Plastic Tubes

The Hostel Gardel

Buenos Aires, 2011

i.

I couldn’t sleep anymore. I pulled the blanket from my head and stared sleepily out the double panes of the plastic window. We’d come down under the clouds. The city was under the plane and the pre-dawn lights sparkled like dust moats in dim afternoon light. Pulling back a little, I could see nothing but my own reflection on the first plastic pane. I leaned forward again and watched the distant lights set fire to my shadowy features and slowly burn them down. I pulled back and saw my features coalesce, like rain draining into growing lakes and reassert themselves. When I realized no one was coming, I set out to the back of the plane for a cup of coffee, the flight attendants almost glad to see me. I was probably the first person awake.

We landed in Buenos Aires a few hours later and it was still early, before six. The plane was cluttered with blankets and pillows and exiting felt like escaping a slumber party that had been cut short. The children on the plane were being carried away nuzzling their little backpacks, mouths open, arms dangling. A few adults were still curled up and sleeping, looking homeless and passive.

I found my bike at the over-sized baggage claim. The box still looked pretty good. I put it on a cart and wheeled it out into the morning to the cab stand. The morning was foggy and the horizon was a mass of gray. A man with a cab driver’s belly and non-haircut raised his hand and strode up to me. We agreed on a price and pushed the box over the folded seat, I thought of how Gina and I had carried it across Oakland to get it on the BART. The cardboard handholds were nearly ripped out. I had to pay extra to get it in the cab. It would be one last thing.

I’d taken a semester of Spanish before coming, but the class had been an introductory-level thing which hadn’t required much effort. I did all the extra work I could, but the professor was retiring. He was from Spain and spoke with lots of -th. The last day of class the wine on his breath was like the smell of old flowers in stale water. When the other students had left, he walked by and scooped up my exam before I’d finished it saying ‘get out of here.’ I’d asked if he was seguro. He told me he was and I left, knowing almost nothing more than what I’d started the semester with.

In the cab, I felt no compunction talking about the weather and fell to chattering just to see how it felt. I was surprised how many words I was able to conjure. My verbs were terrible, though and as we drove down the highway, I rattled out a string of nouns nodding at the unfamiliarity on the highway. The driver humored me for a while slowly telling me I had raison and also nodding. He turned on the radio and I couldn’t catch a word except Kirchnerismo which was terrible-sounding. It caught in the grating of the speakers and crumpled out like a large piece of paper being shoved through a mail slot. The cab driver shook his head at the word, but said nothing.

When we got off the highway, the neighborhood looked like something long buried under the shadow of an overpass. No one was out and all the shutters were down. The address was right, but there was no sign for the Hostel Gardel, where I’d made reservations for two weeks. I got out and rang the buzzer before paying the driver. I couldn’t hear any sound inside to tell if it was working. No one answered. A light blue mist clung to the base of the buildings as if the sidewalks were evaporating. I tried the buzzer again. I had no backup plan, but I figured I’d pay the driver and wait with all my stuff. If no one came along, I’d flag down another cab and find another hostel. Hopefully they’d a room open for a few weeks.

The driver, tired of waiting, got out, pressed the button and yelled into what looked like an intercom. I waited on the misty sidewalk without making a move to get my bike. The sidewalk was littered with newspapers and pigeon shit. I kept my knees pulled up under my chin and waited for the cab driver to make a decision. He knocked on the door in a deliberate, European way with the flat of his palm. I looked around for a window to peer into, but there was only the brick melting into the sidewalk and a few beer bottles set against the wall. The driver paced around and knocked again before turning to me and making a ‘what now, chief?’ gesture. I returned a ‘search me!’ which made him wave me off and return to the cab. I stood looking at the door a moment before making up my mind to take my bike out of the cab. The driver got up and came over to help me. We were easing the awkward box out when behind us, the hostel door opened, a man with impossibly curly hair stood there in a bathrobe looking like someone who’d been kept up half the night by a crying baby. He asked me in English if I was there for the hostel and the three of us all dragged the bike over the threshold, into the tiled hallway.

I tipped the driver, paid the exhausted-looking guy for a week at the hostel and moved the bike upstairs into a dormitory. There were six beds but only two were occupied by sleepers both turned toward the wall. At a table in the middle of the room, one of the lodgers was reading. We nodded to each other. It seemed rude to talk in a room so full of sleep. There were no windows in the dormitory except the small panes in the french doors. The light inside was rainy-day thick. I got a locker but it wasn’t big enough for my bag. I put my stuff on the floor and pushed it into a corner. I examined my bunk with my hand, checking the strength of the mattress but I couldn’t lie down. The unfamiliarity of the place pressed in on me and made sleep impossible. I looked around the room for a moment and went back out to the doors and turned the handle quietly like a kid sneaking away from sleeping parents.

The hostel was shaped like a wide elevator shaft. The rooms were crowded around an open courtyard that rose three floors through the institutional-shaped building. There was no roof over it and a light rain was falling to the black and white tiles below. Catwalks circled this courtyard on each level surrounded by a low wall, rounded at the top, which gave it an adobe feel—the type of wall it was difficult to pass and not pat with the flat of your hand for the clean snare-drum sound it made. Flat, worn enamel tiles covered the floors and walkways. The kitchen, pushed to the back for the second floor was greasy but clean. The lights were off and the pilot flame gave the stove a faint blue aura.

There were single rooms up on the roof. They had been added on and looked very small, like a row of beach cabanas with those flimsy doors you have to push harder to close because they have no impetus and even the air works against them. The view from the roof was of another roof and the scaffold back of a billboard.

After looking around, I went back down to the greasy kitchen, found some common-use instant coffee and stared into the blue shadows cast by the stove while the water boiled, examining all the broken pasta noodles and bread crumbs that had fallen under the burner ring. I sat in the only seat from which I could look out over the elevator shaft courtyard and watch the light rain fall through the middle of the building. It was past nine o’clock, but the place was still completely quiet; no one had any intention of waking up soon. I enjoyed the warmth of the coffee, but I was beginning to feel too impatient to sit in the kitchen and drink it all. I drank about half the cup, tossed the rest in the sink and made my way back downstairs to the street.

