>The Writer

>

“How unfortunate,” he said, “I’d hoped you’d perished in some horrid train wreck on The Continent.”

“Thanks,” I said.

The Writer shrugged. “Nothing personal, mind you. Simply hoping to save the world from some Godawful work of, well, mental vomit. And Drunkard, I see you haven’t drank yourself to death yet.”

“It’s been, like, three days since I’ve seen you last,” said The Drunkard.

“Plenty of time for the enterprising alcoholic to commit various forms of suicide via the bottle. However, I estimate that your dedication to fermentation is lackluster and thus—”

“Do you want me to dump you in a garbage can again?”

The Writer stared at The Drunkard.

We’d apparently caught him in the middle of attempting to write—not that he’d greet us pleasantly if we were around at any other time. He was wearing a different pair of glasses I’d normally seen him wear; instead of his usual button-up fare seemingly chosen to match his corduroy jacket, he wore a plain white t-shirt tucked into his jeans, making him look like a slightly overweight greaser who didn’t want to mess up his burgeoning Jewfro with something like hair product. He held the door open with one of his feet—like every other door in Woolf, his flat’s entrance was designed to be a fire door, and thus, would not stay open unless you forced it open—and, in the other hand, held a coffee mug featuring a picture of Dostoevsky.

“Hey,” I said, pointing at the mug, “I’ve got one of those of Mark Twain.”

“Pleasant,” he said. “I am quite certain you’ll not be surprised to hear that my opinion of Mark Twain is quite low; the man was a hack and a capitalist extraordinaire who put on the airs of egalitarianism.”

“God damn, do you ever come off your high horse,” said The Drunkard, “or are you stuck up there?”

“Indeed,” said The Writer before clearing his throat. “If you’ll excuse me, I really must get back to my project du jour. Quite important, you see, working through the harsh realities of the modern world while trying to reconcile them with the seeming need of humanity to distract itself with flashy objects, i.e. television, that do nothing to advance the intellect or the soul.”

“What the fuck would you know about soul,” began The Drunkard, “you near-celibate, joyless, academic, anemic, moron?”

The Writer cocked an eyebrow and shut the door on us.

“That,” I said, “was perhaps not the best way to go about getting him to head to town with us.”

“Fuck him if he can’t take a joke. Pub?”

I shrugged. I didn’t have any better ideas, and I’d never been able to write an essay unless it was early in the morning and I had baroque music blaring around me, and neither of those requirements will being filled at the moment. So we turned around, walked back down the blue-carpeted stairs, shoved open the door, and were hit with the typical gale-force winds of Canterbury.

I reacted by letting out a prolonged “fuuuuuck.” The Drunkard, stoic, took out a silver flask decorated with a leather patch depicting a deer and took a drink. Nothing stirred. I looked up and saw the three Chinese girls in my flat looking out of the window. They laughed at me and waved. I waved back, and The Drunkard and I walked on.

We hadn’t made it to the edge of the building before a window broke behind us. I looked behind me and, sure enough, flopping out of the kitchen window of the first-floor flat with all the rag-doll physics of a faceless video game enemy, The Writer plummeted to the ground. The strong winds carried what could only be horrible obscenities in Greek, and I gathered that, yet again, The Writer had done something to anger Stasia—like make eye contact or something. I nudged The Drunkard, who snickered, and we watched as The Writer, who had, in the interrim, for some reason, put on a coat, stood up, brushed himself off, and slouched our way.

When he caught up, he said, “I wasn’t making any headway, anyway. Which pub are we going to?”

“Dolphin?” I suggested.

“Ayup,” said The Drunkard, taking another drink from his flask.

We walked to the bus stop and stood there for a full twenty minutes, with nothing moving in sight aside from the rapidly-falling snow—in the twenty five minutes we’d spent outside, an inch and a half had accumulated on the ground—when The Writer finally said, “You do realize that the busses aren’t running to campus during the holiday.”

“What?” asked The drunkard and I simultaneously.

“Oh, dear, you didn’t.” He shook his head. “You idiots.”

“Well why the hell would you have waited thirty—”

“Twenty,” I said.

“Twenty minutes to tell us?”

“I thought you had called a cab.”

“We’re fucking postgrad students, man! We’re not rich, we’re from fucking Tennessee, for God’s sake. No one has that kind of money and is a student where we’re from.”

“You might be from Belle Meade.”

I’d been trying to stay out of the argument, since any energy I spent yelling would have been energy that should have been used trying to keep myself warm, but that was the breaking point. “You kidding me?” I asked. “Have you seen the way The Drunkard and I dress? Do we look like we frequent the shops in Green Hills because they have good deals? Fuck no, man.”

“Wal-Mart!” said The Drunkard.

“Yeah!” I said.

“Well don’t leap upon me simply because I assumed otherwise. I haven’t bought new clothes in three months.”

“Five months,” I said.

“A year,” said The Drunkard.

He won.

We all grumbled, tightened our clothes around us, and started down Eliot Hill. We didn’t even bother looking for the footpath. In this weather, the footpath would either be just as covered in snow as the hill, or iced over completely. We beared it—didn’t grin, though—and schlepped down the hill to the town, which was barely visible for all the flying snow.

>The Drunkard’s Doldrums

>

My post-travel routine consists of sleeping for twelve hours straight, followed by six cups of black, strong coffee and a long, heated internal debate about whether or not to go back to sleep. When this routine, like any other of my routines that lack any modicum of reasonableness, is not completed, my entire day is thrown and I am slightly crabbier than usual.

I suppose The Drunkard ran into The Student—who was probably being responsible and washing his clothes in the Pavilion, after dodging the incredibly friendly and puffy Englishman who laughed at anything anyone said—that morning, because around eleven o’clock, I received a text message and my phone nearly buzzed itself out of my window. (See, Woolf, if I hadn’t mentioned before, was a building that happened to be a mobile phone signal vaccuum. No one could get a signal in that place unless they wrapped their phone in aluminum foil, and even then, it was iffy. So you had to put your phone right on the cell if you wanted to have any sort of contact with the outside world that didn’t take place on the Internet.)

“Drinks. K Bar. Now. Buy you a Guinness. Sent: Today, 11:03 From: Drunkard”

I sent back: “It’s not even noon and I’m still asleep. Call you at one.” Then I turned off the phone and tossed it in the waste bin under my desk.

Half an hour later, I heard what sounded like an elephant slamming itself repeatedly into my door. I tumbled out of bed shouting obscenities, went to open the door, and there, standing in all of his grubby glory, was The Drunkard, wearing jeans, a leather jacket onto which he’d sown a Hunter S. Thompson patch, and aviator sunglasses accompanying a red ballcap. “Fuck you,” he said. “You slovenly son of a bitch. It’s eleven-thirty, it’s cold, and you’re back in a country in which, if you’re not drunk, you’re on the verge of suicide.”

“What? How did you get in?”

“Chacko let me in.”

I rushed to the window, lent out to the left, and shouted, “FUCK YOOOOOOOU!”

Chacko leaned out of his window and shouted, “FUCK YOOOOOOOU!”

