Fireworks in the Wind

I got out early, so I went to get the tickets thinking it wouldn’t be too bad. It was early in the day and most people were still working. 

I was going to take the bus, but then I got lazy and decided to ride my bike. This is how it is when you ride a bike all the time; the bus seems like the less comfortable option. With a bus, you’re usually crammed in the back with a bunch of other standing passengers. Besides, you have to walk four blocks to the stop, wait about 20 minutes for the thing to show up and when it does the driver is surly tempered and in a hurry. No. It’s easier just to ride your bike. You don’t have to deal with anyone that way.

When I got outside and saw all the cars jammed into the street and idling, I was glad I had chosen not to wait for the bus. I hopped on my bike and began to maneuver through the gridlocked traffic. Behind me I could hear motorcycles also maneuvering between the traffic, but in a much more cumbersome way.

The traffic was terrible everywhere. I rode over to Avenida Ayala which is a death trap. The concrete is laid out in massive slabs. The slabs are broken and no longer flush. At the seams where the slabs meet, they sit at different heights. It’s not much to a car, but on a bike a sudden drop or raise in the concrete by half a foot can mean a pretty bad fall if you’re not paying attention. There’re also partially destroyed manhole covers that have been hastily stuffed with a few long sticks to advertise them as hazardous and the cars are always blasting by like they’re all carrying pregnant women who’ve gone into labor. I rode most of the way standing up. The misaligned concrete slabs and the gummy waves of asphalt tar that had been pushed to the shoulder of the street, like padding in an old mattress, kept the bike hopping up and down. It was easier to control without sitting down and taking the shock of every bump and dip into my lower back.

Down Ayala, everything is oily and broken. Battered wrecks sit outside mechanics’ garages, leaking oil and shedding crystal pebbles of broken windshield glass. Further along, more conservative businesses crop up, but the atmosphere of wreckage pervades, the parking areas and scant sidewalks look shattered. When there is any grass, it grows in a crooked yellow way and just makes everything look more broken. Every horizontal surface is covered with a layer of downy black grime.

I turned right onto Avenida Argentina and began riding up hill. Behind me, the old buses roared and rattled down the street, heading in the general direction of the bus terminal, their diesel looseness rattling, wet and hollow like a deep sleep apnea snore that tugs at the air and cries it backwards into the lungs. On both sides of the median, the dog-whistle-high squeak of taught brakes sounded again and again as innumerable feet leap up from and stomped back down on the floor pedals.

Not long ago, Avenida Argentina was a cobblestoned street. The cobbles weren’t taken up but paved over. After the years of traffic, the tar from the asphalt has begun to mold itself around the honeycomb shape of the cobbles. In places where the tar was spread too thinly, it is like there’s no asphalt at all and the spaces between the cobbles are wide enough to ripple under the bike’s tires like choppy water under the hull of a quickly moving boat.   

I arrived at the bus terminal around 4:30. Some passengers, traveling for the holiday weekend, had already made it there with their bulging plastic burlap sacks and were sitting in tired piles with their feet splayed out in front of them. Others were lining up to buy tickets. Several companies were selling tickets to Pilar. I had read that the Pilarense bus was slow and uncomfortable. Having had my diverse experiences at this point with slow and uncomfortable buses, I tried the other companies first.

“Pilar? You want the Pilarense company. Two windows over.”

“Yeah we’re going to Pilar. You want to leave when? Oh, try Pilarense over there.”

“We’re sold out, but I think Pilarense’s got seats left.”

At the Pilarense window, the kid had a rosary tattooed around his wrist. The inked beads crawled up and down his arm like an impressive line of grey moles, holding up a crucifix. I asked him if there was anything for the evening. He told me yes. At 11:00 o’clock there would be a bus leaving. 

“Anything coming back on Friday?” I asked. “No,” he said without looking up. “Nothing coming back on Friday.” He seemed to think for a second and then added “nothing at all,” as if to quash any doubt. I went to another window. The company had a bus returning Friday, but nothing leaving today. I bought tickets to leave and decided to do the rest later, it was getting dark and I had forgotten the light for my bike. The pre-holiday traffic could be heard dog whistling, snoring and dragging all over town. I put my headphones back on and started out into the mess.

Heading towards Lopez from the bus terminal, the condition of the road was much worse. Cauldron-sized potholes had blended into the asphalt by filling up with black water. The headlights shined off them in an eerie way, like the light was spreading through them from some distant underwater source. The reflected light betrayed them and I managed to avoid falling into any potholes. Closer to home, in Villa Mora, the traffic was locked up again. The car engines idled uselessly under stationary hoods, occasionally kicking out irritable-sounding cooling fan blasts. “RUUUUUUGGGGHHHHHHH.” I rode down the shoulder, hoping no one would open their door.

The further I rode down the street the heavier the traffic became. At the intersections, cars were frozen in pointless configurations and the drivers blared their horns as if hoping that the sound would somehow blast the other cars out of their way. I tried to find solace on a side street, but the traffic had spread out like water seeking its own level. No matter which obscure turns I took, the engines were there chugging along, the taillights seething red and angry in the dark and the stereos clapped and whoomped their polka beats as if excited by the chaotic scene.

Despite all the noise and oily exhaust and the smell of the dead water in the potholes, the drivers leaned out the windows with bored expressions on their faces. Every car on the street, disclosed another tired and impatient-looking person, but they all looked at home in the mess. The drivers looked out their windows with the disinterest of someone looking at a mediocre doodle they did while talking on the phone. They recognized it and felt nothing. Sometimes they honked, but I saw the faces of those that had honked; they were completely unaware of having done anything.  

I came off the side street back on to Avenida Lopez. The traffic was being held back by police who were letting a motorcade go by. Amongst the traffic being held back was an ambulance with its lights flashing. The motorcade consisted of seven or eight motorcycle cops and a coach bus that sped through the intersection. I went through the intersection after the bus and, for some reason, I started to ride as fast as I could. I rode up Lopez with the sirens rising and falling from the motorcade with a wall of smoldering taillights before me and the gusting sound of several motorcycles steering quickly between cars. There was music playing in my headphones, but I didn’t have the patience to listen to it.

I broke away from the traffic and turned onto a two-way street. One lane was blocked and, as often happens, a Jeep had pulled out and was driving in the lane of oncoming traffic. Since there were no other cars, I was the only oncoming vehicle, the only obstacle. TheJeep didn’t slow down, and I continued as before, steering into the middle of the lane in attempt to assert my right to the space. I rode toward the boxy headlights, feeling like I couldn’t allow myself to be pushed out. This was a two-way street. I should’ve had a lane. I didn’t want to have to pull off the road just because I was on a bike. I hardly cared if I got hit, I just wanted to make my point. The bastard made no move to even slow down and at the last minute I snapped out of martyr mode and ceded the lane to the Jeep. He roared past. Behind the dark windshield, I never saw anything of the driver, just headlights.

I got back to my apartment sweaty and disorientated. I took a shower and got a Coke out of the fridge. I just sat down when I heard the muffled concussive sound of fireworks. I ignored it for a while but it continued: light pops and deep explosions, they came fast and the sounds piled up on top of each other, like when people applaud over a drum solo. I went to the window to see and caught the tail end of the Independence Day fireworks display. The last few great explosions left the ghostly imprint of withered grey lilies drifting across the sky. Down in the street, the horns began to quaver again and the engines rumbled and whirred and the stereos made bassy gulping sounds. On the next street over, the cars hurrying over the cobbles made sounds like the tide pulling back from a rocky beach.  

I stood on my balcony for a while, watching the traffic pile up. The engines ticked and rolled and the cooling fans sighed angrily on the street below. From overhead, it all looked absurd.      

We took the overnight bus that night. We were lucky to have picked a bus that didn’t play any movies. All night long, we drove through southern Paraguay in a fog of snores and holiday booze-breath. Nothing could be seen from the windows except the golden orbs of street lights which shone through the tinted windows in rapid succession as we passed through each town and then trailed back off into the night. I couldn’t sleep, nor could I stay awake. Each light weighed on my eyelids, forcing me to squint out the window, wonder vaguely where we were and roll over back into non-sleep.

I don’t know if I had been awake or if the light woke me up but I was sitting up and the horizon was lavender-grey as we passed under a Bienvenidos a Pilar sign. I stretched as if waking up and watched the fog-colored scenery drift under the windows.

The bus station was still dark. A single guard stood in front of the place with a stoic look on his face. I imagined the interior of the building being lit up with the glowing fronts of vending machines, but when we got off the bus, I saw that behind the locked gate there was only darkness.

We walked out of the parking lot. The sun was still just under the horizon. Something careened over us. “It’s an owl,” Gina said. And we turned to watch the progress of the squat bird. Two other birds were silhouetted on a nearby roof top. I pointed them out. “There are lots of owls around here,” Jeremy said. And we slowed our walk a little. The owls had returned a sense of strangeness to the place. Getting off the bus, it was easy to just assume it was another town in Paraguay with cobblestone streets and pharmacies shaded by billowing green mango trees. The owl had disrupted this idea from fully taking shape. I had never seen owls anywhere else in Paraguay.

We went down to the coastanera that ran along the river. In the dim light we could see there was very little trash. There were none of the metallic-sounding, tropical birds of the north and the river could be heard trickling through the weeds along the banks.  My face felt dry and stiff after the long bus ride and the cool air coming off the river was refreshing. We sat down by the water for a while, each of us retreating into our own contemplation of the morning. The sun came up through the clouds and the light on the river grew a lighter grey. In the distance, a marching band was warming up and flatulent brass honking occasionally stirred the river from its drifting reverie.

There was a parade for Independence Day. We went down to the main plaza and stood with our bags and slept-in clothes in a great ruffled pile amongst the little girls with ribbons in their hair and white knee socks that ran with tufts of cotton candy in their hands. No one paid us much attention. We lined up to watch the parade and were soon engulfed in a troupe of drumming majorettes that rapped out the same beat incessantly. The brass came in for a few shaky bars of Yellow Submarine and then nothing. The snares rapped and the bass drums boomed. The drummers were tight-lipped, staring straight ahead, twirling their drumsticks with precision between measures and constantly beating out rrrap—rrrap—rrrap-tap-tap. The horns went back up and a shaky Ode to Joy flubbered out. The drums and the horns together sounded like a very precise artillery shooting at a bunch of squawking loons. The horns dropped down again and a smiling group of grandmothers walked passed waving. Then nothing, just the drums. The horn players, who had looked so serious before, were beginning to grin a little, some fingered their values distractedly and others let go of all restraint and looked around wildly like they had just joined the crowd of spectators. The drums continued rapping out the same beat. We went off to get coffee. There was a place down the street with plastic tables and chairs on the sidewalk. A man in an apron served us instant coffee from a huge pot that he left on the table. We drank from tea cups with small plates as saucers. I drank the stuff until my stomach hurt. It was the usual thing.

