Long as we keep drifting.
That had been Constantine’s sole conviction for the past seventeen years.
He had left home at eighteen, a summer graduate of a military high school academy, enlisting immediately for a four-year stint in me Marine Corps. He loathed both the order and the ridiculous concept of uniformed teenagers that marked his high school years, and had in fact possessed both the grades and the SAT scores for entrance into a moderately respectable liberal arts college. But he had enlisted in the corps partly because it was a free, stringless ticket out of the neighborhood, and specifically because it was against his father’s wishes.
His father had said, in a rare display of emotion, that “only trash go into the service these days,” and Constantine had said, “Is that all you’ve got to say about it? How about ‘good luck’?” His father’s only reply was, “You disgust me.”
On the last night before he shipped out, Constantine stayed with his girlfriend Katherine, whom he had met at the Catholic sister school dance the previous fall. They smoked from a bag of Colombian, drank cherry wine, and made love throughout the night on the hill that led to the woods bordering the neighborhood’s elementary school. At dawn, Katherine promised to write every week. Constantine kissed her one last time and walked back to his house to get his gear.
His father was up in his own bedroom dressing for work. Constantine retrieved his duffel bag and sat in the dark stillness of the living room, waiting for his father to come downstairs and say good-bye. But his father did not come down the stairs, and after a while Constantine put the strap of the duffel bag across his shoulder and walked out into the street.
Later that day, his friends Mai and Gary, a couple of spent-heads, drove him to the airport in Mal’s ‘68 Firebird, in part because Constantine said they could finish the rest of his weed before he got on the plane. This they did, and in what was to become an informal pattern, Constantine would desensitize himself with drugs and alcohol before departing for new pastures.
At the airport that day, Constantine bought a magazine from the newsstand. It was the month of October in 1975, and Constantine could always peg the date of his matriculation into boot camp, as at the time he was a mild Springsteen fan (“Kitty’s Back” was his and Katherine’s song), and Bruce was on the cover of both Time and Newsweek on the rack. Mal and Gary were Bachman-Turner Overdrive freaks, and they teased Constantine about “waxing off” on Bruce’s photo in the plane’s head. That was their way of saying good-bye, along with a weak promise to write. Of course, they did not write. As for Katherine, she wrote twice, and that was that.
Boot camp was Parris Island. Constantine felt mentally prepared for it-the sterility, the regimentation, even the waxen, brush-cut DIs-and the whole business was a bit of a relief from the morguish, airless atmosphere that had dominated his father’s house. Vietnam had “ended” the previous April, so there was little danger of seeing any action, lending an unspoken element of relaxation to the proceedings.
The truth was, Constantine enjoyed that time. He learned to handle firearms and found he was something of a natural marksman. The drills made him hard and lean, and there was seldom time for thought. His relative contentment was not universal-often he would be awakened in the barracks by young men who talked achingly in their sleep, mostly to their mothers. But Constantine’s mother had died long ago, and he neither thought nor dreamed of her. In fact, he never dreamed of anything at all.
For the most part, Constantine kept to himself, both at Parris Island and then at Camp LeJeune in North Carolina. He was not disliked, though at first his rather laconic presence was interpreted as snobbery by his fellow marines. Later, when Constantine began to box (a personal challenge for him that held no reward beyond the challenge itself), his quiet and sometimes terse demeanor would be seen as a kind of post-Beat cool. This newfound respect reached its apex when Constantine fought a young man named Montoya, a reputed middleweight with a steel forehead and a steel jaw. The fight was bet heavily on base, particularly by officers, and Constantine was later surprised to find that the bets were split fairly evenly. In the ring, the bout was active and bloody, and the stories about it circulated for months. He lost to Montoya (that steel forehead), bat went the distance; it was his last fight in the service.
Constantine experienced the Beat the first time while stationed at LeJeune. He had gotten a weekend pass, and taken it with a friend named Stewart to Morehead City on the Carolina coast. The two of them had a mutual interest in cars-Stewart was a motorhead and a cracker, and looked the part of both-and that interest had brought them together. Once in Morehead, they found themselves drunk and womanless. Even in civilian clothes, they looked like soldiers, in a time when being a soldier was the least hip thing to be.
