Dru was on the phone, speaking softly, hissing. “Oh, no,” she said. “Don’t you do it.” She looked up and saw me standing there, and I saw that she was scared. “Don’t even think about it…what do you mean? No. No. No.”

Aaron wasn’t there. Tending to Natalia, I think.

“Turn your ass right back around. You know I love you deeply, but you are not welcome here.”

So then I knew. I mean, it wasn’t a stretch to think that he would have tried it. It wasn’t hard to imagine how he’d found his way.

“Yes, she is,” Dru said. “Goodbye.”

“DJ,” I said.

“Yeah.” She bit her lip.

“Not in Moscow I guess.”

“I guess not.”

“Seattle?”

“Spokane.”

“Close?”

“About 45 minutes by plane.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Tonight.”

“But you told him not to come.”

“Yes I did.”

“Then why?”

“He said he has to see you.”

“I’ll leave.”

“No. You don’t have to do that.”

“I will. I’ll go. There’s no need to bring all this shit down on you three.”

“No,” she said. “No. I want to see him, too.”

*    *    *

And he came.

He looked the same, essentially, though I noticed straightaway that he wore contacts that changed the color of his eyes to green. To match his rotation of fake identities. A mustache, too. I hoped it wasn’t real. Shivers.

This time, he was Russian. He had a government-issued Russian passport that was as real as the real deal. He grinned when he saw us. He hugged me, and we kissed briefly, and Dru just looked on, scowling.

He watched her for a moment, and eventually, without changing her expression, she moved forward and wrapped one arm around him. “You look like a fucking pervert,” she said.

“Hi, Dru.”

“That mustache.” She closed her eyes and shook her head.

“I’ve come for three reasons,” he said. “Fate just lined them up, and I couldn’t say no.”

“What are they, Ivan?”

“Vladimir,” he said.

“Well?”
“To see you,” he said. “And to see Junie.”

“And number three?”

“And Colin asked me to do him a favor.”

“Colin the cosmonaut,” she said. “Space cadet.”

“Indeed,” he said. “Indeed.”

*    *    *

And the favor was this: To watch him fly. To watch him fly together, the friends, the Elephants, if that were at all possible. To watch a single point of light against all those other points of light, which was our friend, an impetuous Dubliner who had hitched a ride to space.

And so, with few words, we left before dawn into the bitter mountain cold, Dru and I, breath heavy in her Jeep as we started the engine with a fair degree of resistance, and rumbled off through the dark streets. On the way, we picked up DJ, who was fully awake, his inner-clock chiming mid-afternoon.

Dru had made him stay in a hotel on the river that ran through town. He didn’t seem at all bothered by this caveat, as he rarely seemed bothered by such things. DJ roamed the spaces of his own heart and head, and things outside of that country seemed to have little effect.

So we drove to a high, empty place, well above the town, and away from its light, which after the cities I had seen, was so pale and dim it seemed of little consequence to the starlight.

But in silence, the three of us drove to this place where the road turned to rubble, and then to dirt, and when we stopped, the sky had turned to the faintest steely blue.

“Are you sure we’ll see him from here?” DJ asked.

“Yes,” she said.

We got out of the Jeep and walked through the crisp, dry grass. Dru slipped a compass from her jacket pocket and checked her watch. “There,” she said. “Over the ridge, from there—” She raised her arm, finger outstretched, and traced a long arc across the sky. She paused midway. “—To there. That’s where it’ll be highest. Then there. Then it’ll disappear over the horizon there.”

“How long will it be visible?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Four minutes? Six?”

“When?”

“Soon.”

Dru walked off, over to a dark place near a tree, inspecting a boulder, I think.

“It’s so good to see you again,” DJ said.

“I missed you.”

“It’s not the same without you, Junie.”

“What isn’t?”

“The planet. Walking up and down the earth. All of it.”

“I can’t do it anymore.”

“You can. You can do anything if you want. It’s just a matter of will.”

“I don’t want to, then.”

He nodded.

“There,” Dru said, walking back. “It’s there.”

I looked up, to the place where she had pointed, and just over a line of sparse pines came a star that moved crisply across the sky, faster than a plane and featureless, a single point of white light. It flared brighter. “I don’t believe it,” I said.

“Hello, Colin,” Dru said

And DJ stayed quiet, said nothing, but stood with a slow shift of his body and followed the star across the black, into the direction of the sunrise. Five minutes he was silent. Five minutes he watched, and even longer after the light had gone.
Five minutes. I knew what he thought.

He thought, there is life for all of the Elephants still, and that nothing had really died, and nothing had ended. That there were still some of us, and they were still moving. Always moving.

He was thinking that there was hope.

*    *    *

And hope there was, and hope there will be. DJ believed, DJ believes.

We went back to his hotel that morning, after the sun had risen over the mountains, and please believe, there has not been a sunrise or sunset since that has not made me think of him, that has not made me think of all that I was, and am.

We didn’t make love, but we lay together and kissed in the moments that intervened our conversation, which was heady, and honest.

“Do you like who you are now?” he asked, after one particularly long and very sweet kiss.

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

“Do you regret any of it?”

“I regret making the mistakes I did after you left me in Goa.”

“Don’t. If who you are now is better than who you were, maybe they weren’t mistakes at all.”

“Maybe.”

“Do you have faith?” he said.

“Faith in what?”

“You don’t have to have faith in something to have faith. Faith is simply the ability to believe.”

“I believe.”

“Then you learned something I could never teach Dru. Maybe it wasn’t my place to teach. Maybe I didn’t teach at all. Whatever it was, you learned it.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I believe.”

*    *    *

There is a lot of crying at airports. Many tears fall at the gates. I’ve said that before, I know. Long, long ago. At the beginning. There is so much crying at airports, these places where people’s lives flip, these moments standing, parting, changing. The last moments of love, the last sight you have of one who is everything to you, the last glimpse you catch of love, as they look back once, through the glass, perhaps, before they walk away forever.

Airports are cathedrals of impermanence, where change is music that fills them, and tears, I suppose, are holy water. Final kisses goodbye, the host of hosts. All of the going, the quivering hands in parting, desperate clinging embrace.

Airports are the beginning, and airports are the end. The alpha and omega, I suppose.

The last look back over one shoulder, maybe a smile, through the glass, maybe the last look back over a shoulder searching, searching, to see the one waiting there still at the place where they parted, searching, not finding through the glare, or the tint, or the crowd, not finding and turning forward as one hand waves, shouting look, here, look I’m here, but mute. The end of a glance back as love turns forward and moves on, and is gone. Is gone, gone, gone.

We kissed, he and I. And he did not ask me to leave with him, because he knew that I wouldn’t go. He knew that I couldn’t because my will wasn’t in it anymore. He didn’t ask, and so only said that I should have faith that we would see each other again.

I said that I believed.

He said that he would come and find me here in the mountains someday, and maybe someday soon, though something in me shifted when he spoke, and I knew…well, I thought I knew…that it was not the truth.

DJ, that man, who in his blind long belief in something great that he had only invented in his mind, had changed me so completely into something new. DJ, beautiful man and love of my life, whom I could only now touch for a few more moments. The end, here. The end, now. I cried. There is too much crying at airports.
He kissed my cheeks, and kissed my tears, and we parted.

Through security, through the glass wall that separated us, he walked, and I waited, I waited as he came to the steps. I waited for him to turn. But, my friends, you should know by now that he didn’t. That his heart was already in the air.

*    *    *

A cool, steady wind swept the tarmac, and I stood at the fence outside, watching the Brasilia turboprop taxi. On it, you know, there was this man I had known. And loved, and now I didn’t even know his name.

I suppose you wanted me to end up with him. I know you people. I read books. But this isn’t about what you want, is it. It never has been. It’s about what happened, and what happened is all that I have said, and what happened is thus:

I stood now, with mountains there to the south and all around, and felt the sun on my neck and the wind in my face and through my hair, and the air was clean and excellent. I stood as the plane taxied and came to the end of the long strip and paused.

I am here, I thought. I am nowhere else. I am me, I thought. I am no one else. I am here, in this place. Now. I am here.

The engines screamed and the Brasilia moved forward and raced hard for the east, and in the last moments, its nose lifted lightly from the ground, and then its body, and its fine, long, white wings, and it was in the air, higher, higher. Another plane turned skyward.

There was a plane in the air, and I was not on it.

THE END

Gainesville, Florida
Summer, 2004

I held no preference in those days for place.

Urban canyons, bustling city sprawls, mountains, beaches. Small New England towns, old antebellum plantations. New York, New York, or nowhere. I held no preference, and had never imagined myself in one place over another. But that would change.

We rode a tailwind across the Great Plains, and me with a window seat, watching all the time as the clouds scuttled past and sometimes broke over the long, open sprawl of America. Wide flat spaces that began to roll and fracture, and turn to mountains already snowcapped, and we came to the cool, dry, high places in Utah, where I changed planes to an Embraer 120 Brasilia, only thirty seats and nearly empty, that heaved and lunged over pockets of roiling mountain air, northward into a wide valley and a Montana town seated comfortably against the mountains.

Some of the trees had turned a brilliant and fearsome yellow, and this against the clean wide blue sky made me think that, of all the jumps and all of the Elephants, and all the cities I had seen, none had been better than this.

We landed and disembarked. The sun was brilliant, unimpeded by the high mountain air, hot and white. And in the shade, the air was cool, and all of it clean and smelling of pine and snow. I crossed the tarmac and breathed slowly as I did, hands in my pockets and head bent to the wind.

The airport interior was, I promise you, like none other. It looked like a log cabin of some kind, all bare and polished wood, and western art hung around, mountains and Indians and jewelry in cases.

I thought, as I came into the terminal, that Dru had certainly come here to hide, and if that were her intention, she would never be found.

Then I noticed the taxidermy. Wild animals in various states of viciousness, frozen by necro-artisans into impossible poses. A mountain lion pouncing, a very tall and wooly grizzly bear. Though “wooly” isn’t the word for it, really. “Grizzly,” anyway. There were skins on the wall. It was morbid. Absolutely morbid.

I wandered down steps, through the free-flowing side of security, past about twenty people milling around and waiting for arrivals. Then on to an open space, where the baggage claim lay still and silent, and she stood. She stared through a window, out to the rolling, low, bare mountains at the edge of the sky.

I watched her for a minute, just from behind, though I knew it was her. Her hair tied back and in its natural color. A black leather jacket and jeans. Unassuming. Contemplative. Watching the mountains and the sky.

“I’m here,” I said, and meant it completely. With all the weight of the words, I meant not just that I had arrived, but that in this world, for all the places I had been, now I was only, heart and head and body too, here. This entire book has been an appendix to that statement.

I am here.

She turned, smiled, stepped forward, and wrapped her arms around me. None of the fear or inhibition that she’d had when I’d known her before. The anxious glances were gone.

“Yes you are,” she said.

“Where is here?”

“Here is Missoula, Montana.” She looked at me, up and down, scanning. “Home, anyway. Damn. Let’s go. We have so much to talk about.”

“I guess we do.”

She walked to a set of sliding doors that led to a small parking lot. “I didn’t know if you’d come,” she said.

“I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

She nodded. “That’s what I thought.”

“When did you move here?”

“About a month after I got home from…you know. You heard?”

“Jail?”

She closed her eyes and twitched her head in something that hinted at a single nod.

Enough said.

“They offered me a job,” she said. “An assistant professorship in the physics department.”

“That’s great.”

“Yes,” she said. “It is.”

We came to an ancient muddy Jeep, which she opened without unlocking and started the engine with a button.

“Vintage,” she said. “It’s a classic.”

“I see.”
We drove.”

“So how was the flight?”

I laughed. “That’s some shallow small talk.”

“I guess it’s something normal people like to ask about flying. Personally, I know how the flight was.”

“The flight was fine, Dru. The pretzels were artificially butter flavored. I had window seats all the way.”

“What about prison?”

“Everything was artificially butter flavored. Windowless seats all the way.”

“That’s fair.”

“Sorry. I don’t mean to be an asshole. It was just sort of, moderately hellish. Let’s talk about you.”

“Me?”

“You.”

“Things are different. Very different.”

“With the normal job and everything?”

“I wouldn’t call teaching physics a normal job, exactly. But that. Among other things.”

“What other things?”

“Natalia.”

“Tally? What about her?”

“No, not that Tally. A different Natalia.”

“There are two? Isn’t one enough for anybody?”

She laughed. “This one is mine.”

*    *    *

And Dru’s Natalia, she was.

Five months old, and sleeping.

“We met when I moved here,” Dru said.

Aaron sat across the kitchen table from me, smiling, and genuinely glad, it seemed, to meet someone from his wife’s old life. A life of which she rarely spoke.

“I was pregnant soon after.”

“It’s great to finally meet you,” he said. “Somebody from the old life.”

Dru sort of scowled.

“She won’t tell me much about what went on. I’ve learned not to ask. But she talked about you often enough.”

“Did she?”

“Only foul things, Junie,” she said. “Vicious foul rumours I was only too pleased to propagate.”

“They were true, I’m sure.”

“More coffee?” Aaron asked.

“No thanks.”

Natalia started to cry. Aaron stood. “Be back in a second,” he said.

And we were alone in the kitchen, a sweet-smelling and honestly homey room of their bungalow style house. It was, I think, idyllic.

“You’re lucky,” I said.

“You think so?”

“Don’t you?”

“Yes. I know I’m lucky. I’m just surprised to hear you say it.”

“I’ve changed.”

“Listen,” she said. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you. I should have been.”

“No. Don’t be. You’re here for me now, and now is what matters. It wouldn’t have mattered then. I would have probably just found some other way to fuck it up.”

She raised her coffee cup to me.

“What about the others? What about Jim and Gwen?”

“Happy. Both of them.”

“Still in London?”

“Last I heard. They got married.”

“She told me in Tokyo. What about Tally?”

“She’s rich. And busy. And before you ask, there have been rumors that DJ is often spotted in her company. She can keep him safe in Moscow. All knotted up with the Mafia and the police.”

