en leaned back with his cell pressed to one ear. He watched the dying sun glint off the water. He listened to the wind and the sounds of people walking below.en leaned back with his cell pressed to one ear. He watched the dying sun glint off the water. He listened to the wind and the sounds of people walking below.
“Is this Alex?”
His apartment was clean and spare with a small patio for watching the sun set. He’d bought a canvas and a beginner’s oil painting set but they sat in his room, unopened. Instead he filled his days with wandering. A Dutch language class; a hash bar with bad paintings on the wall; a canal cruise with some fat Americans; a nightclub where he’d met a German girl and they fooled around in the backseat of her car.
“Who’s this?”
“Ben. Ben Fish. Do you remember—”
“Coyote Café. You and Elvis. Of course I remember. That was like a month ago.”
“Thirty-three days.”
“You’ve been counting?”
Ben was a little surprised there’d been no dramatic transformation, no epiphanies. Just some mild culture shock—he was embarrassed to speak only one language after meeting a Dutch couple who spoke fluent English, German, and French—and the occasional lonely morning, because he’d always felt mornings were lonelier than nights.
“How was Memphis?” Ben said.
“Okay, I guess. Fiona hooked up with a guy in his forties and Heather and I saw a terrible Elvis band. The singer didn’t look anything like him. Not as bad as your grandpa, though.”
“He wasn’t my grandpa.”
“Oh, that’s right. I forgot. It’s been thirty-three days, you know.”
One afternoon Ben swore he spotted the old man walking past a fountain in the Rijksmuseum Gardens. He ran to catch up with him and saw it was a middle-aged tourist in a white jumpsuit with shiny black boots and thick gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses. Eating popcorn from a paper bag, street map in hand, reading over the top of his sunglasses.
“So,” Alex said. “Did Elvis ever find his granddaughter?”
“He did.”
“Reconciliation, I hope.”
“Not quite.”
A few days earlier in the top floor of an English bookstore Ben heard the cashier singing “Suspicious Minds,” and he expected the old man to walk out of the back room, carrying a stack of books, a trail of employees following close behind. On one of the racks sat a gossip rag, the front page a grainy doctored photo of an old fat man in a white jumpsuit exiting a classic car—maybe a 1958 Ford Fairlane Skyliner, Ben couldn’t be sure—with a younger woman wearing sunglasses. The headline read:
ELVIS CONTACTS DAUGHTER
SHOCKING DETAILS OF THEIR
TEARFUL REUNION
“Don’t you think this is a little weird?” Alex said. “I mean, I’m not trying to ruin the reunion vibe, but it’s been over a month—”
“I had to make some arrangements. Is that a bad excuse?”
“It’s a terrible excuse.”
“Well, I wanted to let you know that you were right. The Kit Kats are better here.”
Silence. Alex laughed. Then she laughed some more.
They talked while Ben watched the sun set over the Herengracht Canal. The canals weren’t as big as he thought they’d be, little rivers running along city streets with canal boats that looked silly because it seemed so much easier to walk or bike. But sometimes he didn’t want to walk or bike. Sometimes he wanted to get on one of those canal boats and pretend he was headed for parts unknown, to the edge of the map, all the way to the end of the universe and through the keyhole in God’s bathroom door. To a place bigger than his father. Bigger than the world. Bigger than anything he ever knew.