The hostess led me toward a two-person table in the middle of the dim-sum restaurant I had hoped would cure me of my fear of death.
I looked at the tables I passed, each dish at the restaurant a love letter to garlic and chili and oil. A shrine to steam and starch and meat. By the time I took a seat, my mouth was watering, even though I still didn’t know what the hell dim sum technically was. I knew it had something to do with serving tea, and that it was a centuries-old tradition, which in my desperate mind made its supposed magical properties somewhat more plausible. I avoided research that might tell me otherwise so that I could hang on to my belief.
I couldn’t go on the way I had been, couldn’t face my brothers again until I’d changed.
The menu at the restaurant was an electronic tablet, about ten pages to flip through. Most items were phonetically translated from Chinese or just listed one or two ingredients with no further explanation as to how the dish was presented. There were a handful of pictures, but I couldn’t tell which picture went along with which dish. I looked around at the other tables, noticed the way the light was coming in through the large pane of glass at the front of the restaurant and joining the too-bright bulbs overhead. Not a shadow to the place, all these human faces lit up to their fullest detail. Wrinkles and the lack of them, scars, dominant genetic traits and recessive ones, lives leading up to this moment and unfurling afterward, each toward the same final destination.
* * *
I had been in the US for all of two hours and had already felt myself on the verge of oblivion twice. My hostel room was cramped, but elegant in that we’re-a-hostel-trying-to-be-cool-but-without-spending-any-money way. I took a seat on the bed and ran a hand over the white linen, smoothing out the wrinkles caused by my weight. All five fingers felt the coolness of the strange sheet, a miracle of a sensation. My brain reminded me that it was a gift I’d eventually have to return. Oblivion number one. I stayed put for nearly an hour, unable to pull myself out of the whirlpool of my thoughts.
When hunger finally untethered me, I begrudgingly plugged in the hostel’s Wi-Fi password so I could look up how to get to Hungry Heart Row. It had been nice to not have the use of cell service since landing, to look around at this new country I’d read so much about, consumed so much of, had never had much interest in seeing personally. One by one, my apps sent me complaints that I’d been away. My group chat with friends had 243 messages. There were three from my mom, prying in that passive-aggressive way that was trying not to pry. I decided to call her after I got some food in me.
I reached into my backpack and found the little notebook I used to write things down in at work back in Kotor. When I’d first started giving tours of Old Town, I thought I would fill tons of the pocket-size pads, one a day maybe. I’d envisioned stockades of them overflowing from my little room, spilling out from drawers, full of the wisdom of strangers from across the world. But that same eighty-page notebook had been with me for all three summers since I started working for the cruise companies.
The tourists were boring, sure. They spoke too quickly in languages I only had a slippery grasp of, and half of what they said were the same complaints, the same observations of Old Town’s cuteness. “Oh, the mountains, the water.” I could say that in a dozen languages at this point. But I’d never filled the notebook for a strange and simple reason: The corner of each page had a little illustration of a tiny dancing skeleton. I hadn’t given it much thought when I bought it, and I have no idea why it was even there, I must have bought it sometime around Halloween. It kept me from reaching for the notebook as much as I could have, so tourist observations had gone mostly unrecorded, except for the rare occasion when I felt stronger than the grave.
The main example, of course, were the words that would fix me, or at least unlock a way in which I could be okay with it all, stop thinking those same thoughts and enjoy my fortunate life: Qing Xian Yuan.
The Internet told me that the restaurant was a short enough walk from the hostel, just across the river. After that first fall into oblivion, I pictured myself succumbing again, this time in public. The river’s murky depths could do it, or a walk past a funeral home, an advertisement in a pharmacy window; the world was full of its reminders, innocuous to so many but not to me. I downloaded a few podcasts and a fresh music playlist, so as not to give my thoughts too much freedom to take over. But I kept the desire to disappear into my headphones at bay, curious about the voices out in the hall and the reception area of the hostel. I closed the door behind me, and as the voices got more and more distinct, I felt around for a familiar accent. I like talking to people. I like foreignness. That is why I loved my job, despite the boring tourists. Small talk is mostly banal, but the potential to break through the small talk is exciting, and redemptive. I don’t really know what I live for, but if I can point at anything it is this. A conversation with a stranger that can turn into a friendship. If not that, then just a memorable conversation. If we all die and our lives are forgotten, it is these conversations that make an impression on the deletable history of the world.
