Boxes

Most of us have a few really brilliant images from childhood that stand out inexplicably: the dead fly and cobweb laden view of a windowsill, the flaky pattern of an old couch, the legs of a carved wooden chair, the vinyl siding of someone’s house you played at once. These memories are like guideposts in the world of our childhood memories. They are strikingly personal and, as a result, seem to make up a significant part of our personalities. Would we be the same people without the grey memory of the interior of grandma’s car on a rainy day?

Usually, we are certain of these memories. They are mundane enough to not warrant questioning them. Yet, some images remain because they cannot be reconciled with the world we have come to know. The striking orange of the fox in the backyard, the bruised tornado on the horizon, were they actually there or did our childhood imagination blend with reality to create a false impression?

One such uncertain memory I had was of a kid name Chad Tagavor. Chad had a presentable fatness to him. He was big, but well-proportioned enough that no one would have teased him for being fat. His chubby face and wide back seemed to fit him, even at a young age. Chad had a big dimple in his chin and wheat-colored hair chopped into a bowl. He was the kind of kid everyone liked.

Before the day he cut himself on the slide at Dibble Elementary, I don’t know if I even knew his name. I had only just arrived at the school a few weeks before, an incredibly shy kid who spent my recess periods slinking around the edges of the playground, turning over and examining the Flintstones chewable vitamins I’d pocketed, feeling guilty for hiding them when my mom wasn’t looking. I’d roll the slate-colored Barneys and red jasper Wilmas between my thumb and forefinger before finally pitching them in the weeds, which only made me feel worse.

My mopey playground routine didn’t often take me near the large play structure at the center. The confabulation of slides, ladders and monkey bars seemed to have been intended for other kids. I had worked up the courage once, but when I reached the top, amazed at my own audacity, there had been a Charon in Keds asking some kind of admission to the slide. “What will you give me to go down the slide?” He’d asked. Finding nothing in my pockets but a Bam Bam and two Dinos, I turned around and climbed down without saying anything.

When I walked by the structure, I’d watch the other kids climbing it and leaping from it, shouting at each other, like pirates besieging a ship. I wondered how they could be so comfortable acting like this when, for some reason, I was so worried about being noticed or drawing any attention to myself.

I was in first grade and Chad was in third. Having been at Dibble for over two years, he was more comfortable with the place, but even on his first day, he probably ran right up to the monkey bars and started swinging, yelling and challenging other kids to chicken.  Chad existed in the realm of big kids, which, when you’re six, is anyone a grade older than you. Second and third graders were big kids; anyone above sixth grade was an adult. It seemed impossible that anyone should ever live so long to be a sixth grader. I couldn’t fathom what it must’ve been like.

I didn’t know any big kids, but I heard their names called brashly across the playground, so I knew many of their names without having a face to put them to. The day I saw the blood smeared on the reflective metallic surface of the twisty slide and heard the name ‘Chad’ whispered by those who had crowded around, I only had a vague notion of the person this name was meant to recall.

This is the memory: I was at the edge of the playground. I heard someone, a kid, yell. A few of the matronly teacher’s aides who worked the playground were running, which they never did, their whistles swinging back and forth on their stalwart necks. Kids were gathering around the base of the twisty slide. I walked over, staying at the back of the crowd. It was a sunny day. The metal of the slide was so bright it hurt your eyes and dappled and smeared over the metal was more blood than I’d ever seen. “Chad,” the kids around me said. “Cut his hand,” they told each other. “The slide.”

In my memory, the blood was incredibly copious, but it was probably just the sight of the blood, of someone else’s blood, in such an unexpected place that made it appear of a much greater volume. As well as I knew that, I could not succeed in changing the memory to correspond with the reality and Chad Tagavor remained the legendary kid who was nearly exsanguinated by a slide.

Because Chad was a few grades ahead of me, I only saw him one year in every three. He left Dibble just a year after I got there. Three years later, he was in his last year at Frost Elementary when I first arrived to the school, which again, due to the unreliable nature of memory, I am only able to picture under a barrage of heavy rain.

Perhaps as a result of these incessant rains, at Frost Elementary, I gradually got over my shyness and became a loud-mouth. I shouted out stupid things in class at almost every available opportunity. I didn’t pay attention to the principal exports of Peru or to the Pythagorean Theorem. I didn’t do well in school at all after discovering that the sound of my peers’ laughter was every bit as gratifying as an ‘A’ on a quiz and much easier to procure.

After challenging teachers for a few years, I started challenging my peers. I rebelled against fashion and anything else that seemed superfluous to personal, creative growth. I listened to punk rock records, complained about ‘the system,’ stopped changing my clothes and told most people, either directly or indirectly, to leave me alone. In the midst of this quixotic teenage rebellion, Chad Tagavor appeared again as an employee of the McDonald’s on West Avenue, out by the highway.

I’m thirteen, ordering a Big Mac with no meat from him. His navy blue visor with the golden ‘M’ is squashed down on his head. He is still big, a big kid; it’s the first time we’ve ever talked. When I see him behind the register, my mind races back ten years to retrieve the corresponding picture. I see the blood and hear the kids saying “Chad” and “cut himself bad.” I put in my order. “A Big Mac,” he says, “with no meat?” It’s not mean or anything, just perplexed. He can’t help but to share the flagrancy of the order with his coworkers. “Hey, guys,” he says, turning to his coworkers “I got a Big Mac with no meat over here!” I wonder how he can be the same person from that afternoon, the blood on the twisty slide. How can I be the same person? I want to ask him if he remembers. Instead, I mutter something about how he should try it sometime, the Big Mac with no meat, that is.

Chad, being three grades ahead of me, graduated from high school my sophomore year and, in the ensuing chaos of my late adolescence, I forgot all about him, the slide, the blood, the McDonald’s, everything. Some memories disappear like that. It’s like they’re not relevant anymore and become replaced with more immediate information.

I graduated from J-High and barely managed to get into college. I did my best to reform. I convinced myself that all I ever wanted was to be independent and I shouldn’t squander something so hard won. While everyone else was cutting classes and partying, I sat in the 24-hour diner, chain-smoking, gulping down coffee and studying like I’d never studied before. I knew I was way behind most of my peers academically. Even when I worked really hard, I still got mediocre grades, but they were grades I could be proud of and this was enough to encourage me.

I went to a large university with a prominent student culture. Thursday to Sunday, the student ghetto was filled with meatheads carrying 24-packs and mini-skirted girls over their shoulders. In the coldest winter months, the girls waited outside in lines for the night clubs wearing baby doll tops and short shorts, up to their ankles in snow. For an entire year, the song Hey Ya was constantly playing from one frat porch or another, setting the mood for beer pong or some kind of drinking contest.

I decried this sort of student life from behind my overflowing ashtray and mess of papers at the diner, but once a week, the temptation couldn’t be resisted and I’d gather up my books, tip the waitress, go home, call up my friends and head down into the nest of beat-up couches placed in front yards, red plastic cups, sticky floors and people shouting ‘Whoooo!’ for no reason.  

I graduated from college and started applying to graduate programs, having enjoyed my four years of sitting in diners, chain smoking and reading. While I was waiting to hear back from admissions offices in Colorado and New Mexico, I bumped my hours up and started working full time.

Through college, I’d had a slew of lousy jobs. I had worked in one of those gas stations in which the attendant is stuck in a tiny glass box. During the day, the customers could enter the box and pick out their own sodas and cigarettes from the cramped displays, but after 9 pm, everything switched over to a cylindrical window; you rolled the money in and the cigarettes and change rolled back out. It was one of those gas stations that’s constantly lowering its prices before the competition and, occasionally, has lines around the block. There’s a certain type of person who’s willing to wait in line that much to save 15 cents a gallon—usually they’re not very friendly. But the job hadn’t been too bad. There was always lots of free coffee and I could read between costumers.

After I graduated, I picked up a job working at a bookstore. We were allowed to take home books if the spines weren’t the creasing type. Again, there was plenty of free coffee, and it was usually possible to linger in the stock room with a book a little while longer than necessary if the place wasn’t too busy; if the boss caught you with a book, he’d only ask what you were reading and if it was any good.

In the evenings, I went out a lot. I was 22 and I found the neighborhood bar scene much more manageable than the university parties had been. I worked the 2-10 shift at work, so I never had to be up early and I always got out in time to meet everyone at the bar. It was one of those beautiful times in my life when I never seemed to have to wait for anything. When you get older, all the waiting wears you down a little. When I want to go out and do something in the evening now, I’m always ready to go before it starts; after I’ve sat around a while, I lose the ambition to go. Back then it wasn’t like that, if anything, I was usually a little late to things.

I had no car and the bookstore was about a 45 minute walk from my neighborhood. Some nights my friend and ex-roommate Ella would pick me up from work and we’d go down to the bar together. We did this a lot because we had established a ‘dream club.’ I don’t think ‘dream club’ was what we actually called it, but the idea was to meet once a week and share our dreams. I recalled from some psychology class that when you have a reason to remember what you’re dreaming about—like when you know you’re going to have to report on it—you tend to remember your dreams much better.

As hippified as ‘dream club’ sounds, it was really just an excuse to hang out in the bar and drink copious amounts of Labatt beer, which we called ‘Labatt’s’. Back then, Labatt’s was still considered a domestic draft beer in Michigan. A pitcher of the stuff was like 3 dollars.

The bar we went to had this ceiling fresco, a painting of a blue sky with white clouds. It was sort of recessed, like a dome in a church. It had lights around it and the lights changed color. When I’d had too many Labatt’s, I’d start staring at it, watching the colors change and thinking all kinds of nonsense.