The Drunkard pushed past me and tossed his red ballcap over my laptop before plopping down on my bed. “Do you realize how empty this fucking place has been? Guillame—that Belgian dude—hasn’t even been here. God knows where he’s been. Then that fucking crazy Turk, he fucked off to Scotland two weeks ago. It’s been me, The Writer, and the French in my apartment and one of the Greeks in his. Other than that, this place is Chinatown, man.”

I rubbed my eyes. “I’m not following you. I just woke up.”

“Good point,” he stood up, put back on his ballcap, and headed towards my kitchen.

After putting on some jeans, I followed him. I didn’t go into the kitchen the previous night, having ordered out, so I wasn’t prepared for what the lack of someone steadily cleaning throughout the week would mean. It smelled like a trash can in a Chinese buffet and didn’t look far off of that. Strange green vegetables, that looked similar to seaweed in many respects but not all of them, were strewn all around the counters. Lumps of what might have been meat sat in skillets on the oven, covered in a fine, somewhat bubbly layer of film. On the round table in the center of the room, there were bowls full of what looked like yellow sticks floating in syrup; they gave off a strong smell that I hadn’t smelt since the last time I went to a county fair in Tennessee.

“Hey,” said The Drunkard, walking through the stench as if it weren’t nothing but a thing, “this is like The Student’s kitchen. Neat.”

I flung my arm over my nose and mouth. I breathed in gasps. This is why The Student bought respirators, I guessed. “This is not neat,” I said. “This is an affront against the senses and decency.”

“Meh,” said The Drunkard. He went over to my cupboard, picked out the Dunkin Donuts coffee my mom had sent along with the rest of my Hanukkah loot, and dumped what looked like half the bag into the coffee maker. “This isn’t that bad. You want bad, you should see the sort of state my house was in in college. That was bad.” He filled up the pot with water and poured it into the machine. “Roaches wouldn’t live in our house. ‘Screw that,’ they’d say, ‘that place is a sty.’” The machine came to life.

“Frankly, Drunkard, I don’t care. This is abominable.”

The Drunkard shrugged and headed back towards the door out of the kitchen.

“You’re not giong to wait for the coffee?”

“I’m not drinking any coffee,” he said, “I’m going to let it brew. Maybe the smell will cancel out the rancid stench of carmelization and dead fish you guys have going on in there.”

“But you used half of my coffee.”

“Yeah,” he said, “you think I’d drink something that strong? Fuck that. My heart would explode. To K-Bar!”

K-Bar in the interrim of classes, I saw when we arrived, was a desolate place. The only people inside the bar aside from The Drunkard and myself were two employees, one of them a man in his 60s who was leering at a Katie Perry video, and a despondant-looking construction worker clutching a pint of Strongbow. The soft sounds of a Beastie Boys instrumental song played over the speakers.

The Drunkard went up to the bar and ordered a couple of Guinnesses. The older guy cocked an eyebrow and said, “Bit early for Guinness, innit?”

“It’s a bit too late in your life for you to be mingling around with 20-somethings in a university,” said The Drunkard, “not to mention leering at a pop star, but I’m not saying anything, you old pervert.”

The man nodded. “Fair dues.” He poured our drinks.

 We got them from the bar, went over to one of the tables under a big hi-def TV and sat down. “Bit snappy, weren’t you?”

The Drunkard snorted. “I’ve learned a lot during the past week, man. In occasionally trying to escape being surrounded by the Chinese and their, ah, pungent food, I ventured down into town a lot more than I had during the term. You know what I found out down there?”

“What?”

“The English people, as a whole, and by and large, are scum.”

I whistled. “That’s… Man, I…”

“Trust me.” He shook his head and took off his ballcap, setting it on the table with a certain resignation that I’d only previously seen from my uncle, who was the sole survivor of a platoon of international peace keepers in Bosnia. “It’s not nice out there, outside the realm of the University. You’ll see that someday. You’ll understand that somehow, and the English will smell the American on you and go for your throat.”

I scratched my head. “This seems like there’s a story involved. There’s something you’re not telling me about this. What’s going on?” I knew that The Drunkard had done something that instigated a fight. I knew a lot of English people, and none of them, no matter how base and depraved when it came to alcohol, sex, and drugs, would start a fight for no reason. That sort of aggression wasn’t in the national character. The national character was sitting back and nursing a hangover with a cup of tea and disgusting fried beans and black pudding.

“Well, I was down in town with Guillame on Friday, right?”

“Uh oh.” This, I thought, could not be good. The last time I’d heard “I was down in town with Guillame” from someone, the story ended with a guy jumping in the freezing river for a tenner.

“Yeah. Well, it was before this massive cold front hit, so all of the English ladies were dressed as they usually are when they go out—as if they’re permanent residents at the Bunny Ranch. That, by the way, I’ll never fucking understand. I mean, CRU could get pretty raw sometimes, but we never took it into the town. Anyway.”

He cleared his throat and took a drink from his beer.

“Wait,” I said. “Wasn’t CRU in bumfuck, nowhere?”

“Yes.”

“How could that get raw?”

“Man, listen to yourself.” The Drunkard sat back in his chair. “Any time you put college kids and alcohol together, they’ll try to reenact Mardi Gras every weekend. May I continue?”

I nodded.

“So Guillame and I were in town, following this group of girls who staggered out of one of the Wetherspoons, right?”

“Do you realize how creepy that sounds?”

The Drunkard thought for a moment. “In retrospect, yes. Anyway, we were following them to a club, right? Well this pair of chavs comes out of one of the off-licenses by Christchurch and they start harassing us, right? I mean, okay, fair enough, Guillame’s a tall, lanky guy and looks like he’d be easy prey, but that’s just not cool. So I turn to Guillame and say, ‘You know, what’s what I like about this country: They let their retards out of their cages.’”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“Yeah, possibly not the best thing to say. So the chavs flip their shit, sputtering in their quasi-language; that which is more grunts than vocalisations. They start circling us like they’re fucking wolves or something, and they’re about to jump us when BAM!” Here, he hit the table. “A group of other postgrads stumble out of the Wetherspoons and scare the chavs off.”

A silence. “That’s your story? That’s why the English are animals?”

“Well,” The Drunkard said, “er. There were some assholes in the club.”

“It’s a club, man, what do you expect? The atmosphere is that of a regression to some sort of bullshit animal instinct, wherein all of the philosophical, medical, theological, and ethical progress of the last six thousand years has been rendered null.”

The Drunkard shrugged.

“You just haven’t left the flat a lot, have you?”

The Drunkard slowly shook his head.

“And why is that?”

“There’s no one to play with.”

“What about the French?”

The Drunkard dismissed the idea with a wave of the hand. “That’s no good. They’ve discovered clove cigarettes now, and the kitchen is their territory.”

“Who else is around?”

“I think I’ve seen The Writer shuffling around the courtyard some days. The Traveler’s… elsewhere. His last facebook status looked like it was in Czech, so I guess he’s in Eastern Europe.”

“I thought he said he was going to Paris.”

“Fuck, I don’t know. That guy can’t stay in one place for too long. I’m surprised he lasted for as long as he did during the term.”

“Hmm,” I said. “Well, want to go find The Writer.”

“Dear God, why?”

