ONE

    Polly decided to travel. She went to the passport office.
    Pete lay on his back in the Australian outback, waiting to see the Southern Cross, wondering if anything was missing.
    In a market in Cairo, Marshall bought saffron and other rare spices which he slipped into the hollow compartment in the bottom of his suitcase.
    Dale planned a careful itinerary, including the finest hotels and air conditioned coaches.
    At the passport office Polly met Cecil, a rounded pink young man who wore spectacles made of safety glass. He approached Polly and spoke conspiratorially: Traveling? You need a snakebite kit, a bee sting kit, pain relievers, diuretics, anti-diuretics, lariam, chloroquine, antacids, sleeping pills and this twenty-four-volume physicians' helper reference guide which you may prefer to get in the abridged five-volume set.
    Heather bought scarves and perfume at each airport's duty free shop, thinking, If I stay skinny I'll live fat.
    Cecil said, Never drive at night, swim at unfamiliar beaches, run up wooden stairs, ride between railroad cars, disparage religious customs or show your money in public.
    Midge walked eight kilometers over the savanna each day to see if the charitable foundation had replied. She had posted a grant application a few months before and was anxiously counting her money.
    Cecil said, Have you had your shots? I know CPR. I'd offer to come with you but you are traveling into some zones that the World Health Organization considers risky. I’m taking a safer route.
    Polly set off, wondering why she was traveling. Instinct? Whimsy?

TWO

    Ankara lay in its grid promoting harmony and efficiency among its inhabitants; Sydney reconsidered the nation's immigration policy; in Paris a famous old cafe went out of business; and the Rome night was punctuated with the put-put of scooters and dirtbikes carrying impeccably dressed young men to meet stylishly attired young women.
    Dale started in Rome. He said, The ambiance here is a tapestry of the fabric of the past embroidered with the fashion of the present. Yet the service in restaurants is confoundingly bad.
    In Dhara, Pakistan, the pops of gunfire were as constant as the salutes of cars in New York City. A small boy told Cecil, I have killed many men, but never in anger.
    Polly walked down the streets of Buenos Aires in the rain, pausing occasionally at cafes, where each waiter attending to her harbored blue dreams of love.
    Midge asked Pete, Don't you miss America? Pete said, In America the president goes to the South to unveil his benevolent new welfare program. The people say, Thank you very much for the food stamps, Mr. President. Now get the hell off of my land.
    Cecil said, In America there is often a small paragraph in the newspaper headed "Bus Crash in India Kills 30." Imagine my surprise to find that in the Indian papers the news item is just as small.
    Marshall traded his spices in Barcelona for a ruby. He walked through the city taking pictures. Bored, he threw the film away.
    The first time Polly saw Pete he was sitting in a cafe in Vienna. He looked up as she walked past. He caught her eye and frowned.
    Cecil eyed the plane that was to carry them to Phuket. Don't worry, Heather said, These things hardly ever crash.
    Dale refused to smoke the local cigarettes and sent the boy away with orders to return with a familiar brand.
    Cheese, beer.

