how Hannah’s yearning for Daniella caused me to study Central Asia and end up writing about the Kushans (bright eyes, the decemberists, and the facilitation of my fantasies)
Hannah’s search for Daniella ultimately causes me to study the Kushan empire
“The night before, Hannah had bought a one-way ticket from Yerevan to Frankfurt. She said she was going to work her way over land from Germany to Armenia.
“What’s in Armenia?” someone asked.
“That seems like an epic trip,” another said.
“Are you going alone?” asked a third.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m going alone.”
“Aren’t you scared?” I asked her. “I mean, that’s like - have you done that before?” I couldn’t imagine doing something like that. I couldn’t even think of what all the countries were she’d have to pass through to get all the way to Armenia over land.
“I am,” Hannah conceded with a smile.
“But why Armenia?” the first persisted.
“I’m trying to… It’s hard to explain. I’m trying to find someone.”
“It’s very dark in Freiburg. We walk through tall grass and reeds on the banks of a stream, flanked on either side by shanty houses made from scrap metal.
“The Turks live here,” explains Jordan.
After a while, we reach the medieval old town. Castles, guard towers, palaces rise up into the sky, surrounding a vast garden filled with fire flies and flowers. Knights patrol on horses. Drunk college students are stumbling around eating doener kebabs the Turks cooked for them.
“Is this how you imagined it?” asked Jordan.
I shake my head.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“Daniella’s flat,” Jordan says.
We walk out of the central square. We are in a village filled with thatched-roof homes. A peasant woman nods at us as she sweeps her porch in the glow of a streetlight. Dirty children bathe with buckets full of water. A Planned Parenthood clinic is hidden behind a dense cluster of dilapidated houses.
“Gypsies,” explains Jordan.
“You have Daniella here?” I asked.
“She’s close,” Jordan said.
We get to a big cement tower. We walk inside. We take an elevator up to the 50th floor. It opens up into a massive apartment. Most of it is an empty floor stretching out dozens of feet, surrounded by square couches and chairs against the edges. Tall windows give way to views of towering, glowing skyscrapers. I see the European Central Bank with a blue euro symbol on the roof. I see the Empire State Building.
The room is full of people. Tens of people. All of them in their underwear. Guys wearing boxers and briefs. Girls wearing bras and panties. Everyone has a drink in their hand. Daft Punk is blaring in the speakers.
I see Daniella. She’s standing in the middle of everyone, staring right at me.
“This is where we keep her,” said Jordan. “This is where we film.”
I walked to her. She grabs me by the hands and smiles at me. Everyone else at the party keeps talking and dancing and drinking and smoking. The air smells like marijuana. There’s jars full of mushrooms and ecstasy and cocaine and acid.
“Why did you disappear?” I ask her.
She kisses me on the lips. We open our mouths, close our eyes, touch tongues. She draws her face back. “I’m dying, Hannah,” she said.
“You’re dying?”
“I’m dying,” she said. “I have cancer. The same cancer that killed Cameron.”
“No,” I say.
“I can’t control it,” she says. “I can’t control the forces we summoned.”
We stare at each other for a while.
“I want to go somewhere with you,” she tells me. “I want to go on a trip with you.”
“Are you still recording videos?” I asked.
“I love you, Hannah,” she said. “I’m so sorry for everything I’ve done. I took you for granted.” She squeezes my hand. She runs her fingers through my hair. “I’m so sorry.”
We kiss again for a long time. And then I tell her it’s okay, I love her so much.
We wait until Jordan goes to the bathroom. And then that night we are on a flight to Peru from Frankfurt. It’s exactly the sort of international adventure of which dreamed when we were in Bad Neustadt together. Together we will roam the continents.
“It’s just like on the plane before,” Daniella says.
She’s fingering me underneath the blanket. I’m fingering her, too.
I feel her trembling. She leans in and kisses me.
