The Comoros: Getting Lost (in translation)

     Obviously, English is not the language of the people here. I'm no stranger to poorly translated signs and directions, but the odd thing about this is that English isn't even the secondary language in this country. French is.

Paris: Getting Lost

First: nothing.

Darkness, void of consciousness.

Only the rabbit hole descended through, only the empty space itself.

Then, shimmering up from the depths arises the sense of touch: skin upon stone. The sensation is tremulous, though, and slinks with its back along the borderland between thought and suspended animation. It does not trust me. It skirts around the periphery of my mind, reveling in freedom, resistant to my ownership. I will have to sew myself back to this sense like Peter Pan to his shadow.

I call gently, coaxing it like a wayward kitten, extending friendship and assurance. Reluctantly, it creeps back to me, wraps me in its touch and becomes my skin once more.

I am cold and damp against the floor. Cold, damp and afraid to move lest I might scare myself away and become again an empty ghost.

Eyes still shut I observe the darkness around me. This is not a place of my choosing. My cheek is smashed flat against the limestone. The air smells like tomb. For a moment, I consider the hopeful notion that this may yet be a nightmare, something horrible and unreal that I can wake safely from, too hot beneath my mound of blankets with drops of sweat heavy like gazpacho across my scalp.

No such luck.

I am in this subterranean place.  I walked into the mouth of the bear and felt death bubble up cauldron-like inside me. The distance between daylight and me weighs a a million pounds, and though I am now sure I am awake, I cannot rouse myself.

“It’s not like a cave,” he had assured me, “It’s like a basement, or a wine cellar, just with more bones.”

“So, like the wine cellar of a deranged serial killer. Hold on just a moment, I have a lovely ’77 you’ll just… die for.”

“Exactly. Now drink this.”

I frowned. “It’s green.”

“Yes.”

“I was told to lay off the green stuff. It’s danger.”

Tap-tap, he insisted, bringing his glass down quickly in front of mine, a challenge to a game. I could not resist.

We drank the neon Absinthe and for a moment I was invincible. Or insane. Or in love. I fancied myself Dante, ready to brave all seven circles of my own personal inferno in pursuit of this man. Fill me full of liquid courage and I’ll jump right into the deep end of spelunking, never mind the panic I feel underground, never mind the twisting miles of neatly arranged bones. I will follow you into these catacombs, just let me bury my face against your shoulder and breath your scent into my soul.

Still prone, I test one finger. It seems to work.

I open only my left eye, the bad one, the one for whom I wear glasses. Before me a blurry grayness persists. I return to a moment from childhood: the one in which I have just started awake from a bad dream. Is it better to turn on the lights and see that there are no monsters there, or is it better to remain encased in darkness, just in case there are monsters there.

My flashlight is still on, though it rolled out of my hand when I hit the floor and now sits just beyond my reach. I trace the line of light still only using my bad eye. The light fans out in long lacey shards like the sharp edges of broken glass, alive with a shimmering spiral of dust.

I raise myself up onto my elbows and the glass gathers around my skull. Realizing that I may have hit the back of my head a bit harder than I generally like to, a new panic sets in, a real one. What if I am seriously injured; what if I am bleeding internally in the back of my head. My brain is swelling up subtly, dragging me unwilling into my final chapter.

Where is he? I try to call to him, but my voice does not make it past my teeth.  I am dying.

Everything grows cold and a stillness descends upon me, painless to my body, though my mind cries softly for its own demise. Will I be noticed down here amongst the dead? Will there even be a need to carry my body back to the surface, or shall I remain forever locked in this tomb of history, stacked up with the other skeletons, unnamable and impossible to put back together with my skull-head stacked up over here and my femurs in another room entirely. Would I boogie down below the streets of Paris with the countless others, unnoticed by the living world above, or would I simply disintegrate into dust, to catch in the light of a flashlight, the particles of myself dancing utterly without self. Would—

“What are you doing?”

Dying. If you must ask.

“Crystal, are you okay.”

“Is so cold,” I shiver out imperceptibly between numbed lips.

“Well, you’re lying in a puddle.”

“It’s blood.”

“It’s rain water.”

“It’s not blood?”

“No. Wait let me check for sure. No.”

He reaches down a hand and lifts me up. The world spins around me a few times and then settles still. Paranoid, I press two fingers against my wrist and count thirty heartbeats.

“I think I’m okay.”

“What happened? Did you slip?”

My mouth fills with a cotton feeling. I don’t want to tell him. There was nothing brave in how I wound up prone beneath Paris, there was nothing even comical. I wished to tell him the story of how I chased the demons back, brandishing my cutlass ostentatiously. I even wished I could report that I was so drunk a wall of pokey ribs blindsided me and I slipped back with a woozy boozy bump.

