by James O'Reilly, Larry Habegger, Sean O'Reilly (ed) (retail) (epub)
“Euro se prosím, Euro se prosím,” she says, rubbing her belly, miming eating something with a spoon.
“Oh, hungry,” I say, and rummaging through my pack I pull out a loaf of bread and a jar of jam, and offer it to her. She looks surprised, then laughs, a good-natured laugh. She shakes her head and asks for money again. I say no and offer the bread once more but she is not interested. She sits close to me on the bench, our shoulders touching. Her eyes are narrow with concentration, as if she is trying to remember a word. After a moment she puts a small hand on my leg and says, “Sex?”
“Jesus Christ. No,” I say. She mimes fellatio. “No, no, no. Nothing.” I take out my wallet and hand her a few euros. “Please go now,” I point to the station. The women leave together and are immediately followed by a morbidly obese blonde girl who shuffles up to my bench in broken flip flops. “Pleease,” she moans, “Pleeeeeease,” in a deep voice. I shake my head, but she repeats her moan at least ten times, dragging it out longer each time, “Pleeeeeeeeease.” I say nothing, and we spend a moment in silence, looking at each other. She is young, probably a teenager. She’s so fat her facial features are swallowed into inflated folds. The girl wears a yellow flower print dress, ballooned like a living Botero statue. She opens her mouth as if to plead again, but instead turns around and shuffles off on swollen feet. My three night visitors remind me of demented versions of the ghosts in A Christmas Carol, and I laugh out loud, just to hear the sound.
The train finally comes to platform six. It rumbles in a sea of percussion, a free-jazz drum solo. Restless and squeaking, it speeds in, brakes screaming. The colorful graffiti on the cars blur together, a sickly rainbow. Aboard, the hall is tight and hot, the passenger booths full. Almost everyone looks asleep. My unwieldy backpack bumps peoples’ shoulders. “Prominte, prominte,” sorry, sorry, I whisper. I sit in a car with two snoring men and an old man in an enormous tweed suit. The suit is clean and pressed, but four or five sizes too big. He pushes the sleeves back to keep them from swallowing his hands. The old man’s lips purse inward, implying a lack of teeth. His hands are massive arthritic paws, each finger a swollen bratwurst. They look like false hands, part of a horribly realistic Halloween costume. The man studies me for a long time before reaching under his seat and retrieving a two-liter bottle of pineapple soda. He unscrews the cap with deliberation and takes a great bubbling guzzle. The soda is exactly the color of piss: an opaque mustardy yellow. He wipes his mouth and examines me again. He clears his throat and says something, then laughs heartily at himself, an airy wheeze of a laugh. His smile is great, all lines and folds. I smile and nod lightly. This is all the acknowledgement the man needs. He breaks into full-scale monologue, a dam unleashed, talking a garrulous river of words. The old man motions charismatically with his grotesque hands, only breaking his narrative to take excited chugging gulps of pineapple soda. One sleeping man beside me wakes from the noise, scowls, and puts earphones in before settling down again and resting a newspaper over his face. For the train’s hour ride, the old man never stops spouting stories.
Of course I don’t let on that I can’t understand a word he says. What does it matter? He needs someone to listen, so I let him speak. Liptovský Mikuláš is called over the intercom, and I stand to go. The man takes one of my hands in his and says something very solemn. I look into his watery dark eyes. My hand is a child’s again, a tiny slipper of a hand. His reminds me of my grandfather’s, dark and peppered with sunspots. For all I know he could be a philosopher, a Slavic Socrates concluding his theory of good and justice. He could be a Buddhist sensei or a madman expounding some theory on corporate mind-control through dermal microchips. I smile a “nice to meet you smile” and grip his monstrous hand in return.
