Small World

Slabs over the gutter, a cemetery, clowns.

The pollution app said red, which in Jakarta is most mornings. That day it dipped. Not enough to celebrate. Enough to consider.

Jakarta makes me restless. So I invent things. A destination, a distance, a reason to be out of the apartment. That day the reason was the coast. Everyone had told me there was nothing at the coast. But every coast is interesting.

I told Rani I was walking there.

“Do you know how far that is?”

“It’s fine. I’ll make it.”

“It’s four hours from here.”

“Not if I leave early enough.”

There are no sidewalks. What looks like one is a row of concrete slabs laid over the gutter. They can be lifted, and sometimes they have been and not put back. Sometimes they’re cracked, or tilted, or gone, and you’re looking down into the drainage running under the street. So you adjust. One step on the road, one step on something that might hold. At night the rats move through it with confidence, using the edges as if they’d been designed for them. You, meanwhile, are improvising.

Along the way there are little makeshift villages. Alleys folding into dense clusters of homes, corrugated steel marking boundaries that felt temporary and weren’t. Mud. Water mixing to create a pathway. You commit to a direction, follow it a while, and hit a wall, a house, a narrowing that simply stops. Backtrack. Try the next opening. Sometimes it gets you closer to a street. Sometimes it delivers you to the same wall from the other side.

Tourists don’t come to Jakarta. The ones who do don’t walk. And nobody, having decided to walk, walks through here.

So the people I passed looked at me as if I were an alien. Not unkindly. Just openly, without pretending otherwise. Children stopped what they were doing. Adults paused mid-conversation. I’ve been a foreigner for thirty-five years. Smile, wave, keep moving.

About an hour in, Google Maps routed me through a cemetery. I’d been to one before with Rani, so I knew what happens if you stop. You pay people to keep you company while you visit your dead. I didn’t have any dead here. I didn’t stop. I walked at a pace I hoped read as purposeful, because people had started to follow — not closely, not quickly, matching me, waiting.

Four hours in I reached the northern coast, though “coast” is generous. What I reached was the long aftermath of one. Rusted hulls, deteriorating concrete pilings, cranes that had stopped some time ago and weren’t planning a comeback. I stood there a while, having arrived.

Then I heard music. Faint, repetitive, familiar. So I followed it to a wall, and behind the wall was something that looked like a castle, if a castle had been assembled from chicken wire, plaster, and a willingness to overlook details. I walked until I found the entrance.

An amusement park. People looked, smiled, pointed, and looked away the moment I noticed. It’s a place for people under fifty who came with someone. I went in.

And then a ride. An unmistakable imitation of It’s a Small World. Not inspired by it. Committed to it. Faithful in every respect except upkeep, which had been abandoned around the time I left the US. No line. No one waiting, no one leaving. Just the boats going around on a current you could have outwalked.

I loved it immediately.

I’d paid at the gate, so there was nothing left to buy. There was a man, and he did not acknowledge me. He didn’t wave me on. He didn’t look up. I got in the boat.

I reached over the sides and pulled, the way you would in a canoe, except there was nowhere to be. I did it a few times before figuring out that it made no difference. The boat had its own timeline.

The music was loud, and slightly off, and had long ago forgotten where it was supposed to end. The first stretch was Indonesia. Region after region, each with its own costumes. Then the rest of the world, in categories. A general idea of Africa. A general idea of the Middle East. No principle I could detect, no order, just whatever came next to whoever was building it. The animatronics, when they worked, moved without enthusiasm. When they didn’t you could see everything — the metal frame where a face used to be implied, an arm that lifted halfway and reconsidered.

Somewhere between two Indonesian provinces I couldn’t tell apart, I ran the numbers. Four hours of walking. Air I’d been advised against. A cemetery I’d hurried through. All of it to arrive here, alone, hand-paddling through a plaster country while a song I didn’t like played from a speaker I couldn’t find.

I kept paddling.

Then the whole thing gave up. Clowns. No transition, no explanation, just clowns, as if someone had reached the end of the world and filled the rest with what was in the shed. After the clowns, a circus, because once you’ve accepted clowns escalation is the only direction left.

It was the best thing I had seen in months.

Then it ended. I stepped off. No one got on. The man didn’t look up.

Rani told me later she had a school outing there thirty-five years ago.

I took a taxi home. An hour in the dark, half asleep, wading through the traffic I’d spent the day walking past.