This is a direct follow-up to The Shift, a tale in which the characters, Dül , and Samantha find their initial introduction. For those not familiar with Ükür, its people, its culture, and its language, many of the names in this story may appear inordinately difficult, and rather than be a bad writer and provide an extensive language lesson before the story actually begins, I'll just provide a rough pronunciation guide that'll help those unfamiliar with Ükür to actually see how familiar things actually are there. The Central character's name Dül is pronounced "Dool." An umlaut over the letter "U" always means that you pronounce it as "oo." The supporting male protagonist is named Xéŗšé: this is simply the Ükür-local way of pronouncing the name "Xerxes." The accent mark over the first "e" give is a somewhat French pronunciation; the mark beneath the letter "r" indicates that it should be rolled. The "hachek" mark over the "s" indicates that you pronounce it as "SH." Thus, Xéŗšé is pronounced "Zair-Shay" with a rolled "r" in the middle. Ükür is pronounced "oo-koor" in following with that umlaut rule. Šeš is pronounced "Shesh" in following that hachek rule. And now, without further ado...here is PART ONE of the tale. *** Discovering Samantha *** Discovering Samantha ______________________________ A promise kept is more difficult that a promise made. Dül felt a crack in his honor when the strange foreign woman approached him. He was at work, bored with his librarian’s life, but not yet ready to change it. He’d stolen a few moments of down time to text-chat with Xéŗšé on his diminutive and horrendously-expensive iPhone. The woman approached, hesitantly, and she stood before the reception counter like a lost, bewildered child. “I’m sorry to disturb you,” the woman said. She spoke Üküré as if she’d just learned the tongue. Her stresses were right, but the overall cadence said that English was her native language. American English. Or maybe Canadian: Trans-Atlantic English . “It’s okay,” he said, sliding the phone into his pocket as if hiding it from the disapproving eye of a supervisor. “How can I help you?” “I don’t actually know,” the woman said. “I’ve just arrived here. I’m a part of a project with the University of Wisconsin.” There was something between her words, a rhythm of hesitation: signs—Dül thought—of a strange and arcane fear that only she understood. He waited for her to continue. “I’ve been here for a couple of weeks. And you won’t believe this, but I have the feeling that I know you. I don’t know how or why, but I feel it. And I was wondering if it’s possible that you could help me with something.” Dül nodded. “Of course. I can try to help you.” “This city. Were you born here?” “No,” he said. “I was born in Šeš.” “Shesh,” the woman said, smiling. “That’s the word for south.” “Yes. The name of my birth-city means South. We are very creative in Ükür, especially when we name cities. Šeš means south Ōmůt means big. So, you can see how we are so inventive here. And I suppose, since I do not know your name, I will be creative and call you üna.” The woman laughed. “Lady!” Her laughter seemed to relax her. “My name is Samantha,” she said. “And I’d really appreciate it if you called me that. It’s more polite than simply yelling Ai üna whenever you see me.” Ai üna!. Hey lady! He laughed at the sound of that, and then frowned at the recognition of her name. Samantha! It all came back to him now: that dream and the promise he’d made to Xéŗšé more than a year ago. He remembered it all: the dream; the strange, rusted and corroded piece of machinery wedged in the tread of Xéŗšé’s left shoe; the fear such a thing inspired because of what it implied. He tried to keep signs of it from his face as he stared across the counter at Samantha. He hoped that she didn’t see the sudden goose bumps on his skin. “I don’t know if it’s possible,” Samantha said. “But since I’m new here, I’d really like a guide to help me become familiar with things, and since I somehow recognize you I think that I’d really appreciate it if you’d agree to be my guide. I can pay you if you’d like, and to be honest, I want to pay you. Maybe it’s because you’re kinda cute and you’re wearing the dumbest Spiderman tee shirt I’ve ever seen, but that counts for something, you know? I figure, I need a guide, and I can trust a guy who likes Spiderman.” He laughed. She laughed. But the