The Map That Leads to You

by J. P. Monninger

  We were couples. That was the new understanding. It was so natural and unassuming that I had to shake myself sometimes to understand fully what had changed. Constance and Raef. Jack and Heather. Even in the darkness, with the lights from houses and stations and lonely farms flickering past our windows for a moment, I felt aware of Jack. I knew his body now, knew it better at any rate, and I knew the weight of his arm on my shoulders, the heaviness of his hand as it wrapped around mine. It’s a cliché to say our edges blurred, that we became merged in some way, but it was true nonetheless. Everything felt accelerated as a result of our traveling together; we could not hide things or be slow to reveal our likes and dislikes. We traveled out of our backpacks, and the world was reduced to tiny instances of comfort and joy, of great, brilliant sights and sounds and smells. I saw with Jack’s eyes, and he saw with mine.

  Near midnight Jack and I slipped into the dining car and ordered vodka from an ancient porter standing behind the bar. He was a short man with enormous muttonchops outlining his jaw. The muttonchops appeared translucent, a blurry aurora, as if someone had tried to get his face into focus but then abandoned the project. Or as if a dandelion puff had decided to smile. He had a large mole on the center of his forehead, and his hands, when they moved over the bottles and cups, seemed to crawl rather than lift and drop. I put him at about seventy years old. His eyes had lines of yellow that reminded me of small strands of twine.

  He poured two streams of vodka into our glasses. We smiled and drank them down. The porter shook his head.

  “Americans?” he asked in solid English.

  We said we were.

  “My uncle died in Chicago,” the porter said. “Long time ago.”

  “Sorry,” Jack said. I nodded.

  “I wanted to visit him, but never had. Is pretty, Chicago?”

  “It can be,” Jack said. “I haven’t spent much time there. Have you, Heather?”

  “No, sorry.”

  “Lake Michigan,” the porter said and smiled. “My uncle, he always talked about Lake Michigan.”

  “It’s a big lake,” Jack agreed. “A great lake.”

  It was a pun. I liked Jack’s tenderness with the man. I liked his willingness to listen and to talk.

  The porter, meanwhile, held up his finger and bent under the bar. He brought up a bottle of vodka and showed us the label. It was Żubrówka vodka, a famous brand that we had just seen mentioned in the Lonely Planet guide. One of the travel tips was to consume Żubrówka vodka whenever possible. Now seemed as good a time as any.

  The porter poured out second glasses for us. He turned our glasses around one full rotation to bring us luck and to say good-bye to misfortune.

  “Will you join us?” Jack asked. “We’d be honored to treat you to a round.”

  The porter shook his finger at us.

  “You cannot pay for this. Not young people like you. This is a gift. They say it is made of angel tears. You understand?”

  “I do,” I answered.

  “Good drinks are always sad. They bring us life, but they also remind us of dead. You agree?”

  I nodded. So did Jack. The porter made a motion to tell us to drink. We did. The first glass of vodka had burned on its way down. These few ounces of Żubrówka tasted like mountain water. I wasn’t close to being a connoisseur of vodka, or of any spirits, really, but I discerned the difference. The porter put the bottle back down on the shelf.

  “That was lovely,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Smooth,” he said, standing straight again.

  “Yes, very.”

  “Once America was very good,” he said, his hands resting on the cups in front of him. “Now, too many bombs. Bombs everywhere, with drones, ships, just bombs. America never gets tired of bombs.”

  “I can see how it seems that way,” Jack said. “We have funny ideas sometimes in our country.”

  “Not so funny for the people under the bombs.”

  “No,” Jack agreed. “No so funny for them.”

  We paid. We left the porter a generous tip. When we returned, we found Raef and Constance awake. They had their feet on our seats and pulled them down when we squeezed back in place. Constance had the Lonely Planet guide on her lap, doubtless looking for saints to visit. She always excelled at planning activities.

  “Did you guys drink without us?” Raef asked. “I smell vodka.”

  “The good stuff,” I said. “The one that starts with a Z.”

  “Żubrówka,” Raef said with pleasure. “That’s like finding an old friend is still alive. I had some good nights on Żubrówka. It’s considered medicinal, you know.”

  “It’s made of angel tears,” I said.

  “Funny, I heard duck tears,” Raef said. “Tears when the wind blows water out of a duck’s eyes—only in winter.”

  “I need to taste this vodka,” Constance said, not looking up. “These stories are too rich.”

  Then Jack said he saw the northern lights.

  “Balls,” Raef said, turning to look out the window where Jack pointed. “We’re at about fifty-five degrees. We’d have to get up to sixty at least to see them.”

  “How do you know what latitude we’re traveling?” Constance asked, looking up with amazement.

  “It’s a nervous tic of mine,” Raef said. “Does it freak you out? I always know the coordinates of where I am. I know it’s weird.”

  “Not really. It kind of turns me on.”

  It was a sweet interchange between Raef and Constance. Jack, meanwhile, lifted from his seat and tried to get a better angle on the northern lights. He kept squinting and putting his face closer to the window. Over his shoulder I could make out something, but it might have been just about any light source. Although I had never seen the northern lights, I assumed you couldn’t easily mistake them.

