White Scraps Like Beacons
Even as we boarded the plane that night, humid summer air condensed in the seams of the aircraft’s wings, collected, and dripped onto the tarmac: a scorched field of parallel lines afloat on the surrounding marshland. Yes, there are clouds in my memory of that disappearing sky, though I remember holding his hand and leaning into his shoulder as the plane accelerated down the runway, tires spinning at last across the level earth, lurching into that curved space between longitudes—where bodies at first do not sleep but turn and rock and slouch across the aisle, heads bent together or apart—and of all the voices droning on across the ocean his grew the most low and cruel. Yes, there are clouds in my memory of that, too: a blanket, a swirling indigo scarf, somewhere a typhoon, though if someone had leaned over the seatback and whispered the question like an aunt in my ear I’d have admitted to nothing but being an odd pair.
In the photograph, I stand near the baggage claim, just inside a pair of automatic doors at Brussels National Airport. I’m wearing a blue flannel shirt (not my own), cargo pants, hiking boots. I carry no money but hoist an Army Ranger backpack over my shoulder, which contains at least the following items: a sleeping bag, a sky blue towel, a rolled-up pillow, two oversized T-shirts (one gray, one beige), three tank tops, two skirts, one pair of jeans, one pair of black foam platform flip-flops, one tube of toothpaste, one toothbrush, one comb, two sticks of deodorant, three rubber bands, two packs of birth control pills. I hold a purse in front of my body like an egg; it contains a pair of sunglasses, a notepad, three black gel pens, and several well-worn books I’d been meaning to read for years.
If memory were composed only of our ability to remember the past, we might never evolve as individuals. But memory and remembering are also the processes by which we interpret the events of our lives. When I remember, for example, reading Absalom! Absalom! on the train between Brussels and Bruges, my distrust of Quentin Compson, the familiarity of his words in my mouth, depended, in large part, on where I’d grown up and on my knowledge of the man sitting next to me on the train. This reading produced memories I now draw to the surface—the bitterness of the morning’s coffee, the smell lingering in the cabin long after the cup was empty, the book’s oily pages, the compact font—and this remembering produces new interpretations of the original experience.
Interacting with the present is no different. My perceptions of the present, which I interpret in unique and individual ways, are created and made meaningful as memories by the context of my experience. Memory, like reading, is thus an inherently creative act: the characters, their voices and images, are supplied by the external world, but it is the individual imagination that holds them together in the mind, that creates them, keeps creating them, gives them lasting form. We depend on these narratives to understand our lives. It never strikes us odd that they are always changing.
I think that no one individual can look at truth. It blinds you. You look at it and you see one phase of it. Someone else looks at it and sees a slightly awry phase of it. But taken all together, the truth is in what they saw though nobody saw the truth intact. So these are true as far as Miss Rosa and as Quentin saw it. Quentin’s father saw what he believed was truth, that was all he saw. But the old man was himself a little too big for people no greater in stature than Quentin and Miss Rosa and Mr. Compson to see all at once. It would have taken perhaps a wiser or more tolerant or more sensitive or more thoughtful person to see him as he was. It was, as you say, thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird. But the truth, I would like to think, comes out, that when the reader has read all these thirteen different ways of looking at the blackbird, the reader has his own fourteenth image of that blackbird, which I would like to think is the truth.
Odd, too, how cool the hour we shuffled from the plane into the fog-filled foreign city, too early for the black knot of streetcars and taxicabs, no one in their native streets at all except four women in hairnets outside the boulangerie, cigarettes leaning out the windows of their open mouths, curtained by the sweet bread-tobacco scent, gossip in an unwelcoming tongue. And odd how our pair unwove itself through the stone-gray monuments toward separate beds in a rented room: too tired, I told him over my shoulder, for that now. It didn’t matter. My eyes didn’t close that night but shuddered—a surprise concert of fireworks washing the Grote Markt walls in audible light: too loud, too bright for sleeping. The shadows of anonymous bodies danced across our wall like marionettes, each one dangled over the great crack branching from floor to ceiling, and surely beyond: the bond between earth and edifice, brick and mortar, history and memory loosening, sliding, suddenly giving way. And like that: it was broken.
