Idle Days in the West

In this episode, we go on a vertiginous tour through the Western World, guided by one night stands, aging parents, and a lone suicide bomber. From Cape Town, Sydney, Istanbul, Athens, Sevilla, Madrid, Paris, Mexico City, to Havana we look for love in all the wrong places, we search for grit in city centers a century too late, and like a debt collector we survey what the present owes the past. 

If you enjoy what you're listening to but would rather hold these stories in your hand, say while riding on public transport to mom's house or to the mirage of self-actualization through travel, you can buy a book or two at miragetravelpodcast.com

Transcript

Idle Days in the West

I land in Johannesburg at sundown but am looking for a way to Cape Town. The former has a reputation for being perilous if poorly navigated, which would be inevitable, what with the stash of painkillers burning the tips of my fingers. Cape Town, on the other hand, is celebrated for tourism. Up there with Paris, Venice, and San Francisco. I could dawdle around on unemployed afternoons, make sense of a year, tie a ribbon on it, and find instruction. And, if there was a sense of accomplishment in getting out alive, did it not come at the expense of a feeling of belonging? If so, could all the traveling be undone? 

Unfortunately, the ticketing agent explains all the trains and buses are booked. It's the school holidays, she adds. She stands in front of a map of the country. When I ask for any holiday destination, she points to a town on the coast. 

"I'll take it." 

I'm back in the sky within an hour and an hour later, in a nondescript resort town. I throw back a handful of pills while standing on the 15th-floor balcony of a beachside eyesore, then head downstairs while coming up. Wading into the ocean is an inexpressible feeling following a year of being landlocked in Africa. I enter it with joy as if it were a woman. 

I hail a cab to the town center. It's Friday, and I'm free—no work or curfews— and can think of little I would enjoy more than going out drinking. Riding in the backseat of the taxi as it hugs the shore, it's incredibly civilian. I blend in, somewhat. The realization gives me hope. Hope to bring a woman back to the hotel that overlooks the confluence of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. On the west end of the bay, a shanty town sits precariously on a cliff. 

The taxi driver, pegging me for a clueless tourist, warns me of hypothetical dangers. There are muggings and gun violence. He goes long on the matter of black people, and his adjectives become flowery and performative. The shanties of the nearing township betray the structural racism. Its size and flagrancy defeat my desire to correct the man's speech. I feel guilty for remaining silent, and I transfer the antipathy toward myself onto the driver. I don't tip him. 

Skid marks where cars have spun doughnuts ring each intersection, informing me of the possibilities of the small town. Comparisons, although odious, are inevitable. Coastal small town South Africa brings together the working-class aesthetics of rural America, the agreeable climate of Australia, and the methodical segregation of modern-day Israel. There's much barbequing behind fences, with camping chairs and RVs along the water. The smoke of cooked meat covers scenes of pasty skinned men clutching canned beers. It smells of eucalyptus. There's not a black person in sight. It's normal, laid-back even because it's segregated, and all the problems are swept under the rug. It reminds me of home. 

Bar after bar, each beer drinks another. Every woman is spoken-for or taking other guys. I tie one on solo, and the only communication I share is with an older bachelor as we lip-sync Metallica's "Nothing Else Matters." Before leaving, I scan the room. Lo and behold, I see a familiar scene—the last available woman being dry-humped by a dude in a motorcycle jacket. It's universal, after all this travel. It strikes me as familiar, and there's a feeling of destiny. I tell the bartender to send them two shots of whiskey, then close my tab. 

Sauntering the length of the beach, I'm still free. It's a balmy languid evening. It must be after midnight, with the horseshoe moon too high to shimmer on the ocean. I'm halfway to the hotel when I fall off some rocks. Pushing on, drunk and bleeding, a couple of drifters size me up from a distance of twenty feet on either side. They're the guys the taxi driver was profiling six hours earlier. I backpedal and return to the lamp-lit streets of the town. I overshoot a turnoff and get lost. I'm the only white person again. It might be a combination of the pills and booze, or the sense of security one acquires from having left a conflict zone—I take an alley near a club. Blunt smoke clouds the entrance. Four or five guys are openly dealing. I wish to be offered something new other than these year-old painkillers. Except the guys are now whistling, as in, this guy is a cop. I'm cornered at an angle and then asked a couple of questions in Afrikaans. The thing that might've saved me was my dilated pupils. As in, this guy is not a cop, he's a druggie. I escape with that profile. 