When I identified the soft lilt of a French tongue in the hostel’s lobby, the clipped vowels of a German accent, I started thinking about languages. How long they went on for. How long my timeline was compared to theirs. I felt that familiar panic building in my chest and rushed past the two girls sitting at a table and the group of three checking in, their hiking backpacks leaning at their feet. I slipped on my headphones, hit play on the first thing that could keep my mind from churning, pushed open the door to the outside world. Oblivion number two.
* * *
Like most people, I don’t remember the exact moment when I became aware of my mortality. The knowledge came to me early in childhood, I’m sure, but was relegated to some nebulous future thing I wouldn’t have to worry about for a long time. Since the day of the swim, though, it has been hard to forget. Every time I look at my brothers and remember that they were born at a time when bombs were falling, and how fragile the human body is. Every time I remember the swim, and how one prolonged cramp could have pulled me under and ended things. A mere mention of the stars and how they would take millions of lifetimes to reach.
Some days there are panic attacks and the inevitable sink into oblivion, moments when all I can do is picture what it will be like to not exist, what it will be like to give back this life I’ve been granted. Other days it is just a quiet hum in the back of my mind, a frequency that I can tune out if nothing calls attention to it, and which I can escape with a number of distractions—books, television, conversation.
But the hum has gotten progressively louder, and the panic attacks more frequent. Miljan and Radan had started noticing the way I would get up quietly and go to the bathroom until an episode would pass, noticed me never taking my headphones off. When it started happening at work more and more, I knew that I couldn’t keep going this way.
I have had a good life. The one thing that I wanted to change was simply knowledge, the same knowledge everyone else had. The knowledge that others seemed to be able to live with but which had constantly frozen me, which had repeatedly marred my otherwise fortunate life. Death would wipe everything away. I didn’t even want to defeat death; I just wanted that knowledge gone.
* * *
It was easy to find the Swede’s writing in my little notebook. He’d used a red pen, and his neat penmanship stood out starkly against my scrawling thoughts in black-inked Serbian—Qing Xian Yuan. My cure, maybe, the catalyst for this whole trip.
At first I was sure the guy had been drunk or on something stronger. The stuff he was saying. Then curiosity got the best of me, and I googled the city of Rowbury, found that blog post. It was written by a Dr. Ishq, detailing all the rumored magical restaurants in the district. The tone had been lighthearted, but there seemed to be real legends surrounding the place and its food. I’d found a review site called Served and a list of exactly how many places there were in the neighborhood.
That led to a descent into the Internet wormhole: reviews, more blog posts, the most far-fetched corners of the Internet, where conspiracies blossomed. I don’t know why the Swede chose to highlight the dim-sum place out of all the others, or why I didn’t close out of the all-too-many Internet browser tabs and focus on something productive and rational. I kept at it for over a week, until suddenly a plan formed. I’d use my savings to travel. I’d start in the US, a country I’d previously had no interest in. I’d go to this one place first, and then, perhaps, hopefully, I could see the world and be in the world in a way I had never before.
In the morning, when those thoughts I hated surfaced, the theory of magical restaurants was how I kept them at a background hum instead of a full-fledged attack on my day. When waiting for the tourists to unload from the cruise, as if the boat were puking them up, the theory was how I kept myself from falling into oblivion. Magical food. A cure. The thought that I could simply wish away my fear was too tempting to ignore.
“All food is magical, of course,” the Swede had said in his near-perfect English, a slick smile on his face, like he’d used the line before. “This is something else, though.”
In Kotor, I would wake up and be surrounded by beauty. In the evenings before I disappeared back into home, I was looking out at beauty. The mountains were there; the water was there. In the summer the tourists were everywhere, and many of them were beautiful too. The cats that walked the city, lapping at milk that everyone left out for them, they were beautiful. My country’s history, not so much. There was ugliness there, and there is still ugliness around in the world now. In this country too, where they sweep their past so desperately under the carpet like so much dust.
I was lucky to be in my little pocket of beauty in Kotor, lucky to be in that pocket of the country, that pocket of time, that pocket of my family. All three (country, time, family) had experienced much more ugliness, and probably much less beauty. Yet my thoughts superimposed death over all of it. Everyone else seemed to be able to live without the constant awareness, and I wanted Qing Xian Yuan to wipe it clean. I wanted to be able to embrace my good fortune, the way my brothers had.
