I considered Spain to be more of a home than New Jersey, and once I had the means to live on my own, I moved to Barcelona. It was not so difficult.

     I always loved Barcelona when I was growing up. When I was twelve I learned that my grandmother was not dead, and was actually living quite peacefully in Spain. My father had disowned her, but only because he never knew her. He was born in Detroit in January of 1936, and his mother left in February of the same year. She was only seventeen, and she was filled with the rigor of a wonderful, revolutionary spirit.

     I suppose my father and my grandfather got along, though I never knew my grandfather and my father never once spoke of him. My mother filled in the rather gaping holes in the story of my grandfather one day at a picnic with the following two phrases: "He was a dumb, ignorant, factory worker for General Motors in Detroit." – "He sent your father off to a boarding school somewhere in Connecticut and they never really spoke again, except when they wanted a good fight."

     I knew the rest of my father’s history from there, even when I was eleven, for it had become a doctrine of success, and it was the path I was supposed to follow since I was in the crib listening to my father reel off stock quotes while I cried. My father had gone on to Princeton from boarding school in Connecticut, where he met my mother, and then to the world of finance, where he became a very rich man at a very young age by trading heavily in the as yet untapped field of computer technology. He was a maverick of sorts, and he was paid well. He was a self-made man, and he always hated my grandmother.

     I was the fourth of five children, and growing up in New Jersey was hell. My older brothers and older sister were very happy to please my father. They liked money. My mother never needed to be pleased; as long as your room was clean and you ate a big dinner every day and did the dishes every night, she was proud and extraordinarily content with the children she was raising.

     My father was not so easy to please. When his oldest son decided to go to Harvard instead of Princeton, he had his first heart attack. My eldest brother, George, would later become a very successful lawyer and represent my father in court when his sketchy business deals went awry. This made my father proud and he did not have another heart attack until 1986, when he was fifty and I was twelve, and I announced that I wanted to spend the summer in Barcelona.

     I remember how beautiful it was to see the veins on his head bulge out beyond recognition and his hands rushing to his brow to contain the sweat that poured out of his skull. He was having a heart attack and I knew that it upset me, but I had never seen such a vivid sign of emotion in my father, and that made me happy.

     As he lay dying in the hospital bed the next day, with needles hanging in his veins and a tube underneath his nose, he scolded me for my insubordinate behavior as my mother calmly rubbed his thigh and my other older brother, Anthony, stared out the window patiently. My mother barely even noticed when he began yelling at her. He was very upset that I had learned about my grandmother in Spain and that my mother had given me her address so that we could converse via airmail. He was upset at everyone, apparently, for he next screamed at Anthony for not informing him of these developments, even when he obviously knew about them.

     Anthony was a journalist for the Wall Street Journal who grudgingly channeled the thoughts of the extreme Republican Right Wing into the pages of his newspaper and as a consequence to everyone who rides the PATH train to the World Trade Center on black American mornings. Every American morning is a black one, for all there is to think about is work, money, Coors Light, and the nuclear bomb. Anthony had no idea that I had been conversing with Grandma Rose. He did not even know that she existed. Anthony was too busy writing articles that he did not believe in to think about the Grandma that he did not know existed, which was time consuming and mentally straining.

     Actually, Rose changed her name to Rosa, or at the very least everyone she knew called her Rosa, once she moved to Spain. She, along with many others, was fighting for the Spanish Republic against the fascist forces of General Fransisco Franco, which is definitely another story altogether.

     My father hated her for moving to Spain and leaving him alone with my grandfather, although he never loved her in the first place. I am not sure my father ever really loved anyone. I am sure, however, that he never loved himself, and am convinced that all of his heart attacks were suicide attempts. All but the fifth were failed suicide attempts.

     His second heart attack was most certainly a failure. He was back on the job within four days. He was very quickly his old self again – dictating and commanding and making money and spending it on expensive dinners for clients he disapproved of. He agreed, in the hospital bed, to allow me to go to Barcelona for the summer, but only because he wanted me to be a diplomat and that this would be a perfect introduction to Europe, which was the only civilized place in the world where I could be a practicing diplomat.

     My father, whose name was Alexander Morrissey, despised every nation besides the United States, simply because they did not have the exact same policies as the United States. Being similar was not close enough, he thoughtfully proclaimed, and the only reason he favored globalization as he got on in years was because he thought it would mean a new Empire for the United States and form a very profitable series of colonies for Americans to own outright. This is what diplomacy and globalization meant to my father – the Global United States run by Washington and Wall Street and Starbucks. My father loved Starbucks almost as much as he loved Jack Daniels, and both made him hyper, mean, and prone to start swinging and beating people that did not agree with him.

     Alexander hated diplomats. He was sure they were a despicable strain on the tax payers wallet. To begin with, he hated taxes, and he hated that some of the money he paid to the government went to puny, know-it-all, asshole diplomats who could not make any money in the business world. Still, he could not deny that it was somehow a prestigious position, to be a diplomat, and he wanted a son that was a diplomat, without being able to explain exactly why. My older sister, Emily, was a doctor, and he wanted to have a complete collection of the best professions. He had since forgiven George for going to Harvard because he was a successful, rich lawyer.

     My father had his third heart attack in 1988, when Emily was shot and killed by a mugger in Phoenix who was trying to rape her and steal her money when she started using Judo on him. This proved too much for the petty thief and rapist and he shot her through the temple without an inch of remorse. This is an example of a bad golfing vacation; Emily and her boyfriend John, a very successful real estate agent, had not even teed it up at PGA West before the awful murder took place. My father was not upset that Emily was dead, but he was upset for other, more rational reasons.

     First of all, she could have been killed in a more civilized manner, so that the funeral could have been a less somber event. She would have looked beautiful in her open coffin, he confidently mused from his hospital bed, if she had not been shot through the head. The closed casket funeral, he regretted, was quite depressing. And, more to the point, he no longer had a doctor in his collection of offspring. This was particularly depressing, and was probably why he had his third heart attack. I cried when I heard about what happened to Emily, even though I never really liked her very much. She was always talking about saving lives and making money and playing golf, and was always boring me. I suppose, though, that I loved her and still do, which is why I was upset.

     I went to Spain for the first time in the summer of 1986, when I learned that Barcelona was only secondarily a part of Spain and was primarily the capitol of Catalunya, a region of Spain which was rich in its own history, separate from the history of Spain. Grandmother Rosa taught me all there was to know. Emily never met my grandmother, and neither did George, whom the CIA assassinated in 1989 for defending the most powerful, and famous, mob boss in Brooklyn. This caused my father’s fourth heart attack, but he was happy that George was shot through the heart, because the funeral had a much nicer ambiance than Emily’s funeral. Alexander was a very conservative man. He was also a self-made man who was a multi-millionaire and reminded everyone from waiters to busboys to stockbrokers of this fact continuously.

     Every time I returned to Catalunya, Grandma Rosa explained to me that having a lot of money was useless unless it created happiness, which, she assured me, it never did. She clarified her opinion by stating that those with the ability to make a lot of money almost never knew how to enjoy it or use it well. After the Spanish Civil War ended in 1939 with her side losing to Franco due to confusion and division and disillusion, she became a nurse. She made enough money to live without fear of poverty, and married a small, bald, red-faced, and feisty Catalan man who owned his own bar in the Bario Goticó near Plaza Catalunya, the heart of Barcelona. Grandma Rosa lived a happy life and never regretted leaving her first husband in Michigan. After all, she mused in her ranch just outside of Terassa (a textile factory based city thirty kilometers northwest of Barcelona), she was much happier without him and it must have been the same for him, for he was insane and barely even knew there was a world outside of Detroit and big, ugly automobiles. She blamed her marriage to my grandfather on heavy cocaine and reefer use.

     I often wondered whether or not Grandma Rosa missed her son, Alexander, but she continuously insisted that she did not. She knew her son was a conservative millionaire psycho from the papers, and she furthermore was aware that Alexander was a product of his father, her former husband, and that she was afraid of what this combination would mean for her son. Grandma Rosa never had any other children. She was barren from an abortion she had somewhere in the hills of Catalunya after sleeping repeatedly with a gallant and brave soldier who she thought she loved but later realized was stupider than her former husband was. He was a dumb soldier and she refused to have his child, and as a result she would never have another child again. Alexander was an only child.

     Grandma Rosa did not like Americans, but she liked me. I learned Spanish very quickly my first time in Catalunya because Grandma Rosa was the only English speaker in the town just outside of Terassa. My father was torn about my first visit to Spain. Not only did it cause his second heart attack and conjure up images of a woman he had never had an image of – she left when he was aged only a month - but it made him suspicious of, well, suspicious of something. Alexander never had a mother and hated his father; hence he never really understood the concept of parenthood. He was a bad father and he knew it, but it did not particularly bother him.

     I moved to Barcelona because it was finally the time for me to move to Barcelona. When I left my father told me that if he never saw me again he would consider himself the luckiest person alive. He did not agree with what I was doing.

     "Who reads?" He screamed at me in anger over a particularly strong glass of Jack Daniels and soda water while my mother did the dishes because there were no longer kids left in the house to do the dishes and to complete some of her chores.

     My father was very upset that I was becoming a successful writer and had the means to move to Barcelona. He looked me up and down and shouted – "what makes you such a good writer? You’re no writer!"

     "Dad, who the hell would you consider a good writer to be?"

     I had a literary agent to represent the guidebook I had written in my previous journeys to Barcelona, all but guaranteeing that it would be published, and this made my father very angry. He tried to call George and then almost had his fifth heart attack when my mother reminded him that his eldest son was dead and that my father would not be able to convince George to help him sue the literary agency for signing me on in the first place.

     "The only good writer is a dead writer, or an accountant who writes a favorable earnings prediction for the next quarter."

     "What about that Braveheart movie that you like so much? Did an accountant write that?"

     "No one wrote that, it’s a goddamn movie you jackass, incompetent, kid."

     My mother scrubbed furiously at a particularly dirty dish and ignored the conversation. She still did not believe that I was actually leaving. I was only twenty-two years old and there would be no one left in the house to please and amuse her besides Alexander and Alexander Jr., who did not even amuse her. Everyone called my younger brother A.J., and A.J. had a lot of pressure on his shoulders. Emily and George were dead, and most people thought if A.J. were not a success, my father would have his fifth heart attack and that this one would kill him. A.J. had time to work it out, for he was only sixteen and had another year and a half left before he had to choose a university. A.J. was an intelligent youth.

     As I remember it, he spent most of his time at the golf course. When he was very young, Emily taught him how to play golf. He loved the sport. He went on and on about how it was the only sport where the continuous nature of life is not destroyed by the finality of the end of the day. There is always another day in golf, always another round, or so said A.J. at a very young age. He was nine when he decided that speaking to the outside world was an acceptable act; before that he was basically a mute, save the times he sang hymns in church because he thought that they should be number one hits.

     My father hated golf and thought it was pointless to play a game that was so obviously an invention of ‘the retards.’ My father often spoke of ‘the retards’ as if they were a race. According to him, they created not only golf, but cricket, chess, communism, Phish, paintings, novels, and croquet. Alexander hated that A.J. was becoming a retard.

     He was also very confused when it came to deciding what profession his son would take. He knew that his ploy to make me a diplomat had backfired and made me a horrifyingly evil writer, and wanted to be sure when it came to deciding A.J.’s future profession. He thought about him being a doctor and being a lawyer, but then reconsidered and tried to imagine the best possible profession he could brag to his lying friends about. He finally decided on President of the United States, and began to groom A.J. for the job.