The following day, I board a Greyhound bus for a slow ride five hours west, then check into a youth hostel in Cape Town. The combination of the bus and the hostel make me feel ten years younger, and I waltz high and spry into the nest of idealism and carelessness. The hostel is teeming with twenty-somethings for whom travel can only be fun and mind-opening. The foyer, with its backpacks, internet cafe, and postcard carousels makes me wonder if I shouldn't have returned home over the past decade if only to feel I was traveling, not drifting. 

Throughout the week, I keep a tight schedule with the pills until I court an interesting younger woman. Then, I forgo the painkillers for a night out. Returning home, this Canadian psychologist and I nearly consummate our mutual necessity for intimacy if it weren't for being in a shared and full dorm. Walking the hall back to my room, I feel young again, younger, especially as I hadn't gotten laid. It reminded me of my early twenties.

There's a blur of a week in Cape Town. It's a blur because, as a tourist destination, it's all veneer of frivolity, so forgettable. Sights to see. Things to buy. Couples, hand in hand, eat ice cream while the maid makes the bed back in the room. The blacks work on that side of the counter, and the whites, on this side. Only the grittiness of the port city, its homeless needle users, and political graffiti against Zuma's ANC light its underbelly, its specificities against a homogenizing world. 

I annihilate the last afternoon by finishing the stash. I nod off on the second story of a red tourist bus, blinded by the sun reflecting off the ocean. It lights the bronze mountains and burns my face. I rarely think about South Africa, but rather the Central African Republic. I was wrong. The cure for one country was not another. 

With a half-day layover in Perth, I visit the neighborhood where I lived from the ages of eight to ten. When I first traveled outside the U.S. and had the epiphany that America's central position on the map on the geography classroom wall was arbitrary. I cab to my childhood neighborhood. The video rental store is now a bank that advertises interest-free home loans. The fish and chips joint now does sushi. People buy wine. The architects have lowered the roofs, the landscapers have shrunk the trees, and the construction workers have narrowed and shortened the roads. They streets have kept their names to mock my memory. I travel not in space but in time. Cutting through the grounds of my former elementary school, it happens to be recess. I keep my head lowered to avoid being escorted off, if only because I was old. I walk the sideline of the basketball court where my first crush, Sophie, carried her new-found breasts like a cross. Here sexes became opposite. We guys started playing sports for reasons other than fun. A commercial for Anchor Cordial was shot in the schoolyard using local rollerbladers, of whom my brother. We would see him on TV from time to time, sporting fluorescent, and would get excited in our tiny house, him and I struggling to be cool. 

I down an espresso at a corner café that didn't exist. Here my friends and I would meet up to collect recyclables for refunds. We would blow it on candy in a deli and then search for Playboys in the newsagent's trash can. Both places have since vanished. The town has changed incredibly in twenty-five years, so what reminds me more of Australia is not the hot wind and eucalyptus; it's as unassuming as the smell of my stepdad's breath. 

J. picks me up at Sydney International Airport. We hug. We speak niceties, the weather, and the flight, then get personal when in the car, soaring forward. We drive the Hay Plain to Adelaide for Christmas with a family I don't know. They are trying to understand themselves—my step-aunt received military records of her dead father, and it's one of a varied past. "Marched in" some dozen times across the Mediterranean during the Second World War. The records read of him disappearing in Beit Jirja, and I deduce that, as he was in the Australian military, it must have been in British Mandate Palestine. I search online to find that Lloyd Johns, after being "Away Without Leave," was marched in fifteen kilometers north of what is today the Gaza Strip. Having traveled the area, I describe the landscape to my family, trying not to veer into politics. It's too hot. It's Christmas day, never mind the decorative fake snow on the windows. My feet are dangling in the pool. 

I say it's nice. He must have enjoyed it there. The climate is similar to Australia. There's scrub, there's the sea. 

"Well, what could he have gotten up to in the eight days he was AWOL?" His widow, my step-grandmother, says with her posh Southern Australian accent. She speculates on illegitimate children, sips a neat scotch, then laughs. I see myself in the wandering man. Lloyd doubtless went on a bender, but how to roll in the hay with a Palestinian in the nineteen forties? 

"Suppose I have a half-brother then," my stepdad, the man who raised me more than my father, adds. Although they're not my blood relatives, the idea of illegitimate children ties the family together. It reduces the world and flattens it. I decide to retrieve my Tinder account when I get a minute. 

