“Let me just change my shirt or something.”
Luka went out to the garage and pumped his mother’s old bike tires fat with air while I dragged my suitcase into the bathroom and tried on all my shirts, assessing which would look best under black-light strobes. I looked in the mirror, and another rush of self-consciousness ran through me. Maybe it was because of Luka’s ex, her mascara and pointed shoes. Or maybe I was just tired of looking sweaty. I piled my hair on top of my head, securing it with my entire supply of bobby pins in an attempt at a humidity-proof hairdo.
“You drown in there?” Luka called through the door. I swung it open too fast, nearly clipping him in the side of the face.
“Fancy,” he said when I emerged into the kitchen. “Let’s go.”
—
I hadn’t been on a bike in years, and whenever I changed gears the handlebars jerked crooked in my grip. At first Luka laughed when I nearly crashed, but by the time we got to the club I was frustrated and he looked at me with something approaching shame. What was the matter with me? I thought as Luka locked our bikes to a tree. I had spent half my life on a bike, on these streets, and now I could barely steer the thing.
“Let’s get a drink.” Luka grabbed my wrist and pulled me toward the door, bypassing the line.
“What are you doing?”
“Show them your passport.”
I handed my passport to the bouncer, who studied it like it was an archaeological artifact, running his fingers along the indented national seal on the cover and examining the pages to see what other stamps I had procured. Then he gave it back and waved us into the club.
“Tourists have money,” Luka explained.
Inside, the club was tinted purple and filled with cigarette smoke and the pounding rhythm of some remixed hiphop song that had been popular last year in America. Overhead, industrial fans tilled the sweaty air through the room and out the back patio doors.
We pressed through the crowd onto the terrace, where it was calmer and we could actually hear one another. Behind the outside bar, the bartender stood shirtless with his back to the counter, hunched over a blender. He glistened as if he’d been oiled.
“Hey! Tomislav!” Luka called.
“Hey.” Tomislav turned and grabbed Luka in a backslapping man-hug over the bar. He was sporting a giant gold hoop in one ear. “How you been? What can I get ya?” Luka ordered a beer, and Tomislav cracked the cap off against the side of the counter and handed it to him. “And who’s the pretty lady?”
Even in the dim light I could see Luka redden. “It’s actually, um, Ana,” he said, taking a swig of the beer. “Juri?.”
Tomislav stared, then a flash of recognition passed across his face. “Ana? Like from primary school? Are you shitting me?”
We exchanged perfunctory how-are-yous, each of us assuring the other that we were, despite the odds, totally fine.
“What are you drinking?”
“I’ll have the same.”
“I’ll get some more from the back,” he said, disappearing behind a black curtain.
“I heard he was working here,” Luka said. He wagged his head slightly. “It’s fucked, what happened to him.”
“You mean his brother? Getting killed like that?”
“That’s not the worst of it.” After his brother’s death Tomislav’s parents were inconsolable, even forgetting to feed him at times, Luka said. Then, a few years later, after the war was over and things seemed to be returning to normal, Tomislav came home from school to find his father lying faceup in the bathtub. He had stabbed himself three times in the chest and his eyes were still open. The note was wet and illegible, and the only thing investigators could agree upon was that a man must be filled with an exceptional amount of rage to opt for that method of suicide. But more than the mystery, it was the eyes that changed him; in that instant of discovery Tomislav had seen his future in the gaze of the dead.
By his first year of high school, Tomislav’s mother had moved across town to stay with her boyfriend, and he and his sister were left to live alone with the decidedly angry ghost of their father, their rent paid by his pension. It was fine, he’d insist, whenever Luka or any of the other guys at school asked, good even, because he could have girls over whenever he wanted, and he had become quite the chef if he did say so himself.
“But he’s not okay?” I said.
“Of course he’s not. He was one of the smartest in our class and now he’s a shirtless pirate bartender.”
Tomislav reappeared with a case of beer and was loading the bottles into a fridge beneath the bar top.