It wasn’t long before I regretted giving the girl my map. I had the instructions for how to get to my hotel, but I couldn’t seem to find the street. I took another wrong turn onto a busy avenue. Traffic was heavier now; young people on scooters raced their engines at traffic lights—or at me—as I hurried across.
I thought I’d better head back toward the spot where the shuttle bus had dropped me off, to see if I couldn’t start all over. But I’d gotten turned around, and on top of that the street names kept changing, even when I was sure I’d been going straight in one direction. My arms ached with the weight of the notebooks and papers I’d packed and suddenly I felt tired and very far from home. I turned down another street, then another; I didn’t have the heart to stop and take stock of where I was, much less try to find an English speaker and ask for directions.
I was on my way to being truly lost when I remembered an old cowboy trick from my childhood. It was probably something I read in a Louis L’Amour novel: Look back as you ride and memorize your landmarks from the return direction. Somehow the thought of those dimestore Westerns made me feel better. The jog in the sidewalk was a bend in a riverbed—I remembered that—and the shops and restaurants that all looked the same were just another kind of sagebrush wilderness.
I retraced my steps until I found my first wrong turn down the walled-off street, then continued on through narrow canyons of expensive-looking shops, enjoying the thought of my lost cowboy tethering his mount and ducking inside one of them to buy a packet of macaroons. Soon the canyons opened into a construction site around an old church tower. The shape of the tower under its layers of scaffolding was familiar; it might have been the core of an extinct volcano rising from the plains.
Sure enough, in a block or two I was back to where I’d started on the boulevard de Sébastopol. Another airport shuttle bus was coming down the street. I even recognized a stained spot on the sidewalk near where I’d knelt to open up my suitcase. Again I found myself wishing that my son was there with me. He could have groaned in forbearance at an English teacher’s sort of joke: so many lost tourists in Paris, walking in circles, certain they’ve seen the place before. No wonder we borrow from the French when we say déjà vu.
{NEIL}
London, May
By the time Neil bought a bus ticket to Swindon the Christmas presents he was supposed to be delivering were already five months late. On the morning he was supposed to go he woke up on the couch. He’d been dreaming that he was eating the baling twine that used to sit in a pile in front of Nan and Pop’s barn. If dreams meant anything, this one foretold a hangover. So did the empty glasses and cartons of discount wine that covered the kitchen table and part of the floor. Someone, possibly Neil, had started cleaning up the night before and there were bottles filling the sink. Neil took out a few to get to the faucet; he could feel the dream-fibers still stuck to his tongue. He turned on the water and drank some out of his hands.
From the kitchen he could hear Veejay, his roommate, turning in his sleep and mumbling. Under the mumble was a beeping sound, because Neil hadn’t turned off his alarm. He stepped carefully between the glasses to get to their room. It smelled like feet. Veejay, who had been all over a girl from the film school the night before, was now, mercifully, sleeping alone, with only Neil to see the way his eyes didn’t close completely, leaving little white crescents in the gap between his eyelids. It was spooky, and if Neil weren’t feeling so like the undead himself, he might have gotten out his camera. For some reason Veejay denied that he slept with his eyes open, like he denied that he got a huge Indian accent when he was on the phone with his parents. Neil switched off the alarm.
Back in the kitchen he started putting the bottles in plastic bags, as quietly as possible. Nothing would wake Veejay up, and Alex’s door, like always, was closed, but the clink of the glass gave Neil a bruised feeling behind his eyes. No more parties at their flat, he thought, not for the first time. No more wine and cheese parties with the girls next door that started out with the girls bringing over bottles of something bubbly and ended up with Neil and Veejay running to Tesco for cartons of wine and everyone sitting around watching Arsenal play on TV. Neil was a lousy drinker. Starting now there would be no more pretending otherwise. He didn’t even like football, and he was tired of trying to remember to call it that in front of the girls, who thought Americans were boorish if they didn’t take a frenzied interest in a sport where the score was almost always tied at zero.
It was on mornings like this that he envied Alex, who never went out—not even when going out meant joining the party in the kitchen. Alex, their vampire roommate without any friends. Who knew what kind of dreams Alex had, but right then Neil would have given anything to be asleep with a clear head on the black sheets that Alex washed twice a week, a habit that caused their shitty British washing machine to inch its way out from under the counter and across the kitchen floor during the spin cycle. Sometimes he and Veejay placed bets on where the washer would end up, and there were pencil marks on the floor, recording its various journeys.
Neil wondered, dully, why he was awake, but it wasn’t until he was out on the street, wincing with each crash of broken glass as he pushed the bottles one by one through the rubber flaps of the big recycling container by the park, that he remembered the bus ticket. Which explained why he’d set his alarm for today, which was a Sunday, and was normally reserved for rehydrating and finishing the reading he should have done on Saturday. Swindon. Fuck, he thought. He’d have to call what’s-her-name again and go next week. This was the third time he’d canceled on her, and it was starting to get embarrassing, although it wasn’t like what’s-her-name ever volunteered to come to London. And why should she? The whole thing was ridiculous.
The exchange of presents must have been what’s-her-name’s mother’s idea. Neil’s father barely even remembered Christmas, he would never think of doing something like this. If he had wanted to send a present, he would have put it in the mail like a normal person. It wasn’t like her country didn’t have a postal service. No, this was some sinister plan by what’s-her-name’s mother. Probably the daughter was supposed to try to seduce Neil to get a green card. It was going to be embarrassing.