I’d like to think I was reading before we finally climbed from our respective beds, re-dressed ourselves, and wandered into the night. I still have the photograph: a blond girl of twenty nurses a beer from a paper bag, her hand on the knee of a brass statue—a goddess, maybe, draped in robes—lying on her side against a wall near the square. She isn’t me. (It’s impossible.) The discomfort I now feel looking into that blond girl’s face is only partially because of the events that followed, only partially the corrupting influence of time. It’s also because the girl looks happy. She’s smiling. She knows people, has been to places I’ve forgotten. She believes she is in love. After the concert, we wandered silent through the city, peering into courtyards, rattling the locked gates of cemeteries, returning to the hostel an hour before dawn.
But the scrubbed-clean center of the city gave way to morning, to railside tenements: a fortress of small variations: brown, rust-brown, gray-brown, blue unshining windows shuttered against the monolith of mist-gray sky, eroded at the base by clusters of shirts and sheets hanging dankly on clotheslines: white scraps like beacons. People on the train turned to look. Yes, I looked, but also a commuter in a wool-blend suit, two students snapping photographs, a young mother whose right-hand fingers retucked a tuft of down into her infant’s navy-striped cap. Yes, I imagined living her life. It was easy to make it perfect. My husband: young and smiling and kind. Our well-lit flat perched over a musty bookstore, where a single table teetered on the sidewalk, the dun-gray sky reflected in the bookstore’s plate-glass window. I carried a matchbook in the pocket of my denim blazer at all times. Only one chair. Perfect.
There is a difference between the kind of memory that floods you accidentally—as when you pack the last of your belongings into a laundry basket, each item resonating for a moment in your hand—and the kind of memory you search for: under rocks, in the back of drawers, in the margins of a book. These are different kinds of remembering, and their difference makes clear that memory is not just knowledge recalled, nor the locations where that knowledge is stored in the larger system of the mind, nor the sum total of the system itself; memory also includes each process and strategy by which we actually dredge up an impression of the past to the surface of our perception: each trigger, each artifact, each lie. For example, while browsing the Groeningemuseum website several months ago, I recognized the familiar image of the Cambyses diptych (Gerard David, 1498/99). A single moment came flooding back: Ron had moved on to another room, or muttered and cursed not-so-quietly in the corner as he changed the film in his camera, or flirted with a Danish tourist. He wasn’t beside me, hovering over my shoulder as he usually did. A window near the ceiling or in the corridor filled the room with ambient light. In one panel of the painting, the corrupt judge, Sisamnes, is flayed alive, disinterestedly observed by a crowd of stone-faced figures. In the other panel, a much larger, though equally disinterested, crowd attends the king, near collapse. I can’t remember seeing the painting on the wall in the museum. I’ve tried to place myself back in that room, draping myself in the damp layers of wrinkled clothes—the relative future keeps breathing down my neck. (A tall man abducts a young woman in broad daylight on a Wednesday afternoon. Is his hat blue or khaki? Is the car a brown sedan or a tan coupe? He looks familiar. Have we met?) I do, however, recall the impression of seeing it: a narrative that both provoked and captivated me: a reaction equal parts revulsion and suspense.
The train-traveling body coasts in silence beside a field of pursed-faced tulips, almost though not quite sleeping, warmed by the afternoon sun puddling in the lap’s left window. The mind wanders. The body pushes its way through the train station, hears but does not listen to the soup of angry speech boiling in its ears, spilling the length of the tram, its final stop. The body that lies on its side in a tent on an island in the IJmeer does not know with precision in which direction or at what point, if any, in the future it will rise and go. Or even if it is physically possible, the pebbled earth having maybe splintered mandible and maxilla into a thousand wet-shining shards. Underneath: eluviation, regolith, bedrock unbuckles with the thrust of vast tectonic plates: Cocos, Nazcua, Juan de Fuca, skidding even at this very moment over an ocean of white-hot magma in the body’s every orifice. The mind wanders. The mind wanders away from the body, which does not move a muscle, does not move an inch from the spot in which it is traveling, will be traveling, has been traveling since.