Corrientes was the closest thoroughfare to the hostel and I walked it toward downtown. There were a few theaters, but most of the businesses seemed to be those cellphone kiosks with the bulk of their business in Ziplock bagged cellphone parts and glass display cases that looked like they’d been purchased from an auction. I stopped into one and managed to communicate that I wanted a cheap phone and a sim card. I put the stress on the third syllable when I said ‘telefono’ and had to pantomime when I wasn’t understood. I bought a used red Nokkia which looked like a toy and used the free minutes that came with the sim card to call Gina back in California. It was drizzling harder, almost raining, when I left the cellphone kiosk. I could find no place to talk out of the rain that wasn’t crowded and roaring with background noise. I stood under an awning with my index finger jammed into my ear, squinting against the noise like it was a harsh light. I got her voicemail and I listened carefully to the outgoing message. “This is 6161513; leave a message.” At the beep, I described everything around me: the crushed sidewalks, the tables with socks for sale covered with clear plastic tarps, the maimed-looking pigeons, the corniced buildings, the Burger King with the sign ‘Cono, Solo 1 Peso.’ I didn’t say much about myself. I didn’t know what to say. ‘I made it. Ha ha, the bike made it.’ I stretched the message until the voicemail cut me off.

When I hung up, all the specificity had gone out of the place and the streets and buildings had been reassembled with a haphazard ‘anywhere’ quality, like an airport terminal. I couldn’t make up my mind to walk in any particular direction and hurried toward the obelisco like a giant pin stuck in the city, a you-are-here location to give my walk some import. I walked quickly through the rain while considering a post-apocalyptic scenario in which there were no more planes or buses and I had to get back home. The walk would take a year at least. I’d have to swim the Panama Canal and probably climb a good portion of the Andes. I’d be old by the time I got back. Thinking of the miles between Corrientes Avenue and Arcata, California, I started to radiate loneliness. I felt it hot on my face and tilted my chin up to feel the coolness of the rain.

I walked up to the obelisk and turned around without paying it, or the people around it selling bracelets, much attention. I stopped into a market and bought some things for dinner. Walking back to the hostel, the light rain pooled at the bottom of my plastic shopping bag and soaked through my cardboard box of pasta, making the ends of the spaghetti noodles swell into an indistinguishable white gunk.

There was no key for the door of the hostel, so I had to ring the buzzer and wait until someone opened the door. It was the curly-haired owner again. He looked like he’d gone back to bed and I’d woken him up for a second time. His beard was crushed on the side he’d been sleeping. His eyes had a dull, febrile sheen. He tried to be friendly, but I could see he was getting tired of opening the door for me. I thanked him and he disappeared back into the building.

The kitchen was still dim and empty, except someone had left a glob of jam and a bunch of white crumbs on the counter by the stove. I boiled some water and looked out over the elevator shaft courtyard while my pasta cooked. The place reminded me of a high school bathroom. It was hard, worn and utilitarian. The myriad plants below in the courtyard could not belie the stale echo of dripping water and the sense of purposelessness that pervades such places. I looked up and noticed the ceiling paint had cracked and fallen and was hanging like jagged lace from dusty spiders’ webs. The corners of the floor were smoothed over with the masonry of compacted dirt too long swept out of the way. I poured my pasta into a colander and let the steam rise into my face, taking a deep breath, trying not force down the feeling that I’d abandoned myself by moving down here.

I went back into my room for a book, came back and took my plate to a corner of the room, feeling more comfortable sitting next to a wall. I was too hungry to read well and the book lay open, the first line barely skimmed as I shoveled the over-cooked pasta into my mouth. I stabbed at the mess with a bread roll I’d bought, which, even soaked in tomato sauce, was as hard and tasteless as styrofoam. I had just taken an embarrassingly large bite when someone walked into the room. “Estais comienjho?” he asked, speaking Spanish with such a strong accent, it sounded like Portuguese. I had too much food in my mouth to answer and pointed to my mouth while raising my index finger, still holding my fork before realizing I could answer and began to nod. Rather than being put off by this manic series of gestures, my interlocutor continued to walk toward me, smiling. He had one of those out-of-date haircuts that make people immediately endearing, a dark 1993 Devin Sawa puffy center part that swung just below pompadour range. His eyes were almost an emerald green. He sat down next to me and said something else that seemed to come entirely out of his nose. He offered his hand and introduced himself as Nelson.

I shook Nelson’s hand and offered him some of my rain-swollen pasta. He declined, but sat with me while I continued to shovel up the food on my plate. He seemed to wait until I took a bite before asking me anything, forcing me again to nod, or shake my head and swallow quickly so I could complete my answer. After a few questions he waved his hands around like he was casting a spell on my spaghetti and told me to eat, turning around to show that he wasn’t going to bother me with anymore questions. He didn’t get up, but stayed where he was, half-turned away from me, looking out over the drizzling courtyard and singing quietly to himself like he was on a boat, looking out over the waves for home. I listened to him sing politely, but eventually, I picked my book back up. I’d read about three words when he jumped up and yelled “Carlos!” I looked up to see the guy who’d been reading in the dorm when I’d put my stuff down that morning walking toward us from the catwalk. Nelson welcomed Carlos to the table still speaking Spanish but saying everything through his nose and putting ‘g’ sounds all over the place. He had the way of talking where every phrase seemed to ask ‘isn’t that great?’ Carlos and I couldn’t help but to nod at this unspoken question.

Carlos and Nelson were perfectly matched. Carlos had a slow, studious air. He spoke Spanish in measured tones and his Brazilian Portuguese only came out when he spoke it intentionally. He had a the bearing of someone constantly dressed in a dressing gown and wrapped in an ascot. His large, round eyes were slow in their orbits and seldom made direct contact. He never moved his hands when he talked unless he needed to illustrate something, when he did this, it was hard not to feel glad for the extra company which suddenly fluttered into the conversation. Carlos spoke English, but after our first meeting, we agreed not to speak it as we both wanted to learn Spanish. When he came to our table, Carlos, didn’t sit. He greeted me and then welcomed me to the hostel and, by extension, to the room we all shared before moving off to make some tea and sit by himself in the corner of the room under the flaky paint and spider webs with his own book. Nelson watched him go with a quiet affection and I thought maybe he’d go join him but he stayed where he was with me, looking out over the courtyard and singing quietly, his 1990s hair bobbing along, keeping time. Nelson and Carlos were like two people who’d been married in a previous life. Their relationship had a grandma and grandpa quality to it. When I finished my meal, Nelson jumped up and asked if I wanted some tea. He ran to the room and came back with three tea bags. I washed my dishes and when the tea was ready, I went over and talked to Nelson a little about his home in Brazil. Although Carlos had been given a tea, he stayed where he was reading in the corner, paying us no further attention. The second cup of tea steaming and untouched on the table.