We ambled around town the rest of the day, walking along the river bank and going around behind the cotton mill which has always been the town’s largest industry. At the end of the day, we were back on the river, in the same place we had been sitting that morning watching the sun come up.

We returned to our host’s and sat on a freakishly large balcony drinking wine and watching the night fall over the quiet town.  Large white birds wheeled in the sky overhead, the lights of the town glowing under their wingspans. Some of us said they were owls. Others disagreed but offered no further comment about else might be swooping around in the dark.

After the wine, we were all falling asleep and so decided to go off looking for an ice cream place that Jeremy remembered as being exceptional. He remembered the place being nearby and we went down the block looking for it. The first place we came to was not the right one. We walked on passing another place that was also not the right one. At the next corner, Jeremy went up to ask a group of men standing in front of a shop if they knew one. “Yes,” they told us. They did. One of the men’s cousin’s owned a place. Where were we from? Ahh yes. Well, he’d take us there. As we walked, the man talked to Jeremy about the town and life in it. He talked about the difficulty of finding work and how basically life was good, but, as one could see, slow and predictable, which was to say he liked it. Everyone who lives in slow and predictable places and talks about how the places are slow and predictable with visiting strangers will admit to liking the slowness and the predictability, if pressed.

We arrived in front of the cousin’s ice cream shop. We thanked the man and he went back the way he had come. Jeremy said it still wasn’t the one he was looking for. “It had a green sign.” He insisted and we went off looking for a green sign. We walked a few blocks before accosting a couple sitting in front of a rustic convenience store, with the appearance of a rural bait shop in the US. They pointed us back the ice cream shop we had come from. We mentioned the green sign. “Green sign?” They pondered. “Oh yes, El Tropi. Five blocks straight and one to the left.” We thanked them and went off nearly skipping. Of course this El Tropi was certainly the place. But as we began to draw near, I realized that we were back were we had started at the first ice cream shop. We circled the block making sure there was no mistake. When we walked past the one where we had started, I checked the name. “El Tropical,” I said pointing. This was it. Jeremy still balked, swearing the one he was looking for must be nearby, but we were no longer convinced it still existed and he admitted that he wasn’t either, so we decided to go into El Tropi.

The place was too big on the inside. The ice cream freezers were pushed back into one corner of the room in an ‘L’ shape and a few tables and chairs did what they could to fill in the resulting emptiness, but there was still a great amount of tile, light and ceiling empty and shining. A girl and an old man stood behind the freezers. The girl stood attentively and the grandpa liked an ice cream cone with a distracted air, more like he was smoking a cigarette than eating ice cream. When we approached the counter it was gramps who greeted us first and then the girl came forward, shyly, to take our orders. I asked if they had helado al agua, the water-based fruit sorbet that’s fairly common in ice cream shops in Latin America. Even in smaller towns they usually keep the lemon flavor on hand for anyone who wants it. The girl seemed confused by the question. She blushed a little and looked to the man who was lustily licking his ice cream cone. “Huh?” He asked, when he saw that his help was needed. I repeated my question. “No,” he said. He didn’t have any. It would be hard to find around here. Jeremy took advantage of the confusion and began drilling the man about the existence of the place with the green sign. Gramps continuing licking and shrugged. He waved at the ice cream freezer and offered us a free cone, surrendering to our bizarre requests the only hospitable way he knew.  We thanked him but told him we were only looking for al agua, although we appreciated his offer. He repeated again that it would be hard to find. We thanked him again and walked out of the monumental place with its vast tile floor gleaming like an empty dance floor.  

Outside, we weren’t sure what to do and just started walking, perhaps with the intent of looking a little more, perhaps with the intent of turning in for the night. A yell came from behind us. I turned to see gramps, who had finished his ice cream cone, waving us back over. He said something about another place and while we stood there waiting for more explanation, he waved us over to a car. We piled in the back seat. “What’s going on?” someone asked. “I think he’s taking us to another ice cream place.” We were introduced to his nephew, who got behind the wheel and we took off.

We stopped for gas about a block away, which made me wonder just how far we were going. After we got the gas, we drove out of town over the bridge from which we’d seen the sun come up that morning. On the other side there were a few dim stores, most illuminated by a single lightbulb outside. We stopped before a place called Bambino’s, an ice cream place. We piled out of the car like kids after basketball practice. Bambino’s also had a shy girl working behind the counter. The scene replayed itself. “Helado al agua?” I asked. The girl was confused. An older woman working behind the counter, apparently more accustomed to such absurd questions, answered for the young girl. “No,” she said, “everything has milk.” I looked up and noticed that one of the sizes on the menu was labeled piccole. Since the place had been called Bambino’s, I asked if anyone spoke Italian. The girl just blushed again. The woman shrugged. The menu also offed popsicles, I didn’t really want one, no one did, but we bought them anyway. They were less than a quarter each. I grabbed a green one. It was the first mint popsicle I’ve ever had.

When we got back in the car, gramps had his nephew drive us over to see his summer house. It was down by the river and its dark windows seemed to reflect the choppy water. He told us he would have his granddaughter’s 15^th birthday at this house. The road we went over was rutted from the rains and as we drove, the car rocked gently back and forth. Gramps looked out the window and seemed to be imagining his granddaughter in one of those massive white dresses. We came up from the river bank and crossed the bridge. Gramps asked us where we were going and we told him just to drop us off at his ice cream place. We had no plans, and it seemed like as good a place as any.

When we got out we all shook hands. I asked the grandpa if his ice cream shop had coffee, hoping maybe we could repay his kindness by buying something the next day, but he only shook his head, probably leery in case I was now asking him to drive me to a café. We thanked him again and walked away. We left the next day without realizing we’d forgotten to go back and see him. I didn’t remember until we passed Bambino’s on the other side of the bridge, which looked like a place that had been closed for years.

A Long Time away from the American Wild

The rug is slightly bunched up on the white floor. The plants are green shoots struggling out of their cans and clay-colored pots. The empty couch seems a hulking and meaningless object. I haven’t been alone in this apartment for nearly two months. It’s good that it’s been so long. It’s too easy to get acclimated to being alone. You turn inside yourself and watch the world as though it were something that had no bearing on you.

I flew back to Paraguay one of the last days of January. I was scheduled to start work again the 3^rd of February and didn’t want to wait, so I e-mailed my program in Washington and asked them to book me a flight. They sent me a ticket within a day. I received it in a faded hotel next door to a European train station. Outside, the weather was grey and rainy. I packed up everything and left the musty hotel the same day, by that night I was over the Atlantic in the dark. There was lightening in the distance and over the dark oceanic expanses, it seemed to light up the entire horizon.

When I got back to my apartment, I found that the plants were all dead. I could smell their death throes. One of the pepper plants had been baked into the sliding glass door that it stood next to, the other plants in the shower looked like a pile of autumn that had blown in from somewhere. Never before had I seen so many brown leaves in such a verdant country. Outside, everything was in riotous bloom. The parrots squawked in the mango trees and the yellow and red guava fruits were lazily rotting in the warm haze of summer. My apartment looked like Michigan in early November, before the snows come. Even the white floor tiles were cool when everything outside was roiling in tropical humidity.

I cleaned out the apartment and within days I set to work on a new project the Embassy had handed down to me. They asked that I create a curriculum for an online English class. I had begun work on this project before going on vacation but with dismay I realized that there was still a lot that had to be finished. I probably wasn’t even half-way done. The Embassy had given me leave from my other jobs to finish the curriculum; all I had to do was sit around in my underwear writing out activities that would require knowledge of the present perfect or simple past. Initially, I was fine with the task. I had to sit in front of the computer all day, but it wasn’t so bad work with the heat and humidity outside. 

Going outside, you could actually feel the sun burning you. It was so humid it felt like someone had doused you with burning mud. Every time I came back in from the smallest task outside I had to change all my clothes and take a shower. I got sick of doing laundry and started wearing a bathing suit at home. It was much easier to wash.

I was desperately trying to get as much work done as possible before Mikey came into town. I hadn’t seen my old friend since I had dropped him off in Missoula nearly two years earlier. We had taken a road trip through the mountains together and he had elected to part ways in Montana to head east while I went back to California. It was a true Kerouac moment, but without all the Benzedrine and crazy American night jazz talk. Right after we dropped him off, Gina and I passed a series of billboards for some kind of gargantuan used bookstore which made his recent departure almost tangible. We drove on in silence. I realized I was waiting for him to say something. It felt like that until well in Idaho.

I was thinking about all of this as I typed out exercises in the muddy late summer heat. I stopped drinking coffee because it was distracting me. For a week, I was working like a machine. By the time Mikey got into town, I felt I had done enough to take a break.

I worked until five or six the day Mikey was to arrive and then went out to skate a little. The last bus to the airport went by around 9:30 and Mikey’s flight was coming in a little later. Waiting for someone at the airport always makes me feel anxious as hell, so I went skating to try to wear myself out before going there.

I missed the bus and ended up having to take a cab. Nothing ever seems to be on time at the Asuncion airport. I found out after I got there, that Mikey’s plane was scheduled to get in about three hours late. I had nothing to do. I hadn’t even brought a book with me. I went out and crossed the highway to buy a beer at the gas station across the street. Luckily, Asuncion’s airport is not situated in some immense and impersonal concrete highway-scape. Just outside the small parking lot, the land is like any other land in Paraguay. The grass is green, the earth underneath is red. There are clusters of palms and lapacho and, yes, just outside the airport, someone had brought their cattle to graze. I sat down with my beer and watched the cows for a while. I dozed for a while thinking, ‘even if I fall asleep, when his plane comes in I’m sure I’ll hear it.’ At the Asuncion airport only two or three planes are scheduled per night and the flight after Mikey’s wasn’t coming in until four am.

I woke up a little while later all dew-covered. The cows were still grazing. They had moved under a big streetlight and standing over the pools of their shadows, they looked forlorn, like they weren’t sure how they had gotten way out by the airport and had no idea how to get home. I brushed the dew off myself and walked toward the airport.

It is impossible to be late for anything in Paraguay. I’ve tried. I’ve sat around all morning reading, paying no attention to the time and when I see I’ve got 10 minutes before my class starts, I start getting ready. Invariably when I show up, the class has been cancelled or at least delayed. I have gotten to the bus station seconds before the scheduled departure of a bus, only to find that it still hasn’t arrived. Things at the airport were no different. Mikey’s flight had come in nearly half an hour earlier, but no one had even come out through customs. I stood around, not even sure if I was waiting at the right gate. I watched everyone ecstatically greet their friends and family. There was a detachment of what looked like warrior priests there with cloaks embossed with chest-sized red crosses, knee-high leather boots and chains around their waists. The way they were dressed, they looked like they had left their broadswords out in the car so they wouldn’t have problems with airport security. One of the first people to come out of customs was an old man in a wheelchair who had a very dignified look. An attendant pushed him out to where everyone was waiting and a cheer went up, the warrior priests quickly approached him, took a knee, and kissed his ring while another man came up and joked with him like they were old war buddies. I was the only one watching. Everyone else was too preoccupied looking for the people they were going to meet as more and more people came out of the gate. The warrior priests wheeled the old man out the automatic doors and they were gone.

