Attention Foreigners

So, although I usually just bitch about how much people suck and I hate them, I’ve also been known to occasionally write a story. OR a chapter. Or a vignette. This is the first of what was intended to be a set of three, but I’ve been stuck on the third one for a year. If this site stays up, I’ll eventually feel like posting the second also. Here you go humans, some fictional entertainment:

ATTENTION FOREIGNERS..

-1-

You see the sign on a lamp post, if it can be called a sign. A flyer, plain white paper, the text copied and recopied and left out in the open to blur. “Attention Foreigners” it says at the top of the page. Underneath, in a foreign alphabet (Native, you must remind yourself, you are the foreigner here) it could say anything. Five or six lines of shapes your brain just can’t recognize as letters forming tight groups that could be read in any direction as far as you’re concerned. Your eyes keep returning to the page as you wait for the intersection to clear so you can cross the street. “ATTENTION FOREIGNERS” and at the bottom, “EXTRA MONEY” and only one flap left at the bottom, crookedly cut and barely legible. A phone number with an area code you don’t recognize, having been in this country a week. You glance up and down the street, suddenly uneasy. You notice that the street is full of other “foreigners” like yourself. You wonder how many of them have this number already, and how much “EXTRA MONEY” there can possibly be for all of you. You stare at the flyer, trying not to look like a person staring at a flyer on a lamppost at a busy intersection. You debate with yourself over whether or not you should take the hanging slip of paper, and whether or not you would ever be seen taking something like this back home. You wonder if anyone is looking, and then decide it is ridiculous to believe that anyone would be. You reach out tentatively, a finger barely touching the jagged edge of the hanging slip.

The light changes in front of you and suddenly you’re shoved into the intersection. Deciding quickly and without a backward glance, you reach out and tear the phone number from the bottom of the flyer, nearly having your shoulder dislocated by someone pushing past you in the process. As you cross the street, you notice how loud it really is here, how many people there really are, for the fifth or sixth time today. Looking around to identify the sources of all the sounds you hear, you are nearly hit by a motorcyclist who is currently paying no heed to the traffic signals. Mumbling under your breath and feeling completely alone as the cyclist yells incomprehensibly at you, you shove the tattered piece of paper into your pocket. You raise your hands in an apologetic way, hoping that you do not look as lost as you know you are. The man continues to scream at you, gesturing wildly, as you stand frozen in front of him. “Just ignore it,” says a voice behind you. “Fucking racists.” You turn and see a young man approaching you, speaking English, but looking like the locals. You smile weakly at him as he walks past. The light above the intersection starts flashing and some kind of horrible keening noise accompanies this change. You hurry toward the other side of the street, nearly knocking over an old lady in the process. You do not stop to apologize a second time. You make it through the intersection alive.

Throughout the afternoon, you don’t notice yourself absently fingering the scrap of paper in your pocket. You don’t remember taking it, not really. You walk around the neighborhood for hours, trying not to gape at any of the things you see. You try to shop for T-shirts, maybe. You try to find a place to eat where you can both read the menu and recognize the foods being served. Later on, as the sun is finally going down but the air is failing to get any cooler, you go out to a club full of other foreigners like yourself. Over a few drinks, you meet new people and lament about your choice to move halfway around the world alone. “Attention Foreigners” you think to yourself on the way to the bathroom, but at this point you really don’t know why. You stay at the bar too long tonight and plan to end up paying way too much for a taxi home, if you can even remember where you live. It turns out you haven’t the slightest clue, and the cab drivers in this country are not all that friendly or helpful after dark. It has started to rain, and you are drunk and miserable. You wait outside, hoping for a cab for maybe an hour anyway, thinking that someone must know where you live. Eventually you give up. You end up renting a hotel room close by and pay someone for the privilege of sleeping on a lumpy mattress too close to the floor. You don’t really notice, and are just relieved to have someplace dry to lie down at this point.

Sometime in the early morning, you may be awakened by the city winding back up around you and you stumble to the bathroom. You stand in front of the mirror, barely recognizing your own face and less able to stand than you feel you should be. You contemplate whether or not someone slipped something into your drink last night, but you can’t really remember. You don’t see a reason why anyone would. You made it to a hotel alone, and you don’t feel like you’ve been injured. You study your face and torso in the mirror, looking for cuts or bruises and find none. You shrug, blaming your current state on jet lag and drinking strange foreign booze. You turn on the water in the sink and let it run for a moment, to get it as cold as possible before you open your mouth under the faucet. After a few swallows, you remember being warned against drinking the water here. You kneel in front of the toilet, contemplating the worst possible outcome of this situation and while you think, the nausea hits you full-force. You vomit for an eternity before crawling back to the lumpy mattress in the other room.

Pulled suddenly back into consciousness, you hear a coughing sound in the hallway followed by an earth-shattering pounding noise. You try to speak, but can’t seem to remember how to form words. Your tongue is stuck to the roof of your mouth and feels like sandpaper. Your teeth taste like bile and vomit and booze and disgusting slime. You raise an arm to keep the light out of your eyes and try again to speak. There is a sound like water running somewhere close by but you can’t really place it in the current scheme of your existence. You ignore it as a barely recognizable human voice says something in gibberish from a few feet away. You peel your tongue from the roof of your mouth with considerable effort and grunt (you hope) loudly enough for the voice to hear you.