I went back to my room to settle in early that first evening. I wasn’t planning on unpacking entirely, but I’d bought a lock for the locker and I wanted to put a few things in it. The backpack I’d brought was one of those ridiculously large hernia-inducing things that had enough capacity for a small refrigerator which I been foolish enough to take complete advantage of by cramming it to the brim with sweaters and books. I dug around in the thing, rifling through the paperbacks and socks and extracted a few envelopes. One was from Lyndsey, my coworker from the cafe back in Humboldt who’d gotten everyone at work to donate and gave me 100 bucks as a send off. It was in this gift card that sang You’ve Got a Friend in Me when you opened it. The other card was from Gina. It was full of reminiscences and vague promises. Most of the content in the envelope was dried rosemary and jasmine—northern California plants, the smell of them combined was heartbreaking and a trial I was to submit myself to multiple times a day.

That first night, I reopened both the envelopes—I’d already read multiple times on the plane— read them again, listened to Randy Newman profess his friendship and put them in my locker as my only valuable possessions. I stuffed the 100 dollars in my sock with the rest of my money and chewed some of the dried rosemary after I climbed into my bunk. I tried to read, but I couldn’t focus and kept looking through the book, up past the rafters of the room into the sky. I kept thinking about the pale field of lights I had seen from the plane. It was disorienting to imagine how I was now down in what had previously been two-dimensional. I stared up at the ceiling and thought about how great it would feel to leave. To go back to the airport in the morning and buy a ticket back. It wouldn’t be too bad, I’d lose a little money, but no big deal and then I saw the ragged box in the corner, almost macerated by gripping hands and tarmac rains. There was no way I was going to drag that bike all the way back and I wasn’t going to leave it here, not after I’d dragged it halfway through Oakland and San Bruno. The next day, I’d put it together and maybe that would give me a little more ballast.

ii.

The first month it rained almost constantly. August, it turned out, was a lousy time to move to Buenos Aires. I put the bike together, but I only rode it once. It had no fenders and sprayed water all over my legs so that my socks got soaked and, even wrapped up in a plastic bag, my money got wet and I had to take it out and surreptitiously dry it by wrapping it in toilet paper in the bathroom. The drizzling rain was more conducive to walking. I walked downtown, past Nueve de Julio and the art deco confiterias along Rivadavia Avenue. I wandered through the Abasto and Once shopping districts, past the Carlos Gardel murals where tango dance steps had been painted in hectic profusion on the sidewalk. I walked into the city’s crowded gardens on Sunday in the Rosedal. Sometimes, I rode the subte home if I walked too far, but I had so much time, I usually walked back, too. I read about free museums and tours, but I didn’t want to do any of these things alone. I never went into anything. I’d pass nice-looking cafes and think ‘I’ll go there with Gina when she gets here.’ I was waiting before I tried to enjoy the place. But it was going to be a long wait. Gina was still in California, working to earn more money before coming down. At the airport, with the cumbersome bike finally resting against a row of chairs, she’d said goodbye to me and cried with enough enthusiasm that it wasn’t necessary for her to explain how long it would be before she came down, if she ever came at all. As I wandered up and down Corrientes, I wondered if she was back in California, gradually forgetting about me.

Every day I went looking for work, but I wasn’t finding much. I’d gotten a terrible job teaching private classes once or twice a week at an institute that was so small they frequently asked me if I minded just taking my student outside for his class since there was no room. 
Jhonathan from Caracas and I were always out sitting on this bench Wednesdays, passing a notebook back and forth. He had a family and I liked hearing about how they’d all left Venezuela together and were now trying to make it here. He must’ve not been too happy with the class, though. We only met three or four times before I got word he wasn’t going to be coming back.

Carlos and Nelson were the only people I really got to know around the hostel. I gradually met most of the others in the kitchen, but other than exchange greetings, we didn’t talk much. Other than a kid from the Misiones province of Argentina, I was the only non-Brazilian. One of the girls who lived on the first floor was short, wore with very round glasses and had a very maternal air. She was always trying to tell me the most obvious things about the city or the language like “In Argentina, ‘ll’ is pronounced ‘sh’” I thanked her for her help, but after a while, I started avoiding her for fear that she would next explain to me how to tie my shoes.

There were others. A rocker who ordered pay-per-view on his computer to watch the Metallica show live when they came to town. The big guy who lived on the roof who always had a nod and a smile for me when I saw him in the kitchen. He was the only one who woke up as early as I did. Another guy named Raphael also lived up there who had a little amplifier he plugged his guitar into. I didn’t see him much, but I frequently heard his playing through the door. He did some technical stuff and sounded pretty good.

My dormitory had six beds, but it had been just Nelson, Carlos and I for the first month. They were both waiting for something. Like papers to come through or classes to start; I don’t remember, but they were always around. Usually they sat on their bunks. Carlos was a reader and Nelson was such a sociable guy, he seemed to think it was unthinkable that he and Carlos should be separated. So he hung around the dorm, too, but he was much more energetic, walking in and out of the kitchen, seeing who was there and what they were eating. On rainy days, he made tea for himself and Carlos, carrying it back to the room like a proud grandmother bringing tea to her studious and introverted husband. Nelson talked to me all the time, but not in an annoying way. He never tried to follow me anywhere and when he could see I was reading, he knew enough from Carlos not to interrupt. Carlos, on the other hand, hardly spoke at all. The only thing I remember him saying was not to touch his head after I’d made the mistake of giving it a friendly rub after he’d shaved it. He told me he never had his head touched. It was where the spirit entered the body.

The only time Carlos and Nelson left the hostel was in the evening to go to the Spanish classes the Argentine government provided for free for immigrants. Once I lamented that I had no such class to attend. Carlos looked at me blankly for a while and asked ‘do you want me to invite you to come with us?’ He was like that, very forthright. But he wasn’t a bad guy. I told him I’d like to go but that I probably needed some kind of paper or something. He looked at me with the same intense look. ‘Do you think we have any kind of papers?’ I asked if it wasn’t some kind of MercoSur thing. He laughed. ‘Like they’d do anything for average people.’ Carlos was really down on governments. He was kind of an anti-Hobbsian. He told me I should come with them to the class.