“You, my friend, need to be eased into society. I have the strong suspicion you’ve been drinking nonstop for a few days an—”

“Why would you think that?”

“When you walked into my room, I got a whiff of Jack Daniel’s. The sort of smell I haven’t smelled since I was at parties on Frat Row.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway, you’ve been drinking nonstop and need to be eased into a society that doesn’t accept constant drunkenness. And, in my opinion, there is no man on Earth better qualified to sober you up than The Writer.”

The Drunkard groaned, we drank up, bundled up, and headed out.

>Travelling the Next Day

>

We arrived at Gare Lille-Europe the next day, said goodbye to Pascale, got onto the Eurostar.

There, I incredibly awkwardly hit on a girl, who immediately stopped talking to me.

Other than that, the only thing I have to say about the day is that travelling, especially when it comes to England, is the worst. I would experience this again at New Year’s, but, to make a long story short (O, that I could have done that at the beginning of this sprawling blog), the English are just about as bad as Nashvillians when it comes to dealing with snow. You’d think they wouldn’t have any problems with the stuff, since they live in an area of the world that was once known to attract Vikings like nerds to World of WarCraft, but… I don’t know. Maybe some unknown gene deteriorated since the medieval era. Maybe that gene was responsible for the English acknowledging that snow is simply rain that froze way up in the atmosphere and, along the way, turned into the fluffy bits of stuff in which people like to pack ice and try to kill each other. If that’s true, however, that means that that gene is also lacking in every person who was born in the Southeast United States. And, if that’s true, I believe that I should get a MacArthur Genius Grant just for the hypothesis, and start working—post haste—in some well-lit lab in Harvard at this very moment.

Those thoughts flashed through my mind as The Student and I stood in the Godawful cold and good, British wind at Ashford International. Our train was late—thirty minutes late—and the group of travelers we were among stared at nothing but the yellow box up on the wall that showed us how miserable we would be.

The digital numbers on the right, under EXPECTED, flickered. People gasped. They reappeared. It would be thirty-two minutes late. The reactions ranged from resigned sighs to, in the case of one balding old man with glasses and an aura of absolute insanity, an open string of obscenities so vile that a baby across the platform exploded into shrieks. I clapped—golf clapped, mind you; I didn’t want to get this man’s attention—and The Student glared at me.

“What are you doing?” he asked. “Don’t do that, the crazy bastard will hear you and come over here.”

“Oi!” shouted the guy, talking to another man who stood next to him. The other guy was wearing a green jacket, blue jeans, black shoes, and had earbuds in his ears.

He took the earbuds out. “Sorry mate?”

“Fuck off,” said the old man. “Don’t ‘sorry’ me, you cunt. I saw you lookin at my bike. Well fuck off, it’s my bike you little bastard.”

The other guy’s eyes widened and he backed away, towards the cafe.

The old man glared at him all the way and, when the other man was in the cafe, the old man turned to the next person nearby—a harried-looking banker-type in a nice suit, wire-frame glasses, and holding a black briefcase—and said, “Fuckin see that? Tryin to cozy up to my fuckin bike that bugger was. Fuck off, I said to him, didn’t I?”

“Ah,” I said to The Student, “back in England.”

The Student grunted. “Yes. Back in the land of chavs and pasties.” He sighed and pulled out his cell phone. “Yep,” he said, “I have to set up my study carrol tomorrow; check out seven books that are on reserve before Templeman sends them back to God-knows-where; check out three more books that they pulled out of the archives; and—”

“Archives?” I asked. “How old are the books?”

“They were published last year,” said The Student. He readjusted his glasses. “Templeman, or so I’ve been told by an inside source, is slowly shifting into a position to make itself not the library of the university, but, instead, the IT hub.”

“Sinister,” I said. “But it makes so much sense. The fact that there are only two librarians on staff. The presense of thirty IT workers on the second floor. The slowly-shrinking amount of books in the stacks, while the number of computers irrevocably increases.”

The Student solemnly nodded. “Say,” he said, dropping his voice, “I think you might be interested in this. There’s a group of us in the Literature, Medieval Civ, and Creative Writing M.A.s who are joining together to put a stop to this.”

“Oh?”

“Oh, yes. We’re planning a—” he looked around, presumably for agents of the University. “We’re planning an occupation of Templeman. Nothing major, just something to get the University’s attention. Maybe hold the head of IT hostage.”

“Woah, seriously? I don’t know…”

“Narrator, think about who I’m talking about. A bunch of nerds in black sweaters and glasses. We’re not going to hurt anyone.” He sighed. “In all honesty, people probably won’t even realize we’re occupying anything. You don’t get very far unless you’re doing something like that for some irrelevant political statement.”

“Like the NYU kids?”

“Like the NYU kids, exactly. Anyway, consider it. We meet on alternating Thursdays down at Coffee and Corks. If nothing else, you might meet a single girl and hit it off.”

“Eh,” I said.

“Okay, Diogenes, whatever,” he said.

“Attention,” said the ominous, Essex-ish voice on the loudspeaker. “There will be a train bound for Ramsgate and Margate via Canterbury West arriving at platform 2-b in ten minutes. Southeastern apologises for any inconvenience, but will not do anything to compensate you for our slovenliness in preparing for half an inch of snow. Thank you.”

The crowd erupted into cheers. I smiled. At least I wouldn’t have to wait in the cold for another half an hour. And, who knew, the madman to my right might entertain us all some more by threatening pigeons, or something.

Fifteen minutes later, we were on the train. The Student and I managed to push our way through the crush of people trying to get on and nab a couple seats with a table in between them. Sure, we might have trampled an old woman along the way, but, damn it, we scored the table.

The train started up with a whirr of the electric whatever-it-is-that-runs-the-train and a jump, resulting, judging from the ruckus behind me, in someone nudging the old man’s crappy old red bike. “Fuck you, you little shit, get the fuck away from my bike!”

“What? I didn’t touch your bike.”

“I saw you touch the fucking bike, now fuck off before I hit you. I might be old, and you might be young, but I will break your nose just the same.”

“Calm down.”

“Don’t tell me to calm down, and don’t look at my fucking bike!”

I grinned. Ah. England.

>The Next Four Hours

>

We still had four or so hours until Pascale would return to Lille. Four hours to go and the museums were closed and we’d been kicked out of the only pub we could find. The sun was setting and, standing in the plaza next to La Musee des Beaux-Arts, the digital thermometer across the street read –2 degrees. Granted, this was Celsius, and not Fahrenheit, but still: Screw that.

The snow was blowing harder than it had during the rest of our trip, and I was slowly blinded by the precipitation. The sun was, by and large, gone from the sky, and I was getting pissed. And not in the good way. Not in the British way that implied so damn drunk that one would be happy wherever one found oneself, but in the American way. “Fucking God damn it.”

“That’s a horrible obscenity,” remarked The Student.

“Oh,” I said, affecting daintiness, “dear me, so terribly sorry I tread upon your intelligentia sensibilities, fine chap.”

“What?”

“I simply did not mean to drive you to uncomfortableness in any sort of way. Simply not my intention. My intention was to simply state that it is God damned balls fucking cold out here and if you don’t agree, then you’re obviously some sort of fucking cold-thriving-on lizard.”

