Morris, Alive

By Joel Bowman

A new work of literary fiction for a new American era; one that celebrates life, freedom and opportunity for all. 

Morris is a wanderer, a dreamer, a barroom philo

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joel Bowman
• Release date: Jul 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9781736838105

Joel Bowman

Joel Bowman was born and raised on the Gold Coast, Australia, where he passed most of his childhood on the beach and in the surf. In 2000 he emigrated permanently to nowhere in particular, and has been traveling the world ever since, living in Americas North and South, Easts Middle and Far and worlds Old and New, calling a dozen countries and many more cities home along the way. A journalist by training, Mr. Bowman's essays and columns have appeared in numerous news outlets and academic journals both in the US and abroad. After almost two decades writing and speaking publicly about politics, economics and international living, Mr. Bowman turned his hand to fiction. Morris, Alive is his debut novel. Mr. Bowman splits his time between Buenos Aires, Argentina, and the open road. He is at home wherever and whenever he is with his wife and daughter.

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Copyright © 2021 Joel Bowman.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below.

ISBN: 978-1-7368381-1-2 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-7368381-2-9 (Hardcover)

ISBN: 978-1-7368381-0-5 (Ebook)

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Front cover image by Alejandro Baigorri.

Layout and design by Muhammad Faizan Altaf.

Printed by IngramSpark, Inc., in the United States of America.

First printing edition 2021.

www.joelbowmanbooks.com

CONTENTS

PART I

Chapter I: Floreat Romance

Chapter II: Penn to Penn

Chapter III: The More He Saw

Chapter IV: The Less He Wrote

Chapter V: Tableaux Baltimoreans

PART II

Chapter VI: Penn to Penn (Again)

Chapter VII: Away by the Sea

Chapter VIII: A Pretty Illusion

Chapter IX: On Here and Now

Chapter X: Elysian Fields

PART III

Chapter XI: Enter, America

Chapter XII: Nóstos Álgos

Chapter XIII: Citizens of the World

Chapter XIV: Morris, Alive

For Anya

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,

Healthy, free, the world before me,

The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

~ Walt Whitman

Morris, Alive

PART I

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 luculent, 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.

#

The roughly two hours between Victoria coach station and the Old Schools passed between Morris and Katelyn in an exalted kaleidoscope of confessions, quirks and coincidences. Everything happened so quickly, as if they were living each decision before it had firmly been made, existing in the vertiginous, unformed moment immediately preceding reality. Between them, an unspoken acknowledgement propelled them forth while the superficial chitchat regarding bizarre colloquialisms and other such banality soon gave way to unguarded moments of real honesty and contemplation.

She told him, with a frankness of detail that both impressed him and stung vaguely at his bravado, about the prompt unraveling of her last relationship; how she had returned, taken ill, to her dorm room midway through class, only to uncover her boyfriend lustily entwined with a sweaty little sophomore scamp of deservedly wayward repute. She recalled the vixen to mind with a detached laugh, as if by giving words to the incident for the first time, she only now comprehended its utter insignificance. Pausing to give the event one last thought, she allowed it to pleasantly, peacefully extinguish from her mind.

It might never have happened, she mused. That was all so long ago. At least it seems that way now, here with you, on this random bus ride in the middle of a foreign country.

Maybe it’s not random at all, Morris shrugged. Maybe this is just where we’re supposed to be. Where we’ve always meant to be. You. Me. All of us.

And what about him? she motioned toward a derelict two seats over, slumped over and snoring intermittently in his chair, his tenuous grasp on a torn paper bag threatening at any moment to give way and free the liquid contents all over his soiled clothes.

Well, not everyone has such lofty fates, Morris observed. Who are we to argue with the universal order?

Ah right, the Universal Order, she was serious for a moment. That, or we’re just the culmination of arbitrary, unordered happenstance. A collection of lives inhabited by individuals who could just as easily have set off on infinite paths, unending possibilities. Sometimes I wonder what it’s all for, this hot blazing second. There’s more to it than that, of course, but that’s the wedge. The beginning of a thought.

We’ve got all night for philosophizing, he encouraged.

We’ll barely scratch the surface, she turned her gaze out the window. There’s more to understand than we’ll ever really grasp.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty… he began.

Yes, but is that all we on earth need to know? Alas, turning to him, she sighed with a sincerity he hadn’t seen before, in her or anyone else, Keats, right? Alas, my dear Morris, this is no century for poets.

Morris drank her in. Her words. Her presence. Her reflection in the glass, transposed over the quickening past as it flashed by outside. She had smooth, broad cheeks set above a wide and generous ‘All American’ smile which, he would come to discover, was equally adept at relieving tension as it was underscoring the sudden bursts of euphoria to which she was frequently given over. As for her eyes, he knew the moment he met them that their mysterious, sea green glimmer would be with him always.

Her unusual beauty notwithstanding, there was something else about Katelyn that most captivated Morris; an unaffected self-assuredness that derived from somewhere beyond her knowledge of quotable couplets and music references and scientific theories. There was, behind her ready smile and flickering eyes, an inexplicable calm about her that Morris couldn’t quite capture, an elevated quality that drew him nearer, that held him enraptured when she spoke and aroused in him a need to know more about her than he had ever known about anyone else in his life.

