Methuselah Lives in Bali
by Steven Joyal
The gold-rimmed customs declaration reads, "Hukuman berat bagi pembaw narkotik" (severe punishment for drug traffickers). Harry’s bags are stuffed with thousands of capsules and tablets, and the picture of crude surgery on homeless shelter dogs won’t leave my jet-lagged head.
Harry whistles and says, “I think I smell marijuana.”
Ex-military intelligence from the Cold War, Harry is a legend in the anti-aging underground. He wants to live forever, and his body is a walking anatomy atlas of muscle and tendon.
Hong, Harry’s partner and Singapore-based nutritional supplement distributor, smiles. “We need to find our driver, yes?”
Eight time zone changes and twelve hours of jet-lag make everything seem a little less sharp, like a distant picture taken through a frosted lens. Through this softer focus of reality we fumble forward through the Nguh Rai airport in Bali, and a kaleidoscope of butik clothing surrounds us.
A Hindu woman with gilded nose rings holds a screeching infant, a moon-faced Buddhist man stands blankly, and a veiled Muslim woman with darting eyes clutches a passport, her knuckles tensed white. Two young girls throw flower petals in the traditional Balinese pendet dance of greeting, and gamelan music drifts in the air.
At the front edge of the transport area choked with taxi cabs and leaded exhaust, Hong’s trusted driver greets each of us in the traditional Hindu Namaste fashion, hands clasped close to the heart with head bowed.
Harry’s neck veins pulsate and his eyes dart like a rattlesnake’s tail. “Jeez, all the leaded gas fumes we’re breathing in right now, just going right into the body. You know that taxi drivers in third world countries have, like, stratospheric tissue lead levels in their organs at autopsy, right?”
The air inside the taxi smells like old sweat, and with Harry’s bags packed in the trunk, our car edges into Bali traffic. Men and women sit on 125 cc motorbikes with children on their laps, and scooters swarm around us in choreographed chaos.
Harry suddenly resumes a previous story, and my head throbs with every dribbled word from his mouth. “So as I was saying, the anti-aging lung fluid resuscitator worked pretty well, and a couple of the dogs actually lived, and Darwin kept buying new dogs from the shelter for the longevity experiments. He really liked doing weird vascular surgery on dog arteries…did I tell you about his Jamaican boyfriend?”
Harry smirks. “Darwin used to tell me all these really detailed stories about his Jamaican boyfriend and the things they liked to do with beer bottles. We finally had to get rid of him – sometimes I wonder if he used enough anesthesia when he did the surgeries on the dogs. I think he works at Home Depot now.”
The car enters a round-about, and the elephant-headed god, Ganesha, appears thirty feet high, sun-soaked stone rising towards the azure sky. We swerve to pass a man with two children on a scooter, "Supra" in lime green letters splashed across the gas tank. A charcoal dark woman with wounded eyes smokes a cigarette and shakes a bony fist as her motorcycle weaves through traffic and overtakes our car.
We go by distant terraced fields of coffee and cocoa beans, and Hong whispers in Mandarin to the driver. The car turns off the main street down a narrow earth-compacted road encased by Bali greens. Unripe, jungle-framed cocoa pods suspended like Indonesian Halloween pumpkins. Cappuccino-colored Balinese men guide us by foot down a mud path past a stone hut with built-in, stone roasting pit. A chunky cast-iron pot sits atop a spitting fire and the humid air is drenched with the smell of smoky Arabica beans. Men pack thick wads of baked Bali tobacco in traditional unfiltered wood pipes, and the locals exhale heavy blue smoke.
Harry grimaces and says, “Lung cancer on a stick.”
We drink thick coffee from traditional ceramic mugs and the caffeine cuts a path of concentration through the jet-lag and time zone changes.
Back in the car and on the road, Hong turns to me. “You rested on the plane, no? Jean-Paul Xu will join us tonight, yes? You remember him from Singapore, no?
Our car slows as we weave through Bali traffic. Concrete block huts with rusted tin roofs crowd together along narrow streets, and Balinese dogs with matted fur sleep inches from the swirling traffic. A pile of smoking garbage burns in a littered drainage gulley a few feet away from a naked child lapping brown porridge from a sarong-wrapped woman. A spotted black and white-tipped dog salivates over fruit and vegetable peels speckled with flies. Distant figures stoop in rice paddies swollen with rain, their backs saturated with sweat.
The driver stops at the Nusa Dua checkpoint, and pock-faced Balinese men perform a cursory vehicle security check. A young guard in a gunmetal grey uniform, cigarette dripping from his lips, exhales thick blue haze into the car.
Harry grunts at the young guard, “Thanks--blow smoke right in my face--cancer in my lungs!”
The guard’s expression is like stone.
