Back at home, I was a nanny. And since there had not been some dramatic transformation between my being there and my now being here—an obvious metamorphosis—I suppose that I still am what I then was. But, in just a few days, it has receded into me and is recalled with difficulty. It is like answering to a name one hasn’t been called in a very long time. If a friend, sitting across from me at dinner, would ask me about it—my job, my doing things, my passing of time—I could only wonder if I hate myself, if it is possible to hate yourself without knowing.

When I was leaving home, Misael was trying to tell me a story about his mother and brother, who were having a terrible time moving boxes. He couldn’t remember where they were or why it was happening. I’m sorry about this. It’s important to me he blew repeatedly as I continued to stand with him at the station lot under the shade of an elm tree. It was the only other living thing with us, other than a sliver of green between the sidewalk and the main road several yards away. In the silence of Misael’s pain, I was curious if the two—the tree and the grass—longed for each other.

My mother and brother… It stayed between us like a hymn. 

I started to worry about him. He was only newly eighteen; I had been in the service of his family since he was twelve. He quickly took to me as a generally affable boy, but in the weeks leading up to my departure, his warmth toward me vanished. Having already turned bitter due to other pressures, I ignored his spitefulness, falling, rather, into a vaguer mass of apathy. The only remnant of affection was his offer to escort me to the train and my eventual agreement. 

Misael was smart in the way most people are smart, not in any way compelling but still reassuring. But here he stood, beginning a story neither I nor his previous ramblings prompted, tripping over something already supposedly understood—his mother and brother and the moving of boxes, their existence over in the house….

I looked over at Misael then, tearing myself away from the spot of sky I had become stuck on. I could not remember the house that I had worked and lived in for the past six years, nor my employer or her youngest child. It even seemed impossible to imagine a woman or a son, let alone either of them moving boxes. I had passively endured Misael’s forgetting as a final whim of the joy he carried at our meeting, but in searching for what he had lost, I saw that it had escaped me, too, and I became embarrassed. I wanted to forget him, or I wished that this blunder had come later, when he was too far away and there was nothing that I could do. I saw that feelings—whatever they were then—were easier when there was nothing that could be done. I saw a confused boy and was unwilling to let him in on my own confusion, a restraint which persecuted me further. 

Leave I said. The train is coming. The train to the airport, to the future. But the train was not coming. As I gestured toward the southbound track, we saw a still iron-barred fence and the wind, which gnawed at the bottom lip of an advertisement for a local college. Can’t you see? It’s here already and is leaving without me.

Misael kissed my cheek as if blind, colliding into my face like he was only half sure that it was there. Then he walked away without looking back, got into his car, and drove away. He stopped briefly at the exit, deciding, maybe, if he wanted to turn left or right. I, too, did not know which way it was. Though in just a minute, he was moving again, going speedily straight ahead off the road and into the surrounding dirt field. 

***

In the last year of my employment with Misael’s family, I discovered a talent for taking the faults of the world as my own. I told a friend over lunch Stop growing old, if you can. You’ll see all the things you’ve ever done and think you are what’s wrong with people. I was glad he took it for the joke that it was, shoveling another lump of risotto into his mouth and not chewing. 

I like people he said, the food showing as a ball at his throat.

Is that still possible? I asked. 

He shrugged and readied another spoon for himself. 

I am not that nice a person I offered him.

Would you like me to congratulate you?

Might you say that about yourself?

Would you like people if I were to say it?

I don’t like being your friend I surrendered. 

He laughed loudly at me, and it forced him to finally swallow the mound he had been hoarding in his mouth. It was a habit he had had since elementary school. He told me once, when we were trying to fall asleep, that it happened because his mother set timers for him to finish his dinner. Closing his mouth and licking his teeth, he said You do like people. 

            I know, and it’s horrible. 

***

I am staying in an apartment above a square, and I think I am a simple man because I find it exciting to be in a city with a square. The room has everything that I had previously romanticized: large doors and windows that touch both the floor and ceiling, ornate moldings and unmatched furniture, and a stone balcony with a glass-topped table and two rattan chairs. It feels both older and newer than my bedroom back home, which seemed to exist in a way in which it didn’t…as if it was born in someone’s blink without having had the intention of living. This room, in another country, had a soul alive hundreds of years ago, though now still young and energetic. Time, which blanketed the room through floating dust and soft sun filtered through the thin curtains, was inviting and empty. If I lie still enough, time undresses me. First, it removes my clothes. Then, it peels away my skin, starting from the edge of my face—at my scalp, behind my ears—and moving over my shoulders and toward my toes. When it is done, it is twenty years ago; I have just graduated from college and still have ideas that do not die. I stay on the mattress, staring into the white plaster above me, taunting the room to continue, to scrape away at me, to find a more provocative nudity, to wipe and change my diaper.