* * *
I noticed a tendril of steam rising a few tables over, followed it down to a large bowl of soup. A group of three Asian guys about my age, maybe a little older, were using chopsticks to pull things out of the bowl, or alternately dipping some unrecognizable morsel back in, letting the juices drip for a second, then popping it into their mouths.
One of them closed his eyes for a moment as he chewed, his tongue darting out slightly to lick his lips. He shook his head as if he couldn’t believe what he was going through, a small golden hoop in his ear dangling with the motion. Was it magic being granted, or just simple joy?
When the waiter came by, I pointed at the soup the guys were eating and said, “I want that.”
The word made me pause. I looked down at the electronic tablet again and shrugged.
“It’s a soup, yeah?”
“No, man. It’s not a soup. You don’t want some dim sum or something instead?”
He offered no clues as to what dim sum might be. I felt my stomach lurch. “Yes?” I tried to laugh it off. “I’ll take the not-soup, and one dim sum.”
The waiter chuckled again and motioned for my tablet. “How about some soup dumplings?”
“Yes, okay.”
“Pork or shrimp?”
I remembered reading a series of tweets from someone who’d come to Hungry Heart Row and, after eating pork tamales, swore that their wishes kept coming true. “Pork.”
The waiter tapped on the screen a few times and then bolted away toward another table in the back. I was left with the din of the restaurant. Music playing softly from somewhere, the clink of chopsticks and spoons. People gathered around the hostess stand, talking, looking at their phones. I could hardly believe where I was in the world, and why. So many people in Kotor never exited a two-hundred-kilometer radius of the world.
Although that was probably true of people in the restaurant, too, true of most human beings. They stayed within their limited lives. Even I had done it for most of my life and was lucky now to be in a different corner of the world, experiencing new and exciting things. My appreciation should not be dependent on magic. It should not be dependent on forgetting death. And yet.
I examined the sauce bottles at the edge of the table and poured some out into the little container in front of me. I stuck my pinky in the dark liquid, gave it a sniff then a lick. It wasn’t soy sauce, which was maybe the only legitimately Asian thing I’d ever eaten, so I didn’t know what it was at all.
To my right there was a black kid taking out these little pockets of food from one of three bamboo steamers and taking notes as he ate, big, clunky headphones covering his ears. To my left a couple in business attire scrolled through their phones and took distracted sips from tiny ceramic teacups. I poured a different sauce directly onto my pinky finger this time, tasted nothing but heat. I coughed and scrambled for a sip of cold water. The black kid looked up at me, lifting one half of his headphones slightly off his ear. “You okay?”
I was about to simply nod and smile and return to my thoughts, but then I felt the urge for more. I thought: The next few months there’ll be none of Miljan and Radan. No parents, no friends to provide the conversations that could get my mind off death. No Swedes or tourists coming off in hordes from their cruises. No constant companionship of the cats in Kotor, which were mostly strays but not quite homeless, since everyone in town treated each cat as their own. Just me and my thoughts. If I let them in, they’d be my only company.
I took a gulp of water, tried to act as American cool as possible. “Yeah. It’s just we don’t have this level of spice where I’m from.”
“Where’s that?”
“Montenegro,” I said, almost like a question. I had assumptions about Americans hearing about foreigners, prepared for their defensiveness and hostility at once, especially since I sound like a drunken Russian when I speak English. But I wasn’t quite sure how that applied to black Americans, who were viewed like foreigners in their own land. Even I knew that, though Americans liked to sweep that under the carpet. “Next to Serbia.”
The boy smirked. “I know where it is. I took a geography quiz once and got one seventy-five out of one hundred.”
“How’d you do in math?”
He laughed, and a knot that had been forming in my stomach the more my thoughts raged now eased. If death couldn’t be wished away, this would be my other request: to find conversations like these, strangers who offered at least the prospect of momentary forgetfulness. That was the only thing that worked when the episodes started coming at work, at school, at home. At school, I got in trouble when an episode came during a test and I started talking to the girl sitting next to me. I got a few bad reviews from tourists saying I was “uncomfortably chatty,” and my boss had to warn me to stick to facts and rehearsed anecdotes. I tried to talk to the tourists, tried to talk to Miljan and Radan, who were suspicious of the new behavior.