We had a teacher named Ruth who was really sweet, but it was immediately obvious the teachers picked for these classes had been the same ones who had been working in the elementary where they were held all day. The planned our lessons as they went and they tended to underestimate the ability of their pupils in order to make planning a little easier. The class was also wildly diverse in terms of proficiency. Carlos, Nelson and I spoke and understood quite a bit with our similar indo-european linguistic backgrounds, but the other pupils, an old man from Korea and two diffident girls from China barely spoke a word. The teachers frequently complained about them, referring to them all as chinos the same word they used for the bodegas scattered throughout the city which were often owned by Koreans.

In the midst of all this apathy, Ruth was an exception. She did her work with a clean kindness like a nurse or a nun who believes in it and has made it her life’s mission. Her lessons weren’t complex, but she made herself available to us as a local friend. She invited us to her quinta and even after she changed schools and could no longer teach the classes, she asked me if I could meet her in the Abasto food court and do a language exchange once a week. She wanted to learn English, she explained. Feeling bad for not going to her quinta (I’d had to work with Jhonathan that day) I told her I’d love to. I never got to teach her any English. We always did the Spanish portion of our ‘exchange’ first and it always ran too long. Whenever I tried to offer the English portion she’d repeat my homework assignment and pack up her things, saying she had to get going, that she had another student to meet with.

After our classes, we all walked back to the hostel together practicing our new Spanish words. Carlos and Nelson being in high spirits with some fresh air in their lungs. They spoke a little faster and smiled more often. We’d laugh at Nelson who would be so excited he’d continually mix up his Portuguese and Spanish. He could never seem to remember the ‘entendes?’ of Spanish and was always asking something that sounded like ‘intengi?’

It became my ritual to stop on the way back to the hostel and pick up a beer to drink on the roof. When I stopped at the chino, even though it was just around the corner, Carlos and Nelson waited for me. I could never tell if they felt a responsibility for me or if they were just being polite. They never came into the store with me and neither or them drank so there was nothing I could casually buy them to thank them for their friendship.

The roof was my favorite place in the hostel. It was usually quiet up there, Raphael’s guitar and the sound of wind-flapped laundry were the only sounds. There was really nothing to see, but it was the best place to think. With my beer, I’d stare out over the rooftops into the slate-colored sky and think about Gina and the months we’d lived together before I’d left for Argentina. I’d think of the little house we’d had together and the horses that we could see from our window. I’d think about the times we drank whiskey in her kitchen and went to the bar to watch lousy local bands. I’d peer so hard into these memories sometimes it felt like I could lean forward in my chair and fall into them and be there with her. But the illusion was hard to maintain and the little chimneys and those metal spinning things that look like crowns would gradually break back into my field of vision and I’d be looking at the back of a billboard, hearing the sounds of Raphael’s guitar seep from under his door.

I picked up more work. After Jhonathan left, the institute gave me classes at a local vinyl label factory. I taught classes at three different levels, occasionally helping the staff translate things about adhesives or vinyl into English. One of my students was a musician. After asking me to help him with the pronunciation of the lyrics in a New Order song they were covering, he put me on the VIP list for their show. I went, but it was one of those situations where I didn’t know anyone and they were all speaking rapid Spanish. I drank too much, trying to compensate for not speaking to anyone and woke up to the next drizzly morning feeling anxious and lost.

I had the day off, so I decided I would walk downtown and see if the English-language library I’d discovered earlier that week was open. I’d been out on Sundays before and while the streets were always much emptier than they’d be in any North American city on a Sunday, today the city on the other side of Nueve de Julio looked post-apocalyptic. The streets were all empty save a few cars that looked like they’d been there overnight. The shutters had all been pulled down on the buffet places that served hideous flan in chafing trays to the office lunch crowd on weekday afternoons. The parillas with their tourist hawkers in fake gaucho clothes had all receded back into the anonymity of their uniform gray metal covering. The train still rolled through the stations underground, but infrequently and the warm morning breath of the tunnels coughed out of the steel grates by the Carlos Pelllegrini station as I walked past, scattering the papers that had been left behind by someone sleeping there. Even the McDonald’s was closed.

The library was as dark as the rest of the street when I arrived. I tried the door, just in case. From somewhere in the twilight of the place, an old guard emerged. When he saw me, hands cupped on the glass, peering into his world, he tipped his pointer finger back and forth like the needle of a deliberating scale. I gave him a thumb’s up and he nodded, completing our silent dialogue. We’d obviously both been satisfied by the unexpected humanity of our interaction, each of us materializing out of an empty world to exchange a few gestures and disappear again. I imagined him returning to his creaky rounds, walking back through the dim stacks of books, the compacted yellowed pages functioning like refrigeration coils and cooling the air immediately around them to drafty pockets.

I was so occupied with this thought, I didn’t see the kid come out of the alley ahead of me until I nearly ran into him. Although he’d been watching me and hadn’t made any movement to get out of my way when we had the entire sidewalk and even the street to ourselves. I made an awkward movement to step around him and muttered ‘permiso.’ He tensed. I could feel his nervousness even as I passed it. It must’ve been his first time, or an early attempt because he gave himself away by glancing around as he sidled back up to me. “Tenes plata?” He asked. I continued walking toward Nueve de Julio, the border of the empty downtown and the rest of the living city. On the other side, there were cafes and a few people out enjoying the morning. I kept walking, outpacing him again. “No,” I called back, rounding the ‘o’ to the short, almost curt sound it had in Spanish, like the amplified sound of blowing a smoke ring. Walking made it awkward for the kid, but there was no one around. He strode quickly back alongside me. “No tenes nada?” He asked. The last word bent a little by an impending whine. I shook my head, using as little verbal language as possible to not give myself away and echoed back ‘nada,’ trying to repeat the word exactly as he’d said it.

I kept walking, he took a few more steps after me, but then decided against it, turned back and disappeared down one of the gray alleys. It started to rain. I went into a place on Uruguay and Sarmiento, got a small, thick coffee and stared out the wet window wondering where the kid had gone and if he’d gotten any money.