In Melbourne, I eat at a Krishna restaurant and notice how poorly they multitask. I'm still reeling from a year in central Africa, equally disoriented. Everything is bright, and new, and the colors are sharp. I recall a conversation with a Krishna in the Rome Termini Train Station who told me to refrain from sexual intercourse to know if I was truly in love (with Sarah, circa 2003). And another conversation with a Krishna in the rain on Bourbon Street in New Orleans (circa 2001). Youth tap danced for money with spoons attached to their basketball shoes while the Krishna spoke about abstaining from eating meat. He claimed meat takes days to decompose in the body. And then the twin evangelists in a Phish concert parking lot (the Midwest in the millennium) who had converted following epiphanies on psychedelics. I apologized. I had no money to purchase a hardcover copy of the Bhagavad Gita because I'd squandered it on acid. They stared with dime-sized pupils, possibly observed that mine were congruous, and said in unison that they accepted donations, for example, LSD. We laughed, but for different reasons. Their eyes had the same evangelical glare as the woman serving me a bagel thirteen years later in a Krishna café in Melbourne. The food is a godsend and deserving of the wait.

I go for coffee, yet the choices have become so complicated I feign an Italian accent to get an order in. After coffee, I go next door for a beer. The brew has a pun for a name which is not funny. The bartender offers me an unabridged history of two college graduates who teamed up to make some swill that I'll flush down the toilet in an hour. He attempts to persuade me that sourcing locally is a revolution. Unnumbered flavors of staple goods have transformed us all into opinionated consumers. The niche product begets hip boutiques and neighborhoods, where residents consider themselves so unique that they can no longer speak to one another. Even "dive" has become a niche. It takes me hours in Melbourne before I find an artless bar. Just a fucking bar where no one is anything. I sit to write with no distractions. 

Return to Sydney. I seek out the Red Light, and I'm instantly disheartened. Sure, there are sex workers, but they are backlit by high-end jewelry stores. Plants are potted with a good deal of symmetry along the sidewalk to stop the homeless from camping. Everyone's happy on the billboards. The whole neighborhood is pristine. The lower-level urban planners couldn't understand that some constituents didn't want to live in a community. They wanted to live in a city where it was thinkable to air their desires in anonymity and immunity. The boutiques in the Red Light, too, cater to the niche. The general has become obscure, and the obscure general. The only thing authentic left are the sex workers and the dead-enders, and they're becoming so rare in Western city centers they ought to be protected as World Heritage Sites. 

On New Year's Eve, my stepdad and I ride the train to the city. We push through crowds, and crowds push through us. He's uneasy. I'm not. Unlike in Bangui, I don't expect anybody to accost us. Moving up Argyle Street in the Rocks, I summarize the years since we last spoke, the two of us, in person. Since I was twenty, still a teen, in other words. To convince him I'm no longer under his supervision. Or was I drawing a line from the past to the future as a prerequisite to traveling with my parents for two months? A retirement gift my mom offered herself. She enlisted me as a guide in exchange for a free ride. Or was it that I still had the pretense J. was a father figure and that, as his child, he should listen to my stories? That's not what happens. 

He speaks to me as an equal. His attention span wavers in and out of stories. I study his face. Is he reconfiguring the past to sit more courageously in the present? I offer to buy him a pint, knowing he doesn't drink. He declines. My stories involve something bad almost happening, and his stories of youth in rural Australia something good. My stories I've repeated until they're stale. 

We move through the ceremony of New Year's Eve. It's easy. Time is dependable, all told. At eleven, we weave through groups to find a spot on Observatory Hill. Australian Banyan trees dominate the plot and dwarf a rotunda and a war memorial. In a silence magnified by the crowd's presence, I tell him a story about a jaunt to a swinger's club in Paris, not to boast but to break the banality. Or. It was that I did want him to listen to my stories. 

The crowd begins the countdown from 10. At nine, I notice a family pull their two dogs in close. Eight. Seven. At six, I place my arm around J. Five. Four. At three, I check my footing. Two. Take a sip of beer. One. Explosions rip along the horizon. Blazing red flowers on orange stems bloom over the Harbor Bridge. The thud shortcuts back to my recent memory of grenade charges. It throws my mind into overdrive. It's shell shock. I return to Africa momentarily. Like veterans returning to the scene of the conflict, where, for once, life is not a question. It's an answer, an affirmation against death, which is only time. 

