The buildings of the city had uniformly dark roofs, thick wood trim and white walls - being of such simple construction and décor that it seemed the whole place could have been built in a single day some decades earlier. The sole exception was the bus station, a garish brushstroke of curving glass and metal into which he disembarked. A city park with a fountain at its center and scattered with benches and newly-planted trees sat across from beneath its south-facing awning. There were few signs of life despite the noon hour as he walked narrow streets past what seemed like a mix of businesses and residences. He walked a road that paralleled the highway back north out from the city center some distance, then a tangle of roads through a neighborhood, growing fearful that his directions were wrong. At a dead end, a long tree-lined rock drive ran along a field to a wide two-story building. He paused to look back the way he had come, then past the clearing to the highway, other parts of the city, and the hills beyond. There were no signs on the building and despite the unlocked front door he found nobody inside - not at the front desk, nor the kitchen or laundry room, nor the office, marked Private though also unlocked, which he opened last, hesitatingly. In a den, dimly lit by two small windows high on either side of a fireplace, he dropped his bag, lay down on the leather couch, and was soon asleep.
If he dreamt, he did not remember. He woke to the sound of a door closing. When he returned to the lobby the girl sitting at the front desk let out a slight scream. He said sorry and she laughed and said it was okay and he said he fell asleep waiting for someone to show up and she said it was her own fault for being gone so long. They chitchatted as she checked him in, and when he asked where everybody was, even he wasn’t sure if he meant the hostel or the whole city. She said he was the only person with a reservation - a group of Austrian students had cancelled because they were coming to hike and now it was going to rain all week. What are your plans here, she asked, and after a moment of considering this, he said nothing much but that he was hoping to go up into the mountains. Now that it was September it was getting to be the end of the season and everybody was headed home, she said. Me too, he said, soon enough. She explained that it was just her taking care of the place now and with just him there she might only stop by once a day to check on things. He said he didn’t mind and then after considering his response she wrote down her phone number which she handed to him and said, you know, on second thought, maybe you could just call if you need anything before you leave on Wednesday, then I don’t have to drive over here unless something's up? He shrugged, that's fine. There's nothing I really have to do as long as you have what you need. Makes sense to me. Are you sure? Of course. Okay, great!
The yellow of the long upstairs hallway reminded him of somewhere years ago which he couldn’t recall. He walked to the last door on the left and inside he found two sets of wooden bunk beds opposite each other. He set his stuff down next to one and took off his shoes and lay on the bottom bed. Windows faced southeast and southwest and he drew the curtains on both after looking, once again, to see that rain was not falling. It was two in the afternoon. He lay down but for his sleepiness he lay thinking of the past few days.
The yellow of the long upstairs hallway reminded him of somewhere years ago which he couldn’t recall. He walked to the last door on the left and inside he found two sets of wooden bunk beds opposite each other. He set his stuff down next to one and took off his shoes and lay on the bottom bed. Windows faced southeast and southwest and he drew the curtains on both after looking, once again, to see that rain was not falling. It was two in the afternoon. He lay down but for his sleepiness he lay thinking of the past few days.
When he met new people now he always thought of Gabby asking in her Irish accent, what year’a you-nee are ya, one of the first things she had said to him when he had first struck up a conversation with her in the lunchroom, and thereafter she was always calling it Uni, and not school or college - what had taken her first to Dunkirk and then to Copenhagen, where he had landed two days before from Raleigh. It was the first day of the semester they would spend in the same classrooms and dorms and exploring as much of the city, and Europe beyond, as they and their fellow exchange students could reach in their brief time together. Dear friends though all in their group became, none were more so than him and Gabby, who were fast friends and then best friends.
In that lunchroom he had once joked how slow Gabby got ready to go out at night, to which Gabby said he had no fashion sense, and so on until Lindsey said that they were like an old married couple, and everyone laughed, and agreed, none more so than Claire, who insisted at once that the others refer to her as Gabby, which was her grandmother’s name, and he, for that matter, should be called Buddy. Lindsey asked, why, was Buddy your grandfather’s name? Naw, mi grandmutha’s dog! The name Gabby was soon thereafter everyone’s only name for her, and so would it remain for as long as they were in Europe together, and all the time in which they lived on in each other’s memory, so that later in life, when his recollection of her had faded, he remembered only that her name was Gabby and that he had thought of her like a sister.
The last city they visited together was Vienna, and the morning after their arrival he awoke to her sleeping next to him in their hostel bunk bed. The others were gathered in the dining room when he walked in. Thank god, Lindsey had said, Marcus just told me... I woke up shit scared that she had never come back from the club when I saw her bed was empty. He begged her to sleep in his bed when we got back here, Marcus said. I did not, he scoffed, surprised to hear his own statement sound like a question. Marcus laughed and said okay, maybe not – but you were both flirting on the way home. Like hell we were! Yes, exactly. No, I meant we weren’t. I guess you and I remember it differently.