My socks had gotten wet again and I knew I’d have to dry my money out with toilet paper in the bathroom so it didn’t get moldy. Carlos and Nelson were both in the dorm. They never went out on Sunday. Carlos sat at the table in the middle of the room eating some steaming noodles and reading. Nelson was on his bunk with a laptop on his chest on a Skype call with a girl whose ebullient voice pranced all around the male fug of the room..

I put my wet backpack down and went out to the elevator shaft courtyard to call Gina. I’d been in Argentina now for three weeks and she still hadn’t bought a ticket—she hardly mentioned coming anymore. I walked back and forth, looking down at the potted plants down in the courtyard, listening to the phone ring. She answered just as I was about to hang up and said how it nice was to hear from me. It was obvious I’d woken her up. I talked her into her own Sunday morning. I went to the kitchen and we made coffee together and I watched the drizzle fall through the dull light of the afternoon. I didn’t ask about her tickets even though it was on the tip of my tongue the whole conversation. When we hung up, I went back into the dorm, feeling much better about living in a dim and cramped area with guys whose socks were hanging up all over the place. I tried to read on my bed, but each word flew off the page into a tangled thicket of free association and soon I was asleep under the galloping sound of the increasing rain. The best thing about Carlos and Nelson was that they were never loud.

iii.

The next morning was the first clear day since I’d arrived. I woke up early and had plenty of time to review my lesson before heading out to the label factory for classes. I had been warned about the neighborhood around the factory and, after my encounter with the kid on Sunday, I kept a stern expression on my face and walked quickly, despite the beautiful weather. A stretch of dog park ran along the highway ramp by the Constitución Station, a ragged strip of green, ribboned with a broken macadam bike path. Crumpled trash blew freely through the shaggy and crushed grasses of the park. Tires left by the highway traffic, were lying in the tall grass. After the rain, visible clouds of young mosquitoes hovered just above them. In the winter, I hadn’t paid much attention to the trees that ran the length of the area. When they were bare, they’d looked dead, choked by the tires and highway exhaust. I saw now that they were all alive and budding. The smell was pale, faint, but unmistakably the sugary smell of lilac. I maintained my stern expression the best I could while surreptitiously standing next to one of the trees and inhaling deeply.

On the way home, I decided to miss my usual stop of Pasteur and get of at Pueyrredón. I did this sometimes. The hostel was nearly between the stations and it allowed me to walk from a different direction, past the synagogues behind concrete blocks and old confiterias with gold leaf painted on the windows. Once was a market district divided into sections, depending on product. Some streets were dominated by costume shops and balloon stores, others displayed nothing but paper in all shapes and colors; there was even an entire block dedicated to wigs. My walk down Sarmiento was dominated by toy stores, most of them dichotomous, blond dolls on one side, black machine guns on the other. The store were small, some no more than stalls and the products spilled out into the street in mural displays of boxes. But there were few children around to admire the garish colors and dimensions of the packages which had to be walked around, Dangling helicopters, tied up with string, had to be ducked.

Approaching the hostel from a different side, I didn’t recognize it. A group of people were standing around and someone was coming out on a stretcher. I started to cross the street to avoid the scene but I recognized the residents of the hostel among the crowd and realized it was my building. A few of them were being interviewed by police. The maternal girl with round glasses was standing there crying. I crossed the street, went up to her and asked her ‘que paso’ but she waved me away and started crying harder. I shifted through the people and the cops standing around the door and walked into the building.

No one was downstairs. The courtyard was empty, even a few plants looked absent. I climbed up to my room. On the stairs, I passed one of the women who cleaned the place, Ramona. She was spraying vanilla air freshener and crying. I ask her what happened. She stopped and said ‘el murió’ before shaking the tears out of her eyes and continuing down the stairs before I had the chance to ask who.

I was happy to find Carlos in his usual spot reading at the table in our room, looking as imperturbable as ever. He was the only one around who seemed completely unaffected by whatever had happened, but when I asked he stopped reading and told me in measured tones of practiced Spanish how Raphael from upstairs had hanged himself over the weekend and the cleaning ladies had found him about an hour ago. It took me a second to remember who Raphael was, but while I was trying to recall his face or the sound of his voice, my mind was busy putting together the disparate images of the stretcher, the police uniforms and the air freshener. Before I could remember who he was, I smelled him. Carlos seemed relived that I’d noticed before he’d had to mention the smell, and asked if I minded closing the door.

I felt like I should sit and talk with Carlos for a while, but there was nothing to say. I’d only talked to Raphael a few times. I remembered that he’d given me a bag of pan felipe rolls once, but other than hearing his guitar seeping from under his door on the roof, I’d never had any other interaction with him. “He was a nice guy,” was all I could think to say. Carlos nodded, but didn’t look up from his book.

I climbed up into my bunk, lay there and felt the gloom of the place close around me. The dorm was dark at all times of the day, but it was always the darkest when the lamplight was dispelled by the meager light of late afternoon. Two kinds of light, rather than penetrating the dark together were more readily absorbed by it. The only sound in the room was that of Carlos steadily turning the pages in his book and the smell of death and vanilla drifting down from the ceiling less than a meter above my face. I lie there thinking that this wasn’t death, but its wake, the ripples following the event. Death had passed unnoticed Saturday or maybe Friday when the sun had been shining down into the elevator shaft courtyard and everyone was cooking dinner in the communal kitchen or making plans for the weekend. The moment had passed and lying there, I felt this one, too, passing. Each one rushing by, fait accompli, like they’d been constructed somewhere else and were only brought here to be lived through. Nothing could be done to alter them. All we could do was squirm through them, like kids climbing through those plastic tubes on a playground.

Someone downstairs was still quietly crying, someone who knew Raphael better. I interrupted Carlos’ reading to ask if he knew Raphael well. Raphael was also Brazilian. “Not really,” Carlos responded laconically and went back to his book. I stared up at the ceiling and tried to imagine what it had been like for him up there, in that little room on the roof. I wanted to empathize, but it seemed horrible to do so. I started thinking of all the absurd Dostoevsky characters pacing around in their freezing garrets, no furniture, gun in hand, wondering if they should do it or not. I shook the image out, it was too much in this dark, late afternoon dorm. I jumped down from my bed and went into the kitchen. I boiled some water and put some pasta on, retreating to the farther table so no one passing by would notice me eating at such a time.

