Your first afternoon there, a Nepalese man in front of you fainted in an alley. A young man. A man younger than you, in any case. He collapsed politely among tuk-tuks and rickshaws and pedestrians and hit his head on the packed-dirt street. Several store owners approached him. They nudged him with the toes of their sandals. One went back into his shop and returned with a bowl of unclean water and threw it on him and then stood back to see what would happen.
Then everyone simply shrugged and returned to work.
Vendors shouting at you to buy their rugs even as the young unconscious man remained unconscious at your feet.
Their rugs, clothes, bracelets, masks, fruit slices swarming with flies.
When you strolled up the same alley several hours later, the unconscious man was gone.
You never learned the end of his story.
Some narratives simply stopping rather than concluding, naturally.
Some becoming ski jumps rather than weddings or funerals.
Idaho was the last state to be discovered by white explorers.
It was ignored for half a century by everyone except a few fur hunters, missionaries, Indian tribes, and emigrants en route to more civilized patches of Oregon.
Only when gold was found in the Clearwater and Salmon River canyons did a kind of reverse migration ensue.
The stony fields down by the rivers in the Nepali interior where people squatted and shat, staring straight ahead, never stooping to the undignified practice of meeting the eyes of the person shitting next to them.
Nepali or Nepalese.
Either adjective is correct.
The shitting fields.
You had traveled elsewhere, needless to say.
You went to sleep in your seat on a 747, person X.
You woke on a rainy road in northern Norway, person Y.
In a sense you couldn’t stop traveling.
This is what you and Andi did.
You drove through Scotland, hiked through England, snorkeled in the Yucatan.
Someone stole Andi’s passport in Amsterdam.
In a train near Amsterdam.
Traveling being less expensive than one might expect.
Much less expensive, if one is willing to take certain chances.
Andi tucked her pocketbook (the passport in a large wallet inside) under the seat in front of her and a German tourist, a good-looking teenage girl with a backpack in the overhead, craned around the corner of her seat and smiled at you both and you smiled back.
You stirred from a nap as the train pulled into a station somewhere in the countryside.
When you opened your eyes the German girl was standing on the platform outside your window, waving at you and smiling.
You smiled and waved back.
The train rolled forward and next to you Andi announced her wallet was missing.
German or perhaps Scandinavian.
Northern European, in any case.
You could not stop traveling.
You traveled thousands of miles to discover that people in Reykjavik watched the same TV shows people watched in the States.
They ordered chips and salsa or pepperoni pizza in bars decorated with posters of Jim Morrison, Marilyn Monroe, and the young, slim, dashing version of Elvis.
But it felt like there was always somewhere else to go.
The sound haze of different languages on the streets of a foreign country.
It of course felt slightly desperate.
Desperate and thrilling.
You could only inhabit so many channels, so you had to choose which ones to start inhabiting right now.
To choose being to change.
An excess of lives.
A bus driver was dragged off his bus in the Nepali interior near Pokhara and stoned to death for running into and killing a cow the day before you arrived.
The only way to see being through fire.
You can get ten thousand dollars for a U.S. passport on the black market in Europe.
Ten thousand or twenty thousand.
You forget which.
But still.
The penalty for killing a man in Nepal was six years in prison.
The penalty for killing a cow was life.
Because, in the story you tell people again and again, you came to consciousness in a jungle-compound surrounded by twelve-foot-high hurricane fencing in Venezuela where your father helped set up a refinery for Mobil Oil Corporation.
Nothing compared to the shitting fields.
Not really.
Or, say, the way the malaria pills gave you vivid dreams the consistency of cartoon gel.
The fingerless lepers hanging onto your arm as you hustled down the alley-streets packed with bicycles, shrines, barbers shaving people’s heads beneath dead trees.
The medieval energy.
Only in 1938 did the first paved highway couple the northern part of Idaho with the southern.
Some of the shitters using umbrellas as partial screens.
Trekker prayer flags, they called the foreigners’ toilet paper fluttering along the sides of the trails in the foothills of the Himalaya.
The oil vapors presumably contributing to your father’s lung cancer.
The oil vapors, year after year, and the smoking.
Cigars, mostly, the last decade, if you remember correctly, but unfiltered cigarettes by the pack before that, puffing away in the family car with all the windows rolled up.
Lumps of wet and dry and drying human feces as far as the eye could see and in the open spaces trekkers’ blue sleeping bags airing in the sun and a colorful Indian bus like something from California in the sixties parked in the shallows of the river, people clambering over it, washing it like some semi-aquatic animal.
Reading, sprawled on the Persian rug in northern New Jersey, you became aware of a certain liquid pulse of anticipation.
It was this easy to make a decision.
It always had been.
It was this easy to alter everything you thought of as your life.
You had done it before.
The point being how, when you returned to the States from Venezuela and entered school and began recounting stories about your childhood during show-and-tell on Fridays, nobody believed you.
Show-and-tell being on Fridays, as a rule, in U.S. schools.
One ran over snakes for sport on the back roads in Venezuela.
The longer the snake, the more points.
During the rainy season, crabs would appear by the thousands, crunching beneath your tires as you drove along muddy back roads.
As your father drove along the muddy back roads, to be precise.
Crabs or frogs.
It is difficult to remember which.
The crabs or frogs, say, or the time you were digging in the sand on a beach at a resort hotel in Caracas and came across some sort of thumb-sized mucus-colored insect burrowing there, quilled with miniature black spikes, and you reached out to touch one of them and next thing you were in the hospital, what passed for the hospital, under mosquito netting, your swollen arm searing, bulbous as balloon art, your mother and father sitting nearby in aluminum folding chairs.
Your teachers, the point being, thought you were lying.
Or the room at the refinery lined with jars filled with tapeworms floating in formaldehyde.
Designed, you see, to teach the new American employees the lesson about how one should always cook food thoroughly and never pick up anything edible that happens to drop on the floor.
They took you to the principal’s office and made you call home to have your mother verify what you alleged.
Some of the tapeworms being twelve or fifteen feet long, you remember.
Remember or think you remember.
Remember perhaps being too strong a word.
You about to cry, it almost (but not quite) goes without saying, being so humiliated.
How on the back roads the cracking crab shells sounded like popcorn.