by Annie Levin

On May 1st, 2005 the body of a young tourist, dead of exposure, was found inside a telephone booth beside the Hiker's Information Center of the Pfinstegg Horn, the second highest peak of the Bernese Alps. Nothing was found on her person by way of identification save a small journal containing these words:

March 27th, 2005

Chartres: We take a nap after the Latin Mass. I dream Alice Fleishman has rented out Notre Dame de Paris for Passover and Katy plays klezmer tunes on a medieval recorder.

Back to the cathedral later in the afternoon.

State of mind improved, but still, he did say no. Five months in Paris and he still doesn't love me.  

Not a problem. Remember your Chaucer. Contemplate the windows. Think on,

"the melodye herde he
that cometh of thilke speres thryes thre,
that welle is of musik and melodye
in this world here, and cause of harmonye"                  

Lots of coffee in the Arab café around the corner from Our Lady.

Up the flèche towards evening.

Astonishing, the south tower, the 'moon' tower. Exactingly elegant. Cold and hot and fresh and windy, with as beautiful a blue and fluffy white cloudy sky as I've ever seen.

Wheat-colored sunbeams lace the Cathedral.

Dinner. Wine. Bed. Morning. Irritation. Meditation.

The south portal. The confessor's door. I see the convulsing man again. The grotesque who erupted out of evening mass in winter in horrible spasms. He waited until he was fifteen feet from the cathedral to open his overcoat and let free a stream of urine like a burst water main.

March 30th, 2005

Rouen: So, the west portal of Rouen Cathedral is very ugly. Rouen itself, rather very cool. Wet, scraggly animals wandering through the pleasing gloom. Rain, timbers, gilded twilight shining through the eaves, burnt out gothicness partout.

"At the heart of this temple reposes Rollen, father and first Duke of Normandy, laid waste and established by him, he died enfeebled by toil at over eighty in the year 933."

The Cathedral is smaller, narrower, more fragile than Chartres, like a bone that's just been taken out of its cast.

And the windows...good God...

The red window, the glass of the Good Samaritan.

The word descending upon all the oceans of the world.

It's like sorcery, chemical transference, alchemy, slippery mercury, freezing time, capturing that final moment that lasts forever.

April 1st, 2005

Our hotel stands next to a burnt out hole that looks like it was bombed by Allied Forces just yesterday. It's run by a youngish Muslim couple with a tiny baby. They've both begun graying early and they squint through thick glasses with plastic frames. The place is broken and dirty. Inside it stinks of new baby, old cat and a peculiarly medieval-smelling mold you only find in Normandy. Daniel and I trip over infant's toys stumbling drunk to our room. We wake the house. We fall asleep to the sound of Arabic shouted angrily over a baby's wails.

April 2nd, 2005    

Flaubert's house today.

It's like most famous author's houses, empty and sad and totally peaceful, like a well-kept cemetery. It's run by a tragic, middle-aged Belgian in a houndstooth jacket. The house is totally lovely. Also, very boring. I grow restless looking at portraits of famous medical Flauberts and famous lawyer Flauberts. Even the roomfuls of phrenological heads fail to spark my interest.

At the very end of the tour is the room he was born in. It contains a four poster bed, a desk, a stuffed parrot and a first edition of Madame Bovary . It's less cluttered than the rest of the house, in the way a private tomb is less cluttered than a mausoleum.

As we leave I take a picture of Daniel sitting in Flaubert's garden under a tree. He looks beautiful: lithe, pale and afraid, with that trapped ferret look behind his eyes. As soon as the picture is taken I grow jealous, wishing it were me under the tree, wishing I were alone with Flaubert's house, thinking I would find some secret lying there if only I could have my thoughts to myself.

April 4th, 2005

So Daniel doesn't love me. So I didn't get into graduate school. So I'm 5000 miles from home. So, maybe I'll do all right.  

April 5th, 2005

Brussels: I kiss him in the hostel and he turns away from me. I spend the night in the bathroom.

April 7th, 2005        

Bruges: Hot. Dry.

Daniel starts on about Bosch, about the whirling gray whirlpool in the sky at the back of 'The Ascendence,' which I guess is like hell and infinity and depression. He starts to cry. We're drunk. I hug him. We spend several hours snogging next to a canal. Hot Flemish sex in the hotel room later.

April 8th, 2005

In the morning Daniel is bashful and stiff when I cuddle up to him.

I'm hung over, too hung over for Hans Memling. I sit down in front of the St. Ursula Reliquary and take a nap. Daniel hops around, listening in on French tour guides. After a time I am awoken and thrown out by a guard.

I suck down coffee across the street, wondering how many murders by canal drowning happen in Bruges every year.

Daniel finds me later. He's in good spirits.

I ask him how he feels about the night before.

"Well...first it was fun...then I kept on...you know...going, for you...even though it wasn't fun anymore. I hope you enjoyed yourself."

My mouth still tastes of fruit-flavored gin and vomit from last night. I'm in tears again. I wonder if I believe that my tears will get me into Daniel's heart. You'd think there'd be some kind of mercy like that in the world.  

April 9th, 2005

Ghent-Saint-Peters: Daniel of course has a fine time. Drinking beer and beholding the Adoration of the Lamb Altarpiece. He bleats at me all day about how wonderful it is to see so many worshipful tourists in Church. I just see more frightened Americans. They circle the altarpiece in its bulletproof cage with their headsets, in silence. Daniel has a transcendent moment and I fail to, as per usual.

April 11th, 2005

Amsterdam: Mushrooms yesterday. The strongest variety from the most reliable vender in the soft drugs capital of the world.

Dizziness, nausea, wobblyness. Then the weird sick feeling in my stomach spreads to the rest of my body and...Everything is purple!