The Student sighed and pulled out a map.

“Oh,” I continued, “what are you looking at now? Some silly little excursion based on the Crusades? Maybe Charle-fucking-magne? Charles Martel? Ooo!” I shouted, jumping up and down, “Are we going to break into a castle and look at the tapestries, because it’s a castle and it has tapestries?”

The Student sighed, much in the same way that a tired parent would, rolled the map up, and slapped me upside the head with it.

I shut up.

He held it an inch away from my face. “No,” he said. “Bad.”

“Er,” I said.

“I was looking up an internet cafe down the road from here, near some wine bar or something, if you must know.”

“When did you hear about that?”

“I went into the tourist information center earlier.”

“When earlier.”

The Student sighed and rubbed his temples. “When you spent forty minutes staring slack-jawed at the fire-jugglers.”

“Oh,” I said. I had. They were immensely talented, and I believe that if you are a decent human being in any definition of the phrase, then the sight of fire will render you motionless and thoughtless for anywhere up to an hour.“Well,” I continued, “cool. Where is it?”

“I don’t know if we should go. You’ve been a real jerk, and I’m pretty tempted to simply walk over to an all-French bookstore and take the map with me.”

“That would be an extremely unkind thing to do; and I’m very sorry for being a dick. It’s just that my father was a medieval historian and he used to thrash me oh so violently when I was a child.”

“Do you ever not lie?”

“The Narrator’s Ratio is 10% truth, 10% half-truth, and 80% lies and bullshit.”

The Student nodded and walked off. I followed, hoping that he was taking us to an internet cafe, and not an all-French bookstore.

Five minutes later, I saw the sure sign that we were heading towards an internet cafe: in front of a door, more slouching than standing, was a group of three bearded, bespectacled guys in kinda-shitty shirts and jeans, smoking cigarettes. We got closer and I saw that the windows of the storefront were covered in posters of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, World of WarCraft, LOTR Online, and a couple of Chinese MMORPGs I’d never heard of. This was no bookstore.

We walked by the guys standing outside, nodded to our fellow nerds, and walked inside. It was lit like an office. Some extremely bright fluorescent lights slightly buzzed overhead. Some wall-mounted flatscreens played the French equivalent of GTV, and all around the walls, lining the windows, were tricked-out gaming machines. There was a small corridor with some glass-walled rooms to either side; the rooms were, too, filled with gaming towers.

I gave an appreciative whistle. This wasn’t an internet cafe, this was a mecca for all things geek-holy. One of the guys behind a computer looked up, said, “Oh,” then walked over to the cash register. He had a walk that I’d only seen in massive stoners. It was strange, how they had a walk unto themselves. Kind of a loping thing, not too quick, not too slow, the arms kept slack and the entire body relaxed. You know, Shaggy, from Scooby Doo. He made it behind the register, shook his longish hair and said, “Salut.”

“Salut,” said The Student. “Deux L’ordinateurs pour demi-heur, s’il-vous plaît.”

“Oui,” he said, “intrenet?”

“Oui,” said The Student.

“Chouette,” said the guy. He tapped some keys on the machine, printed out a couple of slips of paper and gave The Student the login instructions. We headed back to one of the rooms, took a couple of computers, and sat down. The Student handed me a slip of paper and typed furiously away at his computer.

I, on the other hand, was treated to extreme confusion. The French keyboard is sublimely different from the American one. This is, perhaps, not surprising to a lot of readers, but for me, it was a shock unlike anything since arriving in the UK and making the transition from an insane region of a country in which the religious majority is still thrashing against the thought that Muslims are not inherently dangerous; to a region of a country where Muslims are seen as the people who make food for you when you’re plastered.

I spent about ten minutes trying to figure out why I couldn’t log in, figured it out, opened Firefox on the computer, and then reverted to one of the apes from 2001: A Space Odyssey, slapping the keyboard in rage as I couldn’t log in to precious, precious Facebook. With five minutes to go, I logged in, saw about five messages from Laura berating me for not responding to the first message about my libretto. I dashed off a quick reply that I was in France, extremely sorry that I couldn’t get back to her earlier, and please God don’t cut me from the cast. I jotted down the number she listed in her message to call someone about it, was about to respond that I had received the number, and then the internet cut out.

By this time, The Student was standing behind me. “Get everything done?”

“No. Fucking keyboard.”

“It’s not that hard, man.”

“Yeah it is! The shift key’s all…” I pointed at the keyboard. “Short and shit. I barely managed to get on Facebook, man.”

“I thought you brought your laptop with you.”

“I did, but I didn’t bring the charger.”

“Ah,” he said, “don’t have a European adaptor, huh?”

“Nope.” I spinned resignedly in my chair and sighed.

“So what was that?” he asked, nodding at the screen, that now showed the login prompt.

“Oh, I have to pick up my libretto when I get back to Canterbury.”

“The trials and tribulations of an actor, yes?”

“Meh.”

We left the cafe.

Two hours later, we’d made our sixth lap of Rihour Square. After our third lap, we went inside a bookstore for an hour or so, wandering around, making guesses at what the book titles meant for everything we saw. The majority of novels in the store all looked the same. That is to say, the binding was virtually identical. White covers, black text on the front showing the title and the author, and a red, yellow, and orange stripe in the upper right-hand corner.

After a half hour inside the place, we started being tailed by workers in that special way that translated to, “We know you aren’t going to buy anything, thus, you must be trying to steal.”

Shortly afterwards, we left the store and made a couple of laps around the square.

“Fuck it,” I said. “Beer’s on me. We’re going to a cafe.”

“What?”

“I can’t take this anymore. We’re walking around this square like it’s going to change if we do it enough times. It’s a boatload of bullshit, and we’re going to go into that cafe right there—” I pointed to the cafe across the square, opposite the fountain on which we had sat for ten minutes before being sprayed with water, the yellow-and-white cafe, as opposed to the red-and-blue cafe next door, “—and we are going to drink the shit out of some beers before getting back on the Metro and going back to Pascale’s.”

“I don’t think I want to drink beer brewed with shit.”

“Fuck you,” I concluded before stalking off to the cafe.

I don’t do well in restaurants. It doesn’t matter if the aisles between tables are huge or miniscule, I will probably knock into someone enjoying their beer or food. I talk loudly about subjects no sane man would discuss in public. I make self-depricating jokes about Jews with such frequency that a person observing from the outside would think I was a raving anti-Semite.

We walked into the yellow-and-white cafe to see that it was even smaller than I could’ve imagined. There were no seats in the middle of the cafe—everything was against the walls. The tables were tiny, the seats were tiny, and the coffee was tiny. But we weren’t at that cafe for coffee—we were there for beer. And thankfully, the beer was not tiny.

I have no idea what the beer was called, only that it was a semi-local lager sort of thing with a picture of an abbey on the front. Maybe it was called Abbaye, but maybe not. Anyway, it was good, and I recommend it to whomever is in the area.