     Alexander Morrissey Jr. – President Alexander Morrissey Jr. First A.J. would have to become a lawyer and then he would have to become a congressman. It would not be so hard to make his son the President. My father was excited to become his campaign manager, and he knew his son would become the best golfer to occupy the White House since Eisenhower, even though he hated golf with a passion because it was created by the ‘retards’. He certainly would be a better golfer than that hack liberal Clinton was.

     My father hated Bill Clinton because he was a successful president and because he was a Democrat and reformed welfare and because he was just elected for a second term. He wanted Clinton to die and did not understand why his children were dying left and right and an evil man such as Clinton was alive and well and smiling all of the time. Clinton, according to my father, was successful because he was a good liar, and I believe that my father regretted that he was not quite the liar that Bill Clinton was.

     A.J. did not really want to be President of the United States; he wanted to be a professional golfer, but he liked pleasing my father and he agreed to go to Princeton and to become the President.

     My mother cried when I left for the airport, because she really liked me. She would never admit it, but she was very happy to have someone that thought so differently than the rest of the family. She was secretly disappointed that A.J. thought differently but was still willing to appease her evil husband and become President of the United States. She had no doubt that he would become President of the United States even without the help of George, who could not sue anyone anymore because he was dead.

     My mother really missed Emily. It had been eating at her soul since she Emily was shot through the temple in Phoenix. Emily was her only daughter, and she identified with her sympathetically even though my mother, like me, did not really love her. But she was her only daughter, and she knew she would never have another woman child again because after she turned forty-five and A.J. was a year and a half old her husband never had sex with her again. My father refused to have sex with my mother once he realized that she would never have anymore children. From that point on, he only had sex with prostitutes in New York.

     My father loved those prostitutes in New York. He especially loved the prostitutes with red hair and small, bony asses. He felt that these were the ones he could control the most. He loved the feisty ones. My mother was especially in despair because I was moving to Spain and A.J. was going to be the President and she would never have sex with her evil husband again because he was insistent about not having sex with her because she was past her prime and she was not a hot prostitute with a bony ass. My mother, in fact, was forced to have sex every Thursday night with the local Catholic preacher, who became bored with schoolboys and rulers and decided that he would settle for my mother because she would never be able to have his sacrilegious children. He also liked her full ass.

     Barcelona welcomed me with open arms. Unfortunately, Grandma Rosa had died in early 1995. She left me her apartment in her will and I moved in the day I arrived. The place was laden with revolutionary posters and pictures of Che Guevera and Catalan flags. Her husband was slowly dying in their country home just outside of Terassa. I did not go to see him because he said that he was too sick to see anyone.

     I knew the city of Barcelona very well. Leaving my father and all of his insane rhetoric behind was the most invigorating feeling that I had experienced in my life. I always knew I wanted to get away from him, but it is very difficult to actually get away from your parents and your supposed destiny and your supposed home. New Jersey was not my home.

     The night before I left New Jersey for Barcelona I met with my brother in a Greenwich Village bar. He wanted to see me before I left so that he could offer me some advice. Anthony had never given me advice before, and I thought it strange that he should start now. He called me on the phone and informed me that he wanted to speak to me and get drunk with me in Manhattan before I left. Anthony had never given anyone any advice and he was a writer of a column that was supposed to give political and financial advice to everyone in the nation. He was a ghostwriter for the GOP. He was a damned moron who would spend the rest of his life in hell and might be there soon given the fate of his doomed siblings George and Emily. He, like the rest of us, never really liked Emily, though he loved her.

     "Look, David, you have to get out of here and get out of here fast."

     "I’m leaving tomorrow night – you know that."

     "But you really have to leave, and you can never come back."

     "That’s my plan."

     Anthony sat back in his chic barstool and sighed loudly. Then he began to laugh and lit a cigarette. He looked as if he were a liberated man, and I did not recognize him. He was about to explain to me that he hated our father, hated his job, and hated himself. He wanted to get out at an early age as well, but was never strong enough to do so. He told me of his teenage dreams of moving to Switzerland or Austria and becoming a translator; he thought that it would be the most satisfying occupation in the world, for it would be bringing the world together.

     "You smoke cigarettes?" I did not care whether or not my brother wanted to be a translator; I thought it was a stupid job. Translating made it easy for people to not learn languages and was the equivalent of spending your life as a slave.

     "Of course I do." Anthony was annoyed. I was not listening to him. I was watching him and trying to judge his actions instead of his words. "Are you listening to anything that I've said? You are about to embark on a very important journey and I am trying to make you understand that this could save you."

     "Why don’t you be saved? If you want to be a slave just do it." I paused and lit my own cigarette, if only to show Anthony that I too smoked cigarettes, and we were indeed brothers. "You have money. Go learn how to speak lots of languages and then translate for people who refuse to learn them."

     "You little, horny, ungrateful prick. You are the worst brother I have."

     "You only have two now, and A.J. is going to be the President so you will not be able to speak with him or with me. I do not want to speak with you after I go to Barcelona; you’re too connected with Alexander."

     "How am I possibly connected to our father?"

     "You put his nonsense into words every morning."

     "I write those columns in the late afternoon."

     "You put his nonsense, along with the whacko nonsense of the entire right wing, into words every late afternoon."

     "So I can’t give you a little friendly advice?" Anthony looked around the bar. It was packed with stupid people who were almost as stupid as he was. He was always looking for smart people in Manhattan but only found stupid ones, probably because he insisted on going to bars occupied by Republican, money-making scoundrels who were stupid in the first place. "I hate Alexander, don’t connect me to him."

     "My mind is my mind, and I can connect you to whomever I want to."

     "Dole deserved to win."

     "Clinton won."

     "Dole deserved to fucking win!"

     "Clinton won."

     "You’re a Democrat!" Anthony was shocked, but Anthony should have known that I was not a Republican before this moment in a chic Manhattan bar in Greenwich Village.

     "I’m a card-carrying member of the Austrian Green Party."

     "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

     "That I’m a card-carrying member of the Austrian Green Party. It also means that I am not a Democrat."

     Whatever advice Anthony was trying to give me fell on my deeply deaf ears. I did not want to listen to anyone while I was still in the United States. Everyone had bad advice, and I closed my ears. I suppose that Anthony was trying to give me good advice, and maybe even it was good advice, but coming from him it automatically became bad advice. He was an amateur idiot, and he was a terrible journalist.

     We left that night with a promise never to speak again. We were both drunk and I had no place to stay and had to drive home instead of staying at his place, but he did not care. He openly hoped that I would run my car off the road and die. He screamed this information to me as I walked away. He then proceeded to tell a police officer that I was about to drive my car home drunk and that I was going to leave the garage on Charles Street in about seven minutes and that I should be arrested.

     The police officer ignored Anthony and I had perhaps the greatest drive of my life. I suddenly did not care about life and drove like a maniac. I had no idea where I was going and suddenly I started driving towards Newark Airport on the Palaski Skyway at one hundred and twenty miles per hour in my Jeep Cherokee that my father gave to me when I got into Princeton.

     I had already packed early in the night and put my stuff in the car so that I would not have to pack the next morning, and after my father told me that there were no good writers in the world except for the dead ones I left for New York to meet my brother Anthony. I only had two backpacks, and did not have to return home again, so I checked into a hotel near the airport and proceeded to sample the nightlife in this particular Ramada Inn.

     The bar at the Ramada Inn was still open, as it was only one in the morning by the time I had checked in and dropped my bags off in the beautiful room with a beautiful view of Newark and airplanes.

     I stopped by the bar for awhile and saw that it was packed with college students. This was a surprise to me, for college students normally do not hang out in hotel bars in Newark, no matter what the circumstances may be. They all looked at me like I was a moron because they did not know me, and anyone hanging out in the bar at the Ramada Inn on a Thursday night in December was obviously a moron. They were not morons because they knew each other and had a reason to be hanging out in the bar at the Ramada Inn on a Thursday night in December.

     They were all students at Brown University and were staying in the Ramada Inn because the following day they were leaving to visit Barcelona. They had planned the trip gingerly for months. There were about eleven of them, and they all planned it so that their finals would end before the fourteenth of December so that they could all go to Barcelona for ten days before Christmas with ugly families in the Northeast. Once they realized that I was not a moron and indeed a Princeton graduate with a literary agent, they began to speak with me at length and eventually welcomed me into their group.

     The bar at the Ramada Inn in Newark closes just after two in the morning on Thursday nights but there were more things on the agenda in the group I had just moments before joined. They were on the same flight as me, and they were very excited to have a Barcelona insider on their team. An ugly, short, and somewhat engaging student named Ralph had agreed to have the party in his room. They were already prepared for the party before it even began. There were two handles of whiskey, two handles of vodka, four bottles of coke, and six liters of orange juice.

     I was already beyond drunk at this point. I had been drinking an incredible amount of beer while with Anthony, because that is the only way that I could tolerate sitting with him even though I could never tolerate him. I was perfectly willing, however, to drink whiskey-cola’s at a very rapid pace. The room where I drank at a rapid pace was filled with the sound of rabid techno music and dancing girls. They were all cute and I was made to be the idiot because I did not understand what was happening. I did not really remember driving from Manhattan to Newark and did not particularly remember checking in to the Ramada Inn.

     One girl caught my attention because I kept staring at her. She finally got sick of wondering why I was staring at her and sat down next to me and asked me why I was staring at her.

     "Because you are the most beautiful girl I have ever seen?"

     "Have you seen a lot of beautiful girls?"

     "Only the most beautiful."

     "Where?"

     "In Catalunya; in Barcelona."

     "Did you ever make love to any of them?"

     "A few."

     "Are you a player?"

     "Far from it. Are you?"

     "Yes."

     "Where are you from?"

     "I grew up in Prague and then moved to Boston with my father."

     "When did you move here?"

     "When I was four."

     "You grew up in four years?"

     "Yes."

     Marketa came back to my hotel room and stayed with me because I thought she was more beautiful than all the girls I had seen and/or slept with in Barcelona. I even found her more beautiful than my Grandma Rosa. Plus the three girls she was sharing a room with were very annoying and still dancing when she left with me. The guys were jealous because they all thought that Marketa was more beautiful than any of the girls they had seen and/or slept with in Providence on College Hill. Marketa was not a virgin.

     She slept in my bed peacefully and made love to me with an unusual sense of caring attention. She loved me very quickly. She said that she noticed something in me very quickly and knew that she would be with me for awhile so she did not want to delay the inevitable. She was a very practical and intelligent woman. She was only nineteen years old but would turn twenty on the fifth of January. Marketa was the quietest and happiest sleeper I had ever seen, and therefore I could not sleep because I was completely obsessed with watching her sleep.

     I had many girlfriends in my time because I was quite good looking and made for an interesting boyfriend for a girl to have. I was charming, but apparently only for a few months, because none of the relationships lasted longer than that. They mostly became very afraid of my father and, more importantly, of me. I was a scary guy to be involved with because I wanted to get married with every girl I ever met who I liked. I hated the pleasantries of dating and wanted to get the marriage over with so that I would know. The only thing that Alexander ever liked about me is that I was practical. I never liked anything about my father, especially since he loved my favorite girlfriend of all-time and slept with her on numerous occasions. Granted, he never admitted it to me, but it was obvious.

     No one else thought it was obvious, but I did, and I had proof one night when he started screaming at me for wanting to be a writer and said that no one would ever like a writer as much as a successful businessman Republican – and that my girlfriend was proof of this fact because she kept sleeping with him when my mother and I went off to look at colleges. The girlfriend’s name was Eva, and she was from Chile but living in New Jersey because her father had opened up a lucrative antique store in Chester and thought that America was a more secure place to live than Chile. I was not surprised that Eva slept with my father on numerous occasions because my mother was barren and prostitutes can become very boring after a few nights and free sex with teenagers that your son is going out with is hard to come by and even harder to resist.