Somehow the two of them wound up walking in a residential district at three o’clock in the morning. Stewart had modestly walked to the side of a split-level house to urinate, and then they were both in the backyard of the house looking up at the lit second-story bedroom window, and minutes later one of them had turned the knob on the unlocked back door, and finally they were standing in the pitch-black basement of the house. Later, neither of them could explain or admit why they had walked into a random occupied house in a strange town and stood for fifteen minutes, without attempting to steal one thing, in its basement.
It was in the dark of that basement that Constantine felt what he would call the Beat. At first it had been a weakness of the knees, and then it had been the conscious counter-effort to control the adrenaline that told him to run. Stewart had succumbed to that part of it, tugging at Constantine’s shirt, whispering urgently as they both heard the muffled voices above, the tentative steps of the home’s residents padding toward their phone. But Constantine stayed in the house well after Stewart had left, and the adrenaline turned into a warm calm, a wash of power, and a distinct awareness of his sex. The Beat was knowing he was into something wrong, and the fear of it, and the point when the fear was no longer there. It was a hot buzz; it was in his jeans and his chest, and it was white hot in his head.
Constantine left the house calmly, walked down the street, and met Stewart at the corner. The cop cars came soon after that, sirenless and without cherries, but Constantine and Stewart were out of sight by then, lying beneath parked cars. Constantine felt the Beat once more as a searchlight passed across his folded arms, and then the cops were gone, and so was the Beat.
That was the most memorable night of Constantine’s stay in the service. He had enlisted as an act of rebellion against the old man, and after four years he had learned to use a gun and he had learned to fight with his hands. Those were the very elements that defined manhood to his father; at the time, the irony eluded Constantine.
He stayed in the South, taking advantage of his Marine Corps benefits, and enrolled in an arm of the University of South Carolina called Coastal Carolina, in Conway, just outside of Myrtle Beach. Constantine studied French because the sound of the language intrigued him, and because the prettiest coeds hung out at the Foreign Languages building, though he had no intention of turning the knowledge or the degree into a career. He was not interested then, nor would he ever be, in a career of any kind.
Occasionally Constantine would split a joint with one of those coeds after class, and once or twice the joint led to something sweaty and momentarily satisfying at his place, a trailer he rented on the cheap at Murrells Inlet. The trailer came with a fourteen-foot Boston Whaler, and when the tide was up on hot, slow afternoons Constantine could take the Whaler and a cooler filled with Pabst Blue Ribbon through the wetlands to Garden City. Sometimes he would fish the black waters of the Waccamaw River, and he would bring the fish back, clean it, and pan-fry it as the sun went down behind his place.
To pay the bills, Constantine worked as a line cook and expediter at a Tex-Mex joint in Myrtle Beach. At twenty-seven he was the grand old man of the mostly college-age staff, and he was afforded the accompanying respect. The waitresses were uniformly blond and brown-skinned, in full bloom, and Constantine partook when the opportunities arose. After the dinner rush he would take his Marlboros and a cold pitcher of draft beer and sit on a log in the back of the restaurant, and he would smoke and drink as he looked up at the stars, and he would smell the pleasant summer green of South Carolina. He liked working at the restaurant and living in Murrells Inlet as much as anything he had ever done.
Only once in that time did Constantine feel the Beat. He had been dropped off late one night on the highway after a drinking game at a bar in Myrtle, and he had tried to hitchhike back toward the Inlet. Before he could get a ride, he walked by a house where an unlocked Plymouth Duster sat shining under a blue light in the driveway. Constantine hot-wired the ignition, and as it sparked and the lights came on inside the house, he began to feel the Beat. He gunned the Plymouth onto the interstate as the screaming occupants of the house chased him on foot, and the rush inside him faded as they disappeared from the glow of his taillights. He parked the car a block from his trailer and walked to his bed, where he quickly fell to sleep. The next morning he lit a Marlboro as he casually walked by the police, who were dusting the car for prints. He knew that his prints were not on file, and he knew that no one had seen his face behind the wheel of the Plymouth.
The incident was typical, as in those years few bad things touched Constantine. One morning, when he was turning over his boat at the waterline, a moccasin as black and fat as a tire slithered oat across his feet, and early on he caught the clap from an orange-haired waitress at a pool hall and bar called Magasto’s, in South Myrtle. But these were things that affected him only mildly, and if he learned anything at all it was to keep a sharp eye out for snakes and women who used cheap dye to color their hair.
