The Stowaway Read Online Free PDF Page A

worry, for he figures he’ll go back and get it later. At the back of the hall, the band starts playing a sad, slow song. Bianca takes his hand and they dance again, her head resting on his shoulder. As they sway, he seriously thinks that maybe, in another life, he was like her—he’s never heard music that so accurately captures how it is to watch the sun dip glowing behind mountains, or how it is to realize that life is fleeting, andgorgeous, and cruel. When she realizes the music is making him maudlin, she lifts her head off his shoulder and says, “Hey now, boy, don’t be that way. We are suppose to be happy tonight!” With that she motions at someone, and soon Daniel is given another glass of the foul-smelling tuica, which he swallows in a single, incinerating gulp.
    A numbness has seized his arms and much of his lower body. He finds it hard to speak, which is frustrating for he wants to profess his desire not only for her but for her eyes, and her smile, and her litheness, and above all else the sweet Gypsy sadness broadcast by the nuances of her beauty. His head spins, his vision blurs, the room takes on the same thick, yellowish hue as the tuica
.
He loses his balance and falls against her, and for a crazy second he wishes he were the only man in a world of women who looked like her, and smelled like her, and moved like her.
    “Oh boy,” she says, “a little too much tuica, no?”
    “Yes,” he says, suddenly hating himself. “I think so …”
    “Sometime I forget that the Roma brandy it take a little time get use to, no? Is a little bit strong, no?” Daniel nods, and she adds, “Okay, so maybe you need air. Is not a large problem.”
    She puts his arm over her shoulder and walks him out of the hanul. Outside, she leans him against a wall and encourages him to take deep breaths.
    “There,” she says, “feeling a little better?”
    “Yes,” he lies.
    “You want to come back inside?” “No, I think another minute …”
    “Okay, no problem. When you are maybe feeling a bit better, come on back, okay? And no more tuica
.
I think maybe you have a little headache tomorrow, no?”
    Daniel nods. As soon as Bianca goes back inside the
hanul
, he realizes he’s going to be sick, his only hope being that he can stall it long enough that she doesn’t see. He stumbles along cement alleys, making turn after turn, until he comes to a piata that is small and grimy and ripe with the odour of garbage. His vision has turned wavy, and across the piata he sees a car stripped of its tires and mirrors, and then the stripped car turns into two stripped cars, and then the two stripped cars turn into four stripped cars. Soon, an entire flotilla of stripped cars hovers over the piata
.
He lowers himself and lies on his side, resting on ground spinning as madly as a dervish.

    He regains consciousness in a place neither light nor dark. He sits up, his back sore from sleeping on concrete. In the half-light, the walls look like thick black clouds.
Okay, don’t panic, you can get up and walk right through them
, though as his head begins to clear he realizes that what he is leaning against is hard, and cold, and as real as life in Romania. His stomach drops, and he feels sick. He
has
been sick; the front of his shirt is messed with tripe and potatoes. His thirst is an agony, the pain in his head worse.
    He hears snores. The bodies producing them are spread across the floor, their knees pulled upward, their bent arms serving as fleshy, numbed pillows. The noise in the cell begins to gnaw at him, growing louder and louder, and then it’s reverberating through Daniel’s throbbing head until he clamps his hands over his ears and thinks,
I deserve this, I do.
The air smells of urine and sweat, and though Daniel cannot see any rats, he can hear their nails, scurrying against stone. He rubs the cold out of his hands. On the far side of the cell is a small window, placed high. After a while, it begins to turn a muted orange. A