The Shrinking Pacific

We talk about leaving all the time. I come home and say “God. I’m sick of this place,” and then, still wiping the sweat off my forehead from the bike ride back home, I’ll go sit down on the corner to smoke a cigarette in an attempt to pacify myself. Back inside, we have dinner and try to discuss our dissatisfaction, but it’s very hard to do in such a beautiful place, and makes one feel like the worst kind of curmudgeon. It’s hard to complain about San Francisco because it’s the prettiest city anyone has ever seen. People come from Nebraskas and Baltimores and think ‘my God! I didn’t know such beauty could exist in a city.” The rolling hills, the ocean on one side, the bay on the other, the spectral bridges lancing out into the fog and the dense neighborhoods, Little Saigon, Chinatown, Little Italy and the Mission all representing different cultures that have maintained their identities enough to appear different from each other, most importantly, to smell different from each other. It’s a unique arraignment to San Francisco that one can almost identify where one neighborhood borders another by the smell. Chinatown is mothballs, fortune cookie dough and mushrooms. Little Russia, is stale pirozhki oil and dried sturgeon. Each neighborhood smell is preserved by the damp pacific air that preserves the smells and then blows them out into the ocean at night. Every morning they are recreated afresh. All the highest points of San Francisco are parks; walk up a steep street and it turns into a park. There’s not going to be anyone up there, just trees clinging to the sandy soil, moss, fog and the glittering lights of the city reflected in the ocean below. These parks aren’t just an homage to the natural world the way so many urban parks are. They are light intrusions of the Pacific coastal forest where coyotes trot in the twilight and heavy ravens brood over the day. The parks fit into the pluralistic system of disparate neighborhoods. They have their own residents, advocates and distinct smells. I have always loved this city. I had never given it a thought when I first arrived here about eight years ago. My friends and I had finished college and had decided to take a roadtrip west. I was applying to graduate schools in places like Colorado and New Mexico, so it seemed like a good idea to go and see these places before committing to move to them. We drove down to Memphis the first night and then continued west from there. Alternately sleeping in the car, drinking copious amounts of coffee and only stopping in each place for an hour or so to stretch and find a Taco Bell, it took us less than three days to get from Michigan to Albuquerque. I liked the roads and the wide open spaces of Western America, but I was invariably disappointed by the towns. Boulder was too expensive and it didn’t look like there was much to do besides hang out in breweries; everything was a brewery in Boulder. I liked Albuquerque but the isolation of the surrounding desert weighed down on it. The place offered a charming melancholy to the visitor and possibly chronic depression to the resident. Phoenix was empty; even in February its million inhabitants stayed inside with their air conditioners on. The night before we got to San Francisco, we slept in our van in the hills south of LA. I looked down into the city, much like the view from Mulholland Drive. The lights coruscated through the valleys like rivers rippling over different sized rocks. I watched the scene for about 10 minutes before going back to the van and falling asleep in the driver’s seat, exhausted. After San Francisco, we went to Portland, Denver and a few other places, but I had already been seduced. I remember the cafes and bars we visited, but I don’t remember the cities, not in the way that I remembered San Francisco. After seeing San Francisco, there wasn’t room for anything else. I spent the rest of the trip writing letters about the two days I had been there. Sometimes, when I go down Davisadero, I can see myself, sitting outside a café, frantically scribbling a letter with misspelled street names and strings of clichés. I wrote to everyone, telling them about this El Dorado I didn’t even know I had been looking for. I’m sure many of the people that live here, most of them weren’t born here, have similar stories. All of them stood on some eucalyptus-scented hill watching the sun fall into the Pacific, thinking ‘yeah, this is happiness,’ and then drove back to their homes, only staying long enough to pack up their stuff and say goodbye. I lived in San Francisco for a year before I moved away to attend graduate school. When I left, I did so reluctantly. I was restless. I wanted to see the world, but I didn’t want to leave San Fran. I told myself that, barring another terrible earthquake, that it would always be there, and I could go back any time I wanted. For years, I carried the place with me in form of a keychain, the sight of which, while living abroad, actually caused me to sigh out loud on several occasions. I never tried to come back here. After I finished graduate school, I moved out of the country again. When I decided to come back, I had nowhere to go, my girlfriend’s extended family lives out in the East Bay, they offered us a place of our own for a while and it seemed like as good a place as any; we both knew people in the area, and after living in so many unfamiliar places, I was excited to return to a place and people I knew. ............................................................................................................ After dinner, we take a walk on the outskirts of Golden Gate Park, which is less than a block from where we live. As we walk, I talk about the past and how it’s shaped my perception of the future. I talk about all the roadtrips that I have taken between here and Michigan and the small towns along the way where I talked to someone in a gas station. I talk about living in such a small town, what it would be like to know your neighbors and feel like you were working toward a common goal, rather than competing with each other for everything. I a couple of days, I’m going to leave San Francisco and revisit all the places that I had passed through before when I was too enamored with the Golden Gate Bridge and the smell of eucalyptus to notice them. I do not wish to find another El Dorado; the problem with living in a fairytale is that it feels like it belongs to everyone and no one. I will never really be a part of San Francisco, though it has long been a part of me. No. I want to find a place that looks simple; I think I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can create enough of my own entertainment. I just need the space to do it and at least one place that’s got a decent burrito.

