I met the Wanderer soon after I first puked, into the dustbin in front of the dimly lit Bony a Klyd bar in one of Prague\u2019s less generic residential neighbourhoods, Vinohrady, on a rather steep hill that I had to climb, unfortunately, so I ended up with a couple of bruises and a purple toenail, which took a month to peel off. The Wanderer offered to buy me a drink five minutes after I half-stumbled in, looked around and headed towards the bar where I sat down on a stool, elbows propped up, with a \u201cFuck y\u2019all\u201d look plastered on my face, as he later told me. He sat down left of me, cupped my chin \u2013 I didn\u2019t budge or object \u2013 to turn my head to him, wiped a drop of vomit off my left cheek, without a tremble of his Semitic nose, and looked at me long enough for me to focus and notice his tired traveller\u2019s eyes. Except for the invitation to join him, to which I nodded, dumbly, because I didn\u2019t feel like looking at the bottom of my glass, or staring past the unfriendly waiter, all night, he didn\u2019t speak. He ordered drinks by waving his hand, in a feminine, barely-there, beckoning gesture, like the queen of the hearts summoning one of her varlets; despite my drunkenness, I knew straight away that he was used to attention.<\/p>\n
\u2018Are you alive?\u2019 I asked him the next morning.<\/p>\n
\u2018Are you?\u2019 he retorted, lighting up and blowing the first smoke ring, blue-gray against the vanilla wallpaper and painfully beautiful in its fragility, towards the high ceiling of the honeymoon suite in the hotel Alchymist. I never found out who financed his travels; maybe he had a princess wife in Bahrain, and maybe he was a ghost, or maybe he was the diamond rattlesnake itself; he could have been; he had a diamond-shaped face with square cheeks and a triangular chin.<\/p>\n
Then he offered to help me hunt down the Departed. I still don\u2019t know how he got me talking about him; I don\u2019t remember pouting my lips and exhaling the words, with a bit of carbon dioxide smelling of alcohol and pussy and his spunk, which tasted bitter, like broccoli and kefir, probably because we drank so much the night before, but somehow he did make me tell him about the Departed, and the snake, and the pursuit.<\/p>\n
I think he was still in me when I did it. Now that I think of it, that is why I could: I was not me; I became him; I was his chest and his fingernails; I was his right ventricle and his left cornea; I was his cock and his voice-box, and I could talk through him like a ventriloquist, the belly prophet of the Egyptians and the ancient Greeks. So I closed my eyes, and he whispered the story in his soothing baritone, holding me close as he did.<\/p>\n
I was drunk asleep when it happened. As I was waking up, I remember thinking, \u2018how odd, I don\u2019t recognize this type of pain\u2019. Then I screamed, only once, because I felt it move, inside me, pushing my insides, the stomach, the diaphragm, the liver, up into my throat and onto my tongue. Then my voice left me, like I was Ariel, who made a pact with the sea-witch, to see her lover. I was anonymous.<\/em><\/p>\n I was told snakes aren\u2019t viscid. But the diamond rattlesnake was slimy. Cold. I was choking on the tongue tip that I had bitten off, face pressed against the covers. My body shut down on me. So I panted like a tired steppenwolf, without shedding a tear, teeth dug into that damn feather pillow \u2013 stuffed personally by grandmother Villager who hated pigeons and shot at them every chance she got \u2013 and I let him fuck me, until I started seeing stars and walked up the Milky Way towards the laughing wide-open trap of the black hole that led to the purgatory. It swallowed me with a cough and then spat out stardust and a bit of that crappy, near-black blood that was snaking its way, silently, down my legs.<\/em><\/p>\n It was then that the Wanderer went flaccid in me. And cold. My pussy, still hot and wet, embraced him, squeezed him, to keep him in, but he wormed out; I couldn\u2019t stop him. Before I started wondering why, it became clear: he wanted to ask questions, and he couldn\u2019t do it if I kept talking through him. So he rolled over onto his belly, and he turned his head away from me to be able to speak; he had to clear his throat first because my bile became his mucus, too much of it; he was afraid it would suffocate him.<\/p>\n \u201cDid you report it?