Constantine left South Carolina three years after receiving his degree. He was nearly thirty, and he had ten thousand restaurant dollars rolled in a shoe box beneath his bed. He sold everything he could not fit into a backpack, bought an old ragtop Barracuda, and headed southwest.
He drove slowly through the South, stopping for a few months in Baton Rouge, where he worked briefly in the kitchen of a bar on the Mississippi River. The bar had a wooden floor filmed with sawdust, and the jukebox played Jimmie Rodgers, Big Joe Turner, and Carl Perkins. Willie Hall, the proprietor, was a bald man with a square head and small green eyes, and he took a liking to Constantine. Hall had inherited the bar from a childless uncle, but his real love was horses. He bred them on a small ranch he owned just outside of town. Before Constantine left, Willie Hall told him to look up his brother, Richard Hall, south of Los Angeles, if he was ever in need of work.
For the next few months, Constantine made his way north and then southwest to California. During this time he met few people. The solitude did not feel odd to him, as Constantine felt that he had always been alone.
The Barracuda threw a rod and died in Pismo Beach, one day south of San Francisco. Constantine left the car in the lot of the Sea Gypsy Motel, grabbed his Jansport pack, and hitchhiked down the coast to Los Angeles. Once there, he phoned Richard Hall and told him that he needed work. Hall and Constantine agreed to meet.
Hall lived in an airy house in the hills above Newport Beach, overlooking the Pacific. Hall had the same small green eyes as his brother Willie, but the similarity ended there. Richard Hall was solidly built but strangely feminine, with soft, pink hands and smooth, hairless skin. Not gay exactly, but sexless. He wore an open velour robe during the interview and explained to Constantine that he was looking for a driver. Hall owned a high-end Mercedes sedan and a Porsche 911 but he did not drive. He offered Constantine eight hundred a week in under-the-counter dollars and Constantine agreed. Constantine wasn’t keen on Hall but the setup was just too sweet.
He settled into his duties and the southern California life-style quickly. His days were spent as a caretaker of the grounds and as a chauffeur and errand runner for Richard Hall: At night he mostly hung out at the marina bars in Newport, where he became friendly with the wait staff and tenders. He drank moderately and used marijuana infrequently, and cocaine only as a ticket to bed. Time passed like that and Constantine simply grew one year older and acquired a deeper tan.
One autumn night Richard Hall asked Constantine in for a drink. They had hardly spoken, and never about personal issues. Hall appeared to be half in the bag already, but Constantine considered him to be harmless, and admittedly he was a bit curious about this man, who seemed neither to work nor to have hobbies or interests. The two of them sat in Hall’s living room, where a large fire set in a marble hearth gave off the only light.
Richard Hall began to talk about his past. He had made his fortune ten years earlier as a crew chief on a sloop that ferried groups of rich people down to Mexico. On one such trip, a very wealthy woman asked him to hold onto “hundreds of thousands” of dollars, in broad daylight and in full view of several seedy characters, while she went ashore. That night, there was a full blown, machete-wielding assault on their boat. Hall and his partners killed the assailants using the arsenal of automatic weapons they kept on board, and then, without me wealthy woman but with her money, set out to sea. Hall punctuated this section of the story with a toothy grin and a strange, hearty laugh: “Ah-ha… ha, ha!”
Hall continued: once out to sea, the crew was followed by a black cloud, beneath which trailed a huge waterspout with three smaller spouts orbiting around it. In the ensuing hurricane the wind sent a fuel-loaded pontoon boat careening toward Hall (he had by now “lashed” himself to the mast), which sheared off the bottom half of one leg. Constantine at this point in the story glanced at the hairless, intact legs of Richard Hall and decided it was time to leave. But Hall kept on, his face ghoulishly lit by firelight. There was an awful lot of talk about his dreams, ancient Indians hiding in the hills above Newport, the lost library of Montezuma, and an octogenarian couple that kayaked from San Diego to Panama during the Great Depression. All ending with that grin and Richard Hall’s obscenely frightening laugh. Constantine excused himself and headed for his room.
