by J. Minter
Finally, Arno was so angry at the waiters for not serving him that he got up and left.
Earlier, when he had been searching for Pablo, he had passed a place called Hostel La Cucaracha. It didn’t look nice (in fact, it looked kind of seedy), but he had the general sense that a hostel was where American kids backpacking through Europe went. Arno used his last little bit of clarity to conclude that the people who worked at such a place might speak American pretty well.
When he climbed the stairs to the second-floor lobby he saw a very cranky-looking woman sitting behind a desk. She didn’t even look at him, she just said, “El hotel está lleno.” Arno recognized that phrase from the Imperial, and it didn’t bode well.
“I want a room,” he said plaintively.
“Is full,” the clerk said.
“Please,” Arno said. He was feeling really desperate. “A couch, anything?”
“Out!” she said.
Arno nearly fell down the stairs, humiliated again and hoping she wouldn’t remember his face and tell anyone. He went out into the street, where night had fallen, and stumbled down in the direction of the dock where he had left Mickey that morning. When he got there, he smelled the ocean and it reminded him of Barker Island and how angry he had been at Mickey, and how cute Greta was, sort of. He looked at all the happy people taking their evening stroll, and he hated them.
“Mickey!” he yelled at no one in particular. “Mickey, help me! I’m sorry.” The strollers backed away from him and went in the other direction. Arno saw a man selling beers out of a cooler on the dock, and walked over. He held up his index and middle fingers, to indicate that he wanted two beers. The man smiled at him, and Arno saw that he had no teeth. I’m going to end up like this guy, Arno thought I’m never getting out of here. He took the beers, threw a twenty euro note at the guy, and hurried away without waiting for his change.
He staggered off the docks and down the beach, dragging his bag behind him. As he walked, he chugged one beer and then the other, throwing the empty bottles behind him. He kept on as long as he could, calling out Mickey’s name, until he was too hoarse and exhausted to go any farther. Then he collapsed on top of his bag.
Patch is the last man standing
“Hey,” Patch said to Greta, who had come up behind him but hadn’t really surprised him. He hadn’t seen her all day, but he’d had a feeling she’d be back around. He hadn’t talked to anyone since that morning, when the Ariadne had left Barcelona without his friends.
“Hey,” she said quietly, passing him a warm mug. She was holding one, too. “It’s whiskey with honey and lemon.”
The weather had turned soon after they left Barcelona, and they were both wearing sweaters.
“Thanks. Where’d you get it?”
“Barker gave it to me. He said he thought it was probably okay, since I was sick. He said I should bring you one, too.”
“Oh. Are you sick?”
Greta gave him a quizzical look and said, “Haven’t you noticed that I haven’t been around since yesterday morning?”
“Yeah, of course …”
“I was in the nurse’s office, and then in my cabin with a fever. I guess that survival test did me in.”
“Oh. That’s too bad. At least you won’t be missing any day trips.”
After Mickey and Arno’s fight, Barker had made an announcement curtailing most day trips and restricting Ocean Term’s activities to onboard classes, talks, and recreation. Which was probably a good thing since the weather report said it would be raining in most of their destinations. There was only a light mist now, though. They both looked out at the dark ocean and sipped their drinks.
“I guess we really fucked up, huh?” Greta said after a while.
“Yeah … I mean, no, you didn’t. But I feel pretty stupid. I mean, I ended up being Barker’s pet, which I never planned to be. And now everybody has this idea of me that’s totally false.”
“I don’t think you care very much what everybody thinks of you,” Greta said shyly.
“I guess. All I wanted was to see cool places and hang out with my friends, and now all my friends are lost. I guess you call that ironic. I’m usually the one who’s out of touch and can’t be found.”
“Maybe you like it that way.”
Patch stopped talking because he always felt uncomfortable when conversations dwelled on him this way.