Meanwhile, chickens peck at grass blades, pause to rearrange their feathers. Goats take turns bleating in their pens. Cool lake water laps at the campground shore. The thin metal tab of a zipper, pinched and led in silence along its tracks, bobs in the wake of a head emerging from the tent before dawn. Wrapping itself tight in an unraveling sweater, the heavy skirt shuffles along the gravel pathway, through the fog and early light of morning—campers in their sleeping bags still snoring—toward the shower house, like every other shower house, where each chest surrenders its gray-blue breath to whitewashed cinderblocks stacked around the steam rising thickly out of faucets, the concrete floor darkened by decades of blood and sweat and cum disappearing down the drain; each naked body like every other naked body: pitch or pale, bruised or ruddy, wet and slouching toward oblivion.
God—if there is a God—remains indifferent to the details lost by memory: the color and quantity of glass beads Ron draped around my neck in the marketplace, each orb an imperfect apology; the uncertain denominations of colorful bills exchanged between fat-fingered hands, the name and location of coffee shops where we slid into a series of low-slung booths to order hash from a menu, like every other hash menu, and sink into a wordless haze. Who remembers what led us toward the narrow red-lit streets? Who knows the names of those women who stood or kneeled or bent to press their flesh against the glass separating them from stoned passersby? Even then I envied them the choice: the glass, the explicit transaction, the lock on the door. Weren’t we all selling something? Back on the island, I packed and repacked my bag. Our departure became imminent—to wander so unceasingly through the city streets that the sidewalks had begun to vibrate. What was the word there for silence? An attic room. A flowering tree: the blossoms opened and fell instantly.
In “The Silver Lily“ Louise Glück writes:
“We have come too far together toward the end now
to fear the end. These nights, I am no longer even certain
I know what the end means. And you, who’ve been with a man—after the first cries,
doesn’t joy, like fear, make no sound?”
These lines illuminate, if nothing else, the tendency of emotions to blur at extreme intensities, so that it becomes difficult to distinguish not only joy from fear, as in Glück’s example, but also lust from rage, and disgust from delight. These distinctions are made even more difficult when recalled from a distance. It’s hard, for example, to remember that I loved Ron, because I also hated and feared him. Secretly, I wanted him to die in some sudden and tragic way (struck by lightning, hit by a train, choked on his own spit), so that I would never have to untangle those emotions, so that I could mourn him—in public, briefly—and then move on.
He didn’t die, of course. Now, after all these years, I’m still tangled. And what I remember most is shame, which also makes no sound.
Very few people have significant memories before the age of four or five. There are, of course, exceptions, but for the most part, the onset of memory retention coincides with the ability to narrativize—to tell a story and get the facts right, to know the difference between truth and fiction, to take note of details and to emphasize the parts of a story that others will consider interesting, and to learn to omit other parts. Memory is thus not only the system for storing information about our experience, the strategies for recalling that information, but also the stories we create about that experience. It is a vast and ever-shifting narrative. However, because there is no specific type of knowledge within the human experience that can be easily singled out as being a memory, memory cannot be seen as a collection but rather as a fluid and flexible filing system, a highly organized and dynamic method for storing massive amounts of narration. The sum total of the system is an ever-changing fabric of perception, which for the purposes of research and discussion is sometimes divided into three levels: “lifetime periods” (extended periods in a person’s life such as “when I lived with Ron,” “when we were in Europe,” etc.), “general events” (thematically related knowledge, such as “before we went to bed we poured the alcohol back into the bottles and closed the windows”), and event-specific knowledge (the smell of my unshowered skin). Each layer of this structure provides cues and pathways that allow access to other layers, so that accessing a specific lifetime period provides access to associated general events, which in turn provides access to specific images and perceptions. But because memory is not static, new connections and pathways can continue to form across these structures: forgotten knowledge can be recalled, new interpretations can alter established memories, and that knowledge—those stories—can be tailored to our changing needs.
In Paris he sharpened his shadow on the sunshine and rented a station locker in order to walk briskly. Did he smile? Yes, he smiled and walked briskly, unbothered by the exhaust of buses, taxicabs, delivery trucks. Did we stop for breakfast in the fourth arrondissement? Yes, I ordered in French from the café menu. A single tuft of grass grew from an unclaimed space in the sidewalk. A water mane seeped rust-blue stains down the stone corner of the building, through winter’s late-piled leaves, and into the brick-bright street. We walked briskly, pausing only to snap photographs: le Pont de Grenelle anchoring the Seine to the city, Notre Dame molting from its scaffolding, the shatterproof pyramid perching over the Louvre: a hive both sprawling and vacant, but no less opulent for that, no less pompous for my dusty footfall: each foreign face closed tight—impenetrable, entirely impenetrable—bizarrely unspeaking. Did I realize, at last, that I was on my own? No, not yet, not then, but I panicked and nearly fainted anyway. A female guard with purple hair handed me the white square of a starched and folded handkerchief in the restroom and patted me on the back. My life would be silent and joyless. Did anyone take note? Yes, and then he tapped the face of his watch as we continued walking briskly by.
