His classmate wasn’t picking up the phone or responding to texts. Bob found his address online and went by his place, but he was out, just as Bob had expected. “No biggie,” he thought, trying to keep his cool. “I’ll camp out here until tomorrow. He’s gotta come back eventually.” His passport, return ticket, and last hundred bucks were in his shorts pocket. He didn’t feel like springing for a hostel. Bob dragged himself down the city’s hot streets, believing he’d soon receive a sign from above, his faith in mankind’s higher vocation never wavering. A wild Puerto Rican girl’s black flowing hair slapped him as she crossed an intersection. On his way out of a small Greek restaurant where he’d bought a bottle of water, a scantily clad German girl with fair hair, soft peach fuzz on her lean body, a rock-hard stomach, and a piercing dangling from her nose like a band attached to a tame dove’s leg pressed up against him. He was lugging his suitcase around—it was getting heavier as the day progressed—dreaming about taking a short respite, hot tea, and a woman’s cold skin. He stumbled across the local Ukrainian Cultural Center in the early evening. Some Poles got him sloshed. A few drinks in, he tried paying for himself and his new friends, but the Poles refused to accept his offering, assuring him that it was an honor to carouse with such a hellishly jolly Irishman and that Ireland was Poland’s sister country.
“Dude, the women in your country!” they yelled, looking at Bob’s thick sideburns enviously. “Dude, the women in your country! They have fiery red hair, like squirrels. As pale as jellyfish! As tall as mast pines! Spangled with freckles like the constellations captains use to guide their ships!”
They didn’t take Bob back to their place for the night, however—they limited their appreciation to words and expressions of their deep admiration for Irish women. “What are they telling me all this for?” Bob thought, weeping and lying on a bench warmed by the hot sun outside a Protestant church. “Why are they wringing my heart out? What do Irish women have to do with me? I’ve never been with an Irish girl. I’ve never even been with a Northern Irish girl! I’ve never been with a Puerto Rican girl, a Brazilian girl, or a Peruvian girl, either. I don’t know what their love tastes like, what it feels like, what it sounds like coming from their lips. I just want to go home—to that city of sun that I left so heedlessly. I’ve drifted dangerously far from it, completely lost the sensation of it. I lost all sensation a while ago.” This thought raced through Bob’s mind because it was actually true—he couldn’t feel his throat, his tongue, his pain, or his life. That’s how he fell asleep… He dreamed of the queen of England.
The morning brought hope and relief. His temperature had gone back down; his blood, stagnant during the night, was now bubbling throughout his body, and pigeons were sitting on his suitcase, pecking out the eyes of the East German girls. A young dark-skinned girl was doing some unbelievable exercises in the park across the street. Her legs were tangled up in such unfamiliar knots that Bob’s cheerful morning mood was wrecked instantly; yesterday’s wistfulness and uncertainty had returned. He headed for his classmate’s apartment, taking great pains to dodge the sunny waitresses carrying chairs outside and unfurling snow-white tablecloths and the elderly postwomen looking at passersby with tremulous attention, as though they were potential addressees. He dodged the ancient nuns flashing their ceramic dentures and the portly policewomen—their powerful arms made him want to give himself up to their embraces and their handcuffs made him want to be fettered for the rest of his life. His classmate still wasn’t home. Making inquiries with his neighbors didn’t do any good—if anything, it made matters worse. A Japanese girl sprang out of the next apartment down, poorly concealing her private parts with a blanket. Actually, she was just waving it around like a flag. Bob’s eyes unconsciously, yet unwaveringly, slid up her dark, shaved calves, her hips, tinted gold by the light, and everything else she had to show, although that wasn’t a whole lot, considering her age. Nevertheless, it was enough to send him into a deep melancholic state; he thanked her vaguely and said goodbye, slinking off to a nearby park, where he bummed around all day. In the evening, he found a soup kitchen, had a meal, and told the women dishing out the food all about his trials and tribulations. They listened attentively but didn’t offer him seconds. “Those whores! Is this what their faith teaches them? Is this the kind of behavior their pastors recommend? Why couldn’t they let me stay in that damn soup kitchen until morning? Bunch of whores,” he repeated to himself. “Yeah… whores! Prostitutes are the only ones in this city who could possibly understand me! They’re the only ones I can count on. They’re the only ones who could actually help me. I’ve got this damn hundred-dollar bill in my pocket—am I just gonna take it home with me? No way!” He tried thinking it through logically. “Souvenirs? I can get the same souvenirs cheaper back in Ukraine. A hostel? They’re for wimps. I just have to find a woman here. I have to fix everything, start anew, like I’m filling an old riverbed with fresh water. I just have to nab some Surinamese girl. Or an Ethiopian girl. An Ethiopian girl would give me a breath of joy and serenity. She really would. Or a Japanese girl,” he kept pondering, still lying on the same bench, head now resting on his suitcase. “Japanese women can resurrect the dead with their tongues. They’d raise me up like Lazarus, dust the clay and dark seaweed off me, and set my internal organs, stalled like frozen steam engines, into motion. Or a Brazilian girl,” he thought, already sound asleep. “The queen of Carnival, with feet like red-hot coals and palms as damp as rocks on the shore in the morning. She’d have incredible stamina and flexibility; she’d take me to where the gates of the airport stand open to travelers, make sure I got on the correct flight, and then send me short, funny letters about nothing.” That night it started raining. Bob woke up with a stuffy nose, and his temperature had come back. There were twenty-four hours left until his departure.
But even his stuffy nose could detect all the smells and smoke of this city, its August skin, scorched by the sun and bleached by the ocean. He looked at the pigeons, surprisingly calm in the constant commotion, the yogis and monks, observed the dragons on the rooftops and the hyenas rooting around in the dumpsters, shielded his eyes against the bloody rays of the morning sun, and wrapped his sodden jacket around his shoulders, but he wasn’t getting any cozier. Just as the thought of heading to the airport and waiting out the last twenty-four hours before his flight popped into his head, a bunch of jovial drunkards, who had noticed him earlier yet decided against tearing him away from his brooding and melancholic morning reflection, understanding the true delicacy of the matter, as jovial drunkards so often do, shouted to get his attention. Once they saw that Bob was really hurting and the demons of morning blues were absolutely devouring him from the inside, they hollered at him to join their merry festivities and hospitably handed him some strange beverage. The natives themselves didn’t know what it was called; all they could tell him was that some Poles sold this poison at their nearby store, though not even they could pronounce its name.
“Polish has so many hushing consonants,” they shouted excitedly, pouring Bob drink after drink. “One shudders to imagine how their church services sound! Hymns cluttered with all those consonants have gotta wake God up in the morning!” They were talking to Bob, and he even answered them, but nobody was listening to him; they kept talking and talking as the hyenas scurried into the shade and yellow snakes wove nests in the metal trash cans. The sun was blazing over church bell towers and billboards, bouncing off the windows up where the city’s warm air hovered, where rooms were filled with life and August drafts were skipping down fire escapes. The women walking down the street smiled at him, waved their hats and kerchiefs amiably, shouting cheerful and tender words, exclamations so tightly interwoven with hushing consonants and palatized vowels that Bob didn’t dare touch these nodes of language, golden, like cells in a beehive, packed with joy and delight. Joy and delight were just what he had the direst need of when he woke up that morning and found his dad’s old suitcase unscathed; it was for the sake of joy and delight that he charged into the late evening twilight, searching for public transportation and brotherly love.