The chime—at first—weaves itself through the narrative of a dream, and tugs Aleksandr into the throbbing discomfort of a blunt, cloying headache. It is the size of his skull. It weighs as much as a boulder. The chime persists. Someone else’s ringtone, he thinks. A jolt of adrenaline is all it takes to cut through the hangover—like so much coagulated egg—filling his eye-sockets. His ears, he thinks, are stuffed with oil-dipped cotton. Stubble itches along his jaw, and his breath is weighted with the urge to vomit; but the compulsion is secondary to the need to move his arm and to search the wadded, sweaty bedding beside him. Chase isn’t there, as expected, nor will he be for the remainder of the day. There is warmth in the tactile flavor of sunlight. Something— …a sock…? —greets his outstretched fingers. His own, he hopes, wigging his toes: they are naked, but sweaty in near-confirmation of his wish, and he settles—for a moment, three beats of the heart—into the slight comfort that he has (as far as broken memory tells him) committed no tactless indiscretions…slight comfort that some stranger has not mistaken drunkenness for entreaty. There is silence, a chime, and silence again. The darkness behind his eyelids has faded to red, telling him that the day is well underway. He moves. And the near-silence is shattered by the jarring, metallic sound of a belt-buckle on hardwood. It is enough to force him through restless seas of hangover-vertigo, and his eyes snap open in a merciless gust of sunlight. He is alone. In that there is some mercy, but the hangover—like some photophobic creature—hunkers into his temples, his eyes, and into the space within his ears, where muzzy, sensory-cotton goes to jelly, and whispers the threat of deafness. His stomach gurgles. His bladder is weighted with an acute, uncomfortable burden. The air smells of cologne, sweat, and dead cigarettes. He ignores the silence, the chime, the silence (the persistence of a text he dares not read) and negotiates with his arms, his legs, his fingers, and his toes. After long, long moments, he is seated on the edge of the bed, bare feet pressed to hardwood flooring, toes splaying and clenching as if seized by some tenacious and obsessive instinct to borrow. With elbows on his knees, and his head cradled in his hands, he considers the pounding of his heart, the taste of salt in the meat of his tongue, and the glimmer of scattered coins: it takes him a moment to recognize them, quarters he reminds himself, not crowns, and the shape of that particular thought is enough to dislodge a fragment of memory. It breaks away from the main, hidden body and bobs like so much polar ice into the sea of visible memory. In the displacement surrounding it, he recalls last night: shot after shot of Jack Daniels, and the depraved, unblinking leer of some near-stranger adamant in his drives for sex, combat, or some ambiguous blending of the two. He accepted the free drinks, but now—considerable mercy after so dangerous a game—he is alone. The belt on the floor and the coins—scattered—belong only to him. His phone, buried beneath wadded clothing, chimes again. And—again—he ignores it, thrusting himself though waves of indolent vertigo, until he totters on his feet. His bladder announces a particular, wordless urgency, and he answers it moments before spinning taps and conjuring a spray of water, steam, and the redolence of soap. He remains in the shower spray for a long, long while: hands splayed against slick wall tiles, and eddies of drain-swirling water tickling the hairs on the joints of his toes. He leaves the shower, only after his fingers and toes have gone pale and wrinkled. When he’s dry, he stands—naked—in the kitchen, drinking orange juice directly from the carton. He down’s one of Chase’s vitamins, sure that Chase won’t mind. * The text, when he reads it on his smartphone screen, is little more than a short string of coordinates: something easy to find on Google Maps. —somewhere in the city— —somewhere within steps of public transport— Because it is Saturday, and because he is no stranger to cryptic texts, he locates the near-familiar spot, and taps the command for directions from here to there, and Google tells him that the journey may be a short one. Google tells him that a gallery is his likeliest destination, and suggests three restaurants in the area that fit his personal tastes. * Elevated tracks stretch the length of Franklin Street like the body and rigid legs of some enormous and improbable, mechanical centipede. The street itself is a canyon gouged between the looming facades, red-brick buildings: old things, by local standards. Galleries shimmer behind plate-glass windows, echoing whatever moneyed trends their curators follow, and Alexandr plods past them, ignoring the bulbous glass abstractions and weathered wooden things recalling the shapes of Polynesian myths. He ignores—as well—the call centers, vanity-salons, and dance clubs gone flaky and tarnished in the belligerent honesty of daylight. He is steps away— (so Google tells him) —from his destination: from what he can see, it is nothing more than the mouth of an alley. There are dumpsters in the shadows, heaped with trash and the rumor of flies; a riot