“Fntd,” I tell him without using any vowels.

“What?”

“I… fntd.”

“You fainted?”

He laughs, and I want to not join in, but I can’t help it.

“It’s like a cave,” I notify him, using his strength to pull myself back to standing.

He smiles and returns me to the light.

Venice: Getting Lost

The thing I like most about Venice is that she shows no mercy to the unadventurous. Step across the threshold of the city and you have no choice but to abandon the illusion that you might know where you are. Streets and canals wind across each other in a dizzy Pollock painting that no cartographer has yet to translate into a map of any accuracy. There is no memorization of these streets, for Venice is a living organism who cannot sit still. You think you know her, but she shifts in her restless sleep, leaving you agape on the shore, staring across the murky water at a pharmacy that used to be your favorite trattoria. Did it close down, or are you lost again, on the wrong Frezzaria? Venice is a city that can be felt, but never known.

It was high tide.

San Marco Square stayed one step ahead of me, thwarting my every attempt to track it's progression through the maze of illegible street signs and watery dead-ends. I chased it through the city, judging its path by the pigeons it shedded as it ran. Morgan, a friend from L.A. who I'd carted along, sought the plaza with his nose pressed firmly down (dangerously close to the ground) into the map. He had yet to look up today.

The birds thickened in the sky, like a coming storm, an omen of Marco. Below us, the cobblestones were beginning to drown in the briny tide. We'd have to forge the newborn canal. I shuddered; I needed a hot shower just looking at the water.

But I'd been through worse. What's a little Venetian scum after that river I fell into in Botswana? What's the smell of canal after the whale I stumbled across, half eaten by sharks, half melted by a tropical Kiribati sun? Morgan had braved the wild streets of East Hollywood; surely he could handle a few drops of misplaced Mediterranean.

I followed the birds across the water, clacking carefully over in my three-inch heels. They were not lofty enough to keep me dry and the canal sucked up against my ankles, licking its oily scent onto my skin, marking me as its own, its precious.

Morgon's eyes rose above the edge of the map as if returning from a dream. Beads of sweat collected on his forehead; his pupils narrowed to pinpricks of darkness.

Still in the water, I turned to him, "Come on," but he shuffled backwards a step away from me. Did the word, "Unclean," creep across his lips?

"Morgan." I kept my voice soft.

He was trapped somewhere under the water's rainbow surface, his eyes full with the most beautiful colors, previously unknown to nature: siren's-conch-indigo, viscous-violet, radium-223-chartruese. They stuck on the skin I'd left too exposed by these strappy-straps.

"I'm not crossing that," he said at last, still staring wide-eyed-down, never meeting my gaze.

Damply, I pleaded, "This is the way." From my vantage I could see the gaudy gold shimmer of the plaza. I'd never lost a traveling companion before the fourth day before. This would not be good press.

"No," he repeated, resolute, "I don't care."

I looked back at him with my sad-eyes face, but the distortion reflected back to him was monstrous and not endearing.

"I am not walking through that." He punched the not a little hard and frightened a few misplaced pigeons back into the sky.

I joined them on the other side, looking back across the sea to where Morgan stood, smaller, distant. "Fine, meet me back at Calle de Montello at five. At the trattoria across from the hotel, okay?"

He nodded slightly, seemed to want to spit at the canal. "You ruined your shoes," was all he said. I never saw him again.

That evening I found myself back on Calle de Montello, sitting on a terrace at a trattoria I'd never seen before, half a bottle of Proseco glistening in the last light of day. I lifted my glass again, listening to the bad news told by my new friend Benigno.

"You're thinking of the other Calle de Montello. It isn't here, bella," he said, sympathetically refilling my glass. "You must go back, to the other side of the city."

But I sat still and soaked in the long rays of sun and the dizzy mess that was Venice. Benigno and his sparkly wine whispered calm against the American get-up-and-go schedule-brain I'd brought with me, telling me against all my judgment that everything was okay.

Sure I was lost, sure Morgan would never speak to me again, but I was lost in the heart of Venice, on a sun washed hillside, surrounded by good wine, good food, and Italian men. Beautiful Italian men.

"Forget it," I answered, "No need to go searching for nothing when everything is right here. I think I'll stay."

"How many nights?"

I looked out across the city where Venetian stars sparkled to life both above and below us, and, clinking my glass against Benigno's, replied, "Just one."






Visit "Venice: Getting Hungry?"
Visit "Venice: Getting Robbed"