     I never broke up with Eva; she broke up with me. She ended up, eventually, marrying a crooked old banker who was worth millions and inherited his money when she killed him with an ice pick and blamed it on the doorman. I smiled when I heard of this tragedy, because I was in another country and knew that it was not me that was dead. She broke up with me because she was sleeping with my father all the time and she thought that it was all very sketchy. I agreed with her; she was sketchy.

     I was happy that Marketa would never have to meet my father. She lived in Boston, was going to Barcelona, and was never planning on spending another night in New Jersey. I was also planning on never spending another night in New Jersey, and never planning on seeing my father again, so I was quite sure that Marketa would never sleep with him.

     I was also more confident of myself now that I was not under his fairly large shadow, and the rather calm storm that surrounded my life had subsided considerably now that I was leaving the country, making it fairly simple for Marketa to enter into my arms.

     She had huge green eyes that reminded me of olives and her face was pale and littered with beautiful, tiny specks that were not freckles. Her eyes were ovals and her breasts were small and compact and strong and larger than the average and smaller than the huge. I hated huge breasts because they always left me with too much flesh to grope and that is why I was never disappointed that Eva was sleeping with my father every other evening.

     Marketa’s smile was reminiscent of a heart smiling. She smiled when she was sleeping and I simply had to stare at her and admire what was occurring – she was sleeping. She had a fair face and ruby red lips. Her hair was strawberry blonde and to me appeared to be the color of golden life. She was just so beautiful!

     Her body was firm and full but slight and skinny. She was absolutely a gift from God, whoever that was, and she was sleeping next to me. And she was incredible in bed, whether she was making love to me or simply sleeping. We loved sleeping together, because it signified the comfort that we held when we were together. We both swore that when we were asleep and dreaming, we were much happier if we were in each other’s arms. I do not think Marketa was lying.

     But there was more to it than sleeping. She always hated it when I spoke of my desire to sleep with her. She thought that I just wanted to literally sleep with her, and that I did not want to make love to her. At some points, this was true, but most of the time I wanted to give her all of my loving with all of my might. And she was incredibly receptive to my advances, especially on that first night. We exited Ralph’s room and the party that accompanied it quite mysteriously, attempting to draw no attention to ourselves and in this attempt we drew attention to ourselves – which in turn made us run even faster to my room where Marketa very quickly disappeared to the bathroom. It seemed like hours that she was in the bathroom, and while the hours passed I thought of things like men on the moon and my mother having sex with a Catholic priest. When she came out of the bathroom I felt a huge weight released from my endangered heart as she was naked and slid comfortably into the bed with me and we began to smother each other with kisses and caresses and love and we were in love.

     Anthony would have never understood how I fell in love so quickly the same night that I left him belligerently speaking to a police officer in Greenwich Village. His girlfriend was an ugly, appalling model that thought that she was cute and demanded Anthony to tell all his friends that she was the most beautiful girl in the world. Anthony was in love, and could do nothing about it.

     If Marketa ever met Anthony, which she never did, she would have shot him on the spot or killed him with a huge knife and watched him bleed to death with extreme pleasure. In Barcelona, she moved into Grandma Rosa’s apartment with comfort and with little remorse. Marketa wanted to meet Grandma Rosa, but Grandma Rosa was dead. Nevertheless, Marketa moved into my apartment and was very happy to live with me. She even thought that I was a good cook, though I could only make pasta and put some generic sauce on it with graded cheese and garlic and oregano. Marketa, it seemed, did not want to live in a hotel or with a host family.

     I did not care either way. I was in Barcelona to finish my guidebook for my literary agent. The guidebook was being sold to the highest bidder and I was going to be rich and give all of my money away to corrupt charities, but I still needed to, as my agent put it, "finish another draft and spice that sumbitch up!" He apparently wanted me to write about my many drunken experiences in Barcelona, and to move to the great Catalan city to get more details for the guidebook.

     The apartment I inherited from Grandma Rosa stood on Calle Breda in the neighborhood of Les Corts. She had moved from the Bario Gotico once her husband gave up the bar he owned and drank in daily. Marketa was not only on vacation for the holidays; she was moving to Barcelona. She would be studying at the University of Barcelona for the entire spring semester. She hated Brown and hated Providence and was excited to see Barcelona. Marketa had never been to Barcelona before and was excited to become a part of it. She had not been to Europe since she left Prague nearly sixteen years before. She had spent many summers in Argentina because her best friend from Boston had moved there with her family and she went to visit her every summer.

     Marketa’s best friend was named Emily and they teased each other like kids and wrote letters to each other like long lost lovers. Emily’s family moved to Argentina because they hated Boston and found wonderful opportunities in Buenos Aires.

     I loved Barcelona in the winter. The city was decorated with Christmas lights and beautiful holiday cheer. People rushed about the city looking for Christmas presents and for the Catalan celebration of the Three Kings – a thoughtful and strange observance of the biblical arrival of the Shepherds to little Jesus’ manger. And the mangers themselves, littered throughout the city in flea markets and special constructions always had Jesus, Mary, the shepherds, Joseph, and always, in the corner, a little boy taking a big old shit. It is a Catalan invention, to have a boy shitting in every manger only a few yards or inches away from Jesus. The point seems to be, shop well during the Christmas season, believe in Jesus and Christianity, and above all, take a lot of fulfilling and satisfying craps. Take a good crap.

     I took many a good crap and never bothered to tell Marketa to be careful as she entered the bathroom afterwards because I had left a big stink and had not lit a match. There were many problems with the relationship between Marketa and I, but principle among them was the fact that we had been dating for a year and a half and loved each other but found it absolutely unbearable to hang out with each other. I could not look at her face without feeling unbelievable scorn and love and pain and wonder and happiness and uncontrollable anger. When I thought of her, I loved her, but I hated her at the same time. She always hated my family and, even though I hated them too, could not forgive me for being a product of my father and my mother and my brothers and my sister.

     Eventually, we would turn to games in order to reinvigorate our relations. We would pretend to be meeting for the first time, even if we had already been together for sixteen months. The hotel in Newark is a good example of this. I knew she was flying out of Newark on the same flight as me to Barcelona, but we agreed that if I decided to come to the hotel after meeting Anthony that we would pretend not to know each other and see what would happen. The result was us sleeping together, the same result as the first time we met and actually did not know each other, when she slipped into my bed in New Jersey and awaited me to love her for the first time. This was the most exciting time either of us had ever known, and it was fun to recreate it sixteen months later, even if we both knew we were acting. The fact that we had to act in order to be pleased by each other was very disturbing, but the fact that we were willing to do it in order to continue on in each other’s lives was even more important, and we wanted to do anything in order to stay together.

     Which is why we moved to Barcelona together. She wanted to study abroad and get away from Brown and the pitiful scene that Providence represented, and I wanted to have a place of my own outside of the United States and away from my father that would be a sanctuary for my writing development. We never really wanted to live together but we ignored this fact and moved to Barcelona together with all the idiotic romantic notions that moving to another country together entailed hiding uncomfortably in our back pockets.

     My father called me and told me that cell phones were expensive. He was horrified that I had one, and demanded an explanation. I told him calmly that cell phones were cheaper in Spain than landline phones, but he did not buy that for a second. He told me that I was a bastard and a liar, and that he deserved a better explanation than that, especially since I was spending his money over in the barbarian land of Spain. I told him that it was my own money I was spending, and that he could hang the fuck up before I flew back to the United States to kick his ass. He hung up, while shouting something about emails and how they were very impersonal and that I had some nerve emailing my mother instead of calling to say that I had arrived safely over the phone. He also, before he slammed the phone down in frustrated conservatism, related the fact that Marketa was an unconscionable, immigrant whore and that as long as I was with her he never wanted to speak to me again. He often said things of this sort, and he always continued to talk to me despite his threats, because he wanted to keep saying things of this sort. He was not satisfied with the fact that he was not talking to me, for he wanted to explain to me in detail over and over again why he was not speaking to me in a very angry voice that bordered on fascist proportions. I loved conversing with my father because of the incredible intelligence that he always displayed and the interesting new ways he came up with in every new conversation to slander whatever it was that I was pursuing in my life at the time.

     Marketa hated my father and every time she met him she told him so. She liked meeting with him or coming to our house for dinner because there would inevitably be a fight and she loved to verbally abuse my father. She had a natural charm about her as she ripped into my father for his conservative Republicanism, and I felt naturally in love with her as she became more and more heated in her assault against my father and every one of his precious thoughts.

     In Barcelona, my father was not present, and so we came up with other problems for each other to fight about. Without fighting, Marketa and I felt bored and like an old couple who had already been married for forty to ninety years. She was a dynamic, intelligent, beautiful stranger who I never felt comfortable around because I always felt that she was eyeing me with a particular amount of discontent. She hated all of my habits, from how I showered to how I ate to what I ate to how much I drank to everything that I wrote. Where literary agents praised my work, Marketa carefully explained how terrible it was and how I would never be a great writer because I wrote guidebooks, even if I could survive and make a living at the absolutely horrific things I wrote. Yet when I was with her I felt more in love with everything than when I was not with her. Her smile and her smell and her medium-sized breasts left me feeling in awe of love every time I came in contact with them. Putting my lips softly on her cheek and smelling and feeling her essence was the privileged domain of ecstasy.

     When we met for the first time we simply clicked on a number of levels. We both could say anything we wanted to the other, and from the very beginning trusted each other with every thought we ever had to offer to the world. This feeling of absolute comfort, later to be replaced by a retreating wonder of what she would think of every thought I ever had, was a foreign feeling of love, a divine offering of beauty and wisdom from some deity that I did not believe in and furthermore had no idea existed. It his hard to describe how the comfort faded and the paranoia set in, but it must have had something to do with the fading of love at first sight into a search for that first sight once again as the months passed and the years began.

     We were in love, still, as we arrived in Barcelona. We were also in deep denial, for something great would have to change in order for us to survive as a couple. But our meeting was something great, and it was not so farfetched to imagine something as great as our meeting would happen again, like our rediscovery of why we fell in love in the first place. It is hard to describe how we fell in love in the first place, but I know that we did – I feel it and am amazed by it, and am even more in awe of the fact that she was almost impossible to leave behind, because she was as much a part of me as my heart, my body, my cigarettes, and my penis.

     Somewhere along the line of days that make up the order of late December, I met Whitney. She was not really a friend of Marketa, but they were acquaintances. They knew each other from Marketa’s Boston days, even though Whitney was from Las Vegas. Whitney grew up in Nevada and moved to Boston when she was sixteen; she attended the same high school as Marketa for a year and a half, and the two frequently fought, only agreeing that they liked each other though they hated each other’s points of views. They both had scene-dominating personalities. Whitney was a horseback rider with Olympic designs in the equestrian field, and Marketa hated sports such as horseback riding that cost so much money to participate in. Marketa hated golf as well because it cost nearly two thousand dollars to buy a decent set of irons and woods, a good three hundred and eighty five thousand pesetas, and never got along with A.J., who tried to explain to Marketa that golf would eventually be the avenue by which the world was saved.

     Whitney arrived in Barcelona in September, four months before we did, and she was going to study at the University of Barcelona for a whole year, as opposed to Marketa’s plan to study for only a semester. Whitney was a blonde with short, exquisite hair that made one want to kiss her ears extensively as her hair whispered over his lips. And after I kissed her ears, I was happy to have her hair whispering over my lips.