“I wonder if he ever forgave himself for what happened.”

“I’m sure he hasn’t.”

“I don’t blame him.”

“I know you don’t. But he likes the world on his shoulders. The burden of it. I don’t know why, but it’s really the only thing that keeps him going.”

“And the rest of the Elephants?”

“I don’t know anymore, Junie. That’s somebody I used to be.”

“And Colin? He was playing astronaut, last I heard.”

She closed her eyes and pointed upward.

“He didn’t. That’s insane.”

“Yes. I agree. For all the things I have ever done, I have to say that he is genuinely off his nut. Twenty million for a week-long holiday.

“I thought it was fifteen.”

“The Russians wanted more. They have a monopoly on the space tourism trade, you know.”

“And he paid?”

“Evidently.”

“Where is he now?”

“You have very good timing. It’s his week to shine.”

“Right now?”

“Somewhere over your head, I suppose.”

*    *    *

I didn’t write their fucking statement.

Don’t tell me you thought this whole story was my statement to the FBI. That’s a little clichéd, no? And it isn’t very likely, as Bad Cop never came back with more paper, and all they really wanted to know about was my relationship with DJ, when I’d last seen him, and what happened in Thailand. But there wasn’t much to tell, so I made some things up. Quite a lot, really. I’d say that my talk with the FBI was about 67% bullshit.

Of course, I know I should have told them I wanted a lawyer, but that would have just pissed them off, and there was no way I was getting out of this, anyway. I just made sure to steer clear of the shooting in Amsterdam and anyone’s actual name. So I made up a lot of really clever aliases, right on the spot, too. Some of which I’ve used in this book. I impressed myself.

Eventually, a lawyer did appear, and he was one who had been hired. I say this in the passive voice, had been hired, because no one knew who had hired him, not even him. All I knew about him was that his name was Carlisle Proctor, and he was being paid $1,500 an hour to handle my case. Which is slightly more than God makes for running the whole Universe. Sweet deal.

He called the interrogation off, and the next day I had a hearing, which went surprisingly well. And it was really difficult to keep from laughing, because right there, in the front row of the Federal Court, behind me and off to one side, was Daan Janssen, this Dutch guy I’d met the day before on a flight to Cleveland Hopkins International. And I thought, wow, it was really nice of him to come.
And also, what an insanely good-looking man he was, and if I ever got out of this, I would have to get to know him better.

*    *    *

I’ll tell you, if you’ve never been through a trial for your life, you’re really missing out on one of the genuine living hells this world can provide.

Soon after opening statements, it turned into an ACLU circus. Why? That remains unclear. But I was glad to see it, as it shifted the blame from my own asinine actions to those of Homeland Security in general and the FBI specifically. Eventually it had nothing to do with me, and everything to do with the infringement of constitutional rights and terrorism.

Did I mention the word “circus?” Ah, yes. I did.

Carlisle Proctor was good, but nobody’s that good. Not good enough to let me walk out of that kind of deep hole. He did, however, get me some serious reductions, dismissals, and other sundry legal bullshit.

In the end, I was sentenced to “not more than five years.” Only five. Jesus. Might as well have been life. But the point is, I walked on parole in eight months, thanks to vigorous appeals and prison overcrowding.

My mother, who had come to the trial every day, screamed and passed out. My father had to go on pills.

In the end, I was convicted mainly of the petty crime for which I had been arrested. That is, providing false information in the form of fake IDs. They did try desperately (and failed miserably) to link me to the late Nathan Corbit and Mia Aman, who was now getting a real flavor for the country, Lonely Planet style, in a Thai prison. Very grunge-chic. But they had been the ones with the cash. I may have been an accomplice but was at quite a distance when they were eventually caught.

The jury got the real “wrong place at the very wrong time” treatment, and I got reduced, thank you very much C. Proctor, esquire.

In the end, the FBI could not effectively produce any evidence to connect me to DJ’s scheme or to the United Elephant Jumpers of Earth, generally.

DJ was free to roam because of some quick thinking, fluent Dutch, a good mutual understanding, and the fact that the FBI had simply royally fucked up. Someone had to lose their job over that one. I couldn’t tell you who, or why, or really what, even. Most of what I know of the FBI comes from two interrogation sessions and television. Mostly television.

But if ever there was a fuckup to fire someone over, it was holding your mark—your prime suspect—and letting him go. And he was such a cocky ass that he sat behind me during the entire trial, and sometimes took notes.

Someone had to be out of a job over that one. I was the only solid connection they had to him, and as long as they had their claws in me, they could follow the trail back to him, but now they would have to start all over, looking for him and watching the airline traffic. But they wouldn’t find him, because the scam was over, and in time he would just move on to something else. Just gone, like smoke.

It wasn’t that DJ was too smart for the FBI. I think that the moment you start thinking you’re too smart for the FBI, that’s the moment they catch you. Just a matter of time. Of course, he was too smart for the TSA (but that’s just a given. You know how I feel about the TSA). He could bounce those twats like bunnies and run circles around them besides. But with the FBI, he’d just been lucky. About as lucky as they were. They caught him once, and he got away. If they caught him again, maybe he would, and maybe he wouldn’t. Or maybe they would never catch him. They were just dancing, around and around the world. He liked the chase. He loved the chase. And it suited him.

Even the rest of them were free and clear, as far as I could tell, and as long as they were careful. Colin, with his very high profile, was never implicated, and would never be. Dru sank back into society like she’d never been away. Tally went back to whatever it was that she did in Moscow, making unseemly amounts of cash in the new economy at the right hand of her father. And Gwen and Jim just vanished. Straight into the ether of the East End.

None of them came to visit me in jail. Only my father, who said that my mother didn’t come because she couldn’t bear to see me in a place like that, and also that she was furious and had spoken often of disownment with a feverish gusto.

They were all just gone, along with the life I’d had. I was a stripling. I was nothing but naked.

I cannot accurately express the feeling of having absolutely nothing. Not just material possessions, but no place, no friends. I don’t know if you can understand. It’s a weight and a burden, mostly of fear, but it’s at once freeing, liberating. Nothing must be done, nothing tended. Having nothing means no relationships to nurture. It means no expiry dates on milk.

It means that you don’t owe the world a thing.

It also means that the world doesn’t owe you, and that’s the hitch.

So the things you do have–maybe clothes if you’re lucky, a piece of jewelry that you haven’t pawned that reminds you of better days, of the you that was once but is no longer—well, you hold those things very, very tightly.

When I was paroled, they handed me a blue cardboard box with my name and number in marker, and it was full of the things I had. And precious, oh yes, they were.

Underwear from the Duty Free at LAX, a skirt and top from Goa, boots in fine leather from Constantinople. A sterling silver ring of elephants from Amsterdam, very precious, and very dear.

These were the things that comprised my life, and the memories too, which they could never take. And so on that day, I took what I had and remembered that I at least had these, and that I wasn’t dead yet, and that I was free.

And so I started my life again in September, in the rain.

*    *    *

Oh. And one more thing.

You may have noticed that I skipped over prison. I don’t want to make too much of the prison thing. Maybe you want to hear about it. Maybe it’s the most interesting part of my story thus far.

Well, if you like.

Lesbians. That’s all there is in prison. Hot lesbians, and we go naked almost all the time, sweating and oiled up, and there are a lot of chains and orgies. Prison was the best sex I’ve ever had. Hot, wet, lesbian love.

Shall we move on? No. Probably not. That isn’t fair. Here. Let’s try this instead:

Prison is poverty. Prison is crowded, stinking illness. Prison smells of Simple Green. Prison is cold. Prison was a woman I knew named Jamie, who was pregnant for my entire stay, and she talked mainly of what she would do with Cody when she got out. Cody, the swelling in her belly that would be her son, who died in a prison hospital at the age of ten minutes.

Prison time is not real time. Every moment is counted, let me assure you. Every second ticks, and you look at your calendar and you thought you’d been there a month and it’s your first week. And then you think you’ve been there for six months, and it’s your eleventh day, and then you decide to stop looking at the fucking calendar, and when you’re fairly sure that you’ve been there for two months, or three at best, it’s been a year, and you’re paroled.

Because in prison, every day is like every other day, and you have nothing to mark the time by, nothing to keep track, and you lose yourself in the days. Like in the sky, on a plane over the Pacific, you only know how fast you’re moving when the clouds break and thirty thousand feet away you see the long, roiling, white wake of an ocean freighter, and then the clouds close in again, and you’re dead still.

I thought I’d never get out. I thought I would die there. And then it was over, and they let me go. Dazed but free.

And that’s why there isn’t much to tell you. It was just a long pause in an otherwise swiftly motivated life. A long and awful pause. And there are some stories, about all the Jamies I knew, and there were many, that I would prefer to keep to myself. For now at least.

Anyway. That’s all I want to say about prison.

*    *    *

It was summer still, though late, when I was released, with ninety-seven dollars and the things I’d mentioned from the blue box.

And one other thing that came late the day before my parole. It was a letter that I opened and read as I stood, feeling strange in my clothes. I felt sure it was from DJ, one of his aliases, or Gwen, maybe. But it wasn’t. It was something I couldn’t have expected.

It was from Dru. In edgy, nervous script she had written this:

My dear friend Junie

With all that’s happened, I apologize for never coming to see you. Surely you cannot blame me. You have never left my thoughts, as I am certain you have never left any of our thoughts. I have taken some trouble to see that this letter reaches you anonymously, and hope that I have succeeded. But friends must do what friends must do. So maybe one last time, take a jump and come here. If you have nowhere else, if you have nothing, then come here and we will get you on your feet. We must hang together, even in the worst of times, we old grey pachyderms. One ticket in your name at the Delta counter. See you soon.

Love

Drusilla

I nearly cried. You know? Very nearly. And I walked out into the rain smiling, thinking just of friends, and what a fool I’d been to think I had nothing, when in the end, I had all that anyone ever needs.

*    *    *

They had taken my passport. That was a term of my parole, that I could no longer travel internationally. I was borderbound. I also wasn’t allowed to cross state lines, but they didn’t really check that at the airport, and if I ever wanted to move, for a job or whatever, I just had to apply, and they said I would be able to.

So that day, I used some of my money to get a taxi to take me to the DMV so I could get a state ID, as my former driver’s license had been lost somewhere in Southeast Asia. Then I spent the rest on a seedy motel room. I took a shower and called my parents, who (I learned from a letter) had moved to Florida.

They spoke for a time and asked uncomfortably if I was all right, and I said yes. They asked if I needed money, and I still had fifteen dollars, so I said no, and they seemed relieved. “You were gone so long,” my father said. “We missed your birthday. Your thirtieth.”

“My thirty-first as well.”

“I’m sorry. Maybe we could give you some money for that. Maybe you could use it now.”

“No. Really. I’m fine.”

“Where are you going to live?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, you can’t live on the street, June.”

“I have friends.”

“What friends?”

“Good friends.”

“Well,” he said, “if you need anything, you just call.”

Which meant, Your mother would prefer if you didn’t right now, which was O.K. I didn’t blame them, even though I suppose I could have. I didn’t because it just wasn’t their responsibility to save me. It was no one’s responsibility. None but my own. It wasn’t love that would save me, or DJ. It wasn’t freedom from things or from place. It wasn’t money or any of that. I just had to make something new, out of whatever I could.

And it would all be mine, and it would be wonderful.

“We love you,” he said. “Remember that.”

“I know you do. I love you, too.”

And that was it. My mother, you know, she never picked up the phone. So that night, I slept in a small room that smelled of stale cigarette smoke, and next door to me, all night, there was screaming and fucking, which alternated at fixed intervals until dawn.

But I slept just the same, impossible as it was, thinking of the things I had thought on the night of my thirtieth birthday. Thinking that there was much hope for the future. So then I knew that with nothing left, I still wasn’t finished. Without a thing in the world beyond fifteen dollars, a dirty bed, and the clothes on my back, I still wasn’t broken.

I was amazed, truly, at myself for the first time in my life. That’s when I knew that I had changed and was something else, and something new. That’s when I knew that the woman I’d been two years ago, eyes blurred by boredom and heartache for love to save me, that’s when I knew she was dead, and I wouldn’t miss her at all. That’s when I went to sleep thinking that there was much hope for the future.

Yes, I thought. Much.

I remember that it was winter in Cleveland.

The Pacific warmed Japan this time of year, left it a little rainy, but not bitter. Not in Tokyo, on the bay. But Cleveland. Damn, I hadn’t felt the cold in months.

Gwen’s concern was what she called, “getting me into the system.” This entailed getting me onto U.S. territory without going through Customs, and so without having to show my passport or ID. Once I was “in the system” and inside the airport loop, there would be minimal ID check, and what there was could be accomplished with the fake that I had been given.

My passport. It was tattered and stained, the pages full of every place I’d been. I’d become a sort of collector. American passports—you’d be surprised, for all the trouble that citizenship can cause in foreign locales—more often than not, an American passport gets you in and out of places with less trouble than everyone else. Stamped through most customs stations without the interrogation that, say, an Iraqi or a Saudi might get. It’s like a nod that says: Yes we know your kind, and you’re not liked or welcome here, but please spend your money freely. Entrez! It’s a bittersweet thing.

At Narita, there was a private jet. A Learjet 31, as Dru would have pointed out. It was likely not at all traceable to Antillia Europa or Colin Doyle, and yet smelled sweetly of limitless funds. We took off and banked east, and I slept soundly over much of the Pacific.

We landed in Hawaii at a very tiny airstrip that was almost too short for the plane. But the pilot managed it, and when we got out, there was nothing around, and so, I guess I was in the system.

On the tarmac, which was cracked and deeply pitted, delineated by faded paint, Gwen turned to me and wrapped her arms around me. “It’s not goodbye forever,” she said.

“I hope not.”

“So do I.”

“What do I do?”

“Here.” She rattled back up the steps to the plane and came back with a brown envelope. “IDs. Fakes. Very good. They’re from Tally’s people. Money and tickets, too. Use it to get home.”

“Thank you.”

“I love you so much. You know that, right?”

“I know.”

