There were at least a dozen crumbling hostels in outer Pest, but the Station Guesthouse was by far the most decaying of the lot. I suppose it was easy to get lost among the graffiti-tattered walls, adorned with the poetic wisdoms of beer-swaggering travelers, and feel instant comradity in the wandering, stoned souls that lay strewn about, but I never could understand what made Joe stay for so long. This place had a reputation for captivating the confused, which most backpackers inherently are, and from what I could gather, many three-day trips often spiraled loosely into weeks and months. The legend, according to a slew of backpacking web sites, was that when groups would come stay, one or two would inadvertently find inspiration in the plastic-thin walls and cardboard beds, and join the campground of long-term residents on the top floor. They came and went, but there were four infamous ones — Chase, Todd, Jay and Mark — who had appeared a few years back, at different times, and had readily adopted the Station Guesthouse as their permanent home.
The other boarders usually occupied a variety of different personalities — four to be exact. There were the devotees, who traveled aimlessly around European cities with two staples, cigarettes and a Sartre book, and whose beer-of-choice was already awaiting them as they staggered unexpectedly into the cloth lobby; the London-Paris-Amsterdam crowd, who stumbled upon the anomaly when highlighting the words, “fun bar,” and were letdown when they discovered their locale served Mickey’s instead of martini’s; the easy-living travelers who assimilated nicely into the guesthouse mantra, and stayed up swigging Jack with the owners (and, of course, Chase, Todd, Jay and Mark), spewing out tales of drug-induced epiphanies and signing their lives away in Sharpie on the guesthouse walls; and, lastly, the quiet intellectuals who returned tired and lonely from the comings and goings of a strange city, who smelled the companionship of the others but couldn’t taste it, and were easily forgotten as soon as they stepped out of the felt-covered door.
The last postcard I’d ever received from Joe had three scrawled words on it, and bore the guesthouse’s address. It wasn’t dated, and had already yellowed at the ends, so I had no idea if Joe was still here, but I had a feeling that he had come to Budapest looking for something; something more intangible than law books and coffee machines, something to erase the gradual realization, which comes with getting older, that everyday life is merely a string of unexciting events. I’d accepted it; found solace in morning jogs and dinners out, in upgrading to a new apartment with a Whirlpool refrigerator, in the miniature luxuries that, in my college hood days, I’d dismissed merely as indications of becoming boring. But, after sixty-hour work weeks and law classes in the evenings, boring had taken on a new connotation in my life. Boring was comforting, even savorable at times. The restlessness of my early 20’s had become an element of nostalgia, shelved away next to the red padded push up bra I’d stolen from my older sister before I began to develop the real thing, or the neon spandex everything of my middle school days.
Joe had a harder time. He still held onto the fear that we would become our parents, and that everything artificial and ordinary about their lives would soon seep into ours; that, one-day, we’d end up indistinguishable, with a mortgage for a stucco house on a tree-lined street. I had always thought of these conversations as dejected musings, the onslaught of a grueling week or an upcoming car payment. Sometimes I participated, bringing up the backpacking trip to Peru that we’d planned and never taken, or the three weeks we thought we were going to run with the bulls in Pamplona before I realized the bloody actualities of bull fighting. But mostly I just listened, as he lamented over lost time, and fantasies we’d never even had. I wondered if he’d found those fantasies here in Budapest- if the guesthouse’s rum stained couches and hedonistic indulgence had been able to appease him in ways I couldn’t.
Chase was the first guesthouse resident I met. He sat on the steps between the third and fourth floors (the first floor was the lobby/pool room/bar, second was the doubles and private rooms, third bathrooms, and fourth was the aforementioned campground), smoking the filter of a cigarette.
“I don’t know what to do today,” he said to the stale air.
I was quiet, but then he pointed his face towards me, expectantly.
“Well, what do you usually do?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Work, I guess. Hang around. Get stoned and walk around the city, but I get sick of doing that by myself. Do you want to come?”
I did.
Chase shuffled his hands around in his pockets, and lit up a half-smoked joint.
“You first,” he said. “You’re new.”
I took it gratefully, and set down on a step one lower than his.
“So where do you work,” I asked, guessing that easy conversation was probably a suitable repayment.
“I’m a tour guide… like I do the pub crawls at night and sometimes a bike tour if someone else is sick. Oh, and I’m Chase, so you know. It pays like shit. But I get to drink on the job, and the people are chill. And I don’t need to make much – just enough to keep living here and keep this place supplied with dope. I make a pretty good living off of selling that, more during the summer.”
“So you live here all year round?”
“Yeah. There are 3 other guys who live here, and they’re cool. Have you met them?
“No, not yet.”
“Yeah, they’re cool. Lazy as shit, but cool.”
