It rained for a while, then stopped just as Duke shut his eyes tight and let his clothes breathe out the last eight hours of travel. He had not slept for a day and a half and was standing limp at the metro. Vina nudged him quietly and his body perked.
"Hey, it stopped raining," she said.
"Yeah," Duke rasped. He fisted his left eye socket and peered at Vina's through his knuckles. They exchanged weary smiles. They were exhausted by their travels, but primed for having a good night sleep in Geneva. The man stuck his hand in his pocket and pulled out a map. Vina conquered the sheet of paper effortlessly.
"We might be coming into Geneva a lot sooner than we thought, I'm so glad!" She turned the map like a steering wheel, left and then right, in and then out. "Yeah, here it is. Totally; we will be there around eleven. That's perfect. This is the last train in, then we will have a chance to find our place and sleep all day tomorrow." She brightened that much more. "You're probably looking forward to that."
Duke smiled zombishly with kindness, his eyes shot with blood.
"It's about fucking time, isn't it?" Vina just laughed and hugged him about his waist.
"Yes, it is," she let out.
The train pulled in late, but not so late to cause frustration; they were too tired to get angry. The couple had set out from Monterey, after finishing their studies that previous Spring. International Studies. Now, in a Summer that they had declared would be monumental in their lives, Duke and Vina unlearned all that they had been taught and began to think like diaries. They unlearned all that had been frantic and academic. They tried to forget about professionalism in the manic depressive economy. They silenced everything but the conversation between the voices in their heads. They cut themselves off from overly enthusiastic media and scholarly writing, refused to consider the news from Time or Newsweek, The Wallstreet Journal or Washington Post, and navigated their way to Geneva by the flows of conversation and cyberspacic hospitality that abounded out of following their ambitious spirits.
It was one year ago that they had met. Vina was an over-achiever. Her dad was an optometrist and her mother stayed at home. She was named after some professor that her father had during his undergraduate education in Literature. The god-like game that her parents played was that the boys would be named by her mother and the girls by her father. Vina; a professor of Literature. She never questioned it, but always squirmed to see past it. She never wanted to become a professor, especially in something as purple as Literature.
*
"Vina, come here, dear... let me show you something..."
She had always responded when her father gently spoke these words. He reminded her of some aged clock-worker, some accentric old man that never had friends, but was always fascinated by small things. To Vina, her father was a magician of all of the things that did not matter to anyone. It was a role she considered important to her. In fact, she thought it so noble that a man, capable of being most outspoken and powerful, could be so removed from convention that he boxed himself up, cut himself off from great importance, to delve into the esoteric and overlooked elements of creation. Vina loved her father so much that she used to fantasize about his death, and then feel sad. She imagined how she would plan his funeral, what details would be brought out in his face, his clothes, the ambience around him. Then, when she knew that day was far away, she would become happy, and enjoy her father that much more.
Now, she is heading to Geneva with Duke. Her bags slump in the corner of some house she does not know. Duke talks with the host in the kitchen, and she hears him ask questions about water, food, and transportation means nearby. The host sounds kind, and has an accent that she cannot decipher. She slides her hand into her bag. Her shoes come off as she is opens the beginning pages of a story. It had been handed to her by an old man from the Basque country. Her eyes speed left to right, right to left. The kitchen vanishes into an oceanic landscape. Her feet sink into the soft and cool carpet of a grassy cliff. It is Scotland. The water ricochets off of the rocks and her spirit breathes with the tide.
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