“I owe you so much.”

“No. Nothing.”

“It’s not forever. But maybe for a long time.”

“Yes,” I said. “Probably for a very long time.”

*    *    *

From Hawaii, it was an easy flight to LAX and then Salt Lake, and eventually to Cleveland.

Then, in the bitter wind at the loading and unloading zone, at the doors I had passed through first, at the place where it began, I saw him.

Do you remember what I said about that quiet contemplation one is prone to when one returns to the origin? Well, I never would have guessed it, but that goes for glass doors at the lower level concourse of Cleveland Hopkins International airport, too. This was where I’d started, where I had crossed through the sliding glass, a great skeptic, hopeless, and returned…well, whatever it is that I had become.

I watched the doors slide, the frantic pace. It was about six in the evening and dark.
He came up from behind. He wore glasses and a long black coat, and he’d followed me through the bustle of luggage and leaving. DJ, after all this time.

“Ms. Morgan,” he said, and nearly said something else, but I wrapped him up in my arms and he held me too, hard and completely.

“I’m sorry,” he said into my ear.

“Where did you come from?”

“Everywhere,” he said. “Salt Lake.”

“You were on the plane?”

“Yes. A few rows behind you.”

“How?”

“Gwen told me where you were going. I was in Amsterdam. She called from Tokyo, and I flew in. She told me not to, but I had to see you. So nothing suspicious,” he said. “We met on the plane.”

“I’m—”

“I’m sorry. I should never have left you. Or I should have found you. You’re the only thing I could think about since Goa.”

“I fucked up.”

“Don’t worry about that. Things will work out. I love you,” he said.

“I love you too.”

We kissed, as hard and as sweet as our first. When we broke apart, he said, “We have to go.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere but here. It isn’t safe.” So I followed him at a distance, into the parking garage, into the cold, the night, and after all this time, I was home.

*    *    *

Of course, Gwen was operating under the fallacious notion that the police hadn’t been watching me all along. That I was somehow still under the radar, and that I could just get lost in America, somewhere where they wouldn’t find me. But that just wasn’t the case.

All right. Here’s the breakdown as I understand it, post facto:

When the FBI saw that an American “traveler” had been arrested with counterfeit foreign bills, they came straight down on her. And Mia, good global citizen that she was, told them everything that she remembered, which was more than I remembered telling her. Plenty, anyway. They asked her about the Elephants, and thankfully she didn’t know much, and certainly nothing first-hand. But when they heard her say “DJ,” then they knew they’d caught something. They ate up the story about me in love with him and decided to use it.

They figured that eventually I would go find him, or he would find me, and then they’d have us both.

Because, you see, the FBI was also operating under a false assumption. This being that the Elephants were a coherent organization of anarchistic terrorists, out to devalue national currencies and undermine society in general, with DJ at the helm. The United Elephant Jumpers of Earth, or something like that.

Of course, what they were seeing were isolated incidents, petty crime attributable to people who had a record of frequent travel. They were seeing customs runners, or they were seeing fake IDs, or they were seeing al-Qaeda for all I know, but in our case, they were seeing a few people who had come up with a clever way to launder fake foreign money.

Out of how many? Six hundred? Seven thousand? No one knows how many there were, or are. Nobody. Because there aren’t any lists or borders. Anybody who’s ever taken a last minute flight, or driven to the beach in the middle of the night, just to see the sunrise—sign them up too.

But when they found the body in Amsterdam, in a very anonymous hotel suite, they thought that maybe we’d turned a corner. Turned violent, or something. Which, in a really sad and inadvertent way, we had.

And things just grew and grew. DJ didn’t think they were close. He thought that we were blowing the threat out of proportion. But he was wrong, because they were about a jump behind. Always. They were in Amsterdam when we were in Paris. Paris when we were in Constantinople. (Istanbul. Whatever.) They were in Istanbul when we were in Goa, and got to Goa about the time the Elephants split. They were on our heels. Then they lost us for a while. Jim had been right to think we should scatter. It threw them off the trail. They’d lost us.

Until I showed up with those two dipshits in Thailand.

Anyway, they found Mia and she sang, and they started looking for me. They figured out where I was about the time I flew into Tokyo, and all that week they followed me around. So when Gwen said she knew they were there already, she was right. She just didn’t know the half of it.

They watched me come into Cleveland and watched me get into a man’s car. They followed and watched because they thought we were dangerous fugitives. Me, yours truly, a vicious criminal. Absurd to the nth. The nth times fucking two.

*    *    *

I remember that I was nearly to orgasm when they hammered in the door and the SWAT team poured through. DJ had a way with his oral implements. They went through my underwear, new stuff I’d bought during my layover at LAX in the Duty Free. Nice stuff, with the very last of my money—which was actually the last of Mia and Nathan’s money, which I had gotten out of an ATM in Tokyo before I threw the card down a sewer.

So the FBI hauled me out into the cold, just wrapped in sheets, and the news crew was already there.

But nevermind that. I’ve told you all that before. It’s how we started. So let me check where we left off.

Oh, right.

*    *    *

Shit. Of all the places, did it really have to be Cleveland?

We drove through the city at night, and the handcuffs dug hard into my wrists. Streets I knew well, a skyline I’d lived with, grown up with all my life. What was now so alien about this place was that it was familiar. Nothing had been familiar to me in months. I’d been to no city that I knew, I had seen nothing familiar, and everything, wherever I went, required discovery.

Not Cleveland. I knew this place, and most turns brought memories, and I found that I thought mostly of childhood and of rainy days, driving in the cold. For no reason at all, that’s what I thought of, and I thought that in all of those cities, all of the streets I’d walked, dazed or amazed, all of them, people had childhood memories of all those places, too. Billions of people and their little lives. Mine, too. My little life. Too short to spend in prison. My poor little life.

I cried on the way to the booking. I’m sure of it now.

They put me, for the second time that long day, “into the system.” I was relieved of my motel sheet and was given an orange jumpsuit and government underwear, which was, for some reason, very stiff.

I was led around from one place to another, photographs and fingerprints, and a holding cell for a time, and then came to rest in a silent white room, with a speaker and a mirror, where I waited and waited, and fell asleep in my chair still waiting.

When the door opened, it was Leanne Sheldon and her partner, carrying a fat folder (a dossier you might call it), and they dropped it on the table and sat, hands folded, silently. For a minute or two, which felt as forever.

“Well, you might as well tell us everything,” she said. “Your boyfriend explained everything. He told us what we needed to know. We’re just fact-checking now. You can clear up anything he got wrong and save yourself some trouble.”

“Lies,” the partner said, low and breathy. It seemed he would be playing the role of Bad Cop.

“Mistruths,” Leanne said.

“I hate liars,” Bad Cop said. “You want to lie to me? You’re going down.”

Honest to god. He said, “you’re going down.” Swear. You can’t make this shit up.

“So,” Leanne said, “if you just write up a statement, it would be to your benefit.”

Bad Cop slid a piece of lined paper across the table with a pen.

“Like a confession,” he said. (Like con-FESH-in.) “Make it a one-on-one with Jesus Christ.”

“Pardon?”

“He told us everything,” Leanne said. “He told us what you did. We know it was you.”

They were also, it seemed, operating under the false assumption that DJ was a lying rat bastard.

“Just one piece of paper?” I said. “He couldn’t have told you everything. I’d need, I don’t know. A ream.”

“A what?” Bad Cop said.

“It’s five hundred sheets,” Leanne said. “Usually.”

“That much,” I said. “At least.”

“Sure,” she said.

“And where do I start? I don’t have a clue about these things.”

“Start at the beginning,” Bad Cop said.

“Conception, or birth?”

“Don’t be a smartass,” he said.

“Gordon. Why don’t you go get some more paper.”

He stood up and looked at me in this way that people like him would call “eyeballing.” Yes. He eyeballed me. Then pushed the chair back and stormed out of the room, presumably to get more paper and to watch the proceedings through the mirror while eating a doughnut or something.

“Look. June. Just tell us what we need to know and it’ll be a lot easier on you.”

“June,” I said. I rolled it around in my mouth. “June.”

She waited.

“But that’s what I’m saying, I said. “I really don’t understand. I mean, do I start a confession with the first time I took a plane? Because there weren’t any crimes back then. Or the first time I met you? Or DJ? Or what? I’m not clear on this.”

“Let’s start with that. With DJ. Do you know him personally?”

“Of course I know him personally.” That was a damn weird question to ask, as they’d interrupted us knowing each other very personally. Know what I mean?

“When was the last time you saw him?”

Weirder. Wait for it…and yes, I started to smile. Wide. I was having a hard time holding it down, because that sonofabitch was really just that slick. Just slick enough to pull it off.

“Your boyfriend already told us he’s in Amsterdam.” She leaned over the table, smiled in such a way as to gain my confidence. “Look. Daan is telling us what we need to know. He’ll get the deals. And if you don’t talk, then you won’t see him again for a long, long time.”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” I said. “See. Now I know you’re lying. He’s just this guy I met on the plane.”

“And you were already sleeping together?”

“We weren’t sleeping.”

“You know what I mean.”

“He spoke Afrikaans. Foreign languages get me wet.”

“Come on—”

“I’m a little slutty. To be honest.”

She smiled. Something genuine, it seemed. “Let’s write.”

“Still don’t know how to start.”

“O.K. Let’s start with something simple.”

“Like?”

“Name and age.”

“How about, ‘my name is June Morgan, it was the year that I turned thirty, and it started with an online love affair.’”

“That’ll work.”

In the morning, and it was early, DJ was gone. But he hadn’t gone far. I wrapped myself in a sheet and went to the front door of the shack. Three small steps led to the sand, dirty with foliage and fallen leaves. Not the clean silver stuff farther down the beach.

DJ sat in the sand, arms around his legs, fetal and slowly rocking. At his feet was that matted and threadbare dog, dirty with sand and its tongue hanging out, heavy and dry.

“What happened?” I said.

“She was lonely.”

I sat on the step and watched him watch the dog.

“She was old,” I said.

“No. She was cold and wet. And just lonely. I should have brought her in last night. I should have let her come in.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“It was. Everybody I lose is my fault, Junie. Everything.”

I didn’t catch it at the time, but he was talking about Dru, of course. He already knew she was gone. He was talking about everything that had gone wrong.

“Junie. I had this dream.”

“Yeah?”

“Everybody got killed. Jim and Colin, and Tally and Dru. But you weren’t there, so you got away.

“How’d they get killed?”

“I drowned them.”

“You did?”

“In the surf.” He looked to the side, half way around, not quite far enough to see me. “You aren’t supposed to be here, Junie.”

“I don’t know where else I should be. I love this place.”

“I know you do. But you have to go home.”

“I don’t want to go home. I don’t have anything to go home to.”

I wrapped my blanket around him from behind. I knelt in the sand and rubbed against him. His back was cold.

“I fucked this up.”

“She was old,” I said again. I smelled the wet dog from where I knelt. I hadn’t liked her much, but she’d followed us anyway, and followed me. She needed something from me that I hadn’t given, and now she was dead.

“Not the dog,” he said. “I fucked all this up. Just like the old Elephants fucked it up. Like my mother fucked it up. Fucked up her whole life. And mine. I didn’t see it coming, and then it was over. Just like that.”

“DJ. I don’t know what you mean?” I held him tighter.

“There was the idea. And the application of the idea, and it was innocent. And then we lose track of the destination, and we get lost. And it’s my fault.”

If it sounds like gibberish to you, then don’t feel bad. You’re not alone. I was used to his proselytizing and I didn’t have a fucking clue.

He pulled away and walked a few paces, then turned and looked at the dog and his eyes were heavy. Full of tears, must have been. “Look. So it’s about the trip, not the destination. That’s how it started.”

“Right. I remember.”

“So we traveled. Place to place, and the trip got so important that we needed to do whatever we could to stay moving. And it was worth it because it was all about the fucking trip.”

I just nodded.

“Well, I got so blind that I didn’t see that the trip isn’t on a 747 and the destination isn’t fucking Goa. The trip is just the idea of leaving everything, and the destination is just the figuring out what’s important. I got shallow. That’s why I’m the same as the rest of them. Shallow as hemp and fucking patchouli and misguided as the eighties and a fucking hypocrite on top.”

I cannot begin to express to you in simple words how his voice had changed and how full of futile pain it had become. Like all the world was crashing and he was in the cockpit, as if every moment of hurt that had ever been felt was his fault and he could have somehow prevented it.

Like that dog, right there, in its last lonely hours–like that had been his fault, too.

“Junie, I have to go.”

“DJ. Settle down.”

He stood and stared. Blue eyes straight through me.

“Listen to me,” I said. “We can work this through. I understand what you’re saying, but look—”

“You don’t understand. If you understood, you would have been on a plane from De Gaulle back to Cleveland. You don’t understand. I had a chance to do this right, and I just made a mistake and fucked it all. And everyone’s split. And Dru. Dru’s gone for good.”

“I’m here, you sonofabitch.”

“And you’re the one who shouldn’t be. Of all of them, you’re the one I really could have saved from all this shit.”

“It’s because I wanted to be with you, you selfish fuck.”

He went limp, dropped to his knees, and took fistfuls of sand that drained through his fingers. He stood.

“I have to walk. I have to think.”

“Let me get dressed. I’ll go with you.”

“No. I’m not good company. Stay here.” He went into the shack, came out with a shirt on and sandals. He wrapped his arms around me and kissed me. His lips were cold. He put his sandy hands on my cheeks, kissed my forehead, neck, lips. His hands were shaking. He walked on, without words, and I watched him until he rounded a bend in the shoreline, and then he was gone from me. Forever wanderer, that beautiful man. He was gone from me.

He was gone.

So later, I went into town for a while, to the market, looking for breakfast, looking for him.

I came back to the shack and the dog was gone, and I thought DJ might have been inside, so I ran in, and there was his bag, drab canvas, and the money was inside, changed to rupees and American dollars. All of it. His share and mine—what everyone agreed should be mine after shooting Manchester Lou in the face.

