The only thing they couldn’t agree on was what extra country to do in the middle. Anthony wanted to go to Amsterdam; Spencer wanted to go to Belgium. They’d sort that out later. The one thing they were perfectly in line for was that it should end on a high. The pretty girls and beautiful beaches of Spain. From everything they’d heard, it was the ultimate party destination. They would end their vacation in Spain.
* * *
SPENCER LOOKS UP to see his friend with a weapon point-blank against the man’s head, so close Spencer can smell the metal. He pulls and stretches, trying to get his head to the side because he knows how powerful an AK-47 firing is; if the gun goes off, it will rip through the terrorist’s head and into Spencer. He is growing tired. He is growing frustrated by the man’s wiry strength, and his own inability to knock him out, to submit him, to get him to go to sleep or even just stop struggling, and everything feels delicate because he doesn’t know what other weapons or accomplices this man has.
Spencer doesn’t have the breath left to say it, but he looks at Alek, tries to make eye contact, and with his mouth clenched and his eyebrows raised, tries to communicate permission to Alek. Kill this man even though it will kill me too.
Spencer watches Alek’s hands. The gun barrel moves down to the man’s head, at an angle that will send the round through it, and into Spencer’s neck.
Spencer tightens his grip.
Spencer watches Alek’s index finger slide down off the barrel over the trigger guard.
The pad of Alek’s finger, moving over the trigger.
Spencer closes his eyes. He has no time and can’t assemble his thoughts to say a prayer, but he prepares himself to die with a terrorist in his grasp.
He hears Alek pull the trigger.
Nothing.
Spencer opens his eyes. Everyone is still there; the gunman struggling in his grasp, Alek standing over them, holding the gun, frowning. What just happened?
Then metal tearing into flesh, but it doesn’t hurt, he feels no pain, he feels it as muted percussion waves coming off the terrorist’s body. Thumps. Spencer sees he’s not being hit, the terrorist is being hit—Alek is driving the rifle into the gunman, furiously, over and over again. A flurry of motion; more light and metal off his peripheral vision, the shapes arranging themselves so that a realization clinks into place—the terrorist has a pistol—and again Spencer tries to summon extra strength. Spencer’s chin is tucked into the gunman’s left shoulder, the pistol is in the gunman’s right hand, so Spencer can’t really see it. The black of the barrel swings across his vision; he tries to bob and weave but he’s trapped, nothing to hide behind, and he is wedged into such a tight space between the table and the seat-back that he can’t move. There’s nowhere to go, not enough time to react; there’s nothing more for him to do. I’m about to get shot in the head.
Again the eye of the pistol barrel traces across his vision, and by some mercy doesn’t go off, but he knows it will soon.
He closes his eyes, turtles his neck to make himself into a smaller target. He moves his head back and forth, trying to dodge the barrel of the gun and use the terrorist’s body as a shield, make the angle just a little more difficult. But he can’t hide; there’s no cover, not enough time; the barrel swings back until it’s pointing right at Spencer’s head. The gunman pulls the trigger.
* * *
14.
“YOU MADE IT!” Spencer was waiting in the lobby of the hostel in Rome when Anthony got out of a taxi looking just about the same as the last time Spencer had seen him, except this time he was dragging a rolling bag, and holding a stick with a camera attached to it. Spencer shook his head. Anthony looked the true city slicker; everything about him screamed “American tourist.” If not “fish out of water.”
“Holy, shit,” Anthony said, “we’re in Europe!”
“We’re in Europe! This is crazy!” Spencer had waited for Anthony to check in at the hostel, saving every bit of their trip for them to experience together, and once they dumped their bags into their rooms they were restless and excited. Now what? Even the hostel itself was new and exciting; they’d never stayed in one before, and this one had everything. Its own bar, its own restaurant—somehow that was unexpected and awesome—even just the fact that they had a rack of free brochures seemed like a superfluously generous gift.
“So,” Spencer said, “we’re here! What should we do tonight?” He turned to the young woman behind the desk. “We just got to Italy. And he just got to Europe for the first time. It’s the first day of our trip.”