Exhaustion warps time, a heady drunken squint. The brain feels squeezed, leaky, bleeding. I walk through the train station of Liptovský Mikuláš, trying to blink myself to consciousness. My head throb counts off four A.M. over and over. I slam through the doors of the station as the train’s whistle reaches my spine. I hum “King of the Road” but don’t mean it. I’m angry, interrogating myself: Why the hell didn’t you get a boring internship this summer like a normal undergrad? At least you’d be paid instead of wandering aimlessly in eastern Europe, looking for a place to sleep, asking to be mugged. What the fuck are you doing this for? I want a logical end to the surreal madness of this day, a neat outro with fade-out music, roll credits. But there is no conclusion here, and certainly no logic. There is only engagement—one foot after the next. I walk in what looks to be the direction of town. A few condemned houses with black eyes and graffiti tattoos lean on either side of the road, peeling and softly breathing in the wind. An ancient truck sleeps in the driveway. Vines and tall grass grow over it, the soft hand of abandonment, gently pulling it back to the earth. I crouch next to the truck and look under. Nothing but high grass. I wonder if anyone might bother me if I crawled under there to sleep. I look around.
In the road behind me stands a man, fifty yards away, looking my direction. He is a muscular young man with a shaved head, no shirt or shoes. The street is empty. I stand up and walk on. The man walks behind me. I turn down a side street, he follows. I turn again and hear him behind, closer. I reach back to my pack and unbuckle the sheathe on my buck knife. An idea sparks into my head, a strange thought like the cliché last question of the jumper, did I leave the oven on? I can scare this guy. He’s expecting a frightened tourist, a timid kid easy to corner. I look back. The shirtless man is still following me, closing in. Before I can think again, I whip around and shout “HRRAAA!” with thunderous aggression. The man stops, face contorted in bewilderment. We look at each other for a moment. I take a step toward him and unsheathe the buck knife. Six inches of steel flash in the streetlamp’s yellow light. “HRRAAA!” I shout again, and walk toward him faster, gripping the knife with white knuckles. His eyes widen. He pivots, running, sprinting. His footsteps fade and silence envelops the street. I bend over with laughter, tearing up and shaking with adrenaline. I don’t want to laugh but I have to.
I walk to the town center, edgy, delirious with fatigue. The buildings are made mostly of a heavy dark stone, blocky and menacing. A Gothic cathedral stretches skyward, its blackened spires peopled with grotesque gargoyles sticking out their long fat tongues. Further on, colorful blocks of apartments shoulder each other, pastel blue, yellow, and green, neat and vivid as the Copenhagen waterfront. I pass the massive town hall in a grassy quadrangle. The clock over its entrance reads five-thirty. The town is larger than I expected, much more beautiful, and utterly hushed. I wander, dizzy, seeing little, hearing only the creak of my boots. I find a walking path somewhere in the suburbs near a black river and lie nearby under a tree. I shimmy into my sleeping bag and sink to black sleep as the horizon blushes peach.
I wake to the shadows of cyclists passing a whirring strobe. The sun is bright, the sky cloudless. I remain sprawled out, back turned to the eyes of passersby. I feel no shame lying in the open; embarrassment takes energy. But I am low, hungry, and wearied at the thought of not seeing Joe for days or more. Soon I pack and head toward town, stopping in another park to sleep in cool grass under the shade of a statue—a bronze man in an academic gown looking down disapprovingly. Awake again, the sun is high. I walk to the town square, now thick with people. My plan is to sit someplace obvious until Joe happens upon me. Stupid, stupid plan, I think, sitting down at an outdoor coffee shop. I order an espresso and watch pedestrians pass on the busy sidewalk. I order another. The table is decked in a white cloth and elaborately folded napkins. This is probably the nicest café in town, and I look like Tom Hanks from Castaway. When I lift the demitasse, I see a light gray stain where my arm had rested on the white tablecloth. I pretend to be cultured anyway, sipping gingerly with the obligatory pinky extension. Content as the foil to The White Tablecloth, I continue ordering espressos to the apparent displeasure of the maître d’.
I feel the shallow shaky energy of caffeine. A
beautiful little boy toddles by speaking kid-Slovakian to his mother who wears sunglasses so massive she looks like a fly. Young men kick around a soccer ball in a city park nearby, their shouts echo. A little girl and her mother splash in the basin of a public fountain, laughing. Two men in sunglasses walk down the sidewalk, their steps in sync. They look like punk versions of FBI thugs, like Matrix henchmen. They stop and glance around for a moment. One points in my direction, toward the café. They walk closer, in unison. I look around at the surrounding customers, sure I am about to see some mob action or a white-collar arrest. I brace myself for a Dashiell Hammett fight sequence complete with revolvers, karate, and screaming women, but the men stop in front of my table.