Mikey was toward the back of the group coming through customs. After most everyone had left, he came out all covered in patches and tattoos doing that kind of nodding thing he does when he’s considering something. In all the years we’d known each other and all the traveling we’d done, I’d never seen him in an airport. For two people who met in a diner and have since spent most of their time together in diners, or places that greatly resemble diners, our meeting in the airport’s sterilized atmosphere seemed strange. Still, I was happy to see him and I came darting out of the crowd to hug him the maniacal way people do in the airport. He told me he still had to get his visa. Apparently, this late at night, no one had been available in his concourse to issue a visa on arrival. As soon as I said ‘hello’ to him, a customs agent led him through another gate I couldn’t pass. If I had come about four hours after he was scheduled to arrive, I probably would’ve been right on time.

We spent the weekend catching up, drinking beers and a bottle of mescal that Mikey’d brought from Mexico. Saturday we had a party and I invited everyone I hadn’t seen since I’d left months earlier for vacation. After the party, Mikey and I took a walk into the end of the night. He played Bonnie Prince Billy on a portable speaker and we drank a ridiculously large can of Miller that neither of us needed. The end of the night found us walking back behind the Olimpia stadium, the yellow-orange streetlights glazing the smooth, black cobblestones. We walked slow, dragging our feet on the cobbles, talking about our childhoods and the effect of our fathers on our personalities. It was a talk we’d probably had thousands of times before, but I enjoyed it greatly.

For the next few weeks Mikey and I did nothing but work. We established something of an office/bachelor vibe in the apartment. Gina was still in California and Mikey and I were way too busy with our projects to worry about anything so inessential as cleaning the bathroom or taking out the trash. We did a decent job of keeping the dishes clean, but the rest of the apartment became sweat-darkened and sour. It was hot and we both sat around all day in our shorts with the fan on. I was through the major work with writing the curriculum and all I had to do was to put everything on the platform—which was an incredible tedious process. Luckily, I could do it without thinking much, so we could talk and listen to podcasts or music. We drank coffee in the morning and terere in the afternoon. I kept a big bottle of water on the floor and all afternoon, we’d tap away on our computers, sweat and take large, open-mouthed gulps of water.

Mikey was working on a music project that he’d started back when he was living in Guadalajara. He was fine tuning and editing recordings he had already made. Several times he played them for me, but I could scarcely ever discern much difference. I was like when I told some students about the idiom ‘cream of the crop.’ “Cream of the crap?!” They all shrieked out in response, laughing. “No,” I told them. “Crop as in cosecha. ‘Crop’ is different from ‘crap.’” The students looked at me blankly. “I don’t hear the difference,” one of the students remarked. Mikey’s fine tuning was like that for me. There was a distinction, a very important distinction separating the new, edited recordings from the old, but, like the student unable to differentiate ‘crop’ from ‘crap’, most of the time, I couldn’t hear it.

Mikey tuned and I created questions on the platform for the online English class until Gina came home In March. We cleaned like crazy the night before she came home and got the place looking halfway decent. I was nearly done working on the curriculum, which was good because my butt was starting to form a permanent indentation in the chair where I’d been sitting at the kitchen table. My wrists were getting calluses from where they’d been leaning on the kitchen table clicking and typing in such a vapid way for weeks on end.

Gina’s return was slightly marred by a toothache that had recently presented itself as chronic in my lower jaw. Years before, a dentist in San Francisco had neatly removed all of my wisdom teeth. “Except that one,” she said showing me an x-ray. “You’ll have to wait until that one crowns.” I said I would and then forgot all about it. Years went by, I lived in three different countries, revolutions toppled leaders that had been in power for decades, two presupposed end-of-the-worlds passed and nothing happened with my wisdom tooth. The last time I had been to the dentist, I had been told that the rogue bastard had hidden himself under the gum line so that he could grow into all the other teeth. The tooth had never crowned, but now it was pushing all the teeth on my bottom jaw together. “You’ll have to get it out sometime.” The dentist had told me, knowing that sometime would not be now, having seen crumpled wad of cash I had used to pay for the filling I had gotten.

Occasionally, I get a stab of pain from the vicinity of this tooth, something to remind me that all was not well with my dental health. But when the pain subsided, I forgot about it again. When the pain came up toward the end of February, I waited for it to subside. But it only got worse until I was constantly gnashing my teeth together and having a hard time getting to sleep at night. Mikey shrugged. “You should probably get it looked at,” he said after I’d tried to show him the place in the back of my mouth where the pain was coming from. “I don’t see anything back there, though.”

When I picked up Gina from the airport, her reaction was different. We hadn’t even gotten to the bus stop before she asked to see the offending tooth. “Oh god!” she practically yelled. “It’s all grey back there!” I wasn’t sure what to make of this, but grey never sounds like a healthy color so I decided to try and set up a dentist appointment. I sent a very non-committal e-mail to one office and tried to call another before giving up. I knew these people were never going to get back to me. As much as my tooth hurt, I really wasn’t interested in shelling out 1,000 dollars to have someone pull it out of my head. I had just paid my taxes and having an untaxed self-employed status job, I had had to pay over two thousand dollars. Sick of throwing my money away, I thought of all those people in Victorian England with the bandages wrapped around their heads. If they could make it through life with an abscessed tooth then so could I.

It might be possible to go through life with an unbearable toothache, but it’s not possible to go through life with an unbearable toothache and be a nice person. My whole jaw ached to the point where I couldn’t be bothered listening to the things anyone said. When anyone asked me a direct question, I got annoyed that I would have to listen to them and squeeze my jaw at the same time. It was too much to ask of a suffering person. Eating, probably my favorite activity, was also ruined. Every bite seemed to run down my jaw, touching off nerve endings along the way, like those explosions rigged for demolition that blow one floor out of a building at a time. I could almost live without the talking, but not being able to enjoy eating was quickly turning me into a snarling ogre.

I was going to try calling some other dentists when I remembered a dentist whom a friend had recommended before. It had been suggested that this dentist might be able to give us a deal if we made an appointment and mentioned our friend’s name name. I made the appointment and mentioned the name. The woman on the other end of the phone told me not to worry. She wouldn’t take too much of my money. She seemed candid and straightforward, a thing too many regulations have made it impossible for American dentists to be. When you don’t have a permanent dentist, every office tries to rope you into multiple visits before treating the problem. They claim they must do this and that before they can pull out your tooth or fill you cavity or even assess your problem. Perhaps they do need to do these things, but it makes the dentist seem like a hopeless bureaucracy or a complete swindle. Even the kindest dentist in the US is unable to surmount these impersonal barriers. I once had a dentist— who had been a former Peace Corps volunteer like myself— give me about 300 dollars’ worth of free dental stuff because he felt so bad about not being about to give me a filling without scheduling two appointments beforehand one for an x-ray one for a cleaning, each of which priced at about 200 bucks that I didn’t have.

Paraguayan dentists don’t have this problem. I went into see the recommended dentist and all she said was: “That’s infected. Take this medication until the swelling subsides, come back in a week and we’ll pull that tooth out.” She didn’t even ask for any money. She would’ve been the ideal dentist if I didn’t have doubts about the cleanliness of her practice. Because her main practice was about two hours outside town, she only came to the capital once or twice a week. Because she was not around much, she kept her practice small. Everything was in a small, windowless room: the consultation desk, the chair for the patient, the hanging light, the stool, the tray of tools, the little sink to spit in and a battered air conditioner. The first appoint I had made was nearly cancelled because the air conditioner had gone out. I thought the dentist was being melodramatic when she told me if the air wasn’t fixed we’d have to postpone the appointment. When I saw the jaundiced, airless room, I knew why she’d said it. It probably would’ve been hard to breathe in that room without the air conditioner.

The room was basic. The floor was the same institutional rubbery stuff they have in schools and hospitals that comes in big rolls. Time had darkened the linoleum but frequent passages had run lighter channels through it. Near the floor, the walls were darkened, as if inadvertently kicked repeatedly in the night by someone looking for the bathroom. The lightswitch had those smudgy Hershey bar fingerprints all over it.

When I first walked in, I tried to sit in the reclining patients’ chair, but the dentist told me to relax and come over to her desk and talk to her first. We chatted about all kinds of stuff while my tooth pulsed like a radar beacon in my mouth, each heartbeat sent out a red shockwave of pain I could practically see. After 20 minutes of talking about the weather, we discussed my tooth. “well,” the dentist said. “I guess we better see what’s wrong.” She said it like it was really unpleasant, but necessary job, like shoveling the stables. I appreciated her candor. Just because she was a dentist, didn’t have to mean she liked pulling out teeth, or even looking in people’s mouths.

Where the area around the tooth was infected, my gums were all red and swollen and, according to Gina, in some places they were grey. The moment the dentist got my mouth open she jabbed a finger right into the grey and red mess and asked “that hurt?” I had to nod assent; I was too overwhelmed with pain to talk.

After the dentist had made her diagnosis, she patted the chair over by her consultation desk. We talked about the weather for another 20 minutes and she gave me a prescription for antibiotics and a topical analgesic. While she talked, I noticed that she had left her surgical gloves on. A few times, she brought a gloved finger up to the wing of her nose and, while not overtly picking it, was certainly flirting with the idea. I found myself wondering why she hadn’t taken the gloves off. Was she planning on using them again? Or did she not realize they were on? Either prospect was disconcerting and after I got home I began to worry more and more about my pick of dentists. If the problem had been a routine filling or something, I wouldn’t care if she’d patched the thing up in a cardboard box with a couple of forks if it would’ve saved me money, but this was oral surgery we were talking about. You get an infection in your lower jaw and it can spread to your brain pretty quick. I kept thinking about that gloved finger probing the edge of her nose and then rustling around in my gum socket where all kinds of blood would certainly be geysering after my tooth was removed leaving me vulnerable for all kinds of infections. I also kept thinking about the dentist’s age, in one way her advanced age was good, it would mean she’d had lot of experience, but it was also bad, when I saw a ‘text book’ in her office that resembled something that would come in a cereal box, I started to have doubts. She would’ve gone to school back in the 70s. What was an Asuncion dental college like in the 70s? Did the people teaching back then even know what they were talking about? The country was ruled by a crazy dictator, I found it easy to see the dictator’s rise to power as symptomatic of an overall backwardness of the time and I worried. Mikey made it worse by suggesting that the dentist wouldn’t even have the strength to pull out a tooth. “Remember Little Shop of Horrors?” He said. I waved away the comment away, not wanting to hear more.           

The week leading up to the surgery, I was nervous and frequently felt like trying to back out of it. With the analgesic and the antibiotic I was feeling better. My tooth didn’t hurt as much and I started toying again with the idea of just living with the pain. I mentioned this to Gina and Mikey, and they both told me that I’d probably be better off getting the tooth pulled, although I could tell that they too had their doubts about the dentist.