When Nelson came back, Carlos came and got me and we went to our Spanish class as if nothing had happened. All through class, as Ruth asked us to conjugate irregular past tense, I was waiting for someone to tell her about it—we often used our daily lives in our exercises to make them more relevant—but no one mentioned it and on the way home, Nelson talked about how his girlfriend was probably coming to visit and Carlos told me about this umbrella dance that was typical of the northern state he was from. I couldn’t think of much to say other than my standard ‘interesante’.

I debated on whether I would even tell Gina about it. I think I wrote about it in an email and she responded, but the next time we talked on the phone, I forgot to mention it and the event faded from relevance.

I got more work teaching office workers downtown and Gina called one evening a few week’s later to tell me she’d bought her ticket for the end of the month. I took the bus out to the airport holding a single rose—it was a long ride and I worried a bouquet would start to droop, besides, I didn’t want her to have to carry a bunch of flowers back home.

Right before she came, I’d moved out of the hostel and into a bare, wooden apartment with a clawfoot tub and scratchy tango music drifting up from the courtyard in the evening. We lived in the Once neiighborhood about a year, climbing through the plastic tubes of each moment, drinking Quilmes, eating those smooth avocados that taste too ripe and walking to the obelisco and back each night.

I meant to invite Carlos and Nelson over for dinner, but it took a while to get back to the hostel and by the time I’d gotten back, Nelson had already gone off to live with his girlfriend who’d moved down and Carlos was also about to move out with some other Brazilians. I invited him over, but we didn’t make a date and when I went back again, he was gone, too.

By the time I left Buenos Aires, even the hostel wasn’t there anymore. The couple who’d owned had gotten divorced and, gradually, or all at once—I don’t really know—everyone had left the place.

Sometimes, when we went for bike rides down Sarmiento, I’d point the place out to Gina, but we hardly ever went that way and there was nothing to really see on that street anyway, just an unmarked door and a sidewalk littered with old newspapers. 

Every Hotel is Haunted by Something

I was never too clear about the ‘cultural exchange’ aspect of the fellowship. My counterpart was from Brunei and we were both in Thailand to teach English. We shared an office and lived in the same apartment building. We talked every day at work, between classes, but outside work, I never heard from her. Yet we were here together. That was part of the fellowship, but it seemed incidental to me that it should be this way and after the first month, I ceased to think much about why we were here together.

When Ramadan was ending, my counterpart mentioned an Eid celebration at the Bruneian Embassy in Bangkok. It sounded like an interesting experience and I told her I’d be interested in checking it out, although I wasn’t sure if she was inviting me or just telling me about it. She told me she’d let the Embassy know we were coming, Gina, too. I thanked her and went back to work.

Ramadan was during the summer break and, without classes, I didn’t see my counterpart much. The break passed and I went to Bangkok to go to the dentist. I didn’t think about going back and there was never any further mention of the dinner.

When we came back for the next semester. I asked how the break had been for her and if she’d made it up to Bangkok for the dinner. She told me that she had gone to Bangkok, but hadn’t gone to the Embassy because her family had come to visit at the same time. I told her I was still interested in going to the Bruneian Embassy if there was ever another event. She thought for a second and said that the sultan’s birthday would be next week; after that there probably wouldn’t be anything else until after we left. I felt conflicted hearing this. I had just volunteered to go to Bangkok to be on a panel for scholarship interviews for the weekend. This meant, I would have to turn around and go back the next weekend. With classes just starting, this meant a lot of strain around a time when I knew I’d prefer to be at home relaxing. I gave a vague answer and waited to see how things would work out, expecting that, again, the plans would just be an idea, nothing to be pursued.

The next Friday, immediately following classes, we were all together on a flight to Bangkok. The afternoon was rainy and the flight had been delayed. I knew the traffic in Bangkok would be bad and I wondered how we would have enough time to get in from the airport, check into the hotel, change and make it back across town. Bangkok traffic is like the traffic in LA. On Fridays, it’s especially bad: cars parked with their engines off, motorcycles trying to ease through any place they can, like water flowing around pebbles. The previous weekend, I’d sat in an Uber for nearly two hours. It had only taken 5 minutes to exhaust my minimal Thai with the driver and I’d stared out the window at nothing the entire trip as I was not familiar enough with Uber decorum to know if I could take out a book and read.

Our flight landed toward the back of the airport and had a long walk to get out. I didn’t know what had become of my counterpart, but she had another hotel to go to anyway. Gina and I trotted out of the airport, eyeing every clock we passed, like something that could potentially swoop down and attack.

We passed the desks where the ground transportation salesman lie in wait. As always, ignoring my brisk step and my confident, I-know-where-I’m-going air, a woman practically jumped out at me. “Hello! Where are you going?” I wasn’t sure if I should return the greeting, tell her where I was going or explain that I didn’t need to book a taxi that would just be stuck in traffic. I mumbled ‘no thanks’ and tried to smile, but I doubt it was very convincing. I felt like I’d been sort of rude, but then I had to remember that she’d been a little presumptuous to me, as well.

Since I’d left my apartment in Surat Thani, I’d been steeped in air conditioning.: air conditioning in the cab to the airport, in the airport, on the flight and in the terminal in Bangkok After hours of 62 degree air, going outside, felt like walking into something mid-convection, like an oven or a furnace. Only there was nothing. The heat was tumbling through the air like it’d recently blown through a structure fire and still had wisps of flame tucked among the currents like autumn leaves. Only my sweat prevented me from combustion.

The bus was packed and we had to stand. Luckily, years of experience have taught me to never bring any luggage anywhere for any reason and to second guess anything more than a change of underwear and a book (one usually tucked into the other and carried underarm). On my back I carried my suit, a few oranges, a book and my toothbrush. Everyone else on the bus had large hard-plastic rolling suitcases. Every time the bus braked, a silver suitcase about the size and weight of one of those hotel refrigerators, kept rolling over my foot and slamming against my leg. The suitcase’s owner was oblivious and didn’t even seem to be holding on to the suitcase’s handle despite the constant motion of the bus—probably confident that my foot would stop the suitcase before it got too far.

