Seated across a table, on one of the outside patios of a café, he listens to Z talk, which Z occasionally breaks off to take a drag from the cigarette smoldering in an ashtray, a coal on a spring day, the smell that stays in one’s hair. There is no method in Z’s talk. People rapidly enter and leave the stage of his mouth.

Who is P? Who is D? P’s cousin? L’s aunt? Lover? Where did he meet these people? In which city? How? What was it exactly that passed between you and P, and D? It doesn’t make sense. Why are you telling me this? But he doesn’t raise any of these questions or objections as Z’s continues to drone on, coaxing out the menagerie of creatures who live in the traveling circus of his head, which is also memory, which is also the past, and which is where talk, which is idle gossip often circles back to.

He is meanwhile thinking of others. Grandmother with the skin that always smelt of pharmaceuticals, tablets for a weak heart, the warmth as he lay next to her, listening to her talk in this language from which he is now estranged, this language he cannot tell those stories he heard, without asking too many questions, of saints she saw covered with snakes, cobras, deep in meditation, of burning hay, of burning brick, songs of peasant revolutions, armbands of blood, prison visits, death of a son by suicide.

This segues with talk from a latter time, argument with a fellow student, his finger emphatically jabbing at the shacks lining the roads to demonstrate impoverishment, the ash of first renaissance of that country falling from the sky, and covering everything with a coat of soot and decay, to demonstrate how syllables from those first modernist poems, novels, and plays broke off their moorings and dashed against bodies traveling on the top of tin can buses, eyeing them both, sitting outside a ramshackle tea shack, with the knowledge of hunger.

All this in another country, that it itself has morphed from landscape into an abstract character that he occasionally asks travelers, people with the leisure and money, he meets, to drop by if they are in the vicinity. And when he speaks about this it appears to him that all these other people, who once populated his world, with whom he once broke bread and drank cheap liquor, have been absorbed into this pastiche, which what is this physical country he had set out from, is in his consciousness.

That is why he purposefully avoids books, novels or histories set or referring to this other, whose undercurrents still lap at his sleep. He laughs at Z’s accent, who is now speaking ghetto style, black talk, mimicking and making up rap rhymes. Songs sold on CDs wrapped in cellophane, anger, and angst, and millions of dollars, and women provocateurs as video props. And in befuddlement, subjects of caricature and this laughter.