The Welsh Nationalists

The next morning, we were woken up by the most heinous, despicable method possible. As we lay sleeping, Lena crept in holding two tops to pots as if they were cymbals. She clanged them together at the early hour of eight, and the only one of us who did not leap up from their chair howling as if the devil were approaching was The Traveler.

“Wake up!” Lena shouted. “It’s shopping day!”

My brain raced. Blood rushed through my veins. The Student, The Drunkard, and I looked at each other, wide-eyed and terrified as Lena and Dee—standing in the doorway—laughed uproariously and The Traveler slowly sat up and yawned.

“What the hell?” shouted The Drunkard

“Uncalled for!” shouted The Student.

“That shit just ain’t kosher,” I said.

The Traveler continued to yawn.

Lena, after finally ceasing her laughter, said, “I just wanted to make sure you guys woke up early enough. Seriously, if you think this is bad, then you don’t have loud enough alarm clocks.”

“Amen,” said The Traveler, unzipping his sleeping bag as he sat up and then rubbing his hair. “You’d think y’all don’t have jet engines waking you up in the morning.”

“No,” said The Student. “What kind of person would have that?”

The Traveler raised his hand and grinned. “I’m a deep sleeper.”

We decided who would go first in terms of showering and, luckily, it was me.

I showered, walked out, and promptly went back to sleep. When I woke up (again), The Traveler sat at the dining room table and stared at a spread-out map of Oxfordshire with two Post-It Notes on it. The Drunkard sat next to Lena, who sat next to Dee, who sat next to The Traveler. The Traveler said, “Kay, we’re good.”

“Really?” asked The Drunkard. “Cause that’s what we thought about coming up here, and you managed to get us pretty damn lost.”

“It was an off day,” said The Traveler.

The Drunkard, in a green flannel shirt and jeans, shrugged and said, “Whatever.”

The Traveler shot him a look that would have escalated the situation, had The Student not been there to interfere with a hearty, “You know, the thing I like about these sorts of journeys is that—”

“Dear God,” said The Drunkard. “Please, do not equate going to a retail mall—village, sorry—with some literary trope.”

The Traveler cleared his throat. “Okay everyone ready to go?”

“Please,” said The Drunkard, leaning back in his chair, “can we bicker some more?”

We packed in the car. The Drunkard, flattened himself against the window. Dee sat next to him, relatively comfortable (at the heart of each of us was a gentleman perfectly willing to make life miserable for himself so that a woman could be better off). The Student angled himself so that he wasn’t quite making complete contact with the seat. And I, like the Drunkard, was doing my best to collapse my skeleton so I could become a thin layer of fabric against the window.

“You cannot be comfortable,” said Dee, looking at each of us. “Here, let me—”

“Nope,” I said. “We’re fine. Kosher. Hunky-dory.” The left side of my body went numb.

“But—” she said.

“Nope,” said The Traveler, moving the front seat back and getting in. “If they say they’re fine, then they’re fine. These guys wouldn’t lie, would ya?”

“Nope,” we said in chorus.

The car started up and started on the road. We rode in silence for a little ways—mostly because those of us in the back tried, in very small stages, to make the journey bearable for ourselves by making tiny, tiny movements. Eventually, I got in such a position that feeling returned in my left side. The Student was now sitting partially on me, but, damn it, I could feel my whole body again. “This doesn’t change our relationship, Narrator,” he said.

“Dee,” said The Drunkard, shifting slightly. “Does this change ours?”

Dee laughed. “We’ll see.”

“A black year on your head!” I thought to The Drunkard. “May you grow like an onion, with your head in the ground!” I thought to The Drunkard again. Outwardly, I grumbled. “Traveler,” I said. “Music. None of The Drunkard’s trash. Actual, good music.”

“Trash? Trash?” asked The Drunkard. “I’m sorry, but you clearly have no idea what you’re talking about. Bands like Occam’s Razor and I’ll Razor Your Occam are brilliant examples of the indie-backlash going on in the punk scene. But, hey, maybe we should just go raid the local Goodwill, throw on some thick glasses, and not move at concerts. Does that fit your Goddamn perception of music better, you schmuck?”

“Drunkard,” Dee said, “please. You’re flailing on me.”

“Sorry.”

I thought about how many traffic and motoring laws we were breaking by riding in the back like this, and I hoped that The Traveler wouldn’t give a cop any reason to notice us. We passed the ring road out of town, hit one of the spindly two-lane highways that led out of Oxford and parallel to the M2—or 5, or whatever number it was—and to my great joy, the opening notes of Wilson Pickett’s “Mustang Sally” streamed out of the speakers.

I closed my eyes and started bobbing my head in time with the music.

“Narrator,” said The Student. “Please stop moving. This is making me very, very uncomfortable.”

I stopped moving, leaned my head back, and thought, “This is what Hell must be like: not being able to even bob your head to ‘Mustang Sally.’”

“Mustaaaaaaang Sally-oh-oh-oh, now,” said a whispering, almost mute voice.

I looked around. Whoever was singing had just the right amount of chutzpah to pull off a good soul vibe.

“You better turn your Mustang round, now,” sang the voice again. I looked over and, sure enough, it was The Student.

“Holy shit,” I said.

He turned and said, “What?”

“You’re fuckin good, man. Belt it! Belt that shit!”

“Don’t belt it,” said the Traveler.

“Ignore him! He’s trying to keep the brother down! He’s The Man! Belt it!”

And, sure enough, The Student belted it. Then The Drunkard joined in. Soon, the whole car, even the Traveler, was singing along to some good soul music

We were so wrapped up in it all that we must have missed the sign welcoming us to Wales.

The soul music completely negated any conception of time we had. Someone finally noticed something was wrong when the green signs started showing a language that seemed to have fallen in love with the letters l and f. “Dear sweet God,” said The Drunkard. “Traveler, what have you done?”

“What?” asked The Traveler, turning down “I’m So Tired of Being Alone.”

“Did you see that road sign?”

“No.”

“Look,” said The Student, “here’s another one.” The one he was talking about didn’t look official. It was big, white with red lettering, and looked like it had been painted in a hurry.

“What the hell?” I asked. “Are we in C’thulu territory? ‘Cymru am byth?’”

“Hell,” said The Traveler. “Jesus fuck shit,” he pounded the wheel. “We’re in Wales.”

“What?” asked Lena.

“You’re kidding,” said Dee. “There’s no retail in Wales until you get to Cardiff!”

“Good going, putz,” said The Drunkard.

“See? This is why you shouldn’t belt things around me. I lose concentration.”

“I thought you were supposed to be Mr. Internal-GPS-Traveler-Man,” said The Drunkard.

“I never said anything about having an internal GPS. I know where train stations and bus depots are. I fucking hate driving.”

“Then how come you’re driving?” I asked.

“Cause none of you idiots ever learned how to drive stick. Fuck,” he said. We continued on the way, The Traveler drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. “Okay. Okay, easy way out. We ask someone where we need to go in order to get to this place. We can’t be that far off, right? Look, here’s a petrol station. Narrator, you’re coming with me.”

I looked at my current seating arrangement and laughed. “You’re kidding. How?”

“Dee, Student,” said The Traveler, “Lena, you mind moving for him?”

