DISCOVERING SAMANTHA (part two) ____________________________________________ “I’m sorry,” Samantha said, the following day. Dül had spent the day at work, worried that some aspect of the world was about to slip away. He felt ghost-like and insubstantial, threatened by the vaguest existential winds. “It’s okay,” he said. “No. It’s not okay. You look like you haven’t slept all night, and I’m afraid it’s my fault. I’m asking too much from you and Xéŗšé, and I’m sorry.” There was an accident down the street. Cars were backed up past three whole intersections. There were sirens and flashing, blue lights. Vehicles marked Pōlïcź wove through clots and snarls of stand-still traffic. “It is okay, Samantha.” Samantha grinned, tucked an errant lock of hair behind her left ear, and shook her head. “You know, it’s actually really cute that you can’t say th.” Silence. “Do you want to be left alone?” “No. I will wait for Xéŗšé. I will drink one shot of Rakia and finish it with beer. You will join me?” “You’re sure?” Dül waggled his shin. “Yes. We’ll drink alcohol. This will make us honest and I think we need to be honest with each other, especially today.” Samantha nodded. “Where are we going, then?” “This way,” Dül said. *** Three Trumpets was crowded, as always on so dull and heated a day. By the time Dül entered, one step ahead of Samantha, the crowd had not yet changed from the afternoon alcoholics to the off-work regulars. Dül, vaguely aware of how American men always allowed women to enter first, was thankful that Ükür and America were two different places. There were common scruffs at the main bar: tattoo-ruffians with heroin marks on their arms and dirt of ill-pedigree beneath their untrimmed nails. He entered ahead of her, to draw attention to himself, and then walked behind her, protecting her ass from leering gazes. “I won’t pretend that going to Šeš isn’t important to me,” Samantha said at the start of her third beer. The crowd had changed, now. There were more white-shirts and administrators in the cramped bar space. There were secretaries and IT professionals, with the big foreign companies interested in tapping Ükür’s emerging economy. The music was Üküré-Revivalist pop, now: a complex weave of melodies and off-kilter rhythms like hybrid castoffs from Turkey and Bulgaria. “I know that you and Xéŗšé don’t want to go there,” Samantha said. “And I won’t force you to. But I also think that you’ve been having the same dreams that I have. You haven’t said as much, but I saw the way you were looking at each other back in the café, and I listened to what you weren’t saying, when I’d mentioned Šeš. I’ve been having intense dreams. For years it seems. All of them centered on that city, Šeš. When you told me—back at the library—that you were born there, something clicked in my head. You were the one who’d guided me there. You and Xéŗšé gave in to some demand that I’d had and the three of us went there. Something happened. To you, to Xéŗšé, to me. Whatever it was, it happened to the two of you together, but separately for me.” She nipped at her beer, seeming to ignore her promise that this would be little more than a two-beer chat. “I don’t want to endanger you by going back there…at least with you. But I have to go. Something’s pulling me, and it gets stronger each day.” Dül felt as if he’d lost all of the blood in his fingers and in his toes. His extremities felt cold. Numb. Disembodied. Though he clasped his beer firmly, sipped it without difficulty, he could scarcely feel it, or recognize what he sensed as a cool, sweaty glass in his hand. He thought of the promise he’d made—not so long ago—to Xéŗšé. I won’t pursue this he’d said…and now, seated across from the woman he’d vowed never to search for, he felt more and more of that promise slipping away. “You won’t force us into going,” Dül said. “But you need for us to accompany you.” He left ambiguity in his voice and tasted the way his words hung in suspension between question and comment. Samantha nodded. “I can’t force you to do anything you don’t want to do. And I won’t bribe you, either. That just wouldn’t be right.” Dül was silent for a long moment, and then: “I will talk to Xéŗšé.” Samantha nodded. “That’s more than I can ask you to do. Thank you for that.” “You are welcome,” Dül said. *** “I know,” Xéŗšé said, quietly, his back to Dül, his gaze fixed on the building across the street. “We’ve each done our best to keep that promise we made, but I’ve been thinking. Maybe whatever it is that happened is bigger than we imagined. Maybe Samantha is supposed to return to Šeš.” Dül had been home for hours with Xéŗšé, but they’d spoken of everything else. Only now did