  “It’s a gas station!” Raef said finally, his eyes on the same line as Jack’s. “It’s just neon lights!”

  Jack turned around sheepishly.

  “He’s right,” he said. “Isn’t that a life lesson about something or other?”

  “Think gas station lights before northern lights,” I said. “Probably a good rule to follow.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Constance said, her voice quiet and solemn, her eyes still down at her book. “I admire a man who wants to see the northern lights so much that he sees them in a gas station sign. That’s a man who understands dreaming.”

  “Thank you, Constance,” Jack said with mock indignation as he sat beside me again. “Glad someone here understands.”

  “If you hear hoofbeats, assume horses, not zebras,” Raef said. “Isn’t that the phrase?”

  “If you hear hoofbeats, assume unicorns,” Constance said, bringing her eyes up to look at each of us. “That’s the way to live.”

  The train passed a little closer to the offending gas station. It went by in a blur. The lights were green, and they were muted in the late-night mist, but they were not the northern lights.

  I fell asleep a little later. Raef and Jack talked a long time about the nature of reality—how do we know a thing, how do we trust our senses, what can we take for truth? It had to do with Jack’s vision of the northern lights, I supposed, and I tried to follow the line of their reasoning for a while. Little by little, sleep took me over, and when I woke, the train had begun to slow down for Kraków. It was early morning, not quite light, and the sound of the train wheels on the harsh metal rails sounded like all the waking in the world.

  * * *

  “I’m kidnapping you,” Jack said the next afternoon. “I’m taking you to a place you would never want to go but that you need to visit. We both need to visit it.”

  “That’s not a way to make someone want to do something, Jack.”

  “Trust me on this,” Jack said. “Our lives are about to change.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. We stood at an outdoor lunch wagon eating cheese sausages and fried potatoes from a cupped bouquet of newspaper th
at had gone wet with oil. Jack loved to eat on the street, and he loved the feeling of Kraków. Raef had been correct again: Kraków possessed incredible old-world charm. We had already hiked to the Wawel, the lovely castle anchoring Kraków, and we had plans to travel north to the famous brick castle, Malbork, outside of Gdańsk. Kraków seemed less corrupted by tourists than Paris or Amsterdam, though it was still plenty busy.

  “We need vodka with our meal,” Jack said, clearly enjoying himself. He dipped his sausage into the sharp brown mustard served as a dot beside the sandwich. “We need to toast the ineffable.”

  “You can’t toast the ineffable. The ineffable is impossible to know.”

  “Oh, yes, you can, Ms. Amherst. The ineffable is the only thing worth toasting. Every toast in the world is about the ineffable even if the people toasting don’t know it.”

  “You’re never lost for opinions, are you, Jack Quiller-Couch?”

  “I am a font of ineffable opinions.”

  “And our lives are going to change today?”

  “Without question.”

  “Ineffably?”

  He nodded.

  Then we had one of those love fogs.

  Our eyes locked. It wasn’t on a mountaintop, or beside a blue ocean, or in a flowered meadow. It was in the center of Kraków. I couldn’t speak for him, but I wasn’t feeling particularly in love, or gushy, or anything else. But then he turned to me and smiled, and I smiled back. We didn’t say anything. The world kept going on around us, I was aware of that, but then the world no longer mattered. What mattered was Jack’s gaze and his shy, soft smile that invited me in, invited me to share the pleasure of being here, in a foreign city, being in love, or the beginning of love, and knowing that we had the world by the goddamn tail if we wanted it, wanted each other, stayed with each other. The humor of the look slowly faded, and what remained deepened in the most profound way, and flitting around my head was a little mosquito of doubt that said, No, no, things don’t happen this way. It’s not this easy, it doesn’t happen so quickly, you don’t love him, you just like him, and you’re going to go back to New York and that’s going to be that, and look, pull your eyes off him, because his eyes are a rabbit hole, and if you keep looking you are going to fall and fall and fall.

  But neither one of us looked away.

  To his credit, he didn’t try to kiss me, or try anything at all to heighten what couldn’t be heightened. We stood and swam into each other’s eyes, and I had maybe shared a baby cousin of this look with other men, but this was something different, something terrifying and wonderful, and if I didn’t live a moment longer at least I would have known what it meant to hold someone’s look with your own and to know, without question, that whatever we call a soul had answered your soul, and that going forward this look, this instant, would be carried between us like rare treasure, would be carried with the knowledge that neither of us ever had to be alone again, not entirely, not completely, not ever.

  “Come on,” he said when we broke off the look. “Finish and we’ll go.”

  And we did.

  25

  Jack couldn’t hide our destination for long. After a thirty-minute train ride from Kraków, we stood in front of the entrance to a salt mine. Of all the things I had thought to visit while in Europe, a salt mine might have been at the bottom of the list.

  “A salt mine?” I asked. “You’re taking me to a salt mine?”

  “A salt mine,” he confirmed.

  “In Europe, in one of the most beautiful cities we’ve ever seen, we are abandoning that particular form of beauty for a—”

  “Salt mine,” Jack repeated. “But not just any salt mine. The Wieliczka Salt Mine. It’s a must-see.”