A Song for Everything

The neighbor is trimming something. I can’t see her, but I can hear the steady click of the gardening shears. *click*click* It sounds like someone is standing on the other side of the fence rhythmically snapping their fingers. For a moment or two I snapped back, hoping to produce a dueling banjos sort of effect, but nothing happened, the shearing neither sped up nor slowed down. Along with the clipping there is a pronounced scent of jasmine in this room. Yesterday, while biking between Oakland and Berkeley, my girlfriend, her brother and I stopped to get some coffee. There was a large jasmine bush near the café. I picked a sprig of it and gave it to my girlfriend. She put it in her hat band. That hat is sitting before me on the table. The jasmine is somehow more redolent a day after it has been picked. So it is. There is a click and a breath of jasmine in every second. That’s where I’m writing from. ... We were in Oakland yesterday for my friend Mikey’s going away party. He’s had about thirty going away parties this week (one at work, one for work, one with people from work, but not at work, etc) but this was to be the last. After spending a few hours at the Oakland skate park for what my friend Jason calls geriatric skate club, we bought a few beers at a liquor store named Shareef’s in West Oakland. Outside Shareef’s there was a pious-looking old man sitting on a folding chair and blinking into the sun. ‘Salaam,’ I said as we leaned our bikes against the wall. He made no effort to look or respond, but continued holding his face toward the sky, like he was trying to will himself to be somewhere else. We got to Mikey’s and fell upon the food he had prepared like three eagles all seeing the same rabbit at once. The room got quiet as we went back to our seats with heaping plates of tofu and pancakes. But due to the early hour and the physical exertion of biking and skating, we found that our ravenousness was a quickly passing feeling and soon we were standing in the sunlight outside, holding beers and laughing. … I moved out to San Francisco with Mikey something like seven years ago. I had gone through the lumpy ad verdant peninsula on a road trip and spent the one afternoon I was there frantically writing letters about the town that had captivated my interest, misspelling every street name. One of these letters made its way back to Mikey in Michigan. Misspellings notwithstanding, I had managed to captivate his interest. Although he had never even seen the place, he convinced me in the end that moving there would be the right thing to do, particularly because neither of us had any other prospects. We arrived something like 7 months later in a Volvo station wagon brimming with our useless stuff and roadtrip effluvia such as empty water jugs, taco bell wrappers and about 100 paper coffee cups, some smashed into the floor mats, others ¼ full of some Sumatra, old sock and kerosene concoction that had been sloshing around in there since Santa Fe. There was no one to help us and nowhere to park. We unloaded everything through the haze of a Sunday morning at the corner of Hyde and Turk. Each of us alternately staying with the car or carrying an armload of garbage bags up the stairs. After everything was unloaded and the car was parked we decided to celebrate by going out to eat. On the way, we practically stumbled on some guy shooting up on the sidewalk. … That’s the story that everyone knows already. I’m not the only one who had told it. Almost everyone else my age has their own version of it. These versions, along with mine, are now assigned to moldering corners of the internet where the years-old comments go unread, speaking with the echoing flashback timbre of high school yearbook signatures: Sounds like you guys are having a good time. Be safe. I can’t wait to visit!! -Trish I can believe you lost those shoes! See you in December! -Ernie I’m glad you moved away, jerk! JK! I got my job bac at the shoe store. It’s OK. At least it’s a job. Maybe I can sav up some money and come out and see you… -Aaron aka ‘Snake’ Within the first few weeks the stories were updated a few times and new stories were added, the stories of adjustment and discovery. Inevitably, it tapered off. The site traffic lessoned and the stories came less frequently. More people moved to other places and told their own stories, others stayed in one place. Mikey had different reasons for moving to San Francisco that I had. He wanted to live there. I wanted to go everywhere, but I had to start somewhere. I only lived in San Francisco for a year before I was off to the next thing, writing the next moving story. Mikey helped me move, but I unpacked alone on a grey Sunday afternoon, realizing that I owned nothing of value. There is no feeling as disheartening as unpacking alone and over the years and the subsequent moves, I continued to write to comprehend the feeling, so that I could hold it up and examine it. Since I moved to San Francisco, I have moved almost every year that followed. Ten times in all. I wrote about most of them, perhaps you read some. I know that Mikey read about a lot of them. Perhaps they were more interesting to him, since up until I met my girlfriend, he had been the only person to ever share the experience with me. While Mikey read about the places I went, I thought of him as a stable and therefore supportive figure. The few desperate phone calls I have had to make have all been answered by Mikey. I have received his letters on three different continents and I always looked to him and thought “I’m glad one of us seems to have figured this thing out, or at least seems comfortable with not being able to figure it out.” An idea that always comforted me when I couldn’t sleep and chainsmoked by the window watching the stars intently, waiting for them to give something up, just a hint about what it was all for. When we moved to San Francisco, I didn’t think I’d move again, at least not right away. After Armenia I told myself I wouldn’t move again and after Argentina, I just stopped thinking about it at all. All the while, letters and phone calls went back and forth between Mikey and I. Perhaps we still felt indebted in each other, not quite realizing that by moving across the country together years before we had tacitly agreed to some kind of mutual aid and protection pact. When I left Argentina, I decided to go back to San Francisco. I thought that maybe returning would exercise the restlessness that developed while I was there. And I knew that Mikey would be there, too. My girlfriend had already heard all about Mikey and they had met a few times, but I was constantly talking to her about how great it would be to live in the same place with him again. How great it would be to move to a city and already have a friend there. I began to feel comfortable with the idea of moving back; I began to feel like maybe this time I would stay. Maybe all I needed was to go back to what I had started. After the going away party, we rode off to Bekeley. As we pedaled listlessly down Adeline, I wondered if in Mikey’s absence, I was going to have to stay here for the next seven years and wait for him to come back, if he ever decided to. After all, that’s what he did for me. His stability in this place had made it exemplary in my mind. If I still felt connected to it, it was thanks to him. In a few days we’re going to change positions. Mikey’s going to go drift out into the world and I’m going to be here. I like to think I’ll stay, but I know I still don’t have that kind of patience. There’s still too much out there. The ability to establish myself in a different country is also one of the only things I have really learned over the past five years and like any special skill, it feels good to exercise it. It feels good to remind myself that I something more than a minimum wage worker. This story doesn’t end with Mikey leaving and me staying here and contemplating my 11th move. Our scenario is analogous to an entire generation that seems to have foundered in its attempts to reach a validating adulthood. Maybe somewhere else the plight had been met by more success, but for the people like Mikey and me, it seems life will continue being something so rare and obfuscated as to constantly elude us from reaching a navigable point within it. … *Click* click*my neighbor is still cutting away out there, snipping in the garden. The smell of jasmine is slightly washed out by the open window, but remains at the end of every deep breath. Some bird sings like a nightingale outside: that occasional whirring chirp. The sun makes one side of the leaves look wet, the other ashen. Maybe when I get the first letter from Mikey on the road, I can write these things to him. Maybe they’ll make him want to come back, or maybe they’ll make me want to leave. Either way.

