The Amsterdam Incident
by Ericka Arcadia

          James sat with me for coffee at The Amsterdam Cafe until, unbeknownst to me, his Hinge date showed up. We had been there for a few hours. There was a missing piece to something we needed for some kind of deeper understanding of the self that we could only create if we were together. I have a lot of debris to sort through now, now that I’ve met… maybe her name was Emily? We’re all adults. There’s nothing to feel badly about.

          There’s nothing to feel badly about.

          “I would like that, please. I’ll take that, please.”

          I have spent more time writing lately, and I invited James to join me because we were still talking about this thing that is bigger than us, something we need the answers to. I remember watching an animated short, maybe it was at one of those little festivals they used to put on at the Center for The Arts in Kansas. They had reels of the shorts and documentaries that were up for Oscars in a given year, and this animated short was set in a bar with what looked like regular patrons, and you could see their thoughts and conversations in little thought bubbles, and there were two old men talking into the same thought bubble that they were filling with disembodied boobs, one after another, stacked on top of each other, and at one point one of the old men reached up into the bubble and poked at one of the boobs. It helps me, to diminish what James and I are doing into a bubble that feels playful and ridiculous, as if we weren’t reshaping our perceptions of ourselves. I’d be hunting for this elusive thing we can’t nail down anyway, because I have this entirely different mindset that doesn’t fit my skin, my rooms, the world I’m in. I could do this alone, but he’s right there, talking about the same thing, all the time.

          He asked me if I was cold before Emily took him away. We were sitting outside the cafe, in December, and he noticed I had been hugging myself, but I told him it was the content of our

conversation I was reacting to more than the temperature. Things had been off with our timing from the moment he saw me and gestured, “What is this?”

          He waved his arm around his view of me seated in the garden chair opposite where he would sit for two hours. He remarked, slightly accusatory, about my energy being different. I was wearing my son’s old band hoodie that said “trombone” on the front with no other explanation. The embroidered letters of “trombone” had played as a shield over my heart since I had dropped my son off at college. That morning at The Amsterdam my hair was clean and drying wild, and the hoodie was fresh from the dryer. A muffin, a matcha, and an open laptop in front of me, I had no idea what James could be talking about. He didn’t articulate what was different about me, but tried to explain it by saying, “Is it because it’s morning?”

          But then later, he got comfortable enough to admit that he trusted me, and I stammered through a reaction that did not include my saying I trusted him too. I drew into myself, wondering what he could be seeing. There was something I wasn’t talking about with him. Something in me noted the length of his neck when he cracked and popped it. Something in me noticed the strange dark-water color of his eyes, while staying eye-locked on a concept, a reference, an idea that we could wrestle down and free at the same time. We were playing at circling around who we were, seeing ourselves peripherally, by knowing enough about what we were not, and I prayed not to be seen. Before he disappeared with Emily, I kept chewing on my lips, feeling the sharp edges of my teeth, sitting in sun rays that were only glancing, too weak to warm me, but with light piercing enough to half blind me.

          “Don’t do it. Don’t do it.”

          He told me to stay away from Hinge when we briefly touched upon my own bleak prospects of finding someone or being found. I knew the girl coming up the walkway was Emily without knowing. The clip and clop of her boots, the leather bag, the wispy sound of her long straight skirt. She was very confused that James was already there and seated with me. I offered my hand in introduction, and she looked at him, asking, and then remarked, “Bookstore!”

          Right. Bookstore. I’m an NPC, the older lady who runs the bookstore down the street, trying to become human by spending time with a younger man at a cafe. Nothing threatening here. I was safely contained in her mind, while James mumbled, “I’ve talked about you.”

          When she finally took my hand, it wilted gracefully in mine. Pale skin, pale bones. Nails a modest length, shiny and red. I was careful not to crush her.

          It was actually very cold outside, and I only noticed after James and Emily retreated into the cafe together. I packed up and left earlier than I’d planned.

***

          Earlier that morning, I was able to wake, rise, and when I looked in the mirror, I liked what I saw. I looked deeply into my own eyes, and the person looking back at me was the right girl. I could place a pink palm against cold glass that held an image of my own. We’re getting so close to becoming one, with just a sliver of silver between us. Just a few more talks with James and I’m sure it’ll make sense, why my memories are things I can physically feel, surfacing into my consciousness, sending vibrations throughout my body as I change from what I am into something new by reuniting wholly with what I was before.

          The memory that rang through me the morning of The Amsterdam stirred while I was listening to the babbling brook near my house in the woods. I congratulated it for getting its voice back after recovering from a muting flood that stacked too much sediment in its throat. The water was clear apart from where it glistened in the sun. It ran a long snake’s curve into the thickest part of the forest, dark while everything outside it shimmered in the silvery, low-sky sunlight of winter solstice. I stood there and felt, bodily, the moment the memory sank back into my bones, of being on the banks of the creek near my childhood home on Rose Lane. The long reeds growing from the hard Kansas clay and the low crawdad-infested muddy water that pooled nearest my home oddly shared the same pathways as the clearer water that skimmed over the dark, snail covered rocks below the white wooden bridge I crossed every day to get to school. The snails, the reeds, the smell of the clay came back into my body and connected with the now, the present of this new stream, gurgling and winding off into the forests of Tennessee, a fusion necessary to keep it alive I suppose. I wanted to tell James about it.

          Because I don’t know why this is happening.

          Because even writing the words “Rose Lane” fills me with nausea. I don’t want to remember. I can’t remember a break. I can’t remember a good day. I can’t remember having a moment off from feeling dread. Miles and years away from that place, I walk along the edge of the unknowable forest down the hill from my home every day, and every day I am still terrified of the dark, the things I can’t see. Why am I carrying so much of the past around, but also feeling newly made, without a history, not recognizing the life I’m in? What did I tell James? Don’t think about “why” and just look at the fact of it. Embrace the fact of it. And there are so few facts to hold onto with him. I forget what we say, but I’m left with the feeling, like a conversation of gibberish from a dream.

          Talking to James is like throwing a stick in a river.

***

          Right after the Amsterdam, my neighbor sent me a text to take my time about getting home. A deer had crawled up to our shared driveway to escape something, despite the fact it was too late, that it had been ripped open beyond help. I asked her to send me a picture of the deer, and she wouldn’t. She said it was too gruesome, not something I could unsee if I saw it. My mind ran wild with ideas of its own. I took her

advice and worked well after my normal closing hour, made longer by a follow-up visit from James, wanting to talk face-to-face after my reply to his texts.

          “Was that weird?”

          “Was it?”

          James runs in and out of the bookshop like a river, keeping his own time. He stopped at the tarnished mirror by the front door to fuss over his hair, and when I told him there was a hairbrush he could use in a nearby drawer, he reached into his pants pocket and slowly pulled out an enormous red comb, without breaking his wild stare, and I laughed as I laugh with no one else.

          When I pulled into my driveway in the dark, my neighbor’s husband was spraying blood stains off the concrete. A hunter had been summoned to end the thing, and he said it was either feral dogs or coyotes, beasts he has seen on his cameras, that mortally wounded the deer. The darkness was soaking up light like a sponge by that hour, and the house lights barely reflected off the shiny, black, soapy surface. I asked my neighbor’s husband if we could trust the hunter’s take on the situation. The hunter seemed sure, he said, but he also took a thoughtful moment that held me still and waiting. It was quiet outside, apart from the water dripping in moonlight. He is, like me, from Kansas, and sometimes he makes me wonder what my father would have looked like had he lived longer. After a time, he admitted that he remained skeptical. It had to be something else, something bigger. The wounds were too horrifying.