In Istanbul, I move at the pace of my parents, slow enough that I read historical plaques to their end: The German Fountain is a gazebo-styled fountain at the northern end of the old hippodrome (Sultanahmet Square). It was constructed to commemorate the second anniversary of German Emperor Wilhelm II's visit to Istanbul in 1898. It was built in Germany, transported piece by piece, and assembled in its current site in 1900. The neo-Byzantine style fountain's octagonal dome has eight marble columns, and the dome's interior is covered with golden mosaics.

We have time, as both tourists and the aging do. The present takes its cue from the past. I circle the gazebo, admiring the tiling, and, coming to a vine, I see a modest graffito behind it—Temporary Autonomous Zone. Compared to the police in bulletproof vests lingering in the shade of a pair of gargantuan mosques, it’s pure understatement. The "A" in the middle is encircled, denoting "Anarchy," and it's as if the tag, thrown up in haste in black sharpie, is not a call to arms but rather the Pirate Utopia itself. I read too deep into it, being cerebral at slow speeds. Maybe it's kids happy to get one over on the man, but I can't believe the graffiti. Everything is against it. To paraphrase Orwell, like all men who have lived much alone, I had adjusted better to ideas than people, but my old ideas have become foreign to me. I no longer have them to keep me company. 

A day later, my mother, J, and I sit in a backstreet restaurant, eating what is breakfast for me and lunch for them. 

Everything is in those gestures. My mother, fork in right hand, goes for a tomato in a shared salad. My stepfather, fork also in right hand, goes for the same tomato, or perhaps it's the cheese next to it. It's difficult to tell with the sun in my eyes. They pause. My mother hesitates—she often lets my stepfather have first go of food. She’s accommodating, and her focus is less on actions and more on the memories the actions will make, but at her age, the implications have become platitudes—I like it when you travel, she says, and it's not what you expect. She's from 1950s Texas and measures her appreciation against a pool of possible lives she escaped. She’s meek in her gratitude. My stepfather, this time, also hesitates. Food is his true happiness and his sole inroads to hedonism. He is not shy but awkward and, therefore, less sociable. In the throes of a midlife crisis, he will buy himself a new sports car in a month. Maybe this is the reason he hesitates. My parents waver. Their forks move with the dexterity of fencers. It lasts but one moment, but the marriage of their personalities is contained in those gestures. 

This happens in Taxim Square as I, influenced by the writing of Lydia Davis, consider drafting short stories. I would catalog the rich interior lives of the characters. Their words would rarely be set off by quotation marks. The meditations would lay bare the tenderness between persons. For example, I wouldn't outright write of my mother that her passion for travel springs from her propensity for flight. And that propensity for flight springs from her reaction to growing up in a conflictual home. She flew from home at the earliest possible moment via a short lived marriage. And flight she passed on to me like a hereditary disease. I wouldn't write that instead, I would write of people, lit from within not from without. I would focus not on the actions of persons but instead on their motivations, their hopes. If I could write it as such, it would become visible in the people around me. 

The moment the story pulls itself together, a suicide bomber blows himself up two kilometers over. It's a cruel intrusion into a world of fiction. It's reality, if you will. I hear the blast and know immediately it's a bomb. Say, "That's fucked up," to my parents, to nobody. J. dismisses the sound as construction in the sprawling metropolis. My mother agrees. I judge the disinterest of the locals around us and think, fair enough. I chalk it up to residual neurosis from Bangui. We continue our day. We board a tourist cruise in Ortaköy and play voyeur to the inhabitants of waterfront houses. We then eat again. We return to the hotel, J. turns on the BBC, and there’s a row of police in Istanbul. Behind the line is the German Fountain. The subtitles read BREAKING. And I learn that a suicide bomber, a Syrian citizen, embarked on a one-way flight for seventy-seven virgins at 10:20 AM, taking with him thirteen tourists. I imagine the dozen dead souls rising into the mineral-colored skies above the Bosphorus. That I knew it was a bomb—the dumb thud in the chest and the lungs—gives me pause on the minor, spiritual, collateral damage inherent to international travel. 

That night I cancel a Tinder date, eat a fistful of sleeping pills, and descend into dream. 

