Neil wrote it down, Bikauskait?. He didn’t know how to pronounce it and Veejay said it sounded like a rash you’d get on, like, the fifteenth day of the Tour de France, but Neil found a spot of white marble in his brain and carved it in. Magdalena Bikauskait?.
Then he didn’t feel like telling Veejay about the phone booth or how it was raining and he had no idea where he was, or about the egg and pickle pizzas. When Veejay asked him how he was liking Paris, he said it was pretty great. And when Veejay asked him how many hot French girls he could see at just that moment, Neil took a second to look at the empty street where two old women in babushkas were waiting out the rain under the awning of what was, of course, a pizza restaurant, and said four or five, but one had armpit hair.
“Man,” Veejay said. “You really are in France.”
There weren’t any Bikauskait?s listed in the phone book. There were a few people named Bikauskas, and then it went to Bikauskien?. Neil wondered if he’d written the name down wrong when his father first called to ask him to deliver the Christmas presents. He tried to remember his father’s friend’s first name. Had it started with a D? He wasn’t even sure he’d ever heard it. There was a Dijana Bikauskien?, but that didn’t sound right. And there was a Nellija Bikauskien?, but that wasn’t it either.
He called Dijana first. No answer. Then he called Nellija. Nothing. Then, not knowing what else to do, he flipped through the phone book, waiting for the rain to stop.
The Vilnius phone book was attached to the pay phone by a little wire. Someone had torn out everything after R, but even in the space from A to Q Neil noticed a number of new letters: the E with a dot over it, a C with an upside-down circonflexe. It reminded him of a joke he and his dad had had when he was a little kid.
It was basically a nonsense world that they’d invented—either his mother never knew about it or she was never invited in. It started when Neil was learning the alphabet, so he must have been kindergarten age or even younger. At school they were taught to sing Ay, Bee, Cee, Dee, Ee, Ef, Gee, Aych, Eye, Jay, Kay, Ellameno, Pee . . . And like all parents probably did with their kids, especially parents who were also English teachers, Neil and his father would play the alphabet game. Starts with Cee, his father would say as they stood in the checkout line at the grocery store. Candy, Neil would say. Cash register, his father would say. Candy bar, Neil would say. Coupons, his father would say. Kellogg’s, Neil would say. Not exactly, his father would say. Corn on the cob, Neil would say. Cole slaw. Cans. Corned beef hash. Crocodiles. And on and on. Starts with Ess. Soup. String beans. Spider-Man. Soda pop.
Starts with Ellameno, Neil said once when it was his turn to choose a letter, and his dad thought that was so funny that they started making up a whole world populated with made-up fantastical things: the ellamenopede who liked to eat ellamenoghetti twirled around forks held in each of its ellamillion hands. There was the ellamenopotomus who lived under Neil’s bed and had to be lulled to sleep, as he remembered, by bedtime songs rewritten. There was an ellamen-old lady who swallowed a fly had been one of them. I don’t ellamen-know why she swallowed that fly. Neil’s father had liked Ellamenoland so much that every year as part of the vocab unit he gave his language arts students extra credit if they could make up and define a word that started with ellameno—something Neil had to live down, painfully, when he got to middle school.
That got him thinking about the other things he and his father had done together before his parents split up. When Neil begged for a mail-order town for his train set and his mother said absolutely not, it was too expensive, he and his father set out to build one out of matchsticks. Together they made cabins, then manor houses, railroad stations, castles, pagodas out of matchsticks, even a supertanker that came apart in the bathtub when the glue dissolved. His father sliced the heads off the matches with a razor blade so that the stick was all that was left and Neil dipped them long-ways into a pool of wood glue and laid them one on top of the other for rafters and walls. Neil’s mother would go around sweeping up the little rolling match heads they forgot to throw away. She said they were a fire hazard. Neil’s fingers were clumsy and he spread the glue too thick or made the walls all crooked, but his father’s matchstick houses were perfect, tiny chinks cut for windows, a red Twist-Em for a flag waving from the ramparts of a matchstick fortress.
After his parents got divorced Neil would spend weekends at his father’s house, and sometimes they would work silently, building wooden cities. Neil’s father would be absorbed in the project while Neil cracked stick after stick in mute frustration, trying to make the rounded sides of a space station. Later they switched to sugar cubes, which had the same problem, but which allowed Neil’s father ever more elaborate creations, variegated palaces tinged with Easter egg dye, castles with turrets and double-thick walls.
Then Neil went to middle school and he and his father stopped building things. Neil had speech and debate practice on the weekends, and his father started spending most of his time doing research. When Neil did stay with his father he played Tetris while his dad looked through old books, and during long summer afternoons wasps would eat the sugar cube castles his father had never bothered to throw away.