The day of the surgery, I rode my bike to the dentist’s from work. Again she greeted me and made me sit down at her desk and talk for a while. As I talked, I found I was warming up to her approach. I had time, and now that I was no longer in pain, I wasn’t in a tremendous hurry to have my tooth pulled. I looked around the room. There were no credentials on the walls. The floor was stained with innumerable dirty footprints. The tools looked old and dull, except one laid out that looked just like an X-acto knife. I thought of it slicing through my gums and shuddered.

My tooth was still mostly under my gum line. The dentist seemed confident that she’d be able to get it out, but I was worried about what she planned to do to get at it. I’d been able to understand enough of her Spanish to know that she wasn’t planning on giving my general anesthesia or even cutting into my gums if she didn’t have to, but seeing the X-acto blade made me nervous, all kinds of terrible scenarios began to flit through my imagination and I saw them all playing out in the faded dentist chair directly before me.

The dentist came up behind me. “You’re looking at the chair, huh? Yeah, it was a great deal. I got it cheap because it was used.” I looked around the room. ‘How many other things in here are used?’ I thought to myself. I looked back at the X-acto blade. ‘Maybe that’s even used. Maybe she picked it up cheap from some failed graphic arts outfit. Oh, well, what the hell. I’m already here.’ I thought and sat down in the used chair.

My tooth had to be cut back so it could be gripped and there was a lot of rocking and that horrible sound of blood squelching in the socket, like the sound of someone trying to free a stuck foot from a bog. This went on for a while. It was uncomfortable, but it didn’t hurt and I kept thinking if something did get infected, I could probably just take antibiotics. With each pull, the tooth seemed to give a little more until finally, with a sound like a big sloppy kiss, it came out. No roots had broken off, no gums had been cut. The tooth was intact and it was out. I was free. The dentist jabbed some gauze into the ragged socket and I happily chatted with her for a while before hopping on my bike to head home, overjoyed that I had been able to save some money.

Gradually, as I rode home, the Novocain began to wear off.  At first it felt like someone was putting a great pressure on the back of my jaw, but gradually, a shrieking white pain, like what I imagine a gunshot much feel like after the shock wears off, began to break through. By the time I reached my apartment door, I was nearly cowed under it. I struggled up the stairs, my eyes bulging from their sockets. It felt like someone had knocked a big tent peg into the back of my jaw and then pulled it out with a claw hammer. I plowed through the door. Mikey and Gina stopped in their conversation and congratulated me on getting the tooth out. I didn’t hear. I was like a bull seeing red. I stumbled into the bedroom and curled up on the bed.

Gina brought me ice. I took the ibuprofen that had been proscribed, but nothing seemed to help. I rolled back and forth groaning working my jaws up and down to try to staunch the roiling pain that was everywhere in my head at once and terrible beyond all measure. After about half an hour, I could take no more. I stumbled out in the kitchen and poured myself a half a tumbler full of Fernet, which was the only booze we had in the house. I gulped the whole thing down vengefully and I immediately felt a little better. I didn’t wait a second before I poured myself another half a tumbler. I drank this one down, too, and the feeling was even better, under the pressure of the intoxicant, the pain was subsiding. There gets to be a point when that’s all that matters: the cessation of pain. It may come back tomorrow, it might even come back in a few hours, but the only thing that matters is that, for a moment it is gone.

To make sure it didn’t come back, I kept drinking. I had hardly eaten all day and I was drunk very quickly. Gina and Mikey had a few drinks with me, but the rest of the night was me demanding Armenian music be played, yelling ‘oh-pah!’ over and over and then demanding that we find a karaoke bar, which, thank god there wasn’t one open.

The next day, my gaping tooth wound felt better, probably I had just ameliorated the pain by adding other pains (most due to a hangover) to my growing list of maladies. With a dull headache and a nauseated stomach, I didn’t notice my tooth as much. The sharp shooting pain in the back of my jaw had mostly fled, but it still hurt bad enough to warrant 400 milligrams of ibuprofen a few times a day. For about a week it was difficult to eat, but gradually the pain passed.

As it happened, I had apparently gotten too accustomed to pain to let it past out of my life so easily. The day after I got my tooth pulled, I tried to stop smoking. During the day it wasn’t a problem, but in the evening, especially after work, it knotted me up. I’d come home and not know what to do with myself. I’d pace the floor, pick up books and put them down again. Dinner and a glass of wine helped, but nothing was a cigarette. Even weeks later, I found myself inhaling deeply when I could smell someone outside smoking. Which made me feel like a smoking voyeur, but by then I was in too deep. I couldn’t go back to smoking because I knew I would only try to quit again. Once you make a serious effort to quit, you become like an inverse addict—you become addicted to quitting. Smoking loses its joy and you start fiending for your next quit. You smoke because its familiar, but the cigarettes have lost their appeal. Every cigarette seems like a pointless indulgence. They don’t taste like anything and half the time you find yourself sneaking away to suck one down when no one is looking. The occasions around your smoking friends are spent in a rhapsody of grey hazey rooms and overflowing ashtrays, but still, you’ve gotten the bug, you can’t stop thinking of giving up on the habit again and you know as soon as things quiet down, you will try to quit again. Although quitting is wrecking your life, you can’t stop. Your family misses the old predictable you who smoked. Back then, when you got upset, you merely stepped outside for a minute and came back in the house smelling like an old bowling alley in a much improved mood. Now that you’re quitting, your emotions run in unpredictable torrents that leave everyone feeling vulnerable to your unprovoked attacks of nicotine withdrawal. They wish that you never would’ve started quitting, and so do you, but unfortunately, there’s nothing that can be done about it now. Once you’ve picked up the habit, it’s hard to drop.

The days were never too hard, but sometimes at night, it felt like part of my head was caving in. It felt like I needed a drink of water in the middle of a desert. I tried to occupy myself, but no matter what I did my mind screamed “why are you not smoking!?” Sometimes, to quiet my thoughts, I had to squeeze my eyes shut and clench my teeth.

We went out to a bunch of concerts like this. I felt like a fraud. Everyone else was enjoying themselves, but all I wanted to do was smoke. Between bands, I felt fidgety and was constantly looking around. This, by the way, is, I think, how smoking makes people appear cool. When you’re smoking, you’re enjoying yourself. You’re not really overly concerned with what anyone else is doing. But nonsmokers, damn, you guys are always looking around for some new source of entertainment. Suddenly, just standing there and drinking a beer didn’t seem to hold my attention.

We found other things to do, one of which was to finally go to Salto Cristal, which is a swimming hole/waterfall/idyll about two hours outside Asuncion. Because the place is fairly remote, we had to take a tour bus there which, with picking people up and making unscheduled stops, took more like four hours.

The bus was crowded and hot. The last 45 minutes of the trip was down an endless dirt road that had been scooped out in particular places by heavy rainfall. Every few minutes, the bus slowed to a crawl and dropped way down on an axle to scrape against the ground. On the bus, you were suddenly pitched into the window or spilled out onto the floor depending on which side of the road the pothole was on. The sensation produced was akin to that of a boat making its way over choppy water.

The waterfall was worth the trip. The water was cold and dark. In the shallows it was a sandy green, but beneath the waterfall it was black, like an immense flooded cave. I swam out over the dark eye of water and dropped down a few times. I never touched bottom and I had the feeling I never got anywhere near it, no matter how deep I sank. The further I let my weight carry me down, the colder the water became. As the light dissipated over the surface, the depths darkened and the darkness seemed to press against my eyes, as if it sought some kind of blinding equilibrium there.

In the middle of the afternoon, when we’d been swimming and jumping for a while, we climbed the trail to the top of the waterfall and found a bunch of those orb weaver spiders that have the long skeleton-hand legs, the poisonous green abdomens and are about as big as squirrels. They had great nets of webs strung out over the top of the river. I thought about what it would be like to run into one of their webs by accident, as many of them were at face level, those things looked like they’d be able to take off your nose if they decided to bite.

After our foray with the spiders, we went back and swam around until we realized we were the last ones from out bus left. We raced all the way back to the meeting place, where we found everyone waiting and no bus driver. A young guy who’d been drinking beer on the bus ride in, was now lying prone in the grass with a warm can of Polar in his hand. He smelled like he’d been drinking in the sun all day and laughed at everything anyone said. On the bus ride home, I found myself wondering why anyone would want to spend eight hours on a bus just to go drink somewhere else. I had never noticed the guy down by the waterfall, much less swimming around. He had probably just sat on the bus tipping back beer after warm beer.

Everyone fell asleep on the ride home and I stared out the window, watching the purple and magenta streaks settle over the dark green yucca and corn fields.

…

Back in February, when Mikey had first arrived, I told him if he was going to stay through March, he had to stay for the first week in April when I would have Semana Santa off from work. I dazzled him with all kinds of ill-considered plans and he agreed to leave early in the second week of April.

I had forgotten to plan for Semana Santa and when it was only a few days away, I threw out wild ideas. “We’ll convince Mikey to get his Argentine visa and go to Buenos Aires; We’ll go out to the Chaco; We’ll go to Iguazu; We’ll just stay here and have the town to ourselves.” I suggested all these options but no one, including myself, seemed too convinced of their worth. “Maybe we can just go back to Salto Cristal,” I found myself thinking in a lazy way. Swimming in the falls had been fun, but it was a long trip and I wasn’t ready to sit on a bus for eight hours again to go back to a place I had just been, no matter how cold the water or how big the spiders. Luckily, our friend Rebecca had a suggestion.

“You guys should come out to Carapegua,” Rebecca invited. “Clemente can take you on a hike and I’m sure we’ll find something else to do.” Everybody agreed that this was the best option we had. The only problem that remained was transportation. Wednesday and Thursday (the beginning of the holiday) were to be terrible. Rebecca told us that there would be no buses on Good Friday and everything would be closed. Saturday, the buses would be running again but, like Wednesday and Thursday, they were sure to be crowded as hell.

In Paraguay, buses are usually crowded. Even on long distance buses (three, four, five hours) passengers stand. Often, they are packed into the aisle, but at no time of year is the packing as bad as it is during Semana Santa when everyone goes to the countryside for a few days to eat asado, drink beers and relax, but in order to relax you must first brave the gauntlet of traffic and the public transportation exodus away from the city before you can put your feet up and munch some of abuela’s chipa. 

We got to the terminal Wednesday evening, thinking it would be better to leave after the sun had gone down and the heat wouldn’t be so strong. Either everyone else had the same idea or they were giving away free bus tickets. The terminal was like a human flood, the dross of small children and baggage washed up against the burger stands and the turnstiles. People yelled and handed bursting garbage bags over low fences to each other, buses, strained their gears and roared off into the dark, the vendors, hung back timidly, no longer shouting ‘Gaseosa! Agua!’ but just watching the human tides siege the buses and draw back into waiting room estuaries.

