It’s the middle of December, and everything is frozen over. I arrived six weeks ago with an old, worn-out pair of brown leather shoes. One night I walked around the city with a girl I’d met, and the next day I bought myself some lined, warm, waterproof boots. I threw the brown shoes away. I would have kept them for the spring, but I ruined them by heating them on the radiator at night.
I’m from the desert – a town with a small population. When I was seventeen, I left the town in the desert for a city in the desert. There were three million people in that city. There were a lot of straight, wide roads, and there weren’t many sidewalks. Though I lived and worked elsewhere more than I lived and worked in that city, I always returned – each time for a different reason. When I left six weeks ago, I didn’t tell anybody I was leaving. I just went to the airport one morning and got on a flight. I didn’t even really pack. I had a few books and half a dozen shirts and toiletries and some other things. I wanted to live in a cold city. I couldn’t say precisely why I picked this one.
I bought an ugly winter coat and found a cheap room at a place called Hotel Rus: this is where I’m living now. There is a toilet in the corridor that our floor shares, and a bathroom with a tiny but very deep tub I’m not sure how to use – am I supposed to stand or squat or sit in it? My room has green carpeting and white walls. It has a little sink and a mirror, a wardrobe, a little chest of drawers, and a small single bed. My feet dangle off the edge, and the duvet is too small. There’s no TV, and that’s fine with me. Sometimes I catch a bit of TV in a bar, and it looks pretty depressing. And I haven’t come all this way to watch TV. The man and woman who run the place are nice, Mr and Mrs Pyz. One night they asked why I’d come and I said I didn’t know. How long was I staying? I didn’t have any plans to leave, I told them. But I was American, they said; I had to leave. I had a second passport, I told them. That’s an old story.
A guy I knew from college had come here – he went to Europe and I went to the Navy. I had a number and an address, twenty years old. I’m sure he left nineteen years ago and went back home, and I don’t remember liking him anyway. But on my first morning I bought a map and I walked many hours in the rain and fog to get to where my friend used to live. I needed an excuse to go somewhere specific. I could have got a bus or a streetcar or the underground, but I wanted to walk, and I suppose I was a bit frightened I’d get on the wrong train, the wrong bus, not have the right change, not know how to use the machines, be asked for directions, and I didn’t want to look like a tourist. So I walked. It took a long time and my feet were sore. I thought about getting some new shoes the next day, but it wasn’t until the day after the night I met Saskia and we stood around on cobblestones listening to musicians in the city centre – it was a street festival – that I set out looking for a shoe shop. I passed an outdoor adventure place and saw a lot of boots in the windows. I looked around and realized just about everybody on the slushy street was wearing boots. So I went inside and bought the most expensive pair they had: tall, black aqua combats – that’s what they were called, aqua combats. I’m glad I waited. Had I bought them after that first walk, I might have got cheap ones. I wouldn’t have considered the possibility that good shoes were essential: in the city I came from, shoes are never essential. Every week you buy a new pair of flip-flops at a drugstore for a dollar ninety-nine. I can step in a puddle with the ones I bought here. I can stand in a puddle for as long as I like. Every time I lace them up in the mornings, I’m glad I spent the extra money.
I wake up, usually around seven, and go and get a few papers, even though I can’t read them, and a pack of cigarettes. I go back to the hotel and sit at the bar, or sometimes I go to a little café down on the corner where a nice Italian kid waits tables, and he speaks English with me. He asks what I’m reading. He doesn’t have the language either, not well enough to read it, so we both take guesses. He’s into mobile phones and sunglasses, but he’s a nice kid. He got me a free phone that I top up whenever I want to make a call. I spend about an hour with the papers. Then I go to the bakery next door to the café and get some sandwiches on nice bread, pack them into a little backpack, and start walking around the city. I tell myself it’s been six weeks; perhaps it’s been a little longer. Time is losing shape. Sometimes I watch my cigarette smoke rise above me in my hotel room and disperse across the ceiling, and this is what is happening to time. I am trying to live without a preoccupation with endpoints.