I buy a beat-up bike off a junkie and another change of clothes from the flea market. I may have money now, but I’ve grown used to living simply, to owning only what I can carry. And besides, I’m not staying long, so I may as well leave as few fingerprints as possible.
I wander up and down the Damrak looking at travel agencies, trying to decide where to go next: Palau. Tonga. Brazil. Once the options increase, settling on one becomes harder. Maybe I’ll track down Uncle Daniel in Bangkok, or is it Bali now?
At one of the student agencies, a dark-haired girl behind the desk sees me peering at the ads. She catches my eye, smiles, and gestures for me to come inside.
“What are you looking for?” she asks in slightly accented Dutch. She sounds Eastern, maybe Romanian.
“Somewhere that isn’t here.”
“Can you be more specific?” she says, laughing a little.
“Somewhere warm, cheap, and far away.” Somewhere that with one hundred thousand euros, I can stay lost as long as I want to, I think.
She laughs. “That describes about half the world. Let’s narrow it down. Do you want beaches? There are some fantastic spots in Micronesia. Thailand is still quite cheap. If you’re into a more chaotic cultural affair, India is fascinating.”
I shake my head. “Not India.”
“New Zealand? Australia? People are raving about Malawi in Central Africa. I’m hearing great things about Panama and Honduras, though they had that coup there. How long do you want to go for?”
“Indefinitely.”
“Oh, then you might look into a round-the-world ticket. We have a few on special.” She types away on her computer. “Here’s one: Amsterdam, Nairobi, Dubai, Delhi, Singapore, Sydney, Los Angeles, Amsterdam.”
“You have one that doesn’t stop in Delhi?”
“You really don’t want India, huh?”
I just smile.
“Okay. So what part of the world do you want to see?”
“I don’t care. Anywhere will work, really, so long as it’s warm, cheap, and far away. And not India. Why don’t you pick for me?”
She laughs, like it’s a joke. But I’m serious. I’ve been stuck in a kind of sluggish inertia since coming back, spending whole days in sad hostel beds waiting for my meeting with Marjolein. Whole days, lots of empty hours, holding a broken-but-still-ticking watch, wondering useless things about the girl whom it belongs to. It’s all doing a bit of a number on my head. All the more reason for me to get back on the road.
She taps her fingers against her keyboard. “You have to help me out. For starters, where have you already been?”
“Here.” I push my battered passport across the desk. “This has my history.”
She opens it. “Oh it does, does it?” she says. Her voice has changed, from friendly to coy. She flips through the pages. “You get around, don’t you?”
I’m tired. I don’t want to do this dance, not right now. I just want to buy my airplane ticket and go. Once I’m out of here, away from Europe, somewhere warm and far, I’ll get back to my old self.
She shrugs and returns to leafing through my passport. “Uh-oh. You know what? I can’t book you anywhere yet.”
“Why not?”
“Your passport’s about to expire.” She closes the passport and slides it back. “Do you have an identity card?”
“It got stolen.”
“Did you file a report?”
I shake my head. Never did call the French police.
“Never mind. You need a passport for most of these places anyhow. You just have to get it renewed.”
“How long will that take?”