When our bus rolled up, it was immediately swallowed by a wave of pilgrims. The bus driver and his assistant, driven by a natural impulse, tried to keep order, but they soon just gave way and let the tide roll into the bus. When I came to the door, I lifted a leg to the first step and a middle-aged woman darted in front of me from the left, I looked to my left and saw another woman eager to follow her accomplice, already forcing herself in front of me. I pretended not to see her and pulled myself up onto the bus. I hate when people start grabbing like that. You know what I mean? Like when something in a limited quality if being given away and people just start grabbing at it. Maybe I’ve never known enough hardship or maybe I’ve had too many comfortable bus rides to understand, but damn, I’d rather get out and walk than steal a seat away from someone else like that.

Despite my lateness getting on to the bus, there were still two seats together in the back that had miraculously not been claimed. I made for them and couldn’t believe my luck when I attained them before anyone else squeezed past me and got to them first. I was about to toss my bag down when I noticed the reason no one had taken the seats, a largish swamp of puke was coagulating there on the floor. The driveshaft, or whatever it was, running just beneath it on the floor, was heating up the gastric juices and the vomit actually appeared to be curdling, little bubbles rose to the surface and popped like toxic ampules breaking open. I reeled back wildly. The middle aged lady who had tried to snake me, saw me move away from the prize seats and made ready to pounce. “Cuidado,” I warned her, pointing to the mess on the floor, “Hay vomita.” She gave me a look like I had been the one to make the mess and scurried away to another part of the bus.

The traffic was backed up for miles. No sooner had we pulled out of the terminal than the driver cut the engine. The stationary quality of the bus seemed to draw potential passengers. The bus was like a large fly caught in the web of 100s of tiny spiders. The longer we sat there the more passengers we took on. The temperature of the bus rose. Someone’s elbow kept banging the back of my head, about eight people we leaning all over me. I wanted to get up and give my seat to one of them, but how could I chose who should take it? None of the people standing near me were any older than I was. Besides, how could I find a way to sandwich myself into the standing crowd after vacating my seat? I would’ve had to wedge my pelvis between about seven other pelvises.   

I read the whole way. I can’t remember what anymore, really, I just shoved a book into my face so that I wouldn’t have to look at all those elbows and ears and fingers and chins all over the place.

The further down the line we went, the slower we seemed to go. After a point, the driver finally seemed to stop letting people on but no one seemed to be getting off. It was like they had all heard that this bus was going to Pleasure Island and they weren’t going to budge until they saw the golden lights and the red arcs of the Ferris Wheels high up in the sky.

There seemed to be something wrong with the bus. We were only about 20 minutes away from Carapegua, when we started slowing down. Every few minutes, the bus would slow down and then speed up, slow down and speed up, like the driver was a kid messing around with the accelerator. People just seemed to accept this. Forty minutes had passed and we had hardly gotten anywhere and the sweat was beginning to run down the aisles in rivulets, probably mixing with the clotted grey mess of puke just about three seats behind me, which, I noted with horror, someone was now sitting in.

As we went through the town of Paraguayi we zoomed by three houses and the slowed for the next five or six only to zoom by the next three. This pattern was maddening. I thought to myself, ‘I would rather see the bus completely breakdown that have to endure this for much longer.’

It took twice as long as usual, but we finally reached Carapegua. When the bus stopped we had to fight our way to the front because no one was getting off. I permiso-ed my way past 100s of eyes, noses and knees and 1000s of toes and fingers. When I had nearly emerged from this horrific orgiastic birth canal I noted that yet another kid and burped a skein of grey vomit out onto the floor of the front of the bus. The damn thing was literally awash in vomit. I leapt over the grey mass that I noticed had splattered up around the seats and onto some passengers’ shoes. I fell out onto the dark roadside like a duffel bag tossed onto a runway. Gina and Mikey tripped out after me and in a few minutes we were making our way through the quiet town. We stopped for a beer at the first store we passed and gulped it down on the way to Rebecca’s, unable to believe that we were no longer on the bus and yet projecting it into the distance of our imagination, starting and stopping and rolling, a tight knot of chaos in an otherwise pacific night.

…

A few days after we got back from Carapegua, it was time for Mikey to leave. He was going to catch a flight to Bolivia that left at some ungodly hour. There was enough mescal left in the bottle he had brought for a shot each. We drank the last of the smoky corn liquor after dinner and later we looked at some pictures of Mikey and I after we had first moved to California, pictures that seemed to come from an unbelievably long time ago. Us standing by Crater Lake, us by some desert gas station, walking down the street in Eugene, sitting in a café in Cincinnati and scores of pictures of one night in Taqueria Cancun on Mission where I must’ve eaten three or four burritos for some reason.

I was glad that we had added some new memories to that storage space of photos on Mikey’s computer and that years from now, hopefully we’ll be able to look back on all those pictures taken while he was here and remember them as a bright time.

I am 2 and a half months into my ten-month work contract.  I only recently returned and already the time has fled by so fast. Mikey is gone and the empty apartment seems to empty itself of meaning. The home we have built here, while beautiful, is temporary like so many others. I have to wonder, sitting here alone, how many others like it I will move through in my lifetime and how many more times will one of my friends make the 1,000 dollar trip across a continent to see me in one of these places? I’ll probably never be able to enjoy that luxury again. If you follow travel writers, you’ll find that the friends of their earlier books disappear in later stories and are eventually replaced by innumerable and meaningless acquaintances.

Maybe it is inevitable that this should happen to everyone, if so, it is good that we are able to do the hard things in life like getting wisdom teeth out and quitting smoking while we are still in the company of true friends. In the lonely years ahead, I would imagine these things to be much harder.

Wings that Brush the Snow from Statues

Skopje’s got some huge statuary. There are tons of lion’s manes, arm musculature and sheathes of wheat all over the city, but most of the statues seem congregated around the river that separates the old and new town.

We didn’t stay anywhere near this attractive part of town, but rather found ourselves exiled to some crumbling post-communist block apartment about an hour’s walk from the center. The staircase of the building was open and cold. Our room looked like the type of place you would’ve found yourself getting wasted in at 17. The pasticine wood paneling, the greenish yellow carpet and the florescent lights all conspired to produce a scene of overflowing ashtrays, numerous cheap vodka bottles 1/16^th full and that particular kind of tepid sunlight unique to post-debauch scenes. Luckily, I didn’t succumb to the pressure to recreate this particular tableau, although the apartment seemed to cry out for it.

Rather than suffer our drunken apartment, we spent most of our time wandering around the mainly Turkish and Albanian old town that looked like a neigborhood that had fallen down around the pilings of its own minarets; even in Pristina, I didn’t see so many mosques.

The teahouses were completely Turkish. Those nearest the mosques, full of old men holding cards or leaning over backgammon boards with smoke running from their nostrils.

From Skopje, we went down to Thessaloniki. We arrived late and woke up our host who lived alone in a small rooftop apartment. After some tea we rolled out our sleeping bags on the linoleum floor. The apartment was only one room, and not even a very big room, so after we turned out the lights the post-lights out sleepover laughter began in an incredulous adult tittering that soon broke out into complete hilarity.

The next day, the town was closed to celebrate Epiphany. Finding only cafés open, we wandered around drinking coffee and walking by the sea, while incredibly cold winds blew off the waters through the concrete-colored city. I kept myself wrapped up, but began to feel the cold spreading at the bottom of my lungs when I breathed in. My sinuses began to feel acidic and my eyes watered senselessly. I was getting sick, but I ignored the feeling and continued with my coffee and cigarette diet that had been sustaining me throughout the trip.

That evening, we went to a squat that was nothing like any of the squats I’ve ever seen in the US. The place was more like a bar or an alternative club. Attractive young people were swing dancing on a clean parquet floor. The bar was well-tended and the raki and homemade beer were cheap.

After we ordered our drinks, we sat down at a table and began discussing Europe, the US and culture. I drank a few rakis, as they seemed to sooth my burgeoning cold and started on my tirade against modern US culture, decrying social media, television and Embassies that aren’t available for the citizenry. As sometimes happens, I was seduced by my own words and argued more fervently, thinking that if I kept talking I might make some kind of breakthrough, might actually move myself to action. But, after a few hours, I was tired and just wanted to go back to the rooftop apartment, get in my sleeping bag and snicker in the dark—which we did, but only after getting completely lost on the way home.

We left Greece the next morning for the only train headed to Skopje which left at 6 am, or was scheduled to leave at 6 am. After rising in the dark, braving the cold and waiting around the station, we went out to the platform and paced up and down trying to stay warm while we waited until after 7 for the train. Because the train could’ve come any time, we didn’t leave the platform, but it was so cold, it was almost impossible to not cry out in agony at the injustice. I started cursing without even being aware of it.

When we got on the train, we settled into our compartment and were immediately joined by four other people, thus packing the compartment to capacity. “Damn,” I thought. “Where did these people come from? I didn’t see them waiting on the platform.” Because there weren’t too many others waiting for the Sofia, Bulgaria train, I hadn’t expected to be in such a crowded cabin and was annoyed to find that I wasn’t even going to be able to stretch out a little.

I’d like to write about the Greek landscapes we passed through on the way to Bulgaria, but I didn’t notice them. After the conductor came for our tickets, he told everyone else in our compartment that they were on the wrong car and, thankfully, they left. I went out to use the bathroom after finding my path clear of bags and legs. It was then that I realized our car was almost completely empty. Our former cabin mates had just plunked down in the first place they came to without even checking to see if the other cabins were occupied. When I got back from the bathroom, I pulled the curtains closed behind me and promptly passed out until the Bulgarian border, which is the only EU border 

I’ve been to where documents are checked with such fervor.

We were stamped out of Greece and stamped into Bulgaria. Neither Montenegro, nor Albania, nor Kosovo is in the EU, but passing between these countries, our documents we only glanced at and handed back to us. No stamps. But between Greece, Bulgaria and Romania—all EU countries—they took our passports, compared us to our pictures and stamped us in and out like we were passing from Afghanistan to Tajikistan.

After the border, I fell back asleep and didn’t wake up again until we pulled into Sofia.

“Ugh, Sofia,” I said to Gina as the train pulled into the station. “I guarantee we’re going to be stuck here for a while. I swear they arrange the trains so that you have to spend a day here.” I said this because that’s what happened to me about six years ago coming from Turkey and heading to Serbia and that was summer. Coming back into the city, I remembered the last visit well, how we walked around, had a few beers and watched a basketball game. But now, the sky was grey and there were scags of black and grey ice frozen to the sidewalk and the gutters.

When I got off the train I found an official-looking man waiting to help me. He had a badge and a vest with the same logo as the badge. As I stepped down from the train, he stretched out his hands to me like a waiting family member. I wasn’t sure what he wanted, but, experience has taught me never to trust anyone at a train station, especially anyone who wants to help a traveler, when the typical situation is the total opposite. I strode intentionally past the man.