“Anyway, I’m sorry I didn’t know you were sick. I could have brought you flowers or something if we weren’t stuck on this boat.” He took a sip of his drink and added, “If Mickey or Arno were still on board, they probably would have figured out a way.”
“Hey, I know those guys are your friends, but they’re kind of assholes.”
Patch laughed. “I know. They just liked you … and Suki.”
Greta laughed awkwardly, and then paused like she was thinking out how to say something in her head. “Yeah. I mean, they’re cute, but they’re dicks, too. That’s why …”
She stopped talking, and Patch almost felt bad for her, she looked so uncomfortable.
“That’s why what?”
“Oh, it’s too embarrassing.” Greta covered her face with her hands. They were fair and pinkish like the rest of her.
“Hey. Those guys aren’t dicks, and neither am I. Whatever it is, it can’t be that embarrassing.”
“Well, that’s why I told everybody I had a boyfriend. Because I didn’t want to have to deal with all that …” She giggled awkwardly, then continued talking at a rapid pace. “And that probably sounds really dorky. I mean, I’m sure they weren’t even that into me anyway. Guys usually like Suki, and … But I’m sort of shy, you know what I mean, and … protective of myself …and …”
Patch looked at her in amazement. She was so awkward and spilling over with feeling, like a skittish kitten. It made him want to be very close to her. He put his hand over her mouth, and he could feel her cheeks heating up against his palm.
“You don’t have a boyfriend?”
She shook her head, her lips grazing his palm. So he wrapped her up in his sweatered arms and kissed her. She was warm and smelled clean, almost like baby powder, and he pressed her up against him and kept on kissing her for a long time.
They were only interrupted once, briefly, by Sara-Beth Benny, who was walking by with that guy Loki, Arno’s RA. They looked pretty friendly.
“Hey, cuties,” she said, laughing as she walked by and winking heavily. She was wearing a fur that looked like some small animal thrown over her small shoulders. Her eyes were bright and she leaned on Loki as they walked by. “Oh, psstt, by the way, Patch,” she said, lowering her voice as though that alone would prevent Loki or Greta from hearing, “Stephanie’s been, you know, looking for you.”
Mickey in Bohemia
Mickey’s night at Angelina’s restaurant turned into a very late night and then a morning at Angelina’s place. She lived with her boyfriend, Eduardo, in a huge, ornate house down a little street in the old town. It had been designed by a famous architect and it was all mirrors and dark wood and baroque detail inside. All their friends lived with them, and none of them seemed to work much. In fact, Angelina, whose parents owned the house and seemed to have a lot of money, was the only one with an actual job. Besides Eduardo, who was her family’s accountant.
When she and Mickey arrived, there were people lounging around the haremlike central room and smoking pot. Angelina didn’t bother to make introductions, she just moved into the most visible seat in the room, made herself comfortable, and sat Mickey down beside her. She put his head in her lap and began to rub it as though it were a crystal ball. Mickey wondered which of the many guys in the room was Eduardo, but he couldn’t figure it out. Angelina told everyone the story of how Mickey had finished the paella for two by himself, and all her friends laughed. They were beautiful and smoked a lot and stayed up late every night and made grand statements about art and death that Mickey thought were kind of stupid. He liked being one of them, though
. It was like a twenty-four-hour party back in New York. It was like something that might happen at Patch’s house.
“Ey, what did you say your name was?” a guy in spectacles asked Mickey. The guy was dressed like a nineteenth-century revolutionary, and his clothes were paint-spattered.
Mickey looked at him blearily and thought to say that he hadn’t said what his name was at all. He couldn’t quite get that out, though, so he just said, “Mickey Pardo.”
“You bear a resemblance to the famous sculptor Ricardo Pardo, verdad?”
Mickey sighed. This was the last thing he wanted to talk about. “He’s my dad.”
Everyone got very excited and chattered about how Mickey was the son of a famous artist. They asked him his opinion on a whole range of topics, and pestered him for details of his father’s genius. Then they all seemed to collectively forget, and began chattering about something else.