At the time it seemed like a lot. But that’s just a function of how long it lasts. And that turned out to be about three weeks. It would have been longer without all the supplies we had to buy.

There was a note tied to one of the bundles. It said: I love you. Go home. DJ.

So by noon I was drunk at McManus’s. I’d given the bartender a bill that he said was enough that I wouldn’t have to worry about paying for the rest of the day, like an all-you-can-drink buffet.

That’s when Mia and Nathan walked in, all smiles, dressed sharply despite the rain.

“Junie,” Mia said. “We saw you from the street and just wanted to say hi.”

“Hey.”

“Are you O.K.?”

“Yes.” I turned, rubbed my eyes. “I’m fine. How are you?”

“Really great.” She smiled, and that said everything that needed to be said about the night before, which was that it was fun for them if it was fun for me, and we would just have a secret between us, and that I was always invited.

Strange how much can be said with the human face and a rush of blood.

“You want to come to the beach?” Nathan said.

“It’s raining.”

“Well, not too hard. Probably not until later. Thought we’d take a walk.”

“I’ve had enough walks for today. Stay and have a drink instead. They’re on me. Whatever you want.”

“O.K.,” Mia said, without conferring.

So I sat with them for nearly a minute and a half before she brought up Elephant Jumping, and then it was the topic for the rest of the hour, and I found myself a kind of self-styled authority on the subject.

DJ was gone, and it felt like another death, and it was more than I could handle. It was nothing but pain that I did my best to drown. I didn’t want to go home, not yet, and especially not now. Not after he’d told me to, and abandoned me. Like I couldn’t make it on my own.

So I found myself in an interesting situation, with these two who were just so eager to be Elephants but without the slimmest clue as to what that might entail beyond arriving uninvited at assorted locales. And they certainly wouldn’t have signed on if they’d known it meant truly severing ties and going on the road. But then, DJ would have never picked them up to begin with. But I was desperate. I was alone in India in the monsoon, Dru had gone and didn’t want to come back, my boyfriend had run off, claiming that he had personally brought about the downfall of his spiritual movement, and the rest were scattered to the four corners of the Earth along with my best friend, who had simply disappeared.

I didn’t have much of a choice, when you look at it objectively. I told them what I knew, and they listened, all wide-eyed, ever-eager, and we made plans to leave in a day.

*    *    *

“I’m sorry,” Gwen said. We were walking in Harajuku. “I didn’t know that’s how it happened.”

“What did you think? I just got greedy and ran? Maybe I kidnapped those two?”

“I didn’t know what to think.”

“I got left. Abandoned. I could have gone home. Probably should have. But I didn’t.”

“I should have been there for you,” she said. “We started this together. I was scared.”

“You’re not still scared?”

“Absolutely. But mostly for you. We’ll try to get you out of this, but I’m scared for you.”

“Well, that makes two of us, then.”

Unless you have been there, you have never seen such a place as Harajuku on Sunday. To explain it, you would need a sociologist and an artist. A psychiatrist, poet, and historian to boot. Maybe just a good photographer and some acid. There is no place on earth like Harajuku on Sunday.

Let me explain it this way: Japanese teenagers in costumes. Hundreds. And more than costumes, anyway. It’s, like, glorious plumage, sometimes colorful, often gothic. I mean, I once saw a kid in a full-on fucking duck costume. Swear to god. So the gothic costumes are deeply frightening. They do it the way it’s supposed to be done. Forget the fourteen-year-old in the mall with black pants, lipstick, the stud bracelet and a Marilyn Manson t-shirt. (Shit. That dates me pretty well, huh?) No way. Not a chance.

We are talking about Hollywood film quality, balls-out period costumes here, with makeup too, I mean, the sum total of the yield of a kid’s part-time job could just barely afford these things, but they spring for them anyway, so that they can be a part. So that they can be a part of Harajuku, I mean. Then there are the others, the ones who are even farther out, the sexy cat costumes, or cyborgs, or French maids, or the color red.

Why do they do it? I’m not sure. I can tell you that they sit around, on the ground, talking. Really just sort of being, like on display, and this, I guess, is the point.
We walked among it, Gwen and I, and she seemed to do her best to ignore it. Or maybe she was numb to it. But I’ll tell you that I stared. I watched them be. I was amazed. Since I started going through life with my eyes open (and I don’t know when that happened exactly) I have often been amazed. I have often felt sorry for people who don’t see with awe the things that I see.

And this place, it screamed, howled like bloody murder for people to look, and to be amazed. These kids were begging for it.

A long car with dark windows slid up beside us on the street. Gwen looked to either side.

“It’s time,” she said. “We have to get to Narita.”

“All right.”

We stepped over a girl dressed, I think, as an atomic explosion.

The car was cool and smelled of leather and rain. Gwen gave no instructions, but we began to move, slowly through the streets of Tokyo.

“So,” she said. “Tell me what happened in Thailand.”

*    *    *

The three of us flew to Kolkata (formerly Calcutta, formerly Kolkata, formerly Kalikata) because that night, the last night that most of the Elephants were in Goa, I met a guy on the beach who knew Jim and he said that tickets were cheap on Indian Airlines, and that sounded like as good a plan as any.

In Kolkata we smoked a lot of hash and drank, and this is when things turn hazy. I remember that we stayed in India for a while, because it’s just a comfortable place once you’re settled, because the streets are so full, the place so busy, so loud, it loses you. But not like New York. Not like Paris. Not at all. There is a density about the streets in Kolkata, an impossible consentration of humanity, of absolute poverty. It is a milling, roiling pack of flesh, of meat, of the heat of millions upon millions. And so you are completely alone there. Less than a drop in the ocean. Not even sand on the beach.

Mia and Nathan wanted constantly to see things, attractions, historic sights (of which there are many in the old capitol), but I told them that it just wasn’t my kind of travel. I told them that they could learn a lot more about a place from its alleyways and dumpsters, its television. Its strangers who become friends.

But they were often out and left me in the hotel bar, downing Indian beer of suspect quality and eating very little.

We left India and moved east by train, through Mandalay in Myanmar and eventually to Thailand.

And then we ran out of money.

Well, not quite. Mia had always carried a credit card hidden in the fabric of a pair of Nathan’s pants. The card, they said, had been a gift from Mia’s father, had practically no limit, and could get them home from anywhere in the world.

This, I told them, was not in the spirit of the endeavor. It fell on very young, deaf ears. Neither, I said, was being a phone call away from parents who would rescue them should the whole trip turn south. But that, and all of my advice, was met with eager agreement and complete inaction.

That was their modus operandi. And so, when we ran out of cash, I showed them mine.

Nathan wanted nothing to do with it. But not Mia. Mia was in from the start. Like she had something to prove. From the first time I told them how the Elephants had made money, and why we’d had to scatter, she was at me for details.

It was Nathan who wanted to call it off and go home.

We set up in Lampang, spent the last of our money on a somewhat Western hotel and some simple technology—an older computer, pirated software (pirated as only the southeast Asians can do it), and a high-end printer that had to be shipped from Bangkok. It took a week.

I was totally out of my depth. I was drowning. But I was a junkie for it anyway. They looked up to me, those two. Trusted me for some reason, and I felt like I knew what I was doing. I’d done it with DJ and Dru in Turkey with Syrian pounds. They showed me how. Mia and Nathan (Mia, anyway) seemed to have confidence in the process, and Nathan never said no.

This was gritty. It was their gutter-chic. It was the dirty adventure they’d toyed with, the wet ops. It was what they never talked about on the Travel Channel. This was real. And so they bought into it, because they, like me, were absolutely oblivious to the fact that we were doomed. The three of us, all together.

I should have seen that Mia was too into it. She was drunk on the idea and hadn’t really given it any kind of serious thought. I got the feeling that Nathan had, and he was edgy as hell, but she kept him in check with assurances that the whole thing was foolproof, which, of course, it was. Except for the fact that the three of us were idiots, it would have gone off brilliantly.

We came up with our first batch of bills on our eighth night in the hotel and celebrated with thai stick and sex. Well, they had sex. I drank straight whiskey and watched, and fingered the bills until about ten of them looked worn.

We printed baht. At the time, I’d suggested that we print kip. The Laotian currency is the kip. But the kip is worth next to nothing and isn’t freely convertible because of all the government tape. The Thai baht is worth more and is accepted everywhere. So we printed a stack of 1000 baht notes. The problem is that the baht has counterfeit protection straight up the ass.

The trick—shit, I probably don’t have to tell you this—but the trick is the paper. Technology is up to speed with anything you want to print, but the problem is, and has always been, the paper. The baht was no exception. In fact, the baht is exemplary of the problem. The baht has a high cotton content like American dollars. The better currency to forge has a really low cotton content. Now, it sounds like I know what I’m talking about, and I don’t want to give you that impression. I know about cotton content now, but at the time what I thought was that the easy currency to forge felt more like paper and less like cloth. American currency is almost all cotton. It’s very special paper and impossible to find. It’s made especially for bills, so the paper that’s used has to be processed to feel like the cotton stuff and oftentimes ends up feeling waxy.

In Thailand, we had no such problem. To me, the paper felt close enough. Of course, this wasn’t the case. This was actually pretty far from it. And the color (I really should have seen this), the color was way off.

See, for me, having been familiar with Thai currency for all of seven days, the bills looked clean and perfect. But imagine someone who’s grown up with it. It’s money, it becomes subconscious and ingrained. It becomes a matter of instant recall, a sudden twitch if anything’s wrong.

I should have known, anyway. But like I said, I was out of my depth.

So this was the plan:
In the morning, Mia and Nathan (they wouldn’t split up) would rent a scooter and take it to the country, to this little town we’d found that had a money wire service. It was about an hour away. They were more experienced travelers, and the scooter to the country was something I trusted their Lonely Planet sensibilities with, and so they got the job.

I was going to stay in Lampang and wait for the wire and then meet up with them at the hotel.

This is how it was supposed to happen. But by now you already know just how south things were about to go. Of course, by “south” I mean way, way, way fucking Down Under, Aurora Australis, McMurdo Station south.

Mia was excited. Too excited. She didn’t get the severity of this shit, and that worried me. I tried to talk to her before they left. I tried to explain that this was life and death. The End of Days if they fucked it up, and she said she knew. Third World countries with strained economies also tend to have the meanest laws and the dirtiest prisons. Don’t think this point was lost on me.

But she never stopped smiling.

Nathan said he’d make sure things went well. I believe that he believed what he was saying, anyway.

Before they left, I was collecting some things from the room. Clothes, toothbrush, things like that, and I found the credit card. They’d had it out of the hidden pocket. They’d used it and they hadn’t told me. The little coddled assholes. I didn’t think much of it at the time. I stuffed it into my bag and walked them to the lobby.

I tried to tell her one more time, but she just hugged me and left.

An hour later I went into the place where they were supposed to wire the money. I was about ten minutes early. I waited around. The wire didn’t come. I left, came back, the wire never came.

I never saw them again.

*    *    *

The car hissed along wet highway to the gates of Narita. A low jet howled overhead on approach, another on departure. Rain rolled along the glass.

“It was their fault,” Gwen said. “From what we know.”

“What happened?”

“They got hungry.”

“What do you mean?”

“They got hungry. They stopped at a little town on the road. They spent some of the counterfeit cash.”

“They fucking what?”

“Yeah. They spent quite a bit, actually. They bought food. Then Mia handed out a bill to this leper or something. That would be like handing fifty quid to a stranger in the Tube.”

“Why would she do that?”

“I don’t know. But she did. Quite a few times. The word got around that some American was handing out free cash, satisfying her middle-class white guilt, I guess. Word spreads fast. The town police hear, they look. They see right away that it’s fake. I heard it was even off-tone, Junie. I mean, it was the wrong color.”

“We ran out of magenta.”

Gwen shook her head. “They made it to the bank, but the police were already looking for them. They caught up to them about five minutes later.

“Jesus.”

“He stayed out of it. Nathan decided to run. On a scooter. A 50cc scooter. And the funny thing is, they actually got away. Briefly. They were up in the hills. Maybe twenty minutes out of town. And the rain picked up and we don’t know if they lost control or if there was a mudslide or something, but they went right over the edge.”

“No.” I must have whispered it. “Oh, no.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“It fucking was.”

“Well,” she said. “Maybe a little.”

“What then?”

“Well then they found Mia. The next day, in the bottom of a ravine. In bad shape. They found the money, too. Everything. They didn’t find Nathan until last week. He’d been washed downstream.”

“What happened to Mia?”

“They interrogated her in hospital. She sang, as they say.”

“Everything?”

“Like a beautiful bird. Yes. Absolutely everything. She knew all about you. Name, rank and serial number. But what else?”

“Nothing.”

“Think. What did you tell her about the rest of us?”

“Nothing. Maybe names.”

“Names?”

“First names. Only first names. I’ve only ever used first names for all of you. Except you. Maybe. I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember.”

“Most of the time we weren’t in our right minds. We were drunk and stoned. I don’t know what she remembers about us. Very little, I suppose.”

“Let’s hope it isn’t as much as I think it is.”

“Obviously.”

“You might want to consider surrendering.”

“What? Why the hell would I do that?”

“They might be easier on you. I don’t know. I’ll have to call Tally. She can get an American lawyer. But we need to get you home.”

“Home. Home where?”

“Home, U.S. Ohio. Cleveland, home.”

“Why should I go back there?”

“You’re an Elephant these days, Junie. Addicted to travel and running from the law. So it’s the—”

“The last place they’ll look.”

“We can only hope.”

So that’s it. That’s everything.

Almost.

We walked down a wide street, treelined and clean, the traffic steady, and about ten thousand people on the sidewalk ahead of us.

“Those two,” Gwen said. “You could not possibly have made a worse judgment call on those two.”

“Don’t give me shit, Gwen. I see that now.”

“You should have seen it then.”

“Do you want to hear this or not?”

“No. But I need to. So go on.”

“What’s your fucking problem? I made a mistake.”

“You made quite a few thousand mistakes, Junie.”

“I said I was sorry.”