When we’d boarded the bus, part of a family had squeezed past us, while the other half had stayed near the front of the bus. At every stop they yelled “not here! don’t get off here!” to each other in a Chinese dialect. They continually passed their children through the cordon formed by Gina and I; this was accomplished by grabbing the child’s outstretched hand and pulling him or her through us, like we were a stubborn birth canal. Trying to get out of the way, I often only made it worse. The child would be pulled right into one side of my leg and the suitcase full of bowling balls would simultaneously bang into the other side. The family talked like they passed children, yelling at my head like it was a wall to be yelled through. I memorized their word for ‘don’t get off here!’ and considered preemptively yelling it at each stop, just to avoid having it blasted at the side of my head, but I was worried I’d get the tone wrong and curse someone’s grandma or something. Luckily, the bus only went three stops before it drained all it’s passengers into the complex Metro network. I didn’t stay to hear the family yell ‘Here! Get off here!’ but grabbed Gina’s hand and pulled her through the suitcases and passengers unsure of where to get off, trying out the birth canal trick myself. It actually worked very well.

The streets were gridlocked, smoldering with the embers of taillights. The exhaust had risen to the Skytrain platform where people tried to tunnel through the mass of humanity before them to reach a train or a ticket window. Tickets must be paid for in coins and without a hefty sack, there was no way I had enough change for Gina and I. I went to the window, waited in line and changed the largest bill I had. I came back, waited in line at the machine and when I reached it, began hurriedly dumping coins into the slot. One ticket popped out and I started in on the next one. Behind me, I could feel a line forming and simultaneously becoming impatient with my two-ticket purchase. I continued feeding the coins in. The hand I held them with was gradually rising with the reduction in weight correspondingly, the number of coins left to be inserted on the display dropped. I got to 10, to 5, to 4, 3, 2, and then there was nothing left. I still had a few coins but these were the worthless 2-baht coins which, for some reason, the machines hadn’t been calibrated to take. I could feel the breeze of the line’s collective sigh of impatience on my neck. It was fetid with office air conditioners and dental work. I swore and turned to the girl waiting behind me. Did she have a single baht coin? I would give her a 2-baht coin in exchange. She handed me a 5 and I dumped all my 2 coins into her hand despite her protests. The reluctant machine spat out the second ticket and we were on our way.

I thought I had the address of the hotel in an email, but I only knew the metro stop it was near. Coming down from the platform with only half an hour before we had to be at the Bruneian Embassy, I was beginning to feel frantic. Gina calmly suggested I should ask someone where the hotel was. I asked a motorcycle taxi driver and he shrugged. I used this as evidence that no one knew where the place was, so it was pointless to ask anyone else; the only way we’d find the hotel was by angrily ducking in and out of sidestreets and swearing. Gina wasn’t too interested in trying my method and suggested we ask a guard standing by a parking garage. He looked at the name of the hotel on my phone, shrugged and used his own phone to look it up on a map. We thanked him and, after assuring ourselves we were going in the right direction, we took off down the street, darting and swearing the whole way to make up for lost time.

The hotel was about three blocks down a long dead-ended side street. I practically jogged toward it continually swearing by this time, knowing we were already late, not knowing where my counterpart was and we were still in our sweaty airplane clothes. We had to change and find our way to the Embassy which was, with no traffic, would’ve been about 30 minutes away. On a night like this, an hour was probably a better estimate. The hotel loomed up. I was about to swear at it for being so far down the street, but it was so beautiful I had to stop and admire the entryway for a minute. The facade of the place looked like something out of the Great Gatsby and the foyer even further established this roaring 20s, art nouveau theme. It was authentic, too. The place was legitimately old enough to reasonably look this way. I glanced around the lobby with admiration but was soon back to swearing when I noticed there was no attendant around. We rang the bell and still no one came. I tried to use the time to collect myself; no one wants to be the harassed Arthur Miller character who comes into a hotel roaring about service, still glistening with sweat and frenzy. I tried to humble myself, but the swearing was coming out of my ears like steam escaping a kettle.

Someone finally came up and asked if we wanted to check in. He looked as harassed as I felt and made so bold as to glance at the clock with a disapproving look when I told him yes, we were hoping to check in. I felt like telling him I’d listed my check-in time as 6 pm when I’d made my reservation. Sure it was 8 now, but it’s not like I told them I would be there at noon. Some people you just can’t argue with. This guy looked way too disinterested in the world to bother arguing with. I held my tongue, but when he gave me a job application of a check-in form to fill out I wrote quickly and sloppily, without regard for the little boxes meant to contain my name, passport number, occupation and all kinds of other superfluous information. When I finished it, he looked at it, all but rolled his eyes, heaved a weighty sigh and then gave me the total. 1016 baht. I give him 1050, which seemed to greatly fluster him. As he struggled to count out the change, I told him I could give him four baht so he could give me an even 30 back. He looked up at me as if I were some familiar inanimate object that had suddenly learned the power of speech, a practiced look which combined disbelief with horror. Without saying a word (but never lowering his eyebrows) he continued fumbling around in his drawer for the exact change.

There was no elevator, which normally wouldn’t be a problem; the old wide and low staircase had a sort of Gothic appeal to it and if I’d had more time, I would’ve loved to climb it slowly imaging all kinds of things. It was the kind of staircase we should have been led up by a man in a cloak with a dripping candelabrum in his steady but wizened hand. The irritable and taciturn guy at the desk would fit the role perfectly. Our room was the standard box with a faded tile floor, a metal frame bed and an old fan to stir the mildewed air. Gina had gotten dressed in the lobby bathroom while I’d been checking in, but I still needed to change. She brushed her hair and put on lipstick while I jerked my sweaty clothes off only to put clean clothes over my damp skin. I knew I was just going to get sweaty again. There was neither time nor reason for a shower.

The hurried way we both tried to doll ourselves up in front of that old hotel mirror was like a scene out of a spy movie. I almost hoped someone could see us in order to wonder what sort of shady deal we were up to. Gina pursed her lips at the mirror; I tied my tie and blotted my forehead with a handkerchief, still swearing, but beginning to laugh at myself a little. In five minutes, we were running back down the stairs, trying to get the internet to come back on my phone so we could find the Embassy. “Forget it,” I said, after watching that ouroboros spin around for a minute with no change. “We don’t have time” and we ran back out into the night once again, not entirely sure where we were going.

The train wasn’t as crowded and we only had a few stops to go. In about 15 minutes, we were getting off at the Ekkamai station. Blindly, I chose a street, declared it to be the right one and began walking, taking those great lunging steps you see people making in the airport when they suddenly realize they might miss their flight, something like pulling yourself through the city on cross-country skis. Invariably, you look like such a jerk walking like this no one makes any effort to get out of your way.