Hours passed like that, and pretty soon Mickey wasn’t sure if it was day or night. It seemed a long time ago that he and Arno had split up on the docks, and that made him kind of sad.
“Don’t you ever go outside?” Mickey murmured to Angelina, in English this time.
“You want to go outside?” she asked him. Then she clapped her hands grandly. “Vamos afuera!”
David tries out a little passive aggression
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Hey man. I haven’t heard from you in a few days, so I hope you’re OK over there. Rob told me that he wired you a lot of money, so you’re probably doing fine and having fun which is cool. I had tea with Amanda the other day. She cried a lot, but I think I might finally be over it. I mean, she’s sort of boring, once you get to know her and the mystique is gone, you know what I mean? You’d be proud of me man: I totally don’t even care anymore. Oh, and I went to a show at CBGB’s with this friend of Feb’s called Caroline. Not sure I’m really into her though, she’s a little gruff, you know? Been playing a lot of ball, yada yada. Anyway, about what you asked me about Flan and everything, I haven’t seen Rob in a couple days, actually since the night you talked to him, so I wouldn’t worry. I’m still watching Flan like you asked me to though, so don’t worry about that. Just a question though, I thought you sort of tried to break up with Flan before we left. So why are you so worried about her and Rob or really, her and anybody? See you, David.
The Savage won’t leave me alone
I woke up feeling really great. But that was before I opened my eyes, of course, and once I made that mistake, I remembered that I was in a smelly room with linoleum floors. I still had a taste of my dream of Flan, though, and that felt good, and also gave me resolve to get the hell out of here. Suki wasn’t in the room, either, and that was a relief. Waking up next to her over and over was making feel a little tawdry somehow.
I got myself together and went downstairs. I took my bag with me, just in case—this place was probably full of thieves. Someone was playing guitar in the second-floor lounge, and when I got there I saw that Suki was chilling with a lot of dirty backpackers. There were about five guys, four of them with dreads and layers of weathered clothes, and the other blond and pretty clean-cut. They were drinking espresso from the automatic espresso machine and smoking, again. She didn’t notice me, so I slipped downstairs and tried to put a collect call through to my house, but nobody picked up, so I tried Flan’s again, but nobody picked up there, either. So I went back upstairs and stood in the doorway until Suki looked up at me.
“Isn’t it a little bit early for smoking?”
“Oh, that’s my friend Jonathan,” she said blandly.
The guys sort of half waved.
“I’m glad you’re up,” she said. “I had to return the key, since we don’t have enough money to stay another night, and we were supposed to be out of the room by eleven. It’s twenty of noon, you know.”
“Great,” I said sarcastically.
“Um, yeah.” Suki matched my sarcasm, and then glared at me.
“Well, I just tried my mom and stepbrother and they’re not picking up. So I don’t know what to do, except go check my e-mail and see if my stepbrother sent a number where my mom can be reached.”
“Fine,” Suki said with a little impatient cough. She stood up and went around in a circle kissing everyone on both cheeks and saying good-bye in Spanish. Every time she did this, she leaned over and stuck her butt up in the air in my direction. It was too pathetic for me to watch. When she got to the last—the one blond guy, I think it was—I heard her smacking the two kisses, and then she made this little murmuring noise that made my stomach turn. Why would she put on this show for me? He said good-bye in American-accented English, and he told her to take the rest of his cigarettes with her. When we were outside, she said, “The guys said the Internet café was on Las Ramblas, about four blocks down.”
“‘The guys’?”
Suki smiled. “Are you jealous?”
“Yeah, right.” I had to laugh at that one.
Outside, I realized that Suki was right. It was past noon. The whole city was out, sitting at the cafés and strolling slowly. It was a lovely, breezy kind of day without a cloud in the sky. We found the Internet place pretty easily. It was about the cleanest place I’d been to in all of Spain. It was all chrome and white walls, and I happily used the last of my coins to get us some time on the computers.