The second day after I arrived in this place, I sat for four hours at the table on my balcony. I laid my arms over the railing and set my head at the overlapping of my hands, looking for someone down below who might remind me of why I had come here. The people of here—the light-haired and the skinny, the shy and the repressed, the people with rebellion growing like peach fuzz at the mouths of their sleeves or the napes of their necks—have always been marked by what I marvel at. But this square is not their escape, and they do not imagine that the evil of one place can be erased with a patient nostalgia for something that does not exist, for an Eve who did not eat her apple. I felt a sudden shame and wanted to go back inside. You are so silly to them I thought. 

But suddenly, a boy ran out from a side street in an ugly yellow shirt. Through it, I saw the mound of a belly. He swung his arms around him like propellers, his neck falling back as he looked at the endless sky. In a moment, he stumbled to the ground. Red bubbled at his knee, and he had stared at it lovingly, almost bringing his face to the wound to sniff or lick it. The red reflected in his eyes. Together, though I am sure the boy was unaware of me, we gazed into his bloody knee as if our eyes held a power greater than the currents of our body, as if his blood, fearful of a gaze, would retreat then back into the hole from which it had sprung, disappearing under pale, translucent skin. If only we could stare long enough to erode even the memory of it so that his knees were only ever a knee, and blood had never once risen to his tongue. I hung further over the railing of my balcony as if to stretch and hug him, but he was soon upright and running away toward a woman. He cried Matka! Matka…Mother! Mother! His knee dripped its blood as he ran, still un-licked, un-swallowed.

The joy of this sight spoiled quickly, as does laughter that erupts from a sudden, unassuming horror—maybe your own caught reflection—settles into a thin frown. That can’t be the person who thinks inside my head: a thought drowns in the puffs of your amusement. I often wonder how I can choose to believe that I am a terrible person. In the fifth grade, I developed a habit of cutting my hair. Before bed, between classes, in a seat on the bus, I would roll strands between my fingers and snip them off randomly until no portion of my head was of equal length. In the end, I shaved my head completely, which ended a psychosis I feared might have matured toward permanence, but I never understood why it had happened to me. I profess a fascination with delay, with making my value opaque enough to doubt, with substituting common flaws with the tame perversion of a boy in the square, his yellow shirt and his sucking of blood. I sat at the table on my balcony for some time longer, avoiding the people below. I wanted to tell them I would kill myself and have them beg me No! 

***

How did they vote for the man? Broderick, a writer from Chicago, asks between gulps of his beer. 

I know he expects the group to respond to him with mutual devastation, so I shrug my shoulders for him. I met Broderick three days ago as he was flirting with a bartender at a goth pub near my apartment. I softened at his familiar accent but resented that he had found an equal familiarity in me—my home clinging—and that he would later bring me into a group of others he had found wandering the streets of their dreams. 

Would you write about him? About the people? Alina asks him innocently.

Broderick coughs and traces his finger around the rim of his glass. He starts multiple sentences, and I can guess the end of all of them, but he never indulges me, continuing, instead, to spit fragments. 

It’s enough to just leave a place Stephan defends Broderick, ending the latter’s morpheme train. Stephan has been here the longest of us all, having fled some time before we saw the end of everything, when his hell had come from the end of his marriage.

How will they know you’ve left, the people I mean? I ask.

They’ll know… Stephan replies.

Of course, they’ll know! Broderick encourages. Because only the stupid will remain.

But the stupid love him… Alina says.

But the stupid can’t keep a country. They’ll lose it in a day Broderick continues. They won’t have a country, I’m sure.

They already have a country Alina cries, the weight of her martini throwing her against Stephan’s shoulder.

Before I left home, a friend of mine silenced me with the admission that our circumstances had always been dire, that tomorrow presented the same fatigue as all of our yesterdays, that with all the other things that we admonished—greed, hatred, cruelty—despondency, too, was intrinsic and taunted us like a hunger. I wondered if he felt pride in humbling me, but I saw in his face that his words weighed on him as much as they did on me, that his appetite had left no room for activism. 

We just have so many different ideas Stephan says, nodding his head frantically. But it’s good…it’s good. Even if it makes us slow and unable, it’s good.

So, we leave and think, and they’ll know. 