And then she’s gone. I am standing in my dorm at Michigan State, walking to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I sit down on the toilet and pee. But then suddenly I’m in my bed again. This time it’s daylight. I realize even the peeing was just a dream.”
“My spirit would be with them at this lake again. This time I would jump into the water with them, unafraid to be in a bathing suit. And we’d always have that together. Instead of nostalgia, I would feel everything just the same like I felt it back then, as if it were still happening. But it would be even better. Because the mistakes of the past would be corrected and rectified by the happy pleasures of a hopeless delusion.
I called and called, texted and texted. I walked alone into the stress. I strolled in isolation on the shores of the lake, struggling to concentrate my mind on the hidden reality of their light’s lingering presence. I squinted hard in my attempts to make out the outlines of astral corpses around me. But the more strenuously I reached my arms into the air, the more vigorously I strove to touch the leftovers of their souls with my fingertips, so all the more painful it was to finally concede failure.”
“Once on a driveway, in an attempt to cast this spell, I absorbed the spectral vestiges of another time. The light from the sun, shining in my face, possessed all the same properties as it had before. The scent of the lawn and the sound of the water running from the hose were both the same. My mentality and worldview from that time were restored. Everything I had learned in the previous fifteen years was forgotten, all my experiences forfeit, and I was once again the person I had been.
Then a faint body of light, which could hardly be perceived, was beside me on my parents’ driveway. This was the astral corpse of my past self, I hoped. In a flash of revelation, it felt like my soul had somehow fused with that long-confined carcass. Or maybe I was temporarily possessed by the spiritual remains themselves. It was a possession which I eagerly welcomed, for it was the method by which I could truly re-experienced the past. And I did relive it all just as it was, but it only lasted a second.”
“I knew what I’d tell someone else in my position: forget her. But I wouldn’t forget her. I didn’t know anyone like her. She was still a person who changed my life. She was still a person who had saved me and filled so many of my nights with happiness. I never knew just how lonely I was before I met her.
Soon I’d be in Europe for a year. I’d have over two months free between my semesters in Germany. Two months free to travel wherever I wanted.
I’m going to find her, I resolved. I’m going to interview her. I’m going to write about her.
The last thing I remember seeing that night are the lines and circles I’d drawn on my map. I looked at Tbilisi and imagined that soon I would be there. I dreamed I was a street urchin lost there forever, sleeping in the alleys and begging at the churches and working as a hooker on the street corners with Daniella.”
Facilitation of Georgia/Central Asia fantasies:
“Shrill as a choir of children
Urgent like the first day of may
False and inflatable feeling
Tugs at my senses, big as the macy's Parade
One brick on top of another
Such is the measure of man
Planets are inset like diamonds
On a gravity halo, eternity's wedding band
I slept with that dealer all summer
The ecstasy is still in my spine
Coat check I couldn't remember
Walked into the winter, came out on the other side
And in the south the sun is shining
Back in the east the lights went out
Stuck on a ladder to heaven
On trial way back in the hague
Lullaby sounds from the engine
In my styrofoam coffin, asleep on the interstate
Black globes, old symbols of freedom
A murderer still on the lam
Cities encircled in iron
On a great silver beltway, democracy's shackled hands
Séance that brought us together
Objects we move with our minds
Coat check and I lost the number
Short sleeves in the winter, fell back through the other side
Out in the west the cars are crashing
Up in the north the ice gave out (gave out, gave out, gave out, gave out)”
“Death may come invisible
Or in a holy wall of fire
In the breath between the markers
On some black I-80 mile
From the madness of the governments
To the vengeance of the sea
Well, everything is eclipsed
By the shape of destiny
So love me now
Hell is coming
Yeah, kiss my mouth
Hell is here
Little soldier, little insect
You know war it has no heart
It will kill you in the sunshine
Or happily in the the dark
Where kindness is a card game
Or a bent up cigarette
In the trenches, in the hard rain
With a bullet and a bet
He says, "Help me out
Hell is coming
Could you do it now?