My heart fluttered a little bit as my e-mail account opened up, but there was nothing from Flan. There was nothing from Rob, either, which was both annoying and confusing. A) If he really felt all brotherly with me, how had he not found time to e-mail me my mom’s number at Canyon Ranch? and B) Why had he even pretended to be buddies with me in the first place? We were so obviously not. There was one e-mail from David, which basically said nothing except sort of question my interest in Flan, which was definitely not what I wanted to hear from David. Was he on Rob’s side or what?
Suki was typing away next to me, and smiling to herself, which seemed inappropriate, so I looked back at the screen and tried to think of something else I could do. I looked at my ghostly reflection in the screen—very gaunt, very Lower East Side. I didn’t even look like myself. Which was when I started thinking of the guy Suki had made little murmuring noises at not long ago. And as I thought about his gaunt, snarky face I realized I’d seen it before.
“Oh, my God, what was that guy’s name?”
“Which guy?”
“The blond guy you slobbered on this morning.”
“Watch it.”
“You know who I’m talking about.”
“I dunno, Tony, I think he said. I didn’t slobber on him, he just bought me an espresso and bummed me a few cigs.”
“Tony? Like … Anthony? As in, Rhett Anthony Turner. Oh, my God. You know who that was!?”
“Who?”
“The Savage.”
“No.”
“I mean, he wasn’t a Savage this morning. But that was the Savage.”
“Oh, my God.” Suki looked genuinely upset. I almost felt bad about the slobbering comment. “And you know what his initials spell?”
We looked at each other and said “Rat” at the same time. “How appropriate,” I added.
We ran out of the Internet café and back to the hostel. When we got back to the lounge, we saw the four dreads sitting around. Suki talked to them in Spanish for a minute.
“They say they don’t know who he is or where he went,” she told me.
We went into the reception area and I went up to the clerk. “Have you seen a Savage?”
“Cómo?”
“A Savage. But he doesn’t look like a Savage now. A tall—”
Suki interrupted me to explain to the woman. But she just shook her head.
So for about half a day we ran around the city looking for him until we were exhausted and sweaty and panting and in a complete state of despair.
We were on the dock at this point and the sky was turning rosy as the sun went
low over the buildings behind us. On the other side of the dock, the beach began and it ran north along the edge of the city as far as I could see. Suki was looking at it, too, and eventually she said, “We might as well walk down there and find a nice place to rest. Because we got zero dollars, and there’s no way we’re getting another hotel room for the night.”
If Patch checked his e-mail, this is what he would find …
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Hey man. This is weird, me sending you an e-mail, huh? Anyway, I went shopping with your sisters on Ludlow Street yesterday. Did you know that a pair of girl’s jeans goes for more than $100 these days? Apparently, we’re talking a pretty average everyday pair of jeans here, according to Feb. Can you believe that? Oh, and I saw Selina Trieff, too. She was walking around with that girl Liesel who Arno used to be with and I don’t think she recognized me. Selina wanted to know where you’d disappeared to. How’s life on the open seas treating you? Miss you dude, send me a shout out when you get a chance. David.
Patch experiences one of those awkward moments people keep telling him about
“Pa-atch,” a voice came through the door, “are you there, handsome?”
Patch shot up in bed and looked around him. His hair was roughed up in a million directions, and he wasn’t wearing a shirt. It was past noon.
“Hold on,” he yelled, and looked around for a shirt.
“Pa-atch, where have you bee-en?” singsonged the voice. “I missed you.”
Patch found a rumpled white T-shirt on the floor and pulled it over his long, tan torso. He seemed to still be getting taller every day, and he had that long, lean skater look to him. He smelled himself before he went to the door to make sure he didn’t smell too incriminating. Which he did. He pulled open the door, and saw Stephanie standing there with a big bunch of flowers and a huge, toothy smile. “Where’ve you been?” she whined flirtingly.