We spent the hour or so in the cafe in by and large silence. We’d hit the point where conversational topics had been exhausted. I could have asked The Student how things were going with Rebecca, but, at the same time, I wasn’t interested enough to spend God knows how long talking about someone’s relationship. See, I go through waves of caring. There will be three-month-long periods where I’m about as bad as Diogenes of Sinope, followed by periods where I consider myself something along the lines of Cyrano de Bergerac, and then the remaining time spent dashing back and forth between them and generally confusing myself. The point is, with all of that going through my mind on a generally day-to-day basis, I had no inclination to hear about the troubles of others.

Eventually, Pascale called The Student to say that she was back at the apartment, so we drank up, paid, and left.

We arrived back at the apartment without incident, ate, talked about the ways we tried to waste time, and crashed.

>Nonverbal Communication

>

After a few minutes of chilled silence—the sort of silence which only good friends can manage between them, that silence in which it is clear that the only way to clear up this misunderstanding is either wait a couple of days, get a whiskey or two and grunt, or play Call of Duty—we found the Irish pub. It was at the tip of a building next to one of the many old churches in Lille. Since I’m a horrible note taker, and am writing this nearly thirteen months after the fact, I forget the name of the place, and so I shall call it O’Houlehain’s. The face of the pub was black with bronze lettering. Through the frosted and darkened windows, I saw some flickering Christmas lights on a couple of Christmas trees.

I opened the door and was greeted by three things: First, a blast of warm air; Second: a blast of music in the form of The Pogues’ “Pogue Mahone;” and third, the bartender, a large man in an Ireland rugby shirt shouting, “Close the fecking door, ya gobshite, before I bash yer fecking teeth in!”

I closed the door. I learned my lesson in Knoxville: When a bartender tells you to do something, you do not dally. The Student and I walked up to the bar and now, the guy was cool. “What’re ya havin?”

I scanned the taps. “Murphy’s’ll do.”

“Good choice.”

The Student scanned the taps. “Guinness, please.”

“Good choice.”

He served up the drinks and The Student and I headed over to a table next to the window. Outside, the snow was picking up, and a couple people walked around, hunched over and clutching some shopping bags.

I took off my coat and laid it over the back of my chair. The Student did the same with his, and we both sat down and looked outside.

It was a few minutes before I cleared my throat. If you’re not a guy, or you are and you’ve never been in this sort of situation, let me play sociologist and explain what was happening at the table.  

We were easing over the wounds of the spat in the only way two red-blooded heterosexual American men knew how: Sitting in awkward silence and making non-verbal indicators of apology. The first, was my scratching two centimeters above the top of my right ear. Translated, this meant, “Er, yeah.”

The Student rolled his shoulders. Translated: “Yep.”

I scratched at my chin: “May have overreacted.”

The Student twitched his eyebrows. “Probably shouldn’t have dipped to academic discourse.”

I scratched at the bridge of my nose. “Nah, my fault entirely. I really shouldn’t have thrown you against the wall right next to the hobo.” That’s when the throat-clear came around. “We cool?” it asked.

The Student grunted, which, in our parlance, meant, “Yeah. Good thing the trip’s almost over, right?”

“Woah,” I said, “what the fuck does that mean?”

The Student, startled, looked at me. “What?”

“That fucking grunt.”

“I cleared my throat.”

“That was a Goddamn grunt, and you know it, pisher.”

“What are you talking about? This is insane. First you throw me up against a brick wall and no—”

“You forgave me for that.”

“What? Why would I forgive you for throwing me up against a fucking wall, you imbecile? You didn’t even apologize for it.”

“Fuck you. First: You twitched your eyebrows, which means you agreed that lapsing into an academic fucking lecture about Palestine wasn’t the best way to blow off fear from our encounter, which, implicitely, means you forgave me for my actions. Second: I scratched the bridge of my nose, which meant ‘I apologize,’ to which you said ‘it’s cool’ but then you grunted, which meant you were glad that the trip was almost over.”

Throughout my analysis—accurate analysis, I might add—The Student’s head slowly went from ninety degrees to touching his right shoulder. And, after I finished, he said, “You seriously need help. You have a case of generalized anxiety disorder that surpasses any known case. You could be a boon to science. Your ramblings have the potential to cure untold amounts of people of their problems. You got all of that from fucking gestures?”

At this point, the bar tender brought over a couple of glasses of whiskey. “If you ain’t gonna kiss and make up, yeh can drink and make up. Just shut the feck up before yeh drive away my customers.”

I looked around. The pub was devoid of human life, like Hoth. But this was not something to say to a, man in a rugby shirt. So, we took the whiskey and begrudgingly apologized by doing so. Placated, the bartender nodded, went back to the bar, and came back with two bills. “Now get the feck out,” he said.

“What?” I asked. “We drank the whiskey. That means we get to stay.”

“Shove it up yer arse, yer a couple a gobshites. I know yer type, feckin tourists. Yeh’ll just sit in here and yell about how feckin quaint France is. Pay up and feck off.”

He was growing more and more irate. We picked our wallets out of our jeans, paid and drank up, and got the fuck out of there before glasses started to fly. Dropkick Murphys’ “Finnegan’s Wake” started playing as we left.

>In Palestinian Lands

>

After a certain amount of time spent with another person, I want either to get away from them or to see them dead on the street. (It passes quickly, relax.) This varies from person to person, but, generally, it happens after I’ve been around someone for a few days.

In this case, the breaking point came while The Student and I were in an area of Lille that seemed like we’d walked into the Gaza Strip.

We’d spent the earlier part of the day wandering aimlessly, talking not to exchange ideas or anything like that, but to keep some parts of our bodies moving so we would not turn into human icicles. I didn’t know how the homeless managed to keep alive during the winters, but I sure as hell respected them.

Anyway, after roaming through the Catholic university’s grounds for about half an hour, we wound up in the east side of Lille. I’m not sure what we were trying to find out there. I think, perhaps, that we’d found what looked like an upscale market, and followed the street thinking we’d find a pub or something like it. Instead, what we found was a street which, as we progressed, so too did the buildings from normal upkeep to what seemed like the slums.

I pointed this out to The Student, and he launched into a lecture about how I was allowing my middle-class, some might say bourgeois, sensibilities to effect the way I was seeing the world around me. The buildings, he said, may be decaying, but that did not mean that there was a correlation between their state and that of the residents.

The slowly increasing number of Middle Eastern folk glaring at us from doorways told me otherwise. Then, when we walked down an alleyway and saw a giant Palestinian flag mural which featured a couple of AK-47s crossed in front of the flag, I decided that The Student could shut the fuck up and die for all I cared. “We need to get out.”

He was staring at the mural. “Er.”

“Now.”

“We’re fine,” he looked around. A guy wearing a shirt featuring a red splotch on the Israeli flag was staring at us while leaning out of a window on the other side of the alley. The Student dropped his voice. “They don’t know we’re Jewish.”

“Are you fucking crazy?” I asked, my voice low—I might have been angry, but I wasn’t stupid. “We couldn’t look more Jewish if we were wearing tefillin, you schmuck. We aren’t welcome here. Let’s get out of the area where everything’s halal and there’s a guy with a blood-stained Israeli flag leaning out of a window.”

The Student looked at the man. The two made eye contact and the guy in the window retreated. A couple of other guys who’d walked past one side of the alley walked past the other end and looked at us. “Yeah,” said The Student. “Maybe we should.”