“I’m allowed to be a bitch about this because I love you.”

“Where was I?”

“You left with Mia Aman and Nathan Corbit.”

“I never even knew their last names.”

“None of us did until last month.”

“What happened last month?”

“They found his body.”

*    *    *

The place they’d rented was, I guess, intentionally dingy. For atmosphere, I guess. To bring them down to the level of the people or something. I’ve never really understood travelers like that.

They’d been there long enough to have their things scattered around, and a couple of pieces of dyed cloth hung like art on the wall. The room was one of six in a small, two-story building, four upstairs, accessible by an exterior staircase, and two downstairs, where the small desk was, a pay telephone, and a clerk who lived in one of the rooms. They had moved the bed into one corner and laid a small, ornate carpet in the centre of the room.

We took seats on the floor around the carpet. Mia lit candles that smelled of vanilla and then two sticks of nag champa. We sat in the flickering light, shadows playing off the strangers’ faces.

These two thought they were seasoned travelers, but they didn’t get it. They didn’t understand it the way that DJ understood it. The movement and the severing of ties, the sense of place. Really living it and feeling it—not just hitting the bullets in the Fodor’s and moving on. These two were teddy bears from the suburbs, fawn in the woods.

I shouldn’t be so hard on them. The truth is, they’d been to more places than I ever had. The truth is, they were more dangerous than I ever gave them credit for, because they were so goddamn eager. That’s what gave us so much trouble later. That’s what did them in. And me.

The truth is, we were barely different, they and I.

So we sat in the candlelight, sweet nag champa up my nose and a breath of rum off my skin.

The rain was hard and slammed the tiled roof of the old hotel and the windows. We hadn’t walked far, but we were deeply soaked. Nathan took off his shirt and draped it over a line they’d strung from one wall to another.

“We have towels,” he said. “If you want.”

I didn’t.

Mia disappeared into a small side room, not so much a room as a closet with a single window. She changed into dry things, without modesty, though I suppose there would be no place for modesty in a room so small.

Nathan sat in shorts and shirtless, and Mia beside him. She opened a medicine bottle that she’d brought from the closet and tapped it out on the carpet. Small rocks of hashish, which she put into a glass pipe that lay near the candles.

The light flickered over Nathan’s muscles, and I watched intently as he moved, reached for the pipe, and lit it with some trouble, the lighter’s flint wet from the rain.

He passed it to me, and I hit it and forgot what I was smoking and so drew heavily on the pipe and then, well, then I forgot almost everything. I certainly forgot where I was, as you’d be prone to do when you have no context. I was with strangers in a strange place with little recollection of how we had come to this room, or even how I had come to be in Goa.

I was lost and watched the walls flicker, watched his chest, and there was no conversation between us, none, just the sound of breath, and I could swear that I heard the flames over the rain that rattled at the glass.

Then a fleeting sense of dread. I remember that. Pot didn’t have the effect that it used to, back in my twenties. And I don’t mean back three months ago in my twenties, I mean doobies in the dorms ’till dawn twenties, I mean back in my restless horny college twenties. And this was hash, so multiply the dread by ten when I thought of what would happen in the morning when Dru wasn’t there, and where DJ was at the moment, and whether he wondered where I was, and where I was at the moment, and whether I wondered where I was or where he was and where was home? But this was only fleeting, and then, at the risk of sounding totally daft, I “sank into myself.”

I wasn’t at all surprised when Nathan leaned into Mia and they began to kiss. I was disappointed, I suppose. That was first. And then I just watched because their kissing got deeper, and only once she broke away to look at me, and she smiled shyly, and they went back to it.

I leaned back, arms outstretched and hands to the floor, and tried to look at the ceiling to afford them some privacy. There was a fan there, turning slowly, and that was nearly as engaging as their liplock. I hadn’t thought of leaving. Not yet, and that was the alcohol again, I suppose. In Vino Veritas, to tell you truly, was probably a bunch of Prithvi shit, because I, sans four rum cyclones, would have been blushing and through the door by now.

But I stayed, and eventually I heard them shift and move to the bed, and so I rolled onto my side, propped my head up by my hand, elbow to the gritty wooden floor, and watched.

She didn’t look at me again, just that single shy glance, and neither did he, at first. He had her shirt off, the loose, dry, unbuttoned dress shirt, and I watched her breasts intently, athletically small, her arms strong, her shoulders and back well-defined. I don’t suppose I would have noticed any of this if the candles hadn’t been casting shadows, flittering in the draft.

Nathan looked at me, and this shift in his head and a smile—it was all a question in silence. I didn’t move, which was my answer, but watched them closely as they worked their way out of their clothes and turned to this holy knot of skin and light and eventually, glistening.

This was nothing like what I’d seen at that hideous sex show in the Red Light. This was love, I think. What I saw there between them in that room, it was more than their bodies. What I’d seen in Amsterdam was laughable (in fact, I’d laughed), but this made me ashamed that I’d even watched. These two people in love, two people tied together. What I had never had before and what I had always wanted. I wished I were between them. Just then, to feel them. Not the sex—to feel them in love.

In a while, I saw that Nathan came, and they slowed, and went still. Only gentle kisses between them. And when they had stopped, I stood slowly, as silently as I could, and left. I just walked out into the rain, and it felt wonderful. My skin had been burning; the blood in my face left me hot and heady.

I came back to the shack on the sand, went inside, and DJ was asleep. I undressed and dried myself with a sandy towel and slipped under the blankets with him. He shifted and woke, and without words we had sex, or maybe made love? I tried, though, to move like Mia had. I tried to make him feel what I felt. The longing and the need. I don’t know if I did, or even if I could, but we came together, and I went to sleep wondering, really wondering, if we looked like we were in love.

*    *    *

Gwen’s phone rang. She opened it and didn’t speak. She nodded and put it away.

“What’s wrong?”

“They just raided the hotel.”

“What do we do?”

“We keep walking.”

The sky over Tokyo had turned to grey mist. It dusted my face, a high, cool sensation, over my lips and in my eyes.

We came to a quiet place—quieter, anyway—a bench and trees. A Catholic church nearby. We sat for a while, watching people pass.

“Where are we?” I said. “What district?”

“Near Shibuya,” she said. “I think, anyway. You’ve been here longer than I have.”

“Don’t we have to go? You said they were here. If they’re coming for us, shouldn’t we get out of the city?”

“When you’re finished telling me what happened.”

“I can tell you on the plane.”

“No. I need to know before we leave.”

“Why?”

“Extradition law. I need to know what you did, so I can know where to take you.”

“Oh.”

“Was that it then? The last time you saw DJ?”

“I love the rain.”

“Junie.”

“I haven’t been out of the rainy season for months. I’ve been following it. And I haven’t really missed blue skies. You know, that’s something I remember. It’s been raining.”

“Well that’s something, at least.”

An American family passed, cackling, the mother dragging a fat child by the wrist, fighting, bitter, oblivious. Obese.

“Tell me about the last day you saw DJ.”

“It was bad. It was a very bad day.”

In Goa, the monsoon had not yet begun, though we waited with great expectations for the moon to rise, and for the rain. Silver sand and high tide surf on the Arabian Sea, DJ next to me, and the water warm, and I had no sense at all that this was the end of the world.

He was full of contemplative quiet, half a smile to punctuate it. This beach, he told me, had been the place of his birth.

There were drums through the night, beating hard and ceaseless against the surf, against the rattle of palm fronds and other drums, far away. DJ had told me stories of this place, of its strange, long history in the hands of the Portuguese, and the British, and later, its stranger history in the hands of the first of the Elephants, though they didn’t know their name yet, the hippies who came in droves to get high and wander naked. To “be”…whatever the hell that meant. He told me again of his mother, but in great detail, of how beautiful she had been, of who she had loved in Hollywood, and who she had known. Some of the names were familiar, most weren’t, most were producers and a few were stars. She’d had some bit parts, and they were grooming her, he said, but that was the year that she left for the first time, and that was the year that she never came home.

As much as he told me of Goa, he told me for the first time of himself, and he did so honestly, and that too was a first between us. He told me of the night of his conception (which, even with my newly open mind, did not sit well) and the night of his birth. There used to be, he said, a row of huts by the treeline. There, just beyond where the fence is now, the fence that wraps the new hotel.

He told me of how the place had been, and how the hippies had been, and how all the huts had been supplanted by hotels and hotels and hotels and shops, and all of the hippies replaced by western tourists on two-week holiday, diddling with hash and fantasies of swarthy young girls versed in the Kama Sutra.

Goa, he said, had changed. “I’m not nostalgic,” he said, nestling closer to me. “I was an infant. I never really knew this place.”

“You sound nostalgic to me.”

“For a time, maybe. Not for a place. But I do think you would have liked this beach much better then.”

“I like it well enough now.”

He ran his fingers through the sand. “The time I miss was the beginning. When I was old enough to remember. I remember her friends. I remember all the places. I remember the people who gave up everything. Whatever they had, I mean. They gave it up to go on the road.”

And then he told me again of the differences between (and his philosophies on) generations. Mine and his, his mother’s, all that had come before. And then he ended by saying something that amazed me: “The places, the destinations, are just a byproduct of the trip. When you realize that, then you understand. The Israelites wandered a long time to get to Canaan. They always knew where they were going, but it was the forty years that made them ready for the arrival.”

We had been drinking Big Boss fenny for most of the night, a cashew liquor of local extraction. DJ tipped the bottle up and took another drink. He went on. “You can wander for a long time. Years, even. But you need to wind up home. And you need to know that if the journey never produces a destination, then you’re on the wrong road. That’s what happened to all my mother’s people. That’s what happened to the hippies. That’s why they failed.”

When he got off on these tangents, he spoke almost entirely to himself. He would come to some revelation, usually a fairly convincing one, and then he would want to have sex. This was a very agreeable arrangement.

“Why did they fail?” I asked him.

“Pain and heartache are necessary symptoms of separation. That ache is the feeling when something ends and leaves a void, even one that’ll be filled by something better. They go together, you see? Symptom and product and process.”

I didn’t see. I rarely did. I drank more fenny. “Go on.”

“The destination is the product of the journey. Without the destination, the journey is moot, even though it’s the journey that’s the point of leaving home at all.”

“You mean, the only reason that the destination is important is because it frames the trip?”

“It’s a context. Yes. If you travel without a destination, at least in your heart if not in your mind, the journey will begin on a misstep. If you look for an answer without the right question, you won’t find it. You’ll just walk and walk, looking but on the wrong road from the start. Do you see my meaning? They failed because they were always looking but never present. Never here and now. They didn’t really know what they were looking for.”

“You almost make sense, you know that? You’re almost making sense to me.”

“That’s a dangerous threshold.”

“Do you want to have sex now?”

He smiled.

“Soon,” he said. “Let’s wait for the moon.”

*    *    *

Gwen and I walked in the cool shadow of a skyscraper, somewhere in the city.

“Was that the last time you saw him?” Gwen asked.

“No. We were waiting for the monsoon. Elephants were still jumping in from everywhere. Dru was there, too. She hadn’t left us after Amsterdam. I think she was looking after me. But she was tired. I don’t think I understood that well enough. I should have understood. I should have been better to her.”

“There’s still time, Junie. She isn’t dead.”

“I suppose not.”

“Is that when you met the Americans?”

“Americans? Oh. The Lonely Planeteers.”

“Yes.”

“Not quite. Soon.”

“Go on, then.”

“Where was I?”

“Goa. Waiting for the monsoon.”

“Sorry. I’m tired. I keep losing my train of thought.”

“Goa,” she said. “The monsoon.”

*    *    *

The week before the rains came, a dog started to follow us.

Until the monsoon began, DJ and I spent our days walking the streets, finding narrow alleyways and small shops, walking the dim but welcoming backwaters of the town, where the last of all that was genuine remained. Sometimes, he would hold my hand.

He lusted after anything that was left from the time before the explosive commercialization. And in those days before the rains, we found it together on sidestreets and in alleys, on hilltops where we walked the ramparts of the old Portuguese forts and looked down on the sea and the land of the abandoned conquest. We found it together, discovered something between us, something that I hadn’t known in years or ever, in the way he looked at me in long and pregnant silence with his dark eyes.

And so, as I said, it was around this time that the dog began to follow us, a filthy knee-high mongrel with a naked tail, worn bare by biting or a skin disease. I don’t know. At first, it looked vicious to me, and I held back as it passed us on a narrow street near the open market. But these things seemed to fascinate DJ. They turned him curious, and fearless; whenever he saw the abandoned or the miserable, he was drawn to them. And he had such a way with animals. He knelt, and without the hesitation one might expect from a wild animal embittered by the streets and starvation, it came to his outstretched hand and nudged it with its nose. DJ didn’t smile, but stared, just watched the dog and the dog watched him, both of them no doubt thinking how strange it is to be welcomed by a stranger like this.

DJ stood and we walked on, but the dog followed.

“He’s following us,” I said.

“It’s a she.”

“Either way.”

“She won’t eat much.”

“She might be rabid.”

“She isn’t rabid. She’s just alone.”

“Seems dangerous. Picking up stray dogs.”

“She isn’t stray. Her owner, or the person who feeds her, at least, is dead, I think.”

“How do you know?”

“Just a guess. She isn’t afraid of people, or my hands. She’s used to being touched. But she’s filthy, so I imagine she’s been living on the street for a while.”

“She belongs to a homeless person?”

“Belonged. Past tense.”

“Christ. That’s sad.”

“As is life. As are we all when we lose something dear.”

That grizzly dog, whatever her name had been before, didn’t leave us again that week except to wander into small market stalls and beg from people who seemed to recognize her. And then she would run after us, and at night, no matter where we slept, on the sand, or our tiny rented beach hut, or twice where we shouldn’t have, up on the ramparts, she slept near us, and was there in the morning.

Always, until the rain came.

About a week after we met the dog, I was in this bar…MacGuyver’s, maybe? No. Surely not MacGuyver’s, but a Scottish name like that. It was the kind of place that was frequented by foreigners and filled with Americans. It was the kind of place DJ hated. I left him at the hut on the beach and went to get a drink.

