An Interruption

Outside, a new wave of wintery vengeance rained down upon us mere mortals, and we wept. 

           The old world, gone now—long disappeared behind the veil of white that covered the surface of our planet now—was but a memory. We knew not whether anything lived out there, in the frozen expanses. Perhaps some primitive species had managed to eke out a way of life by tunneling under the permafrost. Humanity would not get that far, I felt. Once our reserves of heating oil and fuel were depleted, it would be a few months—a couple years at most—before we were lost.

Well, that’s what popped into my head as I stood at The Traveler’s window on the top floor of his block. A pretty steady wall of snow flew through the air. Windows around Woolf, which, it turned out, weren’t properly built, vibrated and slammed open and shut with the wind—even if they were supposedly latched shut. On the inside of every door, there was a note by the property management, which read:

“Residents, please take care around the property as there will be strong winds WE will not be in the office until Thursday, as to remain here in this icy hell would be suicide Thank you –UPP”

It was a bit of a hyperbolic reaction, but they didn’t lie: The Pavilion was empty. The help desk was shuttered shut and mail bags piled up in front of the employee entrance door. Critter tracks littered the courtyard and the only people who moved around were dressed like sherpas.

In The Traveler’s kitchen, there wasn’t much hint of that aside from the occasional burst of cold air when the windows briefly popped free of their latches. The air in there was filled with spice and the sinus-melting scent of Diablo peppers. The Thes, we took it for granted (turned out that we were all there, except for The Writer, who was still sulking) that we would be in pain from smelling everything in the pot, and were thus able to withstand it. The two Brits in the flat—a tall, tall guy named Ross, who I think I’ve mentioned before, and a shorter guy in Psychology—weren’t faring as well. They’d tear up from the spices and have to wander out of the kitchen occasionally. Giannis and Chacko came over—Giannis was crying, but stayed around because we were blaring Jethro Tull, and Chacko laughed at everyone, saying, “My grandmother could make spicier food than this. Naturally, everyone hated him.

“Why do you want to kill us all?” asked Giannis. He was sitting at  the long table against the wall, red in the face, tears welling up in his eyes, and wiping his forehead with some paper towels.

The Traveler responded by shouting, “Pain is weakness leaving the body!”

“That,” said The Stalker, “is my personal motto.”

An uncomfortable silence filled the room.

Soon, we ate and--

In The Dolphin

After the worst half hour walk I’d ever had, we’d made it into town. Usually, the city was always at least somewhat busy. During the days, it was locals and tourists from England and around Europe, at night it was drunken students—mostly undergrads—roaming around shouting. If you weren’t careful while roaming, you’d probably wind up trodding in vomit and empty kebab containers.

Today, though, it looked like The Rapture had occurred. The streets were empty and, aside from light streaming through shutters, there were no signs that people were alive. We walked across the bridge spanning the stream they called the River Stour and turned a corner onto Pound Lane. About half a block later, we crossed the drive exiting from one of the parks and saw a display that, normally, contained an advertisement for something called a pantomime[1]. Today, though, it had something that stopped us in our tracks—for the better.

In the glass case, listed under Canterbury Council Events, was a full-sized retro poster of The Empire Strikes Back, with a date, three days in the future, listed. The cold in front of us was wiped out of our collective mind—and I do mean collective. Right then, we were not three separate people, two of whom despised one another; no, we were one person, one combined Fanboy. “We must attend that showing,” said The Writer.

“Didn’t think you’d need to say that,” said The Drunkard.

“Where is that place? The Auxiliary Marlowe? What the hell?”

“It’s...” said The Writer. He scratched his head. “I don’t know. Isn’t the Marlowe being torn down?”

“Yeah. It’s basically a hole in the ground right now.”

“Lads,” said The Drunkard, “never fear. We will find that place. It is our Dagobah, and this shall be our journey into the ways of the Force.”

This pleased us greatly, and we walked the next half block to The Dolphin, and walked inside.

The interior was low-lit, as always. There weren’t many people inside; indeed, the only person in the front room was a pensioner--who never seemed to leave the pub--with her orange juice, sandwich, and crossword puzzle on the table, and her walker next to her. The girl behind the counter was the redhead I vaguely remembered seeing from somewhere, but could never place. Murmurs came from somewhere in the back, so I figured we weren’t the only people in the place.