Miraculously, I’d guessed the street correctly, a nearly impossible task along Sukhumvit where every direction looks like a mirrored reflection of the opposite way, which is due, mostly, to the ubiquity of 7-11s, which, in Southeast Asia, are much more aggressively marketed than their docile North American counterparts. I’ve seen as many as seven of them on a single block.

The Bruneian Embassy was down an alley and off a sidestreet. When we came powerwalking up, I expected the guard to draw his weapon or at least raise a forbidding palm to us and yell ‘halt!” like in the movies. He was well-disposed to us, however, and, through gestures, invited us in. I’d forgotten that I was wearing a jacket and tie and that Gina was in a dress with lipstick. Our spy camouflage was working very well. I called my counterpart, taking out my phone in that harassed way guys in ties and suit jackets always take out phones. I expected that she was already inside, but when she answered, I could tell from the disappointment in her voice that she was still in traffic somewhere. She told us she didn’t know when she’d make it, but that we should just go in. “Just go in?” I repeated, thinking ‘this isn’t my embassy; I don’t know any of these people, or expect them to know me. This is going to be really awkward.’ But I agreed and hung up. I nodded to the guard and he escorted us in. I had my passport out, ready to present it to someone, but no one else was there to ask for it. We crossed an open courtyard and were shown into a building. Through the glass, I could see what looked like a room of dining dignitaries. A small room. I’d been expecting something larger where we might have been able to sink into the background but there were only about four tables and, at the entry, I noticed no one was in western dress. The men wore white and golden shalwar kameezes; the women were all in brightly colored—usually floral patterned—abayas. Even if there’d been 1,000 people in the room, we would’ve stuck out like sore thumbs. We were now in that tense scene in the movie where the spies have been found out. On the threshold of the room, the conversation stopped, hung there like something raised just out of reach. “Salaam alaikum.” I tried. The room, in particular the male voices called out “wa alaikum salaam” in response and everyone went back to eating. We were safe.

The guard left us stranded in the doorway and a woman fluttered up to us. I expected her to give us a polite but firm ‘may I help you?’ through which it would be implicitly stated that we were in the wrong place, but she brought her hands together in a tent and then they leaped apart in apparent joy at our arrival. I glanced around the room to the expectant faces and made a few nods, not entirely sure what was called for when you show up late and sweaty to the Bruneian Embassy for the Sultan’s Birthday Dinner. I explained that my counterpart was stuck in traffic, but the woman who had welcomed us barely seemed concerned by this. I apologized that we were also late—but glancing at a clock I saw that we’d managed to get from the hotel to the Embassy in 30 minutes, which must’ve been some kind of record in a suit jacket. Even at night, the temperature in Bangkok is in the mid-80s and we’d probably walked a total of 12 blocks.

We were seated at an intimate table where the others all had their names and titles on little cards. I introduced myself and immediately, everyone began to ply me with questions. Where did I teach? How were my students? Had we lived abroad before this? Where? What did we think of Thailand? Of Surat Thani? I enjoy talking with diplomats; they’re usually adept at asking interesting questions and it’s easy to steer the conversation to geography. Soon we were talking about places they’d been posted in Canada and Malaysia. When I told them I was from Michigan, I was astounded to hear that the Bruneian Mission in Ottawa had asked the man across from me to drive around Detroit when he came into the states. He hadn’t been able to take the Ambassador Bridge because they were afraid something would happen to him entering the US in such a nefarious place. I had no idea what to say to that. I’d never considered the possibility that diplomats wouldn’t be allowed to travel to certain places in the States for safety reasons. I assured him it wasn’t as bad as he’d been led to think, but then I told that joke about the cops rear-ending an out-of-state car at a four-way stop in Detroit and yelling ‘what the hell you’d stop for?’ Everyone laughed, but it was the kind of laugh that comes when a danger has already passed and there’s still a faint note of nervousness.

I was hungrier than I’d realized and came back from the buffet with an awkwardly large pile of rice and vegetables. I tried to balance my eating with conversation. Each polite bite I meant to take turned into a frenzy of plate scraping and rice grains falling off my fork on the way to my mouth. Luckily, everyone was too polite to pay much attention, to the credit of my tablemates, it’s difficult not to at least glance out of the corner of your eye when you hear such uninhibited gobbling.

We talked and ate for about an hour before my counterpart arrived; by then, I felt totally comfortable with the people at the table and we were conversing like old friends. I had a third plate of food so my counterpart didn’t have to eat alone and the conversation steered toward Brunei and the culture around holidays. Although we were in the Embassy for the sultan’s birthday, his name was never mentioned. It wasn’t until the end, when we were taking pictures and someone insisted we stand underneath the portraits of the sultan and queen, that I remembered the occasion for the dinner.

Gina and I walked out of the Embassy with all the fuss that accompanies a departure from your grandmother’s house. People stood in the doorway, insisting on taxis or sharing rides which we all politely declined and walked back out through the gates framed in golden spotlights.

Back on the Bangkok streets, we carried the glow of people who have been somewhere important and are now returning home, tired, but more upright when they set out, ties flapping carelessly, handbags languorously held, carrying on a continual murmuring conversation about the events of the night and slouched down slightly in the empty train car watching the dark frames of the city tic past the windows.

Arriving back at the hotel, we found the place much more opulent, now that we had time to enjoy it. The climb to our room was long and tiresome, but in the old building, it was like roaming the hallways and staircases of a castle at night. I felt like I needed a sconce to light my way and that there should’ve been at least one of those portraits on the wall with the eyes that follow you. After we’d been down to the pool, returning to our room, midnight was striking and I continually expected to see some perennial apparition waltzing just above the marble floor, but there was no one but us. The place oozed quiet. The entire hotel seemed empty. Even the front desk in the lobby was continually unmanned. After showering and getting into bed, I could hear all the emptiness of the building rushing up and down the stairs and swelling in the rooms and I felt safe and comfortable in the turret above the rest of the empty castle. After all the noise and haste of the evening, it was the ideal place to be: a little portal into the 19^th century and way up on the top floor, no one, not even the silent wispy ghosts of the place would find us. I lie there, looking at the patterns on the dark ceiling thinking:‘no one would think to look way up here.’