You know, he said a little while later, it’d be better if we were all in the same room anyway, recollecting that him and Gabby had talked about that the night before, too. That explains why she slept in my bed, he thought. I think you should both move over to ours, he said to Lindsey. There is no way I’m sharing one of those tiny beds. Well, Alan and Marcus can share and you can have one to yourself. I think someone wants to sleep on the floor, Alan said, and everyone laughed. He smiled and said, maybe we should change the subject - so what’s for breakfast? Eggs, potatoes, hams, Danishes, chocolates. Wow, really? No, not really, Alan said – just toast and, what is the fruit you spread on toast? Jelly. Yes, jelly. Seriously, it's just toast? And jelly. Fuck toast, he said, and Alan said I don’t see the point of that and he said I don’t like toast and Alan said well that’s no reason to have sex with it and he responded, I think a lot of things in America would confuse you. They were laughing as Gabby came into the room and Marcus said well good morning, sunshine, and she smiled and flipped him off. He said is that a promise and she said it’s a threat and he said maybe you have just insulted yourself.
It was that evening near the end of his second beer at some tapas bar where Gabby and Lindsey stood some distance away talking to two guys from the Netherlands that were staying at their hostel and who had taken Gabby’s invitation to join their group. He had been sitting with the others at a table but he couldn’t stop eyeing the girls and finally he stood and approached a girl sitting at the bar who had been talking on her phone until then, but he tried to be too charming and too assertive, and she had acted first disinterested and finally brushed him off rudely. He even then considered joining Gabby and Lindsey but for the intimidation of seeing them having what seemed like an effortlessly good time with these guys they had just met. It occurred to him then that Gabby was almost always out of his sight or right next to him, how holding this rare sustained distance, he noticed her appearance as he hadn't before, the smooth curve of her hips, the way her ruffled brown hair lay across her round shoulders, the way she stood up so straight while Lindsey slouched, the way her hands cradled her glass so lightly, the way her face hid nothing. Yes, her face he thought he knew so well which suddenly seemed so different. He was taken aback to notice her looking back at him, but he locked eyes with her, buzzed and unafraid as he now was. She stuck her tongue out at him and returned her attention to her conversation.
Later that evening, walking into a club, he confessed to Marcus how he felt. Marcus didn’t comprehend the gravity of what he was saying, and, seeing that Gabby and Lindsey were still lingering with the same guys, he tried to console him with the possibility of meeting someone else. When Marcus ran into a group he knew from school back home in Munich – where the two of them were headed in two days – he introduced them. They sat outside the club smoking, one of the girls, Veronica, lingering outside with him to talk long after Marcus and the others went back inside. Gabby circled the club looking for him, asking Marcus, who suggested she try out front. When she saw him with Veronica she turned around without him having noticed. Do you want to go back inside, Veronica eventually asked him, and even as he said no, he thought of Gabby. She let him walk her back to her friend Ana’s apartment building, and when they walked up, his hand slid from the small of her back to her elbow, and then down her forearm to her hand, and holding it, he leaned in, and their lips met. He fell asleep thinking of Veronica, and yet listening even then for Gabby's return, the faint hope that she might come into their room to lay next to him again. Waking alone the next morning, he returned to Ana’s apartment building where he sat outside against the brick façade until much later, his eyes having fallen closed again and again, two figures came out and turned away down the block. She turned as he ran up behind them and to her smile he took her face in his hands and kissed her there on the sidewalk, in front of Ana and all the passersby.
Gabby and Lindsey had left for the airport while he was out, and that afternoon he sent Gabby a message saying he was sorry that he hadn’t said goodbye. When her response later that day was simple and polite he felt an easy relief. It was strange to think that her plane had already landed, that she was already in another country. But there was little time to waste, as he and Alan were headed to Marcus’s home in Munich until Sunday. The day that they arrived they did little, a reprieve from the hectic past weeks spent as tourists, socializing, nightlife. He lay in a lounger on Marcus’s patio that evening recalling the first week of exchange, when they had first visited the Copenhagen waterfront together and he had walked together with Gabby, far ahead of everyone else. Now, her and the city were so linked that he could not imagine returning there in her absence. Indeed, his memory of the city seemed inseparable from his memories of their time together.