Chase rambled on, and I provided the appropriate oh’s and totally’s as he talked. The place wasn’t heated, and the February chill was creeping up the stairs. I tried to hide my shivering, and Chase was too preoccupied in his description of a Parisian strip mall to notice. I studied the wall behind him; the scrawlings were a mix of badly reiterated quotes, a few odes to beer and other guesthouse staples, and a slew of poetic stanzas. I could see some aspiring Bukowski’s, a few William Carlos Williams’, even a Nietzsche or two.
“Do you know what would make this better?”
“What?”
“Beer.”
I nodded, and Chase retrieved two Pilsner’s from a mini-fridge on the fourth floor.
“Sometimes I don’t like going all the way downstairs,” he said.
I took a gulp of mine and smiled, hoping that after a few more of these, I’d be able to tell Chase that I wasn’t another backpacking wanderer, and ask him if he’d ever met a tall, blurry-eyed boy and could tell me what it was he’d found that had taken him away from me.
“So, I always give those kids the same speech, and I say it real fast and they basically think I’m an asshole,” he paused for emphasis. “My name is Chase and I’ll be your tour guide today. I’m originally from Canada, and yes, I’ve done porn, and no, I’ve never done gay porn. We’re going to drink some beers, do some shots and have some fun. Don’t be an asshole to anyone or I won’t have your back. Any questions?”
I laughed.
“Do you want to try saying it fast with me? It’s not that hard after awhile. I usually do it two or three times a night. They think I’m being funny so they always ask to hear it again.”
I could definitely see him doing porn. Something about him, even him clad in plaid shorts and sporting a pinkish-blue Mohawk, suggested a sexual force as innate as cultivated.
“So is this your first stop? No one comes around here during these months. Summer is out of control. This place is a fucking madhouse. But I like these quiet months too… sometimes even better.”
“How long have you lived here?” I asked, hoping to shift the focus back onto him.
“About two and a half years,” he said. “I keep thinking of picking up and moving on, but I’m so used to it here. And it’s hard to find places like this, you know, ones that are so homey. The people here are like my family, and they were, from the second week I lived here. I had a job back home when I first came here, and a girlfriend. And then when I was here, all of that seemed so far away, kind of… inconsequential.”
I heard his voice as if it were Joe’s. Two and a half years… that meant they’d known each other. I wonder if they’d bonded over their isolation together, reveled in their independence from those that still clutched onto them.
“Was it?”
“In a way. Nothing’s ever what you expect it to be anyhow, so yeah, I guess it was.”
“What about your girlfriend?” I heard myself ask.
“Do you mean how do I feel when I think about how my ex-girlfriend probably won’t ever talk to me again, and, for all I know, is probably knocked up and married?” Chase laughed. “Yeah, it sucks thinking about that. But not enough to consider ever taking it back. I needed this. We all need this, just no one wants to acknowledge it and even fewer want to find it.”
I wanted to ask him about Joe. I was here, after all, for one reason, and I could already tell that Chase was the kind of person that Joe would be attracted to, the kind he’d always been attracted to. The kind who had answers, any answers really, even answers that came in the form of stoned prophecies and slurred declarations. I could see them smoking cigarettes on these stairs; Joe listening earnestly to Chase’s blurry wisdom and adopting it for his own. I studied Chase’s face, trying to determine if it was the right time to bring up the conversation. I’d worded this moment a thousand times before, while drumming my fingernails at the Coffee Bean in Santa Monica, while squeezing my eyes shut on the plane to Budapest, while walking up the path to the Guesthouse door, clutching a small suitcase and a yellowed postcard. But for some reason, I still wanted to stall. A part of me still found comfort in Chase’s quiet resilience, and I wanted to savor it for a little longer.
“I’ve been talking a lot, huh? I didn’t even realize it. I don’t even know your name.”
I hesitated. “Amy,” I said.
“Amy… Amy, huh? I think I know you from somewhere,” he said. “You ever been here before?”
“No, this is my first time,” I said.
“Probably my imagination,” Chase said. “After years of seeing people cycle in and out of this place, everyone looks a little familiar. Are you alone?”
“Yeah, it’s just me.”
“Watch your back a little. Pretty girls usually get eaten up in this city, especially ones who know how to keep their mouths shut, which it seems like you do. You should mouth off a little more; it keeps them on their toes. How old are you?”
“Twenty-six. You?”
“Yeah, about the same. What time is it?”
“Around seven,” I said.
“Shit, it’s late. I have a pub-crawl in a bit. You want to tag along? We usually charge them 15 euros, but you’re not carrying a Let’s Go book, so I’ll let you come for free. Plus I could use the company.”
“That would be great,” I said. “Let me run down and change.”
“I gotta warn you, the crowd at these things is pretty lame. A lot of study abroad kids, parent-funded backpackers, who are basically here with the idea that binge drinking in another country is a cultural experience. Which it is. But it’s not the only one. Go get beautiful. I’ll meet you downstairs in a few.”