In Ohio Impromptu (1980), one of Beckett’s last plays, two of his on-stage doppelgangers relate how one of them has, “in a last attempt to obtain relief” from the loss of a loved one, “moved from where they had been so long together to a single room on the far bank. From its single window he could see the down-stream extremity of the Isle of Swans. . . . Day after day he could be seen slowly pacing the islet. Hour after hour.” This silent, ruminating melancholy may shed light on the nature of Beckett’s own silent walks on the Isle of the Swans with his friend and mentor James Joyce. Beckett famously had a “hero thing” for Joyce, though their eventual long friendship cooled after Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, made advances to Beckett. The official story is that he was not interested. However, such friendships (as between Beckett and Joyce) are always, even at the beginning, destined for implosion. Beckett had, for example, long taken to imitating his mentor: “wearing shoes that were too narrow for him [as Joyce did], drinking white wines [as Joyce did], and holding his cigarette in a certain way [as Joyce did].” Is it possible to say that in any overabundant, overswift appreciation for one’s mentor, it is necessary to forget too many of his flaws? We, as admirers, create narratives in which they are stars and we appear as minor characters, and even that only because of some trick of luck. It’s only later that other stories surface, are remembered, take form.
On the night train out of Paris, Ron planned that we would lie down across all the seats in our cabin and pretend to be sleeping. That way, we can keep it for ourselves. Unfortunately, nearly all the seats on the night train had been sold and young backpackers kept barging in. Ron scared many of them away with the same performance: sitting up slowly, rubbing his eyes, saying something in Finnish or Spanish or Danish, slowly raising his voice until he was shouting and standing in the door. My job was to lie quietly, pretend to be ill. This approach worked until a group of young Americans came in and all at once started unloading their things. Ron was furious—having failed at something—and insisted that we at least maintain the window seats. As the train rumbled through the ink-black night, one of the boys lolled his head against my shoulder. We were almost the same age, both unshowered and drunk on a shared distance-from, made drunker by the sound of our own whispered speech: Let me tell you the price of a bottle of vodka. Yesterday, I ate strawberries. Later, he kept waking a little from his dream to say “Milk.” His breath a little like milk. Across the aisle, I saw the window reflect in my other half’s watching eye. (I thought he was sleeping.) My stomach turned. The cabin door slid open. Billets! shouted the conductor.
The traveling body counts the steps: bathwater, tapwater, icewater, tea. It improves the circulation. The traveling body takes the time to test each pool before entering. There is no unbreaking its surface. The traveling body does not float like other bodies; its breath hangs limply in its mouth. The circles ripple out and out forever. Does it have a name? The traveling body is smeared with oil, is held and kissed, walks too fast away, falls slickly to the tile floor. Who could speak its little language? An unmeasurable sound preserved by the smallest Matryoshka: a solid form inside succeeding hollows inside an oversized purse carried over the shoulder of the traveling body lost inside a castle of unmovable objects, where a sparrow flaps its wings among the rafters, looking for a hole in which to roost, or if not to roost, to rest, to perch, to alight on something a little like a solid surface and for just a moment stop moving.
In reality, I did not order in French from the café menu. Despite years of study in high school, I could speak very little French. No sentences really, only nouns and infinitives: people and places existing uninflected outside and in spite of pasts and presents--thoroughly disconnected from time. Though, to be fair, I practiced very little actual speaking in high-school French class. Instead, Mrs. Kohl showed American movies subtitled in French (Home Alone) or American movies set in France (If Looks Could Kill) or footage of her daughter, Sarah Kohl (also a student in my French class), at the most recent Prom or Homecoming Dance. This offered plenty of time for planning my eventual trip to France, where I might one day visit Oscar Wilde's grave, Jim Morrison's grave, Samuel Beckett's grave, the Isle of the Swans, the Arc de Triomphe, the Catacombs. I would survey Paris from the top of the Eiffel Tower. I would buy flowers from a market and shuttle them through the city in the basket of my rented bike. I told Ron this fantasy as we planned our trip to Europe. He kissed me on the forehead and promised he'd make it all come true. Months later, just before sunset, we planted ourselves on a bench across the street from the Eiffel Tower and watched it light up. Having spent all day in the Louvre, he was too tired to ride it to the top. Isn't this enough? he asked. What could I say? We ate some bread, drank a little wine, and rode the subway back to the train station, where we caught the night train out of town. All told, we stayed in Paris only 16 hours.
