The Fraud

Drem was leaning over the barrier with dusky, occluded eyes. Then he saw me.
      “Drake,” he boomed (“DRECK”), “my God, you look something like bushwhacked,” a word perhaps my predecessor had given him.
      “That’s true,” I rasped.
      “A fourteen hours flight for you! My God!”
      “Yes.”
      “I hope you managed all right to sleep?”
      “I did,” I said. “Drem, your English sounds much improved.”
      “You should hope so!” he cried, and then seemed to compose himself and cough out a controlled little chuckle.
      We were waiting at the baggage carousel. Around us were uniformly bedraggled people.
      “I’m a little worried about the bicycling,” I ventured.
      “Oh, it is nothing,” he assured me. “It is a flat city, you’ll pick it right up.”
      Closest to us was a 35ish woman, alone, wearing fake-leopardskin-patterned clothing, and not much of it. Her hair crept in oily spirals down her back, which was the color of yam meat. Drem contemplated her with frank happiness.
      “Where are we headed first?”
      “First we are headed to the flat, Brad’s old flat, now yours, and then if you are feeling up to it we will pay a visit to the office, you can introduce yourself to your new staff, they are waiting.”
      I felt light-headed, contemplating this. There was the fact—a big round undeniable thing, a boulder—that my wife and son would be arriving in two weeks, and I would be expected to shepherd them in. It seemed like the height of irresponsibility.
      Drem continued: “The furniture, most of it was Brad’s, so he took it when he left, but you can replenish the flat in the Old Market. There is much furniture. Replenish?” he added, his face darkening a little with that anxiety I remembered in him.
      “Yes, replenish,” I said. “Replace; restock.”
      “Replenish the flat? Or replenish the furniture?”
      I actually was too weary to recall the answer initially.
      “Replenish the furniture, I believe,” I said.
      Drem shook his head, deflated. “In English I will always feel like a fraud,” he said. Then, as quickly, he perked up: “Now you are finally here, we can give you some speaking lessons, eh?”
      “Tomorrow,” I said, having difficulty imagining a tomorrow. I knew vaguely that it would begin with waking up on a spartan mattress in a crumbling room (Brad had sent pictures), but even that was unenvisionable. Tomorrow did not exist. This was a dream city.
      My luggage tumbled gracefully, like cantering elephants, down the incline and onto the conveyor belt.
      “You will pick up our language in no time,” Drem assured me. “It is not so different from English, many of the words.” He peered at the bags. “They are yours?”
      “Yes.”
      “This is no problem.”
      Loading the bicycles, Drem worked quickly and with a minimum of wasted movement. How we would later transport furniture via bicycle, I did not ask. Nor did I voice my desire to hire a cab. There were taxis, in an uneven row farther down the curb, but surely there was a good reason not to use them. The drivers were all crooked, or the expense was prohibitive, or there was some slippery notion of class, or shame. A thousand answers would have sufficed. I was not in a state to negotiate the question of cabs.

      The airport’s entrance faced vast connected chasms of intersections, washing and roiling with all species of traffic: one-wheeled, one-legged, two-wheeled, two-legged, four-wheeled, four-legged, eight-wheeled, eight-legged. The lights blinked in haphazard directions.
      “Just follow me,” said Drem, and he sailed out into the street into a stream of bikes and motorbikes. I shuddered off the curb after him. Like fish, the lot of us sped and wheeled around a traffic island, Drem surging expertly to the fore. Already I was losing him. My limbs were heavy. I knew almost immediately that the currents of traffic were too strong for me.
      I pedaled furiously. Around me were faces of calm, or indifference, or dull nothingness—faces for which no emotions were designed. Or, I lacked the tools to read them, and they registered joy, or fear, or nausea.
      Our teeming school stopped, seemingly at random, but Drem sailed forward, and vaguely I discerned the gap he was aiming for—a syzygy of spaces between windshields and back tires, existing for two rough moments in yawning, collapsing alignment. He slipped through. I pursued him, clumsily. The space swallowed Drem and did not reappear. To my left, a motorcyclist bore down on me. In front, a bus barred the way. Crushing my own panic in the flat of my stomach, I swerved left to flank the motorcyclist, except that he was veering right. I lurched away. Behind and to my right, something braked. My foot scraped against the road once, twice, again. The suitcase resting on the tail end of my bicycle seemed to totter and hiccup. I stopped.

      Around me was silence and stillness. In all directions, the vehicles had stopped. There were no shouts or klaxons. Instead, I was met on all sides by faces, now no longer blank or indifferent. Drivers stepped slowly out of their cars. Cyclists laid their bikes down in the lanes. Many of them walked slowly toward me, stranded in the center of the intersection. They had Drem’s unreadable eyes. They came within twenty meters of me, fifteen, ten. They continued, saying nothing. Others watched. The city converged on me in silence and completely.
      In the faces of its citizens I saw no anger at all.