*
I woke at 1:37 in the morning, thirsty and a tiny bit drunk still from the two martinis I had consumed the night before. My phone informed me it was 1:37, then 1:38, then 1:39. I checked for messages from Jack. Nothing. I checked for texts. Nothing. Nancy in HR at Bank of America had sent me an emergency contact form. I didn’t read it carefully. I slid it into a folder marked Bank of America. I didn’t examine the folder when the new file took its place among the other unanswered requests. I blamed Jack for losing my focus. I blamed Jack for making me ignore the requests and information coming from Bank of America. Jack the jackass.
Jack was not my true. He was just another boy.
I clicked the phone to sleep. I listened to the breathing around me. Constance’s steady exhalations soothed me. Two other girls, both from Ireland, had come in late at night and fallen asleep with drunken murmurs.
I thought of the word murmur. I thought of it sounding like a word that sounds like itself. That did not exactly make sense, but it seemed clever at 1:41 in the morning. Sludge was another word that sounded like itself. Sludge and murmur. Sludge had to be sludge. Murmur expressed its essence perfectly.
I leaned out of my bunk and dug through my backpack until I found my water bottle. I unscrewed the top and drank a long time. I kept the water bottle next to me and considered going to the restroom to pee. But I didn’t want to leave my bunk. I didn’t want to wake up completely. My earlier buzz spun like a saw at the foot of my bed, and I slowly moved toward it on a conveyor belt.
I made a mental note to block all thoughts of Jack. Sealed tight. It was not difficult, and I felt proud of my new resolve. I had other fish to fry. Many other fish. I had Bank of America in my skillet and a new apartment and New York City and Japanese contacts and travel and Mr. Periwinkle, the world’s oldest cat, and Amy and Constance and a dozen other friends who would be starting their careers. Looked at with realistic perspective, Jack was small potatoes. He just was. He was not going in the skillet. He was banned from the skillet.
Besides, I realized, we were not well matched. He was a freer spirit, impulsive and romantic, while I was steadier. He was correct about that. I was more career oriented, I told myself, more tortoise to his hare, more ant to his grasshopper. It didn’t make either of us right or wrong, or superior or inferior, but merely different. That was a tidy way to look at it, and I felt pleased finally at getting a handle on it, a comfortable way to regard it.
“There,” I whispered aloud, my voice surprisingly loud in the tiny bunkroom.
No room in the skillet. Too much in the skillet already.
21
The next morning, I spent some time in the bathroom holding my breath.
It’s something I had always done. When I was a little girl, I went to the pool with my mother all summer long, and my favorite thing to do—the thing that brought me peace and serenity and a sense of calm—was to sink below the clear blue water and look up. By holding my breath, I could silence the world. I could hear the blood moving around in my body. My heartbeat became the sound of something big and important, and the world, the hustle and nuttiness of the everyday, faded backward like a concerned mother, coffee in hand, staring down in the water to check on her child. There I lingered, serene, breathing in check, the crystal ridges of water casting shadows down to the black lines of the deep end. It was punctuation. It stopped the world. So in the hostel bathroom, I closed my eyes and tucked in a deep breath, then opened my eyes to see the world drifting upward and away.
It worked. It always worked.
I stayed under. I looked up and saw the gnarly ceiling tiles above the sinks, heard the groan of a pipe somewhere below me, but those things did not concern me. I was a water creature, a manatee, even an oyster, and I watched the world slosh above me and recede, and it was okay, everything was okay. The sun pushed down into the water, and I felt the pull to go deeper, and I let my breath ease out in a long, tight whoosh as one of the Irish girls suddenly appeared, her hair wild, her pajamas turned almost sideways on her body.
“Meditating? That’s ballsy,” she said, clanging her way through the door. “All I can manage most mornings is a good, long pee, but I’ll be out of here in a second, don’t you mind me.”
I nodded and held my breath again. A turtle, I thought. That’s what I was.
*
For twenty-seven euros, I bought a day pass to a gym a woman at the hostel recommended. It was the last thing in the world I wanted to do, but I felt poisoned inside by the martinis, and I knew I needed to work out. To sweat. To put my mind elsewhere, preferably deep inside a tedious, repetitive hour of muscle expansion and contraction. Next to holding my breath and pretending to be underwater, exercise almost always helped.
Besides, Constance had calls to make. She had decided to take a miraculous morning off from perusing more art and history and saints.
As I navigated the exchange at the front desk and listened to the explanation of what machines I could use, I made a small cultural note: gyms looked the same, more or less, the world over. This gym, called the Worker, if I did my translation properly, had wide factory windows and two dozen exercise bikes lined up to look out on the passing street. Bikes were bikes, I realized, German or otherwise. I climbed on the second from the right, set my levels to an easy pedal (gradually gaining pretend altitude up, up, and away), and began the drudgery of motion.
I drank water. I pedaled. I pulled up some Checkpoint Charlie information on my phone and read that. I shot Amy a text and told her I missed her. I told her I missed her a lot. I wrote my mom and asked her to give Mr. Periwinkle a kiss and a brush out. I asked her to please play string mouse with him. I read more about Checkpoint Charlie, including a short essay on what it was like to go through all the paperwork and police interrogation to travel from East to West Berlin.
In a while, I had a good sweat going. My ponytail swept the back of my shoulders. A blond woman, German, smiled at me as she climbed on the bike beside me. I smiled back. She was about my age. I checked to see if she wanted to out-bike me, show off her stamina, but she didn’t seem that type. She seemed relaxed and willing to let the time pass peacefully. She also had a ponytail. Hers rode higher on the back of her head than mine did.
At one kilometer, I smelled alcohol in my sweat. I rubbed a white towel across my neck and down my arms and kept going.
At two kilometers, I had to stand on the pedals to get up a pretend hill. My heart began pumping, and I wondered, for an instant, if my heart had decided to explode. But I kept going, and the virtual bike rider on the handlebar screen wobbled a little but kept up a steady pace.