Their conversation flowed along the motorway, streetlights in yellow and brilliant white streaming across the windows and stretching out into the unrelenting darkness of the miles covered. At the depot, they left the man with the brown paper bag and alighted to search for a taxi to take them the rest of the way. As usual, the atmosphere was draped in that faint mist that hangs like stretched cotton over the middle of England whenever it is not positively down pouring.

At last, they were deposited at a sparsely appointed student flop in an old stone two-story walkup, whereupon Katelyn introduced Morris to a pair of young ladies, both of them garrulous and, as the violet rings around their lips attested, already tipsy on red wine. Amy and Sarah were known to Katelyn through an intricately, pedantically explained social web, promptly forgotten by Morris.

Which brings us finally, and lastly-but-not-leastly, Amy nodded toward her first guest, the viscous words coagulating like mercury in her mouth, to Sarah. Sarah and the connection-to-Katelyn, who we see-you’ve-already-met…

Yes, Katelyn, Sarah added, then somewhat redundantly, We see you’ve already met Morris.

The girls rambled messily, spilling wine on the linoleum floor as they emphasized this or that point with wild gesticulation, voices shrilly raised to overcome the electronic music emanating in thudding bursts from a room somewhere down the hall. Morris nodded encouragingly and smiled, gladly accepting their cask cabernet while Katelyn shot him flirtatious looks of mock reproach.

Morris here is a regular romantic, Katelyn conveyed to the girls as the glasses were filled again. If you’re not on your guard, you’re liable to find yourself in a rowboat with him before long, drifting down a quaint little country stream somewhere sunny while he recites Keats’ Odes to you under the falling leaves.

I’m not entirely to blame here, confessed Morris, arms raised in a farcical stance of conditional surrender, some women are simply impossible to resist.

Then, indulging the crowd, he leaned to bended knee in Katelyn’s direction…

Pale were the lips I kiss’d, and fair the form

I floated with, about that melancholy storm…

Melancholy story? whooped Amy riotously. Tell us another one, Romeo.

The impertinence of our curious man, whispered a playful Katelyn to her Morris as he laughingly regained his footing.

And does this romantic have any friends to whom he might introduce us? ventured the other happy lush. We might have a regular petting party on our hands. Ha! Ha!

When Amy and Sarah were very drunk and the newcomers not far behind, the little band made for a nearby club where one of the girls knew the DJ. Inside it was loud and humid and smelled of undergraduate desperation. Shortly after arrival, their hosts having vanished into the flickering, amorphous mass of sweat and booze on the dance floor, Katelyn took Morris by the hand and led him away from the crowd. Her lips were warm against his, their embrace long overdue. Soon they were back at the flat, smoking cigarettes out the top floor window, watching the exhaled clouds comingle in the stillness around them and drift away under the scattered morning stars. Even London seemed an eternity away.

A few hours later, Katelyn found herself on a plane, her forehead pressed gently against the cool glass somewhere over the Atlantic. Morris spent the day at a drab student pub near the coach station, waiting for a standby ticket between slow and solitary pints.

#

It was Morris who wrote first.

"Not a moment forgotten to me… to think you ‘chanced’ on this place… all the pubs in London!... could just as easily have missed me… Euclidian parallels and all that…

I imagine you here every day… winter sunlight at your back… corner table, by our poor and pinafored lover (who, by the way, sends her regards. ‘To the victor,’ she crowed when I told her you’d fled)…

Streaming lights on the coach ride…  fading into cheap cabernet and that delicate, lingering moment before your lips were on mine…

I half expect you to walk through the door and change my life again… Perhaps, someday… Affectionately, Morris."

Her reply, though slower in arriving than he had wished, brought him no end of joy. He read it so many times he found himself reciting it while alone, rolling the sentences over deliciously in his mind, envisioning her pen on the paper, wondering at her mood as she composed her jutty Rs, her childlike, irregular Gs, the cramping, slanting font, struggling to squeeze in the lower right corners of the pages before blossoming outward again overleaf.

"Over 7,000 pubs in London… Amy checked the guide… says the odds are miniscule, so it must be Providence at work… she approves of you, for sure… Sarah too, from what she can remember…

"I can see you working behind the bar, shooting me cheeky, knowing looks… your blonde hair, unkempt then and on my shoulder by morning…

"It’s strange here now I’m back… something changed for me, within me… looking from the window on the flight home… the unfathomable ocean between us… I imagined you standing at the station, as I was carried away at a thousand miles an hour…

Yes, someday. But someday soon. Tenderly, Katelyn.

P.S. Meanwhile, enjoy your decrepit floozy. I don’t need to tell her, I’ve got time on my hands. K

Over the next few letters, with a cheesy Big Ben postcard (his) and some kitschy lipstick seals (hers) thrown into the mix, the narratives began to merge and a wide-eyed romance arose to beckon them onward.

Wrote she...

"These last few weeks have been so impossibly long, our ‘gloomy days and o’er shadowed ways’…

"But if I knew for