     Her ears were terribly in need of kissing. I tried to resist kissing them, but it was just impossible. I could have resisted, but I wanted to kiss her, and so I did. I was with Marketa and we were with Whitney, and then Marketa decided she wanted to leave us and go to sleep, so she did. And so Whitney and I were left alone to our own devices and we went out.

     Marketa was Jewish and our Christmas celebration was somewhat of a disaster. I did not believe in anything, but I believed in Jesus and the Immaculate Conception so we were left with our own immaculate difference, which on Christmas became indifference, and we agreed to celebrate Christmas alone together. There was a bar, and it served us beers, and in these beers we drowned our sorrows and got drunk. I do not remember saying anything of consequence to Marketa that evening, though I was speaking very rapidly in my drink, and was pontificating over the differences between Barcelona and St. Petersburg.

     This was all very boring to Marketa, and she wanted to know why I was such a huge fan of horseback riding. I had to explain to her, over another round of beers, which we were ordering three at a time, that my sister Emily had once been an equestrian star in her own right and it was quite an interesting sport.

     I remember very clearly going to Pennsylvania to see Emily ride in Grand Prix’s and the like and being fascinated by the grace and precision that the sport demanded. Emily had to ride around the ring, jumping huge show jumping fences that were nearly six feet tall and strategically placed, without knocking down a single rail. Those horses who made it through the first round without a ‘fault,’ which was the word for knocking down a rail of the fences, would then race around the ring in a jump off. These jump offs were a scene of wonder and particular enjoyment for me, because the horses and their conductors not only had to avoid acquiring faults again, but had to be the fastest, disallowing the careful nature in which they use in order to get into the jump off.

     Emily was a very good equestrian. She was at once cautious and quick as lightening firing around those difficult, meticulous Grand Prix courses. Marketa listened to my story patiently and then lashed into a huge tirade disowning every connection she ever had to my family. It was not even satisfying to her that I had disowned my family long ago, nor was it enough of a correction that Emily eventually quit the professional equestrian world to join the medical field – my father would never have agreed to have a daughter as a professional equestrian, for this was not a justified profession for an American to pursue. Marketa hated my sister no matter whether she was an equestrian or a doctor, or whether she was alive or dead, of which she was unquestionably the latter.

     Whitney loved my stories about my sister. I hated the stories about my sister because I never particularly loved her. But I felt that I was suddenly in love with Whitney, and listened passionately to her stories about horseback riding and felt a deep emotional bond with her. Or maybe it was a deep physical bond, because her full, tiny lips were attached to mine almost from the moment that we started dancing in the expensive club on Carrer de Lincoln. Or at least that is what I imagined.

     The club was expensive and it cost nearly fourteen hundred pesetas for a Red Bull and Vodka, which was the only drink that would make me dance adequately. Whitney looked at me with lost eyes and a strange smile. It was as if I drugged her, which I did not. She had been in Barcelona for nearly five months, and she had dated, or so she said, the same guy the entire time. He was a pot-bellied millionaire named Pep who was thirty-four and did not care who Whitney hooked up with as long as she slept in his bed every night and gave him a blow job every morning. In return, Whitney was showered with material gifts like clothes, beers, books, and the best in mobile phone technology.

     My mobile phone went off in the club but I did not hear it because I was kissing Whitney and the music was thumping all around me at a wonderful pace. My head was spinning from the vodka and my heart was thumping from the tireless pace that Whitney and I were kissing and fondling each other at. Marketa was trying to call me. She was happy that I was having fun, the message later said on my voice mail, and would be waiting patiently for me to return to the bed on Calle Breda in the apartment that Grandma Rosa left me after her fourth heart attack killed her stone dead.

     Normal instincts would be to feel guilt when hearing such a message, especially when you have been having fun at the particular expense of your girlfriend, but it did not affect me in this way. When we left the club I got the message and then disregarded it as Marketa being unusually nice to me and that she would be mean again tomorrow, thus justifying walking Whitney home and kissing her the entire way, making the walk interminably long and patiently marvelous. The stars were bright in the sky and the constellations were speaking to us in a muted drone over the loud dull of the city’s medium-sized buildings. We imagined ourselves living on one of the far away planets without any hint of Pep or Marketa, and then I dropped Whitney off at Pep’s house and made my way back to Calle Breda, where Marketa waited patiently in my bed.

     "You should go out with somebody more like Whitney. She’s much more suited to you than me." Marketa looked at me over her Christmas beers and presently ordered a vodka and peach juice because she hated beer. "You had so much fun dancing with her last week that you did not even have sex with me when you got back. Maybe you just wanted to have sex with her you rotten, evil bastard."

     I did not particularly appreciate Marketa’s attempts to cheer me up by suggesting another girl should replace her. It seemed to me that it reeked with the motives of luring me into self-sabotage that Marketa so often succumbed to. Why would she invest time in attempts to convince me to go out with other women? It was completely beyond me and it made me angry enough to slam my glass of beer down on the ground, shattering it in one thousand pieces, and causing a stir among the innocent Christmas drinkers in the bar. They looked at us not only as if we were crazy, but as if we were idiots, because we were so obviously in love and so obviously in search of a fight.

     I was in love with Marketa. She had the smile that made me continuously strive to make her smile again, just so I could witness it again. I have never before, nor after, witnessed a smile such as hers. It is incomprehensible for me to even imagine a smile that would compare. I loved to compare Marketa to other girls because I loved Marketa, and Marketa always won whenever I began a new comparison. The comparisons continued forever, and so did our relationship, at least until it momentarily began to end when she told me that Whitney was better suited to me than she was.

     Whitney was never a perfect fit for me and only could have been fit for me on strange nights with brilliant stars and even more brilliant drunkenness. She was too accepting of my ways for me to even comprehend accepting her; she was a dashing, dancing, princess who was so within my reach that I did not even want to touch her the moment after I kissed her. I kissed her again, but only because I was kissing her, and every time I kissed her again I swore I would never kiss her again, only to kiss her again. She was not evil, but she was too receptive of my advances, and I was damn angry that she had accepted them in the first place. We never really understood each other, and Marketa and I always understood each other. I never loved Whitney, and I would always love Marketa.

     But there were always other people, and I never had to concentrate my life in the beauty of my girlfriend. If I could have had another Christmas the day after the day of Christmas, I would have returned to New Jersey and argued gratefully with my father. My mother would have smiled at our arguments, because I would have been under her roof. But my mother was an ignorant, lying woman who never believed in her own happiness because she never possessed it. My father could have given a fig about his wife’s happiness, and I suppose that I could never have given a fig about it either. She was the one who decided to marry my father, not me, and I had never once thanked her for bringing me into this world, though I had thanked her many a time for beautiful dinners and food that approached the tendencies of the serene.

     Though I loved Marketa, I still did not really want to spend Christmas with her in a tiny and disastrous bar in my neighborhood. I did not want to spend Christmas in my apartment either, and I suppose I did not want to spend Christmas anywhere. But the general trend of our life had started to develop before Christmas, in the week that we arrived in mid-December, as Barcelona was unusually chilly and strikingly sterile by way of personality. We had no doubt conquered the continuous longing for sex that we had when we were in the United States and living in different housing stratagem by moving to Barcelona, but now we were faced with the opposite, with the strange and loving desire to not have sex and to not be with each other. This new development was extremely difficult for me to deal with, and I failed at dealing with it with levelheaded sobriety, mainly because I was always wasted out of my mind and writing continuously.

     To say that we were no longer in love would be a misstatement, for we were more in love with each other than ever before. We were drawn to each other like a dry forest is to fire, and we could not resist finding each other’s company, even in Grandma Rosa’s aged, huge apartment, only to fight once we were in each other’s loving presence. It was indeed an odd combination of love and frustration, and there was no way to ease the pain, because we loved each other too much and were too annoyed by each other’s habits. In particular, Marketa was severely opposed to nearly everything I held sacred in my life. She loved everything about me as a person, but scorned everything I actually did as a person.

     By now, I was writing a novel as well as another draft of the Barcelona guidebook. I would write for long, tired hours about old girlfriends and the contradictions within my life and the family that I was born into. I would drink the entire time, beer after beer, and smoke cigarette after cigarette as I blew and drank my sorrows into the page, blatantly ignoring everything that Marketa wanted to do.

     The main problem with Marketa, as near as I could figure, was that she had nothing that she wanted to do. She was the most intelligent woman I had ever met, and her interests were far ranging, but she had no desire to select excursions or decide which type of art she wanted to see on any given day. So, despite my obvious desire to write and to be separate from her for a spell, she would demand that I go with her to do something, and on top of that, that I manage to conjure up the plan for the day that we would spend together. I would be forced, completely against every whim that I held dear to my heart, to schedule the days that I did not want to spend with her in the first place. Instead of being completely psyched to spend a quiet evening with her after a long day of writing, I would find myself annoyed that I had accomplished nothing and that my tireless desire to write was subjugated yet another time by Marketa’s selfish desires, and find myself helplessly annoyed by her beautiful face.

     I wanted to write by day, and pass the time by night having sex with her, but this would never happen, because we would be on excursions to god knows where and then I would want to write at night, which would frustrate Marketa to the end of the earth, where she belonged in the first place. My love for Marketa was unending.

     Where the time stopped or went I had no idea. I felt like my responsibilities were doubling and tripling, which was a considerable shock considering I was supposed to have no responsibilities at all and could not reasonably explain to anyone I came across what exactly it was that I was doing in Barcelona. It seemed reasonable to me, but I cannot necessarily put my finger on where I was heading or what my motives were. I had a specific desire to right things with Marketa, and I had an unending desire to write, and to write again. Considering that these two desires, my two only desires besides drinking endlessly and filling my face and lungs and head with clouds of cigarette smoke, which undeniably calmed my faulty nerves and nervous brain, were absolutely at odds with each other, each day became increasingly more difficult to deal with. Marketa loved that I was a writer, but hated it whenever I was writing.

     When we met, she was quite sure that I was an obtrusive, alcoholic, destructive, pre-Madonna who had very little to say of any value at all, but who was very intriguing, and quite nice to play with in the bed. I often thought I would write a novel, if I ever had the courage, called La Guapa en Mi Cama, or The Pretty Girl In My Bed. I never did write any such novel, because I was forever unable to write about Marketa.

     My father had his fifth heart attack when I charged six thousand dollars on his credit card on Christmas Eve in Barcelona on whores. This one would prove to be the heart attack that finally did him in for good, and I was proud that it was my fault, and that I did not even die in causing his heart attack and his subsequent death. The experts thought that he would make it through this violent, wonderful, uprising of his internal system, but they were wrong – again. He died, and his famous, or infamous last words were – "if that rat bastard of a son wants to buy whores with my money he can do it, but I will not be around to witness it, he will only be able to get more whores over my Conservative dead…" And that was the end of that.

     I suppose my mother was upset, but I did not really care, or know for sure, because I did not go to the funeral or even send a card or a flower. It was sad for the family, or whatever remained of it, but I had long since ceased to consider myself a part of it, and felt no qualms about ignoring the funeral and the mourning period that is supposed to come with death. My father was a battered, breathless man whose whiskey was as much a part of him as his Conservatism. I was happy that he was dead, and I went out and got wasted with Marketa on Christmas in celebration.

     This was one of the main problems in our Christmas celebration, her apparent disgust for my content nature and attitude in the wake of the awful yet historic death of my father (his death was only to be described as historic because it marked the end of my family’s history – thus the use of the word historic). Hysteria, though, is what I felt, and I could not hide it. I was not celebrating the birth of Christ, but the death of my father, who was, in a way, a self-appointed heir to Christ.