The three people grumbled. The Traveler pulled into the station’s car park, turned off the car, and we began the nearly impossible maneuver of getting me out of the back seat. Lena got out of the car and moved the seat. The Student, apologizing constantly, hoisted himself up by using Dee’s leg and the back of the seat as a base. I slipped out, tripped over the bottom of the door, and faceplanted on the pavement. “Ow,” I said.

“You’re fine,” said The Traveler. “Come on.”

I didn’t want to leave the pavement. The pavement wouldn’t scream at me an alien language. Lena helped me up. I nodded and said thanks. I looked up at the sky and saw the clouds had turned a dark, threatening color. The birds were quiet, and it all pointed to a massive rainstorm. The Traveler, though, was undeterred by such a minor concern as weather and soldiered on into the petrol station.

Convenience stores are one of the unchanging constants in the first world, along with airports. They will all look the same, and, if ever one finds oneself in dire need of remembering that there is a spark of home, one only needs to look for a convenience store and, hark!, there shall be Mountain Dew. Do the Dew, indeed.

Inside, a man stood behind a white-and-red counter with a cash register with a green display. Cigarette packets were arranged in rows behind him. Candies in front of him, on the customer’s side. To the side, there was a microwave with pre-programmed options for heating up pasties, paninis, and other things. The small aisles were filled with electronics and nick-nacks supposedly designed to increase miles per gallon, fool-proof rain-repellant to be sprayed onto the windshield of a car, radar detectors, all sorts of other things.

The Traveler and I went up to the man behind the counter. “Hello,” he said. He spoke in an accent nearly unfathomable to my ears. Try as I might, I don’t think I could replicate it, and, as such, I will not even make the attempt. “Help you?”

“Well,” said The Traveler, scratching the back of his neck and smiling bashfully. “We’re lost. Meant to be going to this retail village ou—”

The man sneered and he spat something out in a language that sounded similar to God-Knows-What.

“Er,” I said.

He repeated his statement and laughed.

The Traveler turned to look at me. I shrugged. It didn’t sound like the man was angry, more like he was testing waters.

He picked up the phone on the counter, dialed a number, and spat some more words into it. He waited, did it again, and hung up. He looked at us with a grin, muttered something Welsh under his breath and said, in a Southern accent—I shit you not—that could have passed in Georgia, “Y’all ain’t from around here, is ya?” He then burst into laughter again.

I poked The Traveler in his arm and said, “We should go.”

“Nonsense. It’s just the, er, Welsh sense of humor,” he attempted one of his confidence-inspiring grins, but failed. “Look,” he said to the cashier, “we just want to know how to get back into England.”

“Oh, I bet you do. Where you’re safe.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “I can hear the banjo. Traveler,” I said, taking him by his shoulders and shaking him, “I can hear the banjo!”

“What are—”

The cashier laughed again as the door to the store burst open and The Student, wide-eyed, panting, and sweating profusely, stumbled in. He said, “We have to get out of here. Now. This is turning into a scene from Easy Rider.”

I forced The Traveler away, pushed him past The Student, and back outside. The skies had opened up and rain poured down. Three other cars—an old and green Peugeot, a black Toyota pickup, and a blue Opel with peeling paint—were parked around the lot. Their drivers—tall, lanky, and grinning wolfishly—leaned against the vehicles and stared at us. “Yeah,” I said, “we’re out of here.”

“Nonsense,” said The Traveler, still desperately clinging onto the hope that he could get us directions even as he was being forced to the Fiesta. “They’re just locals. Locals are friendly.”

The man leaning against the Toyota bent down, picked up a small rock, and hurled it at the hood of our car. It made a good-sized dent and chipped off some paint, leaving a large white spot. “Nope, fight or flight’s out of the question,” I said. “The only option is flight, now. Flee, flee like the wind!”

The passenger’s side door opened and Lena, wisely using the door as cover in a crouch, stood aside as I shoved The Traveler towards the driver’s side. I dashed into the back, nearly crushing Dee. The Drunkard had his eyes closed and was shaking his head. Dee sat still, drumming her fingers on her thigh. The Student barreled in, Lena moved the passenger’s seat again, dashed in, closed the door, and The Traveler started the car just as a cascade of rocks hit the frame. Outside, I heard the men chanting, “Cymru am byth.”

We peeled out of the lot, spewing gravel. “Well, well,” said The Drunkard. “Maybe we should change your name to something else.”

“Fuck off, Drunkard,” said The Traveler.

“Something a bit more reflective of your inability to find—”

“Drunkard,” I said. “Stop. Now isn’t the time. We nearly escaped getting attacked, so let’s not exacerbate the situation by turning it into a pissing match.”

The Drunkard shot me a look. “Growing some balls, eh?”

“Drunkard,” said The Student, still sweating and bug-eyed from the encounter, “shut it.”

“We’re fine,” said The Traveler. “Back on the road, heading back towards Oxford.”

I snapped my fingers. “Got it,” I said. I pulled out my phone and called Giggles, who was, generally, always near his computer. My instincts didn’t fail me, and I got him to give us a rough estimate of how to get to the retail village from the Welsh border.

“What the hell are you doing in Wales?” asked Giggles. I could almost see him in his room, an eyebrow arched up nearly to his hairline.

“Almost getting killed by Welsh nationalists. What else?”

Anyway, we got the directions and, thankfully, we were on the right path. All we had done was missed a turnoff at a roundabout (big surprise there). So, The Drunkard cowed—I expected him to sulk, but he shrugged it off and just stared out the window—we continued on the way to the retail village.

A Bar in a Church

We went through the glass doors and walked into the bar. Even if there weren’t a gigantic Christ painted on the back wall—hovering over a few tables and smiling down, like he was going to offer to buy the next round—it would have been obivious that the place used to be a church. Religious buildings take on a holy air that remains even after they stop functioning as places of worship. (In Canterbury, there is an old synagogue that now functions as a music hall for the King’s School; but, if you go inside, you can almost hear the Sh’ma.)

The bar’s lounge/black marble dance floor was where pews would have been. The raised bit at the back was, I figured, the Orthodox version of a bimah. The tables were black-finished wood, same with the chairs, and there were a couple of black sofas near the entrance. The bar was at our right. It was painted black and behind it, liquor bottles perched on dark wooden shelves. Underneath, a long line of refrigerators contained juice and bottled beer. There was a mirror in the center, and the two bartenders stood in front of it, having a chat.

The Drunkard squeaked, contorted his face into gleeful expression, and dashed to the bar. The predominant liquor was whiskey. Unwillingly, the girls had brought us to The Drunkard’s heaven. “Shit,” said The Traveler.

“Now,” I said, “there’s no reason to assume that this means he’s going to lose control. After all—”

The Traveler looked at me, raised his eyebrows, and tilted his head down. If he had glasses, he’d be looking over the frames and the expression of incredulity would have been complete. “Really? You’re going to try to say that he will not go overboard.”

I looked over, saw The Drunkard returning with a glass of whiskey and ice. “Well,” I said. “Maybe you’re right.”

The Drunkard rejoined us and, tears in his eyes, said, “Truly, this is a place of holiness.”

The Student looked around the walls, at the purple velvet reading Freud—the name of the bar—and the various saints’ portraits leading to the Christ at the back. “Drunkard, you may have found your church.”

“Fuck that,” responded The Drunkard. “You get free l’chaims just for wandering around North London.” He dropped his voice to a conspiratorial tone. “I know when the Lubavitchers unleash the Mitzvah Tanks.”

