Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

— We will be able to swim, Milo explained. — But better we don’t drink, you know?

— Is it dangerous?

— It’s America.

They passed through a few small towns until, outside of any town, they came to a line of cars parked irregularly beside the road. Milo pulled onto the shoulder. The farmland here was planted with grasses that had grown so long and heavy that they had lain down in still-living sheaves like parted hair. Along an erratic path afforded by these parts, three middle-aged men were picking their way toward a thicket. The men had stripped to European-style swimsuits, over which their grizzled bellies hung, and they encouraged and mocked one another in voices that were no doubt amplified by beer. Milo, already wearing his swimsuit under his jeans, stood guard while a bashful Jacob changed into his more modest American-style swimming trunks in the car. Jacob was excited by the momentary peril of exposure. The fake leather of the seat felt cool under his naked ass. He wasn’t able to see his own cock and balls reflected in the glass of the windshield; the angle was wrong.

They crossed the field and took a dirt path through the thicket, which gave way to meadow, which gave way to thicket again. The path was marked with white paper signs taped to trees, written in the formal Czech that Jacob had trouble deciphering.

— Does this say ‘forbidden’?

— If you read it.

— To whom belongs the land here?

— It’s maybe still the state’s? I don’t know.

The disregard was of a piece with the general liberation, not yet attenuated — the dispensation that the Czechs and Slovaks were still under to live as if no authority had more responsibility for them than they had for themselves.

Ahead, at a stand of pines, a cluster of people were admiring the artificial canyon, which they had at last reached. The irregular gorge was maybe half a mile long and as deep as a seven- or eight-story building. Toward the bottom, it was spanned by a sheet of water, so unmoving and transparent that one saw clearly the continuity of the rocks above and below it — saw the two faces of the gorge run down the opposing cliffs to meet underwater and fold knottily together, the submersion making no interruption to the eye apart from the slight compression and redirection that light is subject to when passing between water and air. Here and there, an outcropping of yellow, rectangularly chipped limestone reached across the water’s surface like a clumsy claw; elsewhere, a curved, grassy dais formed the shore, and people lay on it sunbathing. The exposed rock of the cliff faces was reddish tan; its parallel wrinkles ran in grand arches, like those on Auden’s face in photographs.

— Like at home, isn’t it? Milo asked.

— Exactly.

— Wait, I’ll eternalize you.

After the photo, Milo insisted on going first down the ledge. Erosion had rendered it slightly dangerous, and he had been down it before. As they descended, he kept looking back to make sure Jacob noticed which boulders he trusted with his weight and which tree roots, laced into the face of the cliff, he used as handholds. As the cliff walls rose higher, the rim of the gorge above them began to seem to make a cutout of the blue sky, and Jacob became aware that the sun needed its full summer height in order to peep down at them, as if they were looking up at it from the bottom of a well. When, as they made their way down, small stones were dislodged by their steps and skittered over rocks in falling, the echoes ricocheted so loudly that it seemed almost redundant for Milo to call out, “Pozor! Pozor!” to those below.

They walked until they found a dais with an unoccupied patch of grass in the sun. They spread their towels. Milo stripped off his shirt and shucked off his pants. At the sight of him, Jacob’s desire was loud to his own perception, but with an effort he understood that the people sitting near them on the dais couldn’t hear it and that their deafness left him free, and after a while he relaxed enough to take off his shirt, too, and lay beside Milo, eyes closed, the sun warming his blindness.

In the orange darkness, he was drawn into the spirit of Milo’s joke — of having brought an American to Amerika — and he let go of his certainty as to which country he was in. For clues there were only the sun, the dry touch of the air, and the bony soil that he could feel through the towel beneath him. When he opened his eyes, he noticed that colors had been bleached out of his sight by the sun; the gestures frozen into the cliff face across the water seemed gray and the hot sky almost white. Was nature nature everywhere? Or was this a different nature than the one he had been born into? This wasn’t Texas heat, just a pleasant representation of it. On the other hand, the setting hardly suggested Europe. One was unsheltered here. No one seemed to be following any rules that the people present hadn’t themselves made up.

— About what will you write? Milo asked, led perhaps by a similar train of association to think of the world that Jacob would before long be returning to. In late-night conversations, Jacob had confided some of his ambitions to Milo.

— I don’t know.

— I think, that you will be a big writer, and I, your secret friend.

— But leave it, Jacob pleaded. — Probably I will write about America, he said. It was with something like this solemn intention, after all, that he was ending his year of travel.

— Then it was a good idea, this excursion.

— I mean, the big America.

— But we are in the Big Amerika, Milo replied. — It is this particular canyon. Over there is Little Amerika. Do you want to see Mexiko?

— And what else?

— Switzerland. Milo pointed west. — You know, the business that will employ me is Australian. Perhaps sometimes they will alternate the personnel, between countries. Have you visited Australia?

— No, Jacob admitted.

Milo looked a little pensive. — There too there are cowboys.

It was frustrating not to be able to touch each other.

— Do you still see Ota? Milo continued, after a pause.

— No longer, said Jacob.

— I, too, no longer.

They sat up, and Milo drank some of his seltzer. He didn’t want to go in the water, which was ice cold, but Jacob waded in, taking care not to cut his feet on the sharp rocks, the edges of which were easy to see. Once he was halfway in, he shudderingly propelled himself off an underwater ledge; because he was among strangers he held in his natural yelp at the chill. He dog-paddled out and upon turning saw that Milo was documenting his swim. By the time he reached the shore again his feet were so numb with cold that he emerged unsteadily, on all fours for caution.

Before driving home, while still wearing their swimsuits, they ate pork cutlets and dumplings in a nearby town, in a pub whose dining room was a sort of greenhouse in the middle of a farm. Through the glass walls they watched the sun set over flat farm lands, losing none of its purity of color as it descended, though the sky around it, at the moment the sun touched the horizon, deepened like a rock picked up from a river bank and dipped in the water. Afterglow still lit the sky when they began their drive back to Prague, but it was dark by the time they arrived in Strašnice, the district where Milo’s father lived. They parked the Trabant on the street, and Milo ran up to his panelák apartment with the car keys to say good night. When he reemerged from the white building, he and Jacob walked the mile to Žižkov — not far enough to be worth waiting for a night bus — along empty streets.

* * *

Jacob had never been to , a park in the western part of the city, because it had always sounded tacky to him. But it has a replica of the Eiffel Towel, Milo pointed out. Exactly, Jacob replied. Milo pretended to be shocked by his philistinism.