Vehr are you travel?

“Vehr are you travel?”

“What – a hostel. Can you take me?”

“Vehr are you goh-ing?” Not now. It is four in the morning Eastern Standard Time at the baggage claim in the San Francisco airport. Has Self-Consciousness really chosen now, in an Eastern European accent no less, on a cellphone! to reveal to Heart that on behalf of Max’s Many Selves – the Intellect, esteemed, the Groin, darkly comedic, the Creature, soulful and weak, the Beast, the Crusader – that we (Max) are lost and need direction. I wished to respond: I do not know really...

In fact Max was not drunk. But wafting around him was a cruel mixture: the conditioned air inside the airport, calculated and sterile like medicated Vaseline, mixed with the intimations growing in his arteries that everything in his life would somehow be different. This mixture worked as a hallucinogen on his nervous system.

“Vehr are you goh-ing?”

“A hostel downtown…on 312 Mason Street. Can you take me there?”

The Boy made his way to the parking lot. In his bag: a new sleeping bag, a tremendous weight of books, including the Selected Works of W.H. Auden, On the Road, Latin America: Modern Times Vol. XI , a pocket knife, three pairs of khaki pants, and an electronic toothbrush. The contents of his bag reveal to some extent the content of his expectations.

On the way out of the airport, he began to hear a muffled buzzing from inside his bag, rather like a honeybee trapped in the mouth of an alley cat. What might it be? At best a cellphone, in which case Max was rather rude not to stop – but at worst? The object continued its fast oscillations. Was Max, unwittingly, trasporting across America woman’s good vibrations? A pimp with a Learner’s Permit. Or weapons? Yes, a bag filled with weapons, all vibrating to some ungodly aim. “Get to the floor" the Officer would say. Ah, Max got the joke. “Death to America” he might even shout back, if only to confirm for the Officer his worst fear: yes, Evil is now in the business of recruiting for Their dark plots the duffle bags of Jews. Seventeen-year-olds from Westchester, NY. An islomofascists with a Learner’s Permit! The Officer might then remove from the bag, rather triumphantly, the weapon of innumerable tears: a Braun C32 Electronic Toothbrush turned on by an accidental bump of the dufflebag. “Death to Plaque you goons” Max smiled in his preposterous head. “Get the fuck off me.”

Yes these were his thoughts. There is no reason to continue to explore them, the bright rainbow colors of his delusions, other than to make once again the point that Max was tripping wildly on his sense of contradiction – so drab was this building but so vivid was his own freedom to destroy or elevate himself, for which this airport served as the most immediate symbol.

Outside gasoline lingered on pavement; the air was dangerous but full of amusement: unsettled. The van to the youth hostel was blue and fat, and it sat on the curb like a caravan set to travel somewhere beyond a Tunisian horizon, where the sun sinks to innumerable moments of mystery. An old woman from Nova Scotia said “take me home,” in part to the driver, but mostly to herself. “I am very tired.” A Minnesotan woman with hair like peels of ripe bananas was in San Francisco to celebrate her son’s wedding. “I’ve been praying for him and his wife,” she said in Midwestern tones. Through the windshield, Max watched the highway push into the night; it was cast in grays too white for this hour, as if trapped in the concrete was a last blush of sunlight long past.

The van dipped into a tunnel filled with racing orange. “He listened to my prayers. God can guide you if you pray” she finished. As the van emerged from underground, the city lights of midnight towers sent vague, bright shapes reflecting off the windshield, like a hundred cats’ eyes piercing the dark. Max wondered about his own guidance.