their talk center on Samantha, and the dark implications of her re-emergence in their shared life. “A čotá is obviously involved in this,” Dül said. “Undoubtedly a wild one. We were stupid to take her to it in the first place…and now, our stupidity haunts us. It’s come home with us.” Dül had taken a shower, had eaten two servings of the dinner he’d helped Xéŗšé to prepare, and drank three shots of homemade brandy procured from one of Xéŗšé’s prodigious number of uncles. Now, with naked feet, he padded across hardwood flooring, and stood beside Xéŗšé, his eyes seeking the end-point of Xéŗšé’s gaze. It was not a window above street level—not something directly across the way, but down. To the street. There were people waiting for a trolley-bus beneath the flimsy shelter with its dented bench and scrawls of graffiti over poster advertisements for Kenvolo jeans and expensive Gucci shoes. An old lady entered the apothecary on the corner, and Dül imagined that she was there for ointments and tinctures intended for her doting husband’s gout. Xéŗšé shifted and put his arm across Dül’s shoulders. Dül relaxed into the contact. “Whether we like it or not, we might have to go back. Something started in Šeš, and maybe going there is the way to end it,” Xéŗšé said. “I know,” Dül answered, tasting defeat in his voice. “I won’t go if you don’t,” Xéŗšé said. “I don’t need to resolve this, not if it changes something else. I don’t know who we were before the dreams started, before we appeared back home, back here, from wherever it was that we’d originally been. But I know we were lovers in that other time, that other place, and I’m glad to have you now. I won’t threaten that, no matter what some American woman wants. But if it’s true that we must finish what’s begun, I’ll do it. With you. And if we must do this, then I pray to every god and čotá that cares to listen to be merciful, and allow us to stay together.” Dül closed his eyes, sliding his arm around Xéŗšé’s waist. For a long moment, neither of them spoke. When Xéŗšé dared to move, he stepped away from Dül, extinguished the lights, and led him—wordlessly—into the bedroom. Hours later, the air was salty with sweat and the vaguest olfactory tinge of spermicidal latex. Dül laughed at what the downstairs neighbors must have thought, hearing as they must have, the amatory exertions overhead. He drifted into sleep, clenched in Xéŗšé’s embrace, as his own clasping contact entangled Xéŗšé in a web of elbows and arms, knees and legs. For as troubling as the night was at its beginning, there was simple calm now. A welcome thing, and in the silence, Dül drifted into dreamless sleep. *** “We’ll do it,” Dül said to Samantha, on the Friday after he’d taken her to The Three Trumpets. He sat with her in the intimate little café that marked their first meeting, and as on that day, Xéŗšé sat at Dül’s side as the two of them faced Samantha. She smiled. “You will?” It had been days since Dül had spoken to her, days of troubled silence in the apartment he shared with Xéŗšé. Dül thought that he and Xéŗšé faced each other across the ruins of an impossible promise. As each day and evening passed, the break became more and more apparent; and now, like some physical thing, Dül sensed it, lying in fragments in their apartment. He was afraid to speak to Xéŗšé, and Xéŗšé seemed as terrified to listen. They’d spoken a promise one year ago, and now what they’d said was a meaningless and impotent thing. It shadowed all else they might have said, leaving only sad and wounded quiet. “We will,” Xéŗšé said. Samantha nodded. “This must be hard for you.” Silence from Xéŗšé. Dül waggled his chin. “I appreciate it,” Samantha said. “And I’m not going to do anything to make you any more uncomfortable. I think that maybe we should just walk around Šeš…maybe talk to a few locals. Go to a museum there and see if there are chotas on display.” Dül toyed with the tiny cup of coffee before him. “You can see those here.” “Not the one I’m looking for.” “A wild čotá?” Xéŗšé asked, sudden alarm in his voice. Samantha shrugged. “I don’t know if it’s wild or not. I’ll know it if I see it. I won’t subject either one of you to going on a wild goose chase, but I’d like to see it if possible. I know where it is. I can get there, I think. One hour west of the central train station.” Xéŗšé leaned forward and touched Samantha with a level, unblinking gaze. “What do you know of the čotí?” “I know that they exist in Agara as well as here, but in Agara, they’re thought to be farmers’ tools…components of an overcomplicated calendar that tell the Agarans when to plant, harvest and smoke those massive quantities of that magical green herb