tension between them was a palpable thing, like the line connecting a tumor-riddled river carp to the hook and line of a poor/hungry fisherman’s rod. But which of them was the fisherman, and which of them was the carp? At any rate, there was desperation between them. Dül felt it, and he was sure that Samantha felt it as well. “You speak good Üküré,” he said. And then, to continue, he switched to the English he’d learned from MTV. “But I know it is no easy. You can say me English speaking very slow way. I understanding it.” Samantha laughed. “You know enough English to get yourself in trouble!” Dül waggled his head from side to side, like a Hindu might when offering agreement; this was a gesture he knew might confuse her, but he couldn’t shrug. It never felt right to do so. “We say in English and Üküré.” And those words were in English. He could taste their strangeness and his own slippery grasp of spoken grammar. English was so imprecise: a liar’s language. It made little sense, but it was important—suddenly—that he speak it. “If I am your guiding boy from this so-much-creative country, it is important we are understanding each other.” Samantha smiled again. And there was a strange, appealing luminosity in her expression. She was a pretty woman. Older than Dül by maybe five fingers, but not too much more than that. It was good to see her smile, and for as inexplicably as the feeling overcame him, it was important that he help her. “Good,” she said, in Üküré. “Maybe after you get off from work today, we can meet at a café?” “OK,” Dül said, slipping back into his native tongue. “But I am meeting my friend. Maybe you would like to meet him too?” “Sure,” Samantha said. “If it’s no trouble.” “I will ask him.” “I’m free all day today,” Samantha said. “And I’ll come back later, if you want.” Dül nodded. “I finish at Sixteen-Zero.” “Four o’clock.” “Yes.” “Okay. I’ll be here. If we can meet, you can show me to a good café and introduce me to your friend. If we cannot, I will give you the number to my mobile phone, and you can call me when it’s convenient for you.” She left shortly after that, and as Dül watched her departure, he reached into his pocket, retrieved his phone and checked for text messages from Xéŗšé. There were two. He answered them quickly; and then, with trembling fingers, fired off news that he’d just met the woman each of them dreamed about last year. The woman—they assumed—that they’d taken to Šeš and lost there, when a čotá, one of those enigmatic, half-mythic machines did something and sent them home. As days became weeks and weeks became months, pieces of what had happened began to unravel in their minds. Though they scarcely spoke of her, one always knew when the other had a small revelatory dream in regard to that woman, the American. They often dreamed on the same night, and awoke at precisely the same moment. When Samantha took a picture of the čotá they had shown her. It was always the same: She took a picture. Things went black. They woke up, sometimes quietly, and sometimes with one or the other of them, shouting or screaming in stark animal fear. And now, with a disturbing text message fired into the aethers and onto Xéŗšé’s little iPhone screen, he thought of his agreement with Xéŗšé, to leave the mystery of Samantha buried in a past that no longer existed. That agreement—because of a strange woman named Samantha—now lay in broken shards, and all Dül knew to do was wonder whether or not his prized tee shirt was as stupid as the stranger-woman had so laughingly implied. *** Five o’clock found the three of them seated together in an intimate little café on Bïlóvir Street. It was as local a place as Samantha had asked for, redolent with cinnamon and dill and the promise of strong, muddy coffee in tiny, porcelain cups. No one spoke English here, not even the scruffy expatriates living a collective bohemian life and calling themselves musicians. Samantha looked at them with disdain: the expatriates. Something in her gaze implied that she judged them as insincere. Xéŗšé, as apparently aware of the expression as Dül, leaned forward and focused on a guy who might have been Rasta, but who wore the predatory élan of a starved wolf. “You know him?” “This is my first time in Ükür. I’d always wanted to come here, but this is the first time I’ve been able to. I always thought that it would be different here, than say Prague, or