Ella and I had gone to high school together; she had dated one of my friends and we had all lived together for a while until they broke up and she moved across town, over where all the students lived. She didn’t seem to mind the drive back home, even after a few pitchers of beer. Sometimes, I worried she’d get pulled over, but, in addition to never having to wait, I didn’t really worry about much back then. It just didn’t seem worthwhile to worry about things.

Part of never having to wait, was always telling everyone else to be early. I did this in a half-intentional way. Technically, I got out of work at 10, but we never really left the building until a little after, like 10:12 or even 10:20. When I came out into the parking lot, Ella’s little white Honda started up from its place at the curb. I swung the door open and ducked in. “Hey.”

“You always tell me 10. You never get out at 10.”

“Nice to see you, too.”

“From now on I’m never coming here until 10:15.”

“Sometimes I get out at 10.”

“Yeah, well, then you can wait.”

The bookstore was separated from the rest of the city by a tangled housing development, a golf course and a park with a marsh in the middle of it. It was just outside the city limits, but it looked very suburban, the kind of place with those long sweeping sidewalks that no one ever seems to use. We drove past the golf course and, crossing Grand River, back into the city. I tried to pry a few dream details out of Ella, but she wouldn’t budge until we got to the bar. It was a warm night and I stuck my arm out the window and let it sweep up and down in the wind.

Situated as it was between the lifeless tracts of vast university housing and an old working class neighborhood, Blondie’s, the bar, did a brisk trade and even on a Thursday night, the place was packed. We managed to walk in right as a group got up from a booth. “Labatt’s, right?” I asked and headed over to the bar.

The clouded dome overhead was changing from red to green to blue and back to red. I was trying to decide which color looked best, but I couldn’t make up my mind. Each color seemed to suit the clouds in a different way. We had discussed our recent dream fragments which led us into speculation as to their source. From there we talked about our lives, our jobs. Ella was working in a veterinary clinic and she talked a lot about the dogs that came through the place. I told her what everyone in the house was up to and complained about the GRE process and grad school, as I had been doing for months. By the time our talk had turned to the future, I was staring at the colored dome. There were two empty pitchers on the table and another 2/3rds full.

“Well, which one do you want to go to?” Ella asked from somewhere behind one of the empty pitchers.

I tore my attention away from the dome where I’d been chasing the question around for a few minutes without finding an answer. “I don’t know. I’ve never been to any of the places. New Mexico sounds interesting, but I don’t know. When I think about moving away, I have this vision of sitting on a bed in an empty apartment, staring at the wall, forcing down that feeling you used to get when you were a kid and had to spend the night at someone’s house; you know, when it was getting late and everyone was getting ready for bed, that feeling that you weren’t going to be able to go home and the vague fear of spending a night lying in the dark wide awake, feeling like you were the only person awake in the world.

“Yeah, I know what you mean. So why not stay here?”

“Naw, it’s time to go; ya’ know? Wayne is the only school I’ve heard anything from. I got in, but I don’t want to go, maybe I will but I doubt it. I’d be like 28 by the time I finished the program. I don’t want to stay here that long. What about you? Did you decide on anything yet?”

“I think I’m going to keep working for a while. I feel like I’ve been in school forever already. I might just move somewhere else and work for a while.”

As it got later, more people came into the bar. I knew some of them; Ella knew others. We abandoned our booth and went to table hopping. On the little stage in the back, someone started playing guitar. It seemed like the harder I tried to pay attention to the music, the less I heard it. After a few songs, it was like all I could hear were the conversations taking place around me. I went looking for Ella and found her laughing with a group of her coworkers. She introduced me to them, but in the dimness and confusion of the bar after midnight, I only nodded to the vague shapes before me. I asked Ella how she was getting home.

“What do you mean?”

“You shouldn’t drive.”

“Yeah, but I will.”

“You know you can stay at the house.”

“I know, but I’d rather just go home.”

“Alright, well I’m going to go in a minute.”

“Hold on a sec. I’m going too. I can drive you back.”

I lit a cigarette and tried to nurse my beer, but once you’ve made up your mind to leave the bar, it’s hard not to feel impatient with the place. I got tired of waiting and went and sat down with some other people, someone kept pouring me beers from their pitcher and after a while, I forgot I had wanted to leave.

Ella and I bumped into each other right after last call. We split the half of a pint I still had and tumbled out into the night.

A light wind had picked up and as we walked over to the car, I felt it blowing all the cigarette smoke out of my hair. The blood was singing in my ears and the cool air felt sobering. It felt so good, I lit another cigarette. It was my last one.

I was going to walk the five blocks back home, but Ella told me just to get in the car. I didn’t resist but asked if she could take me over to the gas station I used to work and get a pack of cigarettes. The place was only about two blocks away.  

I pulled the door closed and we drove out of the parking lot, under the highway overpass and, coming out of the dark, red and blue lights flew out over the car and flooded the interior. A cop car was pulling us over. Without saying anything, Ella pulled into the gas station parking lot two blocks from the bar.

Ella was pretty calm while we sat there with the red and blue lights floating over us. I was looking for a penny she could suck on. I knew it didn’t work, but it seemed better than nothing. I couldn’t say anything when she muttered, “I’m so fucked” because I agreed with her. I thought about the car getting towed and walking home alone. It made me feel terrible and I wished I’d made more of an effort to convince Ella to take a cab or something.

The cop started walking over. The cruiser’s lights were still flashing behind and with each flash his shadow sprang out past the hood of the car, like it was overeager to reach us. We both stared straight ahead, as if we were still moving the way guilty people do.

“Alright, guys, let me see licenses and some registration,” The cop was leaning down to the window. His voice sounded relaxed, like he acknowledged that the whole thing was just a charade we all had to go through.

“Sure,” Ella said, trying to sound stolid and still looking ahead, probably trying not to breathe beer fumes all over the place. She took a wallet from the console and easily pulled out the driver’s license she’d been using all night at the bar. She handed this up through the window and then reached over and opened the glovebox. It banged on my knees and I pretended to be hurt to try to lighten the situation.

Ella was still rooting around looking for the insurance when the cop’s voice suddenly boomed. “Ella Jacobs? Ellie? Ben Jacobs’ little sister? It’s me Chad!” I leaned forward to glance out the driver’s side window. Ella still had her arms up on the steering wheel so it was hard to see the cop’s face, but I saw he’d taken off his hat so she could see his face better.

“We went to school together!” The cop exclaimed. I was friends with your brother!” Then he leaned forward a little, trying to see who else was in the car. Seeing me he exclaimed, “And you’re the kid who ordered the Big Mac without out the meat! God, I’ll never forget that!” He chuckled a little like I had just made the order again.

“Holy shit, Chad,” Ella exclaimed. “You scared the crap out of me! I didn’t know you were a cop.”

“Yeah,” he said, dropping his tone a little, “it’s alright work. Listen, I pulled you over because you didn’t have your lights on. You just came out of the bar parking lot and it’s closing time. It also reeks of alcohol in this car. I’m not gonna’ give you a ticket or anything. If you want to try and blow and you’re under, I’ll let you drive home, but if not, you’re going to have to leave the car here and call a cab. Is that alright?”

Chad was leaning in the window, letting his fingers rest over the door. His palms were hanging down just under the window. A little white scar ran about an inch down the meat of his palm. The memory came back to me. I was six, standing at the edge of a group of kids, there was blood on the twisty slide. Everyone was saying ‘Chad’ and looking around.

I thought about pointing out the scar. I thought about saying ‘I remember when you got that.’ But there was no way to bring it up. It would’ve been too personal, besides, I couldn’t really be sure it was even him. I just stared at the scar hanging down over the doorframe and remembered the feeling of Flintstones’ Chewables in my pocket, like gritty little pebbles.  

Ella took the breathalyzer, probably more for novelty. Chad let out a little chuckle when the thing beeped the result back. “Yeah,” he said, “you’re going to have to leave the car here. He offered to call us a cab, but I told him that I lived nearby and that we’d walk. He still seemed impressed to have run into us. The way he acted, you would’ve thought we were old friends or in another country instead of just thirty miles up the highway from where we’d grown up and had all been kids together.

We said good bye to each other and Chad drove away. I walked across the parking lot, over to the little glass box of the gas station I used to work in. It was well after 9 pm so I had to use the cylindrical window. I rolled the money and the cigarettes and changed rolled back out.

On the walk back to the house, I told Ella about the slide and the blood and how I used to be so quiet.

“Yeah,” she said, “that’s all pretty hard to believe now.”

“Yeah, I guess it is.” Then I added, “You know it’s funny, he thinks of me as forever being the kid 

who ordered the Big Mac with no meat, and for me he’s the kid who cut himself on the slide. It’s like we’re both stuck in time.”

“Well, not anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“Now you’re probably going to be stuck in this moment for each other. Don’t you think?”

“Yeah, at least if I run into him again, we’ll be able to share the same memory now.” I said, sorta’ laughing the way Chad had earlier.

In the little neighborhood between Kalamazoo and Michigan Avenue, we walked past the slumping porches and the Oldsmobiles parked at the curbs. In a pool of streetlight at the intersection of Mifflin and Prospect, a cat walked slowly past. Someone yelled a few blocks away and the cat stopped and looked over its shoulder and then continued on its way like nothing had happened.

Jungle despite the City

I hate to say it, but sometimes we go to the Hard Rock Café.

They just built the thing about a year ago into the ground floor of the old Hotel Guarani. It’s got all the modern crap you could want like pixie stick-colored lights and a guitar in a glass case that Courtney Love once used. As you get older, it’s true that you find yourself doing more desperate things in the eternal quest for entertainment, perhaps because you’re no longer willing to do anything too outrageous. I have a hard time even convincing myself to have more than a few drinks and I go to bed every night congratulating myself on another day of non-smoking. Still, I’m not ready to just lean back in my easy chair and just wait for death to come and obviate the necessity of finding entertainment, so, I go instead to places like the unbelievably banal Hard Rock Café.