 “Train, international!” The official man said holding a pointing finger into the air like he’d just guessed my weight at the county fair. I told him ‘no’ and tried to walk past him. He caught up with me. “Pa russki?” he asked.  “Choot choot,”I said. I don’t know why, because any kind of affirmative response is enough for these people to badger you until the ends of the earth. “Hostel, taxi, change money,” he began to sing out the litany of the train station scammer.

Mr. Official followed us off the platform, skipping around me and my steamer trunk-backpack like a kid who’s eaten too much sugar. “Change? English? Hostel?” he intoned in an impressive tattoo, making it impossible for me to communicate with Gina. Everywhere I turned, his jowled face swung before me like a demented moon. We passed a kiosk that advertised coffee. I managed to indicate to Gina that we should go in and get a cup of coffee to get this boob to leave us alone. I reasoned that if we stopped moving, this would-be guide wouldn’t want to hang around waiting for us all day. It almost worked. He hung back while I ordered coffees successfully in Russian with the babushka working behind the counter. I was feeling pretty good about my ruse and my ability to communicate in a Slavic lingua franca with this woman until I tried to pay and she looked at my five euro bill in abject horror. ‘Euro nyet,’ she told me. At this exact moment, Mr. Official came bounding up from where he’d been waiting by the bags of chips. “Change money!” he gloated. “Dammit, man don’t you have anyone else to bother or are we just the stupidest people here?” I wanted to punch him and I was so annoyed I may have if Gina hadn’t stepped between us and asked him to go away. I don’t know what it was, I guess a woman’s voice had a little more currency with him, or maybe he just finally realized how annoying he was being. He left and I stood there with the woman now scowling at me from behind the counter. She’d already made the coffees. I held up a finger, “moment,” I said and dashed out to find someone to make change.

The train to Bucharest wasn’t leaving until the next morning; the bus was leaving at midnight. The beginnings of my cold in Greece had swollen into full-blown congestion and fever chills. Sick as I was, I considered getting a room and taking the train in the morning, but, no, that would be too easy. I had been reading about the Mujahidin in the Soviet-Afghan war and their imposed austerity. I felt weak and whiney enough as it was compared to them. I wasn’t going to let a cold cheat me into paying for a room when I could take an overnight bus, even if we were going to have to wander around Sofia for 11 hours in the freezing cold. I told Gina what our options were and then bought two bus tickets. I’m lucky to have her, any other girl would’ve left my unreasonable ass a long time ago.

Luckily, Sofia was more gracious to us than I had expected. Everything was cheaper than I had remembered. There was some great food and a nice hidden bar in which to pass the cold evening. Away from the bus station, the town actually looked good in its winter arraignment.

…

We got into Romania the next morning after 10 hours of terrible movies on the sleepless bus ride and spent the morning stumbling around a maze of communist apartment blocs with incredibly confusing addresses such as B-1, M-4, 44-88. (That’s just one building, by the way, the one next to it was Z-104, B-4, 9). It was already dark when we woke up from the nap our host forced us to take after seeing how haggard we looked once we finally found his apt.

…

We had bought tickets on an all-night train, second class, no sleeper. Our seats were out in the open, but initially, the train had been quiet as it rocked out of the station. We stayed awake talking, eating and sharing a bulbous plastic bottle of beer. Around midnight, we attempted sleep, rolling our sleeping bags out on the seats and laying down. I read for a while and let my eyelids get heavy before rolling over in my seat to sleep.

I slept fitfully for an hour or two. The train ground evenly along the tracks. Now and then, there would be a ringing and the train would ease under a station awning. When I opened my eyes, there was never anything to see, a few lights in the distance and caps of snow covering bushes and trees the color and shape of spilled ink.

There were a few other people on the train. An old woman next to us coughed quietly and once in a while, someone a few cars over seemed to groan. There was no talking and very few people on the train.

The car was too warm and the air was furnace-heat dry. I was sweating in my sleeping bag and I continually pulled it back from my face and feet to feel what little fresh air there was when the train pulled into a station and the doors briefly opened.

Because of my fatigue and my unwillingness to look strangers in the eye while I lie sprawled across three seats with my bare feet sticking out of my wrinkled sleeping bag, I kept my eyes shut at the stations, although, after 2 am, I was completely awake and could hear everything happening around me with the clarity of someone intently eavesdropping on a conversation.

The stations got noisier as the night wore on. Whereas the first few stations had only brought a few scuffling steps and maybe a whispered conversation, the latter stations were full of energetic passengers who boarded the train with slapping heels, loud conversation and laughter.

For a while, there was a great cacophony of snores, both the wet and the dry, rattling varieties. There were conversations held around piles of sunflower seeds that could be heard spilling onto the little tables and down onto the floors. Someone’s scream tumbled down into laughter. At every station, the cold and cigarette smoke blew into the car. At least eight different people were coughing almost constantly.

It became increasingly difficult to even pretend to sleep. The comforting rhythm of the train hitting the seams between the tracks could hardly be discerned over the noise being made within the car. The sounds of people sleeping and people awake, people who had drank raki and people who hadn’t, old women babbling in the indistinct tones of Romanian; There were popping sounds issuing from deep in people’s throats and bowels could be heard groaning under the weight of a bolted, pre-journey meal. Someone kept whistling.

I stubbornly held onto the idea of sleep and kept my eyes squeezed tight, despite my desire to open them and observe this obstreperous, rolling world around me.  I wanted to see who kept making the groaning sound. What did the old woman whose voice had that odd liquid quality look like? How many people were sitting around us? Were any of the windows cracked?

When we pulled into a station, I could not resist the temptation and opened my eyes quick enough to see that we had reached Beclean, a town that marked the half-way point of our journey. But what I saw wearied me. The station had the same patches of snow and florescent light that they had all possessed. The old woman with the liquid voice had a white scarf tied around her head and was sitting very still two seats away and talking to her neighbor. A few young men were walking quickly through the train, their heads turning rapidly trying to be the first to espy an empty seat. The coughing started again. I closed my eyes and rolled over irritably.

I don’t think I slept, but I wasn’t entirely conscious. I felt like my head was smothered in cotton. My limbs felt unused and vague like they weren’t completely attached to me. My fingers were too short and seemed to strain against the skin under my fingernails. I felt the train stop and the usual, by now tiresome, sounds began.

First there were those in a hurry—their heels slapping loudly over the metal plates between cars and opening the doors with a quick woosh. A girl was quietly coughing and the difference between her and the guy at the end of the car was astounding. Her cough was apologetic. It seemed to say, ‘sorry for disturbing you,’ but his cough was like the horn of a semi-truck. BWWWWHAAAK! After the people in a hurry, the moderate crowd boarded, most of them tired-sounding, like they’d only dragged themselves out of bed a few minutes ago for this horrendously early train. These people tended to drop their bags rather than set them down.

I didn’t know where we were, but judging by how long I had been awake since Beclean, I assumed that we had reached the region of Maramures, the northern-most Romanian province and, according to the Lonely Planet guide “one of the last places where rural European medieval life remains intact.” I lie there listening, straining to detect something more rustic about the sounds I was now hearing.

The station must’ve been small, because the noise quieted to a trickle almost immediately. A few people shifted in their seats, someone spat out some sunflower seeds on the floor and then I heard it.

I don’t know exactly how to describe the sound I heard, except to say that sounded like a monster groaning in the basement of a castle dungeon, groaning or perhaps laughing. The sound was hollow but heavy, like a heavy length of chain falling to the floor in an empty room. It seemed to echo in a flat way, as if the sound dampened itself. I assumed it was the train straining over ice or something and turned back over and tried to get comfortable on the seats.

But the monster sound didn’t stop, rather it rose, it gained, it approached. As the groan/growl grew louder, I noticed that it was wrapped around the sliding bump of heavy footsteps. Like in a movie: Wiiiish, dum! Wiiiiiiish, dum! Uuuuaaghhhh! I heard the door to our car open, the groaning grew louder, the sliding footsteps drew closer. UUUUUGHP!  Wiiiiiiiiish, dum! I wanted to turn around and open my eyes, but I felt too tired to investigate and I remained still until I heard the door at the other end of the car open and close.

I listened for a while as the sound crossed the train, sliding and growling, each door slapping closed behind it. I thought I heard a yell far down the train and slowly lifted myself up from the seats. Was I imagining things? The train car suddenly bucked, like a waterskier after the slack on the rope had run out. I looked out the window and in the florescent porch of the station, I thought I saw something hulking and grey at the edge of the light, but as I leaned closer to the window the train began to roll away on the tracks and the only thing outside the window was a white blanket of light resting on the snow. In the next car, someone began coughing. 

The Ghost above the Marble Arch

Mostar

It was about 8:00 pm dark and freezing in Mostar when we got off the bus. I walked into a café at the station and asked about a bathroom. “1 Yurro,” the guy at the bar said in that Slavic way that sounds like his tongue had weights tied to it. He glared at me. I didn’t say anything but turned around and walked away. We walked down into an alley and I peed into a weed-choked ditch. In the dark, some guy walked past me. I could barely see him, but I heard his footsteps. The river wasn’t far away. I could hear it lapping against something from the other side of the building I was facing.

We didn’t have any place to stay. The plan to come to Mostar in the first place was horribly half-cocked.  From Dubrovnik, I suddenly decided that I had to see the bridge. I’m not really sure why. I usually don’t care about going to see iconic things, but I’ve seen so many beautiful images of the angled Ottoman-era bridge lit up by floodlights and reflecting back into the river, I couldn’t bring myself to pass so close to it and not go see the reflection of all that white marble shimmering in the water looking down from a parapet that should be old but, since the original bridge was blown up in 1993, is now new, masquerading under the title Stari Most (Old Bridge). Yet, there’s something beautiful about something new that’s so important it still retains the title of old, long after it’s been made new.

But, because all I wanted to do was to stand on the bridge, to walk around a little on the cobblestones listen to the waters, a night seemed enough. Our bus back to Dubrovnik and Montenegro was leaving at 7:00 am the next morning. The limited amount of time turned us into frantic tourists. From the dark parking lot by the river, I wondered where the bridge was and I wondered where we were going to stay. I did not think beyond the two points. My pool table-sized bag was already starting to pull my shoulders down to meet in a knot in the small of my back. The wind, heavy with river water and burnished by the marble of the Old City, had crept into the knuckles of my fingers and behind my teeth, at the base of my skull.

We began walking, without really knowing which direction we were walking in or why. Perhaps the lights on the horizon were brighter out that way. We came to a sign and an intercom in an alleyway. I buzzed and we waited on the carpet of yellow light spread out in front of the door. A voice answered in Serbo-Croatian.

“Uh, do you have a room?” I blurted out in English.

“No. Full.” The voice answered.  The cold night after Christmas and the place was full? How many rooms were in there? One? I was, however, undeterred and we continued down the alley. The concrete was breaking up into cobblestones. The walls were worn-looking as if polished by loose scarfs and jackets for centuries. The alleys were more like gaps between buildings strewn about with no particular order.