THREE

    The reggae in Trinidad sounded sinister; the women in Milan traded names of liposuctionists; Saigon preened, luring investment; the Epernay sunflowers followed the sun with their faces and the famous smokes of the Guinea coast hung in the air like a warning.
    Heather said, Years ago I was just a girl, young and in love with a dissident poet in a country behind the Iron Curtain. I was studying abroad and fell in love. He did not love me; his poetry was his life. That was not the crushing blow you would imagine, it was okay. He could not get his poems to the West to be published, so here's what I did: I bought a white dress and wrote all his poems on it in a fine black script. When I left the country I wore the dress through customs, and no one noticed. I dropped the dress off at a publisher in New York and fell in love with someone else. The dress won many literary prizes. What a beautiful story, Midge said. It was, once, Heather admitted. But now his books are no longer in print in most countries—it seems dissidence is no longer in vogue. But your love for him, Midge wondered, Was that something that went in and out of fashion? Heather answered, Sometimes, I think that is precisely what it did.
    The ferry Polly rode cast off from the dock at Penang just as another ferry arrived carrying Pete.
    Dale said, Here I am in Tokyo and my valet has left off unexpectedly this morning. What am I to do?
    On the train to Oslo Polly met Dale, a thin-fingered young man who smelled of hair groom. He complained throughout the journey about being forced to sit in second class, as first class was sold out. Polly did not conceal her dislike for him, but he mistook her aversion to him for an aversion to their compartment. He left her at the station thinking they were fast friends.
    In Courchevel Heather met a wealthy son of a minister from a small oil-rich nation. He was kind to her and bought her many gifts. Heather sat on the sofa of her suite, the bed covered with hats, scarves, shoeboxes, roses and chocolate, while he proposed to her. As she considered, the Alps hunched outside the window, unconcerned. Well, she said at last, I will wear the gold anklet, but I will not have the operation. He declared the operation not strictly necessary, but asked her to reconsider. They fought and he left, kindly paying her hotel bill on the way out.
    Dale accosted Polly as she admired some buckets of sorbet: Polly! How are you? Isn't this burg dreadful? She agreed to take tea with him because her feet hurt. She made an effort to be pleasant. She asked him the question she had asked everyone she had met thus far: Why do you travel?
    He suspected that her innocence was contrived, concealing an urbane cynicism. He said, as if speaking to a confidante, I can go anywhere in the world and get steak tartare. That's important, but I suppose the main reason is the excitement of the new. Not that life back home was boring, what with clubs and galleries and gossip and weekends at the shore, but traveling refreshes one's sense of . . . wonder.
    Polly said, But doesn't one become used to the wonder, such that the new, after repetition, becomes mundane? Dale lowered his voice and chuckled unappealingly, It might, if one thought about it too much. But by that same logic the mundane can become new. It all depends on your approach. And mine—he pulled a cigar from his vest—is to approach everything as comfortably as possible.
    Pete was sitting at the next table and he and Polly exchanged a number of interesting glances. As he waited for a chance to introduce himself, a boy came and told him his hotel was on fire, so he hurried away with a meaningful backward glance that Polly failed to notice.
    Cecil spent a remarkable weekend in Florence, then the following week fell ill with malaria, the only reported case in that region that anyone could remember.
    In Guernica Heather walked around.
    Midge collected lime samples in the Karstland region of the Dinaric Alps. She met Marshall, who was looking for his ruby, which he had misplaced. She told him the difference between an arroyo, a wadi and a mullah. They lay together in her shack, the wind whistling through the knotholes.
    At night a smear of stars.

FOUR

    Singapore bustled with a quiet intensity; New York thundered with subways and rap; a mariachi band played sad songs under a Mexico moon; Chicago stretched towards the sky, agoraphobic on the plain; Africa was silent except for signal fires in the Sahara popping and crackling in the cold night air, visible only to nomads and jet pilots flying high over the continent.
    Marshall told Midge, I'm really not absent minded, I just lose track of things. Midge sighed knowingly, Yes, it's the curse of consumer culture. No, Marshall said, It's the blessing.
    Hiking in the Ruanzores, Cecil paused every few minutes to check his pulse, struggling not to lose sight of the guides. His guides carried him back to camp, as an enormous thorn had injected itself into his foot. In Kinsasha, a doctor peered over his glasses and said, The thorn is nothing; your primary worry is the milky bowel syndrome.
    At the border crossing, Marshall and Midge proceeded through immigration. Midge had a pouch around her neck containing the white form, the pink form, and the pale green form. The border guard said, ________ __, __________! Marshall said, What? What’d he say? Midge said, Oh no, we need the yellow form!
    A vendor in Panama city asked Polly why Americans are concerned with the private lives of public figures. Maybe, she said, it's because so many Americans are lonely that they are eager to compare how others use their privacy. Then she thought, The only natives I ever meet are vendors and taxi drivers and waiters. Just once I'd like to meet a notary public.
    Pete met Heather and was in love for a few minutes. She had the small flawless features that nearly every culture calls beautiful.
    Midge trudged up the steep slopes thinking, Life is lived in memory. Because we only experience the present by comparison to the past. And memories can never be completely recaptured. After a week in a cabin with Marshall I cannot recapture the joy, only make my present miserable when I think about it. Below, Marshall was packing. He thought, Some rubes travel to create pleasant memories. The same reason they fall in love. Fools.
    Polly met Midge, a nearsighted doctoral candidate. They spent a quiet day together touring the ruins of Troy. Midge said, The archeologist finds something old on every journey and the anthropologist finds something new. What the traveler finds is always the same. Someone else said that, not me. Polly liked her immediately. They ate in the only Greek restaurant in Turkey, pausing between bites to watch the waiters link arms and turn slowly, dancing with an air of distinguished melancholy. Midge sighed. She was square-featured, but pretty in a way that probably would not be noticed for a few more years. Their dance is reminiscent of Scottish bagpipes, she said, Sorrowful and joyful at the same time. Polly asked her, Why do you travel? Midge shrugged, For a long time my grant required that I follow various migratory herds.
    Pete rode on the back of a motorcycle in Benin through fields of millet, sorghum, and yams. A villager told him, In Nigeria they crown a yam king every year. Pete made appreciative noises but the man said, Bah! It is a device of the yam cartel.
    In Tangiers, Dale argued with a taxi driver. A crowd gathered as the men yelled at one another. Finally Dale threw a wadded bill at the man and stormed off.
    Marshall kicked open the door of Pete's hotel room. Give me the ruby you have stolen from me, he said, brandishing a pistol. Pete sat up and rubbed his eyes. I didn't take your ruby, he said. I know, Marshall said, I just wanted to leave Cyprus. He tossed the gun aside. It discharged accidentally, lightly wounding Cecil.
    Annapurna, Catalonia, Colorado, Dieppe.