He packed his bag, walked quietly across the grounds, and spent that night in the bed of a waitress from the Southside Marina bar. In the morning he caught a ride to LAX, where, he booked a flight to New Zealand. He had picked New Zealand because of its distance, because he felt that he had seen the States, and because the country reportedly had no snakes. Constantine sat in the airport bar and drank vodka over ice for eight hours, eating 10-mg Valiums at regular intervals (a gift from his waitress friend), then stumbled onto the plane and fell asleep before take-off. He awoke once in Honolulu (the baggy-eyed stewards and stewardesses were all wearing leis) and once more to urinate, and the next time he opened his eyes he was touching down in a strange country on the other side of the world.
Constantine bought a map at the tourist information desk from a cute blonde with crooked teeth, and hitched out of Christchurch. He was picked up quickly by an older couple who drove him through hours of green hills dotted with sheep. They dropped him that evening at a campground on Lake Tekapo, where they told him to “bust off.” He guessed they meant to wish him a safe trip.
In the morning Constantine drank coffee on the gravelly shore of Tekapo and listened to the honks of geese as the morning sun blazed off the lake against the rise of brown, snow-capped Southern Alps. The mood was shattered by the crack of. 22 rounds coming off the opposite shore and the sudden flutter of geese. Constantine grabbed his pack and hit the road.
He stopped at the sportsman’s paradise Queenstown, nestled beneath the splendor of the aptly named mountain range, the Remarkables. Constantine pitched his tent on a hilltop campground at sundown and walked down to town, which was colorfully lit by Christmas lights below. He talked to a man walking a Newfoundland pup on the way down. The man said, “Check you later, hear?” as they parted, and Constantine headed for the nearest bar.
He found a stool at a pub named Eichard’s by Lake Wakatipu, and slowly drank a couple of tall dark Steinlagers. Next to him sat a man named Neville, who remarked that he was glad to be drinking with a “Euro” instead of another “fuckin’ Japanese.” New Zealand was a beautiful country, and its people very friendly, but Constantine had long ago decided that ignorance was everywhere, even in paradise. After a while he tuned out Neville and focused on the bartender, a big-boned brunette named Joey with wet brown eyes. She seemed to have a hearing problem, as she constantly had to retake the patron’s orders (one young man said, “Read my fuckin’ lips, Joey,” to the laughter of his friends), but she took it in stride. Constantine liked her and told her so before he left for the walk in the cool night air up the hill to his tent.
The next morning Constantine took a gondola up to the top of the mountain and stood with his hands in his pockets amid a group of gawking tourists. On the trip down he rode with a man on a holiday from his western Australian sheep station, and two giggly, unrelated girls from Auckland who called themselves the Smith sisters. He lunched on grilled hupaki with marmalade sauce and green Indonesian mussels, then found himself back in Eichard’s, thinking of Steinlagers. Joey put one on the bar as soon as he walked in. She seemed glad to see him.
At dusk the two of them took a walk on the wooded trail that wound around the lake. Joey stopped Constantine in a grove of birch trees to listen to the song of a bellbird and then she kissed him on the lips for a long time as the lake flowed almost inaudibly near. They said good-bye after their walk and Constantine slept alone at the top of the hill under what seemed to be thousands of stars. He had been with plenty of women, though the number was not an issue with him, but for some reason he would not forget that kiss.
He was picked up hitchhiking the next morning by a young Auckland college student named Chris and his girlfriend Julie. They drove a small camper van loaded with gear and Dead tapes, which they played the whole day. Constantine could see that they were loaded on something, and when the endearing Chris offered him some mushrooms, he shrugged and chewed a fistful, choking it down with a DB beer from the cooler.
They drove on one dirt lane, cliffside around Lake Wanaka, then headed into Mount Aspiring National Park, whose snowy peaks, waterfalls, and massive evergreens surpassed everything Constantine had seen in the American West. It was a fine place to be while doing psilocybin. They picnicked at Davis Flat, then stopped near the Haast Pass, where Constantine slept shirtless in a bed of pine needles in the woods, thinking happily as he drifted off that there was zero chance of snakes. Afterward the road opened up to the Tasman Sea and an expanse of northern California-style coastline, complete with tropical fauna and white beach.