Lena turned to The Traveler and said, “Was coming here a mistake?”

“Nah,” he said, “it’ll be great.”

The girls, The Traveler, and The Student walked over to the bar. I was about to order a drink, and then my stomach did a somersault. The Drunkard and I walked towards the back where there was a large, empty table. Across the room, there was a table filled with Greeks. But besides them and a couple gazing into each other’s eyes under the Christ, the place was empty.

The Drunkard and I scooted a couple chairs out from the table—yielding the horrible screeching sound of metal on marble—and sat down. The Drunkard, facing the mural at the back, stared at Jesus. “How come he never looks Jewish?”

I scratched my chin. “Dunno. Maybe—”

“Narrator!” shouted someone from the table across the room. I looked up and, sure enough, there was Zaf—resplendent in his gelled-hair, jeans, and black jacket that, inexplicably, had a patch for the University of Alabama on the arm. He walked over, grinning madly and said, “And Drunkard! How are you making tonight, huh?”

The Drunkard’s left eye twitched. “My beloved language. She weeps.” He sipped his drink.

Zaf laughed his confused chuckle and said, “What are you doing here?”

I pointed at the chair next to me and he sat down. I said, “The Traveler arranged for us to stay with some friends of one of his flatmates. The hell are you doing here?”

“O, my friend of Santorini studies biology here. I, Natalya, and Lynn are staying with her to Monday.”

“Cool, man.”

“Hey,” said The Drunkard. “You’re Greek. What’s up with your man Jesus? How come he doesn’t look like a Jew? You got something against Jews?”

“Drunkard,” I said. “Contain yourself.”

“No, fuck off. I don’t get this.”

Zaf looked confused and, as such, didn’t answer.

“Drunkard, please. Don’t make me get The Traveler to unleash capoeira on you in front of the Germans. That would be most unfortunate.”

He grunted and returned to staring at the Christ.

Zaf stood and said, “So, I hope you have good time. Maybe we’ll see you out tomorrow. I maybe return.” He walked off.

“He maybe return?”

“He means he might be back. I’ve been working with him, man. He’s an engineer at heart. They’re impossible to teach unless you’re working with numbers.”

The Traveler and the others walked up and took seats. “Isn’t that Zaf?” asked The Traveler.

“Yup,” I said.

“Huh,” he said, sipping from a glass. “Small world.”

“Woah,” I said. “Hold on, what are you drinking?”

“Coke. Relax.”

The Student had a bottle of stout, and the Germans were drinking white wine. We toasted to Oxford (I held up a phantom glass in my hand) and drank.

The night was pretty tame. We talked about coursework as postgraduates (the general consensus was that the amount of time we had outside of classes was inordinate) and attempted to talk about sports, but it turned into a debate about baseball and soccer, with The Drunkard, The Student, and I on the side of baseball, and The Traveler, Lena, and Dee on the other. Turns out—not surprisingly—that everyone outside of the States feels that baseball is a complete and utter joke.

Most impressive, though, was that The Drunkard did not go his usual route and get absolutely tanked. He stopped after he finished the whiskey in front of him, and managed to be quite erudite and—even more extraordinary—reined in on the swearing. After I reminded him of the omnipresent threat of capoeira, not every other word was “fuck.” The Yiddish curses were still there, but those are funny and, thus, should not count.

We stayed until closing time and then returned to the car. The Student didn’t give another look at the OUP—which was probably good.

When we got back to the flat, people prepared for bed and the next day at the retail village. Much to my dismay, no further light was shed on my nickname—though the girls kept calling me it, probably because I twitched whenever they did.

The Student's Rage

It took The Student, The Germans, and I a couple of hours to work our way through the jambalaya. The Traveler and The Drunkard, who were long finished, watched us like we were dinner theater. After, we decided that the remains would be kept for the next day—in case anyone was brave enough to have it for lunch—and the girls said that they had a bar they wanted to show us.

The Drunkard’s eyes lit up and he sat upright. “About time.”

“It’s in an old Greek Orthodox church,” Dee said. “Great start for a night out.”

“My life,” I said, wiping off the last of the sweat, “is made up entirely of Greeks and Jews. How did this happen?”

“What,” said The Drunkard, leaning in, “you want we should be goyim? No offense girls.”

Lena and Dee shrugged and talked in German for a second.

“Well,” I said, “no. I wasn’t saying anything. Just—”

“You were saying something.”

“I agree with The Drunkard,” said The Student. He leaned forward. “Sounded like you wish we weren’t around. Tell me, why would you say such a thing?”

“I didn’t say such a thing.”

The Traveler, getting into the spirit, leaned forward. “I think you said such a thing.”

“I did not say such a thing!”

Lena cleared her throat. “I’m going to take a shower. Loverman, you might want one too, considering you look like a marathon runner.”

“I could take one with you, but that would just be forward of me,” I said. “Holy shit,” I thought, “I said that out loud.”

Lena smiled and walked to her room.

The Drunkard said, “Finally, you manage to say something instead of squeaking.”

“Too bad she’s got a boyfriend,” said Dee.

“Fuck,” I remarked.

“Ha!” said The Student. “Now you feel my pain.”

I turned to The Student and said, “Vindictiveness, my spectacled friend, is not a quality to be admired.”

He sat back and scratched at the puff of hair on his chin.

“Hey,” said The Traveler, “think of it this way: it’s a milestone.”

I viewed this as being patronized, and, as such, I sulked.

We got ready: The Drunkard cracked his knuckles and put on his jacket and hat; The Traveler took a comb to his hair and put on a grey flat cap; The Student put on his corduroy and sat patiently for everyone else; I took a quick shower to wash away the smell of jambalaya-sweat; and Lena and Dee took an hour to, as far as I could tell, put on jeans and t-shirts—we headed out to the car, piled in, and Lena navigated us to the bar.

The bar was near a very remarkable part of the University.

Anyone who has picked up a literary classic has probably run into the Oxford World’s Classics collection. The white-spined books fill more space in a university bookstore than Norton anthologies. They come from the Oxford University Press, a building which, up until my trip, I expected to be a giant warehouse deep in some dark realm. Turns out that, like everything else in Oxford, the Press looks like the British Museum.

We passed by it in the car. The Student, with a quick eye, spotted the building, asked what it was, was told, and flung himself out of the car. Luckily, we weren’t moving that fast, and, even if we had been, The Student executed a flawless tuck-and-roll. (Another thing in his favor was that there was, yet again, no traffic. For a city as big and prestigious as Oxford, I was surprised that there wasn’t a lot of traffic, but hey, whatever.) The Traveler slammed on the brakes, the car skidded to a halt, and The Student leapt up from his ball and ran to the gates.

There weren’t a lot of lights around the building. I could barely make out The Student clutching what I took to be iron bars of a gate. The words “Oxford University Press,” etched into the stone of the columned entranceway were barely illuminated by soft lighting. I said, “I’ll get him, go get a parking space.”

“You tell him,” said The Traveler, “that if he does this shit again he is never coming on a trip again. That was completely insane. He could’ve—”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll tell him.”

I stepped out of the car, shut the door, jogged across the street and went up to the Student on his right. I looked around. Some light from the grounds—a few lamps were sprinkled around the lawn—lit him up, and I saw that his eyes were moist. “Er,” I said. “You okay?”