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYes. I shouldn\u2019t have.\u201d<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t true. But he believed me. Or pretended to. In the land of in-between, truth and un-truth, truth and de-truth and truth and half-truth \u2013 don\u2019t ask me if I\u2019m lying now because I don\u2019t even know myself \u2013 are lesbian lovers that had not yet come out about their bisexuality. To each other. To the world. Which couldn\u2019t care less. \u2018Lesbian until the end of college\u2019, I told a chick once, with thinly-veiled amusement. The blond sweetie-pie was obviously a dumb freshman, so she didn\u2019t notice the undercurrent of sarcasm in my voice: \u2018Men had fucked me over too many times, haven\u2019t they done the same to you?\u2019 She nodded, earnestly, and cooed while she was sipping the spiked drinks that I sent her through bartender Soother, who hailed from Utah, where all the bad boys have gone to screw whatever moved because that godforsaken shithole had outlawed monogamy as obsolete. Three hours later, Freshman Princess, I choose to call her, slipped her hot little hand in between my panty-less legs, and I sighed with relief, letting my head drop back, off the kitchen table in the back of the Pharmacy bar in DC\u2019s Foggybottom, where bartender Soother made delicious bruschettas with magic mushrooms during the day \u2013 most guests could never fathom why they were leaving his eatery so happy, but they kept coming back, so he accumulated a large and versatile clientele: State Department square-faces, George Washington University students, folks from the hood, Brothers \u2013 and filmed movies of me and my prey past closing hour. I never let him capture my face. Just theirs.<\/p>\n In that land, my land, what matters is the story. The Wanderer knew the beginning, and he was hooked. He kissed me, tenderly; I was surprised because I was used to him sucking and biting my lips until they turned crimson, purple, black; his tongue \u2013 the organ with the poison \u2013 felt rogue, but familiar, a piece of meat that somehow belonged into my mouth; it was possessed. Yes, my dented tongue \u2013 too \u2013 was not mine, to speak hurtfully, anymore; it wiggled in the heat of his mouth, with ease, like a trained zumba dancer\u2019s firmly muscled torso.<\/p>\n A good story is a cocktail of truths, half-truths and lies. Bartender Soother taught me that over whisky sour at the Pharmacy. I weaved it, for the Wanderer, for myself, as I continued talking through him, letting our tongues dance and burn. Through that fire, I told him, wordlessly, of the dilated, bloody anal orifice I saw in my hand-mirror. Truth. Of the black receiver from the 70s that I smashed after a dry voice rang to tell me that I had contracted Hep C. Half-truth. Of the humiliating interrogations at the police station that never happened. Of the women\u2019s clinic I really did work at for a couple of months A.B. And of the sobbing of my pregnant mother, whom I told to get an abortion when it turned out that the blob on the sonogram had a tiny penis. Half-truth. I yelled that out at some other pregnant person. All pregnant women look the same to me, so I talk to them as I would to my mother. Of the self-pity that drove me to drink more than I could handle and of the punch I aimed at someone\u2019s face and planted on a wall. Truth. Of the knuckles that broke and of the beloved piano sonatas I could never play again. Half-truth. I started playing at 9 months A.B.<\/p>\n He understood. But a part of him couldn\u2019t take it. Maybe he remembered the last time he had anal sex with someone \u2013 pink cock disguised in the conveniently black Lifestyle Tuxedo, which hides the blood and the shit \u2013 in the dark. That is how I imagined it. He was too much of a wuss to see it all: the delicate human ass that his penis had turned into a baboon\u2019s. Maybe he felt ashamed for wanting to do the same with me last night. I will never find out, and I don\u2019t care to. I like my own version of the story.