“Are you Ben?” one asks in a heavy accent. He removes his sunglasses.
The road is a twilight zone unto itself, a chaotic, serendipitous, lucky, accidental land. Being on the road often has no immediate point, except as a conscious rejection of control. The only immediate sense that can be made of the random joys and sufferings of dirtbag travel is through a remodeling of memory, cutting loose threads, and framing the scattered, loud collage into digestible anecdotes. The “purpose” is made much later, after memories are consolidated, forgotten, measured, weighed, packed, and served over and over at bars and dinner parties. Their meaning is created as memories are added, neglected, and remolded. Often, the road stories that seem to make the most sense are the most manicured, the closest to fiction. There is a surreal insanity to fresh uncondensed accounts of the road, a randomness that defies the logic of imagination. It has been nearly a year since I was in Slovakia, and I have told parts of this story many ways, ending at different places, omitting details, injecting meaning at odd angles. But each time, I say that I was glad to hear my name at that coffee shop in Liptovský Mikuláš. It was as if the impulse to make sense of being lost was speaking directly to me. “Are you Ben?” A call to be found.
Years before hitchhiking in Europe, I wrote a short story about a lonely old man, a farmer without a wife, children, or friends. He sells his farm in Maine to buy a motorcycle and rides across the U.S. On the way, he meets many people and has long conversations with all kinds of folks: kids, construction workers, drug dealers, priests, fishermen, travelers, and prostitutes. At the end of every conversation before saying goodbye, the old man asks each person to guess his name. He gets many responses: “Rigoberto” from a tomato-picker in Florida, “Jochen” from a German professor in New Orleans, “Ken” from a Texan rancher. The old man asks because he has lived alone so long he has forgotten his own name. He wants to pick a new one that suits him. In New Mexico he stays with a family of migrant farmers who know no English. They call him, “el perdido.” Though he does not know what it means, he thinks El Perdido is fine, and goes with Perry for short. Later he finds that his new name means, “the lost one.” Perry is content being lost. He feels more at home on the road than he ever did as a lonely farmer, and he never goes back to his land in Maine. Perry stays on the road for nearly a year, motoring all over the U.S. and Canada. He loves riding through the night and looking at the stars, because even when he goes twice the speed limit, it looks as if he’s standing still. Eventually Perry dies happily in Alaska when he crashes into a moose crossing the road. But his mission is complete, he dies as Perry, The Lost One.
“Are you Ben?” the man asks in a heavy accent. He removes his sunglasses. This will be a good one, I say to myself. This is the ending I wanted.
“Yes,” I say, grinning.
“O.K., we are local police. There’s no trouble. We just met your brother. He’s looking for you.”
Ben Aultman-Moore is a West Virginia native earning a degree in creative writing at West Virginia University. His work has appeared in the literary journals Calliope, Haggard and Halloo, and in the upcoming issue of The Poetry Bus. He spends summers farming and hitchhiking, singing to cows, and reading under his favorite sombrero.
JESSICA NORMANDEAU
Southern Sandstone
A young woman justifies a passion for rock climbing and struggles to find its place in her life.
I. VERTICAL WORLD
I am 115 feet above ground and 5 feet from salvation, but my body shakes so violently that the rock face just inches from my nose is blurred into an earthy shade of peach, and I am rendered momentarily immobile. Nothing is there to catch my fall but a 10-millimeter rope and some precariously placed pieces of gear. My right foot, stemmed out against the adjacent corner, begins to slip from the thumbtack-sized hold it rests upon. I shift my weight left and stabilize, relying on the friction created between the sole of my rubber climbing shoe and the cliff.