When the Winds Have Swept the Moon from the Shore

In San Francisco, Autumn transitions noiselessly into Spring and then back again. The weather differences are subtle. It’s raining in the morning; it’s sunny in the afternoon and cloudy in the evening. At night the stars return to their ocean beds. The change was so gradual that I didn’t even notice until cherry blossoms were suddenly whirling out of the trees and collecting in drifts along the curbs. I probably wouldn’t have noticed at all if it didn’t betoken the passing of another year. I realize now that I have neglected to notice how the years have gone by; I have been attending to place much more than time. At each place, achieving something and moving on, quickly. > The wind is once again blowing and now more attentive, I hear the sound of time it nearly drowns out. The waves are moving onto the stones, the blooms are lifted and the clouds lumber across the sky. It is now impossible not to see these passages as they are. They are past progressions borne into the present: the places and the people staid forever by implacable nature of memory. 1999: The radio is on. The room smells like pastel crayons and old, wet clay. Someone is talking quietly in the back of the room, but, under the radio the predominant sound is pencil scratching and the hum of institutional lighting. Michelle bursts into the doorway. She’s got tears running down her face and now I know that Jeremy is dead. At every milestone, that moment has reasserted itself. Jeremy never finished high school; He’s there forever. Always right there in the doorway. No college, no fiancé, no travel, no child, just right there, caught up to and surpassed, long surpassed at every moment. 2003: The Grand River is rolling away under a canopy of new foliage and subtle afternoon light. I am sitting on the edge and considering the decade that has just passed away. I feel a twinge of anxiety about how I might have to think of myself differently in the future, but as the days go by, I realize that if anything is going to be different, it’s everything but me. Until 2006: The tradition and non-tradition, the Spring nights, the caffeinated dreaming, the snow outside dark windows, it’s all going to leave you standing somewhere else so obviously tabla rasa. I didn’t choose where I was born and I didn’t choose the places after that, but this street and that hill and this whole mess-I chose it all. What a horrible mistake! I’ll have to do something quick to take the responsibility off myself. 2007: I finish packing and Mikey goes off to get a few burritos. The car is pulled over on Hyde with the hazard lights on. It’s a five hour drive and I’m barely going to make it to the leasing office to pick up my keys before they close for the weekend. Moving into this new place is horrible. It’s surrounded by trees and when the wind passes through them it sounds completely empty, like it just blew in from nowhere, like it was just born there. This must be the end of the world. Mikey and I stand on a bridge together and watch the night traffic underneath. In the morning, I watch his car disappear over the crest of a hill. Completely alone, I take the first of a year’s fruitless walks. For the next year every time I cross the bridge, I see the ghost of that moment, like a llorona weeping desperately at the sputtering traffic. Each night is frozen. If not for my classes, days would go by and I wouldn’t even talk. I ride my bike for hours past old farm houses falling in on themselves and I think how they are going to send me some place so much farther than this. It’s going to be a dusty steppe of buzkashi and kumis and I am going to have to stay there for more than two years. When I leave this Klondike I am going to another. It is isolation and impending isolation. 2008: Before you even arrive you know how long it’s going to be before you leave. Every moment feels like work. Work learning a new language, work preparing teaching materials, work just trying to communicate basic feeling to the strangers with whom you live. When the work is done I’ve got enough to read to last for hours. From May to October, the feeling of adventure is grounding. The walks become 8-hour hikes but as the weather gets cooler it becomes more difficult to get out of bed. On my days off, I think about staying in bed all day. After a few hours the room is almost bright with cold and loneliness and I go out to the grey and windy foreign country outside my door where everyone stares. 2009: At night, I sit in the window with my headphones on, smoking cigarettes and looking at the stars. Sometimes, I will go out and take a late-night walk with a stray dog who disappears after a few months. I look for him well into October, but he never comes back. 2010: There is a bird outside my window that whistles a single note at night, a low, sibilant note, like the hoot of an owl very gently whistled. Every note counts off a day that I was here, but I never stay awake to hear them all. The nights are too fine and I am too content. It seems like I had to wait years to hear this bird. This single note joyously full of flour and fire, dogs barking after faraway sheep, dusty parquet floors and dusty coffee grounds. 2011: I return to that lonely town with more than two years’ worth of stories to tell, stories of which the telling has been dedicated to one person. The present becomes underscored with the past and the two are impossibly tangled. 2012: We leave together. I keep telling stories for the moments that I cannot fully make her understand and the sky of a new hemisphere scrolls over the crowded streets, inexplicably changed. Now: The sorrowful notes and the happy ones are all blown together in the wind. On this quiet day, I listen to them one after another and wonder how far they will travel. How many more empty rooms will take me in and how many more moments will spin out of them? How much more present can succumb to past?

Empty Airports

Almaty: Empty. Kiev, Budapest: no one there. Milan: no one. Lisbon: get your luggage and skate toward down town. Madrid to Dublin: empty airports all. When you’re not expecting anyone airports are strangely quiet. There are so many people waiting behind customs, at least five of them in the back standing on their tiptoes, hushed and expectant. They look at me, look right into my eyes. No. No you’re not him. I shoulder past them all. I already know there is nobody to find in the crowd. The people do not want to lose their viewing areas and are reluctant to move a few feet to let me pass. I and the bag: a salesman, a vagabond, a gypsy. I haven’t come from anywhere and I haven’t arrived anywhere. There is a seamless connection between Kazakhstan and Ireland, because I haven’t stopped once to say: “Here I am.” And no one has yet asked me “Where were you?” I haven’t been home in years. Not to America at all. Not anywhere near it. The closest I got was Sarajevo and Sarajevo is still pretty far from America. When I was there I remember thinking to myself, this is the closest I’ve been to America the whole time. I looked west from Sarajevo but there was a mountain in my way. No Europe, no Atlantic to see. They say there’s a reorientation period, that you have cultural shock. They call it reverse culture shock which is stupid. After being gone this long, culture seems like a very relative thing. It’s ridiculous to say that it’s reversed because you once understood the culture now shocking you. It didn’t happen to me. Not in America, at least not in that disorienting way. Every last volt of culture shock passed through me in Budapest. I wasn’t sure, I thought maybe there’d still be some communist vestiges there, you know? A Pushkin street or an old oxidized sign in Cyrillic somewhere. Nothing. This was a city well within the borders of its own democracy and now well within the borders of Europe. In the Budapest airport, the tourist map I’d found had a restaurant directory by category and there was a vegetarian category. I couldn’t believe it, after years of piroshky, a complete meal. I couldn’t decide if I should eat or find a place to stay first. When I considered how nice it would be able to do anything without the dacha I had on my back, I decided to find a hostel first. Near downtown, I found a backpacker place that looked like some youthful adventure club. All the places I’d stayed over the past couple of years, I’d usually been the only one there. If there were others it was hard to tell. It seemed to be expected that you would never meet. Here it was clearly encouraged. They even had outings planned and pencils dangled from string, making small hatch marks on the paper when the front door opened or closed. “Would you like to sign up for the walking tour?” “No thanks.” The guy at the desk spoke English like it was normal for him to do. I was used to using echolalia and word salad techniques to make myself understood and it was almost difficult not to interrupt him and ask him to speak slower. When I taught English, a lot of the kids would explain to me that they had already studied German. They explained this patiently in their own language. ‘Sorry, buddy, I’ve already started my third language [The native language and Russian being their first and second]. Can’t start over again and learn English this time. Wish I could, but German’s already in there taking up all the room.’ Then I would turn to them with paternal ‘sprechen sie deutsch?’ The poor kids, they would immediately respond with ‘da’ because they were almost hard-wired that way. I would repeat it ‘da?’ Realizing their mistake they would scramble to correct it, but often found that they did not know what the German word for ‘yes’ was. I would restate my offer to teach them English and at this point, most of the kids accepted it. ‘Parlez-vous francais’ worked the same way. I wondered if this Hungarian guy had ever tried to get out of his English lessons, or did he realize at a young age that he lived in a pluralistic world and not many other people on it spoke Hungarian. I went into my room to lie down. It was a dorm room but there wasn’t anyone else staying in there. At night, that seemed the oddest thing to me. Here was a room crammed full of bunk beds and I was the only person sleeping on one. In the morning, I went for a walk and ate at the first place I saw offering vegetarian food. While I ate, I looked up at the menu. There is was. ‘Vegetarian.’ It actually said it on the menu. I stared in disbelief for a while longer before accepting it and wandering back outside. It was just a word after all, but one that signified such a drastic cultural shift. All day, I walked slowly. There was too much to process: the fast food restaurants, the diverse population, how expensive the metro was, men wearing tennis shoes in public and the obvious rock and roll influence that never made it past the Urals. In the evening, I went back to the hostel and on the way I passed a park. It was filled with young people. Not kids, but people in their twenties that were not married or acting like adults. They drank beer, smoked and laughed out loud. They rode bikes and put their beer bottles in the recycling when they were done with them. I wanted to go up to each one of them and introduce myself. But I remembered that this is a disheartening correlation between places where there are a lot of young people around and places where no one has the slightest interest in you. I was part of the crowd, but I wasn’t. I smoked cigarettes and grinned like a moron at everyone, waiting for someone to come over and ask me what I was doing there. After the first day things got less disorienting. I went to another hostel, known for being a party hostel and became completely confused by the hedonism of the residents. I’m not going to say that I had been forced to live like a saint while I was away, but I hadn’t seen anything like this in a while. The Scottish girl who checked me in had been drunk at 4 in the afternoon and when I had come back in from a long walk around 2 am she was sitting at the bar drinking and laughing. She told me she couldn’t leave. I could see why. By the time I left Budapest, it almost all seemed normal again: different kinds of restaurants, places that took credit cards, police that generally left non-criminals alone. What took me an unexpectedly long time to get over was all the tennis shoes. I took a late-night bus to Italy expecting to be woken up with a flashlight in my face at the Slovenian border and a hard-faced border patrol demanding my dokumenti. Nothing. I didn’t wake up until we were already in Italy. I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t even heard anything on the border. Did we even stop? I continued to travel around Europe like I was visiting some kind of limbo. The starkness of the soviet landscape was nowhere to be found, but neither was there much evidence of American enterprise. There were no clover leaf exchanges, rows of fast food restaurants, large new cars or entire places shrink-wrapped in advertising. I expected to still be surprised by some of these things when I got off the last flight and walked down a once-familiar street. I had gotten as far as Dublin, and my last night there felt like my last night in Philadelphia years before. I killed the day walking around a park and taking pictures of a typically green and overcast Ireland. I tried to walk down to the Martello towers where Joyce used to live, but I got sidetracked and ended up going back downtown. I took pictures of spider webs on wet iron gates and bridges in the distance, not really knowing what else to do. Over two years before in Philadelphia, I was looking at all the pennies shining on Ben Franklin’s grave. Why not old keys? Did these people all confuse Franklin with Lincoln? I walked by the liberty bell late at night, the same self-sufficient copper glow. America: paved in copper. It wouldn’t have drawn the immigrants as well as the gold rumor, but it had more truth. I walked into south Philadelphia, thinking I would go see some live music. I didn’t expect to have the chance again for a long time. I watched a band with keyboards and trumpets for a while, one of those bands that has more members than they seem to know what to do with. I couldn’t get into it and I went back to my room. It was late. I started at my bed and then went back downstairs. I didn’t have a phone anymore. I’d already cancelled the plan. I asked at the front desk where I might find a place to make a call. “Like a pay phone!? I honestly have no idea.” ‘Interesting how people say honestly to mean ‘really’. Gives it a little more ponderousness, I guess.’ I thought to myself after someone else told me maybe all those 7-11s still had payphones in their parking lots. I went to four before I found one that would work. Luckily, Philadelphia, at least the part I was staying in, has a lot of 7-11s. Because I was still in America, I felt like I hadn’t yet made a decision. I could still rescind. I didn’t have to go, but deep down I knew I did. Everyone knew. The call went like this. “Hello.” “Hi.” “I don’t know about this.” “Sure you do.” “Did I make the wrong decision?” “Well, you’ll never know will you?” “…” “I think it’s the only decision you could have made. It’s your decision.” “I don’t think I can do this.” “You’re being melodramatic.” “Yes, but it’s 3 AM, and I’m standing in a 7-11 parking lot making my last American phone call. I’ve barely got anything left to hold on to.” “…” “…” “You don’t know what’s out there yet.” There were a few more encouraging words before I hung up. The diner, the coffee, the drugstore, the bus ride, a giant cemetery outside of queen’s with a smokestack towering over it and a 20 dollar phone card that I bought in La Guardia and never used again and then I left. At first, I thought about it all a lot. On long walks, in the morning in my room, in the afternoon reading outside my host family’s house I would imagine myself returning tearfully to it all. I held on to these fantasies for nearly a year. It was as if I’d left only so I’d be able to return and say I had left and then never have to do it again. Even when it was clear that I would have no right to my former life when I returned, I still held on. It’s hard to stand by while the world changes around you. Usually, you have the comfort of knowing you can do something about it. From where I was, I watched my world change as if I were reading about it in a newspaper. Babies were born, friends moved or died. There was no closure to get from anything. I just watched it happen and hoped that every so often someone would remember me, just remember me; I couldn’t expect them to call. I stood on a bridge that spanned the Liffey, the night before leaving Ireland, unable to really remember all of that. I knew it to be there, but I couldn’t remember it. I tried telling myself, but the words seem to fall away without revealing their meaning. The only thing I wanted was a welcome home. I wanted the stony-faced customs agent at the airport to look up, assume a mild expression and say ‘welcome home,’ like saying thank you. I didn’t want anyone at the airport. I didn’t know how emotional it was going to be, but I wanted the customs guard to welcome me back. I wanted someone impartial to acknowledge what I had done. It was after the first year that I began to accept my situation. I stopped living like I was in exile and started to accept where I was for what it was. I stopped feeling like I was killing time, just waiting to go home. I understood that I lived in this place. I wasn’t visiting it. I had learned a lot of the language and had internalized parts of the culture. After a year, I had finally begun to understand that one day I was going to miss this place too. Once I understood that, there was no more struggle. I had a life here and until I went back, it was completely here. There was no one in the Dublin airport and no one in the Chicago airport when I came back. I really had used up all my culture shock in Budapest. I found I had none left. Once I cleared customs, a taxi driver stopped me by the currency exchange windows. I was trying to exchange a few remaining euro coins. He asked me if I needed a ride. I told him no, but stood there talking to him. He took me through the subjects, weather, sports, his job, evidently looking to kill some time. I talked a little but mostly listened to him. I didn’t have anywhere to go, not right away anyway. Before he walked away, I gave him the euro coins. I don’t know why. I thought maybe he could find some place to exchange them, or give them to his European fares as change. I went outside. I went out into Philadelphia, looking for a pay phone; I went out into San Francisco to go to the library; I went out into the Michigan summers I loved when I was a kid; I went out into an early autumn day outside Chicago’s O’Hare airport. I went out into everything I had ever known and realized that it was no longer the whole object it had once been. I put my bag down, kneeled and put my forehead on the sidewalk and I could already feel it, in the midst of my return, I had already begun to feel what was missing, but I could also feel the sense of returning to something. “Ahhh, here I am,” I mumbled into the sidewalk. Here I am.