What led me to this rock and roll-themed sports bar initially was that it was the only place open for drinks in Asuncion on Sunday evening, which is my usual night to get restless in the heat of the city and decide to kick up my heels for a bold, enterprising drink. Normally, I’d just go to some bar and complain until I forced myself to leave, but, a few months ago, after wandering all over an empty and dark downtown, I chanced upon the gleam of some bartender’s more than requisite amounts of costume flair and soon found myself in a chintzy lounge watching Michael Jackson music videos on a TV above the bar. Given that I’d never seen anything but soccer on a bar TV in Paraguay, I was soon enthralled with the videos, especially when they began showcasing more obscure artists. Thus distracted, I stopped paying much attention to the number of 6 dollar beers I was drinking and by the time an Elliot Smith video came on the TV, I was practically dancing on the bar.

Now when I go downtown for the weekend, I drift, only semi-consciously, over to the Hard Rock Café, continually thinking that maybe something else will present itself as a viable entertainment option before I get to the doors, but of course nothing ever does.

Owing to a Monday holiday, last Sunday was more lifeless than usual in downtown Asuncion. The streets were devoid of pedestrians and only an occasional bus roared by. In the grey-gold interior lights, you could see even the obstreperous buses were mostly empty. Gina and I had crossed most of downtown when we came to a cluster of popcorn sellers, people waiting for the bus and women from the countryside with jewelry spread out in ropy clusters on white sheets. Just beyond these people was possibly the only illuminated edifice in the entire city and just beyond that the Hard Rock Café.

As we approached the doors, I noticed the unmistakable sound of real symbols crashing that always distinguishes distant live music from distant stereo music turned up really loud. Where else could it be coming from but the Hard Rock Café? Unconsciously, we quickened our paces slightly, but just as we gained the door, a ‘gracias,’ a rapid strumming of a single guitar chord and a drum roll announced the end of the band and the music.

We walked into the gap left by the recently cancelled music. There was that radio popping noise of amps and guitars being unplugged as we walked in and the host eagerly arose from behind his little lectern to meet us. Our friend Everett was already at the bar, so we able to circumvent the host’s excessive formality by mumbling something about ‘amigo’ and ‘esperando’ before running off to the bar.

Everett said his band was playing in something of a battle of the bands that the restaurant was sponsoring. Gina and I sat down, ordered beers and marveled at the lack of a cover charge despite the live music, even if there were only to be three bands playing three songs apiece. Gina argued that the Hard Rock Café chain probably had some policy that disallowed for charging admittance at any of their 100s of locations (from Podgoriča to Phuket). She was right, no doubt, but I argued with her anyway stating that it was probably just that we had managed to get in right before they started charging. At this, she rolled her eyes.

Everett’s band was to play last. In the time that elapsed before they went on, we watched a band that sounded a lot like Blink 182, drank a few more beers, split a shot of whiskey and watched a band that sounded a lot like Soundgarden, or a lot like I remember Soundgarden sounding. When Everett’s band went up, I was cheering before they even played a note or introduced themselves. The Hard Rock Café was beginning to seem like an old and familiar bar and the patrons were all like people I had gone to high school with.

Everett’s band was good. They played a decent set and then all the bands came on stage while they announced the winners. I wasn’t surprised that Everett’s band won, they were clearly the favorite, but I was happy for him and his bandmates. I guess they were going to get to go to play at an international battle of the Hard Rock Café bands in Cancun or someplace. We congratulated Everett, but after the music, there didn’t seem to be any reason to stick around so we left.

There was supposed to have been a jazz thing a few streets over, but a quick perusal of the area yielded nothing but a few other restaurants that had recently opened their doors for dinner, though with the next day off, it looked like most people were just having drinks in large groups, the women with globes of wine cradled between their manicured nails, the men, freshly shaved, drinking Heineken out of those tall and slender beer glasses that restaurants seem to favor. The outdoor seating was packed and the terrible music was blasting from every available speaker.

Gina and I went to an upstairs bar for another beer and compared notes on growing up in the United States, rhapsodizing about teachers, friends and television shows that had all since receded, somewhat bewilderingly, from our constant thoughts.

We left the bar, stopped at a liquor store and bought a beer for the long walk home. The streets were busier than they had been earlier in the afternoon and the frequent cars honked and impatiently sped through red lights, others drifted around slowly like the drivers were looking for an address.

The darker and more claustrophobic streets of the downtown gradually opened up and sprouted ornamental trees. The ornamental trees grew larger until they scattered the light from the streetlamps all over the sidewalk in sloppy disco ball adumbrations. The cars passed less frequently, but when they did they went twice as fast as they had downtown. The combined colognes and perfumes of their passengers loosed into the humid night like oil and gasoline leaking from a tanker making its way through a warm ocean.

I was half-asleep when we reached our neighborhood, but conscious enough to suggest one last beer to encourage us the last four blocks down the street and up the three flights of stairs to our apartment.

No matter how late I stop by, the old woman who runs the little shop down the street always has the place open. The shop consists of a reticulated shutter, like the ones pulled down on storefronts when the mall is closed and a sort of stall behind the shutter. In order to call the proprietress, one must clap one’s hands as though applauding the empty store.

I applauded before the shutter and we waited a minute before the old woman came shuffling out. As usual, her face lit up with beatific, grandmother-like recognition when she noticed us by the door. Having been a foreigner in many different countries, I can say that children and old people are the most tolerant of your foreign-ness. Both are too concerned with you as a person to pay any attention to how poorly you might speak the language or observe the customs of their country. As she approached the shutter, the old woman’s glasses gleamed under the florescent lights and she smiled and asked us how we were. She seemed more excited than usual, especially as it must’ve been after midnight. We covered the perfunctory topics and I was about to ask her for a beer so we could be on our way, when she told us that her son from Austria was visiting. ‘Austria? How the hell does a guy from Paraguay end up in Austria? I didn’t voice my thought, but I must’ve somehow betrayed significant interest because, in a minute, our little proprietress was hurrying back to get her famous son from Austria.

The man who greeted us through the bars of the shutter was like an illusion. Although he had apparently been doing nothing more than lounging around at home, he was dressed in immaculate white clothes. His appearance was topped off with a wide-brimmed white hat, like something a pimp in the 70s would’ve worn, only now, at this time of night, after a few drinks, in Asuncion, Paraguay, it looked magical. His unique facial-hairstyle only furthered this impression. Everything below the man’s ears looked like it’s been drawn on with a pen. He had a little parenthesis under his nose and another, titled vertically, under his mouth.  Just beneath his earlobes, like little arrows pointing out his cheekbones, were little dashes of hair, so small they looked like they could’ve been rubbed away. I kept waiting for the guy to say abracadabra and disappear in a puff of colored smoke. Instead we talked about our journeys, as traveling people are wont to do.

We stood talking at the shutter for a while. I asked about Austria. Did he like it? How did it compare with Paraguay? Having never been to Austria, I kept imagining the guy in my closest point of comparison: Switzerland. While he talked, I imagined him in his white pimp hat walking under rigid Teutonic architecture, his pointy shoes clacking over the cobblestones and the grates surrounding the innumerable fountains. I imagined him like a white moth fluttering through a night of black-suited bankers on their way to the Zentral Bank. I couldn’t imagine this guy doing anything in Austria, so I had to ask him what his job was. “I play music!” He responded jovially, like he was going to play some for us right there but instead he stepped back, opened the shutter and said “why don’t you come in and have a drink with me?”

How could I say no?

The hallway that was visible from the shutter led back to a typical living room with a couch, a coffee table and a TV. Our host ordered a beer from his mother and she came in carrying one with an opener as if she were used to her son entertaining in this manner. She seemed happy to see that he’d invited us in and smiled as if to say “you’re in for a good time now!”

We talked about life in foreign parts in general. The man lamented that he’d left his home country so far behind. He had a family in Austria now and his kids, he told me, didn’t even speak Spanish, let alone Guarani. Our entire conversation was in Spanish and although I kept expecting it, this man never tried to say anything in German. All over the CIS (former USSR) countries, I had met men who were back home visiting from Russia where they worked. These men were consistently thrilled to meet a foreigner they could speak Russian with. Even after I explained to the prodigal fathers that I didn’t know any Russian, they would persist, perhaps wanting to show their families their foreign language skills, perhaps already missing their adopted language. My conversation with the magic musician was so devoid of any German vocabulary that I began to wonder how well he knew the language. He was either very stoic or happy to be away from his adopted country. It was hard to tell which.

After a few beers and a discussion about how his kids should learn Spanish while they were still young so they could talk to their grandmother. The magician told me that his brothers and sisters had also joined him in Austria and I suddenly understood why the little old woman always seemed so happy to see us, even at 1 am, when we came by the store. We probably reminded her of her kids who all live in Austria. I thought about my own mom, back in Michigan, and wondered if there were any people my age that she greeted with enthusiastic attention in the years that I’ve been gone. I found myself imagining my mom inviting the mailman or someone else in for cookies, all the while shamelessly bragging about her international son to the completely unconcerned guest. The thought combined with the beer was making me feel melancholic and I was on the point of making an excuse to go when a terrible sound erupted from the next room, like the sudden whooshing, crumpling sound of cars crashing and what I imagine a Tyrannosaurus Rex mating call must’ve sounded like, all mixed together.

What was that? I asked. The old proprietress, who had been sitting quietly throughout our conversation, stood up and announced that it was her parrot. She invited us to come and see the bird in the next room.