Hungover and exhausted, I dawdle atop the Acropolis in Athens. The white city spreads below me. There's the Parthenon, and below it is my mother, looking for my stepdad, who, all his life, has been waiting for this moment. He can't finish his sentences: my father, around this part of the continent during the great war. He finds the direction of the Gallipoli peninsula. The Greek immigrants when I was a kid in Australia, this is what they were talking about. J. points to a single cloud stuck to the sea-blue sky. For a scientist, the trip to Athens is a pilgrimage to Mecca. He receives layers of understanding of his past in one installment. I appreciate his interest and see vicariously through him for a minute or two. 

Then me—who burned through the present day throughout the previous night—instead of architectural and historical significance, I desire, to the core of my being, nothing more than a blowjob and a nap. As a pragmatist, I know which one I would get.

I leave my mother to reel in my stepdad at the Acropolis. I run down the mountain and through the city on my way to sleep. I run past another graffito, "Fuck May '68, fight now!" I think, ok, let us fuck. Back at the apartment and in the john, I tumble through click holes of internet pornography. A fire truck rolls through the neighborhood, leaving behind it a trail of barking dogs. I have seen them every day, drooling in their hunger, some scratching open wounds. And then, when I come to, I find myself in a corner of the internet where women ceased moaning, and I'm alone, again. I draw a bath.

I connect with a girl on Tinder, platonic only, she adds. Maya has a dance lesson and says I will appreciate the class, which is "full of women and drinks, very informal." We walk through industrial neighborhoods. There are tent cities under the bridges. There are cars parked everywhere, so much so that I don't notice them, even when weaving among them. I'm listening to Maya. She jumps from subject to subject, from Thracian Dance to a crack epidemic in Athens. Maya keeps her eyes on the sidewalk. When I ask her if we're late, she replies no, Greeks are seldom on time. 

In a warehouse, her dance troupe rests on benches made of reused pallets. They're dressed in poorly fitting clothes. Above a cloud of cigarette smoke, the ceiling is water stained and black where it possibly once caught fire. 

After a drink, they dance in circles on a shining parquet reenacting Ancient Thracian culture or that of contemporary Rhodes. That's what I read in a book on a makeshift bookshelf. Quickly. My gaze wanders to the dance instructor. The class rotates around her as she steps one, two, and looks behind her at the outer circle for the precision of her students' footfalls. She's graceful, and the music is jovial, something only peoples with such sunlight, oceans, and the inter-village marriages of the Mediterranean could create. Her life's work is her body and its movements. Her calves, her motions, and how she turns her neck to watch her students. She skates through music in provenance from multiple cultures, as easy as walking to catch the bus. She keeps her hair in a bun, highlighting her jawbone cut like a model for pre-Raphaelite painters. Observing her footfalls on the dance floor, I understand what I've decided to do with my body—sit on the sidelines and write notes, draft stories, and rearrange narratives, to tie together varying experiences with little connection other than that I observed them.

The dance instructor calls for a break by yelling, "Raki."

Later, in a bar, I tell the dance instructor about the Pre-Raphaelite painters and their idealization of Greek beauty. She’s discussing art with Maya, somewhat. Unfortunately, my addition to the conversation is as unimpressive as explaining the art of rhetoric to a bird that sings. 

Towards dawn, I split a cab with Maya, and in a sloppy denouement, we make out in the backseat. She says she would invite me up but she lives with her parents. 

"It's not cultural. It's economic," she adds. She preempted my thought process. It's a genuinely Socratic moment. I fall to sleep in a spinning bed as my mother wakes. 

During the afternoon, I serve as a guide for my parents. We climb the Acropolis again, at my request. We eat Moussaka. In all likelihood, an ice cream, too. My mother insists we walk. After walking, we rest on benches for longer than the unemployed. We watch dogs. She's thrilled to be retired. She nuances this, "I loved my job though. We had such nice and intelligent people at the university. It's the commute that I hated. By this time, I would be crossing back over the Hawkesbury," she details the four-hour train ride. She repeats her routine, astonished it's been broken. Everything is better than it once was. I agree. She's also delighted her son is sitting next to her and not on the opposite end of a long-distance telephone call. She says so. Again, I agree. 

As for J., he's at the age of reminiscence. During a stroll through the Agora, he talks about a specific night in which he made a decision he now regrets. There was one night in Nebraska where he worked as a physicist when Playboy's Miss November, enamored by his Australian accent, asked him a question he thinks he wrongly responded to. Looking at the Grecian ruins in the park, lit in the limelight, he works like the historian Herodotus, collecting his memories systematically and critically. In that sense, we're akin.  