The Night is Less than a Day

Ashgabat was the only place where we didn’t need to be accompanied by our tour guide every time we left the hotel. In the capital of Turkmenistan, we were allowed to amble along the parade ground avenues and faux Timurid domed government buildings. We hadn’t been able to do this before, although we had tried. A few days earlier, when the freighter carrying us across the Caspian had docked at Turkmanbashi, we hadn’t expected to be able to enter the country until our tour guide arrived to vouch for our future activities and whereabouts while in Turkmenistan. When everyone else got in the customs line, we sulked on a curb outside, smoking cigarettes and watching our freighter unload the remainder of its cargo from Azerbaijan. We took out our passports and again looked at our Turkmenistan visas, still incredible in their blue-yellow sheen. We reminisced about the afternoon we had returned to the consulate in Yerevan thinking we’d get mummified in red tape and then booted out the door. We were left sitting in the reception area, looking at a copy of the Ruhnama, trying to decide if it would be OK if we picked it up. I had been just about to open up the touted Turkmen Book of the Soul, when the consular services attendant returned with our passports; he held them open to the page where he’d just affixed our visas. It turned out that we weren’t allowed to wait before entering customs and when we were found lounging around, smoking cigarettes in the back we were told sharply in Russian to get inside and go through customs. The whole time we had waited nervously to see if we’d actually be allowed to leave customs unattended. The stamp on our visas was as surprising as the visas themselves had been. Elliot and I walked out the door into the glare of new sidewalks and the oily Caspian and ran toward the town of Turkmenbashi, about 2 KM down the road, convinced that someone would soon discover their mistake and come after us. After having a gun pulled on us by walking into a bank and getting a slap on the wrist from the tourist agency we were in Ashgabat and finally able to look around one of the most cloistered and xenophobic countries in the world. Everywhere I went it was soldiers and monuments. There were no stores, just wide streets with a few government Ladas cruising around. The only civilians to be seen were completely wrapped in scarfs that covered their heads and faces while they cleaned the aforementioned monuments. It was hard to tell if the cleaners wore these scarfs to protect their faces from the sun and the sand blowing in from the Karakum or if they wore them to protect their anonymity in an autocratic country. They must have realized that there was some safety in looking like everyone else on the streets. Everyone was a worker and every worker had the scarfs on, man or woman. It seemed all one needed to do here to pass as a local was to put on fatigues or an day glo orange safety vest and wrap a scarf around your head. I never heard anyone talking so you could expect that no one would question you. I walked around downtown all day. I saw all the golden monuments and an odd unbroken line of brand new hotels, there must have been at least fifteen in a row, where it looked like no one was staying. I couldn’t help but to pity the volunteers and aid workers living out in Turkmenistan. In the former Soviet Union the capital was supposed to be a place where you could find an over-priced jar of peanut butter and speak English with someone while having a ridiculously overpriced beer in a mock-up Irish pub. Ashgabat seemed to be the only capital that was devoid of these things. What would it be like to live in a Turkmen village and come here once a month? It wasn’t a village, but it wasn’t exactly a city either; it was an amalgamation, part Baghdad, part Xanadu, part Gulag Archipelago. It was also boring. I had been wanting to see this place for years, but there wasn’t anyone to talk to and all the buildings were ministries behind armed guards. If I had tried to wander into one of these even the ignorant tourist card would probably not get me off the hook. Nowhere in the world have I felt the same kind of fear that I felt in Ashgabat. I wouldn’t say I was afraid but I was conscious of a fear. It may have not even been my own, but everyone else’s creating a palpable tension. Everywhere else, you fear a dark alley, a riot, a roving gang of armed teenagers, dogs and maybe even explosions. You fear the overt. In Turkmenistan, you didn’t fear so much as you felt the invert. It’s like there was something underground or between the walls that had no rationale that just struck occasionally because that’s all it knew and, of course, what it did when it struck was a complete mystery. Initially, you enjoy being a protagonist in a Kafka novel, but after a while you get hungry and the conspicuous lack of pirozhki stands is probably the most disconcerting thing. It’s almost like Ashgabat is entirely beyond the purview of either communism or democracy. In a way, it looks like an example of what the world would’ve looked like if fascism had won. The only other place in the world I have seen that looks like it is the EUR, a neighborhood that Mussolini designed as a world fascism exposition piece that still exists south of Rome. I don’t remember there being any place to eat there either. All the right angles and the chalk-white marble seem to inform you that you no longer get to decide when or what you’re going to eat. After finding the only place I saw anyone, in a market on the edge of the downtown area, I ate a little then went back to the hotel. I was exhausted. I found Elliot by the pool with a book and a beer. He looked unfazed by Ashgabat’s epiphytic quality. He had seen most of the monuments I had seen, but hadn’t bothered to walk to the outskirts of town, where the place abruptly ended in the desert, giving one the impression that Turkmen nomadic tendencies were still alive and well. Even the capital, at its fringes, gave the impression of a tent city. We went back to our room, showered and laughed some more at the incredible obvious place where the microphone wires had been run through the wall, but unlike the night we had gotten in, we no longer made a joke of sounding like spies. All those blank guarded buildings were too close to the fore of our minds. There was one place open to buy beer. I had never paid so much for beers in the former Soviet Union. I hadn’t been ripped off too badly because the price of the beers had been marked. Everywhere else, beer had practically been free, Efes in Azerbaijan, Kazbegi in Georgia and Kilikia in Armenia, all well under a dollar a bottle. It was the same in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan too. Either everyone drank araq (homemade) in Turkmenistan or no one drank, which in this part of the world would be quite a feat. After we drank our beers in the room we decided to go down to the hotel’s disco. There were two bars there, one upstairs and one downstairs. We went to the downstairs one first, but there was hardly anyone there. In the upstairs one we found a few more people, even a guy wearing a yes hay em (I’m Armenian) shirt. Thinking maybe we’d talk to this guy, we decided to stick around. We still had too many notes to compare about our experiences in Ashgabat that day to invite ourselves over to the Armenian guy’s table. The more beers we had, the more ponderous our conversation became. By the time we paid the check, we had agreed that the place had something cold and inalienable about it, but, to be fair, I had gotten the same feeling reading from reading Crime and Punishment and drinking too much back in the states. Elliot laughed