“That was good, man.” The kid looked down at his notebook, then a silence fell between us. The restaurant was loud with chatter, but it still felt like silence. Silence always brought back the thoughts. And the moment of his laughter was now gone, returned to the universe.
The kid bit his lip, then grabbed the pen resting by his plate and jotted something down. He kept his headphone slightly off, though, a faint thump of music reaching me.
“What are you doing?” I asked, pointing at the notebook.
He tapped his pen against the edge of the table. “This? No, it’s nothing, just a little research.” He waved his hand at the notebook as if he could make it disappear, laid his arms over it. “What brings you to town?”
When I’d told my parents I was leaving, my dad smiled and nodded like he knew it was coming. Mom cried a little but kept it together, muttering jokes about how it had been a mistake to let me work for the cruise companies. They were sure that I was never going to come back, and I almost told them that if I discovered the fear of mortality did not follow me, I might stay gone. I’d laid out my plans instead, to give them some details to hang on to.
“America? Why there?” Dad had said. “I thought you were interested in speaking Spanish.”
What could I have said? I’m afraid of death wiping me out, and there’s a restaurant that might help with that? “Cheap flight,” I’d said with a shrug. “I won’t stay there long.” Then I dived into a list of places I wanted to go, distracted them and myself from the reason for this first stop.
My parents and I did not talk about the bombs or the days without food; we did not talk about fears or mortality. The only time I had ever told anyone was when Miljan found me outside the house, just a few weeks before the Swede. I was curled up on the concrete dock by the bay, almost catatonic, unable to shake the oblivion from my mind. He’d had to shake me for five minutes before I came to and admitted what had happened. Since that day he’d looked at me like I was damaged, cracking jokes about death constantly.
I thought of going down the path of distraction again with the kid sitting next to me. It was my one imperfect weapon. To force my brain to focus on something else. It only worked for spurts at a time, which was why I loved the summers in Kotor, being distracted by the tourists. It’s why I listened to podcasts and music and dove into the Internet as often as possible. There was always something ready to pull me back toward death, though—a song lyric, an anecdote about a dead grandparent, the mere mention of a disease. I could make up some other answer instead of the truth, since thinking about the cure was in a way thinking about death too.
But then I thought of how the moment would be gone soon, how quickly I’d have to hand it back to the constantly taking universe. The universe which had almost taken away my brothers and my parents, the universe which took day in and day out, which could have taken me during my swim or during a million other instances. And I thought that I’d had enough of keeping death to myself.
The kid slid the headphones completely off, looping them around his neck. I decided to extend the moment as long as possible by opening up. I leaned in and confessed. “I heard this food grants wishes.”
The kid smirked. “Word of that got all the way to Montenegro, huh.”
“It’s true, then?”
At that instant the waiter came by with a bamboo steamer and set it down in front of me. “Pork soup dumplings,” he said simply, then walked away. I removed the lid, saw six nearly translucent pockets of white dough sitting in steam.
I looked over at the kid, who offered another smirk and said, “You’ll have to tell me.”
“Okay, I will.” I examined the dumplings. “First, can you tell me how to eat this?”
The boy laughed and then gave me a demonstration with his own dumplings, running me through what each of the sauces was, how you could bite off the top of the dumpling so that the steam would get out and the insides wouldn’t be as hot as molten lava.
“And when do I make the wish? It’s like birthday candles?”
“I don’t know if there’s a science to that part.”
I grabbed the chopsticks, liking the unfamiliar feel of them in my hand. “I can’t believe I’m here,” I said, more to myself than to my temporary companion.
* * *
“Soul food that’ll make you feel whatever the chef wants you to feel,” the Swede had said. “A Filipino restaurant that can turn your luck, a Mexican bakery that’ll make you love.” He’d lit a cigarette then, exhaled slowly. We’d been sitting on a bench by Old Town, a pink sunset lighting up the Bay of Kotor. The mountains majestic as always, the water still as a mirror. The Swede had insisted on buying me a beer, and we sat there talking while the tourists meandered back toward their cruise ship. “There are few places in the world that are truly magical. Trust me—I’ve been around. That place? The food?” He waved his hand like he was shooing away a fly. “Changed my life.”