“Goddamn right. What the fuck,” I said as we walked out of the alley and back from whence we came. “Two American Jews traipse into a place with more angry Palestinians than East Jerusalem. What schmucks.”

We walked down the street at a speed just under running. In retrospect, we might have been overplaying the presence of a threat. Looking back, as we walked out of the alley and back to the market, the looks on people’s faces weren’t those of “I’m going to slit you open from navel to throat, ZOG,” but more of “Why are they running so fast?” Of course, there was the guy with the Israel shirt, so who knows?

At any rate, we made it out of the area without being harassed at all. Of course, I was now enraged at The Student for putting me in that situation in the first place. Even after we passed the market, he wouldn’t shut up. We walked down a side street back in the direction of La Musée Des Beaux Arts and he kept chattering about the various reasons for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and how that bled over through Middle Eastern politics in the first instance, and Judaic-Islamic relations in the second instance. No doubt that what he was saying was wise, informed, and all of that bullshit, but after a few blocks of hearing about how, really, one could not easily lay blame to either side without being accused of xenophobia, I wanted to strangle the man.

“But of course,” he blabbered on, “I don’t know. The last time I’ve held an in-depth conversation with a Palestinian was in high school. And, if memory serves, that was about how much we both hated trig. Really, the media doesn’t paint the clearest picture, or is that a clichéd thing to say nowad—”

“Shut up,” I said. Then, for good measure, I tossed him up against the wall opposite. We happened to be right next to an adult video store and a suddenly silent and awkward bearded and glassesed busker with a cheap acoustic guitar. “You’ve been talking for twenty fucking minutes, God damn it. It’s cold, I’m cold, I’m hungry, I need a drink, and you won’t shut up about political nuances. For fuck’s sake. Just talk about God damned Star Wars or something for once.”

“S’il-vous plaît,” said the busker, laying down his guitar, “pardonez-mois, monsieur, mais vous-êtes—”

I shot him a look that said he should shut the fuck up.

He did.

“Now,” I said, “get out your fucking travel guide and we’re going to find a place that’s warm and where I can get a God damned beer.”

The Student, not changing his facial expression, took out his travel guide.

I took it from him, flipped to the drinking section in Lille, and saw we were a block away from an Irish pub that had been opened by a guy named Seamus the Scot who suffered from Multiple Personality Disorder. Seemed good to me. I flipped it shut, shoved it back to The Student, shoved my hands into my pockets, turned my head down, and walked.

I guess this happens to me because I’m fundamentally an individualistic person. I don’t like to be around exclusively the same people for long stretches of time, and throwaway conversation (stuff like, “Boy, I sure am glad it’s Friday!”) infuriates me.

While The Student’s one-sided discussion wasn’t nearly in the realm of TGIF-platitudes, what he was saying was incessant and just as unstoppable as Superman on speed. Was my reaction overkill and unnecessary? Yes. Of course it was.

            (In case you’re wondering, this is also why I would never be a good guidance counselor. Imagine: Some middle school kid walks into my office almost in tears about his parents getting a divorce. My reacion is to simply lean back with a wry grin on my face, bark a quick laugh, pull out a bottle of Jack nestled in my desk, and say, “Kid, that ain’t shit. Lemme tell you about how I found out my parents were getting divorced.”)

>The Best Laid Plans

>

“Fuck,” I said.

“Yes,” said The Student. “Quite.”

The giant board in Lille-Europe winked threateningly at the two of us, standing in the middle of the departure area in the midst of rushing Europeans in one of the busiest train stations I’d seen. The line that read “Bruxelles” also had a little buzz-kill “Annulée” just down the line.

“Maybe there’s a later train?” I asked.

The Student shook his head. “I doubt it. The weather outside is terrible, and they won’t run the trains if the lines are icy.”

“Ask,” I said.

“I’m not asking if I already know the answer, it’s a waste of energy. We should spend the time looki—”

“Ask,” I said.

The Student tossed up his hands in defeat and joined a very long queue at the ticketing agent booth. I followed.

There’s something unifying and vaguely warming about seeing people from different countries complaining about the same thing at the same time and in the same physical area. It’s one of those things that we miss out on in the States, unless you want to count the Southwest, which is just as bilingual as French Canada is. At any rate, the good vibes were destroyed once it became clear how incredibly annoyed and angry most of the people in the line were.

After a few minutes in the line, spent behind a couple of German ladies, we got up to the booth where The Student asked what was going on. The ticket agent responded that the Eurostar trains were canceled for the day because of the weather. The Student asked if we could switch to the French line, and the ticket agent laughed and told us to get the hell out.

We left the line, stood at the fence along the walkway overlooking the trains, and leaned forward. “Well,” I said.

“That’s a fairly accurate description of everything that’s going wrong today. Indeed. Yes.” The Student hung his head.

See, this would not have been a problem any other day, and we would have otherwise just gone on our merry way and head back to Pascale’s place to slumber until the afternoon. However, having planned to be in Brussells by eleven, we’d made certain arrangements with Pascale—namely, she’d frolic on out to her parents’s house, thus taking her keys with her, and we’d be drunkenly swaying around the EU’s capital. And so, Pascale already nearly at her parents’ and us stuck in the train station, we were faced with another day spent wandering around Lille.

Eventually, we left the station and headed back out to the plaza. The trains were closed for good reason. Between us and the entrance to the plaza opposite, a distance of about fifty yards, there was a sheet of snow blowing at about twenty miles an hour. Neither The Student or I had scarves, so we covered our faces with our hands, barely cutting some of the coldness, and schlepped across the plaza, up the staircase, and onto the pedestrian portion of a bridge, where the wind was even worse.

I looked up and saw that we had about a quarter of a mile to the giant mall in EuraLille. I was so cold, I didn’t even have the mental faculty to delude myself into thinking I was stuck in a fictional world like Hoth.

Eventually, though, we made it inside a chain café—kind of like Panera Bread back in the States, except French. Everything on the menu seemed to flavored with onions and garlic and served with a baguette on the side. If my heart hadn’t frozen solid, I might have thought about how this was healthier than deep frying potatoes with every meal, but most of my working mind was trying to keep my body from dropping.

The Student and I ordered some breakfast with a couple of double espressos and took our trays to the windows. The people outside looked just as miserable as we did, but took it with a certain European panache that said that, oui, they knew that this weather was coming and had planned for their outfits to match the weather.

“Bastards,” I said.

“What?” asked The Student, who was still shivering.

“They manage to take this in such stride. We resembled two hunched-over old men with…” words failed me, as they often did. “Hunched-overitis.”

The Student cocked an eyebrow. “Perhaps part of that is because we’re from a rather hot climate. This, you may have noticed, is not.”

“Quite,” I said.

Through the rest of the day, this would be a recurring thing. We’d be on the verge of killing each other because of the cold, retreat inside, and talk nonsense over a couple of too-large espressos.

>Docks and Statues

>

We arrived a kilometer and a half later, thirty minutes later, and just a bit more frozen. The beach was empty and dark. It seemed that not going to the beach in the dead of winter and at night was a universally agreed-upon principle that everyone but us adhered to. We followed it for a ways, and I was reminded of Whitstable’s pebble beach for an instant, then the lack of chavs brought me back out of it.