     Marketa was distraught with a thousand impossibilities. The impossibility of sitting with me in a sketchy bar in Barcelona on Christmas, whether or not she was Jewish, was something that she could never have predicted, and she loved to predict, despite her whimsical nature and slightly off-kilter personality. She thought it even more impossible that she ever met, and more to the point, fell in love with someone like me, someone she hated and loved at once, and still hated and loved to that very day. She hated my father, but she hated even more that I celebrated his death.

     "Are you actually happy that your father just died?"

     "Why wouldn’t I be? I hated him."

     "But he’s your fucking father David!"

     "And he was a person, and I can hate whichever person I want to hate, no matter what you try to tell me about paternal importance."

     "People should not hate people."

     "Do you hate the memory of Hitler?"

     "Yes."

     "Then you hate people too."

     "I hate what he did, not him."

     "Are we even talking right now?"

     And the thing was, we were not talking. Marketa was unsuccessfully attempting to make me seem like an evil bastard for appreciating happily the death of my father. I was an evil bastard, to be sure, but Marketa was continuously frustrated that she could never find the right reasons to prove exactly why I was an evil bastard.

     I did not frustrate the whores, because I paid them nearly six thousand dollars and had sex with them over and over again. There were only two of them, so I should probably not embellish my first experience with whores by saying whores (plural) because it sounds like an orgy in which I was able to have sex with thousands of girls for thousands of dollars. But they were sisters, and one was a virgin, which is why the whole thing cost so damn much and my father had a heart attack and died without offspring that he could be proud of. They were both beautiful. The virgin was much taller and skinnier, but they both had long blonde hair and were precious specimens of female beauty.

     The virgin felt very nervous as I entered her auspiciously and used my impeccable rhythm to please her to the frontiers of ecstasy that she previously did not know existed. It was like a flight into outer space or a trip to the backwoods of China or the foothills of the Himalayas or even to the peak of Mt. Everest, it was something she never thought would actually occur, and when it occurred, it was much better than she could have possibly imagined. Or maybe it was what I could have possibly imagined, and she had nothing to do with it, and hated me, and hated the whole thing, and was not even a virgin. Of course the whole thing was mutual, and that is what made it pleasurable, because we both wanted to do it and we both wanted to be together forever – thus the basic principle of good sex – love.

     The fact that I fell in love with this whore who was no longer a virgin annoyed Whitney to no end. Whitney wanted me to be in love with her, but I was in love with Marketa. It was not as confusing as it sounds, because I went to the brothel at a respectable hour in the afternoon and returned home to Marketa at nine in the evening just in time for a wonderful dinner. The revolution in my mind had not yet occurred, for I did not realize that I had done anything wrong, and I was vaguely aware that most of my life was imagined.

     But I loved Marketa since the first moment I saw her. We spoke softly to each other and yelled at each other right from the inception of our relations. Our relationship was wonderful, and yet I had found myself cheating on her continuously since we had arrived in Barcelona. It was inexplicable, for I had never cheated on her before and was becoming the man I had always hated – the husband. I did not want to be the husband, at least not now, before we had been ready to be married.

     We went on vacation after Christmas, fleeing the beauty of Barcelona for that of Prague, where we decided to spend some time with Marketa’s mother, much like a married couple took a vacation to see the family over the holidays. Marketa’s mother still lived in Prague, in the center of town near Wenceslas Square, and was an artist. She was only thirty-eight, and was much more the child of the family than her daughter. She lived with an emerging potter from Texas. Joe, the potter from Texas, had moved to Prague fives years before and was attempting, quite successfully, to start a trade there and live off the thriving tourist scene. He met Marketa’s mother, a small, beautiful, angular, youngish woman named Elena in a bar one evening and they had been living and creating together since he arrived in Prague.

     Joe left Texas because he felt that people hated artists there, and he was sick of being a well-paid bartender who never got a chance to drink himself. He had saved up plenty of money, and the dollar went a long way in Prague, as did his trade. Coupled with the painting brilliance of Elena, they owned a store just off the Old Town Square in the center of town that sold their crafts and made a healthy living off the tourists who could not resist handing their credit cards over continuously to the bulbous, fat clerk who worked for them while they toiled away at new projects in their respective studios.

     We arrived in the Czech Republic with a decided air of uncertainty. We were very happy to be traveling together, if only because we had an incredible amount of fun together once we forgot the inauspicious fact that everyone we knew thought we were going to get married. It was sort of a form of release, for we could travel and spend time together and be together continuously without worrying about the foreboding signs that thoughts of the future presented to us. There was no past, and there was no future, and this is when we were at our most content. There was no wary of lost moments or the imminent failure of the future, there was only the moment, in which we were continuously in love. I loved her smell, and I loved the fragrance of every inch of her body, and I knew, as she smelled my armpits innocently, almost aboriginal in nature, that she felt the same about my odorous affront. I always smelled of cigarettes and alcohol, and of course of the mints that I popped every moment I could in order to mask the previous two aromas, yet she still dwelled in my scent continuously.

     The trip had more to do with Marketa and her mother than it did with our relationship, which took even more pressure off the two of us. Marketa had not seen her mother in nearly sixteen years, since she left the country of her birth, and her mother was as much of a mystery to Marketa as our relationship was. Elena was waiting for us at the airport with Joe, and the meeting that ensued was uncomfortable and clearly a result of only forging a relationship in the previous year.

     Marketa’s father was a militant, jovial, loving man of forty-five years who refused to recognize that Marketa actually had a mother. He was a Renaissance man of sorts, still studying and taking classes and acquiring various degrees as he worked in the fringe of the Boston business world. He worked for the Boston Red Sox, the baseball team, selling advertising space to prospective advertisers and helping to shape the public marketing of the team as a public entity. He was the Publicity Director, a job that paid well and left him plenty of spare time to pursue scholarly degrees and study the philosophical side of life. His name was Karlov, and he was a proud Czech nationalist, economist, and American Democrat. He believed in the rights of the workers, of the eventual fact that Marxism would be proved historically accurate, and loathed communism in practice.

     He left the Czech Republic, with little Marketa following happily in tow, for the green shores of Boston in February of 1981, and he would never return to the country of his birth. He worked odd jobs and eventually found himself in night school to get his degree in marketing, and the fact that he was a drinking buddy of nearly everyone in Beantown eventually made it easy for him to get a job with the Red Sox, where he worked his way up due to a workaholic attitude and an unsinkable desire to do the best he possibly could for a sport he hated.

     But Karlov guarded Marketa jealously, and did not want her to have any contact with her mother. He and her mother had never been on good terms to begin with, and he felt that a relationship between Marketa and her mother would be an emotional disaster, and that nothing good would come of it. Karlov resented what he considered to be Elena’s strange desire to stay on in Prague even when he had acquired visas for the three of them through tireless effort and an acute imagination. He refused to give Elena his home address and only communicated to her through various work addresses, so as to not risk the possibility of a letter reaching Marekta’s hands from her mother, which could be disastrous, given the inherent need of a daughter to speak to her mother.

     This all changed when Marketa violently demanded on her nineteenth birthday to be given the key to communication with her mother. Karlov fished out his former lover’s address in Prague and handed it to Marketa. He was overcome by a sense of remorse that he had made his failings with Marketa’s mother absolutely destroy any possibility of a relationship that the mother and daughter could have had together.

     We went out to a smug, terrible Czech bar for dinner, and did not eat much. I drank a lot of beer, and was happy to meet Elena. She seemed like everything I had ever hoped for in a mother. She was obviously anti-American, yet sweet, and intrigued and in love with her daughter while she found it difficult, especially at this early stage, to get along with her. I found us to be very similar, and we toasted each other and I felt very comfortable while noticing that Marketa was not comfortable.

     It was a little surreal to be sitting there with them, among a family reunion gone wrong or never supposed to occur, wishing that I was not there but so happy to be there. Marketa wanted to travel with me, but she had seemingly forgotten that I would be with her while we were traveling together. I sensed that she needed to be with her mother alone, and as soon as the meal of beer ended, I took off with Joe for a night on the town while Marketa and her mother started out on the healthy road to familiar recovery.

     Joe and I had quite an evening. We started out by going to a place right underneath the popular tourist destination of the James Joyce Pub. When you pass the pub that is inexplicably named after the famous, delirious writer, you find yourself at an unmarked stairway, which leads down into the midst of nowhere. Downstairs, if you dare to make the plunge, is a cellar made of stone and decaying walls that emits an aroma of something that is awful, and very quickly you explain the smell as the dank scent of aging beer.

     It was a terrible place with warm, friendly Czech people who drank their cheap pilsner and smiled at every face that passed by them. There was very little room to move about, as the place only held six, tightly compacted yet huge booths to sit in. Joe and I found a place next to two beautiful Czech women, or who we assumed to be Czech women, at a table that could hold eight comfortably.

     "I love this place. I always come here." Joe flagged the welcoming waiter down and ordered two beers.

     "How did you find this place?" I was curious how Joe, so obviously an American and yet so obviously not a tourist, and so obviously not old and so obviously not young, had found this dungeon-like fortress of the cheapest beer.

     "To be honest with you, David, I have no idea." The beers had already arrived. The waiter, a late twenty-something with long curly hair and a tiny pierce in his nose, put down a thin, long rectangular piece of paper on the huge mass of wooden table before us and expertly marked it with two chicken scratch marks that must have signified our two beers. "I guess I sort of stumbled in here one night with a few of the locals I am friends with. You know, no memory of coming here, except the path that would lead me back once I needed to be drunk again."

     The beers were oddly warm, but were perfect. They cost nearly thirty-eight cents each, if you involve the latest currency rate between the dollar and the Crona, for a half a liter of beer. "What does your girlfriend think about Marketa?"

     "It is hard for her to think anything at all. She’s wanted for a number of years to be in touch with her, but has never been able to come any nearer to her than her protective father."

     "I had a protective father."

     "Where are you from?"

     "I am from the lonely northwestern New Jersey."

     "You sound like a writer."

     "I am a writer."

     "What do you write?"

     "Whatever the Great Creator dictates." I paused after this statement, chugging my entire beer and laughing at the mock sincerity in my voice. Somehow, the waiter had been anticipating my next move, and I had another half liter of beer waiting for me as I placed the empty and somewhat desperate glass down on the huge, wooden table. The waiter fired another chicken scratch mark on the long, thin piece of paper. "I try to write novels, but sometimes my job is to write guidebooks."

     "Anything good?"

     "Not yet. But I do have a literary agent in Boston who seems to believe in me and is trying to sell my first guidebooks. I haven’t told him I want to be an novelist yet."

     "He’s a fucking moron, isn’t he."

     "I cannot imagine a more idiotic cunt on the face of this world." I was starting to warm up to this bar. "So how did you meet Elena?"

     "In a bar much like this one." He paused, looking me over; I wondered whether he appreciated me or even liked me or rather hated me. "How did you meet Marketa?"

     "A long drunken day in my dreams."

     "That, my new friend, is a good answer." Joe toasted me and chugged the rest of his beer. He was happy to be with me, and I was very confused as to why he was happy to be with me.

     "She sort of appeared out of nowhere in a park." I had told this story so many times, and I was quite good at it at this point, and the interest in the listener, as my story-telling ability increased, never ceased to amaze me.

     "In a park?"

     "Well, in Central Park."