They made this special cocktail there, something very strong with rum. I was only on my second but already talking to strangers. Dru, who I had only seen from a distance all week, lying on the beach reading books, came into the bar, completely drenched, and sat down next to me at a low table in the corner.

“Where’s DJ?” she said.

“Didn’t want to come here.”

“He does hate these places. Americanized places in foreign locales. Or Americanized foreign locales. Pet peeve.”

“I’ve never been away from home for much longer than a week before. Now it’s been a month. More? How long’s it been?”

“About that long,” she said.

“I just wanted to hear people speak English for a while.”

“This is the place for it.”

I sipped the drink, and while it was very strong, it was highly consumable. I remember it fondly and have never been able to reproduce it.

“You know,” she said, turning to look at the bar, “I’ve seen a lot of these people before, but I couldn’t tell you their names.”

“Elephants?”

“Mostly. Travelers, anyway,” and she said this with disdain.

I sipped again. “Where have you been all week?”

“Around.” She paid special attention to someone in particular. “I’ve been keeping my distance.”

“You want a drink?”

“No. Look. Thing is, I can’t do this anymore.”

“Drink?”

“No. Jump. I’m over it. I want roots now.”

“You can have roots and still travel.”

“Not the way we do it. Not the way DJ does, I should say. Or you, for that matter.”

“I guess.”

“I want it back. I was a different person before, and things have just turned way, way south since we started this thing. I want out. I don’t want to go to jail, I don’t want to get killed, and if I can help it, I never want to point a gun at anyone again. That’s it. That’s why I came to talk to you.”

“You’re telling me that you’re leaving.”

“Yes. I’m telling you that I’m leaving.”

“You can’t.”

“I can. They have my description, a general idea of our MO. That’s all, though. They don’t have a video of me, as far as I can tell, and they don’t have my name. I can blend straight back into normal life, teach at a college somewhere, I don’t give a fuck. But I’m out.”

“You can’t go.”

“I’m already gone.”

“Dru. I need you.”

“You need me.” That wasn’t a question. It was just a statement of fact. “I never thought I’d say it, but I’m the only one with my feet still on the ground. I know you need me.”

“I do.”

“I told you to split in Paris. You had a ticket to go and everything. I don’t know why you went to Constantinople [she always called it Constantinople, never Istanbul. Never.] and I don’t know why you’re still around. Because the longer you’re in, the worse it gets for you.”

I was silent because I was searching for something witty to say. Something clever enough to get her to laugh, and maybe to stay. I didn’t find it.

“DJ will not save you,” she said, and she said it smiling, like, hey kid, I know what you’re thinking, but….

“I know that.”

“He can’t even protect you. He can barely take care of himself. He’s such a fucking idealist that he has no concept of the deep, deep shit that you’re in. He sits on the beach and philosophizes and the cops get closer. You want my advice? You kiss him goodbye and leave him tomorrow. Leave with other Elephants if you want, but leave him.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m in love with him.”

She shook her head and bit her lip. “So am I. But I guess you knew that.”

“Yes. I did.”

“Doesn’t matter now. Love won’t save you, Junie. It will make you stupid, and it will get you caught. Leave him. Leave him and go home.”

“I can’t.”

She breathed, long and slow, and resigned herself to it, I suppose. She stood from her chair and pushed it back in, prolonging her gestures and shuffling.

“Then take care of him. He doesn’t have sense enough to take care of himself. Take care of our guy.”

I sort of nodded.

“See you around.” She walked for the door.

“Jesus Christ, Dru, don’t leave!” Half the bar looked in my direction.But she was through the door, bent low, rain rapping the back of her neck.

So that was how it ended with Dru. This woman I’d come to need, somehow. A friend when I had so very few. One who had been with me from the beginning, who had been strong when I wasn’t, just walked out of this bar in Goa, and out of my life. And I was thinking that maybe she was right. Maybe it was time to go home, take her advice one last time (or for the first time?) and get the hell out of Goa. Whatever I was thinking at that moment, I know I didn’t chase her because it wouldn’t have done any good. None at all. Whatever I was thinking, I know what I felt. This deep hole where something used to be. I felt the void that comes at the end of things, before something new comes along to fill it. Before something better.
Eventually, on hard drink #3 or #4, I began to notice two people at a table across the way, looking in my direction as an aid to their conversation, which was presumably about me.

The girl was a dark and arresting type, long black hair loose over her shoulders. He was rugged and tan from the Indian sun before the rains had come. This is how I remember them. Now I know that I had seen them before, but this is the way that I remember them first. It was the alcohol, I promise you, but when they looked at me, I looked back. I stared. They were beautiful.

Eventually they both came to my table and asked if they could sit down. They could. They did. And they told me their names. Their accents were solidly middle American.

“Mia and Nathan,” he said.

“I’m Mia,” she said. “He’s Nathan.”

“I’m June.”

“We know,” he said.

“We’ve seen you before,” she said.

“In Seattle,” he said.

“And Saint Augustine,” she said.

“So you’re,” his eyes flicked down and back, “you’re an Elephant Jumper.”

“Yes,” I said. “I am.”

“Where did you come from?” Mia asked.

“You mean originally? Or most recently?”

“Both.”

“Most recently, Constantinople—Istanbul, I mean. Originally, Ohio.”

They brightened. “No way,” Nathan said.

“Yes way,” I said.

“We go to school in Columbus,” he said.

Mia laughed. “Isn’t that fucking wild?”

“I have found that it’s a very small and lonely planet.”

“Fucking wild,” he said.

They put off this vibe that, despite my drunkenness, I could intuit. The vibe being that these were people who knew about Elephants and probably called themselves Elephants to people who weren’t, but really were just cocky travelers, with all of the Travel Channel connotation and baggage included, pun intended.

I did not dislike them, and in fact, we spoke on cursory subjects for about an hour, like the places we’d been, the places we were going, and the mathematical odds of meeting someone in another country who was also from Ohio.

Which, after we did the math on a cocktail napkin, actually wasn’t all that
surprising.

Then they started asking about my first experiences with Elephant Jumping, and this is what convinced me, if nothing else had, that they were interlopers. They called it “Elephant Jumping” as I had when I’d first met DJ and the rest. Not “jumping” but “Elephant Jumping,” and not “Elephants” but “Elephant Jumpers” and occasionally, “Jumpers,” which is right out.

It was around this time that they started talking about hash, and they said that they had some amazing pills and some Charas hash back in their room and asked if I’d like to come.

I couldn’t have said no. They interested me.

We left the bar (McManus’s, that’s what it was called) and it wasn’t yet completely dark. In the street, which was rolling with water that came in torrents from the eaves of buildings that lined it, that dog was lying, soaked and skinny, waiting. She’d been waiting for me.

I’d never shown that dog any love. Only DJ had ever touched it. Only DJ spoke to it, and only DJ fed it scraps of food, but she followed me from that shack on the beach and waited for me, all that time in the rain.

“Oh that poor dog,” Mia said.

“Don’t touch it,” Nathan said. “Dogs in India are known to carry rabies and sometimes even plague,” which was such a fucking Lonely Planet travel guide thing to say. Though true.

I looked away and didn’t touch her, and she followed us for a while, until she disappeared, and I guess she went back to DJ because I didn’t see her again. Not that night.

11. LOST ON EARTH

The pub, which I’d been coming to all week, was dark, and the music that played was Celtic and traditional, from speakers in the ceiling. The beams overhead were beaten and worn, and at a place at the end of the bar, a picture of the Queen stared back. All prices were posted and outrageously high.

The girl behind the bar was Australian, and as she cleaned glasses and poured Guinness, I told her a story about the places I’d been in the time since I’d seen Amsterdam.

I told her in great detail, though I’d be hard-pressed to remember most of it now. It wasn’t until much later that I even knew how long it had been. The planes had given way to rented cars and crowded trains, and stinking buses eventually, when the ill-gotten money ran low. From Amsterdam to Paris, to Prague, to Bucharest, to the Black Sea. I remember that. I remember printing more cash in Constantinople. Istanbul, I mean.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The Australian asked what I was doing here, now, and I didn’t know. I asked her the same, and she said that she had come to travel, and to see the world. I laughed, and I think that put her off.

In the corner, there was a table of drunk Japanese taking endless photos of each other and throwing up peace signs for every flash. There were a lot of Japanese in the bar actually, and I thought that strange and unsuitable to an English pub.

The Australian charged me some amount for the last pint, and I waved her off, and she put it on the tab. I felt for cash in the dusty clothes I’d worn for a week, the long, loose dress of fine tussah silk that I’d bought in Ankara for two-point-five million Lira, which is, like, a dollar.

My delirium and general disorientation had come from a straight week of bad Czech absinth and sleeplessness. Both of these tend to collect behind the eyes and cause delusion—like mescal, only green.

Things had changed for yours truly, and she was not the one you knew when all of this started. She was not the twenty-something office rat, making lists for those more successful and more content in their lives. She was not thinking of love, as she knew that love would not save her. She was not thinking of leaving, or of tomorrow, or of something better. She was thinking only that she should probably not have given up all that she had, and that she was lost, somewhere on the planet Earth, with little money and no direction home.

So why had I not parted ways after the flight from Schiphol hit the ground at De Gaulle? I can only say that I wasn’t finished. I hadn’t yet become what I was becoming, and I wanted more time with DJ, the two of us in love before I left him. So I stayed, and what came after is what brought me here, and changed me, and was, at that moment, the subject of my treatise to the Australian bartender.

It so happens that, in the light of day and clarity of hindsight, she must have thought it was absolute bullshit and that I was drunk, which I must have been, already humming well and good on an assortment of beers and cocktails, and it was just two in the afternoon.

“Where are you staying?” she said.

I thought for a moment. “Seoul Royal.”

She raised an eyebrow at that. “Is that so.”

I thought about it. No. It wasn’t so. I’d made it to Seoul after I’d lost the Elephants I met in Goa, which was another story entirely. Another book, maybe. Just hang on. I’m getting there.

“That was last week,” I said. “I travel a lot.”

“I get that idea.”

“Yeah.”

The cluster of Japanese laughed. The song on the speakers changed. More fiddle and fife, or flute or whatever the hell.

But I couldn’t think of the place. I thought of the guy at the desk, but I couldn’t think of where I’d been staying for a week. I left in the morning to walk and to sightsee, and then came home so stupid drunk that I was surprised to find myself in bed the next day. But always, I mean always, alone.

“What do you do?” she said. “I mean, is it business?”

“Business,” I said. “No.” And that’s how I got off on the story, and that’s what I was saying when someone who looked like Gwen, but couldn’t have been, walked in.

She was dressed in very urban gear which, in some city (though I couldn’t tell you which) was absolutely the height of fashion. Maybe London. She looked very London. And her hair, still that beautiful beetleblack and slick, but longer now, below her shoulders. Anyway, I watched her come down the stairs, as the place was subterranean, into the room.

She took off her glasses and scanned the bar, and that’s when I said, “bullshit,” and went back to my glass, and my story, which had gone on long enough to catch the Australian up to my current situation, which was here at this pub, and so I don’t know what I was still going on about.

I looked again, just to make sure that it wasn’t, and when I was sure that it couldn’t have been, I blamed the alcohol and went back to my drink.

“Junie,” she said.

“It’s you. How is it you?”

“It’s me.” She nodded. She stepped forward and hugged me hard. “It’s me.”

“Where have you been?” I said.

“Where have I been, says the pot to the kettle. I’ve been in London. Where the hell have you been?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and specifically remember saying it because the Australian said, “She knows. Just ask her. Or don’t. She’ll tell you either way.”

Gwen nodded to her. She looked severe. The Australian shrugged and went back to wiping glasses.

“I thought you were interested,” I said, or slurred. “Bitch.”

“We didn’t know if you were O.K.,” Gwen said. “It took us a long time to find you.”

“Who’s us?”

“We’ll talk outside.”

“They left me in Thailand. The ones I met in Goa. I got left anyway.”

“I know. Are you O.K.?” She took my shoulders and looked me in the eyes. One, then the other.

“I’m fine. Your hair’s long.”

“Hair tends to grow, Junie.” Something seemed to occur to her. She spoke low. “Do you know how long it’s been since I saw you?”

“No.”

“Four months.”

“No it hasn’t,” I said, as if I were in a position to argue about time dilation.

“It has.”

“I just saw Dru and DJ in Goa.”

“That was three months ago. No one’s seen you since then.”

“I’ve been traveling.”

“We know that much. Everybody knows that much.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll settle this up. How much does she owe?”

“About three thousand,” the Australian said. “We’ll call it three thousand, anyway.”

“Jesus, Junie. It’s two in the afternoon.” Gwen slipped bills out of her pocket and put them on the bar. “Take whatever that is and let’s just say she’s a little detached from reality. Use it to forget whatever she told you.”

“We aren’t allowed to take tips.”

Gwen slapped down another bill.

“Is your name Gwen?” the Australian said.

“Why?”

“If it is, she’s been looking for you. Talked no end about it all week. But the rest I already forgot.”

“Good girl.” Gwen had this flicker of an accent that she hadn’t had before, above and beyond her usual inflection. Maybe it was just me. I’d been away a while. Maybe I just didn’t know what people were supposed to sound like anymore.
“Junie. Come on.”

I finished my drink, put down the glass, and followed Gwen up the stairs to the door.

It was bright. Damn blindingly bright, and it took my eyes forever to adjust, and I’m not sure that they ever did. The lights and bursting, strobing television signs on building facades, the traffic, and thunderous din. The stink. That city stinks. I stopped and went dizzy. Gwen held me up.

“What’s wrong. Are you all right?”

“Yes. I just…didn’t know where I was for a second. Can you believe that? I just thought…I just forgot where I was.”

“We’re in Tokyo, Junie.”

“Tokyo,” I said.

Yes, Tokyo. Now how in the hell had that happened?

*    *    *

The shower water was hot, and it burned, and I let it. It had been a while since I’d showered. It had been a week. That wasn’t like me, but then, I wasn’t like me. Still, filthy was not a state to which I had ever aspired.