I retreated to my room, one of the only private rooms the guesthouse had to offer. I knew I should have stayed upstairs if I was going to do this right. I knew Joe would have been drawn to the romantic nature of the campground, and found comfort in the awkward communality of falling asleep next to strangers. But I couldn’t imagine sleeping in the same room he fell out of love with me in.
I sat down on my flimsy mattress, tracing the tears in the comforter with my index finger. I glanced at the clock, and then shuffled through my suitcase until I found a manila envelope, creased and bent from the handlings of the last six months. I let the postcards spill out onto the bed; I’d kept all of them. Each one had a different return address, and an appropriately cheesy photograph on the front. He’d seen Elizabeth in England, Gaudy in Barcelona, David in Florence… I sifted through all sixteen, traced over the words I love you and I can’t wait to see you when they appeared. And then the last one, the three lonely words scribbled hurriedly, the t running into the c, as if he didn’t have time to create spaces between his words. I glanced out the window. The weather was gloomy, with gray descending towards rooftops and into the street.
I came downstairs first, where Todd and Jay were engrossed in a lazy game of pool. Todd put down his cue as soon as I entered the room.
“You’re the new girl,” he said.
“Everyone keeps saying that,” I said.
“I’m Todd. This is Jay.”
Jay nodded his head in my general direction.
“We don’t get a lot of people around now. It’s kind of just been us four for the last few weeks,” Todd said. “Sometimes an old friend or two drops in, but it gets lonely here with these boring motherfuckers.”
“Hey, fuck you, man.”
“Where are you going now?” Todd asked.
“Chase’s pub crawl,” I said. “Are you guys going to go?”
I was rewarded with laughter.
“No way,” Todd said. “We’ll be here throwing back some beers if you get bored, though. Nice to meet you, Amy.”
“How did you know my name was Amy?”
“I looked in the log book,” he said nonchalantly. “Oh and hey, don’t be too hard on Chase. He’s a punk. Anyone who is over 30 and a punk has enough to worry about.”
“What?” I asked.
“I just mean, he can be a fucking asshole sometimes. That kid has a plan for everyone. I can just tell by looking at you, he’s probably got some big plans for you, gonna save your soul or something like that.”
“I don’t think my soul really needs saving,” I said. That was a lie; no one flies sixteen hours to visit a disheveled hostel unless they are in desperate need of salvation. But I doubted Chase’s laced doctrines would be of any help.
“Doesn’t matter,” Todd said.
“Oh, the Chase Agenda,” Jay said, directed more at the pool table than at either of us.
I was just about to ask him what he meant by that when Chase came down the stairs, zipping up a track jacket over his wife beater.
“Fuck,” he said. “I really don’t want to do this tonight.”
“Chase, have you been stealing bananas again?”
I turned around to see a tall, waify woman with a mess of curly black hair standing at the back doorway with her hands on her hips.
Todd and Jay laughed.
“Chase is done,” Todd whispered to me.
“I haven’t been taking any fucking bananas!” Chase said, angrily. “I don’t even like bananas.”
“Oh right,” she responded. “So you’re not hiding upstairs, huddled in your bed, eating bananas that aren’t yours and throwing the peels on the ground so the other boys will slip on them and fucking break a leg. You’ve been here for two years. I’m onto you.” Suddenly she paused, and turned to me. “Who the hell are you?”
I hesitated.
“This is Amy. She’s staying here for a bit. And this,” Todd directed himself towards me. “This is Vera. She’s cool. But she buys bananas for herself and puts them in the downstairs fridge and Chase steals them because he’s too cheap to buy food.”
“Fuck you, who paid for lunch yesterday?” Chase asked.
“The peanuts? That wasn’t fucking lunch.”
Vera ignored them, and walked towards me, hand outstretched. She had a short, firm handshake, the kind that felt both unforgiving and considerate.
“Hi,” she said. “I own this place. When did you get here?”
“This morning,” Todd said nonchalantly, as he positioned his cue on the table.
“Did Ana check you in?” she asked me.
“Yes,” I answered quickly before Todd could have a chance to.
At that moment, a slew of giggles escaped from the door, and three girls hobbled in, almost capsizing from the weight of their backpacks. I disliked them instantly; they were too young, too light, the kind of girls who were unaffected by disappointments and downfalls. Todd and Jay exchanged glances, and both made a beeline for the door.
“Hey girls,” Todd said, as he ushered them into the lobby/bar.
“You girls staying here?” Jay asked.
“Beer?” Todd asked.
Vera lit a cigarette and reclined in her chair, smiling to herself, as she took slow, careful drags. She pulled out the logbook from her drawer, opened it to the appropriate page and pushed it to the edge of her desk. She wasn’t a pretty woman, especially not now in her mid-thirties, and her face had the kind of creases brought on by growing up too fast and then staying stagnant. Her wiry arms stretched out of her elastic black tank top, and she wore a flea market pashmina draped lazily over her shoulders. She rested her feet up on her desk, and watched the proceedings before her with a judging eye. From first glance, I could tell she wasn’t a coddler, but instead had developed an alluring conviction that allowed her to get her way in most instances.