She smiled. “I think I know just the thing,” she said in perfect, attractively accented English. “You know we have a bar attached to the hostel? Tonight we have a party bus leaving from there. They call it ‘the perversion excursion.’” Spencer looked at Anthony, who raised his eyebrows. “Would you like me to sign you up?”
The bus had barely pulled out onto the street before a bartender stood up and started passing out unpronounceable Italian beer and colorful shots in little phallic shot glasses. The bus stopped at a bar, then another, then the night became a blur, the bartender passing around more drinks, pouring shots right into passenger’s mouths, music loud and pulsing, people sliding up and down a stripper pole set up inside the bus, giggling girls falling off into piles of limbs, Spencer drunk on adventure and liqueur and beer and the perfect weather and the beautiful young bodies all around him, Anthony off talking to some new friend, and at some point Spencer realized he had to take a piss as badly as he ever had in his life. For what felt like hours the bus kept going, until it finally pulled off on an overlook with the Vatican below and the Colosseum lit up in the distance, rheumy and wobbling in Spencer’s well-liquored vision; the lights winked at him from miles away, but he hardly had time to consider the history. He was running, hands over his groin, across the grass, past busts of Italian heroes from nineteenth-century wars, past Garibaldi on a horse, racing to a place in the distance where a small tree beckoned to him like a beacon of hope, offering just the small suggestion of privacy he desperately needed. He was so close he could almost feel the relief when he stepped on cobblestones canted by a bulging root; his foot rolled to the right, and he heard three successive cracks rocket up his body as his ankle collapsed sidewise.
Then intense, searing pain. Oh my God. I just broke my ankle.
The liquor helped dull the full force of the pain, and he relieved himself balancing on one leg, then hobbled over to a stone wall that was probably four hundred or maybe four thousand years old; someone was saying something about it, but all he could do was lean against it and close his eyes, trying to will the pain away. What did I just do? Holy shit. In the distance he heard Anthony’s voice, laughing at something, then he heard a rustling, opened his eyes, and two girls with exposed midriffs were making their way to him.
“Aw, why dees poor boy stand all alone?”
“You are American, yes?”
“Why you stand by yourself?
The pain receded to make way for his concentration as he tried to turn on his charm, trying to see just how friendly these two girls were. By now Spencer had lost his sense of time, but at some point Anthony snapped a photo with him leaning against the wall, framed by two tanned, lithe bodies on either side, Spencer looking like a man in his element. You wouldn’t know his ankle was in the process of swelling to three times its normal size and turning a bruised, livid blue. More time passed without Spencer feeling like time had passed, and then he found himself following a herd of people wobbling back onto the bus, one of the Brazilian girls—was it Luiza, or her friend?—nestled under his arm, Spencer using the illusion of chivalry to disguise the fact that he’d deputized Luiza (or was it the other one?) as a human crutch.
Then they were back at the hostel. Anthony was with a girl he had laughing, and the two of them were stumbling up to the room too, and Spencer realized too late that Anthony had the better angle, the inside lane, stumbling into the room a moment before Spencer could get there
, so he turned Luiza or the other one around and started making jokes in the hallway, trying to stall—he wasn’t exactly sure what for—but eventually she got tired of standing in the hall of a hostel and went flitting off to some other diversion. Spencer went to peek in the room, cracking the door so as not to disturb whatever assignation might be under way, but found Anthony alone, snoring.
Spencer crawled into bed, thinking, Hell of a first night in Europe, and laughing himself to sleep about how the two had ruined two perfectly good chances to kick off the trip with some companionship.
HOLY shit. Spencer woke up with his foot throbbing.
The night came tumbling back to him in gauzy flashes, and within a few seconds of opening his eyes he was wide awake, the pain like a bucket of cold water on his face.
He pulled up the sheet and looked; he barely recognized what he saw. The foot didn’t fit him; it look like someone else’s. It didn’t even really look like a foot, but a beat-up overripe vegetable, swollen out in two places and a deep blue color he’d never seen a body produce before. His stomach lurched.