<\/p>\n After I\u2019d told him, he still held me for a while, but against his will, his body tense, sweaty. The hand I damaged, the one with the tremor, lay uncomfortably on his chest, cupping his left breast and monitoring his irregular heartbeat. Dum, dum-du-di-dum. It was then that I found out he was older than me, probably above forty, but he could have been wearing another mask to fuck with me again. His eyes, the color of dark honey, like a cub\u2019s, never betrayed his age. I didn\u2019t think about his age much, but I always assumed he had had a life, or several, already. That\u2019s the thing about wanderers; they learn how to deceive time. Perhaps they all have a time box, machine, capsule; I didn\u2019t care what it was; I wanted one for myself. Running my fingers through his hair, I suddenly realized that it had turned silver. Or was it silver before? I couldn\u2019t remember. Years. Passed. By. Overused. Wasted. Recycled. Too many pussies left behind wet, too wet, wetted up for the lingerers, the better ones, he said. We had that in common. Neither of us thought of oneself as a particularly good person but ignored the nagging Catholic guilt urging us to repent and change. He had suppressed his. And I, the child of the post-communist generation, was born almost entirely guiltless. That\u2019s why I could leave now, and that\u2019s why he could only seek me out every now and then, appearing unexpectedly in the Czech streets and the Mongolian steppe or a Chilean desert, without wondering when we would see each other again.<\/p>\n I knew he would return, and that thought gave me enough comfort; also, my over-fucked pussy had already started resenting him, resenting me for letting him do it to me; I could feel the defiant fungus mushrooming inside me and my inner and outer labia swelling and leeching onto each other, to help each another bear the pain of the metamorphosis, until my vagina became one big fly mushroom, or blusher, as they call it in some parts of the U.S., and I knew I couldn\u2019t sleep with anybody for some time. Maybe that was the contraception he imposed on his women. I suppose I will never know that either.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s your name?\u201d he asked me as I was getting dressed. I took my time before I answered.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m the Banished,\u201d I said quietly, with a bit of annoyance with my melodramatic self, as I was closing the door behind me.<\/p>\n My upward-pointing, snobbish nose started smelling the damn yeast as I hopped down the steps beneath the Prague Castle, leather duffel bag swung over my left shoulder and digging uncomfortably into my left buttock. I was rushing to the restrooms of the city\u2019s first Starbucks, on Malostransky Square, to change from the skinny jeans into my \u201cperiod\u201d skirt \u2013 I remember the Departed smirking that \u201cflow must have come into town\u201d every time I put it on \u2013 a shapeless piece of burgundy silk floating freely around my hips and ankles, letting my pussy air itself without every clinging onto any bit of irritated skin or tissue.<\/p>\n My train, the mid-day inter-city with a name that was supposed to advertise both the destination and the speed with which Czech Rails could deliver you there, the Slovak Shot, was due to leave at 4:20pm from the Main Station, which had not been renovated yet: I liked the arrogance that had Prague flaunt familiar communist ugliness next to incomprehensible medieval beauty; it was rogue, and it reeked of piss and un-showered homeless bodies, so I lit up, just outside the sausage bar with a grill and a capped caveman disguised as a waiter in a white apron, and breathed it all in, because I wouldn\u2019t be back too soon, and I needed to remember it, the city where I told the Wanderer.<\/p>\n It was still only early A.B., but I was about to start working again. As I inter-laced my fingers and stretched out the arms behind my back, squeezing the shoulder-blades that I had tattooed to give myself angelic wings \u2013 cigarette still burning the skin off my scrapped lips \u2013 I told myself, without speaking, that I would do my damn fucking best to silence the spirits of the rest of my kind, in the vain hope that mine, too, would get tired of screaming.<\/p>\n Kristina Mikulova<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Wanderer Part I \u00e8 stato pubblicato la prima volta l’8 Maggio 2014 nel nostro settimamale e pu\u00f2 essere sempre letto nella sezione Racconti.<\/em><\/p>\n The Wanderer Part III \u00e8 stato pubblicato la prima volta il 22 Maggio 2014. <\/i><\/p>\n La foto \u00e8 un lavoro di Stefania Bonatelli<\/a>, dal suo progetto intitolato Zumo de Flores (Italia)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"