I guess the parrot must’ve had its wings clipped or it was merely too lazy to try to do anything about its predicament. There was no cage or little chain around its scaly, black chicken claws. The parrot, about 10 inches tall, stood on a little wooden perch and looked content to stay there. As we approached, he shifted back and forth, sidestepping in the interesting way parrots do, without making any movement to fly away. “Be careful,” the old woman warned, “he’s mean.” Normally, I would’ve heeded this sage advice, but the combination of the beers and the lateness of the hour addled my judgment to the point where the best course of action seemed to be to immediately prove to these people that I was some kind of parrot whisperer.

To demonstrate the meanness of the bird, our musician host stretched a hand out, which the bird promptly attacked with its talon-shaped beak. As he didn’t seem too injured by the bird’s efforts, I stuck my own hand out to the bird, which accepting the challenge, it immediately tried to tear apart. I was too busy imaging how the bird was going to get tired of biting my finger, accept me and then climb up on my shoulder to notice that none of these things were happening. The biting didn’t hurt much, but eventually I had to concede that the parrot was never going to accept me. I pulled my hand away. Now it was Gina’s turn. I thought she would be sure to win the parrot’s affections, but again, the bird immediately began to gnaw at her fingers.

Before we went back into the house, I made some comment about how the biting hadn’t hurt. In doing so, I held up my hands, as if to show off the lack of pain in them and found that I was, in fact, bleeding all over the place. I tried to act casual, but everyone had noticed. I pretended that it wasn’t a big deal, but I was also perplexed by how the bird was able to lacerate my fingers in such a way without me noticing. It occurred to me that I’d probably had even more to drink that I realized. We went back to the living room and continued our conversation about living abroad and while discussing the pros and cons of moving away from what is familiar to one, the old proprietress gently cleaned the blood off my hands and applied antiseptic and bandages. I protested, telling her that I could do it, but she just shook her head at me and went back to her work, like I was a five year-old boy who’d skinned his knee rather than a slightly drunken 32 year-old foreigner.

When we left the shop and said good bye to the old woman and her son, I walked back home, looking at my bandaged hand and thinking about the great potential for kindness in people and my renewed respect for parrots.      

(If you happen to be in Austria and need a Latin-themed band, be sure to check out members.aon.at/losastros )        

The Floating World

I was sixteen, so I guess the whole thing was endowed with that sixteen year-old feeling, which I can’t really describe except to say that new things seemed to be happening all the time and none of them were really that bad.

I didn’t get along with my parents. When I was home, we argued all the time. There was this increasing sense that the disappointment I was causing them was going to become a permanent thing. Up until that point, it looked like it might have been possible to turn things around and go back to being the decent kid I had been. But now I couldn’t seem to halt my progress of becoming a pain in the ass.

The way I saw it, everyone else just couldn’t accept what I knew to be true: we were all pretty much all a bunch of bastards. The only thing to do was to reject everything. You couldn’t even talk to me about it. I had the answer and didn’t need to listen to any more conjecture. Rejecting everything was an easy credo to maintain and I didn’t want anything messing with it.  

Embittered as I was, I was still having fun. I guess that’s what I mean about the sixteen year-old feeling. I learned things that upset me, but I just let them roll off my back. It was the first time I had been able to feel bothered and simultaneously unconcerned about something. I had always been bad at stuff like that and I used to hit every problem head on like a brick wall. My first year of school, I cried every day for the first few weeks. I couldn’t shake the idea that I’d been abandoned. When I was ten and my parents left me at my grandma’s to take a vacation, they’d hardly driven away when I began to convince myself that they’d died and that I’d be alone forever with my autistic sister. I went behind the garage, which looked out over a field that was stubbly with the remains of some kind of crop. The sun was setting. I sat at the edge of the field and planted my feet down in one of the furrows of loose earth. I watched the sun set while I lashed myself with the words ‘your parents are dead’ over and over until tears came into my eyes and it seemed I would grow up with only this gnarled field for love. After years of feeling this way, it was liberating to have finally achieved apathy. 

I wasn’t in love or anything. No girl would have me. There was a girl named Michelle. Everyone actually called her ‘stache as in ‘mustache.’ She didn’t seem to mind. Someone would say “hey, ‘stache!” and she’d come over like it was her name. I got drunk one night and convinced myself that she had something no one could see. She said ‘no’ and I remember thinking that I must’ve been pretty pathetic to not even be able to get ‘stache for a girlfriend. But it didn’t bother me. Like I said, things just happened.

One of those things that I remember in incredible detail was that Ryan and I tried to stay awake for an entire weekend. Although we only made it one night, it changed my perspective. I guess my threshold for spiritual quests was low enough that a single night wandering around in the snow was equivalent to a few weeks in the desert. The weightlessness of the buildings, the way the hulks of frozen snow and light rendered everything inert and useless, it was all the furniture of a floating world and even my rejection of it was decadent.

I’d met Ryan before. He had sold punk records out of his parents’ house. I went over on my bike when I was about 14 and bought an LP and a few 7”s. He was eating pistachios out of a bag from the health food store, which seemed like the weirdest thing to me. He moved to California a few weeks later. I forgot about him until someone mentioned that he’d come back. We all called him ‘Captain’ so everyone was talking about how Captain was back, but I didn’t expect him to remember me. We’d only met once. 

He was sitting on a washing machine, at a basement show one night listening to the bands, nodding his head. A band played a Code 13 cover and dedicated it to him because they’d bought the record in his parents’ basement. I had a few drinks and went up and we started talking. He said my band needed to practice more, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t really even interested in being in a band. It was just something to do. When the last band was hauling their stuff out, we went outside and talked standing in the ruts made in the snow made by the cars, each of us wearing tennis shoes. I was kind of drunk by then. I told him about all the records I bought since I’d seen him last and gave my opinion of each one. Ryan had an encyclopedic knowledge of the DIY punk world and added pertinent comments as to who had been in each band and what they were doing now. He was older than I was and obviously knew much more, but the way he talked included me. He ended every statement with a “right?” like he wasn’t sure and thought maybe I’d know, although I knew nothing and was just some drunk kid standing on a snowy street.

Ryan came over the next night in his dad’s pickup truck. My head was still kind of fuzzy and I couldn’t think of much to say. We listened to a tape of a band I’d never heard of with a name that sounded like it was in another language. I had to keep kicking my feet together. The floor was too far down for the heater to reach and the cold was rising through the rubber floor mats. Ryan asked where we were going and Taco Bell seemed like the most convenient place to suggest.

In comparison to the dark and empty streets, the dining area was as bright as an emergency room. I walked up to the counter, stomping my frozen feet and ordered a bag of bean burritos that had heft like a garbage bag and a cup for water that I filled with orange slice. Ryan didn’t get anything and politely looked out the window when I unrolled the burritos to squeeze copious amounts of hot sauce onto them.

I felt better after eating and the conversation in the truck picked up a little. We went to Meijer’s and walked through the mercantile vastness. No one seemed to be around, the streets, the Taco Bell and now Meijer’s had all been empty. On the way home, we listened to the same tape of the band with the weird name and Ryan told me about the band and their myriad connections to the greater DIY world. I tried to make jokes about the bumper stickers on passing cars.

We started hanging out after that. Ryan moved out of his parents’ place and in with Katrina, then Katrina moved out and Ryan lived with a series of roommates who were never at home. I’d go hang out at his place all the time. He never seemed to be doing much but listening to records, so usually we’d sit on the living room floor and talk about bands. I was always a little nervous he was going to play something really important that I wouldn’t be able to recognize or that I’d mistake one band for another or just say something dumb. But gradually, I started to relax around Ryan. He seemed to be completely free of the latent desire most people have to pass judgment.

Around this time, everything really started to go to hell at home, but I was sixteen so I had that underwater feeling about all of it, like it wasn’t really happening or at least if it was happening, it didn’t matter. My dad moved out. My sister went to live in a home and I have this memory of standing on Ryan’s porch late at night that winter. It was one of those open porches that the snow drifts up onto and gets all stomped down by people walking in and out of the house. The bootprints only go from the stairs to the door. The rest of the porch, with the chairs and ashtrays, is frozen and untouched, like something after Chernobyl. I was standing on this porch. It was late at night, freezing cold out and quiet. I was smoking, trying not to use my hands so I wouldn’t have to take them out of my pockets. I listened to the glissade of cars trundling down the frozen streets, blocks away. I think it was a weeknight. You could almost hear everyone asleep. I looked down the street. The streetlights were so intense there were no shadows. The snow that the plows had piled up was frozen in golden crags. Everything the snow didn’t cover, like the ground under the arborvitae along people’s homes, bedroom windows and car tires looked wet and black. Everything else looked like burnished gold. 

The streetlights vibrated like florescent lights. I wanted to stay out after I finished my cigarette, but it was too cold. I went inside, wrapped myself up in the blankets and my sweatshirt that smelled like smoke and wind and lay down on the old oatmeal-colored couch. I fell asleep immediately, sinking into the crease where the cushions met the backrest and still hearing the blurry hum of the streetlights outside.

The next day we started talking about staying up all night. Ryan said he’d stayed up before for something like three nights in a row. I’d never done more than one. It seemed amazing to me that I’d been so impatient to accomplish the goal of staying up all night as a kid but then, soon after I’d achieved it, dropped the idea of staying up longer as something unworthy of my attention. We agreed to try to stay up all of the next weekend.

My dad called home that week. I hadn’t talked to him since he’d moved out. When I heard his voice on the phone, I handed it to my mom without saying anything for a reply. My sister came home and stayed with us for a few days and then she went back to the group home. I took naps on the couch every day after school and my mom woke me up for dinner when she got home. It was usually getting dark, by then.

I stayed up late and tried to write. I wrote a lot about snow and different kinds of light, waiting so long for the right word that it sometimes took more than half an hour to write a sentence and even then it wasn’t anywhere near what I wanted to say.