He gulped. “These bastards are responsible for making me read Lord Jim. You hear me?” He shouted. (His voice was extraordinarily loud. Enough to make me wince for a moment.) “You hear me, you cocksuckers? You will pay for unleashing new edition after new edition of Joseph Fucking Conrad on the bright-eyed, idealistic new members of academia! Do you realize how may souls you’ve crushed with your World’s Classics? Do you?”

As much as screaming at an empty building was probably therapeutic, it was drawing us very unwelcome looks. An older couple across the street stared at us with their mouths agape. A woman our age rushed out of a door to a building a few doors down with an easel, a canvas, and a paint-covered palette and scratched madly at the canvas with what I assumed was a pencil. A car slowed to a gradual stop and idled in the street, the driver poking his head above the roof.

The Student shook the iron bars. He abandoned all pretenses of coherency and gave himself over to some primordial rage, shouting in everything ranging from a low growl, to high-pitched squeals, to gurgles. Frankly, I feared that, if I stayed much longer, I would be caught up in the man’s apoplectic rage and would find that I too had to shout and wail.

Thankfully, before such a thing happened, The Student’s fit suddenly stopped. One second he was shaking and banging away at the gates, screaming so hard I imagined that his throat would stop working all together. The next, he was straightening his shirt and his jacket. He took off his glasses, cleaned them with a handkerchief, and said, “Ah, Narrator. Whe—” He looked around him. “Where are we? This isn’t the bar.”

I cocked an eyebrow and took a step back. “No. No it isn’t. We’re at the gates to the Oxford University Press.” I shielded my head, sure that, in a second, he’d be flailing out his arms in anger.

Instead, he looked up at the building, said, “Ah, so it is. Fancy that. I was just reading a Cather novel pubished by these guys.” He took a black digital camera out from his pocket, turned it on, took a picture, and put it back in his pocket. “Funny how these things all tie together, isn’t it?”

I blinked. It was the only reaction I could muster. “Er,” I remarked. “Yes. Downright hilarious. Don’t you remember anything of what just happened?”

The Student shook his head. “I was in the car, I looked out the window, and then I was standing here. So where’s this bar? I’d be interested to see a Greek Orthodox church—you see, I’m reading this Dostoevsky novel right now for a module and—”

Someone ran at us from the right. I turned, prepared to see a police officer wielding a nightstick, blowing away at his whistle and preparing to unleash cold, British justice on us, but instead saw The Traveler. He was nearly out of breath, his jacket was waving out behind him like a sail. “What the Hell were you doing, Student?” he asked when he skidded to a halt next to us.

The Student shrugged. “Standing in front of the OUP, apparently. Funny thing is, I don’t remember getting here.”

“Bull,” said The Traveler. “What was that screaming shit you were doing? You looked completely insane.”

The Student cocked his head to one side. He looked at me. “Er,” I said. “Nothing happened.”

“But—”

“Nope. Nothing happened.” I mouthed, “I’ll tell you later,” facing away from The Student.

The Traveler shook his head. “I’m considering never taking you guys on a trip again. Between this shit and The Drunkard, I seriously have no idea how we haven’t been arrested or kicked out of somewhere yet.”

“Oh,” I said, “we’ve still got a full day here. Plenty of time to get kicked out of all sorts of fine establishments.”

“Nope,” said The Traveler. He turned and started walking back the way from whence he ran. We followed.

“What do you mean?” asked The Student.

“I mean that tomorrow we’re taking the girls out to a retail village about half an hour away.”

“Retail village?” I asked. “What’s that?”

“Think of a giant mall spread out to look like a high street. From what they said, it seems like the embodiment of capitalism. Jeans that cost a few bucks to make, selling for £89.99, and that’s on sale.”

“Woah!” I said. I stopped in my tracks and coughed. “Ninety quid for a pair of jeans?”

The Traveler turned around. The look on his face was one I would expect to see at a funeral. “On sale. Remember that. Disgusting, isn’t it?”

We continued walking some more, this time in silence. The Student looked around, unfazed by the discussion of prices—I reckoned that he was apathetic when it came to petty matters of financial transactions. The Traveler looking straight on until we got to the car. “Okay,” said The Traveler to The Drunkard and the Germans. “Shall we go?”

“Is he okay?” asked Lena.

“Hmm?” asked The Student. “Me? Peachy. Why?”

Lena and The Traveler exchanged looks that said The Student was a cause for concern.

We crossed the street and walked up the stairs of a building that looked like a church. I’d always assumed that Greek Orthodox churches were supposed to look vastly different than other buildings, but then I remembered that, after all, we were in England, and this building may very well have been a tea house before. (Or, the ultimate irony, a synagogue. This isn’t impossible—though it is definitely strange. In a place called Ramsgate, the reform synagogue used to be a Methodist church.)

In Which The Traveler Tries to Kill Us All

(Now, hold on. I know you may be thinking “What?” at that heading—or, alternately, “Who cares?”—but it’s accurate. Though he denies it, I am convinced that The Traveler was trying to kill us that night in Oxford. It is the only explanation for why he chose to do what he did—a malevolent soul enacting revenge for some unperceived slight.)

We returned to the girls’ flat and, after another comment about me being ‘loverman,’ The Traveler dumped the Tesco bags onto the girls’ counter and gathered a few mixing bowls, a couple knives, a pot, and a cutting board. The items on the counter were, roughly, as follows:

-       A pound of chicken breast fillets

-       A pound of jumbo shrimp

-       Four links of chorizo sausage

-       A regular onion

-       Garlic granules

-       Cajun spices

-       Hot chili powder

-       Turmeric

-       Three bell peppers of various colors

-       Five chili peppers

-       A few supremely wrinkled peppers known as a Scotch bonnet peppers

-       Some olive oil

-       An even more wrinkled mass of a pepper (looking like it was about to collapse in on itself) known as El Pepper del Diablo

-       And, finally, a pound of rice.

The most complicated meal I’d made involved eggs, toast, and a tomato—and I managed to make the tomato explode in a frying pan. Seeing such an array of foods sitting on the counter boggled my mind. That a person—a regular person, not a chef—could think they could successfully juggle such a collection of foods was laughable.

“Traveler,” I said, “what are you doing? There’s no way you’ll be able to handle all of this.”

“Oh?” he said.

“That’s really not that much,” said The Student. Well, it’s a lot of food, don’t get me wrong, but I think I know what he’s planning.”

“My friend,” I said, “I know when something’s doomed to failure, and this is definitely doomed to failure.”

“What are you making?” asked Dee.

The Traveler opened the chicken and diced the fillets. “I’ll tell you when its done.”

“I know what it is,” said The Student, in a childish sing-song voice.

“And I’d ask you not to tell anyone. I think you may be—”

“Oh, shit,” said The Drunkard, coming out of the bathroom, “you’re maki—”

The Traveler threw one of the red chili peppers at The Drunkard. “Shut it.”

The Drunkard shrugged. “Whatever.”

“What,” I said, “you know cooking?”

“Of course I know cooking. Used to cook all the time in undergrad. If The Traveler’s making what I think he’s making, then this was my specialty.”

“And do you cook now?” asked Dee.

“Nope. Can’t. I live with five French nihilists who go to class, come back, and sit and smoke in the kitchen all day and night. Tobacco smoke ruins food, in my opinion. Now I mostly eat ramen.”

The front door opened and Lena, tossing her backpack into her room with a dancer’s fluid motions, walked in. She put up her hair and I went, “Guh.”