  “Who must see it?”

  “Should that be whom?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I think it should be. Whom must see it? No, maybe not.”

  “I’m not persuaded,” I said. “Why a salt mine?”

  “You mean, why the Wieliczka Salt Mine, don’t you?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Because the mine no longer produces salt. It’s now a national treasure of sorts.”

  “A salt mine treasure?”

  “The chambers have been made over into chapels with chandeliers. It’s supposed to be quite beautiful.”

  “As far as salt mines go.”

  “Yes, as far as salt mines go.”

  “You’re a strange man, Jack.”

  “I’ve eaten a lot of salt in my life. It’s time to see where it comes from.”

  “It’s like salt’s origin story, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Something like that.”

  We stood in front of the entrance booth. Jack held my hand. I looked at him several times, trying to gauge his interest. I knew him well enough to guess that he was, in fact, intrigued by the salt mine. He liked the unusual, the off the beaten trail. But a salt mine seemed like a new standard for him.

  “What else is at the salt mine? And don’t say—”

  “More salt,” he beat me to it.

  “Besides salt. I’m assuming we’ll see more than salt.”

  “You don’t think it’s enough to see a world constructed inside a salt mine? You’re very hard to please, Heather.”

  “So this is the life-changing thing? We’ll never look at salt the same way, will we? Is that what you’re saying?”

  He nodded. He was having a good time, I could tell. He liked everything about this: the train ride, the potential absurdity of a tourist destination formed inside a salt mine, the inevitable quirkiness of the people who had one day decided that of all things a salt mine might be, it served it best to make it into a national treasure. He bent down and kissed me. He closed me inside his arms.

  “People who visit salt mines together are bonded for life. Did you know that?”

  “I didn’t know that,” I whispered into his shirt. “Are you certain of that?”

  “Salt is the foundation of life. Salt and vodka, of course. If we go in the salt mine together, it is a declaration of eternal devotion.”

  “The world isn’t make-believe, Jack. I hope you know that. I hope you remember that it isn’t for me.”

  “Who says it isn’t?”

  “No one says it. It’s just the way it is.”

  “Right now, you’re in my arms in Poland. On the way to a fantastic salt mine experience. If someone had told you that was your future three months ago, you would have thought it was make-believe.”

  I nodded. It was true.

  We broke apart and paid our entrance fee and went inside.

  I realized, quickly, that nothing in the buildup had prepared me for what was inside. Saying salt mines conjured up images of piles of white, snowy mineral compounds, a noble attempt by someone to turn a dead industry into something, anything, that might bring in a visitor’s euro. But what awaited us, what we saw nearly at once, was something entirely different. It was designated a World Heritage Site, for starters, and I saw Jack’s face turn to a slight smirk as it began to dawn on me what we had come to see. The brochure at the admissions desk informed us that salt mining had been going on at the site since the thirteenth century and that it had only closed for good in 2007. Meanwhile, the miners had begun carving four chapels from the rock salt, decorating them with statues of the saints, and boiling down salt to reconstitute it into crystals for the remarkable chandeliers that hung above. It was such an unusual combination of the everyday—what could be more common than salt?—and the sublime that I found myself moved beyond any expectation.

  “Oh, Jack,” I whispered. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Copernicus and Goethe visited these mines, and Alexander von Humboldt and Chopin—and even Bill Clinton.”

  “I had no idea. Constance needs to see this.”

  “I wanted to see it with you.”

  “How did you know?”

  But it didn’t matter how he knew it. On the way down the wooden stairs to the 2
10-foot level, he told me the story of the Hungarian princess Kinga who came to Kraków and asked the miners to dig down until they hit rock. She had been forced to leave her native land and in her last moment had thrown her engagement ring into a salt mine in Máramaros. When the miners struck stone deep in the Polish earth, they also found salt. They carried a lump of salt to Princess Kinga and cracked it open. They shouted with delight when they found her ring inside the lump of salt, and ever afterward, Princess Kinga was the patron saint of salt miners.

  “What?” I laughed when he finished. “That doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  “Of course it does.”

  “She throws away her ring in Hungary and the miners find it in Poland?”

  “You have no romance in your heart, Heather. That’s becoming clear the longer I hang out with you.”

  “I need a little more story continuity, Jack.”

  He turned around when we reached the bottom of the wooden staircase. Then he reached up and grabbed me by the hips and slowly, slowly lowered me into him. He could hold my entire weight above him as long as he liked. It was erotic and beautiful and quietly lovely all at the same time. His lips waited for mine, and when we kissed we stayed that way for a long time.

  What was the use? I gave myself up to him.

  I couldn’t resist him. I couldn’t imagine our lips ever coming apart. I felt my body drip into his and his chest and arms, strong and steady and firm, slowly molded me against him, fit me to him as a man might fit a life jacket against his chest. Our kiss went deeper. It went on until I thought that I might pass out in his arms. I felt as if I had entered on a pair of train tracks that traveled into his body and mind and I could not escape, could not veer for an instant, that wherever Jack went so would I.