staring at the video screen, and the bartender, who was a woman. She was also young and good-looking, with spiky hair and a pierced lower lip, but she was very serious. Dan, however, introduced her as though she were already a friend. “Gray, Zlata. Zlata, Gray. Zlata makes a mean Thirsty Lesbian!”
I said, with as much enthusiasm as I could muster, “Oh, really?”
Zlata just stared, waiting for my order.
“Is there something you recommend?”
Zlata said, with nary a hint of a smile, “We have two specialty cocktail, Thirsty Lesbian and Double Penetration. Thirsty Lesbian is wodka. Double Penetration has two kinds alcohol. I recommend beer, Zlatni Medvjed.”
I looked at Dan’s glass. It had a pink liquid in it that I guessed might be sweet. The TL. I considered asking for more information on the DP, but since I wasn’t really in the mood to get hammered, I went with Zlata’s recommendation.
Dan introduced me to his friends, who were all, like him, ABD. Sometimes I feel a little old in these situations. I went back to graduate school as what they euphemistically call a “mature” student, but these days a lot of doctoral students are fresh out of their undergraduate institutions. All three of Dan’s friends, two guys and a girl, were gossiping about some confrontation that had occurred at the plenary that day. I try to steer clear of academic gossip. I have one of those little figurines of three monkeys next to my computer at home: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. I tried to engage Dan in a separate conversation. We didn’t have to apologize for missing each other’s paper because we’d been scheduled in the same time slot. I asked him how his had gone.
He said, “Do you want the blow-by-blow?”
I said, “That sounds like one of Zlata’s cocktails.”
Turns out almost nobody showed up for his panel as well. Then we realized the gbar was also virtually empty. It was a little sad, and a little funny.
Dan and his friends wanted to stay to see if things would pick up after midnight (doubtful). After I finished my beer, I excused myself, awkwardly hugged everybody, walked back to the Arcotel, texted Sven about the names of the cocktails (answer: “:)”), brushed my teeth, and turned in.
The next morning I made the mistake of eating the wall decorations at the Arcotel. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My room, and presumably all the other rooms, had a decorative metallic apple holder on the wall near the desk, stocked with two Red Delicious apples. It was stamped, in English: HAVE A NICE DAY. I’d been looking at these apples for the last two days. I felt one. Definitely real. I figured they had to replace them anyway, so I might as well eat one. I washed it. I took a bite.
It was a shocking mouthful of mealy mush.
This incident made me ponder: my somewhat distressing financial situation; the notion of “decorative” food; the ubiquity of the English language and the global implications of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe; what the maid might think when she found this mealy apple with a humiliating bite taken out of it in the trash can; if I’d been tipping her appropriately in kuna; what it would be like to be a hotel chambermaid in Croatia; biblical representations of paradise and temptation; sexuality and sin. Sven.
I was still hungry, of course. I hoped there still might be some muffins or something over at the conference site. I’d let myself sleep in, feeling my experiences of the day before exonerated me of much responsibility in regards to attending other people’s panels. In fact, when I got to the U. of Z., there was some burnt coffee and a bowl of apples in remarkably similar condition to the decorative ones at the Arcotel. Maybe this was just the way they ate apples in Zagreb. Somehow that made me feel better.
I attended a late-morning panel on performance and new media. There was a guy who introduced himself as a “witch doctor” and he compared the manipulation of avatars in cyberspace to the use of voodoo dolls. That was a little disturbing. But then a woman gave a pretty rousing talk in defense of “collective solipsism.” She showed photos of an “Air Sex” competition, an installation by Sophie Calle, and an interesting YouTube video of a 12-year-old girl doing the SpongeBob SquarePants dance in her San Antonio bedroom.
This video made me think of falserebelmoth – another small, almost embarrassingly intimate domestic chamber dance.
I really liked that SpongeBob SquarePants dance. But the business about voodoo dolls had left me a little unsettled.
When the panel was over, I grabbed another boxed lunch and headed back to the hotel. I made a bee-line to that computer that I’d started to think of as “mine,” and pulled up the performance that I’d also started to have kind of proprietary feelings about. It was up to thirty-three hits. So mine would make thirty-four. This time, though, I couldn’t seem to focus on her dance. I was watching her shadow moving across the wall behind her. Sometimes it danced right out of the frame, but then she’d dance it in again. I’m not sure why it would make me so anxious every time her shadow disappeared.
That was when I felt a presence again just over my left shoulder. I knew exactly who it was. I closed the browser just as the dance was ending and sat there with my hand on the mouse, refusing to turn around and acknowledge him. My heart was beating. I’m not sure if I was afraid or angry.
Jimmy Stewart said softly, “Hm,” and strode past me and out the big glass doors. The handle of his miniature racquet was jutting out of a small beige backpack. I watched him check his watch, look up and down the avenue, and then flag down the approaching tram. I think he was looking back in my direction as the car carried him away.
On my last afternoon in Zagreb, I decided to skip all panels and meander through the city. The weather had turned slightly overcast. This seemed like an appropriate backdrop to all that Habsburg architecture. I was lamely trying to pick up a word or two of Croatian from the signage in the store windows. It seemed that every 20 yards or so there was a hair salon, and these were marked with the word “FRIZER” or some variation on that term. Like, FRIZERSKI, which was probably the adjectival form. It was odd there was evidently such a preoccupation with hair styling, because despite all that professional attention, most people’s hair looked terrible. Croatian people didn’t strike me as a particularly unattractive people, but there was definitely a styling problem. Even the more intentional looks seemed badly misguided. It was strange because in many other ways they struck me as quite cosmopolitan.
I took a picture on my phone of one of the posters outside a “FRIZERSKI SALON” and sent it as a text to Sven with the message “the zagreb hair situation.”
Then I thought that would be a pretty good name for a band. The Zagreb Hair Situation.
Sven didn’t text me back. Maybe he was sleeping.
That night I stayed in, watched a little CNN, and turned out the lights at 10:00 p.m. I had an early flight the next morning. When I got to the airport, however, I found out that my 7:00 a.m. Zagreb-Frankfurt flight on Croatia Airlines had been canceled – no explanation. That meant I’d be missing my Lufthansa FRA-LHR-JFK connections. They gave me a roundtrip taxi voucher, a voucher for a night at the airport Westin Hotel, and vouchers for two meals. They rebooked me for a flight out at the crack of dawn the next day.
The employees of Croatia Airlines were not particularly apologetic. First that weirdness with my bag – now this. I was also a little concerned that Sven hadn’t answered my last couple of texts. I sent him another one, explaining, in brief, my situation. I wondered if he’d