We shook ourselves off at the door like three dogs—prompting a disproving grunt from the pensioner—and walked up to the bar. We ordered some pints and meandered to the back, the thing that would double as a back porch. We took one of the tables, took off our coats, and plopped down in silence. Outside, wind blew. I saw a few birds in the sky fighting off wind in their flights to some other country, some place where they could exist in the sun and the warmth and not have to deal with so many fucking rainy, windy days.

I grunted.

The Drunkard grunted and drank half his bitter in one go.

“So,” I said after tapping the tabletop a few times. “Writer. What have you been up to?”

The Writer adjusted his glasses. “I’ve been working with my tutor, whom you may remember from the reading in which you made a complete ass out of yourself, in one-on-one sessions on my latest work. A short story, in the parlance of the proletariat, in which both of you, no doubt, find yourselves. It explores the deep, cutting divide found within each individual of even middling mental faculties, and explores how those individuals compe—”

“What’s the plot?” asked The Drunkard.

“Yes, you would ask about something so base as the plot, wouldn’t you? Can’t quite wrap your gourd around the concepts therein without having a full explanation of the material happenings therein. No, I’m not surprised, just disappointed.”

I looked at The Drunkard and, while his face was calm and not shaking, his knuckles around the pint glass were white, and you could see the glass vibrating against the table.

“Very well,” he said, “I shall endeavor to lay out the plot. It follows a young man, similar in age to ourselves, who finds himself in a different country than the one of his birth. In this country, he must combat the forces of mediocrity as he struggles to maintain his artistic worth in the face of—”

“This isn’t fiction,” said The Drunkard. “This is your life.”

The Writer gave off a little, smug laugh and I wanted to punch him.

“No,” said The Writer, “it’s fiction. None of it happened, thus, it exists in a plane of existence that is not this one. If you could wrap your mind ar—”

The Drunkard slammed his fists onto the table in front of him. “Shut up, you blathering jackass. What you’re doing isn’t anything that requires more imagination than that which is needed to change names. Your ‘conflict’ in the story, from what I can tell, is one step above whinging in a damned Livejournal entry about how no one understands you and you are a lonely artist, living on the fringes of a reality television-obsessed world.”

“I—”

“Shut up, you fucking hack,” he said, dropping his voice low and jamming a finger an inch away from The Writer’s face. “Narrator, back me up on this.”

“Well,” I said, “I agree that it’s pretty unimaginative to write about nothing other than your life, viewed in the lens of, well, semi-fiction; but to shit on it with the gusto you’re doing is—”

“Absolutely necessary if fiction wants to survive another ten years,” said The Drunkard.

The Writer scoffed. “Please. Alarmist rabble rousing.”

“If there were a rabble to be roused, I’d agree with you. Fiction’s going through its death throes, man. If it weren’t for Stephen King and Terry Pratchett, the only people reading would be tweens and academics. And yet you continue to ream them at every opportunity.”

“They’re hacks who refuse to acknowledge the struggle of the daily grind—the horror that is the modern society built upon repressed emotion, feeling, intellect, and thought in favor of rote reactions to TV and pop music drilled into the mind by nothing more than repetition at an early age.”

“And you’re a specific, despicable breed of hack that refuses to acknowledge the value of looking at the world from the view of fantasy or science fiction; in other words, that the genres you decry are just as valid and able to provide social commentary as your beloved fucking Tolstoy.”

“Ha! Like what? Fantasy and sci-fi are nothing more than Dungeons and Dragons and Star Wars.”

“My ass, you shit-brained piece of dog turd. Dune, Lord of the Fucking Rings.”

“I’ll give you Dune, just barely.”

“You’re a schmuck!” The Drunkard stood up, finished the rest of his beer in one pull, and stalked off to the bar, shouting, “Whiskey!”

“Congratulations,” I said, “you’ve broken him.”

“He was near breaking anyway. I cannot believe that the man is so staunchly in the camp of genre fiction.”

“Tolstoy’s pretty fuckin terrible, man. And really, the real world’s depressing enough if you read the news. Why would you want to read about it in your spare time with a book in front of you?”

“For information about the world around us! The human perspective!”

I dismissed this with a wave of my hand. “I know that argument, and it’s bullshit.”

The Drunkard arrived at the table with a couple of . “What’s he talking about?”

“Realism as a way to show the human interest piece of any modern event. I was about to point out that that’s what good journalism is supposed to do.”

“Eeeeeeh,” said The Drunkard. “Yes and no. It sells, but, you know, facts are important.”