I came into the main room of the suite wrapped in a hotel towel, and Gwen sat alone, her legs crossed, staring through a long glass wall that overlooked much of the Tokyo sprawl, obscured by haze, ever shifting, always building, tearing down, building again.

“Nice tattoo,” she said. “When did you get it?”

“A while ago. I don’t remember.” I looked at the elephant on my shoulder, then back to Gwen.

“We’ll have to get you checked for hepatitis.”

“Amongst other things.”

There was, I came to realize, unlike every other metropolis on the planet, no Tokyo skyline. Have you ever thought about that?

Paris and the Eiffel, London and that scene on the Thames, with Big Ben and Buck Palace, and the London Eye. New York (before and after that shitty day), but not Tokyo. Rainbow Bridge, Tokyo Wheel, Tokyo Tower, landmarks all, but not a one makes a skyline. It’s because the skyline changes. Because they keep their economy floating that way, a constant state of war against stagnation and age.

I looked over Tokyo and saw the highest buildings topped by steel girdered cranes, in the midst of creation. This is the Tokyo that I remember.

“What shit did you pull to afford this?” I said.

“I didn’t pull anything, Junie. We got some money together to come get you. That’s all. A lot of money. Mostly Tally’s.”

I sat and turned my body in the chair so she couldn’t see up my towel. My clothes were gone. “Tally?”

“Since we fell apart, she’s been into her father’s business. Businesses, plural. She won’t tell me much.”

“So she’s rich?”

“Suddenly, yes.”

“What about you?”

“Me? I am not. Though I have to say I couldn’t be happier about it. Great distraction, that. The money and all. You forget about the rest of it.”

She said this without smiling. She stared me down like she was trying to gauge me, like she was trying to see what had changed about me in the months I’d been away, maybe trying to see if she could trust me.

She folded her arms and slouched back into the chair. Chin to her chest.

“For all these years, all I did was bitch about money. I wasted so much time. You know I live with Jim, now?”

“How would I know that?”

“Small world,” she said. “We have a nice flat in Mile End. He likes it there. He doesn’t care about money, and he doesn’t want to move. Tally said she’d get us a place wherever we wanted. A car, a house. Engagement presents, she said. Jim could give a fuck. So I don’t care either, and we’re not poor, but we’re not rich either, and I say fuckall. What do you think of that?”

“Engaged?” I said.

She smiled. “When we landed at Heathrow and there were no cops waiting, he asked. The little celebrations, you know.”

“What happened to you?”

“People change.”

“Do they?”

“Sometimes for the better, I hope. Which brings me to you and your present state. Filthy. That’s not like you. You’re homeless and drunk.”

“What can I say?”

She sat back up, leaned forward, changed her tone. I think she decided to take a different approach. “Dru went to jail.”

“What?”

“Settle. Jail, not prison.”

“What did she do?”

“It had something to do with a human rights violation and a very horny cop. It’s unclear.”

“Where was she?”

“Georgia. Not the kind of place you want to find yourself in jail. But she’s out now. You can buy almost anything in Georgia. Fissile material, justice. Whatever. Tally got her out. Her connections, anyway. Her father’s connections.”

“You can buy fissile material in Georgia?”

“Not Dixie. The other one.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“I thought she was going home? Why was she in Georgia?”

“She was on her way to see Tally in Moscow. Traveling by rail. It was a very dangerous and stupid trip to make alone.”

“Where is she now?”

“Hiding. Recovering. I don’t really know.”

“Shit.” I thought I probably wouldn’t be far behind. “What about DJ? Have you heard anything from him?”

“Yes. I saw him before I came to find you. He’s fine. He’s very worried about you, Junie.”

I remembered the monsoon. I remembered the leaving. Walking off in the rain, all tattered and heartless. I shook it off. No reason to think about it now.

“What about Colin,” I said.

This made her smile. Just a corner of her mouth. She closed her eyes and shook her head.

“He’s paid the Russian government fifteen million dollars to fly to the International Space Station. He’s training for it now.”

“Are you fucking serious?”

“Deadly. He wants to put an Elephant in space. His words. Honest to god.”

I sat for a while, digesting it, and in the intervening silence, Gwen did very little but stare at me.

“Why’d you do it?” she said.

“I don’t know.”

“Junie, you have left a path of rampant destruction and police interest through most of Southeast Asia. The only reason that you’re not in jail is that you move too far, too fast, and you’re usually cash-only, and therefore anonymous. Usually, being the operative.”

She sounded very pissed. I didn’t like it, I have to say. Not because I disliked being condescended to, but because she sounded too much like my mother. It embarrassed me.

“Well,” I said, “you don’t have to worry about it much longer. I’m nearly broke, so I won’t be moving very far or very fast at all. Then they’ll catch up to me, I guess.”

“You don’t understand.”

No. I suppose I didn’t.

“They’ve already caught up to you. They’re here.”

“In Tokyo?”

“Oh, yes. And sometime today, they’ll find the place where you’ve been staying. You fucked up, June.”

Yeah. Now she was really pissed.

“You used a credit card for the hotel. You never, ever use a credit card. Why?”

“I’m broke.”

She stared. This hurt her, I could see. All kinds of raw emotion drizzling over her face. I knew that look. It was everything, all at once.

“What were you thinking?”

“I’ve been a little confused. Ever since DJ left. I was alone. I didn’t have enough money to get home. I didn’t want to go home. I got lost. Do you know what it’s like to be lost? On the whole planet, you don’t know where you are?”

“No. I don’t.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“I need to know where you’ve been for the last three months. Since Goa. That was the last time anybody saw you. Whatever you did, before they were just looking for the Elephants. Now they’ve made it a mission to find them.”

“I didn’t–”

“To find us.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Just tell me.”

“I want to take a walk.”

“Fine. Anywhere but here. I bought some clothes for you. Look on the bed.”

“Thanks.”

“I’ll be in the lobby.”

I stood. “Thank you for finding me.”

She shook her head. “Don’t thank me. Until we get out of Tokyo, we’re just swimming in the kettle together.”

“Still—”

“I’ll be in the lobby. Hurry. They’re coming.”

When we came out, it was dusk, and the breeze was cold, and the smell of fried food was heavy. Dru slipped the barker, who was now half asleep on a small stool, a little more cash, and we were gone.

I asked her where we should go, and she said that we should find DJ, who was either in jail or with Hotze at Arkology.

In all of Europe at that moment, and maybe the world, there was only Dru that I could rely on, and her only because she hadn’t lied to me yet. It wasn’t a mystery that she resented the turn her life had taken, and she would have turned back if she thought she could, now that all this had happened. She couldn’t. She was in it to the end.

That’s why when she went to a payphone and told me to wait a while around the corner, I did without a question or a doubt. So fifteen minutes went by, and twenty, and I walked around the block a few times, then looked at the payphone, and she was gone. So then, there was no one in all of Europe, in all of the world. There was only me alone in the Amsterdam nighttown, and without a soul to trust. I had a watch that I thought I could pawn for a hundred euros or so. Maybe less.

I started walking.

I was scared and still running on adrenaline and a lack of sleep, so I don’t know how long I walked or how far. But when a car came up behind me and I heard it slow, and the lights turned in my direction, I just walked to the side of the street, tried to see through the glare, and assumed I was under arrest.

“I told you to wait around the corner,” Dru said. “You fucking idiot.”

“Dru?”

“Come on. Quick.”

It was three hours later. I was scared. I was pissed.

DJ was in front with Hotze, and Dru was in the back. She opened the door for me.

“Move it,” Dru said. “We’ll be late.”

“Don’t need no attention,” Hotze said. “We get pulled over and you be about ten years late.”

“Where are we going?”

“Schiphol,” DJ said.

“Totally against common sense or my better judgment,” Dru said. “It’s like walking right into a police station and giving yourself up. This is stupid.”

“They don’t have her name,” DJ said. “She can fly freely. They still shouldn’t have yours, and I’m flying on a counterfeit. A good one, too. So don’t worry about it.”

“I am worried about it,” she said. “They know something. They asked for our IDs in the fuck show. They either know I’m American or they have a description. I don’t know. But I’m not anonymous. And you shouldn’t assume that she is either. I’m worried. I’m very fucking worried.”

She looked at me, her eyes bright through the dark. I noticed she was wearing makeup. Quite a bit, glossy wet lipstick, a black dress.

“You do have your passport, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. I felt for it, panicked quickly when I didn’t find it and then remembered that I’d stuffed it into my back pocket. “Yes.”

“I told you to stay around the corner. Colin set up tickets. I didn’t want you to know where I was going in case they were camping out. I didn’t want them to find you and have you tell them I was coming back. That’s why. Damn it.”

“Lay off her, Dru,” DJ said. “It’s O.K.”

She sat back, and the light from the city at night threw shadows across her face, long streaks that moved and cast her features in sharp contrasted lines. I thought then, through feeling tired and dirty, mostly that Drusilla had been good to me through everything. I thought, yes, that she was beautiful.

*    *    *

There were police at Schiphol. There were always police at Schiphol. Security and everything. I’m not sure that they were looking for us specifically, but they definitely should have been. That’s why Dru had changed her appearance like that, and DJ, I only noticed when we got out of the car, had cut his hair and dyed it deep brown.

“Best of luck,” Hotze said in the loading and unloading lane, then dropped us off and was gone as fast as he could without peeling the tires.

“Out of the fucking frying pan,” Dru said.

“Have some faith,” DJ said.

Faith in what, I have no idea. Still, I didn’t have much faith in Dutch law enforcement, so that was something, at least.

“You know how I feel about faith,” Dru said.

“Then wish us luck and shut up.”

“I need to call someone,” I said.

“We don’t have time,” DJ said.

“Who?” Dru said.

“My mother.”

DJ’s eyes were wide at that. “Really?”

“Yes. Really.”

There was, between us, palpable tension in the silence. A pregnant pause, you might say.

“Why?”

“Because I need to. Just because.”

“Do it when we land,” Dru said.

I waited.

“Give her your phone.” DJ turned to her squarely.

Dru fished it out of her carry-on. She slapped it into the palm of my hand.

“Throw it away when you’re done,” she said. “Don’t let anyone see you.”

I nodded.

They turned and walked to the sliding doors.

I didn’t know what time it was in Ohio. I guess it didn’t matter. Either way, my mother answered.

“June. Where are you? Where have you been? I tried to call yesterday but–”

“It’s not important. I’m O.K.”

“You haven’t answered your phone in three days.”

“I’ve been busy.”

“Someone called here for you. Her name was Leanne. Do you know a Leanne? She said you worked together, but you’ve never mentioned her. Is she a friend?”

“Not really.”

“Are you in trouble?”

“No. Listen. Do you have the extra key to my apartment?”

“Yes. Why?”

“I need you to do me a favor.”

“What is it?”

“Sell everything.”

“What? No. What’s wrong with you? What happened?”

“Put it in storage, then. I don’t know. I’m not going to be home for a while.”

“How long? Where are you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t really know.”

“What’s happened? Oh my god, June. Are you in trouble? Just tell me.”

“I can’t.”

“This is so typical of you. You can’t just leave. You can’t just sell everything. It is so typically irresponsible.”

“No it isn’t,” I said. “There is nothing typical about this, Mom. There’s nothing typically me about this.”

“June–”

“I love you.”

I hit end. I tossed the phone into a garbage bin and followed them inside.

*    *    *

My problem was that I was sweating. Sweating like, I don’t know, my grandmother used to have quite a few very racial idioms for sweating. I was pouring, anyway. I was terrified.

Every glitch, and there were many, had me on edge. Right up on my toes and ready to run. DJ’s passport (a South African passport of high visual quality but low technical substance) refused to scan. Eventually, and in a thick accent, he convinced them that it was an older issue and they had changed the scan algorithm, and something about a barcode checksum. It was absolute bollocks. They believed it, and we got through.

Then I got some kind of random number on my ticket that told them to harass me at every juncture, though the harassment was minimal as I didn’t have a carry-on.

It was only a visual check of the passport at the gate, so no problem with the checksum, and no problems with Dru at all, as far as I could tell. Just me, sweating like mad. I disappeared into the bathroom briefly and that caused a commotion with Dru.

Something funny that I didn’t think about until we boarded and I was seated (oh yeah, first class by the way. Do you know what goes on up there? Thank you, Saint Colin) was that the boarding pass mentioned airport names, airlines, times and flights, but not a country. Until I asked this good-looking South African named Daan Janssen, who had been conveniently seated next to me, I hadn’t a clue what country I was bound for. That was the first time I was ever lost in the air.

I didn’t stop sweating until the plane took off. That’s when I knew no one was coming aboard to haul us off. That’s when I knew, finally, that we’d gotten away with it. Maybe just for another day, but still, that would be a day not spent in prison.

In the air, and somewhere near our cruising altitude, I finally got to join that club I’d been thinking about. Yes, oh, yes. I did it in the first class bathroom with the South African who was nice enough to donate his time.

Dru slid into an empty seat half an hour later, across the aisle from me, DJ sleeping against the window.

“This is a Boeing 777-200,” she said. “First launched October, 1990. First flew, June 12th, 1994. Certified and cleared, 1995. First customer delivery to United in May of ‘95. Do you know anything about planes?”

“Not really.”

“I know too much.”

“You should tell me about them sometime.”

“When we get to where we’re going, we’ll split up. You can go home from there, no trouble. So I just thought I’d say goodbye.” She was whispering. “I don’t think we should speak after we land.”

I looked at DJ, still humming a little from the bathroom incident, wished he were awake to tell me it was all right to go. I didn’t tell Dru that it was already too late. That I was in it like she was. To the end. I wondered about Gwen.

“You’re lucky,” she said. “Don’t be stupid. Just go home and remember us fondly. That is, Junie, I strongly suggest that you go the fuck home.” She smiled sweetly. “I’ll miss you. But it’s best.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s best.”

She went back to her seat, and we didn’t speak again. I put my hand over DJ’s and turned off the light over my head and slept.

