Cheap plastic made up the heels of his discount dress shoes. They clattered against the wet, cobblestone streets like the hooves of a carriage horse. He had purchased them several years ago during a short stay in London. He thought about that trip as he walked. The uneven path forced the memory into the soles of his feet. In a tragic, but all too common, case of lost and found, flight 314 from Boston greeted him at baggage claim with an empty conveyor belt. He lingered in the awkward cloud of tension that overwhelms that part of an airport. Irregular hordes of travelers disembarking their planes, shuffling into crowds, standing in the wake of the black, undulating courier of trinkets and clothing. He stood there much longer than he should have, watching people walk one by one through motion-activated doors. He attempted to calculate the actual probability of his things being lost. Stories of lost luggage were things that other people told at parties. Not something that actually happens to a person. He stood there, staring until the belt stopped entirely. It was only then that the reality of such an occurrence truly sunk in: no bags, no clothes, no time for preparation. He looked down at his watch: twelve after eleven o’clock in the evening. He cursed under his breath. Every shop across the city was surely shut, leaving him left with the horrific thought of presenting his life’s work in a collared t-shirt and jeans. The lecture he was scheduled to give the next morning was set to be one of the biggest presentations of his career. An auditorium full of people he admired. The greatest minds of biological anthropology from around the world gathered into a single room. Substantial, to say the least. Though, normally he would not abide by such social politics, this particular ministry of brilliant individuals could push his career in any number of directions. He had to at least try to play this game appearances.
So, he rose early the next morning, rushing through an already haphazard morning routine. Tangled in a mess of nerves, he dressed himself in the previous day’s clothes and set out into the dawning light of a busy London. As fate would have it, he found the one and only shop in the entirety of London’s colored history that was open at seven o’clock in the morning. He frantically dressed himself in the best outfit he could assemble from items hanging on the shop’s sparse racks: a slate blue suit, a white collared shirt, and a pair of brown cap toe oxfords. The dressing room stall swelled with body heat, cause him to sweat as he anxiously rehearsed all the terrible things that could happen between that toilet stall and a stage in the Museum of London. Or worse, what came after. Nonetheless, he found himself jogging at an unsustainable pace, hurtling towards an uncertain affair.
The shoes were a half size too big, but he hardly noticed the extra room. A brisk, 20 block walk along left him with little time to ponder anything other than the thought of his career – idly swirling around the porcelain plains of an English toilet bowl. But upon his return to Boston, those cheap, cap toe oxfords had plenty of time for contemplation. They spent several years in hibernation, neatly tucked in a guest room closet. Awaiting the day they would once again find themselves anxiously placed on a pair of feet that were half a size too small. They proudly clopped along the uneven sidewalk, laced with a jovial expression. He hadn’t given any thought to taking them when he left Boston. He just took them. A seemingly random event without precursor. But anything that can happen, will. So, here he was. In France. Indifferent to the size of his shoes. In a wool jacket with sleeves that stopped at his wrists. In pants that didn’t require a belt. Though, the inseam could have been marginally shorter. The shoes did not bother him. His mind was walking elsewhere. On a similar street, but not one nearby.
Sullen clouds filled the dark, autumn sky. A quarter moon hid behind them, framed against rooftops that were typical of European architecture. Street lamps from a bygone time lined the wavy path, spilling amber light across every window frame and doorway. A subtle breeze hissed across the rooftops, separating itself from the sky to investigate the quiet regions of wood and rock and metal.
Suddenly his shoes ceased their hoof-like clammer. He stood, for a moment, motionless on a street corner on the edge of a three-way intersection positioned just across from a small park. No lamps within its borders, just the night feeding on its darkness. He wheeled around, looking back and forth up and down the street. A confused expression contorted his face. His lips forced his dark mustache up into his nostrils as he hummed and sighed in frustration.