That Friday, I walked to Ryan’s after school. We listened to some records and then made dinner: a bunch of sautéed vegetables, brown rice and half a bottle of Bragg’s. I had a few plates and all the rice felt like a brick in my stomach. I went outside to smoke and it was getting dark. It must’ve been early January because it wasn’t much later than 5 o’clock and the streetlights were already coming on. A few cars went by on West Ave. but there were few other sounds.

It was exceedingly cold, so we stayed indoors most of the night watching movies and talking. I went out to the porch every few hours to smoke. Around three am, I started clenching my jaw as a subtle way to keep myself awake. There didn’t seem to be anything to do inside that didn’t involve sitting down in one way or another and, every time I sat, I started to fall asleep. Ryan seemed fine, but he saw my drooping eyes and suggested we take a walk. Not ready to give up on the idea of staying up all weekend so early, I agreed.

Whatever minimal sounds had been drifting around earlier in the evening had been killed. The street had the prickly silence of something abandoned that had not hosted sound in years. There was no wind. About a block away, like a watch’s second hand, I could hear the periodic tic of the traffic light which had switched from red, yellow and green to flashing yellow— north to south— and red— east to west.

Going out into the night was like falling into some huge frozen body of water like Lake Baikal. The snow lay heaped around like slag and our bodies seemed to dissipate in the intense cold. A breath billowed out like a mouthful of cottony cigar smoke; each word we spoke chugged out like a locomotive puff. The snow crunched under our shoes like soft ice between the back teeth.

Most people on the block had not shoveled the sidewalks in front of their homes and the path was limited to a narrow gorge where the snow had been trod by people passing in the day, most of them probably going up to the corner store to buy cigarettes or lotto tickets.

The gas station was closed. The Wendy’s was dark and the parking lot that had been recently cleared was already dusted with snow. The traffic lights ticked on and off and drew the world in red and black. And on it went. Down the street, the Little Caesar’s and the liquor store were closed. The Heavenly Ham was closed. 

The concepts behind these places seemed much more obscure with all the storefronts dark and shuttered. Why ham? Why did we need a specific store for ham? And why was it here? It could’ve been anywhere. Was there a reason why they put it here? We shook out heads, uncomprehending.

Unconsciously, we were walking downtown. After Mason Street, the buildings grew by a few stories and you could hear them up there, with their loose hanging fire escapes, cutting through the wind. The lights on the tops of the TV antennae, cast a red glow on the buildings that made them look pixilated. It was colder downtown where the buildings were taller and there were fewer trees to halt the progress of the swelling wind. I had to pee. I would’ve gone outside, but we saw a security guard standing in the doors of an old building, smoking, and asked if I could use the bathroom. A peaceable old guy, he agreed, tossed his cigarette into the street and stood back from the door to let us in. I slipped down the faux marble floors to the bathroom and Ryan talked with the guard. Their voices rising and falling like shadows in candlelight descending a staircase. The building’s echo made all the plosive sounds in their voices pock like tennis balls being overhanded down the dark hallways.

Back outside, I couldn’t tell how far we were from morning. The sky looked mauve-grey. It may have been the streetlights and all the neon floating and squirming through the glass tubes twisted into the soft contours of the word ‘open’ over and over.  

We walked back west, past St. Mary’s, and came out over on Brown Street. Even the gas stations were closed. It was like being conscious for your own blackout, walking down streets that you weren’t supposed to remember in the morning. On Brown, we walked by a bank and started talking about a girl Ryan had met there.

“Yeah,” his words each muffled by vapor, his eyes fogged over under his glasses. “But she works at a bank.”

I thought about this for a while. Imagining a young teller, brown hair pulled back into a bun, subtle indications that she was still young: perfume, horn rim glasses, turquoise nail polish. I saw how she’d be nice to everyone, even to someone with only 82.00 dollars in his account.

“Yeah, but what if she hates it?” I asked in frozen white syllables.

“Working at the bank?”

“Yeah. What if it was the only job she could get and every day she goes in to that 70s-looking building with all the same coworkers who have been there for years thinking ‘God, I’ve got to get out of here’? ”

“Then she should.”

“What if she couldn’t?”

“Why not?”

I ignored this. “But wouldn’t you say it’s possible that you and her could have something in common? What if she likes the same movies you do?”

“Ha.” The laugh came out in ghostly burst and drifted up while the hollow sound of it rang out like a wrench dropped in an empty garage. “I doubt it,” Ryan said, shaking his head.

We talked about the bank teller until we reached the Westwood Mall. Ryan wouldn’t concede to asking her out. I countered by insisting that she was probably one of the most interesting people in town and declared, only half-jokingly, that I’d ask her out if he wouldn’t. I saw myself going in and starting up a savings account on the pretense of talking to her. I saw her driving me around in her ‘90 Focus with the rust around the wheel wells. I smoked cigarettes and changed the stations until the cold brought me back to the present scene and the extinguished McDonald’s sign blocking out a dirty ‘M’ shape against the black sky signaling the beginning of Blackman Township.

We passed the old Jewel Osco and the sidewalk ended. There were no footprints on the shoulder so we walked in the street, stomping to knock the snow off our shoes again. We crossed the railroad tracks in front of the Mopar plant that looked abandoned behind the low wall of snow that had drifted up around it. A grey water tower sagged over the building. In the faint light I could almost make out the FORD SUCKS that someone had spraypainted up there years before.

It had begun to snow again and the wind had abated. The heavy flakes were falling through the dark with the sound of someone pouring salt onto a plate. Neither of us was wearing a good coat and we frequently had to brush the snow from our shoulders so it wouldn’t start to melt and dampen our clothes. A car drove past and a flume of marijuana smoke drifted out, smelling alien in the cold, like a distant jungle on fire. The smell chased the red tail lights down into the dark meadows around the airport, down by the highway on the north side of town, in the direction we were walking.

Any town on a major highway has at least two parts to it: the central shopping area and the chain stores out by the highway. In Jackson, these districts are separated by a swath of empty, treeless land where, in the summer, the grass grows long and turns yellow and, in the winter, the snow lies even and peaceful over the hillocks left by the tufts of long, dead grass. There’s an airport runway out there and, as we walked by, lights flashed over the snow. After the bright flash, the contrasting dark was difficult to navigate and we walked through patches of light and darkness, leaving drunken, lurching footprints behind us. The cars going down 94 were muted by the snow. From less than 300 feet away, we could hardly hear them, but their lights spun through the trees and falling snow like cruising searchlights.

The area between the highway and Argyle St. has a long bight of sidewalk that bridges the empty area. The county had cleared this stretch of sidewalk recently and it still had partially submerged look that concrete dug out of a snow bank often has. In the summer, one often found abandoned shopping carts and the broken ink tags of stolen merchandise scattered along the sidewalk but now there was nothing but a meandering set of bootprints coming from the other direction. The freshness of which indicated that we had probably come close to overtaking this traveler and I wondered how we had missed him and where he’d been going.

At the top of the hill, the sidewalk runs out again over the highway overpass. In the day, it’s difficult to cross the exchange, but at 4 am, we walked across slowly, stepping down from the last plate of sidewalk with the balls of our feet to keep the rising snow from spilling over the tops of our shoes.

On the other side of the overpass, the Denny’s glowed like a candle placed in the window of an empty house. The bottoms of the plate glass windows were fogged up with melting snow, conversation, newspaper ink and coffee steam. Looking in at the hunched forms and the meringue-colored lights, I imagined the rattle of dozens of coffee spoons stirring at once, the crinkling papers and the springy clink of zippo lighters and quickened my pace.

We stomped the snow off our shoes, crossing the recently plowed parking lot. The cars of the third shift waitresses and cooks at the back of the lot were covered in snow, about four inches, like they’d been there for months. Even the side mirrors balanced little caps of snow. By the door, the snow had been knocked off the newspaper vending machines, probably by the guy who stocked the papers—an aspect of the job you don’t really think about.

I opened the door and the jangly, warm sounds of encapsulated humanity came floating out into the dark, like a particularly crackly fire.

A waitress, grabbed two of the greasy, oversized laminated menus from the box by the register and cocked them under her arm in a business-like manner. “Two?” She asked. We nodded. “Smoking or non—?” I looked at Ryan. He nodded, slightly. “Smoking.” I told the waitress and she marched us to the back of the restaurant.

A few solo diners looked up to watch us walk by, but most were too busy watching the snow continue falling outside through the steam of their coffee. The conversation in the air had a showered and baggy-eyed quality, like people still weren’t too sure what they were saying to each other, or what the sense was in talking at all.

The waitress tossed the sticky menus down signaling our table, a semi-circular booth in the back, too big for two people. I ordered coffee, Ryan, orange juice and, to our waitress’ irritation, we returned the menus saying we didn’t need anything else. “That’s all you want?” She asked, clarifying. “Yeah,” I nodded. My eyes burned and I couldn’t tell if it was because I hadn’t slept or a result of all the ambient smoke. I pulled out my cigarettes and put them on the table, waiting until the coffee came before lighting one. Ryan and I didn’t seem to have much more to say to each other. We were tired enough to have retreated into our own bleary thoughts in lieu of retreating into our warm, unmade beds.

When the coffee came, I took a deep breath over the top of the cup and let the steam warm my lungs and face before taking a drink. When I looked up, I noticed that the room was full of older middle aged men. The waitresses were the only women. The men were all slightly slouched in their seats, like they were waiting for someone important to meet them, but didn’t want to look overly-expectant. A lot of them reminded me of my dad and I thought about him living in the apartments across from the jr. high. I imagined him coming in here early in the morning for breakfast with the same filmy expression.