There was nothing to differentiate it from a pier you’d see anywhere in the States, and, except for this being the first pier I’d set foot on, it was wholly unremarkable. The French started walking onto the construction and The Student said, “Er, hey, wait.”

They turned around. “Yes?” asked Pascale, briefly stopping in her breathing into her hand for warmth.

“We’re not going on that thing, are we?”

“Of course,” said Andy. “Why, you scared?”

“No, not at all. I’m more concerned about the, well, fucking cold breezes out there. Wind doesn’t stop on the ocean, and this is some mighty cold air—don’t know if you HOLY SHIT.”

A gust of wind blew by, carrying with it a couple of newspapers, some Styrofoam containers, and a seagull corpse. We shielded ourselves against it and cursed in our native languages.

“Eh, it’s not so bad,” said Albert. “My family, we climb the mountains in the winters, usually. That is bad.” The fact that he said this through chattering teeth and a half-covered face made me doubt that he could handle the freezing wind, but I shrugged and followed them onto the pier. I heard a string of expletives behind me as The Student shuffled along after us.

We reached the end of the pier and stood around for a bit. I started spitting into the water, thinking that somehow my spit would freeze midair. Everyone else ignored me and went to look at all of the boats docked in the harbor to our right. Eventually I joined them, looked at the boats, lights illuminating the darkness, some foghorns honking into the night, competing with seagulls to see what sort of sounds would most directly counter a conventionally serene setting like a beach at night. A ferry set on its way out of the harbor, which, due to its size and the speed it was traveling at, meant that it would be out of the docks in thirty minutes—a length of time in which I hoped we’d be sitting warmly inside somewhere.

“Nice,” said Andy, lowering his scarf momentarily.

We nodded.

“Well,” I said, after The Student threw a snowball at my face, numbing my ear and making me wish I’d stayed in England. “Bout that time, eh chaps?”

Albert nodded. “Right oh.”

We walked back towards town.

On the way back, we stopped by a building that looked like a structure out of a strategy game I used to play. Turned out that this was the hôtel-de-ville and the other building was something else entirely. I thought about asking what the other building was, but instead decided that I’d get The Student back for making my ear not work for ten minutes.

While he and the French went up to a statue of three elders (Rotarians, for Americans) who decided that they’d rather not work with the Nazis, rebelled by helping people leave the city, and were, predictably, shot. There must have been about five inches on the ground there, enough so that I didn’t even have to bother with making a snow ball. I just bent down, scooped up what felt like ten pounds of snow and ran over to The Student while screaming, “Raaaaaaaaaaaaaaugh!”

He looked over and his eyes widened for the couple of seconds he had before I smote him with the snow mound.

Well, The Student dropped to the ground like a rag doll and lay there moaning. Gotta tell ya, it was a bit of an awkward time explaining to the three of them that I hadn’t meant to render him unconscious and/or kill him. It was even more awkward when we had to drag him back through town, especially as he spent most of the time murmuring about Rebecca. Things I did not want to know and now that I had heard, I could not unhear.

When we finally made it back to the car, we sat him up in the backseat. “Huh,” I said. “Er, yeah. Really didn’t mean that. Hope you all realize that.”

Andy shrugged. “It happens.”

“Frites?” asked Albert.

“Oh,” said Pascale. “Yes, I am hungry.”

I looked at the car. “Will he be okay in there if we just up and leave him like that?”

“Yes,” said Andy. “He’ll be fine. People will assume he is drunk and leave him alone when they steal the car.”

Pascale punched him in the arm.

“What? It was a joke.”

We walked off to find frites, along the way, I was given a history lesson in just how it was a Belgian idea to fry potatoes like this, even though Americans called them French fries. I kept telling them that I knew they originated in Belgium, and was met with a constant, “Then why do you call them French fries? It makes no sense!”

“Because that’s what they’re called,” made no headway. Nor did: “It’s like calling McDonald’s or Taco Bell ‘food.’ It’s nonsense, but that’s the socially accepted norm.”

The argument, surprisingly, persisted the entire trip to a mobile fry station, where we each walked away with what would equate to two super-size fries from McDonald’s—and they say Americans eat more unhealthily than anyone else in the world. Pshaw.

Anyway, after that, we headed back to Lille. The Student regained full consciousness on the motorway, and, as a peace offering, I offered him the remainder of the fries. He hadn’t retained any memories of being knocked unconscious by a massive snowball, judging by the, “Did I fall? I knew I should have worn my boots on this excursion.”

Far be it from me to describe massive head trauma—and I also made sure to clear my throat and wink at the others in the car (though I’m not sure if they quite understood what I meant). “Yeah, pretty nasty one, too,” I lied. “Luckily, you didn’t cut yourself or anything. Don’t know if they have free health care in this country or what.”

“Yes,” said Andy. “We do.”

“There we go,” I said. “Bleed away, my friend.”

“My entire face feels numb,” said The Student. “It’s like when my brother and I used to smash each others’ faces into the snow.”

“Yes. Indeed. You tripped forward into the snow. It was very unfortunate, but we got you out before any major damage could be done.” I cleared my throat. Lying always seemed to create ungodly amounts of phlegm. “Have some fries.”

“These look half-eaten.”

“Nope.”

“Yes, they are. My God, this one looks like a toothless rat was gumming at it.”

“That’s ridiculous, these are perfectly good fries that I bought for my dear, unconscious friend.”

The Student glared at me. “Liar. You ate most of these fries, didn’t you? You did, there’s no way to explain—good Good, there’s a pool of spit at the bottom of this container.”

“Drool, not spit,” I said. “Fuck,” I cursed. My cover was blown.

The Student grew just a bit green. “You drooled on your fries before you ate them?”

“They smelled delicious. I can’t help that they smelled delicious. Guys,” I said to the French, “didn’t they smell delicious?”

“You drooled on your frites?” asked Pascale.

“They smelled delicious!”

“That is disgusting.”

“Do you do that for all of your food?” asked Andy.

“No,” I said. “I just haven’t had fries in a while.”

A groan filled the car and I became the pariah. I spent the rest of the ride trying to explain why I was not a Neanderthal or a troglodyte, and thus deserved something other than the incredibly cold group of shoulders that I was currently getting. I’m not certain if I made the headway I thought I deserved, but I did get to shake people’s hands at the end of the night, so I think that I made some progress. We went our separate ways and prepared for the next day, when, unbeknownst to me at the time, The Student and I were scheduled to take a trip to Brussels.

>Dear God It’s Cold

>

We arrived in the evening, parked on the street and exited the car.

Calais, seemed to be made up of two-lane roads, with the exception of an area next to the mall and the hôtel-de-ville. A mile or so down the road from where we’d parked was a large mall, some more, iced-over roads, and a bunch of shops. For a port town, Calais seemed really nice—especially when one compares it with Dover.

In the waning light, snow was briefly illuminated by the streetlights spaced out every few yards, and people walked around with take away boxes and shopping bags. The sound of jazz, coming from speakers mounted on shopfronts, floated through the air. That’s all information that registered after I got out of the car. What I primarily thought of was a series of horrible invectives directed at the gust of wind that blew straight into my face.