How would he explain this?
How would he spend three weeks on a walking tour of Europe?
He nudged Anthony, who stirred, with a groan. “Ugggh. What the hell did we drink?”
Spencer wasn’t all that worried about Anthony’s hangover. He shimmied to the edge of the bed while Anthony groaned more behind him, hung his feet over, and without looking down counted, “One, two . . .” and eased himself down, shifting his weight off his butt. The moment the soles of his feet touched the floor, blades shot upward into his shin, a sharp splintering pain that knocked him back onto the bed and forced the breath from him.
“Anthony, man—man, my foot’s messed up. It’s—it’s pretty bad.”
“Mmm.” Anthony still hadn’t opened his eyes.
“I don’t think I can walk on it. I can barely stand on it.”
Still no reaction, so Spencer shook Anthony awake and made him look down at the foot. Anthony’s eyes widened. “Oh, God. That’s disgusting.”
“I’m not trying to be a wimp, but I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do all this walking.”
Anthony shook his head. Spencer could see the mix of sympathy and disappointment in his eyes
The trip is over. The one chance they’d ever have to travel in Europe, in all likelihood, and it was over, after the first day.
Spencer struggled down to the front desk, and a girl rushed to get him a bag of ice.
“I know a doctor who might come look at it,” she said. “I’ll call him right away.”
While Anthony slept off a hangover upstairs, Spencer sat, iced his foot, and internally rehearsed how he was going to tell people that his European trip had ended on the very first day. Before they’d seen any sites at all, or even ridden one of the high-speed trains they had tickets for. Unless the doctor had some miracle cure.
He didn’t appear to. When Spencer finally got to see him, the doctor poked around, took an X-ray, showed Spencer where he’d had a microfracture—but it was hard to tell whether it was new or a childhood injury—then gave him a prescription for ibuprofen and a €120 bill.
Spencer spent the rest of the day hopping back and forth to the front desk for more ice, hoping that by some miracle he would somehow heal, because if he wasn’t better by tomorrow—and when had a softball-size bruise ever gotten better in twelve hours?—he’d be on the next flight back to base. He went to bed that night making peace with the fact that his three-week epic blowout European trip had ended before it really began. No Germany, no Belgium, no France.
Most of all, no Spain.
Just one day in Rome on a party bus.
He was asleep before the sun went down.
15.
THE NEXT DAY, Spencer woke up in a wallow of disappointment. Today was the day he’d have to make all the arrangements to go back to base. He figured he might as well give the foot one last shot before making it official. He swung his legs off the bed, put them on the floor, and rose up. He winced; the pain came back. But it was a dull ache, not the knives of pain that shot up through his legs like they were angry at him; more a soreness that enveloped the whole lower half of his leg.
He leaned forward a little—the pain stayed, but didn’t worsen. He leaned back, and to the side. He took a few steps. The ankle held. He ripped the laces out of his shoe and squeezed the foot in. It felt like the shoe was four sizes too small, but he got it most of the way in. He took a few more steps
“Anthony! I think I can walk!”
“For real?”
“I think I can do it. I think—let’s keep this thing moving!”
By some small miracle, or else by force of will, the trip was back on. Next stop, Venice.
THE TRAIN THAT ARRIVED at the station to take them to Venice looked less like a mode of public transit and more like a rocket ship. Or one of those jet cars they built to set speed records over salt flats. It gleamed red; Spencer felt like he was walking into the future.
On board, the train wasn’t like trains he’d been on in America. Seats were plush and minimalistic, it was clean, and attendants walked in pressed uniforms, offering drinks. Internet was fast and reliable, the windows were big, and the passengers all seemed to be well-to-do and well put together. No addicts or panhandlers moving through like the subway cars he’d been on, no one asking for money. No criminals.
