one-way coach ride, Victoria-Cambridge.
“Now I’m going to get to know all about you, Morris...?” her question lingered.
“Just Morris,” he smiled.
“I see. Well, you’ll have precious few secrets left by the end of my expert examination.”
“No, we’ll talk about you,” he insisted. “Then, if you’re lucky, I’ll relent and reveal to you how this story of ours ends.”
“Like you know!” She raised her eyebrows in playful defiance. Pulling her scarf up against the chill, she smiled into the plush argyle.
Morris arranged to take the seat next to hers, promising the spotty ticket clerk a free pint next he wandered into the King’s Head. The ride was scheduled to depart in a few hours, before his shift even ended.
“I’d ask if this kind of romantic impulse was a force of habit to you,” Katelyn half probed, “but I’m afraid I don’t want to know the answer.”
Around them the streets hummed their old London tune. Day trippers alighted from foggy black taxis and red buses and emerged, bleary eyed, from that iconic subterranean network.
“What will you do about your work?” Katelyn queried as a group of young professionals filed past them, en route to some distant world of drab, romance-free responsibility.
“Ah, someone will cover for me,” Morris assured her. “Davo, probably. Well, hopefully. And I’ll find my way back to London tomorrow, I reckon. Or the day after...”
Morris was convincing, without being presumptuous. His blithe manner intrigued Katelyn and stirred in her something vaguely recalling the days before she had gone off to college, that summer when the world laid itself out before her like a grand feast to which she was welcomed as honorary guest. She accepted his happy-go-lucky disposition with a gleeful demeanor all of her own.
Looking at him now, in the open air outside the pub, moving freely against the staid surroundings of the city, she noticed for the first time his impressive stature. He was tall, over six feet she guessed, though his movements were easy and unencumbered, as with an athlete of some discipline; tennis, perhaps. Or swimming. His shoulders were broad, but he was not bulky, unlike the football players she had disregarded as mental infants back at college. It was clear, too, from his felicity of wit that he was no such dope. When he spoke, his eyes did the talking, his mouth following later as a kind of wily understudy, delivering words when his gaze either locked with her own or drifted abstractedly to some point far-off in the distance, as it often did. He was unlike her classmates, those unworldly, small town folks. In fact, now that she thought of it, he was unlike anyone she’d ever met.
Katelyn and Morris walked for his entire break, stopping only once to buy two cans of cider - “roadies,” he had called them, to her amusement - and once more when they encountered his workmate, Davo, a block from the pub.
Of course he’d cover the evening shift, Davo assured them with a bowing wave of affected chivalry. Their encounter was brief, but warm.
“You kids have fun now,” he jogged off to sneak in an all-day breakfast at the café next door before his now extended commitment behind the bar.
“Your friend is very generous,” observed Katelyn. “A pretty girl saunters into your bar and he’s diving on shifts for you.”
“He knows I’d do the same,” Morris replied in earnest, “except pretty girls never come in the bar asking for Davo.”
“You’re evil!” she castigated him with a smiling shake of her head as they clasped hands once more.
Davo was, in fact, Morris’ closest friend. They had traveled together from Australia, though their ambitions were rather independent. Within a year, Davo would be back home, courting a beautiful woman that would become his devoted wife and mother of his children. Morris, however, had no such plans.
Immediately Katelyn and he were back at the pub, Morris shot off to the living quarters upstairs to pack his bag. She wondered, on seeing him return not five minutes later, what he could possibly have bothered to throw in his overnighter in such short time and, faintly, whether it had been readily prepared all along, an optimistic duffle waiting by his bedside table for just the right moment to escape. She did not spoil the moment with inquiry, but greeted him excitedly when he dropped it lightly by her feet and ordered a six pack of ciders for the journey.
“Thanks, Davo,” he nodded as they left his mate behind the bar. “And, if ever a beauty should find her way in here asking after you…”
“I’ll know exactly who to stick the shift with,” Davo finished the sentence as he watched the rapturous pair breeze out the door and into a world of their own...
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Cheers,
Joel
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