By Shelby Mang
Fall 2016 Kaplan Award Winner
I haven’t been high since high school, so I’m anxious holding the aromatic pot brownie in my hand, especially where I stand in the middle of the street. As the rest of my group spills out of one of Amsterdam’s many cafés and onto the cobblestone street, I remember that getting baked in public is common here.
Half a brownie down, still numerous gallery rooms of the Van Gogh Museum to go, and I feeling far from foggy. But my friends are taking off. In a frenzied attempt to have the shared experience I dip into the bathroom and finish my brownie in the privacy of my stall. I keep the reflex to feel embarrassed by this desperation at bay by convincing myself that it’s what any tourist would do. In my imagination there’s a girl in the stall next to me doing the exact same thing, thinking: “Shit, even Van Gogh’s museum is really boring. I need to be high, like, now.” “See,” I tell myself, “You’re not as desperate as that girl.”
And then I can’t see straight. My body’s moving before my brain realizes it. I can hardly follow my own thoughts, let alone the directions of the security guard urging me to check my bag at the counter before I try to enter the Heineken Museum. I can tell this isn’t the museum’s usual procedure because it’s a mess, people everywhere. No clear start or end to any kind of line, it’s apparent there’s no system in place for accommodating the essentials of hundreds of tourists at a time. I wonder why the museum’s suddenly opted to clog its lobby with throngs of foot-tapping foreigners until I hear someone behind me mutter: “Paris.”
Forever later, I’m curled at a table of a small restaurant, the ally-side patio table the only available in the night’s dropping temperature. I glance behind me through the restaurant’s window to see every warm seat filled. As we wait for our food, my conscious thoughts slowly trickle into my subconscious, until I lapse back into attention. In my mind, jovial shouting between drunken mates down the ally escalates into the screams of those running away from someone in fear, a sadistic gunman or suicide bomber, until I shake, literally, the paranoia from my head. Apologizing to my friends, I put my headphones in one at a time. Maybe music will help me stay present in time. Maybe it will drown out the screaming.
—
Every complaint my brain begins: “I’m cold; I’m hungry; I’m tired” is followed immediately by ashamed internal silence. As I stand on the ground where a million Jews lost their lives, I shut my whining up almost fast enough to redeem the guilt I feel for doing it in the first place.
At Auschwitz we walk the hard paths solemnly. The air smells old. But not like an old house or garage. It smells old like decay, like the scent of an archaic ideology that murdered millions.
We tread heavily through the halls of Block 11, the prison within the prison. Our eyes eventually adapt in the darkness of the torture chambers where prisoners were hung by their arms tied behind their backs; were forced to breathe every inch of air until there was no more left; were trapped in a cell just big enough to stand in. But our minds can’t adjust to the suffering these walls have facilitated.
In the neighboring block, a house of collections, we walk for miles past the faces of prisoners whose expressions, frozen in film, evoke a sadness just commanding enough to conquer the sickening feeling of responsibility.
Upstairs. Ten truck’s worth of pots and pans give tangible meaning to the lives we know were taken here. Suitcases long emptied are piled into mountains behind a glass wall. Things that can never be erased of their original owners prove quite the contrary: prosthetic limbs; wedding rings. Hair. We’re asked not to take pictures out of respect for the dead.
I remember that I’m on vacation only as our tour bus pulls up next to our hostel in Krakow a few hours later. My friends and I had planned to go out drinking that night, but another disposable night out feels too trivial to consider now. I ask myself seriously for the first time in my life: What will it take to feel happy again? I feel guilty living a life surrounded by death.
—
Our usual booth was taken. Turns out it was one of those seemingly random nights when sports fans were in higher attendance at Kiely’s than usual. It only felt random because as American students in Ireland we never had any idea of what days Irish fans would flock to the pub to watch the game.
At a slightly less homey table, my roommate and I order our usual: a chicken goujon wrap with chips. I think that I should be hesitant to order the same thing every time as a foreigner; “Try something new! Make the most of your limited time here!” says a voice in the back of my head. I’ve justified the behavior by calling myself a regular at Kiely’s. I’ve had enough pints here to constitute the status. I’m romanticizing the idea of regularity at a place so irregular from my normal American life instead of holding myself accountable to common expatriate practice.
The bartender, Alex, comes to the table before our food does. “Next time you’re in an uncomfortable situation like that, tell me. We thought he was here with you.”
He’s referring to a few nights prior, when a Scottish man approached my friend and me at our regular booth, well past midnight, way too late for the game to be on.
“Can I sit with you?” he had asked warmly.
My roommate and I had exchanged a cautious glance. But our sympathy overcame as he continued: “I’m just an old Scottish guy here alone. Don’t make me talk to a bunch of old men at the bar.” He scooted into the booth.
An old Scottish man he was. Kind and gentle. He loved to talk. About his life and experiences, his granddad. I never felt any emotion stronger than obligation in our interaction until my roommate left to go to the bathroom. I looked up from the tequila he’d insisted on buying us to meet his eyes. Suddenly he looked like a predator, and I felt like prey. I remember feeling his eyes trickle downward, clinging to my cleavage.
“I would have stepped in, asked him to leave,” Alex’s goes on, his thick accent pulling me out of the memory. “He spent the rest of the night babbling on about his daughter who’d just hung herself. Nearly got into a few fights. He wasn’t well.”