Beads of perspiration form in the creases on my forehead and along the vertebrae of my spine, though the air temperature tops off around fifty degrees. My palms also start to sweat, so I remove one from the ledge I hold on to and reach behind my back to dip it in the bag of chalk tied with a black nylon string around my waist. I repeat the same gesture with my other hand, tighten my hold on the rock and reassess the situation, looking to my next move. The anchor is close, and if I am able to follow this crack system just a bit longer, I can reach out to a large flake of rock with my right hand. I’ll need to hold on long enough to extend my left arm and clip my rope into two metal rings permanently bolted in the rock above. If I don’t stick the move, if my arms give out or my feet slip out from beneath me, I am looking at a twenty-foot fall sideways into a rock face.
I am climbing a very famous route named Rock Wars, which runs up the side of a sandstone cliff at The Long Wall in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge. The general predicament of my situation is attributable to my being on lead in a traditional form of climbing, called “trad” for short. What this means is that clipped to my harness is an assortment of multicolored and variously sized pieces of metal gear called nuts and friends. Friends the latter truly are, for when I pull a trigger, the four lobes of each metal piece marvelously swivel in toward one another, decreasing the friend’s size. When the trigger is held and the friend is placed in a rock crack of an appropriate width then released, the lobes of the friend push outward against the rock with a tremendous amount of force, acting as a miniature and temporary point of anchor. A nut is similar, though without moving parts, and can be slotted into a like-sized constriction in a crack. Once a lead climber places a nut or a friend, she clips the rope tied to her harness through a carabineer threaded through its end. Her rope runs through the carabineer as she continues to climb upward, and if she were to fall, she would fall only twice the distance between herself and her last piece of gear.
Trad climbing can be as safe as a laundromat or as dangerous as washing shirts in a shark tank, the trouble being that more than a few poorly placed pieces have popped out of cracks in the years since this form of climbing came to be, and sandstone itself can crumble and break, for yes, it is composed primarily of sand. This is not my only point of concern, for in my immaturity as a climber I did not plan well enough ahead and am out of friends, having climbed up and to the left of my last placement. To fall from here would be bad enough if my last friend holds; if it fails, then my downward plight would be long enough to make a final prayer or shriek a handful of profanities before my rope catches me. The alternative would be a ground fall.
“Dude, you’ve got this.” I look down to the bottom of the cliff where Sel, my climbing partner, is belaying me. His head is resting on the hunch of his shoulders and his blonde dreadlocks are spilling out of a slouchy gray hand-knitted hat.
“Come on, Jess, send it!” he offers encouragingly. I try to respond but only whimper. How I’d really like to reply is by yelling, I don’t want to fall. I don’t want to fall! I don’t want to be here, I want this to be over, I want to get down!
I start to move, my arms tired and pumped so full of blood they are visibly swollen in size. The veins in my forearms are frighteningly raised, and the scabs covering my once nicely manicured fingers are reopened and joined by new fissures in my skin.
I leave drops of blood in the crack, viciously red against the white trail of chalk accumulated through decades by many hundreds of climbers’ hands. I cross one arm over the other, move my feet higher, sink my right hand into the promising jug of a hold and reach with my left to clip into the anchor.
“TAKE!” I scream to Sel, signaling for him to pull in the extra slack of rope.
II. CLIFF BAND DREAMSCAPE
Thirteen hours ago I left school in upstate New York, fourteen of us total, filing down South in four cars packed full of ropes, cook stoves, and duct tape-patched puffy coats. My route is marked by the flux of city light—driving by night through Rochester, Buffalo, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, and finally Lexington. The skyline of each metropolis emerges beyond the highway guideposts, unnamed stories shooting out of this flat western land. Lexington is the last stretch of urbanity before we reach Slade, Kentucky, and it is here that I rise from my back seat slumber that carried me unconsciously through most of Ohio and all of Illinois.
The landscape now rolls itself into hills and valleys, the road winding along the courses of rivers and over bridges where water withers slender. Everything is shrouded in pastel blue fog, as if someone took the artist’s dust and threw it in the air to filter out sunlight before coming to rest upon the spring earth. On the eastern horizon the sun is rising like an overcooked heirloom tomato, pregnant with ideals of its own enormity and the pigment of dominion over southern lands. Soon the fog will burn off and the blue dust will dissipate, revealing grasses greener each day along the miles of fenced-in horse pastures stretching on.