Chris and Julie dropped Constantine at the foot of Mount Tasmin and moved on. There was a rainbow coming out of the clouds, reflecting off the mountain and its main attraction, Fox Glacier. Constantine watched it for a while and walked to Fox Glacier Motor Park, a campground in the middle of a meadow. He took a room there on the end of a cinder-block row, and settled in for the night. He could not have known then that he would sleep in that room for an entire year.
What made him stay was hard to determine. He would tell himself that it was the white kitten who adopted him the next day, though he suspected it was the job he landed almost immediately (Constantine could never resist a no-tax restaurant gig) as a cook in the no-name local that sat on the edge of the campground. The pub housed two pool tables, kept a friendly staff, and had Speight’s and DB on tap. Most of the talk was about the glacier (the townies called it the “glaah-sheer”) and the daily stream of tourists it brought into town. Constantine only went up on the glaah-sheer once, led by a guide he knew named Kevin. He was surprised it wasn’t colder, standing on the ice.
Mostly he spent his mornings walking in the woods and the mountains, his days at the local, and his evenings reading popular novels left by travelers in the bar. The white kitten grew to be a slow and heavy cat; beyond that, Constantine noticed little change in himself or his surroundings, though the feeling he had then was in general a wary contentment.
That ended, too, one night behind the pub. Constantine was sweeping the kitchen when he heard a woman’s cries through the rear screen door. He walked out the door with the broom in his hand and saw a group of three young men raping a Dutch backpacker in the dirt. After that he recalled swinging the broom handle, and the sound of it as it collapsed the skull of the largest, smiling man. The pub’s staff got Constantine under control eventually, but not before he had taken the other two almost completely out, ramming one man’s skull flat into the cinder-block wall of the pub. Later, he remembered that the blood smelled like the jar of copper pennies he had kept in his room as a child.
His expulsion from the country was political-one man’s father was a prominent landowner-but it was something he did not resist He never met the Dutch girl, and was never asked to identify her attackers. The authorities told him that the wall-rammed man was critical, and that Constantine was an alien working illegally in their country, and strangely, that they would pay for his ticket of departure. Constantine pictured a map in his head, selected a place at random, and told the men that he would like to go to Thailand. Before they escorted him to the plane that would wing him to Auckland, the one cop who had remained silent throughout the ordeal finally met Constantine’s eyes, and thanked him.
Constantine had a night to kill in Auckland. He took a room in the Railton on Queen Street, a temperance hotel run by the Salvation Army that had the smell of old age and decay embedded in its lobby. After a bath he stopped at a place called Real Groovy Records, bought a pulp novel, and walked downtown with the paperback wedged in the back pocket of his jeans. He stopped at the Shakespeare Brewery and had three of the best and most potent ales he had ever tasted, Macbeth’s Red. After that it was hot beef salad and chicken larb at a side-street eatery called Mai Thai, where he washed down the fiery dishes with two Singhas, then back to Shakespeare’s for five more Macbeth’s Reds. He had a load on now, but the walk back to the hotel was long, and he stopped for a short one in a chrome-heavy bar at the top of Queen Street. At the bar Constantine met a Kiwi named Graham and his girlfriend Lovey, and the three of them got stinking drunk trading shots of ouzo and Bailey’s Irish Cream. Constantine ended the night dancing on the bar to Curtis Mayfield’s “Give Me Your Love,” a song he had selected from the jukebox. He did not remember the walk home.
He woke the next morning with a top-ten hangover, realizing suddenly with a painful smile that he was fiercely drunk and in the bowels of a temperance motel. His back hurt from the paperback that was still stuck in the pocket of his jeans. Constantine vomited, took a bath, then grabbed his backpack and fell into a cab for the Auckland airport.
He caught his flight to Thailand and rode a taxi into the heart of Bangkok. Upon exiting the cab, he realized that it was very late at night, and that he was an American and without prospect in a country of Asian faces. The streets were narrow and unevenly paved, and rats moved freely around the closed stands of vendors.
Constantine stopped the driver of a three-wheeled tuk-tuk, who told him of Soi Cowboy, the party district whose bars were largely populated by expatriate Vietnam vets. The driver took him there and dropped him in front of one such establishment, Inside, Constantine made friends over a half-dozen Mekong beers with a bushy-sideburned American named Masterson, a burnout for sure but less of one than the others in the bar.