* * *
“Cheers,” I said to the kid, then managed to pick up the dumpling with the chopsticks. For the first one I bypassed the sauces, wanting to taste it as is. I didn’t want to dilute the magic, if it existed. It wobbled a little in my unsteady hand, but then I plopped it onto the large spoon like the kid had showed me. I stared at the dumpling, an imperfect white blob with a liquid hidden within. What a strange, fanciful journey I was on, chasing a thing human beings had not ever been granted.
Although, fuck, what did I know about what human beings had been granted. I lived in Kotor my whole life, a beautiful little corner of the world, where the Adriatic was a blue mirror, and cats licked cream from any bowl they pleased. The way everyone else went about their lives, complaining about what they did, it often felt like I was the only one persistently thinking about death, while everyone else worried about responsibilities and money and sex. My friends at home, the tourists parading around town in their khaki shorts and tucked-in polos, none of them seemed to worry about this cloud hanging over all our heads. None of them had panic attacks when they squished mosquitoes against their skin, none of them were ever paralyzed by their own thoughts. Or maybe they were and were just as good as I was at hiding it. Maybe the only way I was alone in this was in thinking I was alone.
I tipped the spoon and slipped the dumpling into my mouth whole and closed my eyes.
The first sensation was heat. The steam built up against my palate, and I opened my mouth to let it out, shielding other diners from the sight with my hand. A little disappointing to have a feeling rather than a flavor jump out first. I tried not to hold it against the food, let the steam waft out. Then I chewed, waiting for a telling tingle of magic. I scoured my mind, hoping to already be rid of the knowledge.
The broth inside the dumpling spilled out into my mouth, instantly scalding my tongue. I’d forgotten to bite the top off, and now my taste buds were melting or burning away, or whatever happened to taste buds when they came into contact with a hot liquid. My eyes shot open, and I started mumbling curses in Serbian, causing the broth to dribble down my chin.
I reached for a napkin and looked over at the black kid to see if he or anyone else had noticed that I was making a fool out of myself.
My table neighbor was looking away, but there was a slight smile on his lips that made me think he hadn’t missed the spectacle and was just being kind. I made eye contact with my waiter, who was standing by the door to the kitchen and laughing in a way that made me feel without a doubt that it was at me. I felt myself flush with embarrassment and anger, followed immediately by the recognition that I would take this embarrassment and anger any day, any minute, if it overtook my worries about death, if the dumplings had worked.
I paused, waiting to see if my thoughts would start to tumble down in that direction, if just wishing for a cure would send me into my trip’s first full-on paralysis. Then I thought: You are not alone in this.
“I forgot to do the biting-the-top-off thing,” I said to the kid.
“I wasn’t gonna bring it up. Happens to everyone.”
“Why is burning your taste buds the worst feeling in the world?” I said, scowling and making a show of how weird my tongue felt at the moment, trying to sell the fact that I believed what I’d just said.
“At least now you can wish your tongue a speedy recovery.”
I laughed. “How does food-wishing work in America, anyway? I know how it works in Montenegro, obviously,” I joked. “But I forgot to research this. Do I get, like, one wish per meal? One per food item?”
The kid showed his palms. “I don’t make the rules,” he laughed.
I placed another dumpling onto the flat spoon, then leaned down and bit off the top peak. Steam billowed out, along with a little bit of broth. I followed the steam as it rose and disappeared into the air, the way my body eventually would, the way the planet would, time itself. I closed my eyes as my heart rate started climbing, then took a deep breath. Not now, I thought. I urged myself to stay just in the restaurant, stay in the food, stay in the moment.
“Here you go, man.” The waiter reappeared, this time holding the not-soup. “Damn, boy, feeling hungry?”
I peered at the bowl, which was piled high with shrimp and vegetables, little cubes of what looked like meat or fish. The broth was a beautiful golden color, with little circles of orange oil floating on the surface, near the edge of the bowl. My heart rate slowed, oblivion averted. “More chances at wishes. But also, this looks damn good.”
I realized I was still holding the spoon with the dumpling, the steam not wafting out like a volcano anymore. So I closed my eyes again and readied myself for another bite.