“At any rate,” I said, “you can’t expect that argument to hold up when most of the news pieces are human interest bits that relate to a larger story, Writer. Look at an extended article in the New York Times magazine, for example. Most of those things are about how individuals deal with things like housing bubbles bursting, recessions, student loans, and any number of other crises that pop up from time to time. You can’t make the claim that it lies solely with literary fiction to deal with these problems.”

“No,” he said, “but the most intelligent amongst us go to literary fiction for insights one would not otherwise encounter in the base pages of the broadside.”

I sighed and The Drunkard gritted his teeth.

The redhead (Sarah, as I’d later finally remember) passed by from the kitchen. “Ma’am,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Could please slap him?”

“Sure.”

She reached out and slapped The Writer in the face before walking back to the bar.

The Writer looked shocked—but that might have just been because he was being abused by a woman who wasn’t Greek.

“I think that about sums up the mood of most of the people here,” I said. “Now,” I said, “I’ve got a question that’ll keep us away from talking more about your writing ideas—and thus keep us from having someone slap you again: You schtupping Rose?”

“I say!” said The Writer. If he’d had possessed a monocle, it would have popped off of his face in consternation. “Scandalous!” Right the fuck off. With a cartoonish pop.

“Who’s Rose?” asked The Drunkard.

“His tutor,” I said.

“Hot?”

“Eh,” I said. “In the cold heated, ice-queen way that the English manage. Got a kind of dom feel about her.”

“Makes sense,” said The Drunkard. He pointed a finger at The Writer. “You’ve got a bit of the submissive about you. Kind of like one of the editors at the paper back at CRU who went off to New York for a few days. Never came back. Turned out he was accidentally killed in an S&M dungeon.” He suddenly grew serious. “Please, Writer, promise me you’ll be safe.”

“Fuck you,” The Writer said.

“I’m just looking out for you. Why, if you weren’t around to provide the hilarity of being the best straight man ever, I don’t know if I could bear it.” The Drunkard’s phone buzzed and his ringtone, Kinky Friedman’s “They Ain’t Makin Jews Like Jesus Anymore,” went off.

A couple of the other pubgoers looked over with a look that, if properly analyzed, would have betrayed a confusion of how to feel. The ringtone was only the—relatively—sedate chorus, and did not include the verse made up entirely of racial slurs, but it was fairly obvious that Sarah at the bar, the pensioner—who was mumbling something that just sounded like “what?” over and over again—and the artsy couple a few tables over did not know how to take something that made light of ethnicity. This was England, where they took guilt to levels of which a good Jewish mother could only dream. Talking about ethnicity was reserved for stand-up comedy and the BNP, and to have someone broadcast their ribald song at such volumes (meaning: audible), well, inconceivable.

The Drunkard answered it, nodded, and said, “Sure.” He hung up.

“Who was that?” I asked. The Writer was fuming and glaring out the door, trying to avoid looking at The Drunkard—something that was hard on his part, since The Drunkard was sitting directly opposite him.

“The Traveler.”

“He back in town?”

“Yep. Wants to make jambalaya for Christmas tomorrow; he got a hold of a few bottles of kosher wine, and said he’s going to make it the most Jewish Christmas ever.”

“By serving a dish including both shellfish and pork?”

The Drunkard shrugged. “I’m not complaining, man. I’ll eat the shit out of some jambalaya.”

“Taken literally, that would be disgusting. You gonna go Writer?”

The Writer grunted.

“D’aw,” said The Drunkard. “Did I get to you? Burn the ego of The Writer, did I?” He reached over and slapped The Writer lightly on the cheek. “Drink your beer, little Writer, and one day you’ll learn not to take yourself so seriously.”

And with that, The Writer stood up and left the pub.

“Well,” said The Drunkard, “I don’t think he’ll be going to Empire with us.”

I nodded.

---

[1] There aren’t many things I despise about England. Overall, I look back at my year living there as a student/unemployed person and have nothing but warm, fuzzy feelings everywhere around me. However, there were some things that really cheesed me off about the place. The predilection for overdrinking (rationalized by a few friends as “well they said we were going to binge drink anyway”) among the youth is one of them, right up there with fucking Essex. But the one that really takes the cake is the pantomime.

A pantomime, see, is a deliberately awful play. Seeing a deliberately bad movie is one thing, because you’re virtually encouraged to heckle the movie as you sit in your living room. But you can’t do that during a pantomime because it’s a time-honored (or honoured) tradition. It’s bollocks. Sitting through one, in my opinion, is worse than a wisdom tooth extraction without pain killers. If you ever hear a Brit talk about how superior British humor is to American, bring up a pantomime and see their faces melt like a villain in Indiana Jones.

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.