Hippie

17

When they walked out into the silent drizzle, their ears were still buzzing from the music. They yelled so they could hear one another.

“Are you going to be around tomorrow?”

“I’ll be in the same spot you found me the first time. Then I need to go buy the bus ticket to Nepal.”

Again with this Nepal stuff? A bus ticket?

“You can come along, if you’d like,” she said as though she were doing him a huge favor. “But I’d like to take you on a little outing just outside Amsterdam. Have you ever seen a windmill?”

She laughed at her own question—that was how the rest of the world thought of her country: clogs, windmills, cows, prostitutes in the windows.

“We can meet in the same spot we always do,” Paulo responded, a bit anxious and a bit pleased with himself because she—that model of beauty, her hair neatly combed and full of flowers, a long skirt, a vest covered in mirrors, patchouli perfume, a wonder from head to toe—wanted to see him again. “I’ll be there around one o’clock. I have to get a bit of sleep. But weren’t we going to one of those houses of the rising sun?”

“I told you I’d show you where to find one. I didn’t say I’d go with you.”

They walked about five hundred feet until they reached an alley where there was a door without any number or music coming from it.

“There’s one over there. I’d like to give you two suggestions.” She had thought about using the word “advice,” but that would have been the worst choice in the world.

“Don’t leave there with anything—there must be some policemen we can’t see in one of these windows, keeping an eye on everyone who visits the location. And they tend to search anyone who leaves. And whoever leaves with anything goes straight to the slammer.”

Paulo nodded, he understood, and asked what her second suggestion was.

“Don’t try anything either.”

Having said this, she kissed him on the lips—an innocent kiss that promised much but surrendered little. Then she turned around and set off toward her hostel. Paulo stood there alone, asking himself whether he ought to enter. Perhaps it was better to go back to his hostel and start gluing the metallic stars he’d bought that afternoon to his jacket.

However, his curiosity won out, and he walked toward the door.