This time the heat took a step back and allowed everything else to come forward. The savory richness of pork, a bite of ginger and scallions, the broth. Oh, man, the broth. I hadn’t ever tasted anything quite like this before. I chewed the dumpling, which was starchy but also managed to melt away, not letting its texture dominate. For a moment, I wanted to reach for something beyond the flavor, but failed. Would I recognize the taste of magic, if magic even had a taste? Then I let the flavor itself take over.
“Wow,” I said.
“Good?”
“So good.” I prepared another dumpling, forgetting about wishes for the time being. On this one I drizzled a tiny amount of chili oil into the hole I bit off the top. It was hard to wait for the heat to dissipate, hard to resist the gratification of another bite.
By the time the fifth dumpling had disappeared, I was starting to sweat from the heat and the spice. I took a long gulp of water and turned my attention to the not-soup. I dipped the chopsticks into the bowl, grabbed the first morsel I could hang on to—something that could have been cabbage—and let the oil drip down like I’d seen the other customers do. A satisfying crunch, followed by the velvety, rich feel of whatever this heavenly liquid was.
It was the spiciest thing I’d ever eaten, and I had to keep asking the waiter to refill my water, causing my new friend to crack jokes.
“You know you don’t have to eat that whole thing, right? You are bright red right now.”
I went to respond but ended up coughing instead. Ice cubes in water had never felt better. I just shrugged and dug deeper into the bowl. A piece of shrimp, something unidentifiable that was fatty and chewy, a texture I’d never cared for but could now appreciate, maybe because of the potential fear-erasing promise within it. I took a bite, intensely attuned to the motion of chewing, wanting to sense anything that was different about this meal from all the others. I phrased the wish in as many ways as I could, in as many languages as I could remember. Each time I wished, it was with added desperation, a plea to the food, to the chef, to whatever magic existed in the world. And when the desperation threatened to overwhelm me, I took another bite.
There had been a few times in my life when I’d honestly devoured a meal. The last time was that day a few summers ago when Miljan and I swam across the bay. We’d been sitting in front of our home, bored out of our minds and sticky with sweat from a heat wave passing through. Even inside we couldn’t get away from the heat without the boredom compounding. Then Miljan pointed at Old Town and asked how long I thought it would take to swim there. Five minutes later we were in our trunks and jumping off the cement into the water. About halfway across the bay, my thighs and arms were already throbbing with pain and fatigue. I looked up from my paddling and saw Miljan a few meters ahead of me, the edge of the water an impossible distance away.
I thought that if a cramp hit in that moment, pulling me under, Miljan would keep swimming and not look back until he’d reached the shore. I thought about the way the bay had been shaped by glaciers thousands and thousands of years ago, about how little time, in comparison, it would take me to drown. My life itself was such a brief flash in comparison. The thought that I could die in this situation entered my mind, that the universe had granted me a life but could take it back at any moment. I started swimming harder. I imagined sharks in the water, rip tides, though neither of those exist in Kotor and had never been a fear of mine and never would be again.
Forty-five minutes later we dragged ourselves onto the shore, panting and wishing we’d brought enough money for a taxi back. Miljan lay down on the gravelly rocks, his hands on his forehead, his face turned into a tired sneer, calling us idiots for not staying within our boredom. I panted, wondering why I couldn’t catch my breath, why my thoughts were glued to oblivion.
We found an overpriced restaurant in Old Town and sat down in our swim trunks on the patio of a plaza, eating mounds of spaghetti in tomato sauce and drinking water in the shade, people-watching and gathering our energy. The air cooled within the high walls of Old Town, and I remembered thinking that it would have been a perfect afternoon, absolutely glowing in beauty, if not for the fact that the swim had put death in my mind. The stain on the day was there and wouldn’t leave.
The dim-sum meal felt kind of like that perfect afternoon, though this time I’d managed to push thoughts of death away before they could ruin my appetite. I scooted my chair back, tossed my cloth napkin onto the table. The waiter came by and cleared my plates, leaving behind a check in a leather booklet. I usually get out of restaurants as soon as I can, since I like post-meal walks. Now I lingered, though, not wanting to part with the restaurant quite yet. I fumbled with my wallet as if I couldn’t find the bills within it, finished my water. I dipped my thoughts into the realm of death to see if I’d get pulled under.
I looked over at my neighbor, noticed that his food had been gone for a while now, but he was still around. “My name is Joko,” I said, reaching my hand across the table. “Thanks for helping me figure the food out.”
“Leo.”