at this. True, he said. We paid our exorbitant bill and went downstairs to the disco. Earlier there hadn’t been anyone down here, now it was almost at capacity. I’d already had too much, so I promptly went over to the bar to order another round of beers. Elliot stood on the edge of the dance floor like an uncertain kid standing on the edge of the ice skating rink. When I got the beers and turned back around he was gone. I looked around and found him sitting with some American-looking guys, military by the shape of their hair. There were two girls at the table too, one of them darker, like she could’ve been Turkmen and the other clearly Russian. I put the beers on the table and Elliot introduced me. I could feel the tension from the greetings. One guy was friendly, the other indifferent, but those two girls, those two girls wanted us dead. Either Elliot didn’t notice or, more likely, didn’t care. He was too busy talking to the friendly guy, leaving me to try to coax something out of the indifferent one. Since they were military they were practically hard-wired to regard any question with suspicion. I’ve seldom had such an unamiable conversation partner. Over the noise and russki pop I could hardly hear his monosyllabic answers. After a while I gave up, besides the more I talked to him, the more those two girls glowered at me. One of them kept saying things into the friendly guy’s ear. While she talked her eye brows fluttered up and down with irritation. I was about to wander away from the table when the friendly guy order a round for all of us. The place was so expensive that it felt rude to take my beer and go, so I stayed with the sullen crew, sipping my free beer and looking out at the dance floor like there was actually something interesting out there rather than the spandex-clad and bored-looking prostitutes. On their heels, in the flashing lights they looked spiderish somehow. Both the girls were getting up, they had been angry ever since we had sat down. I guess Elliot and I were bad for business. We had showered earlier, but after traveling for a few weeks, we probably still had that transient look, especially for these girls that were used to the biznezmany who came down here. They’d probably never seen anybody so irresponsibly groomed as Elliot and I. The girls stormed away and although I thought their behavior was vapid and amusing for its naivety, I hadn’t angered anyone so much with my appearance since I was in jr. high. After the army guys left, I finished my beer and realized I was at a threshold. I could either go up to bed now or get another beer and, quite possibly, do something stupid. I was about to go upstairs when I saw the angry girls that we had been sitting with out on the dance floor. They had the same bored looks on their faces and danced in the same uninterested way as everyone else on the floor. I felt choler burning the back of my throat, but I’d had too much to drink to be able to tell if I was actually upset or just felt maudlin. Elliot had wandered off somewhere. I stood there for a moment, tired, drunk and thinking about how quiet it must be out in the city. I am dancing, not just swaying around a little, but dancing like I’m at a punk show, dancing like a complete jerk, bringing my knees up, pistoning my elbows back and forth and shaking my hands like they’re holding maracas and I’m not alone. I’ve managed to wedge myself between the two sneering girls. At first they’re so shocked they don’t know how to react, but gradually their faces take on the same sneers they had on before and their eyes roll. Right in the middle of the song they stop dancing and walk to the other side of the floor where they begin dancing again and I follow them, not making it obvious at first, but soon, I’m right between them again, flailing around, acting completely oblivious. I’m trying not to laugh as they cross the floor yet again and I find myself dancing their way. These girls are so icy and I’m such a ragged bum, I can’t believe that I’m the only one that sees the humor in this, but then I think of the humorless city outside. I think of all those empty hotels and that revolving golden statue of Turkmenbashi. I think about the fascist architecture and the lack of any place to eat. I leave the sneering prostitutes alone. I don’t see Elliot anywhere so I go back up to the room. There’s no one there either. I get a glass of water and walk over to the window. I open it and there is nothing, no sound, just a gust of desert wind, it is bathwater warm. I finish my water in a gulp and lie down on the bed. I am lying there listening to the silence outside when I notice the microphone wire in the wall again. “You can hear me, right?” “It’s not funny, you know,” I say against the warm silence coming in the window. “It’s not funny at all.” The last word almost seems to echo. I roll over on my side and feel myself falling asleep. “Yeah.”

Goop

I’m so mad I can’t even finish any of my expletives. “Mother—,God—,Sonofa—” Then it trails into a cacophonic scrape, up from the top of my lungs, pushing against throat the whole way up.”Uuuuggghhhhh!” An inhuman noise, a sound from the Neanderthals stretched over millions of years. It’s the sound of a five gallon bucket of hummus falling over in the back of my truck. I’m always in a hurry; I can’t help it, the deliveries all have deadlines, even when I have all the time I need, I’m in a hurry. I want to get past all the other damn cars. I don’t want to wait while this guy takes a left up here. This old guy is taking way too long; I want to rear-end him for breaking when there’s no one there. That lady went right through that four-way stop. I want to hold back the impulse to break and let her run into me so that everyone will say that I had the right-of-way. I want to get around all of this, despite the fact that I know I will never get out of it. It’s like having a huge meal in front of you and trying to eat faster so you won’t get full. Racing through traffic doesn’t help anything. In the city, there is going to be traffic and even when you get around some of it, there’s going to be more. Nonetheless, I try to drive past it hoping that at least it will thin out a little. I don’t drive like a lunatic, in fact, by the city’s standards, I drive in a fairly mild way. I don’t cut people off, very often and I don’t floor the pedal when I get mad. I don’t even honk the horn, not that it would do any good. I only go a little fast sometimes and usually this doesn’t upset anything, but you’ve got to remember that my job is to transport food and I’ve got boxes of 100 dollar platters stacked up in the back of the truck. With every sudden depression of the gas they go sliding toward the back. If I break on a hill they come bearing down on me. All day long the food in the back of my truck is sloshing back and forth, usually with no ill effect. If the food sloshes with consistency it’s fine. If suddenly there should be a quick gravitational pull on it from one direction or the other, the food may be salvageable. If someone slams on their breaks in front of me, the food is probably not going to be in a condition to fetch its high price tag. When you are driving fast it’s difficult to keep gravity from infringing too harshly on the food in the back of the truck. The force can be somewhat subdued by boxes and with anything that could be used as padding. Sometimes, it seems to work just as well to leave things up to chance. What you may have carefully packed could tip over while the order you tossed on the bed of the truck had a center of gravity low enough to stay put. I try to consider how I’m packing everything, but there’s usually way too much on my mind. I’m lucky if everything makes it into