After about half a block, there was another sign, “Hostel David.” A little white plastic sign like any other in a tourist town, someone’s grandma’s house turned into a hostel offering day trips in the summer to the countryside. Hoping to keep you there more than the day or two you’d need to see the bridge. There’d be a little common area and a ‘breakfast’ of incredibly white bread and packets of cherry jam with instant coffee. The chairs would be plastic and everything would smell like a mildewed shower.

In many ways my assumption was correct. The place was a hostel much as I’ve described them, but it was much more than that. It was clearly a place someone inhabited and, consequently, cared about.

We stepped into the doorway to scope the place out. An enigmatic Jesus-esque figure sitting at the ubiquitous plastic table addressed us immediately. “You’ve found it. Take off your bags. Relax,” he said. “Is it a nice place then?” I asked rather stupidly. “The best; it’s home,” the bearded and long-haired guy responded without hesitation. I’d seen this behavior in a hostel a few times before. Guests who’ve been travelling way too long end up crashing there and losing the nerve to continue onward. To justify this inertia to themselves they call the hostel wonderful, paradise even, despite the fact that it’s no different than any other hostel.

We talked a little more, but, oddly, the guy seemed reluctant to talk. “Go in there,” he said gesturing to a door, “wait for Stefan; he’ll take care of you. You might even get a cup of coffee or something. Stranger things have happened.” So, into the room we went. It was sparsely furnished. A little table, a few demitasse cups with fine coffee grounds muddying the bottoms and a laptop playing the same Black Eye’d Peas video over and over. We took off our bags and began criticizing the video and the horrible song we were being subjected to. No one came in the room.

The lack of any kind of reception desk and the stoned Jesus-looking guy out front made this place look like the type of hostel where people yell and crash around in the middle of the night and turn all the lights on. Since all I wanted to do is go out for a few hours and then sleep here, I had no desire to stay at a party hostel. I was about to leave when Stefan came in.

Stefan did not initially do much to allay my fears; he seemed intoxicated himself, but I couldn’t deny that he was incredibly nice, even to the point of fawning. The bearded Jesus guy came in and poured us a shot of raki and Stefan made coffee. After a little of each, I hardly cared that the place might be a little dirty or loud. The people were nice. They weren’t trying to hustle us. Stefan showed us our room. It was clean. No one’s wet towels were draped over my bed with their characteristic mildew backpack smell. Stefan called me ‘President’ and Gina became ‘Queen,’ which he pronounced like K’veen. We left about an hour later happy to have found such a nice and cheap place.

The streets of Mostar were frozen. The light was frozen in the dark window panes; the minarets were frozen in the starry sky. The people walking through Old Town were all tourists speaking in the subdued tones of their respective languages, bringing the market town ambiance back to the town, but the stalls were all shuttered, the mosque courtyards, all dark.

We stood on the bridge for a moment. The stones were smooth, like the age had been built back into the new bridge by using old stones. A childish impulse caused me to consider throwing a coin over the edge, like throwing a coin would give my journey more purpose, more inspiration. The waters below folded the paper disk of the moon into origami and straightened it out again.

We walked into the Croatian side of town and the minarets turned into steeples, the crescents became crosses, like moons becoming scintillating stars. There were more people out. Young people walking around. It was Friday night on this side of the river. On the other side of the bridge it was night-the medieval night that farmers and merchants sleep through, night before electric light.

There was a bar, down by the river. Coffee and beer were freely mixed on the wooden tables. A band was playing in the backroom. The layers of smoke distorted the sound coming from the speakers. The horn player blasted brassy paths through the haze and the guitar players scratched it away in layers. When we went back outside, the cold wind coming off the river blew the smoke out of the fibers of our clothes. Crossing to the other bank of the river, the thick smoke poured out of my pockets and jacket folds feeling like a dry baptism. Back down the river, the lights from Stari Most drifted out over the water, through the wind and made a ghostly sound.

The next morning, Stefan was there to make another cup of coffee and stood in the alley seeing us off like a grandmother. Waving and calling ‘ciao’ long after we’d turned the corner and walked out of his line of sight.

Kotor.

It’s hard not to get nauseous on the bus ride into the Bay of Kotor. The coastal road trips out onto every premonitory and slinks back in to every cove. The bus driver didn’t compensate for these drastic turns and did about 45 mph while whipping the wheel back and forth to avoid the lapis lazuli waters about 300 feet beneath us. Monasteries floated solemnly and white fishing boats drifted lazily across the bay, but it was hard to keep watching because the entire scene had a tendency to pitch itself outside my field of vision as soon as I made contact with it through the driver’s reckless efforts.

We arrived in Kotor and tried to get our bearings while the usual chauffer group assaulted us with indirect cries of ‘taxi.’ At first these drivers didn’t look at anyone. They just yelled the word ‘taxi’, hoping someone would approach them, when the crowd had cleared and gone off to the cars waiting for them, and we remained with our monstrous bags, they moved in like hyenas after a lame zebra. “Taxi?” they asked, as if we didn’t just hear them, standing not 10 feet away, repeating the word like some kind of incantation. “No, thanks,” I said, but soon after, another moved into the place of the rejected driver. “Taxi?” Ad nauseum, until we walked away.

I guess Kotor’s taxi drivers were bored, because they were practically following us around town, slowing down and watching us trundle our ridiculous bags like to drunken and inept Sherpas. The drivers were so bold as to leer at us as and, as they slowed, I felt their hot gaze as perhaps a woman on a lonely street at night feels the eyes of a slowly passing man. I wanted to shout and wave them away, but it was useless. We didn’t know where we were going and after hours of walking up and down the same street, I gave in and waved one of them over.

We drove alone the bay to our host’s place, back up to the premonitory above the turquoise waters. I tried to talk to the driver, but my limited Russian held no water with his Montenegrin. Eventually, I reverted to the obvious, which pained me, and clutching my sides and making a shivering motion I said kholodna. He agreed with this obvious statement (it was the end of December) and did me the favor of not rolling his eyes in too obvious a manner.

I don’t know why I should be the recipient of such incredible kindnesses. After Stefan, his raki and byurek, I didn’t figure I was due anything fortuitous for a long time, but when we finally trail-blazed our way down to the water (there didn’t seem to be any roads, only back alleys crossing through backyards) and found our host’s place, I realized we were in for another undeserved gift. Our host Ivan’s place was like an apartment building and we were shown to our own apartment. My heart sank when I noticed a card that said something like ‘guest rules’ on the table. ‘Damn,’ I thought. ‘This guy confused Couchsurfing with Air B n’ B, I only hope he doesn’t want too much for the room.’ But, as if reading my mind, Ivan told me that, while he rents the room out in the summer, during the low season he lets Couchsurfers use it free of charge.

The next morning, we decided to go out and see the fortress that runs along the mountain that looms over Kotor and trails off the old city, making it look like a brick and mortar comet that has only recently crashed into the earth. The old Venitian cities along the Adriatic are all beautiful, but Kotor is the only one that seems to have spiraled out of control, as after the town was built and walled off and the fort at the top of the mountain completed, something had to be built to connect them, something traveling all the way down the mountain, something that should be ornamented with churches and turrets and shines all along the way.

Despite the regal aspect of the stairs and walls that were almost draped over the mountain above Kotor, in the rain, fog and deepening twilight descending them was scary as hell.

We had walked up a trail that the shepherds used and crossed over behind the fortifications at the top of the mountain. A small crumbling church stood guard at the makeshift entrance in the fortress walls made by the crumbling masonry. Above the church there stood a lone shaggy cypress tree that was populated by a few crows; it was like a Currier and Ives hallowe’en print. Almost as soon as we reached the church, it began to rain.

We waited out the rain in a series of different shelters, as it would abate and then redouble its energy and spray water all over the grey stones and bright lichens as if trying to blast them from the mountain. First, we waited in the church and when the rain slackened, we ran to the opening in the fortress wall. Squatting in this broken rampart, we could see over the city and out into the bay again. Below, the lights barely broke through the fog to reflect their feeble lights off the dark waters of the bay. Only the movement of the cars on the main road below betrayed any life in the city. Looking down from atop the crumbling walls of erstwhile empires, the modern city below took on a doomed aspect. The further we moved along the fortress, the more the gloom colored my thoughts. When we attained the main fortress with its rooms and anterooms, many of which still had their roofs intact, and I smelled the damp stone and listened to the monotonous plink of the water upon the worn cobblestones, I began to feel like a monster in a Lovecraft story, like something skulking out of the bowels of this rotting castle for the first time in centuries. I scuttled quickly into a dark corner and waited for Gina to come around the corner, planning to jump out and scream like a banshee when she got close enough.

I waited for a while, but I am not cruel enough to scare anyone. When I heard the beginnings of fear in her voice as she moved around the wet stones and called out in the darkness, I couldn’t hide any longer and came out from my hiding place casually, like I had only been back there looking at something. Coming back out into the grey, faltering light above the city, I found the gothic aspect replaced by something more peaceful. The view would have been better described with a comparison to an old, oil portrait one in which the background is entirely black and the only light to be discerned being that which emanates from the figure, particularly the light in his or her eyes. Such gleaming light was now to be found in profusion below and slowly, carefully, we began our descent.

Shkoder, Albania

The bus station at Ulcinj in southern Montenegro, didn’t invite much speculation as to the amenities of the town. It seemed pretty obvious there would be very little, though we were still on the Adriatic coast. We had planned on passing through if a bus was available, but after seeing the town and feeling the cold wind blowing down from the mountains I was convinced that Shkoder, Albania had to be better than where we were. So we bought our tickets and boarded another dim and little bus, stepping onto it was like stepping into a puddle; the cold seemed to have entirely settled on the floor. 

Between my shins and my feet the difference was at least 5 degrees.

There was no stamp at the Albanian border, just a stop by the glowing customs gates and, after that, a stop at the oddly named Kastrati gas station. Shkoder, appropriately, had no bus station and when we reached the central plaza, the bus pulled over and we all got off. No one called ‘taxi?’ and no one offered rooms. The few people we were on the bus with quickly disappeared into the night; Gina and I were left standing, dumbstruck, in front of an ice cream-white mosque whose loudspeakers suddenly broke into life with the pious and haunting call to prayer. Only a few blocks away, other equally white mosques echoed the song in varying tones. Although the streets quieted for the song, no one moved toward the mosque and its sahn, which was visible from the street, remained empty. It was cold here, too. Possibly colder than it had been in Ulcinj and the eyes peering over their demitasse coffee cups from behind the café windows, looked too warm and contended to bother with praying.

We met up with Ezra, the Peace Corps volunteer who had agreed to put us up for the night and, over the next few days, I began to feel as though I had returned to my own Peace Corps experience, as in myriad ways, Albania and Armenia are similar countries. But with Ezra’s site being more cosmopolitan than mine had been, we had a few more options for entertainment, although the experience was still dominated by the three ubiquitous Ottoman entertainments, namely:

1. Raki;

2. A central market;

3. An arched bridge.

The raki tasted like the same raki I’ve had everywhere. Grape, I think it was, but I was never very good at telling. As long as it’s clear, I don’t mind. It was only that apple that was a whiskey-colored amber that I really preferred to keep away from. Ugh.