they like so much. They’re a part of something else, too…a bigger machine, according to Agaran folklore.” Dül laughed, desperate for some truth in Samantha’s apparent joke. If only the čotí were parts of something easy to understand. But in truth, no one knew what the čotí were. That ancient Agarans and Üküré built them was all anyone was certain of. No one in Agara, or Ükür claimed that they were gifts from the gods, or artifacts left by god-like aliens. Indeed, the most venerable local and foreign archaeologists commonly dismissed fringe theories in regard to čotá pedigree, and that was what made them even more frightening. They did strange things and appeared to have self-replicating capabilities (some of them, at least) but they were totally human in origin, totally prosaic. For as human as they might have been, for as commonplace—in two countries on opposite sides of Europe—as they were, no one could explain them. Üküré, like Agarans, claimed them as aspects of their national character, and so claimed kinship with one another. Unlike Agarans however, the people of Ükür were less easy with the remnants of their past. There were country people who said that the ancient machines were magical, and in Šeš (and similar bumpkin cities) couples would conceive children in ruins where such machines were found. Dül harbored the secret belief that his own parents conceived him in the dark, half-buried hollow surrounding such a device, and it was something only Xéŗšé knew about him, something Xéŗšé would joke about on amorous nights tinged with sweat, latex, and spermicidal lubricant. But Xéŗšé was serious now. His lean, dark features were knotted in a contemplative scowl as he sat across from Samantha, possibly considering how deeply strange life had become. “That is all you know?” Xéŗšé asked, his gaze level and unblinking. Something in his expression must have made Samantha uncomfortable, because she looked away. Quickly. She nipped at her super strong coffee, and then looked down, as if considering something in her lap. “That’s all anybody knows,” she said. Silence. “But,” she continued. “There’s a strange chance that all three of us know something that no one else does. It may be dangerous; it may be frightening. But…”and again, she paused as if tasting each word before speaking. “But,” she said again. “Don’t you think we owe it to ourselves to find out what that is?” *** Samantha’s words echoed for a week before Dül found enough courage to explore them in his own mind. He spent quiet hours at work, doing his own research on the čotí, and the folklore associated with them. He knew the stories from his childhood in Šeš, and the naughty boy games he sometimes played with Aleškü, in the darkness of an ancient mound. He remembered finding the right sized stick, and a red ribbon to tie to it whenever he went (with Aleškü) into that intimate, cloying darkness. He’d gone with other friends as well, with black ribbons and brown ribbons to mark occasions more ordinary. He’d gone alone more times than he cared to remember, to commit the sin of Onan and dream, and in some superstitious way he fought against believing that such acts conjured his own journey to Ōmůt, and the fiery courtship with Xéŗšé that led here. To this moment. To this life. Whether it was a čotá or not that drove him into the most intimate recesses of Xéŗšé’s life wasn’t really the issue. He was afraid, as he and Xéŗšé admitted one year ago, that a čotà could break what they had. A čotá and an American girl who spoke Üküré like a Turk raised by Bulgarians. At home, he clung to Xéŗšé with quiet desperation, cooking and seducing and spending quiet moments on the sofa or in the bed, simply holding him. Xéŗšé for his part, seemed wracked by the same emotions, and though neither of them spoke of the trip Samantha wanted, some unseen (though profound) force sparked between them. They settled on the best day to go. A Saturday. A week from now. *** Šeš, upon their arrival, was exactly as Dül remembered it. Drab. Rusty. Dusty. The City Council had cleaned things up: buildings stood behind scaffolds and tarps, as if strange caterpillars had woven their cocoons. Litter no longer played in errant breezes. Grackles wheeled through the air, calling to one another with their odd, metallic voices. There were grackles everywhere in Ükür: strange mascots that drew the doting attention of old ladies and the ruminations of local poets. There were grackles in Ōmůt and so their presence here stirred no twinges of nostalgia. They were a comfort, nonetheless. They were mundane. Samantha and Xéŗšé were strangers here, and Dül read that in the eyes of everyone they passed: old women