Vera turned to me. “Where did you say you were staying, Amelia?”
“I’m in one of the private rooms on the second floor. And it’s Amy.”
“Amy, huh?” She squinted her eyes at me. “Well, I guess it—”
Todd and Chase exchanged glances.
“Let’s get out of here,” Chase said abruptly. He pulled a banana out of his pocket and threw it at Vera. “There’s your fucking banana.”
Chase and I left the hostel and wandered out onto the dimming street towards the Ziglo bus stop. The surrounding neighborhood was a collection of drab houses, and yellowing yards. Something about this neighborhood felt sad, too sad for an array of travelers to overlook, and I wondered why the guesthouse had adopted this lost area as its chosen home. We were both silent for most of the walk — Chase most likely lamenting the loss of his banana, and me increasingly fixated on Vera’s peculiar reaction towards me.
“So why did you chose Budapest?”
Here was my chance. I could tell him everything, and then maybe he would stare at me in disbelief, realizing he had misjudged me completely. That I wasn’t really a traveling soul-searcher like the others who usually found themselves at the Guesthouse. Or maybe he would glance at his feet, and tell me that he already knew who I was and what I wanted. And then, either way, he would answer all of my questions, and I could seal them away in a tiny envelope marked “closure,” and return to the U.S. healed. Ready to Let Go. To Move On.
But I hesitated. I realized this whole day I’d kept my search for Joe my own shy secret for a reason. Something about this temporary hedonism was comforting, even more comforting than potentially learning the truth. After everything, after all the misguided, heaving events of the last six months, a joint and a beer, without the usual retrospective chatter that happens between friends who know too much about each other, was freeing. But, even in my fuzzy, half-drunken state, I could tell all the reasons I had come here weren’t going to just dissipate into the February chill. After all, I was walking the same streets he’d walked, perhaps even with the same companion. I wasn’t in my own adventure. I was still in his, and his led somewhere, to a location whose only defining quality in my mind was my absence.
“You don’t want to say.”
“I’m here,” I paused, uncomfortably. “I’m looking for someone.”
“Fuck, aren’t we all?”
Chase lit up another cigarette and we kept walking. When we reached the bus stop, he motioned for me to step on first while he savored his last few drags. I sat down in an empty seat, and within a few minutes, Chase slipped himself down next to me.
“You’re looking for someone that doesn’t really exist, you know.”
“How do you know?”
Chase shrugged. “I can tell. Girls like you… They don’t let themselves change.”
“How do I need to change?”
“It’s not that you need to. It’s that you can’t. You said it your self, you’re here to find someone else. You’re here to find out how someone else changed. This is our stop. It’s just a block or two to the meeting place.”
I was shaken by his sudden subject change, and how it flowed so easily into his nonchalance. He hadn’t even paused to acknowledge the different weights of his words. I studied his somber face, his brown eyes staring casually into my own. I saw a flicker of something in them, something satirical, as if it pleased him to provide the dramatic irony for my journey. We got off the bus, and Chase pointed towards a church, where a group of young twentysomethings waited expectantly, huddled in groups of twos and threes. They were all participating in a bizarre mating dance — checking each other out, and then looking away swiftly as soon as their attention was reciprocated. Two similar looking boys, presumably strangers, clad in striped polo shirts and baseball hats, were feeling each other out in a sort of macho flirtation.
“Take a seat,” Chase said to me.
I looked at him, puzzled. I had the feeling that Chase’s easy nonchalance was deliberate; that he was trying to steer me away, teach me a lesson somehow, make me grow in ways I didn’t want to.
As soon as I sat down, a boy in his late 20s leaned over to me, and whispered: “This guy’s a trip, I’ve heard.”
“Listen up! My name is Chase and I’ll be your tour guide today. I’m originally from Canada, and yes, I’ve done porn, and no, I’ve never done gay porn. We’re going to drink some beers, do some shots and have some fun. Don’t be an asshole to anyone or I won’t have your back. Any questions?”
The crowd laughed.
“So who’s from Canada?” Chase asked
A small group of people raised their hands, and then reassured each other with friendly smiles.
“Alright, we usually get more from Canada. England?”
A freckled boy, whose face barely peeked out from his winter coat, raised his hand.
“U.S?”
“Fuck yeah!”
I turned around to see one of the polo shirted boys grinning profusely, goofily looking around the crowd.
Chase narrowed his eyes contemptuously. “Hey. Remember what I said about not being an asshole,” he said, as he focused his attention on the polo shirted boy. “You. Don’t be a fucking asshole.”