the truck regardless of where it is. Sometimes, I forget to pack things. Sometimes, I forget to feed the meter, or the wheels might not be curbed. The only time I ever owned a car was for about three months in high school. I have no idea what I’m doing with this job. I enjoy the work though. After my last job working as a traveling actor, it’s nice to work alone. I always wanted to be a delivery boy, ever since the first Ninja Turtles movie wherein the turtles befriend a pizza delivery boy. I don’t expect to meet the Ninja Turtles delivering Mediterranean food, but maybe I’ll meet their Middle Eastern equivalent, the Morphed Marrakech Monkeys or something. Driving around, listening to music, however, doesn’t have the same appeal it did when I was 14. I cannot seem to listen to any CD more than 20 times and when I began to notice what radio stations play what song at what time, I started listening to NPR. So, in addition to driving too fast I’m also arguing with the radio all the time. I guess the arguing would be OK, but I tend to gesture a lot when I argue so my hands are very often leaping off the steering wheel, flapping around the radio and generally not anywhere near ten and two. It’s Saturday, I had to turn around before doing my delivery and drive across town because I forgot to drop off a five gallon bucket of hummus. I’m arguing with Lach Mi Sing (I’m spelling that phonetically) on the radio, going down a hill and I’m in a hurry. It’s Saturday so everyone else is out kind of putting around and getting mad at anyone who isn’t putting around, especially in the neighborhood where the restaurant is where no one ever seems to work anyway. The street is narrow and there’s unbridled parking on either side. Cars stop in the middle of the street when they hear a car freeing up a parking space three blocks away. If the parking spot that’s opening up is anywhere nearby five cars will suddenly redirect from wherever they are on the street and charge to this spot. It’s interesting to watch their faces, while they gun for the spot they look like they have the whiney faces of petulant children, but as soon as they move into a position from which they are assured the spot their faces resume the placid look of Saturday and they gently ease the car into the spot. A guy seems about to leave his spot down the hill, since he’s not moving I assume that he’s waiting for me to go by so he can reposition his car. I slow down, but not enough. Just as I’m about to pass the inattentive slob, he pulls right out in front of me. I slam on the breaks and while my reaction prevents the cars crashing it causes another crash as the five-gallon bucket of hummus flops the hell over in the back. While you might think that hummus is delicious when you’re eating it, when five gallons of it are draining out of a bucket all over your car it’s nothing but stinky goop. That’s right. It’s a damn smelly goop. From my standpoint, it wouldn’t have been much worse if a bag of medical waste exploded back there. “God—,mother—,UUUUUGGGHHHHH!” The guy pulling out of the spot smiles at me in such an idiotic way I have no idea what message he could be trying to convey. He looks at me like he’s just farted and I’m the only other one that noticed. Before he’s done driving away, I’m pulled over, with my hazard lights on, trying desperately to upright the bucket in the back of the truck. Oh, god, it’s all over the seats, it’s all over my order, it’s oozed down under the console, the damn smelly goop is everywhere! I’m able to keep about 1/3 or it from globbing out of the bucket. I feel like hurdling the accursed bucket into the street, but I keep my cool long enough to call my boss and make an ass out of myself by explaining what just happened to the hummus that he could’ve sold for hundreds of dollars. He tells me just to bring over what’s left. As I’m driving to deliver the remains of the hummus, I’m so angry that I keep unconsciously pushing down on the accelerator and grinding my teeth. The back of the truck is awash in hummus. I’m afraid to look back there, but I can smell it. That starchy garlicky smell reminds me of something that’s gone bad sitting in the back of the refrigerator, some abysmal Tupperware horror. As I drive faster, the hummus becomes more redolent, choking out the fresh air with its mephitic swells. When I stop to deliver the dumped hummus bucket, it doesn’t seem so bad. Yeah, it’s all over the car, but it looks like the bucket’s still about half-full. At least I managed to deliver something. I was worried that in addition to the mess I was going to have to drive across town to deliver an empty bucket. My disappointment resurges when I try to wipe some of the hummus off the bucket, not even that much, and end up with the stuff smeared all over my hand. It’s like glue and cottage cheese mixed together. It adheres to my pores, it crawls up under my nails and I’ve barely touched the stuff. There’s a huge pool of the stuff in the back of the truck. Its seeping under the front seat where the seat connects to the floor in these depressions. The hummus has pooled in these depressions and I know that I’m not going to be able to get it out of there without taking the damn seats out. The only way I can think to clean this stuff out is to take a fire hose to the interior of the car. I can’t think about this much though; I’ve got to get back to the delivery I started before all this hummus nonsense came up. When I get there, I’ve got to spend about another fifteen minutes scraping the hummus off the bags the order is tied up in. Luckily, everything is in bags, if not, I probably would’ve had to throw out the whole order. I scrape off enough of the hummus so that it won’t drip everywhere and when I do the delivery, I take the bags off as soon as possible and crumble them up before the customers can see that everything is covered is a maize-yellow garlicky funk. When the delivery is finished, I drive back to the restaurant with my head out the window. The sun has hit the hummus now and the smell is almost a tangible thing, like gravy floating through the air in tiny particles. I get a bowl, some water and a bunch of rags from the kitchen. None of it is any good. The water rolls right off the stuff without thinning it out, one swipe with the rags and somehow I’ve got hummus behind my ears; you so much as look at the stuff and it gets everywhere. Because it’s a goop, it has a very low rate of absorption. It’s not like a liquid that the rags would absorb, but neither is it like a solid that could just be picked up. It spreads out like pancake batter on a hot pan, instantly coating and sticking to everything. Using the rad to clean it is like using a scrap of wallpaper to clean wet paint. Because I am in front of the restaurant, and the truck has the restaurant’s logos all over it, everyone who goes by knows what happened; again, it’s Saturday and there’s lots of people out walking around. Almost everyone that passes me makes some kind of comment like “whoa, hummus spill,” or “wish I had some falafel for that.” Actually no one made that last comment. I may have laughed at that. The comments were all so mundane, that I couldn’t tell if they were supposed to be sympathetic or if everyone was making fun of me. The people making these comments didn’t seem to know either. They just said meaningless things as they walked by and I smeared the goop around in my car. I cleaned it up as best as I could, and luckily no one mentioned the incident again. I still haven’t forgotten it though. I couldn’t possibly. Every morning I punch in and get the car, hoping that the smell of rotting hummus somewhere under the seats hasn’t gotten any worse. Unfortunately, it always has.