in orthodox shawls and veils; some of them wore complicated henna-marks on their fingertips. Men—with hair as dark as Dül’s own—paused in their work, their conversations, their scams, and simply watched the expatriate local boy and his two cosmopolitan friends. They recognized him—by his walk, by the way he ignored most of what he saw. It was this way in every Üküré city where locals knew their own body-language dialects. “Are we close to where you were born?” Samantha asked, digital camera in hand. She’d snapped a dozen shots, judging them as they walked. “Yes. Šeš is a small city. Everything here is close to where I was born.” He was thankful that she didn’t ask to see his family house. It took an hour to cross from city center to the outskirt regions. They walked for most of the way, allowing—by some wordless agreement—Samantha to absorb local color and document the city with her camera. They stopped at a local market and purchased bread, cheeses, deli-sliced meats, fruit juice in plastic bottles, and local black chocolate. With their cargo, they boarded an ancient tram and rode in relative silence to the city’s fringe. “Are you okay?” Samantha asked, suddenly. Dül felt her focus boring into the side of his face. He flinched. He shrugged. “Why do you ask?” “You’ve been quiet all morning. I wouldn’t say you were brooding, but you’re damn close to it.” Dül shrugged again. “I don’t like it here,” he said. The words tasted hollow. Samantha nodded. Smiled. “I like it—for me, this city is like the remnants of a Communist Era nightmare dressed in the tatters of the Ottoman Empire. It’s odd. You just don’t get things like this in the West.” “You don’t have old buildings with rats in US-America?” Xéŗšé asked. Samantha shook her head. “We have plenty of old buildings. None as old as these, though. None as—”she shrugged, apparently struggling for the right word—“historical,” she finally said. A wry smile crossed her face. “We tend to get rid of them and replace them with enormous, flat shopping malls and even larger parking lots. And we have rats too: big ones.” “But this is good, the new buildings, I mean,” Dül said. “No?” “It’s okay,” Samantha answered. “It’s convenient, but it lacks character. Not like here. Everything is smaller here. Closer together. Half the streets here are alleys. Everything is built for people. In the United States, everything is built for traffic.” Dül felt a cold expression cross his face. “I don’t know,” he said. “US-America sounds better. You have so much.” He glanced around, grabbing an eyeful of crumbling stucco and blackened, weathered wood. “Here, we have…antiques.” And ghosts. Far too many ghosts. Dül sought distraction in the conversation, happy for the chance to vent whatever frustrations he felt with his birth city. It kept his mind from what they were doing, what he and Xéŗšé agreed to allow. But the conversation dried out like a raisin, and left awkward silence—first in small and embarrassed pauses, and then longer stretches of failed speech. Dül had time to consider familiar landmarks: distant farm-houses and livestock barns and whole fields of grass for goats, or wheat for humans. They caught a bus on a street called Čüt, and used their flimsy paper train tickets to cover the fare. The ride was a short one. The ride was an eternity. Dül felt that paradox as he stepped from the bus with Xéŗšé and with Samantha behind him. In some small way, he’d become the leader of this expedition, and he knew it was simply because he’d been born here. He knew the way around: at least his feet did, tasting familiar soil and cobblestones through the thick soles of his Bulgarian army surplus boots. “It isn’t far,” he said. They’d de-bussed and walked—now—through half-wild land. They’d left Šeš proper and walked along a farmer’s road. Dül heard wind and animal sounds. He felt his past, asserting itself in each forward step that he took. He remembered numerous excursions into the open lands, always with friends. Sometimes they’d search for fragments of dead machines. Their rare metals always brought money. With more intimate friends, he’d go in search of a mound and the čotá nested at the hollowed-out center of it. Such wild machines centered local lore: relationships, copulations, and business ventures started in the presence of such cryptic and protean antiques were always lucky. There was a mound close by, a famous one by Šeš-local standards. Dül knew what to look for. He felt it. Just over there— END OF PART TWO Of course there will be more. As always thank you for reading and commenting, and I hope you’ve enjoyed this little dip into that odd little country on the eastern fringe of reality.