The polo shirted boy shifted his eyes uncomfortably. The other travelers glanced around the group, gauging each other’s reactions.
The boy next to me leaned over again and said, “I’m Andy. You cool?”
“Am I what?”
He pulled a stack of papers and a bag of tobacco out of his pocket. I watched as he emptied a small cluster of tobacco onto one of the papers and began to roll it.
“I roll my own cigarettes,” he said. “It’s cheaper.”
A few others began to watch Andy with default curiosity.
I glanced up at Chase, who was listening to our exchange with an amused expression on his face.
“So do you have a boyfriend?”
“Yeah.” I was shocked at how automatically the word had rolled out of my mouth. “I mean, no. Not really. No.”
Andy paused in his rolling demonstration and looked up at me.
“A little flustered?” he asked.
The others laughed. Chase pursued his lips, feigning sympathy.
“So you guys got to know each other yet?” he asked. “We don’t want to waste any time. Let’s get to the first bar. The deal with this bar is you choose, beer or wine, and you get as much of it as you want, for an hour. So drink up, get wasted here, and you won’t have to buy a single drink for the rest of the night. Just don’t pass out in a gutter because I won’t look for you and from experience, it’s not comfortable.”
The first bar was nestled on the corner of a cobblestone street in central Pest, a vast improvement to the Guesthouse’s dowdy neighborhood. Restaurants and shops lined the curving street. Christmas lights were wrapped loosely around trees. Couples toasted each other inside heated cafes. The shop windows were adorned with flashy pictures of dark Hungarian woman in hats and lingerie. The neon lights of an Internet café blinked at us. A group of Hungarian teenagers were leaning against the entrance to the bar, talking boisterously, barely noticing us as we squeezed our way past them.
We sat in a random dispersion through the bar, people clinging to their last conversations. The bartender, after slapping backs with Chase, passed out wine and beer glasses. Andy eagerly retrieved two, handing me a beer mug as large as my head.
“I’m going to have wine,” I told him, grabbing a wine glass from the bartender’s hand. I traced my fingers over the soap stains on the sides of the glass, and began to scratch away at them with my fingernail.
Within the next ten minutes, the groups began to dissipate and laughter was echoing easily through the wooden bar. High-pitched giggles, small town chuckles, deep guffaws… I glanced around at the travelers, some awkward, some glowing, some pretentious, others merely shy. But they all seemed comfortably young; happy in their age and state.
Andy had adopted me as his friend, and proceeded to tell me a string of badly rehearsed travel stories, each of which sounded as though it had been circulating through hazy-eyed backpackers for years. I was in the middle of hearing about how he jumped on the wrong train in Vienna and ended up spending the weekend with a lonely Austrian girl in the Corinthian countryside, when Chase motioned for me to come join him at the bar.
“How you doing?” he asked. “I hate guys like that. Fucking posers.”
“He’s okay,” I said laughing, as I motioned for the bartender to refill my wine glass.
“I would never go on one of these if I was visiting somewhere,” Chase said, loud enough for the group to hear. A few giggled nervously at the comment. I wondered if Chase’s utter disregard for others’ ego was part of his charm, or whether it was merely infuriating. I imagined if I spent more time with him, it would be the latter.
“Yeah, what would you do?” I asked.
“Find someone sympathetic, ask them where they like to go, make friends the inartificial way.”
“I don’t know if it’s always that easy,” I said. “Being new in a town, alone… They just want to have a good time for a night… without worrying about how to do it.”
“They want to get fucked up and hook up, so they can say they fucked in a different country.”
“You’re awfully cynical,” I said, in a teasing voice, almost teetering on flirtation, that I hadn’t heard myself use for months. I used to use it all the time; it was my get-out-of-jail free card, the one I depended on when I wanted Joe to take out the trash or read me Supreme Court cases as bedtime stories. I suddenly remembered the stack of law books I’d left in the bathroom at the LAX airport. I wondered if someone had thrown them away, or if they were sitting in a lost and found bin somewhere, along with the rest of my life.
Chase took the last swig of his beer and then slid it down the bar towards the bartender, who was deep in conversation with a somewhat attractive brown haired boy. I wondered why I hadn’t noticed him before.
“Jack!” Chase yelled. “Man, I need beer.”
Chase waited until Jack had refilled his mug before he turned to me and said, “I’m not cynical. I just don’t care.”
I squinted my eyes at him; the wine was washing over my senses and I leaned back in my chair, feeling unusually relaxed.
“So is that your secret?” I asked. “If I just don’t care, everything will just fall into place?”
“If you really don’t care, then you won’t care if everything falls into place or not,” Chase said, winking at me.
We sat silently under the glow of our high school flirtation, refilling our glasses and trading half-joking observations about the rest of the travelers.
“That guy,” Chase said, “eats peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with the crusts cut off.”