A half-mile further our car parks under the bright beehive yellow banner: "Conference Plenary Session, Anti-Aging Medicine, Asia 2007." A mocha-colored young woman welcomes us at the outdoor reception area. Her nametag reads, "Law Mei Kiaw," and in a more primitive time she could be a Balinese princess draped in jade and worshipped as a goddess, her flawless skin and perfect teeth a source of great pride to her devoted subjects.
We stand at an intricate wood-carved desk in the open air, and rivers of sweat run down our backs in the blazing Bali sun.
Harry taps his foot in triple-time. “Between skin cancer from the sun, my electrolytes sweating out in front of me, I mean, we’re late anyway Hong, come on, we’ve got to get inside!”
Hong’s expression is blank as he whispers into the right ear of Law Mei Kiaw, and her mocha eyes smile.
“Yes, we pleez tah come, Miss-tah Hung,” she says and we by-pass the registration desk.
Once inside the air conditioned Keraton Room, my head throbs from the contrast in temperature.
Over two hundred conference delegates from Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Singapore sit quietly in the conference hall. Gamelan music pipes lightly through mounted mahogany speakers at the far side of the room. A Balinese man in a batik shirt slowly thuds a huge padded mallet against a golden gong to welcome the plenary session delegates.
The Most Venerated Chairman of the Department of Anti-Aging Medicine and Sexology mounts the stage to polite applause. He spends fifty minutes discussing Biblical longevity while projections in bolded forty font are shown on the huge conference hall screen: "Seth lived 912 years," "Enosh lived 905 years," "Jared lived 962 years." His final slide is an animated cartoon of a huge-breasted blond bursting out of a skimpy bra.
The next presenter is a Dutch scientist with piercing blue eyes, and his graphic slides illustrate the dangers of drinking water from Chinese rivers choked with cadmium, of fluoride-induced toxic brain damage, and of Japanese commercial fishing boats overflowing with butchered shark fins contaminated with mercury.
My presentation is next, and a Malaysian physician named Mansubramaniam introduces me to the crowded room. A cellphone chirps in the front row of the audience during my slide on aging mitochondria. The projector freezes on my summary slide of coenzyme Q10 clinical trials, but Hong quickly whispers instructions to a dazed Indonesian technician who solves the software problem. A Malaysian man in the center right row coughs repeatedly during my slide highlighting the benefits of alpha-lipoic acid for diabetic nerve damage.
Forty-five minutes on-stage passes quickly, my nutritional supplement speech ends, and jet-lag fogs my feet as I trip on an electrical extension cord on the stage exit stairs.
From the side door of the Balinese conference room hall Hong and Harry motion urgently to me. Outside in the open-air courtyard bathed in sun-drenched Bali heat, Hong and Harry introduce me to Kazem, a Saudi with a neatly-trimmed beard and a molecular pathology degree. His eyes are soft and unassuming, his handshake firm.
Harry taps his feet as Hong methodically reviews distribution, marketing, and sales. Kazem discusses imam edicts on the status of pig- and cow-derived gelatin capsules for supplements.
Suddenly, Harry violently interrupts, neck veins bulging. “Just so you know, Kazem, t-to get this out of the way, I just want to say that, um, I mean, you know, ah, I d-don’t agree with the war or anything like that. I just want to say that, um, you know, live and let live, even the crazy Muslims.”
The sun-drenched Bali air seems to flash-freeze into Arctic chunks in front of my face.
Several seconds pass, but then Kazem smiles and slowly speaks. “Educated people speak the same language.”
The ice blocks evaporate, Harry withholds any further personal comments on geopolitics, and Hong provides Kazem with a sample package of nutritional supplements.
The next four hours are a jet-lagged blur of business meetings. We meet a dog-faced Russian pharmacist who claims to cure cancer with a special blend of Siberian herbs, a collagen-lipped Australian woman who markets anti-aging skin cream derived from fetal pig cells, a blonde New Zealand physician named Lauren who treats wealthy Hong Kong businessmen with injections of diluted snake venom, an Australian plastic surgeon who has thickened eyebrow ridges and greasy skin from too many self-administered growth hormone injections, and an ethereal Japanese woman who claims to cure skin cancer with extracts of human placenta but isn’t a medical doctor.
Harry whispers, “I wonder how she gets the human placenta--you know that stuff doesn’t grow on trees.”
Late in the afternoon, our car leaves for the beach town of Kuta. Our driver navigates Bali rush-hour traffic along crusty access roads. Stone- and wood-carvings of the Hindu pantheon of gods and goddesses line dust-soaked sheets at the street edge.
Hong turns. “Surprise for you, Harry, yes? Here is holy water to heal you, no?”
Harry raises an eyebrow. “Okay, I guess...”