     "In Central Park. And you picked her up, did you?" Joe pulled a cigarette out of his wool shirt, a shirt many would later describe a typically Joe shirt, and lit it up with an unusual sense of enjoyment. "Did you enjoy her? I mean, she is one of the most beautiful girls I have ever seen in my life."

     The smoke blew into my face and I could only light a cigarette of my own and blow it in his face.

     "Of course I did. But it did not start like that, it was more of a romantic…" I paused, unable to continue, only able to converse with my beer, in which I was counting many things, including the lifespan of my life.

     "A romantic what?"

     "A wonderful romantic occasion in which we found ourselves totally in love and have not been able to get over since." I had never before been able to put it so simply, but it was the truth. We were in love, and we could not stop being in love, and that was where most of our problems stemmed from. I had no desire to be with anyone else, which is probably why I cheated on Marketa, and she had no desire to be with anyone else, which is probably why she cheated on me. Imagine affairs are just as dangerous as physical affairs.

     She thought that the Argentinean man she met working as a hostess one night in a terribly expensive Boston restaurant would be the answer to all of the problems between her and I. She figured, quite prudently, that if she found someone else, she would not have to be so in love with me all the time. She was wrong, of course, and she came crying to me and confessed immediately, something I would not have expected but certainly appreciated, and we were both overcome by a fear of ever touching someone else again. She said, or she tried to say, for I would not let her talk for very long, that it was the worst experience of her life and it simply did not feel right, even if he was a distant relative of Juan Perón, extremely good looking, rich, and wonderfully romantic, and not a terrible drunk like me.

     "I am not sure why we fell in love in the first place, but we did."

     "And now you can’t fall out of love." He slowed his speech as if we were about to say something very important, "but do you want to fall out of love?"

     "Absolutely not."

     "So why sweat it?"

     "Because we are driving each other absolutely insane."

     "What do you think love is about? Listen, when you really love someone, I mean truly love someone, you want him or her to be perfect or the best they can be. Simple annoyances can be blown out of proportion, her habit of brushing her teeth eight times a day, his habit of brushing his teeth only twice a day – her demand of him to only drink a certain number of beers a day, his wish that she would just relax – these are minor things, really nothing in the face of love, but they get blown out of proportion very quickly because we want the people we love to be the best possible person for us. Even though, of course, no one is perfect for anyone, and this is too much to wish for. This is what you need to realize David, and you have to let some things go and let the love take over." He patted my back with a patriarchal sense of wisdom, "if I were you, I would have sex with her more often, because she is the most beautiful girl on the planet and no doubt, judging by her spunky and outgoing personality, a sexual dynamo. This, my future son-in-law, will make her happier and make you happier, and – more to the point – will leave you both more willing to accept your true love’s inherent and unchangeable faults."

     This potter made a lot of sense. He was a tortured soul who never found love until he met Elena five years ago. He was growing pot-bellied, his hair was thinning on the top, and it was ridiculously overgrown into a huge, curly bush of nonsense that made him look like a mad professor who had just been electrocuted. His legs were long, his arms even longer, and he walked with his back arched just slightly forward, angling in front of him as if he were continuously searching for the future or for the next beer. He was strikingly handsome, with a chiseled, large, defined nose and a pair of blue eyes that hinted at the sky of a gray Prague morning. Though showing the signs of age, he was aging gracefully, and I suddenly thought him to be my best friend in the world.

     "I suddenly find you to be my best friend in the world."

     "That is, I am sorry to say, very sad."

     "No one ever understands me. Everyone my age in America is in search of money, not artistic genius."

     "You can’t find artistic genius."

     "Ah but you can find your own artistic genius. I know that not everyone has it, but I know that those who do have it have to search for it and pull it out of themselves, which is a tortuous process, and sometimes too painful and difficult to achieve. I know I have artistic genius, but it is just so sinuous a procedure."

     "That it is. And you may have artistic genius, indeed it seems as if you do. You have a strange way of expressing yourself that allows others to know, without knowing why, exactly what you are trying to convey. You choose your words carefully and somehow without thought." Joe the potter raised his hand violently into the air as if he were trying to cut it in half, ordering another beer with a torrent of physical emotion. "But, it is still sad, my future son-in-law, that I am your best friend in the world."

     "Who is your best friend?"

     "Your future mother-in-law."

     "Besides Elena."

     "Probably my work. But if you are speaking of a human, perhaps this bartender over here." The beer arrived fast. The bartenders were the same men who brought us our beers and served as our waiters. It was a fairly unique Czech system, and the fluidity of it all was a thing of beauty for the drinker at heart.

     "Seriously."

     "Well, I guess you’re my best friend too."

     My new best friend and I had no idea what was happening in the family reunion section of Prague, where Elena and Marketa were making their first attempts at salvaging a loving relationship and somehow having fun at the same time. It was a very abnormal vacation.

     They fought for the first four hours, as we drank beer and became comfortable with our developing relationship. Joe and I walked around the great city of Prague, indeed the Golden City, and stopped in random places to have beers and chat more about our newfound friendship.

     "Do you think they are fighting?"

     "I have been with Elena for five years, and I know that they are fighting."

     We could only find out at a much later hour that Marketa and her mother’s meeting had gone quite well and quite bad, as was to be expected. We returned and found the two of them sleeping in a warm embrace on the couch. We woke them up and were ready to party. We had a jug of cheap Spanish wine and we thought that if we drank it all, it would make the apartment seem less glum. The apartment seemed to be sort of glum, in a state of sadness and the moods of its inhabitants was screaming – "alright, what now?!"

     They accepted the drink quite happily. It was time to have some fun. We chugged the wine gleefully and listened and danced to Joe’s favorite band, the Grateful Dead. Perhaps it was the Jerry Garcia Band, but I cannot be sure, for I was already drunk and getting even more drunk by the second. Everyone was happy, and the sight of Marketa dancing with her mother was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Despite all their problems and the effects of neglect that would linger on for years to come, they were truly ecstatic to be reunited.

     After the wine was done and the music died down, I had an almost uncontrollable desire to sleep with Marketa at that very moment, to take her and rip her clothes off and absolutely fill herself, and in turn myself, with pleasure. So I did.

     We said goodnight, and went into the guest bedroom and turned some music of our own on. It was techno, Spanish techno, and it was loud and it was bad but it was good to keep our drunken joints from faltering and depriving us of sex, sweet sex. We were savages. Our warm layers of clothing were torn off within eight seconds, and our nakedness felt even warmer as our bodies pressed together provided more heat than any number of blankets or furnaces could provide. Her body was so smooth against mine. We were of equal height and weight, and there was always a struggle for each of us to dominate the other, a sort of medieval battle for control, carried out not only in the bedroom of our lives but in all corners of our relations. We wrestled each other and licked and caressed every part of each other’s bodies. After what seemed like an eternity, satisfaction was eventually achieved.

     The techno music faded out and the house became quiet, but we could hear, only faintly, Elena and Joe playing their own sex games of conquest and pursuit, while we both passed out tranquilly in the exact position where we finished. I did not have enough energy to roll off her or to take myself out of her.

     The next morning went smoothly enough. Breakfast came at noon and we all seemed a little hungover, and anyhow eager to repeat the fun of the evening before. We felt comfortable, just the four of us, and whatever fighting went on between Elena and Marketa was now fading as a motherly sense of persuasion, or rather a desire to be friends instead of parental and daughterly, took over. We walked and walked again around the center of Prague all of the day, and were absolutely content to be with each other.

     It was two days after Christmas. We were planning on going to San Sebastian for the New Year. We were meeting my brother A.J. there, who was traveling to San Sebastian against his parents’ wishes, or his mother’s wishes, because my father was dead as hell.

     "So I am sorry to hear that your father died." Elena’s words cut like a knife through my heart. I was happy that he was dead, but I had never heard anyone express grief to me over his death before, and was shocked that I actually felt grief as well. Even Marketa had not showed any grief when she was belligerently arguing that I should show some remorse on Christmas.

     "It was his fifth heart attack. It finally did him in."

     "What caused it?" Elena was curious, and somewhat motherly and nostalgic in her speech. She must have felt the loss of her daughter until now, and was horrified at the thought of Marketa losing her, even if they never knew each other very well until the instant of the past couple of days. "Please, tell me if you mind me asking."

     "Not at all. It’s odd, the other heart attacks were caused by death in the family or disappointment, but this one is still a mystery." I could not very well tell them, my new family, that it was because I was visiting a whorehouse on Christmas Eve and charged so much money on my father’s credit card that he could no longer breathe. I choked with laughter that I attempted, unsuccessfully, to hide. "I guess he’ll never be able to tell us why."

     "‘Deaths in the family?’" Joe was now interested, Marketa horrified. She hated to revisit my family’s awful fate, probably because it proved her theories of our imminent demise to be true.

     "My older sister Emily, shot dead in Phoenix on a badly planned golfing vacation." Elena and Joe gasped in horror; I continued. "My brother George, shot, like a skeet disc, through the heart, by the Mafia." I rubbed my own temple in contemplation and was surprised to find not even a twinge of remorse in my voice, for my father or for my dead siblings. "I guess it was a little much."

     Elena felt obliged to say something, as she was the one who brought the subject up, but could not think of anything reasonable to say. "Well, I am sorry to hear that." Maybe she could simply not think of anything intelligent to say.

     Joe had no family. His father was as dead as mine was. He died when Joe was only six years old - an accident in the workplace. A swinging blade chopped off his head when he passed out drunk on his workbench. What this involved in particular is unbeknownst to me, but I get a violent picture in my head as I try to imagine the obviously gruesome death. Joe’s father was a worker in an auto factory, much like my grandfather, and I believe it was in Detroit as well. My new best friend’s mother died in an auto accident when she fell asleep at the wheel and drove off a cliff in Big Sur two years later. Joe, now an orphan, moved to Texas to live with his crazy uncle, who lived on the farm that formerly belonged to William S. Burroughs. His crazy uncle, Joe’s mother’s second cousin, was the last of any family connections for Joe, and the KKK hanged him in a mass riot when Joe was only twenty. Joe’s crazy uncle, a proud and vehemently radical intellectual who worked as a clerk in the Texas State Supreme Court in Austin, was black.

     Joe, a very bright man, then worked as a journalist for nearly twenty years, submitting articles to random publications as varied as Time, the Nation, and the Economist, before giving it all up, along with the ranch where Burroughs probably wrote Naked Lunch, and moved to Prague to become a potter and find love. He was succeeding, so far, and there was absolutely no reason for him to dwell on his past, which most people would probably dwell on indefinitely. I felt very close to my new best friend. I too had learned to separate myself from my past, and indeed to feed on it. So much tragedy can taste very good if you are connected to it by blood yet mentally entirely indifferent to the problems it can cause to your skull.

     During the Reagan administration, Joe had caused some delicious political controversy in the state of Texas that he was particularly proud of, and, at this moment, as we sat down to our first beers of the day and segued away from the horrible history of our families, for some unknown reason, he was moved to speak about this fortunate development.