I pointed out the over-aged frat guy, beer dripping from his mouth onto his protruding belly. Chase nodded towards a sullen girl who was staring uncomfortably at her wine glass.
“Anorexic,” he said. “Drinks diet soda and chain smokes. Parliaments, if she can get them.”
“That’s horrible!” But, on closer look, her arms jutted out curiously from the sleeves of her t-shirt, and her jeans were sliding down her hips. “Well, maybe you have a point.”
“I’m an expert at this shit,” he said, pointing towards a stringy blonde haired girl, who was unheedingly leaning over a table full of boys. “Slut. Doesn’t shower after sex.”
“Oh, please. Even I could have gotten that one. On the left, tortured poet.”
“Over there, Daddy’s girl. Is here as a graduation present.”
“Next to the brunette, stoner.”
“Nothing wrong with that. Girl in the corner, likes to give head.”
“What?” I exclaimed, laughing.
“Look at the way she’s handling that straw.”
“In front of us, total cokehead.”
“The dark haired guy, whose been talking to Jack this whole time, learning all about his American upbringing and how he ended up here… That’s your Joe.”
“The girl over— what?” I felt my weight fall against the edge of the bar.
Chase glanced at me, unfazed. “Everyone ready to go to the next bar?” he yelled to the crowd.
“What?”
“Amy, hold on,” he said, annoyed.
My wine glass was shaking in my hand. I watched it sway from side to side, the last few sips of white wine almost spilling over the edge of the glass. I wanted to throw it, at Chase, at Jack, at anyone, but I stood still, transfixed, hearing the words that’s your Joe echoed in Chase’s unaffected tone. He knew, he’d known all along, and had watched me dance around the subject from the moment we met.
Chase grabbed my arm, and led me down the block to another bar, a dim lounge covered in white lights and white chairs so low they looked like footstools.
“This place,” breathed the stringy haired girl. “Is so trendy.”
Chase laughed good naturedly, and looked at me to share the joke. I glared back at him; angry he’d ruined the first breath of easy air I’d had in six months.
“Aw, Amy,” he said, slurring, more out of laziness than inebriation.
“You knew the whole day and that’s how you chose to tell me?”
“Aw. Fuck.”
“Fuck? You’re saying, fuck?”
A few of the other pub-crawlers turned to look at me, but I couldn’t stop the desperation from seeping out of my voice.
“You could have told me. I’ve been with you all day.”
Chase shrugged. “You could have told me,” he said.
I followed him to a back table, my toes scraping his heels with every step. Now that he had brought him up, introduced Joe’s presence into the scene, my questions suddenly felt urgent again. Chase sat down, and motioned for the waitress.
“Guilia, abbiamo bisogno due bevande forte pronto. Ha senito notizie cattive.”
“You know Italian?” I asked, thrown off.
“Don’t worry about it,” Chase replied, reaching into his pocket for some forint.
Guilia brought us two dark colored concoctions, and I tipped mine up to my face, ignoring the stench of black licorice, and took two large gulps.
“Well?”
“Well, what? You came here to see Joe, right? So that was Joe… I took him on a pub-crawl, and, the first night, he sat totally captivated, chatting with all the locals or, at least, displaced travelers who become locals. He wanted to meet everyone. He fucking lit up talking about it.”
“About staying? In Budapest?”
“Well, if he’s in Budapest, I haven’t seen him. I think he went somewhere.”
“Did you know him well?”
“I don’t know. It was summer. There were people everywhere. Yeah, we drank a bit together, smoked some joints, shot the shit… I don’t know where he is now, if that’s what you’re asking. He didn’t sleep that much and neither do I, so, yeah, I knew him okay.”
“What did he say about me?”
Chase hesitated, and squinted at me, trying to gauge how much of the truth it would be safe to divulge. Finally, he shrugged, and said, “he said he’d probably regret a lot of things later.”
“Did he say he was ever coming back?”
Chase titled his head at me, in a manner that hinged on patronization. “You tell me, Amy.”
I sat silently, paralyzed by the anti-climatic texture of the moment. That’s all Joe had told me; three scrawled words, can’t come home. I guess it was technically four words, and I’d imagined a fifth tacked on the end of it, unwritten but still there. I pictured him tracing over the fifth word with his pen cap, wanting to write it but unable to. Unwilling to make any more promises he knew he couldn’t keep. I liked to stare at the card, hoping one day the fifth word would appear and I would know that he just couldn’t come home, yet. That it was temporary, that eventually the yet would pass, and he’d be standing at the kitchen counter, eating wheat bread without butter, his crumbs raining onto the floor.
“He said you had your shit together.”
“What?” I asked, confused.
“Yeah, he said you were going to be some big time lawyer.”
I thought of my discarded law books lost in the LAX airport.
“Well, it’s going to take a while for that. I’m still in law school. I’ve only done a year and a half.”
“Fucking school. I bet law school’s pretty expensive.”