Hell is here"
See the sterile soil, posion sky
Yellow water, final scraps of light
Bringin' new tears
Well wake, baby, wake
But leave that blanket around you
There's nowhere else safe
I'm leaving this place
But there's nothing I'm planning to take
Just you, just you, just you
Just you...”
“The Atlantic was born today and I'll tell you how
The clouds above opened up and let it out
I was standing on the surface of a perforated sphere
When the water filled every hole
And thousands upon thousands made an ocean
Making islands where no island should go
Oh, no
Most people were overjoyed, they took to their boats
I thought it less like a lake and more like a moat
The rhythm of my footsteps crossing flatlands to your door
Have been silenced forevermore
The distance is quite simply much too far for me to row
It seems farther than ever before
Oh, no
I need you so much closer
I need you so much closer
I need you so much closer
I need you so much closer”
“In matching blue raincoats
Our shoes were our show boats
We kicked around
From stairway to station
We made a sensation
With the gadabout crowd
And oh, what a bargain
We're two easy targets
For the old men at the off-tracks
Who've paid in palaver
And crumpled old dollars
Which we squirreled away
In our rat trap hotel by the freeway
And we slept-in Sundays
Your parents were anxious
Your cool was contagious
At the old school
You left without leaving
A note for your grieving
Sweet mother, while
Your brother was so cruel
And here in the alleys
Your spirits were rallied
as you learned quick to make a fast buck
In bathrooms and barrooms
On dumpsters and heirlooms
We bit our tongues.
Sucked our lips into our lungs
Till we were falling
Such was our calling
And here in our hovel
We fuse like a family
But I will not mourn for you
So take off your makeup
And pocket your pills away
We're kings among runaways
On the bus mall
We're down
On the bus mall
Among all the urchins and old Chinese merchants
Of the old town,
We reigned at the pool hall
With one iron cue ball
And we never let the bastards get us down
And we laughed off the quick tricks
The old men with limp dicks
On the colonnades of the waterfront park
As 4 in the morning came on, cold and boring,
We huddled close
In the bus stop enclosure enfolding
Our hands tightly holding
And here in our hovel
We fuse like a family
But I will not mourn for you
So take off your makeup
And pocket your pills away
We're kings among runaways
On the bus mall
We're down
On the bus mall
We're down
On the bus mall
Down on the bus mall
Oh oh oh”
“Did it all get real, I guess it's real enough?
They got refrigerators full of blood
Another century spent pointing guns
At anything that moves
Sometimes I worry that I've lost the plot
By twitching muscles tease my flipping thoughts
I never really dreamed of heaven much
Until we put him in the ground
But it's all I'm doing now
Listening for patterns in the sound
Of an endless static sea
But once the satellite's deceased
It blows like garbage through the streets
Of the night sky to infinity
But don't you weep (don't you weep for them)
Don't you weep (don't you weep)
There is nothing as lucky
Honey, don't you weep (don't you weep for them)
Don't you weep (don't you weep)
There is nothing as lucky
As easy or free
Don't be a criminal in this police state
You better shop and eat and procreate
You got vacation days, then you might escape
To a condo on the coast
I set my watch to the atomic clock
I hear the crowd count down til' the bomb gets dropped
I always figured there'd be time enough
I never let it get me down
But I can't help it now
Looking for faces in the clouds
I got some friends I barely see
But we're all planning to meet
We'll lay in bags as dead as leaves
All together for eternity
But don't you weep (don't you weep for them)
Don't you weep (don't you weep)
There is no one as lucky
Honey, don't you weep (don't you weep for them)
Don't you weep (don't you weep)
There is nothing as lucky
As easy or free
Or free
Or free, or free
There's nothing, there's nothing, there's nothing, there's nothing, there's nothing
There's nothing, nothing, there's nothing, there's nothing”