     He was writing for a spell for the Houston Gazette, a religiously and rigidly conservative periodical, and his editors were aghast by the columns he wrote and their anti-Republican and anti-Reagan rhetoric, and even more aghast at the sharp increase of sales that followed in the backlash of Joe’s ideas. Conservatives were so horrified by what he was writing that they had to buy the paper just to see what new ideas they would have to refute while getting wasted in the local saloons after the markets closed on any given evening, and Liberals were so amazed by their thoughts being put into words in the Conservative mouthpiece of Texas that they simply had to buy the Gazette in order to find out what ideas they would be defending that evening in the local saloons after the markets closed. Happy hour had never been so intense, and Joe was the cause. The ideas that he presented were widely held, but usually only whispered, kept quiet by the loud, cocaine-filled breeze of economic success and corporate gluttony that dominated the Reagan years. Joe’s ideas were the worst nightmare for any well-dressed Reaganite whose idea of success was excess and was horrified to think the excessive nature of the Reagan years would turn into a recession and very nearly a depression. The fact that the Vice President, the well-traveled and very intelligent yet largely ineffective George Bush, was from Texas, did not help the situation at all, and eventually Joe and all his ideas, indeed the secret ideals of the entire nation, were wiped away like dust balls with a tired and rigid broom. It ended right there, and Time and other such publications only accepted Joe’s articles when he wrote a review of a new movie or something else entertainment oriented.

     Joe’s time was short in the spotlight, because he was too controversial to survive the mainstream – he was made to sell pottery and homemade kitchenware in Prague, a wonderful destiny, a destiny that I would only imagine for the best of men. He was the Hunter S. Thompson of the eighties, though he wrote when the nation’s mood was extremely conservative, unlike Hunter, and it is no coincidence that Joe fled the country in the wake of his controversial stance against the Man and Hunter kept quiet in the eighties, waiting for the nineties to publish his best book, Generation of Swine. Also, Hunter S. wrote for Rolling Stone, not for one of the most jealously guarded bastions of Conservative rhetoric in the hallowed state of Texas. For once, the Conservatives ignored sales and fired Joe, making Joe very happy, for he had obviously affected quite a lot of ignorant idiots.

     A.J. was not aware of Joe or even of the fact that we were in Prague. He was smoking dope in Amsterdam. He was so high that one night he stumbled down the street and met his girlfriend, a beautiful, Belgian princess of a woman who was twenty-five and immediately fell in love with A.J. I bet you thought I was going to say that he was going to die. Not all of my family dies, at least not yet anyway. Annemie could not take her eyes off of A.J. and was fascinated with his stories about becoming President of the United States, and even more fascinated by his fascination with golf. They were married in a chapel in the red light district of Amsterdam and she promised, two days after meeting him, to look after him until the day he died.

     A.J. was not a good-looking young kid. He had long blonde hair that went halfway down his back and the only apparent esthetic use for this hair was to take the eyes of those that viewed him in the streets and in the bars off his face and his huge, scarred nose and nasty black eyes. Or perhaps this is just a brotherly hatred of how a sibling looks, and perhaps A.J. was what those in literary circles might dub as "ruggedly handsome." I do not know, and I was so shocked by the email I received in Prague about A.J.’s marriage that I resorted to drinking eight whiskeys and wandering away from Joe, Marketa, and Elena, and ended up on top of a statue on the Karlova Most (Charles Bridge) singing love songs and Beatles’ tunes at the top of my lungs. I had apparently lost it, probably because my brother was married and, well, and whatnot. The alarmed Czech citizens and marveling tourists all pointed at me, which only made me sing louder and flounder even more. Some of the wanderers tried to throw me money, or looked for a hat on the bridge where I was accepting donations, as if I were in the midst of a spectacular performance, but I was simply wasted and wondering when the hell I would get married, and if it would be Marketa that I would marry.

     I do not remember much, and I am not a fan of recounting the whole story of my own inherent familiar and linear brush with death, but I might as well say that there was a sudden dizzy spell that caused me to look up at the sky and search for guidance. Then the sky began to, slowly at first, and then very rapidly, but still in slow motion, rise away from me, and as I reached up to grab it I realized that it was simply too far out of my reach. I smacked against the bridge and fell semi-unconscious, only hearing the applause of the crowd around me – all part of the act, they supposed. They were right; my life was a huge act dominated by the search for destruction and the apparent need for teetering on the edge of disaster. I fed off of it as if it were a drug or cocaine from Joe’s Texas days and the sky came back to me slowly as if in a dream and the dream was long and unending and only ended when I woke up in Elena’s bed with an ice pack on my head and a storm of worried faces surrounding me.

     "What the hell were you thinking?" Marketa was angry, frowning, and ready to disown me and wipe her hands of me as usual. She was also beautiful, and I smiled at the sight of her rosy cheeks and waiting-to-be-kissed rosy lips. The sweet smell of her perfume made returning to consciousness a fantastic thing. Her strawberry-blonde hair hung like a halo around her ears and her head, and I continued to smile. "What are you smirking at you terrible, drunken bastard?"

     "You."

     "Me? Why don’t you thank God that I am even yelling at you," she yelled at me angrily. "You’re extremely lucky to be alive! I wish you were dead!"

     Elena, whose personality I had not yet figured out, and whom I had not yet realized was cold, professional, loving and warm all at once, thought this last statement by her daughter was, perhaps, a little much. "Marketa! Why do you say such things?"

     I have not had any whiskey since that day, but Joe and I drank a lot of beer the next morning, when Marketa and Elena went on another one of their discovery trips through the history of their newly existing relations. I was in love with Marketa and never wanted to be with another girl again. I think Joe wanted to have sex with Marketa because he said so. I could not prove myself wrong. I was, of course, wrong.

     "We heard you guys the other night making love and I just knew that Marketa was a sexual dynamo."

     "You already said that you knew she was a sexual dynamo."

     "I know. And you?"

     "What about me?"

     "What are you going to do?"

     "Where? What?"

     "I mean…it’s obvious that you are an alcoholic writer, and I was just wondering how you were going to hold onto a girl like Marketa, who so obviously hates your ways." He was triumphant with reason, delirious with the logic in his statement, whether or not it connected with anything that we had been talking about at that moment, or in any given moment, and I am not even sure what we had been talking about at the moment. "Well?"

     How would I do it? This was a very difficult question.

     I did not really appreciate the early January Barcelona evening. It was just past five in the evening, and it was pouring. I was in the midst of an absolute downpour, and there was no way out. It was hard to predict what had happened over the past few days, and even harder to accept just how well my life was going. I had never really agreed with success, for it meant that my dreams were coming true, and then what would I dream of? And A.J. was walking by my side, with his new bride, and Marketa was on my left.

     It happened very quickly. I was standing on a street corner in Prague and Marketa came running up to me. I had no idea how she found me, but I later learned that Joe had informed her of my favorite bar in the town. I was a victim of circumstance, and even if I wanted to spend more days in Prague with Joe, it was an impossibility that would never come to pass. Which was fine, in some sense, because I really needed to spend time with Marketa, who needed to spend time with her mother, and could not spend anymore time with her because they had gotten into a huge spat, which is why she was standing on the street in the middle of Prague with me – breathless and breathtaking and beautiful as any woman who has ever appeared on this earth.

     She came to me running, with hope, without hope, and with a certain amount of desperation that I had never before seen in my life, and which I appreciated greatly. I was as much a part of Marketa as her mother was, and we had more of a history. I had listened to Marketa’s seemingly unending problems sympathetically for a year and a half, and I could only listen, as if that would even help. Her mother horrified her; I understood her plight.

     We caught the next flight out of town, flying to San Sebastian with a switch in Madrid. We met A.J. at the hotel we were all staying at, and we met his wife at the hotel we were all staying at. We were all a little apprehensive at first, but it was nice to meet A.J.’s wife.

     "I’m Annemie."

     "Hello Annemie," I said, without really thinking at all, confused and shocked, dismayed and happy, baffled and flustered, perplexed by this new development in my already cluttered life where I did nothing but was overwhelmed by constant responsibilities. I was very angry. I wanted to write, and nothing more, but I was ceaselessly bogged down with unending tasks like counseling Marketa and meeting my younger, very much younger, brother’s new wife. He still had a year left in high school, or a year and a half, so I now felt the weight of my dead, rotting father on my back as I attempted to make light of the situation and help A.J. remain pointed in the right direction, whether or not he would become President of the United States or not. I tried to remain calm, continue to caress and comfort my girlfriend after her disastrous meeting with her mother, as well as being amiable to A.J.’s new wife.

     Annemie was taller than A.J., at nearly five foot ten inches, and she was indeed an amazing specimen of female splendor. She had tiny, muscular breasts, very manageable, and a long, angular neck that made her appear to be taller than she actually was, with dimpled cheeks that were always smiling and massive brown eyes that displayed continuous wonder and a bizarre quality of curiosity. She was at once small and imposing, and it was obvious she had the mind of someone twice or three times her age, tested and tested again and ready for anything or anyone that crossed her path. And you probably did not want to cross Annemie, for she was as strong as an ox. How A.J. was sitting in a bar with us in San Sebastian two days before New Year’s with this woman was beyond me, but he was indeed married, which I had not bothered to tell Marketa after falling off the Karlov Bridge and nearly killing myself.

     Marketa was stunned at this latest development, and had nothing to say to either A.J. or to his wife. She was already in emotional trauma because of an unceasing headache that her mother helped develop and the flight had made even worse. I had to do all the talking.

     "So what are you kids going to do?"

     Annemie looked at me with stern, steely eyes. "How old are you?"

     We sat in a ridiculous shrine to ETA in San Sebastian, a place which served up cheap, nearly free, beer and wine and had fake bombs lining the bar as an announcement of their Basque superiority. "I’m twenty-two."

     "Twenty-two?"

     "Yes."

     "Well I am twenty-five years old, and I do not appreciate being called, ah-hem, a kid."

     I looked at Marketa to see what she might have thought of this statement, which was rude and seemed to imply that A.J.’s wife had a severe distaste for me in the early moments of our association. Marketa was no help – she was flicking the end of an unlit cigarette continuously, lost in a dream world of happy families and chocolate, and good sex.

     Just then Annemie began to laugh a horsey, ugly laugh that was scary and unnecessary, but which I would later find out was her friendly laugh that always proved that she was simply being the sarcastic Belgian that she had always been. "I am just kidding David, you know I am just kidding. A.J., he must know that I am just kidding!"

     She looked at me with a serious tone, allowing her evil laugh to subside just a touch. "So I will take care of your brother. He deserves to be taken care of! He has led such an awful life." Annemie put a hand on A.J.’s face, caressing it delicately, and smiled sweetly across the early evening smoke. "I want to love him."

     Marketa snapped out of her daze, and rudely interrupted the conversation. "What do you do? Wait, is this like you are, um, adopting a kid – or getting married? Do you guys have sex?" She finally lit her cigarette. "Do you know how old he is and that he has to go to college, and not even this next fall, but a year and a half from now?"

     Annemie laughed.

     I did not. "Marketa, you’re not helping."

     She snapped back at me. "Do you really think you’re helping, sitting here and pretending like this whole thing is normal?"

     I was abruptly reminded of something that Joe had told me before we left. He told me that careers and marriages mean nothing, that life is really a humorous affair, and that you can only enjoy it if you take a step back, look at how funny it is, and ignore what the conventions of society are dictating to you. In this light, it could be seen as not shocking, but humorous, that A.J. and Annemie were married and hanging out in San Sebastian with Marketa and I. I was starting to relax and enjoy myself. I was beginning to let myself go.

     "A.J., where are you going to go to school?"

     "He is going to come to school in Belgium. We will live there and he can finish his studies, and then go to the college in the U.S.A. I want to move there in another year, my job demands it."

     "What do you do?" I had no idea what Annemie did.

     "I am a sports agent for the best Belgian basketball players."

     "Are there any good Belgian basketball players?"

     "But of course."

     "Really?" I did not believe her.

     "Well, not so much the Belgians, but I represent most of the best Europeans."

     "Why are you not living in the States already?"

     "I had not met A.J. yet – no reason to go."