“What’s cooking?” she asked.

“It’s a secret, apparently,” said The Narrator.

“Mmhmm,” said The Traveler. He’d finished dicing the chicken, sausage, and peppers, and put the chicken in one bowl and the sausage and bell peppers in another. “Also, if you wouldn’t mind buggering off somewhere while I prep and cook, that’d be great. I picked up the habit of talking to my food while cooking, and it kind of unnerves people.”

“You talk to your food?” I asked.

“Yeah. Strange habit, I know. Got it from a friend of mine who claims that it brings herself and the food into a closer relationship—almost a Zen sense of oneness.”

The rest of us got a pack of cards and played poker, hearts, and, finally, Go Fish. I lost every game we played except Go Fish. I was never a card player. In high school, while other people were getting together on Saturday nights and playing Texas Hold ‘Em, I was over at a friend’s house, where a group of us would gather and shout at each other over Mario Kart.

An hour or so after starting, The Traveler announced that the food was done, tapped a big ladle on the side of the big black pot, and set out five plates.

“Already?” asked The Drunkard. “For this, I thought it was supposed to be longer.”

“Yeah,” said The Traveler, leaning up against a wall in the kitchen and letting us serve ourselves first. “Normally, I’d agree with you. But I figured we didn’t have two hours to let the stuff stew in its own juices and bought quick cook rice.”

“This smells delicious,” said Dee.

“Take a bite.”

She got a fork from a drawer, stabbed some of the yellow rice-meat-pepper mound on her plate, and ate. In a second, her face turned red and tears streamed out of her eyes. “Good God,” she coughed.

Lena had the same reaction.

The Drunkard took a big bite, nodded, and smiled. “Good job, man.”

The Student took a plate, heaped some on, took a bite, and shouted, “Milk! Give me milk!”

“Narrator,” said The Traveler.

After seeing the reactions of everyone else, I was hesitant. Suddenly, I just wanted my usual dinner of microwaved lasagna or spaghetti. Still, I was determined to be the alpha male. I took the ladle, dug it into the mass inside the pot—and, man, it did smell amazing—scooped out a giant hunk and slapped it on a plate. I took a fork, dug it in, and took a bite.

While I didn’t black out, I wished I had. This was beyond spicy. There was no mirror, so I couldn’t see myself, but judging from the grin on The Traveler’s face, I reacted a lot like The Student. I kept in the pain, bottled it up, and tried my best to pretend that I wasn’t turning redder than a tomato and sweating like I’d just run a marathon. “Good,” I coughed. “Not trying to insult you, but my grandmother made spicier.” (In the interests of being an honest human being, I will attempt to transcribe what actually came out of my mouth: “Gub” cough. “Nah hayin” cough cough “inhul” cough “ranmot” cough “her made spicier” long stream of coughs.)

“Here,” said The Student. He pulled a chair out from the table and I sat down with the plate in front of me.

The Traveler took a mouthful on a fork and ate it like it was salad. “This is jambalaya.”

The Student, Lena, Dee, and I let loose a barrage of coughs. The Drunkard shoveled the rest of his plate down his apparently iron gullet, let the fork clatter to the plate, and said, “Traveler, I have a lot of respect for you. Don’t misunderstand me, that wasn’t the best I’ve had, but considering you cooked that up in an hour… well, let’s just say it’s worthy of seconds.”

The Traveler pointed to the pot, and said, “Help yourselves.”

The rest of the group sat down at the table. The Drunkard took the ladle and heaped some more on his plate. The Traveler opened the fridge, said, “Lena, you mind if we use your milk? I think The Narrator’s about to explode.”

“Am not,” I said. This was, of course, a blatant lie. (A while ago, I’d come up with something called The Narrator’s Ratio. Essentially, it says: 80% of what I say is a lie; 10% is half-truths; 10% is truth. The Narrator’s Ratio, of course, may or may not be a misrepresentation.)

“Please,” Lena said. “I might need it more than he does.”

Forsooth! Such grace! Such humor contained in such a fine vessel! (Sweat continued cascading down my forehead and dripping onto the table as I let loose a near unbroken chain of coughs.) That someone such as she could, maybe, perhaps, find a glint of the sublime in such a flawed example of the human form as I. But soft, there might—

“Hey,” The Drunkard said, poking me in the side after he sat down. “You can wait between bites, you know? You don’t have to continue eating if it’s causing you physical pain.”

“What physical pain?” I asked, mopping my forehead with my arm. “Physical pain schmysical pain. I—dear sweet God, Traveler, never use the Diablo pepper again.”

The Traveler, now sitting next to Lena, gave me a Cheshire cat grin. “Can’t handle the heat, get out the kitchen, boy.”

“I’m out of the kitchen. Where’s your remedy now?”

“You know,” said The Student. “You bring up the Diablo pepper, and I can’t help but think that, if they were to serve food in Dante’s Hell, then this would be the punishment for gluttony.”

The Drunkard, Traveler, and Dee chuckled. Lena and I laughed. The Student, reeling in a finally successful joke, grinned, took a bite from the jambalaya, and said, “Shit!” before diving for the milk.

In Which I Grow Tired of Flowers

“Lots of plants here,” I said.

“These are the Botanical Gardens,” Dee responded, using the tone of a teacher at the end of her rope.

Indeed, these were the Botanical Gardens. However, the gardens are not something I wish to spend time in describing. (You probably don’t care about the amazing variety of foliage—and if you do, too bad.) A small river cut through the Gardens. Trees—perilously close to losing all their leaves and becoming big sticks—were plentiful. If there were bluebirds, they would have been singing—however, this is England and it is a well-known fact that the only indigenous birds are gigantic crows, gigantic seagulls, pigeons, and those tiny birds that hop around vacuuming up crumbs.

On top of being largely disaffected by manicured beauty, I had The Drunkard to worry about. He was snapping out of his absinthe haze and was no longer whimpering. Perhaps the gardens and the trees helped him, or perhaps the stuff was weaker than I thought. Regardless, he hung in the back with me, while The Student and Dee walked ahead remarking on this tree or that plant.

“I’m a shit, aren’t I?” asked The Drunkard.

“What?”

He groaned.

“Nah, man. You’re, er,” I didn’t quite know what to say here. Sincerity and giving advice were never my strong points. I could tell a joke—that was easy. Helping people deal with problems in a serious manner, though, was hard. I’d briefly considered going to rabbinical school, but decided against it when I realized that, just maybe, a couple getting married wouldn’t want to hear “What’s another name for marriage? Meshugas!” under the canopy. “You’re a good guy. Just a little, um, crazy sometimes. Yeah?”

The Drunkard craned his neck to look at me. His eyes were bloodshot. “I’ve tried to attack The Traveler twice on this trip. I’ve spent most of the time tripping balls on absinthe. I’m a schmuck.”

“Nah.” I shook my head. If I did that enough, it would convince him otherwise. “You’re a good guy.” I patted him on the back.

“Right,” he said. “You tell that to Julie.”

“Er.” Yep, this was going into dark, frightening, and, most important, serious places. I looked ahead and saw The Student gesticulating with his hands and making some point—probably about an obscure novel he’d just read—which meant, in other words, that I had no hope of enlisting his help. “Nah, we just need to find you—” Find him what? “We just need to find you a nice Jewish girl.”