After a couple of shots to back up the Mekongs, Masterson took Constantine to Patpong, the area noted for its commercial prostitution. Constantine was a bit surprised at the organization of it all-the tuk-tuk driver, undoubtedly with his hand in the till as well, dropped them at the “most very clean place”-and at his first sight of women onstage wearing cardboard numbers strung around their necks. Two more beefs and a joint of something sweet, and Constantine had chosen a woman who stood with a dispassionate smile on the plywood stage.
He came in her in the back of Masterson’s place, a two-room affair down another dark alley. Afterward, she pulled a crumpled piece of yellow paper from her jeans and read a poem, in English, to Constantine. Her ability to speak the language puzzled him, as she had repeated the words “No English” to him several times before they stripped off their clothes. It puzzled him, too, that she slept in his arms the entire night, until he reasoned that his room was probably nicer than anything she had to go back to. He settled with her in the morning. Later, he casually mentioned to Masterson the whore’s “No English” mantra. Masterson laughed and said, “But it don’t mean ‘no speak English,’ mate. It means ‘I no suck your dick.’”
Constantine left Bangkok quickly, hearing of the beautiful south and huts on the beach. After an overnight train ride and the ferry to Ko Pha-Ngen, he rented such a hut, at less than two American dollars a day, a serviceable dirt-floored living arrangement that housed a corner slab of cement with a hole drilled in the cement for excrement. The beach and green water were some of the finest he had seen, and there was a nearby eatery called the Happy Restaurant that served “special” mushroom omelettes, which kept him right for half of every day. But he soon tired of the fierce mosquitoes and the repetitive conversations of backpackers-where to eat cheap, where to sleep cheap-and after a few weeks on the Gulf of Thailand he headed north.
In the course of his travels he found a guide and trekked up into the hills close to the Burma border. Small tribes practiced slash-and-burn farming there, and each tribe had an opium professor, opium being the most prized of crops. In one village he visited the hut of the tribe’s opium professor late at night, and lay on his side on a straw mat as the professor prepared his pipe. The hut had been built up on stilts, and Constantine could hear the sound of pigs running beneath him as the mixture was carefully heated to its boiling point. Constantine did three bowls, and stared without thought at the candles in the hut until he fell to sleep.
His months in the hills were uneventful, and later he could not remember exactly what he had done to pass the time. He bathed irregularly and ate very little. In the ancient walled city of Chiang Mai he smoked some heroin offered to him by his guide, then sat in a folding chair on a riverbank, under a black sky. He sat with his guide the entire nights both of them uninterested in conversation, as the muddy river flowed by.
Eventually Constantine made his way south once again. His intention was to leave Asia and visit Europe. He spent nearly the balance of his cash on a cheap flight out of Bangkok, and took it all the way to Brussels. In Brussels, very late one night, he caught a train headed for Paris.
Constantine chose an empty compartment, but soon the compartment was filled with three backpackers-two young British women and a thin Jamaican man-and a well-dressed Parisian woman in her early twenties, a transplanted Italian named Francesca. The Brits and the Jamaican stared at Constantine with a curious, grinning contempt, but Francesca broke the discomfort with some spirited conversation, buoyed by her delight at Constantine’s command of French. Constantine confessed to her that he was now quite broke, and Francesca gave him an address where he might find some work. Soon the Brits and the Jamaican were asleep, and then Francesca’s head dropped to Constantine’s shoulder, and later her face fell full in his lap. Constantine closed his eyes, eventually nodding off with an unwanted but unshakable erection.
Constantine left the train at the station in Paris, giving Francesca a guilty kiss before he waved her off. The station was busy with well-dressed Parisians and backpackers, and the air was thick and aromatic with the smoke of Gauloise cigarettes. He hitchhiked south and was picked up by an amiable young man who was playing a cassette of Bob Dylan’s “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” loudly through his rear-mounted speakers.