The market of Shkoder seemed to be holding a holiday special on live fowl. From guinea hens to 60-pound tom turkeys, the market was festooned in upside down and dazed fowl. It almost seemed incredible to see so many subdued near-wild animals. They only hung there and blinked. If they were set on the ground, their response was not even to walk, but to sit down. They looked straight ahead and looked resigned to their imminent deaths.

Until the end of Enver Hoxha’s rule, very few Albanians had cars. Since the despot’s death in 1985, cars began showing up from all over Europe. Now Albania is like anywhere else, with noisy, clogged streets and places to service tires and engines all over the outskirts of town. Shkoder remains something of an exception with many middle-aged, even elderly citizens still using bikes as their main means of transportation. The older demographic of bicyclists creates a different flow on the streets.

On the Rruga 28 Nëntori, it is a perpetual Sunday. Loafers and slightly over-sized slacks rise and fall above the pedals and contended faces reign over the handlebars. No one hurries and the mood is that of an evening passeggiata that has been placed atop a Schwinn.

We rented bikes from the local hostel so that we could ride alone with everyone else. The slow place took a while to get used to, but was not too great of a problem given the clunkier aspects of my bike and the abrasive temperature. After we had toured the town and the nearby Lake Shkoder, our host offered to take us to see the last and usually most interesting of the requisite Ottoman entertainments: the bridge.

We assented and pedaled off together in some vague bucolic direction. We passed the old communist-era Hero Monument (in each country the ‘Hero’ is different, but is usually portrayed in the same great-coated, futurist fashion) and continued down a seemingly endless street and wound through Albanian hamlets, long yellow grass and skeletal mosques and churches before reaching Ura e Mesit or Bridge in the Middle, an impressive Ottoman-era bridge. Given its wider span, it has more arches than I’ve known any similar bridge to have and was, therefore, something interesting to see, or would’ve been if I were not being slowly consumed by frostbite as I stomped around trying to look at the thing. After Gina and I posed for a picture, I took off to find something to eat and drink in hopes that it would warm us up.

While we stood in front of the bridge, stomping our feet and guzzling beers in hopes of warmimg ourselves, but to little avail. Our arduous journey hadn’t been a waste, but it was clear that the goal of the journey had perhaps not been worth the frozen knuckles and toes, but the faster I drank my beer, the less it seemed to matter and I looked at the mountains in the distance, grateful that I was no where near their hoary slopes and rock-clotted arteries. No matter how cold it was where we were, those mountains looked much colder.     

Our host had wandered back up to the road to speak with someone. A car pulled up and he was joined by another party. It wasn’t clear what was going on, but someone was holding a shotgun, not pointing it, just wearing it casually draped over this shoulder. I didn’t pay much attention since in any kind of mountainous country it is not unusual to see people with guns. I went back to my beer and vigorous hand-rubbing. I was trying to light a cigarette when I noticed the party moving down to the bridge. I introduced myself to everyone and was told that we would be shooting the gun. Did I want to shoot it? Of course I wanted to shoot it. It was about 10 below zero, the sun was setting, we were about 2 hours away from any kind of shelter (as far as I could tell) and I was almost out of beer. What else was there to do but blast a shotgun at the cold and distant mountains?

They handed me the gun. I made sure there was nothing in front of me but cold and rocky earth, then I turned the safety off, squeezed the trigger and felt that little clap in my eardrum that meant the gun had gone off. I handed it back to the man and thanked him and in a few minutes we were on our way back to Shkoder and the old men gently pushing their bikes down the rrugas and bulevardis.

The Patriotic Highway

The road between Tirana and Pristina was built between 2007 and 2013. Someone said the project was started years before to extradite the movement of ethnic Albanian refugees, but when I mentioned this to the Albanians they didn’t seem to agree. “I think it’s just because we have a lot of trade between here and Kosovo.” They told me. I wanted to tell them that there’s a lot of trade between Paraguay and Brazil but that doesn’t mean someone’s going to put up the money for an American Super Highway.

As we turned onto the Albania-Kosovo highway, north of Tirana, there was a banner proclaiming its noble American-Turkish origin. As the afternoon light diminished, we climbed further up into the mountains. Instead of just being blasted out of the rock as so many mountain highways are, the rock cut into tiers attested to the complexity of the design. I started expecting the bus to actually move faster, like the road was going to have some kind of aerodynamic quality to it that displaced headwinds and moved them behind the vehicle.

The rocky cliff faces got darker and, in contrast, snow started to appear in glowing patches. Lone service stations blazed in the distance and steadily grew on the horizon until they were like cold, white bonfires shining through the windows of the bus. Everything gleamed, even the lonely man standing at the pumps in a nylon jacket watching us speed by.

The border crossing was at the top of a pass. The official vehicles were crusted with salt and exhaust-dark ice behind the tires. The men in huge orange jackets stood in small booths and seemed loathe to give up their warm place. We were practically waved through.

In Kosovo, the highway leveled out and began to take on a more familiar aspect. The saurian way the exit ramps curved and raised, the thick, grey concrete pylons that were still new enough to have that little fissure of cement around them, the bright, excessive signs all indicated that it was an American highway. The road hadn’t just been built with American money, it’d been lifted right out of Indiana or Des Moines.

I couldn’t see anything beyond the limits of the concrete and the ice-craggy shoulder of the road, but it was possible to believe that anything could be out there. The familiar design led one to populate the dark lands beyond with haggard strip malls, Taco Bells, drive-up coffee places and those gargantuan red buildings that sell nothing but tires. American grew along the germane highway. It seemed impossible that the soil beyond the breakdown lane could produce anything else.

The highway was an old movie set with everything 2-dimentional and pushed together; beyond it there was a real Kosovo, but it was a Kosovo I never saw. Pristina was every bit as deceiving. We got off the bus in the dark. There were only distant buildings. It looked like a long walk. Two Japanese guys from the bus seemed to be hashing something out with a taxi driver. “10 euro,” they said when I asked them, “to the town center.” “Good,” I said. “We’ll all go together. It’ll be cheaper that way.”

The streets looked like they belonged to a much older city. They curved around the buildings and the snow made them look grey and exhausted. Most of the windows were dark. It was impossible to tell where we were and no one was outside. But, as it was on the highway, occasionally a building rose furiously from the dark with green and blue lights soaring to proclaim its newness. These buildings displayed their names in English and there, at their very feet, in a sanctimonious glow, was Bill Clinton covered in gold and raising one arm in an undiscernible gesture. Bill Klinton boulevard marked the end of our trip into this surreal America-scape. We got out of the taxi and looked for a place to stay. It was 9 pm on New Year’s Eve.

Pristina

“Oh, just go downtown, everyone does,” our host told us when we asked about New Year’s in Pristina. Despite all the glamour we had seen coming in, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be out with the throngs for New Year’s. In any former communist country, New Year’s remains very important. Despite the rebirth of religion and the rise of nationalism, the people from Albania to Siberia still favor the secular feel of one year becoming another. The great thing about New Year’s in formerly communist countries is that it usually lasts for more than a few days. It’s a time when many people open their doors and offer food and drink to their neighbors and possibly backpacking strangers. I was excited to see what particular permutation New Year’s would take on in Pristina, but I also remembered Robert Kaplan’s unflattering description of the town in his book Balkan Ghosts.

I don’t have a copy with me, but I remember the descriptions of unshaven men, seething with booze fumes, looking over the top of their pornographic magazine to leer at the author. He wrote something about how he had never been so scared in any Muslim country, where decorum and hospitality are the norm. Despite the glitzy façade of Pristina, I still expected this drunken, war-ravaged face to be among the celebrants. Maybe, between the fireworks, there would be the empty report of guns.

When we got outside and began to walk around, I began to wonder how any seedy element ever could’ve survived in this environment. Everything was new. The people were young and no one looked remotely poor. Over 50% of Pristina’s population is under 25 and they’re all chic. Gina and I were easily the shabbiest people on the streets with our boots and second-hand jackets. If anyone leered at us, it was because they were confused by this sudden apparition of poverty in the otherwise, 21^st century town.

There was a concert. Despite the freezing weather, the stage was open air and in the middle of Mother Teresa Square. A girl with long pink hair and a massive white fur coat over a skimpy cocktail dress jogged in place to a techno rhythm. She skipped around the stage and sang in Albanian while running her hands through her wavy sea foam-pink hair. Everywhere, children danced in their hectic circular motions. Teenagers in large groups jumped up and down together, smiling. It was the most friendly-looking New Year’s I had ever seen.

We stepped over to a little hut to get a cup of the steaming alcoholic concoction that was being sold and consumed around flaming barrels in an effort to dull the sharp effects of the cold. It must’ve been well below zero. I grasped my cup and was savoring the feeling of the blood returning to my frozen fingers when I heard a chant begin: tre, dy, nje. The fireworks, which we had been seeing sporadically all night, began in earnest, blowing colors across the dark sky and throwing fiery shadows across the square. Balloons erupted like an exhalation underwater and confetti was raining into people’s hair, the tops of the vendor’s huts and directly into the flaming barrels. The display lasted for a full ten minutes; I can’t imagine Time’s Square gives the spectator much more.

I went out looking for a pack of cigarettes and finally found a little basement-level kiosk that looked to be open. As I walked down the stairs, I noticed the small shop was crowded with stubbled faces and black leather. I imagined the rotten fruit and nail polish smell of bad raki and the dry, heavy air of a room where burning cigarettes have consumed most of the oxygen and left nothing but foul, blue smoke in its place. I opened the door and the place went quiet. Every face turned to me. “Um,” I stammered. “Sigaretti?” I said, pointing to the cigarettes, hoping I was somewhere close to the right word. “Vere are you from?” The guy asked me and the room, seemed to get quieter. “I’m from the US,” I told him. “Ah,” He said, suddenly beaming. “Thank you for supporting Kosovo!” “No problem,” I said, as if it was something I had done personally.

 In 1999, the worst time of the conflict, I wasn’t even old enough to vote and I’ve always wondered why we were so keen to bomb Serbia and recognize and independent Kosovo while doing nothing a few years earlier when the Hutus were hacking apart the Tutsis in Rwanda. I’ve always preferred to think of myself as being non-complicit in the decisions of my government abroad. The military bases, the air spaces, USAID, I never voted on these things, they just happened. Sometimes they are good and sometimes bad, but I’ve never taken credit for any of them. Until, this stubbly guy thanked me personally for supporting Kosovo. Maybe it’s just that I’ve never been thanked for anything the US has ever done. Returning to the street with my cigarettes and sporadic fireworks still exploding in the sky, I felt like an American in Paris just after WWII and I wondered which Pristina Kaplan had been writing about, because it wasn’t this one.