The snow started falling thick and fast outside and the volume of conversation increased a little in wonder. As I watched it, it began to look as though the snowflakes were stationary points of light, like stars, and that we were the ones rushing up into the sky, like the whole restaurant had become unmoored and was racing up to the moon.

Ryan was holding his orange juice like he was trying to finish a thought before taking a drink. The waitresses were thanking the tired-looking men and the bus boys were crashing the leftover portions of eggs and toast and coffee into those big black tubs. The Denny’s kept rising through the snow and each patron that went out for their car, pitched headlong into the darkness. I imagined stepping out of the door and the cold wind fluttering the damp and salt encrusted ends of my untied shoelaces as I fell. I saw my mom float by, her long winter coat sounding like a flag snapping in the wind. I saw my sister in her home, flanked by smoking CNAs like hideous caryatids. And my dad, sinking like a stone, with the same tired look and his hair fluttering up, away from the direction of his fall.

We paid the bill and stepped out into the salt-smeared foyer, pulling zippers up, hats down and gloves on. The highway was ahead of us, carved out like a shallow canyon. The muffled sounds of traffic increased as we pushed open the door. “Hey,” I said to Ryan, turning as I pushed open the door. “I bet that bank teller is probably down there right now driving to work. Don’t you think?” A trickle of sunlight was running down the highway on the roofs of the eastbound traffic. Ryan thought about it a minute and then answered. “Yeah, I bet she is.”  And we stepped outside.

Endless Sunday Evening

Last Sunday morning was cool and grey, like it had stormed during the night, only there were no puddles and no vague, half-awake memories of lightening. We went down to the park for a while to drink our coffee and watch the birds flit through the trees and call out to the grey morning. It was Sunday and everyone was still inside. When I first moved to Latin America, I hated the feel of its occluded and penitent Sundays. Alone in Buenos Aires, I was continually distressed to wake up on my only day off and find that the clouds had moved back over the sky (even if it had been beautiful all week) and that everything had closed so utterly as to make the neighborhood look abandoned.  Even the sign boards seemed to come down and the shutters pulled over the shops were battered into anonymity. A walk through the desolate city would reveal nothing more than a few dying pockets of Saturday night: tired-sounding music echoing up from basements, empty Fernet bottles and an occasional gust of dead perfume and spilled beer from a barroom floor.

I have since adapted to the feel of what I have come to think of as a ‘true Sunday,’ after I came to understand the character of the day was not as grim and vacuous has it had initially seemed. Sundays here are like a Norman Rockwell ideal. Rather than the sort of tenuous pause we have in the US—an odd little gap usually filled with the fallout from Saturday’s parties and Monday’s work anxiety— Sunday here is entirely empty. It is a sort of weekly vacation.

In the US, I never tried very hard to choose between Saturday night and Sunday morning. No contest; Sunday was for sleeping through. You didn’t plan anything for Sunday. But the neglected aspect of the day, often dissolved into almost painfully sad evenings that didn’t end until Monday morning. In the US there is no Sunday night, only interminable evening and I spent these evenings trying to understand where the sense of failure was coming from the same way you try to locate a puncture in a bike tire. Somehow in having not changed my situation between Friday and Sunday, it was like I’d missed something important. I’d have to wait out another week before I could try again. But, whatever I was aiming for was never very clear.

In Latin America, Sunday is so universally dead, it’s like the guilt over the weekend is shared by everyone. The stores are all closed, the streets are mostly quiet, but, despite this, there is a feeling that Sunday is the focus of the weekend, like this quiet was all anyone was after and Saturday had been no more than a prelude.

Asuncion is a noisy city. Cheap motorcycles have flooded the streets and many of them have mufflers in poor states of repair, or missing altogether. Cars drive by with megaphones mounted on the hoods announcing that they are selling food or buying old car batteries. A guy rides by on a bike calling out that he sharpens knifes. Construction is consistent. Old diesel buses roar past on low, quasi-brown note gears. Something is always either going up or being taken down. My first year here, the noise got to me. I started to feel skittish, like a dog constantly darting back under the table from the Fourth of July fireworks. It took me a while to trust Sunday, I kept expecting it to turn sour and melancholy on me, but eventually I started to find relief in day’s quiescence.

I am now accustomed to the noise. I’m probably still more aware of it than everyone else, but it doesn’t shake me loose from my mental moorings the way it did after I’d arrived. I am much more aware of the absence of noise that its presence, thus Sunday morning dawns with a sort of beatific quality. Almost no one works and the only people who seem to get up before noon are the elderly. Walking through our neighborhood on Sunday morning, it feels different: dogs play in the empty streets, people lean over their fences talking to their neighbors, every greeting is returned heartily. It’s like waking up in a different city.

Last Sunday, we settled into an awkward wooden bench in the park and poured our thick coffee into our tin cups, a small measure at a time so it didn’t get cold. While still waking up, we attempted subjects of conversation, abandoned them and moved on to others, each more flippant than the last until I found I was soliloquizing on all the places I love again. Sunday here is mutable, it’s easy to imagine it as a Sunday in Siracusa, Italy or Batumi, Georgia on the Black Sea coast, but there is no coast anywhere, only the swampy boardwalk along the river, and I contented myself with going home after the coffee was finished, making a few phone calls and eating some pancakes.

After the pancakes, we went walking down the long avenues of the city toward the botanical garden, but this undeveloped diamond plot of land at the northwest end of the city should not be called a garden. For one thing, it is too large. It is also formless and savagely crisscrossed with sandy motorcycle and scooter treads. In the botanical garden you are more likely to hear stereos playing the latest pop songs rather than bird song. It is something like a sports complex/parking lot that has been pushed back into a neglected stand of trees. You can’t call the place a botanical garden because there is no garden in it, not really, but somehow, the title “botanical” still suits the place as an adjective. There are plants, animals and trees coexisting with the beer cans and the subwoofers. Behind a cyclone fence, I have even glimpsed a neatly arranged medicinal herb garden, in which each plant looks tenderly cared for and every sprout has an identifying plaque. However, this sole vestige of a garden seems to be firmly locked against intrusion. I have never seen it open or anyone else in its vicinity. A better term for the place would be “park.”  

The walk to the park is not pleasant, but after the previous day in the countryside, I felt my tolerance level for the more inane aspects of the city had been raised, or rejuvenated. It was also Sunday so I was expecting the traffic to be mild.

From our apartment, we walked down a street that looks like it has been blazed through a dense and humid jungle. The canopy of the trees still laces across the sky, parrots flit around and squawk in their metallic voices. The street goes nowhere and has been paved with the most haphazard paving stones. Most of them are not flush with the ground but dug in at an angle lifting a sharp corner to the sky. Imagine a street paved with imperfect and broken bricks and you’ll have an idea of what it looks like. The jagged street is uncomfortable to walk on and the cars that drive down it can’t go more than 15 mph without completely rattling loose. There are three mango trees growing up through the paving stones, in the middle of the street. The stones have simply been scattered around them, as if there was nothing to be done. Walking down this street, I am always tempted to envision an entire city built this way: small, narrow streets snaking around heavy tropical trees. The cars would be reduced to such low speeds that pedestrians would have a clear advantage. I think about this idealized city and imagine how quiet it would be, because even during Friday’s rush hour traffic, this street is quiet: no horns, no diesel engines, not even any dogs barking. If the world were more like this, it would make more sense to walk.

We exited this Eden to find ourselves on one of Asuncion’s most traveled thoroughfares. The lighter Sunday traffic allowed the cars racing down the avenue to move much more quickly and as the cheap motorcycles struggled to keep up with this increased pace, their engines screamed under their plastic housings.

_BRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhhh_hhh!

As we walked down this wide and noisy avenue, I began to think about how everything masquerading as progress is so inordinately boring: steel skyscrapers, business English, wide streets, new cars, TGI Fridays. Progress blatantly favors those more money and less time. The environment progress creates is a wasteland with air-conditioned shopping malls and condominiums. You drive from one to the other. The stuff in between is just avenue. It is meant to be driven down. If you walk this landscape, you’ll find it has no imagination. The stores repeat themselves, advertising the same oil, soda and snack foods. The passing traffic is the same, it presents no spectacle, only repetition of certain makes and models and the dull thudding of pop songs turned up to maximum volume. Even the colors are hardly varied. Companies could make the cars any color they want, but they insist on using the same colors, like they were trying to get rid of all the extra paint left in the garage. Once in a while, walking, you catch the eye of someone driving by and you regard each other with the same curiosity with which one normally regards animals in the zoo.

The sidewalk is oil-soaked and broken. It seems to have been built on a heap of sand. Approaching the park, the neighborhood becomes more run down, until the sidewalk and even the streets are half-obliterated and covered with grass. The walls lean at crazy angles and while we walked down Sacramento, a chuck of a building front detached itself and slapped onto the sidewalk with a concussive report. After the initial door-sized piece, smaller chunks of plaster continued to rain down for a while and then even these stopped. It was like a demolition, but there was no one around, it was just an empty building collapsing under its own weight, the dust still pluming from where the plaster had fallen. We stopped and waited to see if more would fall, but the building was still. Only the dust of the plaster rose and settled. About ten feet up the wall, the scabrous wound of exposed brick already looked like it had been there for several years.  

“It’s a good thing we weren’t walking over there!” Gina said. I nodded, “Yeah,” and then looked up to make sure that there was nothing nearby that might fall on us.  

The entrance to the botanical garden is set back from a four-way intersection with no traffic light. No one knows where anyone else is going. Buses turn right, motorcycles blow straight through and cars make cautious U-turns. The intersection is managed with mettle, nerve and plenty of horn-honking. The cacophony of this congested park entrance is rivaled by the sounds of the park itself. Dirt bikes roar back through the trees and cumbia music plods like a dancing giant from every car parked out on the grass. The smells of barbecue, cut grass and stale beer abound.