“Oh?” shouted The Drunkard. His face went from pale to beet red in about a second and the veins in his forehead popped out. “Is that what we need? Let’s find The Drunkard a Jewish girl, cause all of these shicksehs are bad for him! Is that right, you schlub?”

I backed into one of the black iron railings along the path. I wished that I had a shell at that moment—for though The Drunkard, in his fury, would inevitably break through such a defense, it would tire him out enough so the rain of endless blows would not cripple me.

“Let’s just find him a girl with –stein at the end of her name and everything will be all right. Hey, I know,” he said, jabbing his index finger into the air, “let’s turn The Drunkard into The Student! The Student managed to find a nice Jewish girl, didn’t he? Well fuck you, sir.” He dug his hands into his pockets, bolted to a bench, and sat down. I could practically see steam billowing out of his ears.

I blinked a few times. I looked around. Thankfully, no one noticed The Drunkard’s explosion. The Student and Dee were still talking up ahead—moving further and further away. Everyone else in the gardens was having too nice of a time to pay any attention to the American having himself a nice conniption.

About five or six years ago, I told someone that I wished they would stop sending me articles about Rush Limbaugh and was given a death threat. This event flashed through my mind, but, judging from the adoring looks I’d spotted The Drunkard give Julie (actually, they were more like the looks a puppy gives his owner), this was a completely different beast.

I watched The Drunkard. The vein throbbed for a little bit more, then stopped. His eyes steadied, and he stared at some flowers across the path. His left leg—which, when he first sat down, had been bouncing up and down like a jackhammer—stilled. I gave it another minute, buttoned my coat, and sat down next to him. “Sorry.”

He grunted.

“I didn’t mean to say that finding a Jewish girl would solve your problems. In fact, finding one would probably drive you mad, as they’re all balabustas.”

The Drunkard mimicked a rimshot.

“You know what Mel Brooks said. ‘Humor is just another defense against the universe.’ For me, it’s the only one.”

“Yeah,” The Drunkard said. “I’ll explain later.”

“Wanna catch up with The Student and Dee?”

He snorted. “You kidding me? You hear what they’re talking about? They’re talking about Brecht. Fuck that, my friend.”

“Well hey, there’s half the group,” The Traveler called.

I turned to my left and saw him carrying a couple of plastic bags stamped with the Tesco logo. “Heya, Traveler.”

“Enjoying the Gardens?” He asked. He put down the bags and sat between The Drunkard and I.

“Eh,” I said. “It’s getting tiresome, this looking at flowers and trees business.”

The Traveler nodded. “I’ve got this English friend, right? One day, I went down to his place in town and asked if I could break a bottle in his yard so I could make a guitar slide.”

“Why don’t you buy one?” asked The Drunkard.

“You kidding me? You want to be authentic, you make one out of a bottle neck.”

“Good answer,” The Drunkard said, slapping The Traveler on the back. “The answer of a true guitar player.”

“So,” continued The Traveler, “the guy says no. I asked why not, he says that the garden is the Englishman’s castle.”

“What was his castle like?” I asked.

“Overgrown with weeds, disheveled, and littered with trash. But, as the man said, it’s his castle. I see The Student and Dee are getting on well.”

“They’ve been talking about Brecht since we walked in the Gardens,” The Drunkard said. “Hearing such a conversation and not being a drama student is akin to being decapitated by a blunt guillotine.”

“The Student seems to like it,” said The Traveler.

The Drunkard nodded. “He also reads Joyce for fun. No one does that. Joyce’s wife didn’t do that.”

“She read his letters,” I said.

The Drunkard shivered at the mention of the letters. (Read them, if you dare.)

“Well,” said The Traveler, “what say we catch up with them? I’ve got the ingredients for food tonight, so I’d say after we’re done we can head back, feast, and then go out for some drinks.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

“Yeah,” said The Drunkard. He stood, took off his ballcap, scratched his head, and said, “Look, I should apologize for the absinthe thing. I’ve had a shitty time recently and—”

“Yup,” said The Traveler. He held out a Tesco bag. “You carry that and we’re fine.

The Drunkard took the bag and we caught up with the other two. They were now discussing Samuel Beckett and whether or not he was completely insane. For someone in the sciences, Dee knew an awful lot about theater, and, as such, I fell deeper in smit.

Anyway, we walked around the Gardens some more. However, I zoned out and, next thing I knew, we were back at the car.

Sub-Par Bagels and More Problems

We left the college and walked into the bright sunlight. I saw The Drunkard blubbering in the fetal position on the ground. The Traveler stood over him, looking around at the confused tourists walking by. I rushed over and said, “Dear God, Traveler, what did you do? Why did you use your capoeira powers on the poor man?”

“I didn’t do anything,” he said, raising his palms in the air. “Someone stepped on a beetle and The Drunkard just collapsed onto the ground in tears. I don’t think he just has absinthe in his flasks.”

“Can he get up?” asked The Student.

The Traveler shrugged. He gently kicked The Drunkard in his ribs. The Drunkard’s blubbering grew louder for a second and then subsided back to slightly louder than a whisper.

The Student crouched down and said, “Drunkard, it’s okay. That was a bad beetle.”

“What?” asked The Drunkard.

“Yes. He was a bad Beetleborg. You remember Beetleborgs?”

The Drunkard’s blubbering ceased. “I do remember Beetleborgs.”

“That was a bad one. Someone killed one of the bad guys.”

“Good,” said The Drunkard. He straightened from the fetal position, craned his neck to look at the squashed beetle carcass near my feet, and smiled. “Good.” He finally stood. His face was pallid. Veins stood out and his eyes were bloodshot. “We should eat.”

Dee nodded. “Good idea. I know a good bagel place right outside the gates.”

“Son of a bitch,” I said. “It’s been a while since I’ve had a good bagel.”

“I know,” The Student said. “The ones over here? Treif.”

We walked out of the gates, across the street, through the pedestrian traffic, and into a bright blue shop. It was set up like an ice cream place in the States—probably because, in addition to bagels, they had thirteen flavors of ice cream (nothing on thirty-one, I know, but it was England, after all). There was a long bar—part freezer, part bagel bar. At the end of the bar furthest from the entrance were three racks of bagels and displays of delightfully British fillings and toppings. By ‘delighfully British fillings and toppings,’ I mean smoked salmon, plain cream cheese (they refer to it as ‘soft cheese’), cucumber, and mayonnaise. There were a couple of others—lettuce and a couple meats among them—but, overall, it looked like they were trying to make a sandwich bar.

There are times when I really pity the British, for they don’t know what they’re missing. I pitied them now: they did not—and, barring a trip to the U.S., would not—know what made a good bagel. Their options were limited to cinnamon raisin, plain, and sesame. They would never know the joy of challah rolls, or potato bagels, or asiago bagels, or—I should stop this train of thought, as I am starting to dribble over the keyboard.

“Help you?” asked a man wearing a dark blue shirt and black apron from behind the counter.

“No,” I said. “It is you who needs help.”

His eyes darted from side to side—what he was looking for, I do not know. Possibly a hidden camera or a Bible to fling at him from some hidden space—and he said, “Sorry?”

I shook my head. “Nothing. I’ll have ice cream. Your bagel selection is, frankly, insulting to my people, who—”

“Narrator,” said The Traveler, holding a cup of ice cream. “Order your food and let’s go downstairs. Dee’s holding a table till we get down there.”