J. doesn't drink because he worked behind his parents' bar outside Adelaide during adolescence. His father was an alcoholic. Drank himself from South Australia to British Mandate Palestine. J.'s hang-ups stem from his timorousness. All I can offer him are apologies and advise him that drinking, although it's a problem, could as quickly be a solution. I convince him to drink a single Raki. 

"Like the swinger's club you mentioned," he says when my mother is in the bathroom. "Those things happened when I grew up, more likely in a field, but they happened. Where was I?"

Crossing the boulevard, on the way to meet Maya and before saying goodbye we conclude our conversation. 

"It doesn't mean I'm any happier than you." I didn't say that it's arduous work to make a life in which one doesn't end up singing into the barrel of a shotgun. We hug and make plans for the next morning. He apologizes for voicing his nostalgia and blames it on age. 

"I already do the same." I say, "Write about it all the time." 

My mom tells me to be careful. 

I meet Maya. In the bar there are women. Women talking to women, talking to women. It's overwhelming. Maya is friends with a woman who is to sing tonight. The singer and I are introduced, and we proceed to stumble through misunderstandings. She exhales hand-rolled cigarette smoke from the corner of her lips. I nod and wish her the best for the concert. This is translated by Maya, and the singer thanks me in the translation from the Greek. Maya and I get closer during the show, beer for beer, and my hand slips up her thigh. She leans into me. Here, her sister joins us for the night and dashes the momentum. 

At one point the singer, who is dramatic and neo-gothic in her high notes and bustier, calls me up on stage. Maya's sister nudges me. I have no choice, no control in this foreign land. She sings an entire song with only the microphone between us, and her band is tight on the stage around me. Four beats per measure are on the floor while she and I make unbroken eye contact through the chorus. It's about love or loss of love. Initially, I'm flattered. Doesn't everybody want to be loved, to be sung to? I stare into the crowd. Or was I being sung about? Then I realize —the number of women, the lack of men, and the life-size pig-woman statue with her legs spread. Under the pig is a sign that reads, "tonight you're eating pork." It's a lesbian bar, and I'm on stage. Am I, then, a representative of all men, in this play? I have no part, nothing to sing about. If I had anything to say, I would claim that I'm a human, unfortunately, only a man. She continues crooning. It's her stage. I wrap us in the mic cord, and we finish the song together. 

At dawn, I board a plane, hungover, smelling of cigarettes and desperation.

In Barcelona, I meet Maya's sister at the Miro Museum, who happens to be on vacation, too. Shiftless days. We're staring at a painting I could do myself but didn't. I ask her about several nights back in Athens. 

"With the singer," I pause, "In the lesbian club," I add, to gauge her reaction. She doesn't correct me. 

"You were only a prop, I guess you would call it. She wasn't making fun of you, but not necessarily hitting on you either. She's not a lesbian though." I'm staring at a large Miro canvas, blue and approximating sperm. It was confusing. The singer must have been more subtle than I was willing to handle.

I travel the countries along the Mediterranean, pushed back into poverty. Only yesterday these countries were run aground by autocrats. Greece, Spain, Portugal—Greek junta from '67 to '74, Franco's Spain. Portugal had the longest dictatorship on the European continent, from '26 to '74. So it wouldn't surprise me if the citizens along the sea are ready to return to the fields or arms if need be. In Athens, I crossed an elderly woman each day on my way out. She sat on her front porch, dressed in traditional Athenian garb, with a headscarf and embroidered dress. She asked passersby to use their cell phones. She was ready for the future. I would be texting on Tinder with women my age. They were still in school. Everybody was going for their doctorates, preparing for the future. Despite this, the bars and restaurants were packed. There was still joy in the streets. 

Unlike the cities of southern Europe, Paris is not ready to be poor. Parisians, and the French in general, have dragged their heels into the 21st century. This is convenient since most of the city’s tourists are principally interested in time travel. It's also suitable for Parisians, who long for the smell of their grandmother's attic. Then again, the French are only ever ready for lunch. They ride high on social gains fought for by their ancestors. Instead of a recent history of dictatorships, they boast the Front Populaire. They've had it good for too long. This is why French cities are more morose than those of Southern Europe. Today, on the grands boulevards, beggars rub shoulders with other beggars, and punks with dogs squat next to Romani. The Romani have taken to dressing like Syrian refugees to play the victim. Soldiers patrol in clusters. Posters for military recruitment tile the subway walls. 