The tip from Francesca led him to Tours, a university town on the Loire, on the northeast edge of central France. The address she had given him turned out to be the local orphanage, and the mention of her name brought an instant smile to the chief of staff. Apparently Francesca was some sort of angelic philanthropist, making Constantine’s lecherous thoughts from the train seem somehow even more unclean. He was hired immediately as an interpreter, with a small salary to go with his room and board.
Constantine settled in to the slow, easy life of the town. He rode an old bicycle for basic transportation, and to run errands to the local pharmacy. Mostly his job consisted of acting as an interpreter in the crucial first meeting between French child and English-speaking parent. He suspected that there was something a bit illegal in these transactions, and that there was much money being passed below the table. But he remained emotionally detached from the children and the dynamics of the adoption process, preferring to pursue perfection in the art of being alone. In general he stayed away from trouble, though he did steal a Citro? n one night, returning it to the unsuspecting owner’s parking spot before dawn.
One year after he had arrived in Tours, Constantine packed his Jansport and rode the train to Amsterdam with the intention of having a short holiday. Once there, he took a room at the Hotel My Home, a boarding house near the station run by a couple of humorless but kind old men. On the first night of his stay Constantine had a few genevas with beer chasers at the pub below the hotel, the CafE Simone. He was surprised to see middle-aged men smoking marijuana at the bar. Other than that the place was like any local, complete with the requisite, red-faced, cap-wearing drunk at the end of the bar doing his atonal rendition of Del Shannon’s “Runaway.” He took to Amsterdam immediately and did not return to France. A week later he took a job as a barback in a lesbian club named Homolulu’s, and a week after that he met a blonde named Petra Boone, who became his girlfriend until he left Amsterdam, quite suddenly and for no explainable reason except to travel, six months later.
He drifted south by rail into Italy, and later took the ferry from Brindisi to Patras, in Greece. A bus dropped him in Athens where Constantine checked immediately into the local hostel. Athens was no place to experiment on accommodations if one didn’t know the language. It reminded Constantine of New York City with heightened emotions.
The desk clerk at the hostel was a Greek girl named Voula, a tightly curled brunette with mahogany eyes and a small, wet mouth. The manner in which she used her hands to navigate through her broken English attracted Constantine, along with her low-stanced, hippy shape. They were friends immediately and lovers three days later, when Constantine moved into her room, the best and most private in the house.
Beyond his desk duties at the hostel, which paid his room and board, Constantine did not work during his stay in Greece. He spent his days drinking NescafE in the cafeneions and his nights in the tavernas eating rich, garlicky food washed down with Amstel and the occasional retsina. Late at night he and Voula would lie in beach chairs on the roof of the hostel, smoking cigarettes and laughing over the sounds of crazed, honking cabdrivers in the street below. He was beginning to like Greece, revising his original opinion of its people from incivility to a kind of unrestrained passion.
One day, after a rainfall, Constantine sat in the National Park Garden near Syntagma Square. He noticed a small boy crying and pointing at his tricycle, which was stuck in the middle of a large puddle on an asphalt track that surrounded a small pond. Constantine walked into the water and retrieved the bike, carrying it to the boy. The boy was wearing elastic-banded trousers and red suspenders over a striped green shirt. He said “thank you” in Greek, and receiving no response, put his arms out to hug Constantine. Constantine picked him up and held the boy to his chest, immediately feeling something that scared him, a connection to the child that brought on an odd but acutely heavy sense of loss. He realized then that the road he had taken had not been natural or right but rather the long, aimless act of a man who had no center. He realized the import of the stability mat had eluded him, and that realization frightened him. Constantine put the child down and returned to the hostel, where he loaded his pack and walked, without a good-bye to Voula, out into the street.
He drank that night, wandering from one taverna and discotheque to the next, catching an early morning cab to the airport, where he boarded a flight to New York City. Landing in JFK, the first American voice he heard was from a uniformed man who was loading luggage onto a moving belt. The voice sounded foreign to his ears.
Two weeks later he had taken a job in Annapolis, and then he had run from that, and now he was sitting next to a puckish old man in a hopped-up Mopar, cruising the interstates of Maryland. He drummed his fingers on the dash, thinking mat after seventeen years the sum of his accomplishments had been one big broken circle with a gaping dead end. But Constantine had been wrong about a lot of things, and he would be wrong about this too. Everything always added up to something, and the real trip was about to begin.