The next day with Marcus and Alan was archetypal - lunch on the patio, a museum in the afternoon, a long walk through the city park, a biergarten on the square for dinner and drinks, a club. Alan was to return to Innsbruck the next morning, it was their final celebration together but he dwelled instead on Veronica’s arrival the next day. He woke around noon feeling terrible, knowing Alan had gone and that Veronica was already on her train to Munich. Leaving Marcus's with a throbbing head and sore legs, he returned to the city park where he lay in the grass watching the clock in the distant tower ticking down the minutes that separated him from her. He sat at the station impatiently, recollecting the scene outside the apartment, the romanticism of that winning moment. Having told her to expect him there, he watched as the passengers disembarked, but with each passing minute his eagerness sank into confusion and then disbelief when he was finally alone upon the platform. He returned into the station, lingering on a bench, thinking that perhaps she was still to appear from some place of which he had not conceived.
Now the facts rearranged themselves in his mind. He had not thought to ask for her number in the flurry of that first night, but nor had she volunteered it. The next day he had surprised her – she must have simply assumed until that moment that they might never see each other again. He had suggested they meet here and she had immediately accepted and that had been that. It certainly left her an out. He had not even considered that she might fail to appear – so receptive was she to his advances that he assumed she felt the same way. But now it seemed as though she had been a canvas upon which she had allowed him to paint whatever he wanted, so agreeable had she been to his advances. He thought of Gabby and how she never gave an inch. And yet she had slept in his bed the other night, had brought board games to his room when he had been sick from class.
Marcus was to have dinner with his girlfriend and then meet her friends who were arriving back in town from break, including Ana. When he joined them Marcus asked what had occurred at the station but he would not say. Nor would Ana tell him anything about Veronica, yet her evasive responses were themselves an answer. When Marcus and his girlfriend retired home he stayed out with the others, and when they left he latched onto another group they had been talking to. The next thing he knew it was five a.m. and he was in a diner some distance north of the city center with a group of people he didn’t know and with nothing left to say. When he walked outside into those unfamiliar surroundings he felt a terrible despair for the direction the day had gone and a longing to have another chance. With much difficulty he puzzled out a combination of walking and subway ride back to Marcus’s house where he went inside just long enough to grab his possesions, returning back the way he had come to arrive at the bus station in time to board the bus to Vaduz. Color was still coming to the eastern sky as the bus pulled away while he wrote and rewrote a message to Gabby, saying finally that he was sorry that he had not said goodbye and that he wished they were still together in Vienna, but to this message he never received a response.
He woke in his bed late that Monday morning, the muted light of another cloudy day having long ago bled in through the curtains. He had slept much of the prior afternoon and evening, had laid awake long stretches of the night, before again falling asleep before the sun had arose only to dream of a figure whose face in shadow beneath a hood. He feared importance in this person's message, broken words he didn't understand, but no matter how many times he begged them repeat themselves or strained to hear, he could understand nothing of the responses, which grew more and more impatient. Lying awake the prior evening, he had finally walked into town to find the grocery store already closed, wandering the winding, shadowy streets until he heard heavy metal from a doorway through which he saw half a dozen people sitting around a long, bare bar, a place with dim lights and black walls. He spent Monday afternoon getting groceries and wandering aimlessly around town. When finally there was nowhere else to go, he returned to the hostel and sat in the dining room eating, the vacuum-like silence of the place playing tricks with his mind as he gazed out for the hundredth time at the clouds, unchanging. He hadn’t been able to puzzle out a way into the mountains from any information at the bus station and hadn’t thought to ask the girl yesterday. Despite his boredom he found little motivation. He sent Marcus a picture out his window of the empty yard out front and the gray skies to which he eventually replied, looks like you finally found paradise! He sat and stared at the phone, willing some additional response, but nothing came. The only thing worse than the idea of staying was to have to start again somewhere else, only to be disappointed - Geneva for instance, his bus ticket for Wednesday notwithstanding - to be in some new part of this same world in which he was alone, without Veronica and without Gabby and without his friends. In desperation to feel something, he went out into the field as the rain spit and lay down, looking into the sky. For long minutes he lay in the grass, waiting to be soaked, wishing for it, but instead the drops soon ceased.
That evening he ate at one of the restaurants just off the square where he asked about the nightlife. Not much on a Monday night, maybe a couple places around the corner, the cashier said, pointing outside. He went for a walk and when it seemed there was nowhere else to look he tried the one with a few patrons, but everyone kept intensely to themselves. He considered dialing the number of the girl from the hostel, trying to convince himself by asking, what is there to lose? Instead he left for the hostel, on a whim detouring past the bar he had seen the night before.
Even coming down the block there was a crowd of smokers outside and inside he took the last single seat at the lively bar. The drinks were cheap and soon he was bullshitting with his neighbors. As he finished his second drink he felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to see the girl from the hostel who said hi, I thought that was you! Oh, I’m so happy to see you, he said, and she laughed and said oh yeah, why’s that? I’m just happy to see anyone I know. How are you liking it here? I’m so bored, he said, laughing, and she laughed too. I’m sorry to hear that. I almost called you earlier, he said. Oh really? Yeah, I mean, I wanted to ask for your advice. Well, you found the nightlife, if that is what you were going to ask. That's one thing. Something else? It's not important. No, what is it? Ask me again later. Okay, well hey, I’m going outside to smoke. Can I join you? Yeah!