I nodded, ordered my food, paid, and we walked down a narrow wooden staircase to a seating area downstairs. “I notice,” I said, “that you’re not holding a bagel.”

He snorted. “You see that selection? Please, any place that doesn’t at least have an asiago shouldn’t legally be allowed to refer to itself as a bagel place.”

“Amen.” We clunked our ice cream cups together and joined the others.

The seating area downstairs had enough space for about twenty people. The walls were hospital white with some paintings featuring cows in famous places across the world—naturally, places where one would not expect to find a cow. We sat down at a booth set at one of the walls and Dee went upstairs to order. None of my friends had bagels. I pointed to the ice cream. They grunted.

At this time, a group of students descended the staircase. Most of them wore cardigans and clutched Moleskine notebooks. I twitched. In my mind, there are two types of people who use Moleskine notebooks: the first group are the Writers of the world; they fancy themselves the crème de la crème and nothing but $15 notebooks shall contain their thoughts. The second group—and even worse—are journalists. Journalists are the scum of the earth, for they live in a dying medium and do not acknowledge it. (Of course, it goes without saying that I would never say that to The Drunkard, for he would gouge out my eyes and them force them down my throat.)

“Well,” the first one—a tall, thin man in a maroon cardigan, thin-rimmed glasses, and an immaculately-trimmed goatee—said as they sat down at a booth nearby, “it’s incredibly hard to plan out an issue of a magazine without knowing how many people are going to be writing articles.”

I snapped my plastic spoon in half. Journalists.

The Drunkard stood up. He grinned out of one side of his face, showing some teeth. A disturbing look, made all the more so by his eyes, which arced up at the sides, giving him a look somewhere in between a serial killer and the mask representing Comedy. “Drunkard,” The Traveler said, “where are you going?”

The Drunkard, unresponsive, walked to the journalists. “Er,” I said.

The Traveler turned to me and arched an eyebrow.

“What?” I asked.

“What’s he doing?”

“How should I know?”

“You two are buds, aren’t you?”

“We’re friends, you think that means he telegraphs everything he’s thinking to me?”

“Did I say that?”

“Guys,” said The Student, “you need to stop that.”

“But—” I said.

“No. Chains of questions don’t help anyone.”

I looked back at the group of students. The Drunkard scraped a chair across the linoleum floor, straddled it, and stared directly at the man in the maroon cardigan from behind a woman in a green shirt. “Hi,” said the man. “Can I help you?”

The Drunkard, slowly, shook his head. “Nope.”

“Um,” the man said. He looked around, shrugged. He unwrapped his Moleskine, opened it, and said, “So, Stephen, could you—”

The Drunkard burst into a coughing fit. “Oh, whoops,” he said when he stopped. “Sorry.”

The man nodded. “Stephen, could you—”

“Hey,” said The Drunkard. “Hey. You. Maroon Man. You the editor?”

“Yes.”

“Thought so. I could smell shit from across the room.”

The group of students grumbled. The Traveler hung his head, The Student looked to me, and I said, “Oh no.”

“Sir,” said the man in maroon, “I’d like to know what you’re insinuating.”

The Drunkard pushed in front of the woman and said, “I’m insinuating, you spineless coward, that you, as an editor, are naught but a fish-faced enemy of the people. How much you paying these guys, huh? Nothing, I’ll bet.”

“That’s more of a complaint to take up with—”

“Fuck you,” said The Drunkard. “I’ll take it up with whoever I want. Look,” he said to the woman. “This guy ever gives you shit, you take a dump on his desk. That’s the only way to handle editors.”

“I don’t th—”

“Hey,” The Drunkard said to the girl in green. “How many times he come on to you?”

“None, he’s a per—” she began.

“Pervert. Probably rubs one out thinking of you during meetings. Right, Maroon Man? You fucking letch.”

“Sir, I’m going to—”

“Do it right now.”

“Okay,” said The Traveler. He bolted out of his chair and dragged The Drunkard out by his collar. “We’re done here. Sorry about him, he’s deranged.”

“Your mother is deranged,” shouted The Drunkard. “Editors are scum! Spineless tools of the corporate world who don’t understand the risks of—get off me, Traveler, or I will—stop that!” The Traveler was now dragging The Drunkard up the stairs by his collar. The Drunkard’s shouts devolved into guttural screams, nonsense threats against The Traveler’s family. We heard a series of thumps on the floor above us, the ringing of a bell, and then silence.

Dee slowly plodded down the stairs with a confused look on her face. She held a plate with a salmon and lettuce-covered bagel.

“Ooo, went with lox, huh?” I asked.

She looked at her plate and said, “Yes. What was that?”

“Yes,” said the man in maroon. “What was that?”

Everyone turned to look at me—except for The Student, who stared at a magazine on the table with enough concentration to move the damn thing. “Ah,” I said. “Well. You see. The Drunkard—the man who just insinuated you were a sexual deviant—used to be a journalist. And, um, his father—who beat him with a length of rubber hose each night in rhythm to ‘Hey Jude’—was an editor. So, you know, he doesn’t really like editors.” I scratched my head.”

“You’re lying your arse off,” said a man in a navy blue cardigan. (Why were they all wearing cardigans? What was wrong with these people?)

“Maybe,” I said “But, just maybe, I’m not. And, if that’s the case, that makes you a rat bastard, sir. For my friend still carries the scars of his father’s ruthless shenanigans, and I shall be damned if I allow you, some cardigan-wearing poof, to say that my friend’s dark past is something to be scoffed at. Why, if I had a glove, I would throw it on the ground and challenge you to a duel. But, since I don’t, I bid good day to you, sir!” Then, since my train of thought essentially led me to turn tail and bolt, I did just that—although in a manner that said I could return and kick this guy’s ass six ways to Sunday.

The upstairs was still quiet from The Drunkard’s forced exit, and it entered a whole new realm of silence by the time I made it halfway to the front door. Before I left, I turned to the people, bowed, and said, “Thank you all, we’ve had a blast.”

Outside, I saw The Drunkard crumpled in a heap and The Traveler bouncing off of his hands back onto his feet. I sighed. “Again? Really?”

The Traveler shrugged. “We made it outside and he hurled a haymaker at me. I dodged it, tried to talk him down, he did it again and, well… there he is.”

I bent down and saw that The Drunkard was in the fetal position with his eyes open and blood trickling out of a gash directly above his right eye. “Hey,” I said. “You okay?”

“I’m going to sue,” he said.

“No you’re not,” said The Traveler.

“Fine. I want to go home.”

“Can’t. We’re taking the girls shopping tomorrow, and I’m cooking tonight.”

“Holy hell,” I said. “You cook?”

“Of course I cook. You don’t think I’d be fool enough to spend all my money on microwave meals, do you? God only knows what goes in those things.”

“Er,” I said. “Goodness. Goodness goes in them.”

“That’s what you eat, isn’t it?”

I shrugged. “Yeah.”

“Christ. I’ll teach you how to make something tonight.”

“Will you make spaghetti?” asked The Drunkard, sitting up. I wasn’t sure if he was dazed or still tripping from the absinthe, because that didn’t seem like a question that he would normally ask.

“No,” said The Traveler.

We stood around outside the ice cream/bagel bar for a while konger. It seemed The Student and Dee were content to let us revel in awkwardness outside. After about ten miinutes, they walked out, The Student saw The Drunkard on the ground and said, “You schmuck.”