Memory is, as we all know, a fundamentally unreliable human faculty, as when we fail to remember important or trivial information, or remember it wrong. There were two weeks, for example, during which we traveled in Austria and Italy, about which I remember little. What, if anything, happened during those weeks? The blue bruise of a boat ferried two people across a mountain lake. Of that I’m sure. The following week, in Budapest, we shared a room with three Australian rugby players; they took turns touching my breasts. What were their names? Did one have a mole on his cheek? I remember Ron held up my shirt for them, pinned back my arms. He laughed without smiling, his mouth wide open.
But maybe that’s not right. He might have been waiting in the hall for the bathroom. I might have been drunk. Or not drunk. Maybe I was standing on the bed, holding my own shirt up, my own arms back. Did they finally turn away? There’s nowhere to look for answers to these questions. I’ve destroyed every photograph I don’t want to see. I’ve never kept a journal in which I’ve told the truth. I didn’t send postcards. I never asked for help.
Because the train began to smell a little like dread, where dread is not a noun but a verb, a state of perpetual being-without-air. Because the engine stopped droning at the border, stopped moving for hours, while uniformed guards moved up and down the train cars making everyone stand. Because they carried machine guns. Because it wasn’t just for show. The passengers assembled their arguments. It was all anyone had. But not even that in common. Because two guards questioned a young family: a young mother, a young father, a daughter who whimpered, an infant who wailed. They did not understand. Because theirs was the true definition. Because passengers closed their eyes, one emptied his pockets: passports, tickets, this is my documentation, Herr Schaffner, this is who I am. Coins clattered to the floor and rolled under the seats. Because all the exits were blocked. We remained sitting and did not whisper, tried to look like we belonged, together.
What meaning exists, I wonder, in the space where no story is written? A week before we boarded the plane in Newark I took a final exam in a Spanish literature class, choosing to write on the following lines from Lorca’s “El romance del emplazado”:
Hombres bajaban la calle
para ver al emplazado,
que fijaba sobre el muro
su soledad con descanso.
Y la sábana impecable,
de duro acento romano,
daba equilibrio a la muerte
con las rectas de sus paños.
Then I saw Guernica for myself at Reina Sofía in Madrid, and looking through that war-shattered window, I wished I could have written differently. The point being that there is no such balance. The poem, the painting, do not matter. There is no story, no religion, no art, in which unmitigated violence makes sense. And so we tell ourselves lies in order to go on living.
In fact, it may have been us they questioned, an exchange we hadn’t anticipated. I spoke only Spanish and a little French. Ron spoke several other languages, but German wasn’t one of them. Maybe they were going to throw us off the train. Maybe they were going to kill us. Why didn’t they? Earlier that day I had been thumbing through Leaves of Grass in a musty bookstore, elated to see English in print. It was one of those shops a person could get lost in forever: a leather armchair in the corner and coffee rings on the ancient library table near the register. Whitman writes:
The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return.)
These lines gesture toward not only the nagging persistence of the remembered past (unless we come down with amnesia, which happens only on Days of Our Lives; we can’t will ourselves to forget a person, his face, the rough impression of his palm against the hip’s fractured curve) but also memory’s cruel and uneven reciprocity. The fact is, Ron remembers my departure, too. And I’m sure he remembers it differently. Most days, I try not to think about that fact, because thinking about it would mean acknowledging I’ve told myself lies and have omitted certain details of my experience. There is no story in which this, or our life together, makes sense. And yet it’s the only thing I carried with me.