We bought a bag of popcorn and immediately steered ourselves away from the masses. Large swales of bamboo laced together over the footpath like hands folded in prayer, the fingers interlaced. 

Beneath the bamboo, the earth had been trampled into sand, so fine and heavy it was like walking on a beach. When we came out from the swale, the character of the park had changed somewhat. More people were jogging and the cumbia rhythm pulsed from slightly farther away.

The footpath was wide and sandy and the trees had been scraped up recently in its construction.  To the right, was a dense stand of trees and to the left, the park opened up into its more spacious avenues of trampled grass and baby diapers. A small path opened up in the stand of trees and seemed to burrow into it. There was a sign proclaiming this path to be the Sendero Encantado or something like that, so we ducked under a few low-hanging vines and plunged into the cooler world of dense forest—something Asuncion often hints at but never quiet achieves. There are lots of trees here, but there are almost no places where one can stand in the midst of trees, feel the stirring of their manifold shadows and the leafy coolness that grows up around them: a feeling much like sinking down into a still lake, when the light and sound diminish and the temperature drops, first around your ankles and then rising up past your head the deeper you sink.

We were about half-way down the path when the silence retreated under an incipient whine which seemed to be growing toward a crescendo. Somewhere along our walk, we had disturbed a cloud of mosquitos that were now following us doggedly down the path, like the raincloud that followed Eeyore around in the Winne-the-Pooh stories. In a city where anti-dengue murals are everywhere and malarial warnings are given out as little cards on all arriving international flights, a cloud of mosquitos presents a more intimidating obstacle than it would elsewhere. If, statistically, one out of every, say, 1,000 mosquitos carries dengue or malaria than there was about a 100% chance that at least one of the mosquitos in the cloud was infected. I waved my arms in the general direction of the winged mass, but soon realized the futility in what I was doing and we had no choice but to run.

We broke back out into the clear light of the more frequented paths of the park within a minute or two. A woman, walking with her family, stopped to gawk at us, quite openly, as if by running, or coming out of the woods, we had committed some incredible faux pas that made it acceptable to stare at us, nearly open-mouthed.

We walked on and, unfortunately, soon came to the “zoo” section of the park. The full name of the place is Jardin Botanico y Zoologico. Nearly an entire pride of lions was penned in together in an area less than half the size of one of the soccer fields that are so common here. One of the lions was roaring in a choked way, repeatedly, as if trying to communicate a strangled protest to the people standing around pointing and staring. Nearby, was a lone grey elephant in an even smaller enclosure that had been made still smaller by a moat that had been dug around the unfortunate animal to keep her from knocking down the fence and trampling us all, as she certainly deserved to. I suppose for some, zoos are proof of mankind’s indisputable dominance of the entire animal kingdom, but for me, watching that elephant swing her grey truck back and forth in an area not much bigger than your garage, zoos are monuments to our incredible arrogance and total lack of empathy. Even if you hated elephants in the most passionate way, I don’t know how you could consider the fate of this creature and not feel overwhelmed with pity: stored in a box, like a curio in museum just for us to come and look at. How people ever thought such a thing would be acceptable is beyond me.

We could find no way to go from the zoo but toward the people and as lumpy sound of thudding bass grew I began to feel more annoyed with the whole idea of the park. Like so many other parks, it was just something different for people to drive to and park their cars in. No one was here to walk through the closeness of the trees or to listen to the winds stirring the leaves over their heads. It was a parking lot with trees, a shopping mall with birds.

We left soon after that and started the trip home, but I didn’t leave with the misanthropic impressions that had been stirring in me after the zoo. Rather, I thought of the small, mosquito choked path we had walked. Someone had created it, someone that appreciated the close feel of trees as we did and that someone had made a sign to point it out to anyone that might feel the same way.

And, who knows, maybe the path was created by the same people who stuck that elephant in that cage. It’s certainly possible for people to have dual natures. This thought seemed especially relevant as we exited the park and watched the peace and tranquility of Sunday torn away by multiple families rushing to get home before the traffic. The four-way intersection looked like it had been multiplied by about five. Cars were honking, breaking and peeling out in every direction.  That’s the problem with having a peaceful Sunday: no one is thinking about Monday until it’s already dark and then they’re all racing down the wide streets, headlong toward the beckoning chaos of Monday.

Passengers

 There were no numbers above the seats. I looked down at our tickets and looked back up again to where the labels had been rubbed away. “It looks like that’s a five,” I said, pointing. “This must be 25 and 26.” I tried to move up to find our seats, but other people were getting on the bus, blocking the aisle. “Oh, hell,” I said giving up, “Let’s just sit down here. No one ever checks anyway.” But I was wrong. Almost as soon as we sat down someone came over and pronounced that we were in their seats. Our mistake was that we had sat down in some of the seats above which the numbers could still be made out. We moved to some seats with no visible numbers above them, hoping that no one would make a case out of it. Everyone that got on the bus consulted their ticket and then tried to check the phantom numbers above the seats. Two ladies came down the aisle counting. “Excuse me, miss,” one of the women said to Gina who was sitting in the aisle seat, “you’re in our seats.” “There are no numbers,” Gina shot back. The woman would not give up so easily and began explaining her counterfeit system of guessing numbers from one seat, four rows back, which had one number showing, to determine our seat numbers. It was like hearing an explanation of how an astrologist determines a horoscope: complete bullshit delivered like a pseudo-scientific tone. Seeing that we were not responding, the woman inquired, “What are your seat numbers?” obviously hoping that we would have to admit to having none and having plainly stolen hers. I produced our tickets with a flourish and stated our numbers in the same bullshit tone she had used on us.  She mumbled something, looked around, pointed vaguely to some seats and then, when some other seats opened up she and her companion, seized on them, effectively admitting that her ‘counting’ system hadn’t been real all along, or else she just didn’t care.

It didn’t matter anyway, just before we pulled away, a fifty-something woman, got on and, finding every seat occupied, positioned herself unsteadily next to us. I waited for someone else to offer her a seat, but by the time we started moving, no one had come forward, in fact, the rest of the bus looked soundly asleep. I couldn’t let the woman, probably someone’s grandma, stand there for the whole three-hour trip. The guilt would’ve made it impossible, so I got up and gave her my seat and tried to steal myself for a long ride. It was a holiday weekend and we were going out of town, the bus was sure to be packed.

As we drove out of town, we stopped to pick up everyone waiting on the side of the road, and there were many people, so many that the attendant (who’d been curiously absent when we were all trying to figure out our seat numbers) now appeared and bodily crammed us into back of the bus. The man actually used his hands to shift the standing passengers so that they didn’t take up more than their fair share of the aisle, which was about 12 square inches. We stood two-by-two, back-to-back all the way down the length of the bus. The traffic was terrible, as we were not the only ones fleeing the city for the long weekend. Most of the time, the bus moved somewhere between a crawl and a rolling stop. 

When the driver had to brake, we all toppled into each other like a bunch of bowling pins going down after a strike.

The plan had been to stay at a friend’s place who was out of town, but when we finally got to Villarrica, it was too late to disturb her landlady who had the key. We didn’t even know where she lived and after the arduous bus ride, I was hardly in the mood to go look for her. We’d brought a beer for the bus ride, but due to our positioning (Gina sitting and me standing), had been unable to drink it. Now among the dark lanes of the night-time empty marketplace, I opened the warm beer and took long, desperate pulls, trying to sooth my ragged temper. It was past midnight; I was tired; we had no place to stay and I didn’t even know why we’d come out here; everything looked the same as it did in Asuncion. We’d traveled all this way and still hadn’t escaped the city.

We woke up the doorman at Hotel Centro, who had been napping in front of the TV. He groggily took my name (no passport, no ID) and my cash and gave us two plastic bags filled with folded towels and two remotes, one for the air conditioner and the other for the TV. “Room 8,” he said, but gave no indication where it might be. We wondered around in the dark halls of the hotel for a while before finding the room on the second floor.

Room 8 had a closet, a TV bolted into the wall, two single beds and a balcony, which I immediately dragged a chair onto and set about opening another warm beer in hopes of mitigating the irritation I felt. Somehow, it all seemed so hopeless. We would sleep here, wake up and have a stressful time trying to find a way to get to Colonia Independencia, we probably wouldn’t even make it to the waterfall and, in the end, we’d go back to Asuncion on another crowded bus and I’d have to stand because another old lady would get on right before we took off. It all felt like such a huge hassle for no real benefit. The only thought going through my head as I sucked down the luke warm beer was “we should’ve just stayed at home.”

I felt a little better the next morning after a few bananas and a generous helping of the hotel’s complementary instant coffee. The weather was still mild and overcast, but the caffeine helped and I was beginning to feel less burdened by the situation.

We went down to the bus station and found out the bus to Colonia was to leave in an hour. To kill time, we wandered around Villaricca for a while and then went into café to split another instant coffee and watch the grey day drift past the plate glass windows in the form of tired workers and stray stands of fog.

When we got back to the station, people were beginning to board the bus. We got on and managed to get a seat as a woman vacated it. I was inordinately thankful to have a seat as multiple vendors kept coming through the bus with large wooden trays of sodas and sandwiches, bags of earth and mildew-scented vegetables and other kinds of brick-a-brack like sewing scissors and packets of natural remedies. Standing in the aisle, I would’ve been jostled by each vendor who passed.

We had been waiting on the bus, listening to the myriad calls of the vendors, watching the passing of their wares when suddenly, about half the bus’s passengers, or would-be passengers jumped ship like this bus was sinking. I watched as they scrambled to another bus that had just arrived, they began filling it quickly and I soon saw why. Even as these people struggled to board the bus, it was already pulling away, looking like an emergency convoy with refugees grabbing at it with full-blown desperation. Before I had a chance to gauge the situation or find out where the other bus was going, it was already pulling away, shaking lose clots of passengers and vendors still hawking their wares over the tumult.