But most of all, as the train began to pick up speed, it was the force of it that struck him. The train was whisper quiet, hitting 150 miles per hour and still accelerating, the countryside blurring past like a movie on fast-forward, and he had a feeling that seemed something like inevitability.
All that power conveying him silently, but with tremendous force, toward a destination.
16.
SPENCER COULD TELL Anthony was in a bad mood. That first night put a hurt on him that hadn’t totally let up in two days. Making matters worse was the fact that the moment they stepped off the train in Venice the heat hit them, thick and soupy; it enveloped them and felt like an extra layer of clothing. Spencer was too distracted by what lay before him to mind much about the heat—he’d known Venice was a city on the water, but he hadn’t thought it would be . . . so on the water, a whole water world. People used boats like everyone everywhere else used cars. Traffic jams were skiffs stacked stern to bow in a channel, rather than minivans bumper to bumper on a freeway. The directions to the hostel had them getting on a water bus.
The water bus was the first of many tests the city of Venice placed before them. Curiously, some people seemed to be just getting on board. Other people were buying tickets. So, um—was it free? Spencer couldn’t decide, and Anthony clearly wasn’t in the mood for a discussion. All the people Spencer asked for help were either clueless themselves or didn’t speak English. So he figured he’d pay the guy selling what might have been tickets for the water bus, and might have been something else entirely, before getting on to try and find their island.
The water bus pushed off and motored out into the Grand Canal. Spencer was loving it, his sense of adventure piqued because he’d been given a new lease on life now that he could walk again. Anthony was having a hard time dragging his rolling bag, which he now realized was a poor choice for backpacking across Europe. Spencer looked back and saw him struggling. “Why do you think they call it ‘backpacking’? They don’t call it ‘roller-bagging.’” Anthony’s luggage was designed for buttoned-up businessmen traversing regional airports, not ancient cobblestone streets. Spencer heard a crack, and then Anthony exploded: “Fucking, fuck this thing!” Spencer had to turn away to keep from laughing, while the plastic cracked on one of the castors on Anthony’s suitcase, splitting off and grabbing at the ground so that the handle lurched out of Anthony’s hand and the bag dove forward. “Damn it!” Anthony wound up and kicked his suitcase. “Fuck you!”
Spencer laughed into his fist while Anthony started dragging the one-wheeled bag behind him, the pl
astic claw where the wheel used to be scraping and catching on every single cobblestone.
Spencer had booked the hostel, but they got off the water bus at the wrong stop and didn’t realize it at first, so Anthony had to drag his one-wheeled bag around the island in slowly tightening concentric circles as Spencer made wrong turn after wrong turn—“It’s gotta be just up there!”—before finally realizing they weren’t even on the right island.
Back to the water-bus stop.
More standing in the heat.
Spencer was having a hard time focusing on the directions because he still couldn’t get over the fact that he was in a city but that there were no cars. It was like a plane without wings or something; it seemed so strange he couldn’t stop looking up and taking it all in, rather than stopping to study the directions and actually figure out where the hell they were.
Another hour and a half circling around streets which—and this was now starting to frustrate Spencer too—seemed to never have signs. How did people find their way here? Did everyone just memorize where they needed to go? It wasn’t laid out on any kind of grid, or in any kind of order at all, but seemed designed precisely for the purpose of confusing foreigners. It was just circles upon circles and sets of staircases up and back down that seemed to serve no purpose Spencer could discern other than to raise Anthony’s blood pressure.
Up they went, Anthony huffing and sweating and dragging his Samsonite over pointless staircases. It wasn’t just street signs; there also hardly seemed to be any business signs, or building signs. Spencer figured it was time to ask someone for directions and then realized there weren’t any people either. It was actually kind of eerie, now that he noticed it. Where was everyone? It wasn’t just a water world, it was a ghost town. It wouldn’t be until much later that Spencer learned of riposo, the Italian tradition of going home and resting in the middle of the day when the sun was highest and the heat most unbearable. He just thought the city was deserted. Had there been some viral outbreak he hadn’t heard about?
The 15:17 to Paris Page 8