DURING the Union War I commenced at the close of 1862, and continued steadily through ’63, ’64 and ’65, to visit the sick and wounded of the Army, both on the field and in the Hospitals in and around Washington city. From the first I kept little note-books for impromptu jottings in pencil to refresh my memory of names and circumstances, and what was specially wanted, &c. In these I brief’d cases, persons, sights, occurrences in camp, by the bedside, and not seldom by the corpses of the dead. Of the present Volume most of its pages are verbatim renderings from such pencillings on the spot. Some were scratch’d down from narratives I heard and itemized while watching, or waiting, or tending somebody amid those scenes. I have perhaps forty such little note-books left, forming a special history of those years, for myself alone, full of associations never to be possibly said or sung. I wish I could convey to the reader the associations that attach to these soil’d and creas’d little livraisons, each composed of a sheet or two of paper, folded small to carry in the pocket, and fasten’d with a pin. I leave them just as I threw them by during the War, blotch’d here and there with more than one blood-stain, hurriedly written, sometimes at the clinique, not seldom amid the excitement of uncertainty, or defeat, or of action, or getting ready for it, or a march. Even these days, at the lapse of many years, I can never turn their tiny leaves, or even take one in my hand, without the actual army sights and hot emotions of the time rushing like a river in full tide through me. Each line, each scrawl, each memorandum, has its history. Some pang of anguish—some tragedy, profounder than ever poet wrote. Out of them arise active and breathing forms. They summon up, even in this silent and vacant room as I write, not only the sinewy regiments and brigades, marching or in camp, but the countless phantoms of those who fell and were hastily buried by wholesale in the battle-pits, or whose dust and bones have been since removed to the National Cemeteries of the land, especially through Virginia and Tennessee. (Not Northern soldiers only—many indeed the Carolinian, Georgian, Alabamian, Louisianian, Virginian—many a Southern face and form, pale, emaciated, with that strange tie of confidence and love between us, welded by sickness, pain of wounds, and little daily, nightly offices of nursing and friendly words and visits, comes up amid the rest, and does not mar, but rounds and gives a finish to the meditation.) Vivid as life, they recall and identify the long Hospital Wards, with their myriad-varied scenes of day or night—the graphic incidents of field or camp—the night before the battle, with many solemn yet cool preparations—the changeful exaltations and depressions of those four years, North and South—the convulsive memories, (let but a word, a broken sentence, serve to recall them)—the clues already quite vanish’d, like some old dream, and yet the list significant enough to soldiers—the scrawl’d, worn slips of paper that came up by bushels from the Southern prisons, Salisbury or Andersonville, by the hands of exchanged prisoners—the clank of crutches on the pavements or floors of Washington, or up and down the stairs of the Paymasters’ offices—the Grand Review of homebound veterans at the close of the War, cheerily marching day after day by the President’s house, one brigade succeeding another until it seem’d as if they would never end--the strange squads of Southern deserters, (escapees, I call’d them;)—that little genre group, unreck’d amid the mighty whirl, I remember passing in a hospital corner, of a dying Irish boy, a Catholic priest, and an improvised altar—Four years compressing centuries of native passion, first-class pictures, tempests of life and death—an inexhaustible mine for the Histories, Drama, Romance and even Philosophy of centuries to come—indeed the Verteber of Poetry and Art, (of personal character too,) for all future America, (far more grand, in my opinion, to the hands capable of it, than Homer’s siege of Troy, or the French wars to Shakspere;)—and looking over all, in my remembrance, the tall form of President Lincoln, with his face of deep-cut lines, with the large, kind, canny eyes, the complexion of dark brown, and the tinge of weird melancholy saturating all.
(from Memoranda during the War, in The Walt Whitman Archive)
And then there are no questions to be asked. As when the rain falls in sheets between the train and the platform. As when he pulls me roughly close—the last time, I know it—and places several crumpled bills in my shivering hand. (The equivalent of thirty-two American dollars. The only money I carry during the entire trip, which lasts me less than two days.) Odd, but stuffed in my pocket before I bolt down the stairs and across the platform, shouldering my way past faceless passengers, into the train cars about to pull away on the tracks. As when the city is stamped out by darkness. (I am already forgetting.) As when I remember the way back to the cracked room near the Grote Markt, the single bed, and can’t sleep for the sound of a guitar, played badly, for tuneless but joyful singing. But first: a cold beer, a lit cigarette. Their open faces also lit. It is morning as the plane lifts from the continent. Somehow still morning when it lands.