We left after about half an hour, reaching Colonia Independencia about an hour later. There didn’t seem to be any town anywhere and we kept getting off the bus, looking around, determining that we were not yet in the right place and then bounding back on before the bus pulled away.

When the driver pointed out the trailhead and we got off, I was a little nervous about the situation for a return later that day. There didn’t seem to be anything in the town and transportation looked really limited. We had decided to walk out to a waterfall, but it seemed like it would be impossible to make it. It was already noon, the waterfall was a two-hour walk away and the last bus supposedly left the area around 4. As it was, we would barely have time to walk to the waterfall, turn around and immediately start back. The feeling of irritation started to come back, this whole trip had been a disaster, we would probably have to stay somewhere for the night again and I wasn’t sure I’d even brought enough money for another hotel stay.

Without discussing any of this, we started down the dusty two-track that led straight back into the green countryside. I wanted to stop thinking about details and just enjoy the scenery, but the clouds were heavy and the silver glow of the sky on the burnt sienna-colored road was giving me a headache. We didn’t even know where the waterfall was out here and this road looked like it went on forever.

As I walked, these negative thoughts began to decrease in severity, until I felt a happy sort of apathy welling up. Walking down the quiet country road, I remembered the quiet mountain roads of Armenia and how I’d often walked them for hours with no clue where I was going and no concern for destination. I was happy only to walk, to perhaps chance upon something new, and often, I did. Even if it was only something small, I always came back from a walk with something that made it worthwhile. Why should things be so different now? The walk gradually became pleasant in itself. The bus schedule ceased to be important. We would find a place to stay, maybe out here at one of these pleasant farm homes. We could offer money for lodging. Who knew what might happen. For the first time in what felt like ages, I was ready for adventure.

We wound through the mown pastures, glancing up from the progress of our feet to watch the lazy movements of the afternoon herds of cattle ruminating in the silver-grey sun. A number of flowers were in bloom and when the occasional motorcycle scooted past, the driver always lifted an arm in greeting. The peace of the place was contagious and many times, I had to stifle a desire to lie down in the grass on the side of the road and take a nap.

The waterfall wasn’t so hard to find. There were signs posted everywhere and the road eventually thinned out to a narrow footpath. At the entrance to this foot path we came abreast with a new SUV, full of sun-glassed woman, the dark lenses corniced with plucked and expressive eyebrows. The driver was clean-shaven, man, who looked like he was probably wearing dock shoes and Calvin Klein underwear. He was holding a large glass of red wine and contemplating the footpath. He rocked the car ahead slightly and then braked as though trying to ease the car out of a ditch. The look on his face was completely baffled, like the owl-eyed character in Gatsby’s library. The man looked like he couldn’t fathom the possibility of a road ending. “I don’t think you can drive down there.” I told him, passing his open window. From the passenger and backseats, the bevy of plucked eyebrows and dark glasses regarded me in a vaguely hostile way. It was obvious they had been cheering him on to continue down the footpath in the monstrous car. “I don’t think it’s wide enough,” I said gesturing to the path, hoping he’d be able to see what was so blatantly obvious if someone else pointed it out. The driver repeated my comments like someone in a grocery store trying to recall a shopping list. “wide enough…” he remarked, one hand still on the wheel, the other cradling his wine glass. The lepidopterous sunglasses and eyebrows from the backseat flashed but otherwise gave no indication of emotion. After we had gotten out of earshot Gina asked “do you think they’ll turn around just because they can’t drive all the way?” I thought for a moment and then answered “I sincerely hope so.”

The day had not been hot, but the low sky and the long walk had brought out a sweat along my shoulders where my heavy bag had been knocking back and forth along the walk. When we came out to the clearing around Salto Suizo, despite the mild weather I was glad to have the opportunity to swim. There were only a few people around: two other young couples, one with their young daughter. We all greeted each other in subtle nods, but everyone seemed to be busy with their own contemplation of the falls. Above us, Salto Suizo was the type of high and precipitous waterfall that dissipated in the air and hit the pool below like a light rain, though it fell in a straight line with no bounding or splashing down the rocks. Each drop was like something loosed from a plane flying overhead with nothing to obstruct its passage to the ground.

Behind the falls there was a shallow cave scooped out of the rock and after taking the scene in, we scrambled up into this rocky maw and tried to sit and contemplate the beauty of the scene, but the sound of splashing water had made me impatient to swim and in a few minutes, I was clamoring back down to change into my bathing suit.

It had been overcast for days and the temperature hadn’t been very high since the previous weekend, but because it never gets that cold here, and because we had been walking so long, it seemed appropriate that we get in the water. The first few steps were feet-numbingly cold and it was only after I flopped in and all my internal organs retreated further into the hidden recesses of my body trying escape the cold that I realized the water was, in no place, more than three feet deep. I alternately stumbled and dog-paddled around the pool, glancing up at the sprinkling water falling from some infinitely distant point of origin in the rocks overhead.

The longer I stayed in the water, the more accustomed I became to the freezing temperature and eventually I felt comfortable in it. I felt the cool water relieving my back of the ghost of its burden: the impression of my backpack seemed to be fading; the light abrasions and the downward pull of the shoulder straps were being lifted from me. Thus refreshed, we climbed out, dried off and opened a warm beer we’d brought while wishing for a thermos of hot coffee instead.

An hour later, we were back on the country road, returning to the small town. The sun had come out, but it was now down around the horizon and the light was restful, striped as it was with unspooling shadows. I knew if we expected to get out of the town, we ought to try to flag down a passing car, but I couldn’t bring myself to give up the walk. When a car passed, I earnestly hoped they would not stop and offer us a ride.

About half-way down the road, I saw something that I am thankful to have experienced. In the light of the setting sun, Gina pointed out a matrix design stretched over the road, something like an invisible net, but at every point of intersection on the net there was a large black dot. Even as we approached, I had no idea what we were looking until Gina solved the puzzle and gasped “those better not be…” and then in a whispered tone of awe “…spiders!” She was right. Hanging directly over us, at six-inch intervals, there was a vast web of spiders stretched across the entire road. There must’ve been 100s of them just above our heads and their vast web continued on into a stand of trees. I had never before seen spiders share a communal web, but here it was, with meticulous arrangement, each of them had plotted their own little square. I wanted to wait for something to fly into it, to see how they would handle dividing the quarry, but the night was cool and there seemed to be few insects out. Perhaps this was why the spiders had decided to economize their efforts. We ducked under the volleyball net of spiders, Gina with great trepidation, and continued.

We were nearing the main road, when another black SUV pulled abreast of us. “Like a ride?” the driver asked and, as I knew we only had about 15 more minutes to walk, I decided to accept, although I did so with regret and every feature of the road we sped past in the car seemed to be robbed of some of the beauty that I could’ve seen if I had been able to walk past it and appreciate it longer.

Back in the town, we learned immediately that there were no more buses for the night. We asked a few people but they all said the last one left around five. I checked my phone to see it was only about fifteen after five. We must have just missed it. “Well,” I said shrugging, “I guess we’ll just start walking and see what happens.” We stopped into a little store to buy supplies in case we had to sleep out in the open, which I fully saw as a possibility and then set off down the darkening road. I had no idea what I was doing, I wasn’t even sure if I was going the right way. The only thing I knew was that we had a long way to go before we would reach another town. I guess, I was thinking vaguely that we would walk until we came to some kind of hotel, I remembered passing a few on the way in.

I hadn’t communicated any of this to Gina, because I was trying not to admit to myself just how untenable my plan was. We started walking and she said “should we try to get a ride?” I shrugged. “Sure.” But I didn’t hold out much hope of getting one. “It’s going to be dark in a minute,” I said despondently. “You can’t hitchhike in the dark.” Gina stuck out her thumb and I walked on, slowly, like I wasn’t sure where I was going. The car passing us made a ‘no’ gesture, but, bizarrely, a car going the opposite way pulled over. “Need a ride?” The man called out. I bolted toward the car like a dog who’d been kept inside all day; my tongue was probably lolling out of my head. Only Gina had enough wherewithal to notice that the man seemed to have another car following him and had, originally, been going the opposite direction. “Do you think it’s ok?” she asked. “Sure!” I bellowed out, jumping into the car. “Hola! Muchas gracias!” I barked.

The man who gave us a ride turned out to be the ideal person to get a ride from, an interesting conversationalist who owned his own campground/restaurant. (He took us there, but didn’t pressure us into staying, despite the fact that we were totally at his mercy.) He drove us 30 km back to Villarrica, conversing on various subjects the entire way. We were having a good time talking, but as we drove further and further into the night, I began to worry that we had really inconvenienced him. I had promised him some kind of payment for the ride, but I was earnestly beginning to wonder if I even had enough to give him. When we got into Villarrica, he drove us around, pointing out a lot of the sights and finally dropped us off at the bus station. In the end, he wouldn’t accept any money, although the round trip that he would have to take for us, would probably took him over an hour; I don’t even know how much it would’ve been for just the gas. Before we parted ways, I remembered that he worked in the capital (where we live) during the week and had said that he’s always wanted to study English, but never had the time. I offered to do some classes with him and he seemed happy with this as a fair trade and I was happy to have something to offer him other than the dullness of money.

The bus station was dead and the Asuncion bus was to leave in 15 minutes. We got our tickets, a couple cans of beer and settled down to watch the dogs roam around the place, sniffing at the garbage and each other. Soon the bus pulled up and after a few minutes, not even half-full, we pulled away from the station and into the quiet night. I struggled against sleep for a moment, but soon collapsed under its pressure, like an old barn giving out under the weight of a heavy snow.