     Marketa did not like the direction of this conversation or of the seemingly idiotic sentences Annemie and I were firing back and forth at each other. "Why didn’t you marry one of your basketball players?"

     "I do not mix business with…with pleasure."

     Marketa looked at A.J. with a mix of scorn and sorrow. "Why don’t you say something, you haven’t said shit since we got here."

     "Marketa, always the amiable girlfriend."

     Marketa turned to me with a flurry - "Shut the fuck up or speak the fuck up, don’t say stupid, idiotic things, say something that means something." She then turned to A.J., waiting for him to say something intelligible.

     "I love Annemie."

     "Why, because she loves you?"

     I was reminded of a time where I visited Providence nearly a year before this date in San Sebastian. I drove up the coast, through a horrific, torrential downpour, through the state of Connecticut, where no one knows how to drive, and found myself on College Hill at two in the morning at a Brown dorm, trying desperately to contact Marketa. I was standing in the pouring rain, frantically calling Marketa’s room, and there was no answer, even though we were supposed to meet. I was a little late, but I found it aggravating that I had to stand there, drenched, waiting in the rain like a lost puppy. I used to be lost. Marketa demanded perfection, and I was late, so I was sent to the dogs of rain, and was forever in a perpetual mood of persuasion that attempted, however foully, with whatever folly, to please her right.

     And now she was not going to be pleased. She was angry. She hated marriage. She thought it to be a tired and extremely antiquated institution that did not fit in the modern world of travel and working women. She had just seen her mother and seen what can come from a broken home. She was, in short, not very keen on families, especially my own, to begin with, and was especially sensitive to idiotic ‘kids’ marrying a day after they met, and the age difference that split Annemie and A.J. had nothing to do with it – she was against marriages, and chiefly against idiotic, half-witted, imbecilic, asinine marriages.

     "Do you two actually think that this can work?"

     "Marketa, I’m sure they thought this through…" I did not really think that they had thought it through, but did not particularly believe that a verbal, abusive assault was going to make anything markedly better given the situation.

     "Your brother is an idiot, David, and I feel the need to tell him so, because you seem to refuse to speak your mind."

     "My mind?"

     Marketa turned towards Annemie with a look of shocking scorn, and offered the following biting and definitive volley. "And you! You! You dimwitted, insane, horse, what do you think you’re doing? Do you really think it is kosher to seduce sixteen year old boys and trick them into marrying you for obviously pedophilic reasons?" She paused, continuously flick, flick, flicking on her cigarette. "Is this a hobby of yours? Are you a molester? What are you thinking?"

     That was the worst of it. Marketa calmed down considerably after this tirade, and there appeared to be more to the story than Annemie molesting A.J. They met at a museum, had a coffee, and were instantly in love – nothing suggested that hash was somehow involved. Whether Marketa liked it or not, it seemed that Annemie’s motives were pure. Annemie had to be, of course, a sick and delirious woman.

     Marketa was a wonderful, amazingly sensitive woman who any man would love to have by his side. I was a guilty soul who was forever concerned with the fact that Marketa would leave me for any of her thousands of admirers. Everyone loved Marketa. There was no questioning the fact that if she had left me there would have been a long line jockeying for position in her life. I never cheated on Marketa, though I thought many times of doing it. I say that I have done it, but fantasies do not equal action, at least not to most. I am the sane one?

     How is it that I was expected to be the sane one in this situation, when I was so obviously lost deep within the depths of inner insanity? My father’s fifth heart attack was not caused by one of my whores, but by one of his whores. My father was dead, this was much sure, but it was not because of a credit card bill and a lovely virgin prostitute, it was because of his inability to keep up with a twenty-year old prostitute of his own.

     As I walk through Barcelona, through the pouring rain, through the random insight of my brain, I wonder whether I have been lying to myself the whole time. A.J. did get married, and I did go to Prague to visit Marketa’s mother, and we did meet up in San Sebastian after Marketa’s inability to make ends meet with her mother, and I did meet my best friend, Joe, but where did my memory go wrong?

     I surely never had sex with anyone but Marketa, much less kiss anyone else. A.J. was dead. Annemie was in jail. And I was happily engaged to Marketa.

     We were engaged on a whim on New Year’s Eve, or New Year’s Day. It was three o’clock in the morning, just over three hours into the first day of the New Year of 1997. We were about an hour into an intense ecstasy trip and feeling the flow of the moment, and we decided that we never wanted to be apart, drugs or no drugs. It was an appalling realization for the both of us, and the ecstasy could not have been milder. It was mild, but it was strong enough for the two of us to dedicate the rest of our lives to each other. Or perhaps our love was strong enough for the two of us to dedicate the rest of our lives to each other.

     Annemie and A.J. had since become our two best buddies. Marketa had returned to the girl that I had known and loved at times over the past year and a half. She was fun, fantastic, and agreeable to all those around her, including, most importantly, me. She was absolutely the most extravagant person to be with, and I was with her, so we became, almost whimsically, engaged. A.J. was a big fan of our engagement.

     A.J. laughed and looked at me with a younger brother sense of enlightenment as we danced. The ecstasy was treating him well. The ecstasy was treating me well. Marketa and I could not stop kissing each other and rubbing our respective backs with soft hands and utter care. We decided to get engaged as loud, obnoxious Spanish techno music thumped around our heads.

     The decision stood the next afternoon. We woke up at one o’clock in the afternoon without headaches, and with our hands tightly clutching each other. We slept in a joined cocoon, and there was no external force that could separate us, at least until it became dark again and we figured we should finally, once and for all, rise from the bed. It was a difficult decision to make, one made tougher by the pelting of rain on our windows and balcony. Who would want to venture out into the world in this weather?

     I certainly would not, but A.J. and Annemie struggled to revive us and we sat happily on our beds together as they came in.

     "You’re up!" Annemie was a picture of nectar and animated in rare form.

     We sat on the bed, up, but still not actually having escaped its confines, and stared blankly at Annemie.

     A.J. spoke next. We both turned our gaze towards him, shocked by this newly married couple’s energy. "David, man, we have to go up to see this huge ass Jesus that is on top of the mountain. It’s only like ten minutes walking…plus, I’m starving."

     "How many nights have you guys been married?" Marketa suddenly had that look of complete wonder.

     "I don’t know," he turned to Annemie, "I think last night was our third night."

     "Three nights," Annemie confirmed.

     "Is the sex good?" Marketa showed a strange lawyer’s eye that allowed that wonder to be turned into making a point.

     "Fantastic," the two chimed in at once.

     Marketa jabbed me in the ribs; the lawyer in her had won, but this was a lighthearted case. "You see, frog face, we should get married."

     "I never said we shouldn’t!" I was red in the face. Annemie and A.J. were looking at us, trying to figure out whether this was a joke or if the sex was really that bad.

     It was not so bad. Marketa started laughing. It was a joke; I was a joke. I had a huge afro created by the static of sleeping on a pillow and weird spikes created by sleeping on Marketa’s breasts. I loved to sleep on Marketa’s breasts.

     We left the room, had a big breakfast, and went to see A.J.’s heralded Jesus, which was showered with light and was made to seem more powerful than the sun itself. Which makes sense, given the false Dogma of Catholicism. A.J. and I were raised as Catholics, and though we did not resent it, we did not necessarily believe in it; we only believed in it as a falling back point when there was nothing else to believe in. The rain had miraculously stopped.

     Very soon after we left the city, catching a quick flight back to Barcelona. Marketa was eager to get to know her new host family, and probably eager to move her stuff out of my apartment, now that we were engaged. We never really got to know Annemie, and I had never really gotten to know A.J. in our entire lives together. He was a strange man with long blonde hair, big golfing shoulders, and an ugly, rugged, handsome face. All I really knew about him was that he considered himself to be a golfer and a philosopher, and eagerly combined the two, continuously citing Michael Murphy, while still appearing to be childish because of his rather ordinary speech patterns. "Yo, lets go get some eats," or, "yo, David, are we going to go check out that big Jesus or what?"

     What was apparent, however, was that A.J. was an extremely intelligent youth that was very attractive to females, and it seemed that Annemie wanted to take this evident genius, cultivate it and take care of it, as if it could go wrong and be used for evil instead of for good. He would grow, she was sure, so she wanted to be there to watch him grow into the most amazing man on the planet. The tendencies were there, but she was not his mother, she was his lover, and ever so slowly, even as we spent time in San Sebastian and only a few days after they were married, he was already beginning to change for the better and to, well, to grow up. Which I suppose was good, because, after all, A.J. had just gotten married, and would have to grow up a whole lot, no matter how talented he was at his young age. He was obviously talented in the bed.

     But this did not help him as he crossed the street two days later, long after Marketa and I had left for Barcelona, and found himself awash in a Basque protest against ETA. He could not have known, despite his intelligence, that a bomb was going to go off as the protest went on, and that he would be a victim of this bomb. He would grow no more, no matter what Annemie tried to do. Annemie would remarry, but only after getting out of jail on sodomy charges, which were skillfully presented by my mother through the International Court in The Hague.

     My mother was convinced that I would be next. She wanted me to come home and lie in bed every day so that she could watch me and protect me from bombs, rapists, murderers, heart attacks, and everything else that seemed to attach themselves to our family in the form of death. She could not get me to return, though, and I thought of Grandma Rosa and her life in Catalunya in order to cope with the fact that every one of my siblings, as well as the father I hated, was dead. She, as far as I know, was the only person in my family’s history to survive happily, and she, as far as I know, was the only person to take residency outside of the United States.

     The year is now 1997, and I am very confused. Marketa is by my side, as usual, and I write with a particular sense of wary, if only because there is nothing else to write. Maybe I will start writing some fiction; is that not why I came here in the first place? They have all died, and we have only just begun. I just got in from that wretched rainstorm and am wondering when it will stop raining. I have been to Barcelona many times, but usually in the summer, and I have never been for the rainy season that dominates November, December, and January. When will it stop?

     Probably soon. I cannot imagine another rainy day. At least Marketa lets me into the apartment these days, unlike when I visited Brown and eventually found her naked with two girls who thankfully were not guys at a swimmer’s house across the campus and indeed off-campus. We are pretty content these days. She never moved in with that host family, and we are still engaged.

     I have to say that I have never loved a woman as much as I love Marketa, and I will never love a woman as much as Marketa, and I am very happy that Marketa will never have the opportunity to sleep with my father, as Eva did, because he is dead.

     We go out sometimes. We go to the movies. We go to a few of the bars and we wonder what to order. It is very difficult for me to order a beer because I sit in Grandma Rosa’s apartment and sip on beer all day as I write. Sometimes I order a rum and coke, and sometimes I order a vodka drink with special sports energy drinks to mix with it, so that when we go home there will be more sex than usual – but there is enough sex. The question is, is there enough writing?

     Marketa smiles at me continuously. She is the most beautiful girl in the universe. She smiles at me and tells me that I should just keep writing, and she rarely argues with me about pointless things anymore. She still has her admirers, but I am not jealous of them. How could I be jealous when she is always in my bed, looking for me, wanting to be with me, and believing in me? Still, there is a slight pang in my mind that says that I have stopped thinking altogether, and settled for life.

     Have I settled in too much? I do not think so, but we always seem to go to the same places. Maybe one day, when it is not raining, or even if it is raining, I will walk past Grandma Rosa’s apartment on Calle Breda and head up Entenca, maybe about thirty blocks, and see what’s up there. I hear it is nice up there, in Sarriá, and it could change the scenery for me, and maybe, just possibly, Marketa might come with me, if I call up to her nicely while she sits on the balcony pondering life, to Sarriá.