Budapest. I’ve been to each of those cities, and when I was there, I saw that guy. Not him in particular, but his species. I don’t know him; I don’t need to know him. I’m sure I’ll see him in any city I visit.” “He is American,” Xéŗšé observed. “Yes. And I hate his type. He’s a poser, only he doesn’t know that.” Dül waggled his head. “He wants to be free. He finds freedom here.” “I know,” Samantha said. “And I’m not being fair to him. It’s just…I’m here for something other than what Americans normally come for. And sometimes I wonder what it must be like to see things as you do. To see Americans coming here and acting as if they belong.” “Everyone belongs here,” Xéŗšé said. “We are friendly. We like everybody. Even him.” Samantha nodded, giving Xéŗšé a quizzical look. She thought—Dül knew—that all Üküré would be the same: white, with dark hair. White like Turks. And now, Xéŗšé, with his Greek name and African ancestry, broke some close-held notion that she’d evidently cherished. It would come as no surprise that Xéŗšé’s family was Muslim. Most Üküré held that faith, as did their Turkish and Albanian neighbors, and nearly a one third of all native Üküré were African in origin, as had been the case for nearly two-thousand years. But it was a thing few Americans recognized. It always surprised them. Ethnicity was such a monolithic thing as Americans reckoned it. “You say that you are here for something else,” Dül began. “This is related to your work?” “Something like that.” “And what is it that you do?” “I’ve just received my Doctorate degree in Anthropology, and I’m here on a research grant from my university.” “Anthropology?” “Yes.” “We are interesting for you, even when we wear stupid tee shirts?” “Yes, you are—maybe more so because you recognize Spiderman. How you interpret him is something all-together different, but still.” She paused, smiling. “I’ve always wanted to come here. But not as a tourist. This is my chance to know Ükür, and to answer some questions I’ve had for as long as I can remember.” “Questions?” from Xéŗšé. There was a long pause. Samantha toyed with her fork, lifted it and sliced the corner from her dill cake. She lifted it to her mouth, tasted, chewed contemplatively, and then focused on Dül, Xéŗšé, and then Dül again. “Look. This is going to sound strange, but I think that somehow I know you, both of you, and whether or not this is true, or just some weird kind of déjà-vu doesn’t matter. Something’s called me here, and I’m not going to pretend it’s something mystical or magical, but it’s called me, nonetheless. I want to find out what it is, and I can’t really do that on my own. I need to immerse myself in this country, in this city, and the only way I can do that is with a local guide. Two local guides, if you’re willing. I need to know what Ükür really is, and why I’m so obsessed with the idea that I’ve lived here before. If it’s possible, I need to go to Šeš, to the fields just outside of the city limits, or maybe to one of the villages nearby. I’m drawn there, and if you two are willing to come with me, that would be great.” If Xéŗšé felt some shock at Samantha’s words, his expression didn’t reveal such. Dül felt as if the color had just drained from his face, from his extremities—fingertips and toes—and he toyed with his dill cake (the remains of it) as he considered the murky, turbulent implications of Samantha’s words. For a year, Dül and Xéŗšé were haunted by dreams of a woman they did not know, dreams of an event that bespoke quiet and arcane terrors: something with the ability to bend reality and shift lives into something that they weren’t. Neither of them spoke of this thing, this feeling, but as far as Dül’s concerns went, he knew that he’d lived another life with Xéŗšé, and that an American woman was a part of it. He knew that reality could change again, and that was what terrified him. He was content to live with the faceless mystery of Samantha if it meant that he could also live with the reality of Xéŗšé. Only now, that mystery had eyes; it could stare at him and challenge him with a gaze. It loomed across the table from him: sunlight caught in a hazy-green stare and snagged in strands of hair half a shade more reddish brown than his own. Samantha was haunted by similar dreams, and probably an awareness of a changed life; she’d said as much, though only obliquely and without words. It was in her body