We shook hands, and again the din of the restaurant stepped in. I wiped my sweaty brow and bit my lip. I looked around the restaurant. Quite the crowd had built up by the hostess stand, some people on their phones, some looking hungrily into the dining room. I waited for a terrifying thought to come but felt the fullness in my stomach and forgot.
“So,” Leo said. “What’d you wish for?”
I chuckled as a response, since I still remembered the look on Miljan’s face when I’d told him, the squint in his eyes that made me feel like I was a fool for fearing something so simple and inevitable. I looked out the window. The sunlight coming in had turned a rich gold, and I suddenly longed to be outside in the beauty of Rowbury. I started gathering my things, and Leo stood with me, saying he was heading out too.
We stood on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant for a moment, the sun on our faces. I closed my eyes, taking in its warmth. When I opened them again, Leo was still standing there, a smile turning his lips. I remembered that I was on this trip as a cure, that I had left Montenegro behind, and that I could leave the secrecy of my fear behind too.
“I wished that I could stop thinking about death. Or at least not care about it,” I said.
Leo’s eyebrows went up for a second, and I wondered if my confession had made things weird. Then he nodded and said, “I guess it’s too early to tell if it worked.”
I shrugged.“Probably.”
We lingered in silence another moment, watching people walk by. The food rested heavy and warm in my stomach, and if nothing else, I knew I’d at least eaten well. “For what it’s worth,” Leo said, “I always think about how things aren’t canceled out by the fact that they ended. Life ends with death, but that doesn’t erase all the moments leading up to it.”
* * *
Something like hope bubbled within me.
It could have been my momentary friendship with Leo. Or it could have been the meal, could have just been the fact that the neighborhood looked cool, the ideal stuff of a traveler’s daydreams. This, the dust America tried to keep hidden under the carpet variety. Skin colors, cuisines, cultures, all within the umbrella of that damn flag. The whole world gathered on its land, embraced the history it repeatedly wiped clean, and still America wanted to only sing of its European roots. And yet the dust rose in the air, resisting. It lingered and fought, and I was here as its witness.
I could smell spices in the air, couldn’t even identify any of them. A sort of magic, that, right? Mysteries the world would continue to hold no matter how long I lived. Even if the dim sum wasn’t wish granting, these snippets of magic would still exist. And I was given a life with which to discover them.
I decided in the moment that I would eat in this neighborhood every day I was in the city. A full week, but short in the wider scope of my travels. I’d go on to Mexico City, then farther and farther south. Until then, I’d give myself a chance at the magic the Swede and the Internet had talked about. I would look for snippets of magic, whether death came for my thoughts or not.
Food, everywhere. There were so many spots I could walk into and be served a plethora of dishes I’d only ever seen on TV or the Internet. Food that my brothers would make fun of me for wanting. Food that they would sneer at, call it foreign bullshit.
Again I thought about how I’d been touched only by luck. Like the meal I’d just had. Like this street here in front of me. Indian food on the corner nearest to me, an Italian restaurant right next door, roasted chicken across the street, people living above, basking in the smell.
Hell, if there were some magic in the world, why wouldn’t it be here? This place that I’d arrived at only by circumstance, because of the chance encounter with a tourist and an unusually cheap flight, a crazy Internet theory. That meal had been magic, regardless of how long I felt this way. I put my hands in my pockets and slowed my gait, kept an eye out for beautiful things as I made my way down Pepper Street.
When I passed a bakery, the smell lured me in, and a girl named Lila sold me a cardamom roll, which I picked at while sitting on a bench in Mallow Park, even though I was still stuffed to the point of discomfort. Eating had brought me joy for a moment, and I wanted these moments to keep coming.
To my right were three food carts, each selling a different cuisine. Straight ahead of me, a halal cart, the girl working it smiling at her customers as she passed them their plates of rice and meat, her body language changing entirely as soon as they walked away. Her shoulders slumped, and she pulled her phone out, put it away again, grabbed a rag and half-heartedly ran it over the counter in front of her. She puffed her cheeks out and exhaled, then caught me watching her and blushed, smiling to herself while avoiding eye contact. I laughed, then looked away so as to not make her uncomfortable.
A sweet little moment, which I would have to hand back to the universe one day. For now I could set it on my tongue and taste it, forget about anything else. It was possible.