“Ereben o-crok. Way-gup time. Time you going home now” says the voice, and you try uselessly to decipher the syllables. You glance around, moving your arm a fraction of an inch, and you do not recognize your surroundings. You sit upright a little too quickly, throwing a thin blanket off yourself, and through the pounding vertigo, you vaguely remember drinking with some people last night. Walking over what seemed to be miles and miles of winding sidewalks, trying to talk to the people you met on the street and laughing uncontrollably when it got you nowhere. Trying to understand some brightly lit place and a man smiling at you. You gave him your passport and the last of your money. He gave you what? A key, you finally remember. You look around, trying to locate this key and find it in the pocket of your pants, which are crumpled on the floor beside the mattress. The smiling man from last night doesn’t seem too happy now, and he is still pounding on the door mercilessly. You stumble three steps, and leaning against the doorframe, you open the door an inch and a half. Breathing a foul breath at the very short man standing outside, you grunt something like “yeah, I heard you”

“Ereben o krok,” he says again, emphatically gesturing at his watch, “you go now.” You move away from the door and manage to climb back into your pants and wrestle your boots onto your feet (which have grown overnight by at least a size and a half). You do not bother to shut the door as you dress and the man stands in the hall and watches as you gather your shopping bags and wallet from the table in the corner. The hallway is too narrow for both you and this little man, so you have to maneuver around him, shoving him a little more roughly than absolutely necessary into the room you just exited. You move down the hallway and out the door into the sunlight, reminding yourself to look for new shoes as soon as possible, and try to find your way home.

Hours later, and you’re finally back home. Well, you’re in the single room that will be your home for the year that you will live here. Barely furnished, and all the furniture having seen more than its share of owners, this is your home. You drop your shopping bags onto the floor and fall onto the bed next to the front door.

You lay for awhile, trying to forget the lengthy journey back here and all the inconvenient little hassles that make up your life on a daily basis. As you think, you begin to notice a stench in your apartment. You can’t place the smell, but it is terrible and soon becomes overwhelming. You stand and circle the room. The trash can is empty; there are no dishes in the sink. The bathroom is luckily not leaking or mildewed. Standing in the middle of the room, bewildered, you catch sight of yourself in the mirror hanging on the wall at the end of your bed. You take in your unkempt hair, your rumpled clothes. You look down at your hands and the dirt under your fingernails, and you realize the stench is coming from you. You stink of diesel fuel and stale cigarette smoke, of whiskey and of sweat and of the smell of the thousands of people crowded into the non-air conditioned subway earlier. You strip off your clothes, depositing them in the washer in the corner. You go into the bathroom, shut the door, and turn on the shower. You remember as the first high-pressure drops of ice water hit your skin that you forgot to turn on the damned water heater. Cursing, you move to avoid the spray of what you would on any other day swear were ice chips. Once out of range, you assess the situation. You could step out of the shower, cross the room, turn on the water heater, and wait, simmering in your own disgusting stench, for fifteen or twenty minutes while water heats. Or you could stop smelling bad right now. You sigh and decide to wash quickly. As you scrub the filth of the past two days off your skin, you begin to feel more human. You brush your teeth twice, trying to get the last of this morning’s vomit taste off your tongue. You step out of the shower, which is actually just the bathroom and towel off. After you are sufficiently dry, you toss the towel in the washer and start it running.

The next morning is Monday. You wake up for work and realize that you fell asleep when you came back from dinner with a coworker last night with wet clothes still in the washer. They probably smell of mildew. You shudder and hurry (as if it will help now) to hang them up on the rack in your living/bedroom. As you pull your clothes out of the smallish washing machine, you notice what looks like confetti clinging to the fabric of your favorite pair of jeans. You brush it off, reach inside the pockets. In your front left pocket, you find a cheap green plastic lighter, even though you don’t smoke. You set the lighter on the small shelf in the laundry area, believing that maybe one day you will need a lighter after all. In the right front pocket, you find seven dollars and some change left in your jeans from yesterday. This will pay for lunch, you think, so you set it on the table attempting to flatten it. As you hang your jeans, a sopping wad of paper falls from one of the back pockets. You finish hanging your clothes and pick up the soggy mass. You try to unfold the wet white sheets, but they crumble in your hands. You can vaguely make out numbers and more of those foreign letters on the pieces. These must be receipts or something, probably not important. You drop the entire wad into the trashcan beside your bathroom door. “Attention Foreigners” you think to yourself, chuckling at the sign you barely recall seeing. You don’t remember taking the piece of paper from the bottom of the flyer. You don’t remember if you ever called the number, but it shredded in your wash and covered your clothes for most of a day. It is on your floor and in your washing machine and stuck to your clothes in pieces you couldn’t put back together if you wanted to, and you are safe.