“Yeah, it is,” I heard myself saying, as if my responses were automatically programmed. “I have loans.”
“How’d you pay for this trip? Pretty expensive trip just to see where some guy left you.”
I looked at him, startled at his bluntness. “Um,” I stammered. “Well, I sold the ring.”
“You sold it, huh? Gutsy move. You must really want to find him.”
I looked at him, waiting for him to continue, to tell me where Joe was or what had happened in their summer together, but he tapped his glass against mine and stood up from the table.
“Good luck,” he said, as he made his way over to the stringy haired girl.
I couldn’t stay in the bar anymore, so I found a bus stop on the corner, and took the first bus back to the hostel. It went a roundabout way, darting all over the city before stopping in the vicinity of the Guesthouse, and I found myself leaning my head against the cold window, wishing I had never come. I don’t know what I expected to find. Joe, sitting in the lobby/bar, suitcases packed, waiting for me to walk through the door so he could finally come home? I could feel my disillusionment burning red in my cheeks. Everyone’s voices were on replay in my mind; it’s better this way, you’re chasing a ghost, don’t be irrational, you need to move on, pretty expensive trip just to see where some guy left you.
When I reached the guesthouse, the lobby/bar was deserted. I could hear the strains of laughter from upstairs. I sat down on one of the corduroy couches, my head in my hands and tears dripping onto my leather boots. I glanced at Vera’s desk, the logbook was still lying out, open. I walked over it, and then flipped back the pages until I found the summer entries. There it was: Joe, Los Angeles, stayed 63 days. I stared at the entry in disbelief. So the Guesthouse hadn’t just been the regular stop-over, a random point in his journey where he’d happened to let me go. He’d found something here, something that kept him here, and then propelled him off in directions he no longer needed to tell me about.
“Amy?”
I looked up to see Vera standing at the doorway, bottled beer in hand, looking at the logbook in my hand.
“So you looked him up?” she asked.
I stared at her, startled. It seemed that everyone knew my story but me. Everyone understood the implications of my stay here, and treated me with the appropriate indifference.
“What?” I asked, flustered.
“I figured you would. I would have.”
“How did you know who I was?” I asked.
She paused, and then motioned for me to take a seat on the couch. She handed me a beer I didn’t want, and then said, “Well, as you know, he stayed for awhile.”
“63 days,” I said sardonically.
“It was summer, and this place was crazy. He was a little reserved, hard to get to know and all, but he was always around, and he opened up gradually. He was going through a lot—”
“I’ll bet,” I said, surprised at the level of bitterness in my tone.
Vera smiled sympathetically. “Anyway, he was always around, smoking on the stairs, trying to sort things out. So we helped him. Don’t freak out, by helped, I mean listened. Well, I listened. I can’t say much for Chase. At first, he was pretty quiet, good-natured. After a few weeks or so, Joe started talking about everything a lot, about you, about getting engaged and becoming a lawyer. So when you showed up, and said you were Amy from Los Angeles, Ana, the girl who checked you in, began to wonder a little. And it’s February; lone travelers are kind of an anomaly these days, for good reason. Plus, everyone could tell you weren’t exactly here just for a good time.”
“So you all just guessed it? Everyone knew?”
“This place is tiny, and it’s kind of boring right now. Same old shit. Joe had your picture up for awhile, taped next to his bunk bed. I think it’s around here somewhere.”
“So what happened to him?” I asked, choking on my own words.
“Well, he was really… confused. I felt like his emotions were suffocating him, he seemed so lost. Seemed really fucked up. Like he just didn’t know what he wanted. He kept saying he was looking for something that would make it okay for him to go back home. Eventually, he stopped talking about back home, started talking about other things, random things, places he might want to go.”
“Did he meet someone else?” I asked.
“Do you really want to know?” Vera asked.
I didn’t say anything. She sighed.
“As far as I know, he didn’t. There were girls around, but Chase always has girls around here. I saw a few more than once, but that’s all I know.”
“So Chase was close to him?”
“Oh yeah, they were inseparable,” she said. “Why, did he tell you otherwise?”
“He didn’t say much of anything, except that he knew him. And that I shouldn’t be looking for someone who doesn’t exist.”
Vera laughed, a deep guffaw that echoed against the walls. “Well, you can’t believer everything Chase says. You can’t really believe anything he says. Did he tell you why he was here?”
“Yeah, kind of,” I said. “He said he had everything set for him back home, and then he came here and felt like he’d found something he needed, and just decided to stay.”
“Oh, is that the new version?” Vera asked. “Makes this place sound pretty good, I guess.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, confused.
Vera lit a cigarette. “You want one?” she asked.
I shook my head. I felt like we were still tiptoeing, that I was close but I needed to be closer, and it had to be done quickly.
