He knew I needed him to talk, so he wasn’t saying anything. I stared straight ahead at signs written in Dutch, with drawings of happy people washing hands for safety.
The doctor came in. He was tall and pale with rusty hair. I imagined him building a windmill with his bare hands, sawing the wood, standing nobly underneath. I kept crying even after he told me it was just a bacterial infection, and he looked at me strangely, as if I hadn’t understood.
It will be cured in two days, with cream,” he said again, in a heavy accent. I had these lesions on my right arm, quarter-size spots secreting pale pink water. I had gotten a cut and been unlucky.
The tourist hospital was outside the city. We rode the train back, past dying mid-rises and fences diseased with graffiti. In the reflection of the window, I watched myself pop a white pill into my mouth. I was self-medicating, looking past the pale outline of two mute people on orange plastic seats. The buildings were derelict, sinking ships. They were going down, down.
I see you,” I said, talking to him in our reflection. I was holding up my arm. The top two sores looked like eyes.
At the hostel we moved up return tickets, counted out hundreds of dollars. He said obvious things, “this cost so much” or “the money we could’ve saved.” By now that white powder was all dispersed through me, and his words were slippery things. They struck me and fell off without effect. I tried to grasp them, rolling a joint on the twin bed, when the Romanian tourists came in. They were sharing this room, and they stank and spoke in broken English.
You want to come with us to erotic massage?” they asked, snickering. I stopped rolling and held out the inside of my arm for them.
“Here,” I said. “Let’s go.” Their faces soured, and they left.
I struck a match and walked to the window. It had no screen, so I stuck my head out into the world. A drizzle seeped out of the sky. I wondered if it was always grey here. I sort of liked it, because there weren’t any lies in it.
Down below were bicycles and canals and all manner of other offensive things. There was the little park and the apricot tree where I had cut my arm a week ago, on the day we arrived. My body had still been clotted with sleep, but I ran up to it, dropping my suitcase in the grass. My eyes had clamored for good omens, searching for something lost. A long time ago, he and I had wanted a garden.
“Where we could feed each other fresh fruit. And lie naked,” he’d said.
I had climbed up the trunk, ignoring the scraping shards of bark. The apricots hung in fat clumps, and I took one between my thumb and forefinger. There was an obscene tautness to it, like smooth skin. It looked a little young, so I tested its flesh in my teeth. It wasn’t bitter. With my pockets full, we sat in the grass. Hours ago we had been in a dried-up place with the goodness slowly leaking out of us, almost gone. Now we had sweet water sticking to our hands and faces, and we looked around, waiting for our restoration. He palmed apricots absentmindedly, pulp running between his fingers, and I spat seeds onto the ground.