And that was, all of this, the end of my twenties.

Looking back, with hindsight and all that, it wasn’t a bad way to spend my thirtieth birthday. My twenties, like all the things that had happened to me in the last months of that decade, are a place I think of often, visit fondly, and against all of my expectations and preconceptions, a place I left agreeably, amiably, and with much hope for the future.

Yes. Much.

Dru just laid her foot down on the gas, as if the car might have actually been able to outrun the police (which it couldn’t have) and as if we might have gotten away if it had (which we wouldn’t have). She didn’t take it out of second, and the engine screamed. One of the police vans came over the bridge and fell into pursuit behind us, lights flaring and the siren howling in that annoyingly foreign way.

We came to an intersection, a wide boulevard over the canal, and Dru cranked the wheel and it felt like we might flip. We fell in behind a bus and into traffic in all lanes. The police followed behind, three cars that I could see, and I’m sure there were more trying to cut us off ahead.

Then, without precursor, and with only a quick look over her shoulder and behind, Dru swerved into oncoming traffic and accelerated. I think I screamed. DJ was looking back with his arm up and a fist clenched around the handle over the window. He wasn’t looking at me. He was watching the pursuit, which came hesitantly in our wake, past cars that had been run off the street, onto the sidewalk, and one right over into a canal.

Dru’s head was twitching back and forth in a quick and subtle way. I don’t think you could have noticed if you weren’t looking for it, but I was, because she did that when she had to see a thousand things at once, and I’m sure her eyes were scanning everything and everyone, hypersonic. Because we didn’t hit anything. She just watched the cars far ahead, slamming brakes and fishtailing, careening into oncoming traffic. Dru is also frighteningly talented at chess.

But the cops still came, and then a few more joined from sidestreets, and we were really almost surely doomed. I couldn’t see any way out of it. Dru, on the other hand, was calculating her odds. I had always thought that people like Dru saw equations in their heads, numbers flying around and canceling each other out. That’s how I’ve always done math. I have to see the numbers. But Dru told me once, long after, that it just happens, more like a feeling when the numbers work. She doesn’t see them, she just feels their bulk and feels them when they slot into place.

That’s what she must have been doing in that moment, and it must have been the moment when the tumblers came up cherries because she swerved hard into an alley that was barely wide enough for the car. She slammed the wall and took off the mirror, sparks flew, though only a few, as the car was composed primarily of plastic.

In front of us, at the end of the block where the alley opened up again, a police van went by. We hit a set of garbage cans midway through the alley, and a spray of something very wet and rotten hit the windshield. Dru threw on the wipers and the car started grinding, making this awful sound like death, but she swerved left and right, in tight turns not long enough for us to hit the walls, and the garbage can that we were dragging came loose, rattled under the tires, and it was gone.

We came out of the alley, nicked the front of an oncoming car and turned the opposite direction the cops had been going and now were apparently free of them. Until they came up behind us, going faster and maneuvering quicker than Dru could.

I was completely lost, and DJ (who probably wasn’t, after living here for a few years) was not giving Dru directions. He either agreed with where she was going or thought that it didn’t much matter.

We came to an open space, a roundabout with a tall monument in the centre, a pillar, the kind of thing you see on the Travel Channel. The circular terraced steps around it were covered with people, eating and talking. I saw these things, though not for long, as Dru squealed around, end of the car fishtailing like a fucking stunt driver, at just the right angle for it to catch up with the front of the car, and we were off again, and the police close behind, splitting to either side of the monument, a few getting lost in oncoming traffic, slamming into walls and cars, and scattering pigeons.

I suppose most European cities don’t see car chases. They don’t have the room for it, or the disposition, and car chases themselves seem to be a primarily American invention. The police have never been trained to be evasive in traffic, or to pit. Pitting, I learned from COPS on television, is a great skill and a hell of a lot of fun to do on the practice course, and in life.

As Dru pulled more and more ballsy moves, up on the sidewalk, just slow enough to let the pedestrians scatter, the cops fell farther behind. Still in sight, but receding behind a frantic and tumultuous panic.

Dru came to a bridge very much like the one I’d kissed DJ on. A high, sharp arch. The kind you wouldn’t want to take at more than ten or fifteen miles an hour. Dru took it at forty. DJ saw what was coming and braced himself, and Dru started to howl (hoot, maybe? I don’t know, whatever it is that cowboys do) and we launched over the top of the bridge and went thoroughly airborne.

When we hit, we smashed the front end, and the hood was crumpled so that I’m not sure if Dru could see, so she was flying, as they say, on a wing and a prayer. But I hit my head fairly hard on the back of her seat, and the car started making a rumbling and grinding noise and spraying sparks over the cobblestones. That’s about when Dru stopped cowgirling. When she couldn’t hear herself anymore.

“Here,” DJ said. “When we stop, run.”

“Where?” I said.

“Doesn’t matter. Go with Dru. I’ll catch up.”

So Dru turned the car into another very narrow alley, this one lined with neon and windows. She pulled the wheel around, and the car went up on two wheels, and when it came down it was wedged intractably between the walls of the alley.
DJ forced open his door, fighting the bent frame. Dru crawled across and fell out. Both of my doors were jammed.

“Come on,” she said.

I scampered. Yes, scamper would be the word for it, up between the two front seats and got out about the time a cop car turned into the alley and saw that it was barricaded.

Women in g-strings and no tops had come out into the alley to see what had happened. They spoke among themselves. We ran the gauntlet, some of them laughing, and, in Dutch and hints of Russian, cheering us on. DJ broke right, Dru left, and I stood for a second at the mouth of the alley before DJ yelled, “follow Dru,” not looking back, and sprinting.

I did. I followed her. And we ran for a short way, but she was out of shape, and while adrenaline can take you places, it can do so only within certain running distance. We slowed, and she turned and looked back, then doubled over, hands on her knees and gasping when she was sure they weren’t on our tail.

“We have to get off the street,” she said, panting.

“I know. Where?”

She stood straight, coughing, hacking really, looked up the street and down it. She spit.

“Fuck show,” she said. “Come on.”

“What?”

“Let’s go. Now.”

Of course, when I said, “what,” I hadn’t meant it rhetorically. I literally wondered what she meant, because in my very short time in Amsterdam (what was it, twenty-four hours? Felt like a week) I hadn’t yet made it to the Red Light. I’d been busy pulling DJ. I’d been busy now, running from the police. No time for sightseeing.

She stopped in front of a very colorful storefront. Noisy colorful, yellows and reds and endless tiny posters, with naked women, triple Xs, hardcore sex. And very clearly, on a sign with small red bulbs that flashed in sequence, LIVE SEX SHOW!. A barker, like a carnival barker (which I had only seen in movies, never in person) spoke in English directly to us. “Come on in. Hot time. Americans get special half price.”

“Yeah.” Dru reached into her pocket and pulled out some bills. She handed them over.”

“No,” the barker said. “Euros only. American, too.”

I looked at the bills in his hand. They were rubles.

“Fuck me,” Dru said. She reached and yanked the bills back, tried a different pocket, and handed over euros.

“Hehe.” He didn’t laugh. He just sort of spoke, hehe, and gestured that we could go inside. It was dark. It smelled of ganja and sweat. And something else. Something like, unclean, uh, dirty…well. I don’t know how to say “unclean vagina” in a literary way.

“What are we doing here?”

“Hiding.”

“But why here?”

“It’s dark and it’s anonymous.”

The floor was sticky.

“What happened to DJ?”

“He can take care of himself. Don’t worry.”

And then, after a little hallway, we came into a room that looked like a tiny theatre. It was, actually, a tiny theatre. With five semicircular rows around a circular stage with a bed. The chairs were folding and wooden.

I was surprised that it was actually somewhat full. We went to a middle row and sat among a crowd (well, I wouldn’t exactly call it a crowd) of high school-aged boys of varying nationalities, older men, and a few couples, there for novelty or inspiration.

“Why do Americans get a special price?”

“Because everyone loves Americans.”

“That’s nice,” I said.

She looked at me. “Are you crazy?”

“Why?”

“Because nobody likes Americans. Nobody. Everybody gets the special price.”

“Oh. But how did he know we were American?”

“It’s something you just learn to accept. I don’t know how they do it, and other than the clothes, I don’t know what vibe we put off, but no matter where you go, Europe or otherwise, people will just know that you’re American.”

“That’s bizarre.”

“If you’re lucky, they’ll think you’re British.”

And then she whispered, spoke low and came close, like she was really passing me a secret, and so it turned out, it was a good one to keep in mind. “And if they peg you for a Yank in some place where it’s not such a good thing to be, just say you’re Canadian.”

“Canadian?”

“Yes. People feel sorry for the Canadians, like they’re just harmless victims of the American rep. Keep a Canadian flag pin around so when you travel to places like that, you can wear it.”

“Places like the Middle East or something?”

“Well, places like everywhere on earth that isn’t America. Including Hawaii.”

Around that time, what little light there was in the place dimmed. I thought we must have had good timing, but they run these constantly, often without pause, and all day.

The stage brightened, a lot of red light around, much of the stage in pale blue. A man came out, really skinny, and a complexion that looked like he’d never seen the sun. He had a few tattoos on his arms and was fully naked, scraggly unshaven pubes over a well-hung uncircumcised unit. Probably freshly enlarged from the pump backstage.

Then a woman came out, sagging breasts, maybe thirty-five or older, but definitely the product of unfortunate genes and gravity. She knelt in front of the guy and sucked him until he was hard and then turned around and rested her elbows on the bed so he could go at her from behind. She moaned, he moaned, said some things in Dutch, then a few other really stilted sexual phrases in English, like:
“I am fucking you now.”
“Yes yes.”
“I am doing the fucking.”
“Yes oh yes.”
“Ride cock bay-bee, ride cock,” et cetera.

With the English-speaking patrons satisfied, they went back to Dutch, which was probably just as stilted, because I recognized from their accents that they were both some flavor of Russian, anyway.

He moved a little faster, and her tits started swinging dangerously. Like, with a few more inches, I thought they might have given her a black eye.

“Do my rod, bay-bee….”

“Stuff me, your pole inside….”

“How long should we stay in here?” I said.

“As long as it takes.”

“For him to cum?”

“Who? DJ?”

“No. Him.”

“Oh. Cum, not come.”

“Yeah.”

“No, you fucking space cadet. Did you hit your head in the car?”

“Yes.”

The guy stopped, laid her belly-up on the bed, and raised her legs in the air. He held her by the ankles and started again.

“We stay until they either come to arrest us or I feel like it’s safe to go outside.”

“How long will they let us stay?”

“You are the wetness.”

“Your cock like horse, so long….”

“As long as we want. I paid him enough that we could stay in here until tomorrow if we wanted. But it won’t take that much time.”

He let one leg down, did a few pumps, turned her back over so they were both on their knees.

“Do you think anyone followed us?”

“They would have been here by now.”

“Did anyone see us?”

“You are the wetness,” he said, “wetness poo-see in world.”

“I doubt that,” Dru said. “We were running too fast.”

That’s about when the lights came up. The two on the stage stopped their show. The guy put his hand up to shield the stage lights. There was a clamor in the hall and an announcement.

“Speak of the fucking Dutch devil,” Dru said.

“Oh my god.”

“Settle.”

“I’m settled.”

“You’re shaking.”

“Shit.”

The police, a few of them, were moving from face to face, looking everybody in the eyes. Dru turned in her chair, craned her neck, and was suddenly over me with her tongue in my mouth. I tried to pull back. She stopped and whispered, half an inch from my face, her hot breath over my lips. She said, “Look like you love it. And don’t talk.” And she went back to kissing me, and I, I suppose, went back to kissing her.

Dry lips, but soft, and hot breath, and she smelled of soil, rich and wet. Her hands were in my hair, fingers on my scalp, bringing me close to her, and her tongue darting over mine. I’d never kissed a woman before. Not like that. But given that it was a generally positive first experience, I would probably do it again.

“Draaien, alstublieft,” a cop said.

Dru moved back and was suddenly British. “Whatta you want?”

“Turn around please,” the cop said.

She squinted and looked at him.

“Do you have identification?” he said.

“Maybe.”

“May I see it please?”

“Fuck.”

“May I please see identification?”

She reached into her pocket and pulled out a passport. It was British.

The cop called someone over. Another uniform. They looked at the passport together. Compared the photo.

“And you?” he said to me.

“Moi?”

“She don’t speak English,” Dru said.

“Nederlands?” the cop said.

“Not that neither.”

“Does she have identification?”

“Il veut savoir si vous avez l’identification,” Dru said.

“Pardon?” I said.

“She says no.”

“How long have you been here?” the cops said.

“Quite a while,” Dru said, and raised her eyebrows in my direction. She laughed and kind of nudged me. “Quite a bit.”

The barker from the front door was standing in the room, at the stage, trying to talk to the performers. The cop called him over and asked, presumably, how long we’d been there. The barker then, presumably, decided that the amount of money Dru had slipped him was sufficient to lie and then, also presumably, he did so.

The cop handed back Dru’s passport and they moved on.

In another minute, the lights were back down and the barker was apologizing to the crowd. He said something angrily in Dutch to the two who were still on the stage, though somewhat stunned and certainly deflated. The Russians went back to sucking and fucking and eventually we were back to where we’d started.

Save for the fact that I could hear my heart and my legs had gone numb.

“That was absolutely excellent,” Dru said. “I could kiss you.”

“You did.”

“Sorry about that.”

“Don’t be.”

The guy on the stage flopped the girl over and pumped her some more. They did it missionary for a couple of minutes.

So how long should we stay in here now?”

“I’d say an hour. An hour would really make me happy.”

“I cummink,” he said. “I cummink now!”

He pulled out and she knelt on the floor in front of him while he stroked himself. He spoke in Dutch. She spoke in Dutch.

“Where’d you learn to drive like that, anyway?” I asked, watching now, closely, as this part of pornography always made me curious.

He made this ridiculous face and arched his back, one hand on his scrawny, bony ass. “Da,” he said, “Da!”

“It just comes naturally,” she said.