Flowers all Year

Tata Simonyan is playing in the restaurant. It’s the first time I’ve heard it playing anywhere since Armenia. There is an abrupt feeling of disinterest, probably caused by the lack of sleep and too much coffee. I feel irritable. I would like to walk out of here, have a cigarette and come back all over again. The deliveries have to go out; there’s no time. I package all the orders together and bring around the van. The music in the restaurant keeps changing: Tata, Devochka, Beirut, Parisian rap. When I come back in from getting the van Tata is on again. It makes me slightly happier to hear than it did when I first came in. This is the music that I recommended. Hearing it makes me feel like I’m being listened to. I take a cup of coffee with me for the orders. Outside, San Francisco is lapped by waves. I can see them from Broadway; I can hear them making that indolent *chok, chok, chok* sound when I do my second delivery on the Embarcadero. The sun is out. People don’t pay much attention to me during the morning route. Someone else has already arraigned, they presume. It’s easiest when I’ve been a place before. I can walk in and set everything up without exchanging a word with anyone. That’s what people seem to prefer. When you’ve got to ask questions you’re bothering people. Park the car, sign-in at the door, take the elevator up twenty flights, set up the food in the break room. When the food is set up, I always take a second to step back and glance at it, to make sure everything is right. It looks good like this: untouched. This, rather than feeding people, seems to be the most important aspect of my job. I make my way back out of the office building, moving quickly with a few empty bags dragging from me. I thank the receptionist. She thanks me. From the moment I enter an office, it take about 4 minutes to set up a medium-sized order. Back down on the street, I toss the empty bags in the car. The deliveries are done, but the smell of food is still strong. The restaurant supply store is on the south end of town, in an industrial area where the streets are gravelly and worn away. At the door, I select one of the massive carts. It seems almost all of them have a defect of some kind. It’s not until the cart is weighed done with hundreds of pounds of wholesale items that the defect is noticed: an uneven wheel that makes the cart bounce, a slight bend in the frame that puts all the weight on the back while the front wheels hang two useless inches from the ground, making it almost impossible to steer. Today, I’ve got one of the bouncing carts. The non-refrigerated parts of the store are fine. Cardboard has a soothing smell to it and there’s a cathedral silence to the place—must be the high ceilings. No matter how well I’m dressed for it, the refrigerated part is always cold. It seems like an aberration that a place inside should be so cold. It looks just like the rest of the store, only it’s cold and gruesome. There’s a big box that reads: “Special! Half-goat.” Inside the box are about seven vaguely anthromorphic forms wrapped completely in gauze. It looks like a box of child-sized mummies. A whole isle is devoted to beef. Each piece is evenly cut and wrapped in cling wrap. It looks like a wall is being built of blood and muscle. I look at the list. “5 leg meat, 1 breast halal.” The chicken is shelved in waxed cardboard boxes. Despite the cold, some of them are very damp. The water and blood beads on top of the boxes. The beads roll off when the boxes are moved. After moving five boxes over my hands are damp. I look for the halal breast. I don’t see it. I cross the section: “thigh, leg, drumstick, wing, necks and parts,” no breasts. I find them. They’re all above me, on a shelf right over my head. I’m getting cold; I want to get them and leave this freezer. I reach up. The handle cut into the box is a little soggy. It’s hard to really get purchase with it. I pull the box over the little lip at the end of the shelf. To do this I bounce it up, ready to catch it when it comes back down on the other side of the lip. The box comes down, half on the shelf, half off, part of it angling down to me. There is a sound like large maraca being shaken and the box begins to disgorge its contents. My arm shoots up to steady the box balancing on the edge of the shelf and moves right into the sluice of fat, ice and blood that is pouring out of the box. I try to shake the box off the shelf so it will no longer be angled down at me, but it’s stuck on the lip. There must be about five pounds of slushy blood in there. The icy part is burning my palm, my wrist. The liquid part is running down my shirt. It goes down my arm, into my armpit and drains down my side, into the waist of my pants. When I get the box down, my hand is slippery with ice and fat and the cold blood had spread across my chest like an external circulatory system, soaking all of my undergarments. There is blood on my shoes and on my hands. I can feel it chafing my shirt against me. My arm is so soaked in blood that I have to roll up the sodden sleeve. Within seconds, my blood-wet and exposed arm is bitingly cold in the freezer room. I pick another box of chicken quickly and walk out. I through the checkout and pay for everything still soaked with blood. There is a wash station in the parking lot and after I’ve loaded everything up I scrub from both my elbows down like a surgeon. I don’t expect that it’ll do much good because I’ve got so much blood soaked into my clothes. In the San Francisco wind, my wet clothes are already feeling cold. I drive back across town to the restaurant. All I have to do is unload the truck, find a place to park and then I can go home and shower. On the drive, I keep my wet right arm out in the window in hopes that it will dry off a little. The restaurant is busy as it usually is for lunch. Luckily, the lighting is dim and my clothes are dark. The blood cannot be seen. When everything from the restaurant supply store is unloaded, I check the delivery sheet. There are about six more for the day. I’ll have to be back here for the next one at three. It’s already two. I’m not going to have time to go home and take a shower. I can feel the blood beginning to dry stickily underneath my shirt. I go and wash my hands again. There’s a park near the restaurant. I go there every day for lunch. I eat and watch the people walk by with their dogs. I know some of the dog’s names. One of them is named ‘nacho.’ I can’t hear that dog’s name without laughing. When the dogs are gone, I watch the buildings and the sun behind them. I look at the houses across from the park and wonder what they would be like to come home to. It’s uncomfortable to be outside in the wind, but the blood seems to be drying little by little. When my lunch is finished, I’m thankful to be able to get back in the car and do some deliveries to warm myself up. After a couple more cups of coffee and a few deliveries downtown, I’ve almost forgotten about the blood. The last delivery of the night brings me back downtown. It’s late, so there’s not too many people still out. I find a parking place right in front of the building, which is nice because the order is large. I’ve got to set everything on a cart. The porter downstairs is a larger guy, very jovial. He talks to me, not like the 304th delivery driver he’s seen that day, but like someone he’s actually interested in. He reads the name of the restaurant off my shirt. “What is that? Italian?” I tell him what kind of restaurant it is. “Ahhh. I see. Now what’s your name?” He’s writing all this down on his sign-in sheet. I tell him my name, spelling my last name. He reads it aloud, pronouncing the double ‘L’ as though it were Spanish, the way they did sometimes in Argentina. I correct him and tell him to pronounce the ‘L’s. “What kind of name is that, Catalan?” I tell him what kind of name it is. Almost wishing it was Catalan just because his guess was so specific and narrow. Upstairs, the workers of the tech. firm are forming a line while I’m setting everything up. They are all watching me, one man, set up all their food. They talk among themselves, but really they are watching, waiting for me to finish, cursing me for taking so long. When I am done, they move immediately on the food. No one thanks me. I have come and gone almost unnoticed. Back downstairs, the porter breaks off his conversation with someone to say goodnight to me. He even uses my name, glancing down to read it off of his sheet. I park the car off the meter and take out my bags, a few of them have accumulated over the day’s work. I have to stuff the smaller bags into the larger to get them to fit. It takes me a while to get everything together. The night is quiet and I walk back to the restaurant slowly. I can tell it’s crowded in there before I go in. The windows are slightly foggy and the yellow light inside is dimmed by the multitude of shadows darting around. A couple walks by me and I hear them quickly decide on a restaurant. “It’s Italian and they’ve got wine,” the young man says. “And you’ve eaten at this place before and like it?” The woman asks. “Yeah, it’s pretty good.” And on that unenthusiastic note, they turn back up the block, most likely heading back to the restaurant they had been discussing. Back in the restaurant, Tata Simonyan is playing again. I walk in with all my bags and a few people look up at me, then they look down again. I brought them this dinner music from the other side of the world, but they don’t know it. It’s a song about California, in the singer’s language he sings: Bright sun, love and happiness Buds and flowers all year Ocean: you do a bad thing You save us, but you won't set us free. (Paytsar arev, sern u barin Tsil u tsaghik amboghj tarin Ovkyanos lav ban ches anum Mez pahel es bats ches toghnum)