In Sevilla, the women's Tinder profiles read like Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself." They enumerate their ambitions, accomplishments, and what ambitions and accomplishments they're looking for in a partner. Tinder's not a forum for one-night stands then. Given the complexity of the poetics in the profiles, I'm forced to use a dictionary to interact. Ava is a translator, and we chat about languages, in yet another hotel apartment rented by my mother. When I learn she speaks in English, I ask for a date in my native language. The words fit my mouth perfectly. We give each other our real names, set a time, and she sends me the address of a bar. The two next days become a discreet countdown to phrases I plan to say. Up until now, I've only complimented Ava on her punctuation and her eyes. 

We sit facing each other in a bar on the Alameda de Hercules. Her British, and me American, the high table could be the Atlantic. I swing my feet underneath it. 

Ava translates poetry for a living. She does so freelance. She lives where she wants, she says. "Italy, England, Spain. Wherever I speak the language." The wind blows the length of the plaza and Ava pushes her hair behind her ears again and again. 

"Not Latin America?" I ask, assuming all those who travel want to travel far. Assuming everybody wants to put an ocean between themselves and their past. 

"One day." She says she's not rushed. She's young. I would tell her that she's young, but it would make me old. We talk literature, we circle around the poets we've read. I can remember names but not the poems themselves. She recites what must be a sonnet in Italian. It's perfect. At least the accent is.

I tell Ava I write and regret it instantly. I say "prose" which is even worse. It's too early in the night but I was excited to be talking about literature. It's the equivalent of saying I'm an exhibitionist. Now I'll need to cover myself and run if she doesn't like what she sees. 

She says go on. I stall and judge her glass. I'm surprised she drinks as fast as me. I tell her wait, I'll go fetch two more pints. I linger at the bar and stare at the bottles backlit on the wall. The room is otherwise empty. The bartender slips a napkin into her novel. It suddenly seems like a book fair to see the gesture, and it gives me confidence. While she pours the drinks, I glance sideways into the mirror. I notice the twin wrinkles around my mouth that were once temporary have become permanent. It gives me character, I convince myself, and I take the two pints with long fingers and return to the table. 

"I write about people I meet in the places I go.” I could add that on occasions I get sidetracked and write about myself which makes the narration unreliable.

"Basically travel writing." 

"It sounds cheap when you say it like that. Then there's a novel about a cult, about the lies we tell ourselves. They're not finished, though. It's kinda difficult to talk about." 

"Don't be so precious." 

"No no, I don't mean it like that. Talking about books is interesting but talking about writing is not. Writing, in itself, is a dull and lonely thing. You know, how writing is portrayed in the movies. There's that cinematic moment of the author at the typewriter. He taps a cigarette against the ashtray. The camera pans away, pans back, the ashtray is full. The author types the words the end. That's bullshit. Most of writing is editing and editing isn't interesting."

"No joke. When I tell people I translate poetry they think I'm Christina Rosetti. I've never used a typewriter in my life. Why would I?" 

I raise my glass to hers. Ava's hair is straight and golden. Her arms are crossed. 

"It's a bit cold," she says. 

I ask her if we should move inside. 

She suggests we eat, then says, "Let's just go back to mine. I have a bottle of Prosecco." 

We eat tapas ordered from the bar on her couch. She leans in and tells me to try this cazón. I don't tell her that food doesn’t interest me. Tell her I love it. 

Then, the food is gone. Ava offers another shot of Disaronno, but it feels superfluous. The silence in the room, all but several seconds, is pregnant. The moment hinges on itself. Suddenly the couch is longer than before, the length of a body. I lean in.

I have my head between her thighs. She whispers in Spanish and tells me to whisper to her in French, in other words, we whisper to one another in languages that are not ours. At one point, she laughs and says, "am I one of the people you'll write about in the places you go." 

I tell her to shut up and switch to Italian. 

Fast forward twelve hours. I'm walking back through the plaza in the foreign country, in Andalusia even, as the morning sun clips the terracotta roofs. The church bells toll seven thirty, and I've left Ava's bed without sleeping. When I smile my jaw hurts. 

In Lisbon, at the edge of Europe, the capital faces the ocean both physically and mentally, I climb Barrio Alto to get drunk on Caribbean liquors in a cramped wooden bar and am nostalgic for experiences I've never lived, like pirates, or Jack London's America. Then, at closing time, I stumble out on the cobblestone and am whipped by the wind off the Atlantic in winter. 