Dee, possibly bowing to some maternal instinct made a whining noise and said, “Traveler, what did you do?”

“Capoeira. He tried to hit me with a haymaker. It was all in defense.”

“The man,” The Drunkard said, “is an animal. An absolute animal.”

“Right,” The Traveler said. “How much more absinthe do you have?”

“I’m out.”

“Prove it.”

The Drunkard took out four flasks, opened them all, overturned them. Not a drop fell out.

“Stand,” said The Traveler.

The Drunkard did so.

“I’m going to pat you down.”

“Aw, man, don’t do that.”

“What do you have to worry about? It’s not like you’re hiding anything else, are you?”

The Drunkard grumbled and pulled a flask from inside his pants and poured out a greenish liquid.

“Any more?”

“No. I hope you’re happy, Mr. I-Don’t-Acknowledge-The-Parrot-On-My-Shoulder.”

“I’m ecstatic.” He clapped his hands together once, turned to Dee, and said, “So, tour guide, where to now?”

“I was thinking the Botanical Gardens. They’re just down the street.”

“Okay,” said The Traveler, “while you’re doing that, I’m going to go get the ingredients for cooking tonight.”

“You’re not cooking,” Dee said.

“Yes I am. Lena won’t let us pay you guys for crashing in your flat, so I’m going to cook.”

“What?”

“It’s a surprise.”

“Spaghetti?” asked The Drunkard.

“No, not spaghetti.”

The Drunkard hung his head and The Traveler said he’d call us when he got done at the store. He walked off and The Student and I helped The Drunkard up and followed Dee down the street.

Inside The College; Or, We Get Bored Easily

The interior of Christ Church College looked like it should have been the interior for a film about a Tudor monarch. We entered via a walkway leading in from a courtyard. It was dark. Though there were plenty of windows set in the walls, the light streaming in was minimal. When my eyes adjusted, I saw beautiful stained glass windows, portraits of old college masters and a couple tapestries. I looked up and saw a few coats of arms on the ceiling high above. The entire place was beyond my abilities to describe in terms of architecture; however, I believe that the ceiling had flying buttresses. (I say that because it was the only architectural term I remember from my Medieval Studies classes.) There were crenated beams running from the walls to a large column—beyond that, I would direct you to a well-stocked photo library of Oxford.

As we walked in, both The Student and I went, “Oooo,” and stood and looked with stars in our eyes.

“Yeah,” said The Student. “I should have gone to Oxford.”

“You think you could have gotten in?”

“Oh, God no,” he said. “But that doesn’t change the fact that, in a just universe, I should have gone here.”

He spoke the truth. It was a damn shame that this wasn’t a just universe. “So,” said Dee, who hadn’t seen us stop, had walked up the stairs, and now had to come back down, “this is where they filmed parts of the college scenes in Harry Potter.”

We turned our attention to Dee. “What?” I asked.

“Never saw it,” said The Student.

“Really?”

I nodded and started up the stairs. The other two followed.

“Did you read the books, at least?”

The Student dug his hands into his jacket. “I haven’t had the luxury of reading anything for fun in, oh, six years.”

“Woah,” I said. “Really?”

He nodded like a man in mourning. “What with reading lists, critical interpretations, scholarly articles, and philosophical readings relating to the subjects undertaken in the literatures of different regions—nay, cultures—I can barely form a normal thought any more.”

“And you?” Dee asked.

I shrugged. “I read them when they came out. Thought they were decent, but I never thought it would be worth the time to see the movies.”

“But the cinematic brilliance—” she started.

“Pah!” shouted The Student. His objection echoed off the stone walls. We passed through a large archway at the top of the staircase and walked into a massive dining hall. The tables looked like they were about fifty yards long. At the end of the hall, there was a gigantic stained-glass window (the shapes had some significance to something or other, but, frankly, I didn’t care—we were in a dining hall). Small lamps were placed around the tops of the tables, generally one lamp for every two seats. Along the walls there hung large portraits of men wearing wigs. “Pah,” repeated The Student, a little quieter due to the glare he received from an usher. “Cinematic brilliance? Hardly. If you want cinematic brilliance, watch Kubrick.”

“Pah,” I said. “If you want cinematic brilliance, watch Spielberg.”

“Spielberg’s tripe,” The Student said.

“Your mother is tripe. Good for Kubrick, he can adapt novels.” I gave a slow clap that earned a glare from the usher.

“Pah,” said The Student.

“Pah,” I responded.

It should be clear to the reader, who is probably infinitely wiser than I, that neither The Student or I were impressed by the display of every stereotype of Oxford portrayed in this room. I wasn’t impressed because I realized that we had just paid five pounds to view a dining room. I guessed that The Student’s temporary fascination with buildings that weren’t built in the 1960s (as the University of Kent was) was fading. We left the dining room after about one minute spent scoffing at each other and, as we left, realized that Dee was still inside. We looked back in and saw her gazing around the room with a giant grin on her face. Clearly, she was a big fan of the movies.

“Still wished you went to Oxford?” I asked.

The Student scratched his chin. “Well, it would have looked nice, having a degree from Oxford. But, really, when it comes down to it, literature’s all about an individual’s perception of a work, or ‘work,’ and taking a degree is about formulating, postulating, perhaps, a critical standpoint—be it Marxist, feminist, post-modern, anything really. So it doesn’t really matter what university you attend. You know, have I ever told you my thoughts on Conrad’s ‘The Secret Sharer’ as an Oedipal—”

“Shut up,” I said. “You’re going into literary criticism mode, and I fear that may lead to you throwing feces around the room. Stonework is a bitch to clean, and I’d rather not spend the afternoon scrubbing defecation from centuries-old college walls.”

The Student, presumably seeing the wisdom of my idea, silenced himself and we looked at a sculpture of a man named Cyril Jackson. I have no idea who this man is, but I expect that he is Michael Jackson’s ancestor—for no reason other than he was sitting, and I’d heard that, from time to time, the King of Pop enjoyed a nice sit-down.

Finally, Dee, dazed, walked out of the living room. “You could almost see the owls flying in from the roof.”

The Student turned to me with a bewildered look on his face. I shrugged. It appeared that students in the sciences were no less prone to being kids than we in the humanities. “Here,” I said, pulling a chair over from a small table in the corner, “have a seat while you gather your senses.”

“Oh,” she said. “Thank you.” She sat down, still grinning.

“So,” I said. “How bout them Yankees?”

The Student blinked. “What?”

“The Yankees. They won the Series.”

“Ah.” The Student sniffed. “I presume you don’t like the Yankees.”

I shrugged. “I’m more of an Astros fan.”

“Houston? Why in God’s name would you like them? They’re terrible. I don’t watch baseball and I know they’re terrible.”

My nostrils flared. “Gotta support the team. Home team. For it’s root, root, root for the home team.”

The Student turned his head to one side. “What? You turning into Rain Man over there?”

“I was born in Houston. You have to support your home team.”

“Please, that’s bullshit. You’re free to go with whomever you want.”

“Well maybe I want to cheer for the Astros.”

“I repeat my earlier question: Why in God’s name would you want to support one of the consistently most disappointing teams in baseball?”

“Because I believe in a little thing called loyalty.”

“More like stupidity.”

“Why you—” I raised my fist in the air and Dee jumped between the two of us.

“Okay,” she said, “let’s go.”

I dropped my fist and nodded coolly at The Student.