Bringgg, bringgg, on the cot beside me. Like a little bird trapped in the sheets. A banner across the top of my phone “Malaria Meds”.
She looked up briefly, disinterested, professional, and carried on.
I giggled, only I knew the absurdity.
A little intersection of two parts of my brain, high-fiving in the red-light district alley. The horny, fresh haircut traveler finally giving in and the recreational germaphobe fresh from exploring un-sanitized regions of the world.
I’d gotten all my shots before Africa. Typhoid, Diphtheria-Tetanus, give me a lollipop. Careful with malaria, take Malarone daily, and seven days after you leave. I was by then several days past that window.
She keeps going, I look around the room at the low lights, feel the heavily scented air. Fiddle with the phone volume briefly.
Health abroad is one of my forever vigilances. The first mis-timed sneeze and I’m at the corner pharmacy. Paying a grinning doctor way too much to give me a Z-pac and send me back to the dusty streets.
Bringg, Bringgg. I grab the phone, finally silence it. Exhale.
She looks up at me, “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure you finish.” Maybe she thought it was my wife? Or the cosmos was randomly chiming in to wrap up this unsavory encounter?
I had strolled the Red-Light district a few times, a couple 50 euro notes burning holes in my pocket. Got back to the train car hostel, pop my pill, wondering when I was going to slip behind a curtain.
The two currents weaving through each other, health freak, horny guy, shadow selves in the forest. Never noticing each other until they were face to face.
Oh hey. They shake hands. My Id family reunion at the brothel.
We’re always at the intersection of some neuroses, fantasies, laundry.
Adrift in a Pacific garbage patch of junk food and overstimulation, or riding a swift current trying to keep a newborn alive, ignoring every other force for the moment.
The more you push one down the weirder places they pop up.
I’d googled all the rigorous health protocols that prostitutes undergo there, felt reassured. I made some loops, found different alleys.
The red glints on the cobblestones, foggy air, laughs of the high British tourists stumbling around with Heinekens. Churches from 1640, austere, having to look down at the oldest human desires they couldn’t wash away.
Eventually, I caught the eye of the most animated lady: big fake tits, easy smile and laugh, warm eyes. I felt like she cared. Rapport matters, in any business.
I walked in and she closed the curtain, triaged me like a field medic. Faint conversations of passersby in the alley.
“It’s more to touch,” she said, watching my eyes drift.
Now the phone reminder’s off, but the alarm echoed in my head.
I didn’t have a reminder that told me to go to a bar and try to chat up a cute traveler, or one in the busy hostel.
No alarm that said chill the fuck out you’re not going to get malaria 2 weeks after from a mosquito that got stuck in your carry-on.
Just these stale pathways rooted in me, twisted by loneliness, travel fatigue, adrift with my own paranoias, crossing paths.
What current pulls you? How many secrets up your sleeve don’t make it past the grocery line conversation.
Get a note that grandma is in the hospital while you’re chuffing up a mountain feeling alive.
Think you’re writing a novel in a coffee shop but you’re really just aura flirting with the girl in yoga pants. Wallowing in self-pity at a drive thru when the cashier with the Chia Pet hairline asks how your day is, and you stop to actually take a look.
Riding one wave until another knocks you back to center.
Horny/hypochondria. Odd bedfellows. They briefly winked at each other as I sat in that brothel. You realize how absurd you are right, Guy? See you soon.
Wanderthoughts 