FIVE

    The curlews cried at the Antiguan dawn; rumors of war floated up to mountain cabins in Kurdistan; Los Angeles trembled with racial animus; Prague embraced capitalism with a hearty hug; a woman in New Orleans danced slowly in a smoky bar and in Uganda the president spoke softly into a radio microphone sending his nation to sleep with a lullaby of problems and progress.
    Pete followed Polly through the ruins of Edzna thinking, I have seen that almond-eyed woman before. Polly noticed Pete was following her and turned to him with her inimitable Polly-poise, saying, Oslo. They ate dinner together, beans and salsas and tortillas and tequila.
    Marshall told Cecil: You are absurd. Absurd to the point of hearty laughter, if one wasn't so moved to pity. Cecil cowed and Marshall continued, Absurd to be afraid of something you know nothing about. It is like being afraid of the dark. Cecil's voice cracked as he said, No, no, it is just the opposite. That which is known can be grasped and categorized, dissected and analyzed until it is no longer fearsome. It is only that which is not known which can take us by surprise and truly hurt us.
    In a small town on the Asian steppes Polly helped Heather find a place to stay the night. As they walked, Polly asked Heather why she was traveling. Heather shrugged. They found Heather a room, and as they parted, Heather touched Polly's arm. She said, I was born in a small town in Missouri, smaller than this town, but you could drink that water. I knew I had to leave when my older sister turned nineteen. For a birthday present her boyfriend bought her a gun rack. She tried not to cry, and he looked at her with a dopey grin and said, Well, you don't have one.
    Here in the Khyber Pass, the guide told Cecil, 26,000 British soldiers were killed in one evening.
    Polly said Rurrenbaque, Rurrenbaque, over and over, rolling her r's, savoring the sound.
    Heather watched Marshall haggle in a market in Vientianne. He is a young man, tall and serious, who knows what he wants, just like me, she thought. She sipped her iced tea and continued, We all have gifts, touched in certain ways by angelsí wings and petals of grace. My gift is I've got a tasty unit.
    A friendly travel agent in Bogota told Pete and Polly, Ah yes, as your American author has said: The mind needs a design, the conscience needs a purpose.
    In one day all these things happened: Polly and Pete embraced in a public square, Dale accused Marshall and Heather of trying to steal his luggage, Midge cried herself to sleep and Cecil met a Masai doctor who spoke English.
    Marshall told Heather, Someone snide suggested I lost my ruby on purpose. Why would I do that?
    Polly and Pete lay together in a small hotel in Harare. Polly asked him, When you saw me for the first time why did you frown? Pete said, I don't know. I can't imagine why I would, and I honestly don't remember. He knew it was not a satisfying answer, but it was true—he couldn't remember. Polly believed he couldn't but it vexed her nonetheless.
    Midge studied the creation theories of every land she visited, careful to keep a clinical distance. She told Dale, There are thousands of fruits and vegetables, viable nutritious crops that no one knows about or wants to try. People are so ingrained in their habits and customs. Her tone was pleading but Dale waved his hand, We have enough troubles without creating some mythic conspiracy of agricultural hegemony. Some things, you have to chalk up to preference.
    Photographs.