The room the next morning was filled with the same light as the day before, bleeding in around the drawn curtains in the late morning. She lay with an arm over him, scrunched as they were into the single bed. When he moved to slide out from under her she awoke enough to smile at him before settling where he had been and closing her eyes. He was surprised to find a steady rain falling beyond the curtains, for the silence and the indistinct light had given him the perception that perhaps time was not passing, that today may well have been yesterday repeated.
That they had come back here together seemed to pass right through him. He thought nothing at all of it that day - not as though it were simple, but as though it were insubstantial, even ordinary. They ate breakfast, walked umbrella in hand to shops in town where she had errands to run, and back again. Late in that listless afternoon he slept, dreaming that on an overcast night, he was walking with Marcus and Alan along a road which wound upward from the city to a castle on the hillside. Their deliberate pace felt like a procession, and in time he understood that a ceremony was to occur. An iron gate led into a courtyard beside the castle, surrounded by a low brick wall overlooking the valley and in the middle of which stood a stone archway through which he knew a path descended back to town. The full moon through broken clouds cast everything in a blue pallor. He stopped before the archway and from his left Gabby appeared from the shadows in a long and simple white dress, hair adorned with flowers glowing a cold ivory in the moonlight. She stepped forward, though as she reached his side, he awoke.
Strolling around the damp field out front that evening, he could make little sense of it. The trees were void of birds where they had seemed plentiful the day he had arrived. Returning from town earlier, a coyote had stood ahead of them, trotting away as they went up the driveway, turning to look back once more before crossing the highway. No sign of it remained, not tracks nor sight. That night, though, he dreamt of a dog, bound by ropes in the ditch beside the highway, gagging and filthy, and yet as he cut these ropes she became the coyote, suddenly healthy, her fur clean, and once freed she cut through underbrush into the broad countryside, a way mysterious and untraceable.
The next morning Alisha asked him what he planned to do. He looked at her as if considering for the first time that she might want to know. I haven’t decided. Go to Geneva? What’s it like? Expensive. Maybe I’ll look at the weather and decide. If you stay we can actually go hiking, I mean, that’s what you wanted to do here, right? I guess so. They had talked about it briefly the day before, too, but he couldn’t find the motivation, then, either. Let’s eat and then this afternoon we can go. What about the rain? It might not even rain, and anyway, if you wait for no chance of rain here you'll be waiting forever.
They went downstairs to eat and as he was finishing his toast he decided he would leave, though when he tried to justify it in his own head, as he knew he would feel compelled to justify it to Alisha, he couldn’t find a reason. He told himself that he missed his friends - not that they were in Switzerland, either. He sat across from her with what felt like a terrible secret. His plate was empty and he grew nervous. Well? She asked, when she, too, had finished. He took a deep breath, I’m going to Geneva. You know, the weather will probably suck there, too. It’s not that. Yeah, sure. You know, he sighed, it just seems too easy to stay here, I need to move on to the next thing. More like the next girl. It doesn’t have anything to do with you. Well, maybe that’s the problem. Listen, I’m really glad I met you. Just shut up. Well, I am. Shut the fuck up, she yelled, leaving the room. For a long time after he could hear her saying that – it was the last thing he would remember of her, even years later, even when he could no longer remember her face.
The bus station was deserted when he arrived and as he waited he sent Gabby a message that said I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye Claire, I hope I can come to Ireland one day. Late that evening, laying on his bed in his hostel in Geneva he got a message back which said, don’t you ever fucking call me that. He could hear her then speaking the words, her voice trembling towards a shriek, his hair standing up as if she were there in the room with him, close enough to reach for his throat. In that moment he knew he loved her and that he had lost her and that now it was too late.
In Vaduz the bus had appeared the moment he had finally stopped anticipating it, and though he would soon be in another country his thoughts were of his home in North Carolina, of the quiet street where he had lived his whole life. The bus glided forward silently along the street before swinging up beside the curb. As the empty square began to move away out the window, he caught a form in the corner of his vision and glanced quickly, and in that instant he anticipated Alisha and Gabby and Veronica, all together and at once, but when he turned to look there was nobody.
The highway ran south out of town, paralleling a stream up a long and narrowing valley. He had not thought himself tired but now as the scenery passed before him he found himself dozing off, his thoughts distant and indistinct. When finally they gained the pass he could see far to the south into the lowlands where the clouds were breaking up and whole huge swaths of land were bathed in sunlight, and he thought of his first childhood trip to Virginia Beach and the first time he had seen the ocean, its thrashing waves throwing spray which upon the wind did not to the water return.