Our speed slows, and the car maneuvers down a mud-splattered stretch of baked dirt through a gauntlet of trinket shops and sleeping dogs.
We exit the car to barefoot women, and shouts of “Two for ten thousand!” surround us. A toothless Balinese girl stuffs small bananas into my hands and says, “You like, you buy more.” A woman with skin like orange peel sits cross-legged while roasting peanuts in an iron pot. Three small brown-eyed girls run barefoot across a stone slab covered with flies. An old man wades into a stream covered with thick green scum and rubs his hands with mud.
We walk over a dirt path to a small stone pool framed by limestone slabs. Water pours from drilled spigots speckled with green algae, and orderly lines of the Balinese faithful form in waist-deep water. Bali women and children clasp hands and bow in the traditional Namaste way before bathing in the holy water spilling from the stone spouts.
Hong shouts above the splashing Balinese. “Harry, this is the Agama Hindu Dharma temple, yes? The water is holy and cures disease, no?”
Harry grimaces, his neck veins bulge like coiled pythons. “I’m not going in there.”
We exit the temple grounds through another gauntlet of trinket shops, and more shouts of “Two for ten thousand!” echo against the rocky path. A thin dog with matted fur follows us. Harry spots a Balinese man with mud-caked pants selling food out of a small wooden cart and buys four chicken wings for forty thousand rupia, about four dollars and fifty cents. He tries to feed the wings to the thin dog, but three larger dogs seemingly appear from thin air and fight with one another over the scraps of food.
The little dog goes hungry.
Back in the car and on the road to Kuta, Hong’s bland face is calm as a Hindu cow and my stomach rolls like South Florida thunder.
Our car weaves rapidly in Bali traffic. On the outskirts of Kuta we narrowly miss sideswiping two men on a motorbike with "Super Surfer" in arrest-me orange lettering on the gas tank, and Hong receives three different calls from Jean-Luc Xu.
In the center of Kuta, our car narrowly misses a group of alcohol-soaked Australians singing 80s pop songs by Men at Work. A few minutes later our driver drops us off at a bar called the Apache in a greasy section of the city that smells like the New York subway on an August night.
The all-girl house band wears knee-high white leather boots, and the lead singer grinds against the microphone pole.
She shouts off-key, “You muh budder-fla, shooga, bay-bee!”
Indonesian girls hungrily prowl the bar. One of the girls whispers something in Harry’s ear.
He stammers, “Uh, no, th-that’s not for me, but, um, th-thanks anyway.”
Hong orders local Bintang beer for us, and Harry chases the beer with yellow tablets.
Hong spreads out a stack of paper pamphlets on the bar and shouts above the bar band, “What should we do tomorrow, yes? Maybe the Gunung Batur volcano, no?”
Between a gulp of straw-colored Bintang, Harry yells in my ear, “Why aren’t you drinking…more?”
Jean-Luc Xu, the vegetarian veterinarian, arrives to join us at the Apache. Wealthy Singaporean pet owners buy his mega-expensive brand of vegetarian dog food.
Jean-Luc’s amputated left fifth finger assures superb service in Japanese restaurants.
Drinks flow, and Hong opens a supplement bottle of "Anti-Alcohol Protection" for Jean-Luc. Capsules spill on to the bar top and cover the tourism brochures, and Harry, Hong, and Jean-Luc chase a small handful of "Anti-Alcohol Protection" with alcohol. One of the bar girls whispers in Jean-Luc’s left ear, and he laughs while she sits on his lap.
Jean-Luc smirks, “Karaoke girls keep me young; that, Hong’s supplements, and one milligram of growth hormone every other day!”
Harry hiccups in my ear. His words are coated in vodka, “Thazz is about my dose.”
My eyes drift in a jet-lag haze, and everything seems a little less sharp, like a distant picture taken through a frosted lens. The bar girl on Jean-Luc’s lap giggles and strokes his hair, Harry hiccups and chases two white tablets with more Bintang, and the house band’s lead singer screams, “You lahv me too, bay-bee!”
My hands wipe away the spilled supplement capsules of "Anti-Alcohol Protection" on the pamphlets, and just below, a glossy ad reads, "Authentic temple tour for twenty thousand rupia!" is an ancient Ramayana story.
Subali, the monkey prince, stole the throne of the kingdom of Guakiskenda from the true ruler, his brother King Sugriwa.
In the blood of the monkey prince Subali flowed a mysterious white fluid that rendered him invulnerable to pain and invincible to illness.
Immortal.
* * * * *
Steven Joyal recently returned to South Florida after several weeks in Southeast Asia. His flash fiction story, "Pharmaceutical Solutions to Situations Rapidly Unraveling," appears in the November 2007 on-line edition of Underground Voices.