Daniel becomes pixilated and I lose my mind in the shampoo isle of a pharmacy.

It starts out as a strange and entertaining carnival, a series of ups and downs and all the same people on bicycles going over all the same canal bridges. I giggle and giggle until my brain starts to asphyxiate.

Suddenly I'm in Toon Town for the night to pick up a few animated hookers. Daniel wants to bring me home. I'm so angry white puffy clouds of steam fly out of my ears and I scream until a thunderstorm brakes out over my head.

And everything is still purple.

And I wake up in the hotel room. And I've created hell. Cartoon carnival hell. And Daniel is there, and I'm there, and we will remain there, forever.

April 14th, 2005

Strasbourg: Silly Germans...Building their cathedral out of ham...

April 16th, 2005

It's a rotten goddamn continent. Five months spent mercilessly cultivating myself in the capital of wantonness and spleen, and I still can't convert to the fucking metric system. We're not really Byrons, we pathetic American faux ex-pats; hell, we're not even Jim Morrisons. We're just half-grown vegetables with trust funds. All the youth hostels have the feel of rec rooms in elite New England boarding schools.

We travel far from home to meet ourselves again on the other side (no Doors reference intended). Our Europasses haven't taken us anywhere.

Old news maybe, but we've got to remind ourselves once in a while.

April 17th, 2005

Switzerland: Boring, strange, milk-filled. I say goodbye to Daniel. We share chaste kisses on the grass beside the chicken coop in front of our alpine hostel.

Yesterday afternoon, freezing my tuchus off under the glacial waterfall, looking up at the just setting sun behind the trees, I forget everything, for a little while. I think of the cold Catskills mornings and our raspberry picking tins, and swimming in the lake with Katy buoying herself along at the back of Dad's motorboat.

I am good and cheerful on the walk down the mountain. I don't cry or scream at Daniel or anything. I am happy and ponderous, wondering about city and country and novels and art and puzzles and willpower as we bounce down the mountain, winding our way along a path overshadowed by pine and ringed with clover.

I probably should have gone home with him. I'm almost broke and all these Swiss are mighty creepy. It's as if they're all harboring some horrible secret, a dreadful, fucked up secret from thousands of years back, like Cthulhu or The Arc of the Covenant or something.

And I am homesick. But what's there for me at home, a place in front of the television, the waiting room at Temps Incorporated and the subway in midsummer? No thank you. I'll take continental starvation over the New York doldrums any day.

Sure, there's the family. But I fear the big, noisy, farting fam with its big, senile, incontinent dog is not what it used to be. Everyone is old and sad. Even Katy, after running home from school, her thick mascara caked around her eyes, just lies around, eating and eating and watching reruns of "Friends." No one laughs or goes to the park anymore. Mom goes shopping and Dad tends to his CEO. The monster television is on all the time. Everything's been tried and done and the internet is the only undiscovered country.

I thought Daniel could bring me home again, back to the elements, back to when flowers were worth sniffing, stories worth writing and store windows worth peering into at Christmas Time. How could I have been such a shmaltzy idiot? Daniel destroyed me with his aroma of homecoming. If only I'd murdered him on the mountain. Pushed him over the edge or held him under the waterfall until his scrawny little chest stopped heaving. But no, I was his ever-kind and constant companion. To hell with my lily-white ass, I don't deserve a homecoming.

April 18th, 2005

Getting back from today's hike, there's a class of 16-year-old Minnesotans at the hostel.

I become friends with a wealthy Oxford undergrad over pinball. His name is Alec. He's alone and waiting for a group of Australians to join him for a week of white water rafting.

When the Minnesotan chaperones go to bed, Alec organizes a grand drunken game of murder in the dark. I sit on a rock in the woods on my third Kronenbourg, watching the shadowy teenage shapes flitter around me.

It's later, very much later, when only nixies and wolves wander these here hills. I've bummed two packs of my cheap-ass Spanish cigarettes to the pajama wearing adolescents.

I discover the Brit smoking a joint of hash at the back of the hostel.   I take a toke. He takes the joint away from me, pins me against the house and covers me in quick, stabbing kisses. It's like being attacked by a Venus flytrap. After a minute he gets bored, sucks at the smoldering roach and stubs it out beneath his hiking boot.

"Ta ra pet," he says with a beautiful smile, flapping his palm against my hip and sauntering up to the house.

April 19th, 2005

I spend most of the day in my bunk, nursing my hangover. As I sleep and devour uncountable packets of Swiss cookies, a small troupe of Japanese girls moves into my room. I hide from them under the duvet. They each have a suitcase half-filled with festively wrapped rice crackers. They make the room smell oddly chemical with their grapefruit scented air-fresheners and kiwi body sprays.

Looking out the window beside my bunk, I watch the bleary-eyed Minnesotans lumber up to the hostel after their morning hike.

Despite my hangover, I feel deliciously foot-sore from my own mountain meanderings. Proud calluses form over the ripe red blisters. I ache to be walking through the clouds again.

April 20th, 2005

Bernese Oberland, Grindelwald: I climb all the way up to out-of-season ski country. Thousands of little white roots in small clumps coat the precipice.

Farther, rather a lot farther I think (hope) along the ridge. Big muthafucka buttercups the size of water lilies.

Rain, snails, slugs, black lizards, dripping ice, beautiful goats, lots more wildflowers. Farmers in silly hats and gorgeous working dogs. Rushing river, violent, frothing, ever-angry. Isolation, anger, distress, ice, distress, more ice, gigantic geological formations as smooth as a backside. Water rushing down in flat, fast, silent rivulets from great glacial heights. 1000 meters above the tree line and counting.  

One high altitude, low oxygen bumblebee moans across the tufted hill.

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