The Student stepped out of his side of the car, slipped on a patch of black ice, and steadied himself with an impressive chain of body contortions that brought laughter and applause from our French friends. When he regained composure by clinging to the side of the car for dear life, The Student gave a little bow and shuffled his way to the sidewalk, which was alternately salted and covered in snow.

“So,” Pascale said, turning to Andy, “ou sont allons?”

“Oui,” said Andy’s friend, Albert, “Andy?”

I tilted my head to the side.

The Student, who had by now shuffled up to my right, whispered, “They’re asking where we’re going.”

“I know, thanks.”

Andy put on a disconcerted face. “What? Why are you asking me?”

“You wanted to go here,” said Albert. “What do we do?”

“I just suggested,” said Andy, shrugging up his shoulders.

“Pfft,” said Pascale.

“C’mon, man,” said The Student. “You drag us out here, we have to sit in friggen traffic for two hours to come to Calais, what are we going to do? Huh?”

Andy looked at us in shock, as if we were pinning war crimes on him or something. He gestured in the air, hands twirling in indecisive circles, like a compass trying to right itself with a magnetic force, and eventually, he pointed down the road. “That way. We’ll go to the beach.”

“There,” I said. “Was that so hard?”

“Now you?” he asked.

We laughed and walked down the street, every once in a while shouting obscenities while one of us lost footing on the ice, with the others laughing, masking their fear of the knowledge that it would probably be them who would fall next.

We made it about a mile or so before the sun started setting. We had passed the mall and were now on what would be a busy district, if it weren’t for the ice covering everything. The roofs’ overhangs were sprinkled with icicles, shops’ windows were frosted over, and in the dusk, the neon lights of the few open kebab, frites, and bakeries glowed like beacons. We’d spent the past fifteen minutes—or, in spatial terms, since nearly being run down in a roundabout and pausing in the plaza near the huge quasi-Gothic hôtel-de-ville to allow The Student to take roughly twenty pictures of its spires and clocks—discussing what to do for food.

Ultimately, as we walked along the street and stumbled upon the only large boulangerie that also did not seem as if it was a drug front, we decided to just get some rolls and such until returning from the beach, when we’d get something a little more filling. We went in, ordered some food, and continued down the street.

Pascale, Andy, and Albert took up the front of our promenade—which made sense since I had never been to France, even, and The Student hadn’t been to the country in a year and a half. They talked in that rapid-fire way that made it clear they were gossiping, and The Student and I followed behind, noshing on our baguettes.

“So, how’re you liking France?” he asked.

“Pretty, pretty good,” I said. “Lille’s my kind of town. The coffee flows like wine, and the wine flows like water.”

The Student nodded. “I like that. You should use that in your blog.”

“I’m gonna.”

“How is that going, by the way? I’ve missed the last few entries.”

“Going well. Just got to where The Drunkard smote The Stalker and banished him unto the dark depths of the Underworld, wherein the latter was forced to undergo a purging of all that was dark in his soul in order to rejoin our group.”

“The hell?”

“Allegory for when The Drunkard’s flatmates tossed The Stalker into Madame Guillotine.”

“What goes on in your head?”

“Twisted things that seem as though they were ripped from a Tim Burton movie, why?”

“That’s what I thought.”

A few minutes later, we’d taken a detour into a war memorial park because hey, why not? We walked past a few people, past a fountain that had frozen over and then, near a barren playground that, too, was frosted over, we saw a giant world map, the sort of thing that reminded me of when I was in elementary school and my friends and I pretended to be Godzilla and crush Ohio. It was big enough to show Cookeville, Tennessee—a true shitsplat of a town.

So, my instincts kicking in, I started pretending to crush the U.S. beneath my giant Godzilla feet while The Student showed the three French where we came from in the U.S.. Soon, we moved on.

We were now obviously close to the docks. I say obviously close, because everything was just a bit more run down than the rest of the city, and the human to seagull ratio was rapidly resembling the worldwide human to insect ratio. Off in the distance, I could see the dull glow of light pollution from the high-powered lights on various docks. The sounds of giant ferry horns wafted through the air, like the songs of horribly ill songbirds.

“Out of curiosity,” I said, “how much further to the beach?”

“Oh,” said Albert, “not that much further. Kilometer, kilometer and a half.”

“Oh,” I said. “Good.”

>Calais n’est pas fermé!

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The next day, I woke up before The Student and Pascale, and was thus treated to one of those incredibly awkward times in life that either drive one to reflect upon their own life, or hate others.

You probably know the horror that arrives when you wake up before anyone else in someone else’s house. You’re sitting there on the couch, staring up at the ceiling, wondering why you woke up at six in the morning, since you’ve never done that before, and there’s no reason on God’s green Earth that you should be doing that now. You’re wondering when your hosts are going to wake up, and wondering if their floor is one of those that’s overly sensitive and will creak at a decibel level equal to that of a Mastodon concert. To make matters worse: you really, really have to piss and you didn’t think to ask where the bathroom was the night before—because you were drinking with your hosts and didn’t want to break the seal or seem like a weirdo.

This was all my fault. I claimed the bunk and it was far from silent. Every time I turned, it would creak and squeak. Getting down sounded like a symphony of car wrecks, which would surely wake up The Student, who was snoring like a chainsaw down on the floor, if not Pascale, who was also snoring away on her mattress. And so, I lay there, looking at the ceiling, concentrating on dry, dry deserts and not roaring rivers when, suddenly, The Student bolted upright with a cry of “Fuck no!” bolted out of his sleeping bag, and ran out the door, down the hall to the toilet, and proceeded to make his own cacaphonous symphony of puking.

Pascale groaned and so did I. I didn’t want to spend my time pissing in someone’s puke. There’s something fundamentally dirty about that, something that seems like it deserves a section in Leviticus. “Thou shalt not relieve thineself in someone’s vomit.”

After a while, when everyone had cleaned themselves up and was properly caffeinated, Pascale broke the news that we’d be going to Calais with someone named Andy.

I’d apparently met the guy the night before, but hadn’t remembered. I shrugged and said, “Whatever.” The Student, however, was pretty excited. Andy was one of the people he’d known from a couple of years ago, and got along with pretty well—I don’t think he’d gotten on anyone’s bad side except for a German guy who had engaged in some alpha struggle with The Student. He was vague about the details, which told me that there was a girl involved.

At any rate, I was up for it, since I needed a break from wandering around Lille and stumbling across cathedrals and horse butcheries. 

So we waited around for Andy and his friend for an hour, and when they arrived, there was much rejoicing. Any was a tall guy with dark skin, curly hair, and–not to seem, ah, well, like myself–a Heeb nose. His friend was taller, but otherwise looked pretty similar, except he was wearing a hat. The rejoicing was followed by discussion about what, exactly, to bring on our excursion. Eventually, it was decided that, fuck it, we’d get coffee and food there. So we piled into Andy’s car, drove, and, several minutes later on the highway, hit traffic and sat idling for a couple of hours until driving off into a series of other roads leading to Calais.