SIX

    A row of peasants, hoes on their shoulders, filed forward in the Kirin dawn; the Tigris and Euphrates danced without touching; in Malawi the drums beat a slow angry rhythm; bathers on the beach at Cannes applied oils and screens; and in San Francisco the morning fog receded, washing the houses on the hills in brilliant blues and whites and pinks.
    Responding to her question, Pete said, I don't know, to do something. His laughter scented with guilt, he said, I mean, I'm a tool-making animal. To just . . . He looked at her to finish the thought, but she was already asleep. He continued anyway: It seems that once you have traveled, you have to keep traveling because once you have seen a few other places then suddenly nowhere is perfect. The walls of Siena, the women of Mogadishu, the waters of Truk—none of these things can be replicated elsewhere. They make everywhere else look weak, lacking.
    In a mirrored room in Milan, Heather admired her breasts. She pouted for the mirrors. She stepped closer and saw the tracings of lines near her eyes, still faint, faint as laughter in a room down the hall.
    Cecil sat and watched the Malays sitting watching him.
    Marshall found his ruby in the back of a Jakarta taxicab. He went to Thailand and traded the ruby for silk, which he took to Pakistan and traded for guns.
    Midge brushed past Dale as she left the telegram office in Istanbul. They took an instant dislike to one another and did not pause to talk.
    Pete watched Polly sleep, the crumbs of a smile on her lips.
    Walking back to his hut near Kho Phrangna, Cecil tripped in the dark and fell into a hole, opening a wide gash above his knee. He paid a young boat driver fifty dollars for the fifteen-minute journey to Krabi to find a doctor.
    Polly and Pete walked through the streets of Lima holding hands. The women in the flower market presented them with large colorful bouquets. Polly said, Pete you are the Ur'man and Pete said, Polly you are the Alpha woman. They looked into each other's eyes: Egypt!
    Marshall and Dale had tea near Kew Gardens. Marshall said, I don't travel to meet people. I've never met anyone that interests me. Dale sniffed indignantly and called for the check.
    Heather told Cecil, In Bangkok I saw the Wat Po, the Wat Arung, the Wat Phra Kaeo, the Wat Mahatat, the Wat Bovornivet, the Wat Benchamabophit, the Wat Suthat and the Wat Traimit. She smiled, pleased with herself.
    The room seemed to flip and crash, and Pete, sweating above Polly, blinked twice as if he had only just realized she was there. She stroked his arm. It's okay, she said, I was gone too. The next evening they planned where to meet in Egypt.
    Heather suffered a rainstorm in Oaxaca for four days. Thunder like the end of the world.
    Dale was momentarily intrigued by the graffiti in Dresden but decided to ignore it.
    Midge spent a day watching men ladle colorless soup into tin cups, taking careful notes.
    Due to a miscommunication, Pete waited for Polly at the Ambassador Hotel in Aswan, while Polly waited for Pete at the Ambassador Hotel in Luxor.
    Languages, spices, dogs with odd barks.

SEVEN

    The blues minstrels of Natchez kept the population from madness; a Somali youth stretched dried skin over a hollow clay base; Zurich pedestrians stepped in time to their watches; in Brazzaville all the radios were silent; and in Bucharest the dawn broke coldly, without a soul to witness the sunís first rays.
    Polly was lost in Bruge. At the end of a narrow street she heard a convocation—shouts, bits of flute music. At the end of the next street she heard it again. Then at the end of the next street and the next.
    Midge told Cecil, Our generation, our socio-economic category, doesn't have a Soweto or Buchenwald or Tiannamen or even a great pampas. Instead we have Bali and Mykonos and Cabo San Lucas. Cecil disagreed politely, No, travel is a question that is answered at death.
    Pete asked the members of a traveling oompha band if they had seen Polly.
    Dale met Heather in Cannes. Heather said, I hear Liechtenstein is filled with royalty. Where is it? Dale knew Heather was beautiful but did not like her shoes. He was hoping Heather would leave him alone. I think they keep moving it, he said.
    Polly said, It's a Spanish word, I think it means someone who has a destination but doesn't care how they get there.
    Pete asked a Brazilian farmer if he had seen Polly. The farmer said, A lost love is a seed from which pleasant memories bloom after a long, wicked winter. The blooms are fragrant but, unfortunately, inedible.
    When Marshall met Polly in Reykjavik, the soft curve of her lips rounding over smooth white teeth that flashed when she laughed distracted him momentarily from his negotiations. But only momentarily. They had no particular affinity other than loneliness, so they walked in the grayish late evening among fissures and steam spouts and lava deposits and moraines. The white tin houses looked battered by weather, as if they stood in a place where it had always rained. Polly asked Marshall, Why do you travel? He did not hesitate to answer. Money, power; both, he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Also, mystery and adventure, as long as they can be exploited, which they nearly always can.
    Travel is chaotic, Heather said, so I take snapshots. It turns out they are the only things I remember.
    Airplane food.

EIGHT

    Gilgit fell hushed under a twenty four hour curfew; floods killed hundreds in Bangladesh; a family of South Africans threw up their hands and cried; the Sudan lay in the burning sun like a broken bowl; and Bombay filmmakers produced hundreds of new movies in which gods were heroes, monsters were vanquished and lovers stayed together for eternity.
    Polly said, It would be nice if all my travels would somehow cohere, if I could look back at them and see meaning in the mist. She lay on a beach on a small island near Fiji. When the sun became too warm, she turned over or else went indoors.
    Heather sat in a tower restaurant in Paris, sipping wine, watching the black tail of the Seine split the lights of the city.
    Marshall walked through the markets of Lima peddling nerve gas, which he had acquired in exchange for his guns.
    Pete found a job in a Hong Kong bank.
    Midge examined the spoor of blue sheep in the mountains near Tarakot.
    Dale sat in his hotel room and ordered room service.
    Cecil lay dead on the floor of a canyon in India, tangled with Hindus and Moslems and bits of bus.

~
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