In Amsterdam, he’d been in the Anne Frank Museum, walking quietly through the rooms, measured steps on the old wooden floors, sensing within the walls, a kind of gravity, a sense of what had transpired somehow captured by the space and the lateness of the day, light fading on the Amstel as he’d waited, now barren, winter-like as it leaked through the warped windows. Frank, who he’d once read nearly thirty years ago as all children in his school district had, a symbol for the calamity and horror of humanity, Shoah. It quieted him, and he walked silently through the museum, sometimes reaching up to brush away tears, which kept forming unbidden.
There were teenagers there too, who had to be shushed, placated, reminded by their teacher that this wasn’t a place for jokes, for horsing around. There’d also been a woman, a decade or so younger than him, who he’d been walking near, who he’d seen on a bench by the Amstel, sitting in the half-shadow of an elm, and he’d almost said something to her in line but had thought better of it, and now they were walking silently through the museum, taking in the horror.
After they left the museum, they started walking the same way, away from the dark canals where revelers had all disappeared while they were in the museum, and he’d struck up a conversation. They were both tourists after all, strangers in this strange city. She surprised him by saying she thought he’d been too serious in the museum, that he looked as though he was in pain.
As he often did when he found a woman attractive, he passed over her comment, which, truthfully, he found callous. And maybe it wasn’t that he passed over comments like that only for attractive women, in fact, he did it for almost everyone, overlooked things, ignored them, because he wanted to be liked, a habit his partner had criticized him for, which struck her as inauthentic, a characterization he felt was unfair, because though he did want to be liked, his impulse was twofold, to like as well, to draw himself and others into communion.
Though in truth, this proclivity, this communion, was something he disliked about himself at times. But he didn’t seem to be able to change it. It felt immutable. And so, as they sat on the cold marble of a fountain in Amsterdam, they talked about how both of their marriages had failed.
As they talked, he gazed out across the distant space, the eclectic and many-storied houses thinking of the vertiginous stairs of the pancake restaurant he’d climbed that morning; beyond the houses, a purpling sky, dark birds scattering, the sun fading behind the pointed roofs, leaving them in a valley of shadow as they admitted to one another that they hadn’t had much sex during their marriages, that it was probably a grave sign, some deficiency they’d both ignored because they’d been brought up religious, which meant that sex had been, not only forbidden, but problematized, associated with shame and hiding. And yet, here they were, strangers talking about sex on a warm day in May, pigeons dotting the small square.
There was always something alluring about disclosure with strangers, the assurance that your secrets or failings, if you shared them, would be forgotten, buried away in that person’s mind as they took a train to a different city, met a different person, heard different stories, visited a new museum, until all the new memories fell as thick snow over the slender tracks of your disclosure. And yet, the burden had still been lifted from your heart. Finally, you’d admitted the truth to someone, a person who understood you, which wasn’t really new, but which felt new, which was the trick both of travel and disclosure with strangers.
But now the earth’s tilt, light held only in the crowns of distant plane trees as the conversation continues to meander. The woman asks the man if he can find his way back to the hostel. And he says he’s got his phone handy, but the whole time they are talking, he’s aware that his phone is almost dead and that without that blue dot, he’ll get lost, horribly lost, wander the street for hours in this unfamiliar place, that he’s not the type to ask help from a stranger, that he’s the sort of person who used to get lost driving in his hometown where he should have had all the streets memorized, but he’d drive and drive, choosing the wrong way every time, doubling back, until in horror, he’d recognize some landmark from when he first started, and he’d bang his hands on the steering wheel and wish himself dead for his stupidity, his lack of an internal compass.
But he wanted her to like him. I’m fine, he said. He didn’t want to be the sort of person who cut a good conversation short—a deep conversation, the sort he was always seeking out, always yearning for, the sort of conversation that had led him to travel to Europe in the first place. So, he stayed, sitting with her on the fountain, legs dangling in the air, as though they were children, both of them, he thought, liking one another.
When only the last vestiges of some strange afterlight remained in the air, they parted ways. He began walking toward his hostel, warmed by their conversation, a blue dot guiding him home. But within moments, his phone winked out, the dot vanishing. And he was left standing in the middle of an unknown city, in the middle of his life, with only his horrendous sense of direction, no hope of getting back home, the shadows growing longer across the streets, darkness falling fast, not only across the city and the houses and the Amstel, but across all his life, a ghostly shadow, nightmarish as the now black sky.