In Madrid, I see the St. Petersburg Ballet perform Swan Lake. Despite their physical beauty, as they pirouette in tight clothes, I don't think once about sex. It's their artistic prowess. I'm as close to a spiritual being as I'll ever be. It's as if traveling, instead of creating some unity with humanity, created distance. The world is too rich in diversity to fit in one trip, the brain fights back and reduces it, simplifies it. And yet I knew this and was at war with my spirit. While I fought to transcend my narrow perspective, I was continually called back to my body by a pebble in my shoe. By my dick. 

Sarah flies into Madrid from Hamburg for the weekend. She recently flew home, out of the Central African Republic, and landed, not to an all-expenses paid trip through the Western World, but to family drama. We're in a café, drinking if only to provide some ceremony to our retrouvailles. At the window, children play with a ball in a plaza. It's quiet, there's graffiti on the walls. I don't understand what she's saying. Her father, and a gold digger, in Northern Germany. The misunderstanding leads to a fight. I would understand soon enough. She was asking for my help yet was too proud to say it like so, and I, steeped in flight and non-committal, downplayed the situation. We say goodbye at dawn on a busy street in Madrid. The last I see of her is her back. I take a train to the airport. She returns to her father's house in northern Germany. 

I first heard the Spanish language as a child while living in Texas. The early memory, remembered clearly as if it were an injury, was underscored by my grandmother's racist remark. I wondered how to translate his language into English. Back into English was the precise thought, as if what I spoke, even if piecemeal, was an original, and all other languages derivatives. It was the first time I thought of travel, the travel of the man in front of me. He approached me and offered me a stick of gum. He wore a suit. Nobody wore a suit in rural Texas, especially on a summer day. He was dignified, although it could've been sadness. The man's ancestors may have been buried in my backyard before the border was redrawn further south. Was he on a pilgrimage to visit their graves? He bought a set of tires, through them in the back of a pick-up truck, and drove off. I looked into the dust. 

In Mexico City, the wrinkles slide up my face as I walk the Paseo de la Reformas. I'm traveling, but I'm in North America. There's the same air pollution of Houston in my memory, the diesel of idling buses. My feet hurt, but they have for twenty years. I'm grateful for the shade. The avenue is long, but the benches are mostly empty, except for several people who carry many bags. In cities so large, everyone is traveling, everyone is in flight. 

I've left the Museo Nacional de Antropología. I've registered, preserved, and consecrated, the pottery of Olmec men with hideous faces. I've stared into the hollow eyes of Xochipilli. They've been taken up by the State, the greatest of modern storytellers. Thousands of years have been excavated from the soil that lies neatly within the nation’s borders. The years become Mexican. Will be remembered as Mexican. Speaking Spanish, the State has built its perfect machinery for memories, for their latest conquistador, yours truly. I'm projected backward, in a supreme genealogical project. Everything is about posture. Just as the anthropologists historicized the indigenous, I foreclose on the moment and space. I'm distilled by history then and running a continuum. I'm but one man, dancing on the head of a pin, and I kill the diversity in the world with my gaze to exhibit it in my monolithic language. 

On the Paseo, nearing the Zócalo, posters of missing persons, primarily women, are stapled on telephone poles. What's more disorienting, that they're homemade, or that I'm the only one reading them? 

In Havana, it goes that the most significant cultural contribution the socialist project has gifted the world, along with choreography and poster art, is the annihilation of the niche. The flattened world where no one is special is an incredible feat. It creates the greatest, shittiest, bars. Fuck Hemingway and his "My mojito in the Bodeguita del Medio and my daiquiri in the Floridita." I get my garbage beer from a hole in the wall and drink it on a picnic table and gather all the stray animals like the Pied Piper. 

Some countries, often islands, are mostly recalled, even if subconsciously, for their weather. Lugubrious and humid, the streets at night resemble those in lucid dreams. The bastard dogs lope across the dimly lit pavement. The men and women, the gorgeous skeletons trod on uprooted sidewalks, their fat hands, their thin hands, hanging at their sides.

Yet, the world will have its way, and the busloads of tourists, on these idle days in the West, pour into the wound. They transform the city into a cliché using photographs and postcards. They pose next to wax statues of Che or Fidel. They ride around in vintage American gas guzzlers, my mother the first and therefore myself, longing for the Cold War when things were simpler. And because most travel rarely goes beyond looking, if you look at it from the right angle, you can still see that Havana does have soul. Whatever that means.