I listen to these new friends’ words, knowing they’ve existed within me too. I down the rest of my mule, needing the illusion of lightness.

The conversation transfers to Alina’s friend in New York, a set designer who was recently featured in a short piece for Vanity Fair, and I drift away from them into the memory of Misael. I feel a sudden, gentle longing for him and his warm voice, his crude humor and hope for the future, even his playful ignoring and his hidden pains. 

Is it Sunday, too, in America? I ask, forgetting the others had flowed on somewhere without me.

Sunday? Yes…It’s Sunday in America one of them answers.

Beautiful! Oh, then I’ll have to say goodnight to all of you, goodnight! I pay my tab and rush onto the street, eager to be settled in my apartment, to phone Misael, and to tell him that I miss him. 

The streets here are even more magnificent at night. The indigo of the sky mixes in swirls with the hazy yellows of streetlights. Despite the time and day, many people are still alive in the city, walking in groups down alleys, smoking and snacking on greasy kebabs. I strain to listen to them, to see if they are like me, coming here because home is a hard place and because happiness was cut from them at the snipping of their umbilical. The languages mix, and I wish I were intelligent enough to decipher them. 

Almost back to my apartment, I am pulled down a different course by the seductive echoes of a woman’s voice. Under an arched roof, between a pillar and a wall, a woman in rags sits on a bike seat and plays a blue guitar. She is singing something mournful; the words escape her in long, romantic wails. As much as I have reverence for her, I have fear (an indigestible perseverance has followed me even to this country), and I run in the opposite direction, losing sense of where I am and where I want to be going.

The streets are inexplicably deserted now. The brick walls and their chalky mortar seem to be falling over me as I meander through the city away from the singing woman. Leave. Her words morph into Leave. In a new, smaller opening, I find a wrapping second-story balcony overlooking a covered well. In the corner, two women, dressed in long, fluid black garments, are hunched, facing each other and whispering. One of them notices me and grabs the chin of the other, pointing it in my direction. In a moment, they are sprinting toward me, their whispers now growing into a soft shrieking. We have your happy they say in broken English and sloppy unity, their mouths wide as they speak. I see the sharpness of their teeth and the smudged red on their lips. Happy happy…you want happy!

I shake my head at them and raise my hands in defeat. Even just their eyes on me feels draining in a way, as though whatever it is they seek to give me will also be my death. I see the skin on my hands gray as their smiles grow wider, their teeth somehow moving with their lips, their whole mouths heaving with their words as if drinking them. Monsters are chasing me, hungry monsters. I tell myself I am drunk and in bed; I am seeing things in my heavy, drowsy sadness! I escape them, past the bricks, past the lady on the bike, past the church tower marking the time, and into my suite. I sink into the cushions of an armchair, grabbing at my body as if to make sure I had not left it somewhere outside.

***

Misael doesn’t answer my phone call, and it does not surprise me. After my third attempt at reaching him, I retreat to the table on my balcony. I try to picture his mother and brother and their boxes, the house from which I would be erased, the country that had instilled within me the easy acknowledgement of tyranny, but with the reluctance to do so. I still cannot recall them, and it bothers me that I have not let go of Misael. 

I look to the spot where the boy fell. His mother is sleeping somewhere with his head resting on her chest. It still perturbs me that everyone—revered or abhorred—was once a child, a pure spirit, a sponge we pray might not become us. In some other life, I was a nanny—through irony or lethargic dispassion—and I loved a boy who defended himself from every germ of life I believed unavoidable. But he was getting older, too, and maybe I had imprinted that on him… that getting older. 

Has my home noticed my going? Did it weep? I place my cheek on the cool glass of the table, looking toward the square, forming some lesson that I had once wanted my home to learn. Right then, I didn’t know how to articulate it, but I could hear it around me in the wind, in the stragglers of the city—the distant wailing of women—and their energetic hum. I search through the noise to name each of its components, maybe the clanging of construction pipes or the low murmur of a car engine, but it is all lost in one sludge of rising emotion. I think back to the people of here, their mocking of me; it sings now with my love for their city din, a symphony somehow invented here and never shared, the only garden in a world of silence.

In the last year of my employment with Misael’s family, I was having lunch with a friend when I realized I would leave it all behind, that I would invent a new humanity in a people of somewhere, that, from my own imagination, I would draw a different me, a healthier me, a me who can stand straight and say what it is that he knows. 

You do like people he said.

I like people so much that I might kill them I said.

But what is here was there too. There is no metamorphosis. I remain what I was… and it’s horrible.