“Where is this damn place?” he wondered aloud, squinting down at the piece of paper in his hand – it struggled to keep its form. It looked to have been crumpled, folded, and surely misplaced at the bottom of his briefcase several times. But at least once during the bus ride into town. He juggled the straps of the three bags that hung from his body, trying his best to balance them long enough to get a good look at the abused page. It had turned the color of a peach under the influence of the tungsten lamp. A nearly illegible address, along with other information about his itinerary, was printed between its corners. This address belonged to a hotel where he had called and made a reservation four days earlier.
“How hard could it possibly be to find a hotel in a town this small?” He continued to bark at the shapeless piece of paper, annoyed with the cab driver who had driven him from the bus station. He was convinced he had been left in the wrong place due to carelessness. However, unbeknownst to him and to no fault of his driver, he had misremembered the address and mistakenly requested that he be taken to 8049 Acacia Street. Not 8049 Arca Street – the actual address for the hotel.
It had been an hour since he began an involuntary examination of civil engineering in rural France. An hour since the tail lights of that black Toyota taxi cab disappeared into the night. An hour wandering street after lonely street, through a heavy and unforgiving fog. He found it to be abnormal, or rather, unusual – the fog. Not your run-of-the-mill European weather event. It looked gray, but not gray in the traditional sense — the way you would describe the color of someone’s shirt or the food in Scotland. It was dense… heavy. The kind of gray he found difficult to walk through. It filled his pockets and pulled at his shoulders. An uneasiness lived in its vapors. It clung to the walls of his lungs, waiting to enter his bloodstream.It turned the comforting glow of the street lamps into nothing more than a spot of color against the dark. They seemed as if they belonged to another time entirely. Like they had somehow lost their way. In a way he thought of them as kindred spirits.
He attempted to reassure himself that he wasn’t in danger – muttering under his breath, ”It’s fog, just fog. Nothing to be afraid of. A little water vapor never hurt anyone.” Though, he had recently heard from a friend, well, a friend of a friend he didn’t like very much, that kidnappings in France weren’t all that uncommon. He also knew this friend of a friend, Norman, to be what one of his British colleagues would refer to as “a knob.” But the subtle dread growing in the back of his mind kept getting bigger. Martialed by the aberrations of his back alley universe. It took a few more laps around the blind maze of brick and single pane windows before he reached back into his messenger bag and removed the crumpled piece of paper a second time. He held the irregular shape up to the dirty haze of a street lamp and read the address aloud, “Eight, zero, four, nine, Arc–” It was only then he realized he had been looking for the wrong street entirely. His arms went slack. His head flopped back under its own weight. All the bags had slipped from his hands and shoulders. The abused paper reservation floated calmly to the ground as he forced his frustration out in a single, hushed word that barely made a sound at all, “Fuck.”
The curse floated out of his mouth on a sigh, language reorganized into another state of matter. Tiny droplets that fizzed and broke down on and on and on, infinitely rearranging themselves. He closed his eyes, bothered by the combination of street lights. Completely unaware of the chain reaction he had pushed into motion. This posture, the slack human in the shape of a dead tree, resembled something you might see in the museum of London. Perhaps an oil painting. A downtrodden soul so utterly unavailable to the world it might as well not be there in the first place. And yet, it exists all the same. Hemmed in by ornate frames and little signs that implore you not to touch it, but secretly hope someone might dare.
After a moment, he pulled up his roots from the ground. The groping stems that had momentarily grown from his feet and sunk into the cracks between the stones. Holding his mind in place. Once he had freed himself from thought, he bent down and collected his bags. Returning them to their settled positions, hanging them back on his shoulders in no particular fashion. A glare from the brown and gold watch on his wrist caught his eye, begging for attention. His father had given it to him as a teenager. A gift for his fifteenth birthday. He could name every scuff and scratch that marked the clasps and casing. The strap was dark and covered in a patina. It was twenty-three years old, but it always kept perfect time. The sweep hand began a new sequence at the exact moment his eyes met its face: twelve after eleven o’clock in the evening.