language, in the way she clenched and unclenched her fists. And now, she wanted to go find her way back…to Šeš and to the wild, half-alien machine that was so obviously responsible for the unknown thing that had happened to them. To her. To Dül. To Xéŗšé. “If Dül agrees to be your guide,” Xéŗšé said. “Then I agree as well.” And Dül nodded, numb to what the gesture implied. “Yes,” he said, and the word was a dry half-whisper. “Welcome to Ükür. We will help you. But I am not so sure about going to Šeš.” “Because you know what I’m talking about,” Samantha said with more deadpan challenge than she’d expressed all day. “Something happened in Šeš, didn’t it? That’s why I need to go there, and why you’re probably not willing to. You know something that I don’t, and I want to fit in here, but I can’t do it unless I know what you know. “I won’t force you to go there with me, and I won’t threaten to go alone…but if I’m to live anything like a decent life—here or overseas in the grand old US-of-A, then I need to at least understand that something happened, and I need to know what it is that connects me to this country, these people…and most especially to you. I know you both, and I know how head over heels in love you are with each other. I remember seeing you lick each others tonsils at a party full of the world’s most polite skater-punks. That’s how deeply you were kissing…but in God’s honest truth, I’ve never spoken to you until now. I’ve never even seen the two of you together until we walked into this place and the owner threw daggers at me with her eyes, probably thinking I’m just an expatriate tart, out to score some local meat and a notch on my bedpost. “I’ll pay you guys if that’s what it takes…but I need to understand what past we share and why our lives don’t match it now. I just need answers to the questions I see in the mirror every day. “Who are we? “Who the hell am I?” *** Dül’s stomach had been a storm of wild pigeons since his return from the café. He’d lost his lunch, twice and explosively enough to draw obsessive grandmother’s concern from Xéŗšé. “This will settle you,” Xéŗšé had said, shoving a bowl of unseasoned rice beneath Dül’s nose. He’d made him eat a lump of ginger also, but the taste of the ginger, the texture of the rice, and the mood of the afternoon still played in his gut. He tasted bile. He tasted fear. He tasted the constant urge to spit. The worst had passed, but still…there were pigeons in Dül’s gut. That’s how it felt: pigeons moving around, fluttering and defecating where they shouldn’t. It was dark now. The sun was long dead and the day’s heat played itself into a strange, cloying humidity like the underside of a rock. He sat on the aged, second-hand sofa, thumbing the remote like some high tech machine, a reality generator that coaxed soap opera intrigue and cop dramas from the flat-screen television. To his disturbing surprise, he’d found (and settled on) some science fiction drama, involving screwed-up humans, suicide bombers, and a sarcastic, blond robot-woman in a red dress. Galactic Battleship. It was called something else in English and the Ükür-translated title seemed to miss some existential quality of the show’s complex narrative. “Are you done making a mess in the toilet?” Xéŗšé asked. “I don’t know.” “You need to calm down.” “I know.” “I’m just as scared as you are, but you’re not alone, Düláčki. Try to relax. We’ll work through this together. You and me.” “And her?” “And her too…but you’re the one I have great sex with. You’re the one I’m in love with, so I’ll help you more. Okay?” Xéŗšé was seated beside him and smoking a cigarette. He’d coaxed Dül into a protective cuddle, and toyed with the crest of Dül’s ear as he spoke. “I don’t now what we’ll do or how we’ll fix this…but we’ll do something.” “We can’t go to Šeš…at least not with her. Please Xéŗšé…promise me we won’t threaten what we have by going there. Something’s already changed, but we were lucky when it happened. I don’t want something else to change. I don’t want to become someone who isn’t in love with you.” There was a moment of silence. And then, softly—oh so softly—Xéŗšé kissed the flesh of Dül’s lips. “Love,” Xéŗšé said, “is a promise I’ll always keep with you.” *** END OF PART ONE *** Rest assured that there's more to come, and I hope you've enjoyed this little dip into a very strange country inhabited by rather interesting people.