The Traveler: Falling in Love

The Traveler, or, Meditations of a Company Man, illuminates the inner life of an assassin trained as a child in the art of murder and employed by a shadowy company whose national allegiances are forever cloaked in mystery. The short pieces that make up The Traveler weave in and out of time in an organic pattern more akin to music than to narrative fiction. Its pleasures lie in the joy of words heard and felt for their own particular, undefinable magic.

Transcript

“I’m not sure I remember how to do this,” I said.
 “It’ll come back to you,” she said. And it did, in a way. We stopped on a drive over the mountains, over the sea, and I held her in my arms and we kissed, and sure enough some things came back to me from long ago, and in spite of my training, against all good sense, I told her who I was, that I was looking for a way out, that she’d come along at a tricky time and I wasn’t sure I could protect her, and she said, “Sigmund Freud is a distant relative. Kiss me again.”
 So we kissed in the car a long time and then I put it in gear and we headed down the mountain.
 “It’s not good if you’re falling in love,” she said. “You’re not the type.”
 “I was taken from my home at an early age,” I said. It was the first time I’d told anyone in quite that way. All the other recruits of course were in the same situation, so we only obliquely referred to the hurt. It was indeed as if something of human feeling had been removed from us, but it was easier talking amongst ourselves, we who were all damaged in more or less the same way.
 “Boarding school?” She said.
 “Something like that.”
 “The British,” she said. “They don’t like children.”
 “I’m American.”
 “I know,” she said. “Americans don’t like children either but they pretend to. I was a child once.”
 “Really?” I said. “Me too.”
 “Here,” she said, and handed me a photograph of a girl in a yellow swimsuit with a swim mask on her face, and a snorkel snaking up from her mouth, holding a pair of swim fins in one hand and the hand of an unseen adult in the other. All you see of the adult is knees. “Biarritz,” she said. “With an uncle. The Freud uncle.”
 “I’m hungry,” I said.
 “Me too,” she said.
 “There’s a French restaurant ahead. I did a favor for the owner once. He always remembers to pretend not to remember me.”
 We drove on. She nodded off. I heard her snore, then she awoke. “What?” She said.
 “I didn’t say anything. You fell asleep.”
 She reached into the backseat for her handbag. “I have to take a pill.”
 “There’s water in the glove compartment.”
 She shook out a couple of pills and put her palm to her lips and drank the water; this I observed out of the corner of my eye as the traffic increased coming down the mountain into town.
 “I have a condition,” she said.
 “Don’t we all,” I said.
 “It’s potentially fatal,” she said. “If I don’t take my pills.”
 I looked over at her. She looked like Lauren Bacall in a movie I saw once.
 “Don’t die on me,” I said. “I’m just getting to know you.”
 “I like steak,” she said. “Do they have steak?”

It was the kind of place that’s ritzy and they take your car and park it for you and give you a little slip of paper. I’ve never understood how they know from the slip of paper where to find your car, because in these crowded little towns they have to find a place wherever they can; I don’t know why they can’t have assigned lots like in American towns but maybe it is tradition, or maybe a lack of space, and I always want to tell the valet when I come out after dinner, it’s a red Maserati or it’s the dented blue ford sedan or it’s a Porsche or a Mercedes or a VW Microbus or whatever happens to be the car that suits whoever I’m pretending to be at the time, but I never have to tell them, they just know.
 It was the first time we were in public together and I saw she had an effect on people. They were nicer to me when she was there. I give off an air of coldness and possibly even menace, even when I am trying to be casual and friendly. Years of living in terror must have done that to me. But with her, even my friend who owns the restaurant seemed sort of jovial when we came in, and took her hand and kissed it.
 We got a nice table and a nice bottle of wine and she got her steak and the steak was good. But halfway through the steak she fainted, and they had to call a doctor, and I helped her up to our room and the doctor came and talked to her in French and took her pulse and looked at her pills and looked at me and shook his head and gave her his card and left.
 She lay back on the bed. “I’m alright,” she said. “It happens now and then.”