“Chase came here with his girlfriend. And she wanted to go home, wanted to get back. So she went back to the U.S., and Chase kept traveling, went to Croatia, I think. I don’t remember thinking much about him back then, but I remember thinking they were a nice couple, seemed happy. Anyway, a few days later, Chase comes back, drunk as fuck, and he’s decided she’s here, and he’s running around the hostel looking for her, screaming her name. It was fucking scary,” she paused. “Anyway, we finally sit him down and sober him up and he tells us that she was in a car accident on her way back from the airport.”
I gasped. “How bad was it?”
“She’d died on the spot. Drunk driver, same old story. Anyway, so we told him that he better stay here for a bit, to cope. A week later, he’s supposed to go back for the funeral, and he just doesn’t get on the plane. And then, he just stopped talking about it. Didn’t even mention her anymore. Like she’d never existed.”
I looked back at her, in disbelief, unable to speak.
“Anyway, he doesn’t talk about her anymore. Sometimes I wonder if he’s forgotten about her.”
“He seems so… strong though,” I said. “Like he just doesn’t care.”
“Sure, I guess. But all these boys, well I don’t know about Joe, since he was only here for 2 months or so, and that’s not uncommon, but the rest of them… In my experience, the ones who end up staying here are ones to worry about. I hear Chase talk about escaping normality and convention, and all of that, but he does the same thing every day… drinks, smokes, gives those stupid pub crawls when he needs to. I mean, I don’t think it’s normality they’re escaping, you know?” She took another thoughtful drag of her cigarette. “It’s something in themselves. Like they can’t grow up, can’t form relationships that last longer than a few nights.” She motioned to upstairs, where the giggling had grown louder and the beats of their music were vibrating through the hall.
“Who is the fourth one?” I asked.
“What?”
“There’s four that live here, right? Chase, Todd, Jay… one more. I haven’t seen him.”
“Oh,” she said, pulling a white envelope with Vera written across the top out of her desk drawer. “This is Mark.”
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“I woke up this morning, and I found this on my desk. An envelope with my name on it, and some cash in it. He owed me a bunch of money, you know. Most of it’s here. And then I looked upstairs and his stuff was gone.”
“He didn’t even say goodbye?” I asked, surprised.
“No, thank god,” Vera replied. “What’s the point? I get happy when one of them leaves, you know, I feel like maybe they’ll finally get somewhere. And there’s always more coming.”
“So why do you do it, then?”
“Well, isn’t this ironic,” Vera laughed. “I moved here, fourteen years ago or so, with a girlfriend of mine and we lived in this shitty house with six other Australian guys. And it was a blast. We’d decided to come for a year, but at the end of it, she went back and I realized I didn’t have much to go back to. So I stayed. Eventually I bought the shitty house, and turned it into this.”
“Do you wish you hadn’t?” I asked.
“Nah… It’s comfortable for me and I like it,” she said. “Plus, I’m beyond saving.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about Joe before?” I asked. “Why are you telling me all of this now?”
“Well, for starters, I didn’t really have a chance,” she said. “Plus, Chase likes to think he can heal people, you know, drown them in alcohol and drugs until they forget themselves. I thought it might work for you. I mean, I’ve seen it work before. Plus, what’s the use of me telling you anyway? He was here. You knew that.”
“And that’s it? You have no idea where he is now?”
Vera glanced down at her feet. “What are you going to do, Amy? Follow him around from one town to the next? How long were you two together anyway?”
“Since we were eighteen,” I said. I hated telling people that; divulging that Joe was more than just the end, he was the beginning too. My first and last everything.
“Shit. Well maybe you guys need to experience a bit more first. You could try this for awhile too. Go to Austria, Paris… see some stuff.”
I envisioned it; nights in Parisian cafes, days hiking through a tiny Swiss town, the smell of Italian espresso wafting through the air, crepes for breakfast… But it all felt too romanticized, too removed from real life. I’d spent the last six months being removed from life, my eye always on the door, my hand always cradling the phone. Maybe what I needed was just to live, to be secretly happy when my People magazine arrived at the door every week instead of just tossing it in the trash bin as I’d been prone to do lately.
“I could set you up with some friends who are going to be doing some traveling in a few weeks,” Vera suggested. “As long as you don’t stay forever, I think it could be good for you.”
I imagined Joe, backpack strapped on, wandering aimlessly around Europe until he found his sense of satisfaction. Or Chase, hiding from emotion in the top floor of a cracking yellow house. Or even Jay, who had barely said three words to me, and seemed to ping-pong himself between his three loves in life; pool, beer and apparently women, judging from the sounds coming from upstairs. I suddenly felt extremely tired, as if the emotional strains of the last day were all capsizing onto me at once.
“No,” I said. “I think I’m just going to go home.”
Vera looked at me, surprised but then she shrugged and offered me another beer. I took it gratefully, and we sat there together, in a strange companionate silence, sipping our beers and thinking of absolutely nothing.