of stickers blooms on telephone poles and garish, yellow bollards in defiance of the city’s anti-graffiti laws, and equal defiance to all local ordinances forbidding the sale of spray-paint. The stickers are garish marvels of street art; more than half of them pay sarcastic homage to the US Postal Service, FedEx, and office supply stores. He has seen more than his share of stickers, here and at home: he recognizes a few of them as tentacles of a street-art collective with its nucleus in Italy. But Google Maps leads him past eruption after eruption of stickers, until—at last, or suddenly—he is motionless before one of the rusting metal support struts of the overhead rail lines. Graffiti tags have been scrawled and painted over in shades of municipal gray, brown, and dry-puke beige. Grimy, gray rectangles mark vanished stickers: though one—right at eye-level—snags his attention. It is an old sticker, still in place. It is weathered. Faded. Dirty. It retains an impossible image. He recognizes it: a photograph that should not and cannot exist. And yet it is here, stuck to a support strut in the colors of rust and municipal paint. The photo—faded and mottled with grime—matches the most pleasant of his memories: * It was quiet, then. Things were different, imperceptibly so, but Alexandr remembered the way things had been before. He— —Remembered the habitual walks to the grimy, all-night kiosk on Narodni Třida for sausage or grease-dripping potato pancakes, sausages, or schnitzel, followed by cigarettes and Koffola from the non-stop convenience store at the west-end of Lazarska Street. —Remembered the skater punks cloaked in grunge the color of oil, dust, and hedgehog spines, their hair matted into dreads or teased into rakish, dingy spikes. They clustered (in memory and in reality) like ungainly vultures, ignored by the impermeable mass of travelers waiting for whatever trams would carry them to their various destinations. They begged for tabak, no matter the pedigree. They asked for coins. —Remembered the night-trams, especially, because in late, late hours too hot for sleep, he’d taken to the street with thoughts of a walk. To the river. His nerves had been twitchy, and in need of some calming, existential unguent. Smoke in some cellar bar held no appeal. The throb of live music had been equal in its sullen lack of promise. And so he’d walked, thinking once—thinking twice—that he should have retrieved his laptop and taken to WiFi hotspots on rooftops or friendly balconies that comforted him on nights devoid of sleep. But he’d left his laptop in power-conserving hibernation beside a clutter of news clippings and crumpled Marlboro hard packs long past empty. With his back to Josefov, and his thoughts elsewhere, he’d passed a stranger: a definite traveler by his poise. American by the swagger in his walk. Black. He smiled. And then, with the spring-time boast of sunlight slanting through a part in curtains not his own, he came awake to the smell of coffee, and a warmth on his feet that spoke of absent socks, echoing playful, nocturnal provocations. “Cream and sugar?” The voice at his side—in English—was unexpected, but welcome. And his thoughts were drawn from the warmth of morning sun on vulnerable flesh, and the idle question of where he'd lain his socks the night before. “Cream,” he answered. “No sugar.” He could taste his accent: English was a strange weight on the edges of his tongue. Then, as sunlight caught on motes of dust suspended in the air, he thought of how things were—of how in those small silences after the answer to a question, things began to change. It hadn’t always been that way. —Before then, he always awoke alone, without sunlight on his flesh. —Before then, he always awoke alone, with no one to speak to. Then...there is sunlight, a voice, and a moment. He held on to all three, lest they slip—unfelt—into memory, like the lonely nights of— * But it has been years, an ocean, and another world ago: that morning of coming awake in Chase’s apartment on Vodičkova Street, that first morning filled with coffee and shameless arousal, before something started in the warmth of sunlight on naked flesh—and later—on naked flesh, sweat, and the chill of evaporated kisses, suckles, and playful, naughty nibbles. They’d made plans, months after that, with Chase suggesting that Alexandr might find work as an interpreter, as a translator in a tall, loud, and gleaming American city. Now, dwarfed by the city around him, Aleksandr is seized by the memory of Vodičkova Street: half a planet away and there is no logic to explain the fading image on a dead sicker here: his own feet in sunlight, at rest on the footboard of Chase’s Ikea-standard bed: a photograph no one could have taken. Not even Chase: he took no photographs on that formative day that began with coffee and ended in the throes playful and exhausting sex. For the first time all day, he smiles as his phone chimes, vibrates, and falls into silence. He touches a command to the flat, shiny screen and summons the newest text. A message from Chase: Back in the city. it says. I’ll be home in 1 hour. Alexandr thumb-types a resonse: OK. I’m waiting 4 U. It’ll take less than an hour to get home, if he heads back now. *end*