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 misplaced his phone. The thought crossed my mind that it might be something worse. But it probably wasn’t. I didn’t want to add to the drama by sounding worried, so I wrote, somewhat flippantly, “living large: spam on voucher + night @ airport hotel!” I thought I’d start worrying in earnest if I didn’t hear from him by the morning.
My taxi driver to the Westin was very nice, in an understated way. In fact, I thought it was possible that he was a little attracted to me. He asked me if I was married, and I said, “No, you?” He said he was divorced with a 16-year-old son. He said his name was Brna, and he gave me his card. He agreed to take me back to the airport the next morning at 5:30. Feeling that Brna, at least, was on my side helped me relax a little.
I momentarily contemplated inviting him up to my room – I mean, not really, I was just kind of joking with myself, but I did consider how funny it would be to turn up in New York with Brna. I imagined Brna eventually meeting Sven. I thought to myself, “If that did happen, we’d probably all get along.” I remembered my massage therapist, Ellen, telling me once, “I like Eastern European men. Their depression can be very charming and they’re not obsessed with happiness which is linked, I believe, to a more relaxed idea of what breasts need to look like.” Ellen is great.
I ate dinner at the buffet at the Zagreb Airport Westin. In truth, the food was not bad. Before I went to sleep I read a little bit from a book on queer theory that enthusiastically quoted the somewhat unfashionable psychologist Silvan Tomkins: “If you like to be looked at and I like to look at you, we may achieve an enjoyable interpersonal relationship. If you like to talk and I like to listen to you talk, this can be mutually rewarding. If you like to feel enclosed within a claustrum and I like to put my arms around you, we can both enjoy a particular kind of embrace. If you like to be supported and I like to hold you in my arms, we can enjoy such an embrace.”
Just before I turned out the lights, I got a text from Sven: “sorry. bad day :(better:/ miss you.”
I just answered: “xoxo.”
Early the next morning, at the crack of dawn, Brna drove me back to the airport in silence. I gave him the last of my vouchers and we thanked each other. The rest