What is Bratislava
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by Jake Lancaster
My son became sick, then my daughter, then my wife, so I was hiding out in the basement, avoiding what was likely inevitable, the sickness passed on to me. It was something like the flu or covid or RSV or norovirus or strep or pneumonia but no one was sure because we hadn’t been to the clinic because we didn’t have health insurance. Fevers were exhibited. Body and headaches. A chorus of moaning, machinic coughing. What did it matter, what it was called? What was the difference, I kept thinking. I tried to explain to my wife how names and designations did not entirely individuate the sicknesses, they were all fundamentally similar, the sicknesses. She disagreed. She still had faith in the medical establishment, in science. It was like how I tried to explain to a former student, a student of literature, how things didn’t change, historically, how the world and its systems and cultures and societies didn’t progress. This was a student called Sofie and she disagreed. She said things did change. We’re in a desegregated classroom, she said. I can vote, when I couldn’t have not so long ago because I’m both a woman and black. I argued that those were superficial things. This infuriated her, obviously. I’d become something of an asshole. It began when I started drinking again. Or maybe I started drinking again when I became an asshole because I hated that I was becoming an asshole. Maybe I wasn’t becoming an asshole so much as a depressed person, a mentally ill person, a hopeless person, and this gave me the power, a clairvoyance almost, to see the world as it really was, reality with all the reason and thought since The Enlightenment stripped away--an animal march through shade and blackness, the occasional bright object merely an illusion (at best), a derangement (at worst). I’d washed all the pillows and blankets on the couch but they didn’t necessarily smell fresh because we used unscented, allergen-free detergent, as we had since the kids were born. They smelled not dirty, if that’s a scent. Through the sliding glass door was a frozen world lit only by sallow light from the moon (it hadn’t been over ten degrees fahrenheit in a week)--dog shit, tennis balls, fallen limbs, leftover leaves, a red plastic adirondack chair, a bright yellow birdbath, bird feeders, an empty suet feeder hanging from the lowest branch of a maple tree, the five or six inches of snow, a bean-shaped pond--everything frozen. I was watching the Pop-Tarts Bowl. Iowa State was playing Miami. Miami’s quarterback had opted out to prepare for the NFL draft. It was colorful. There wasn’t any defense to speak of, from either team. They were tied with four minutes left in the fourth quarter. I’d been throwing tight spirals to my son all through the fall and then something happened and I was throwing total fucking ducks and I thought maybe I’d had some kind of mini-stroke or something. It was like I’d short-circuited. It felt like dying a little. Not like dying a little. Like dying, but incompletely. A total and comprehensive little death, of something, a part of me. Is this what it will be like to grow old, I’d wondered. All these little functions blowing like fuses. Kill me now: I thought this at least a few times a week. I also thought that without faith or God, or whatever, a belief in salvation, people, myself among them, were doomed. Was anyone actually ok with this being it? A one and done type-of-deal? I was an adjunct at a massive state school teaching literature before my contract wasn’t renewed. I wanted to teach Dante but they assigned me to Queer Literature, Introduction to Literature and the Environment, and Literacy and American Cultural Diversity. I’d been looking at becoming a welder. There was a tech school nearby. I drank a six-pack of Coors Banquet Beer. The first two made me feel like a normal man. On the third I got a little sappy. By the fourth and fifth I was remembering old friends and making grand declarations of what I would do with my life to become a success somehow. And by the sixth beer I was sad at nothing in particular, melancholic I suppose. Studying the blue mountains on the can with a kind of desperate longing, before I began shifting my gaze from my phone (Instagram posts of tits and sordid deaths and cryptids) and the TV (a Nicholas Roeg movie--Bad Timing, starring Art Garfunkel--that I’d fairly randomly selected from The Criterion Channel, which I’d paid for with my Capital One Silver credit card, which now had about twenty grand of irreal debt on it). I texted my wife to make sure everything was ok, that everyone was in bed, if I should bring people water or medicine?, and that I loved her, that I loved them all, that they were the only things that mattered to me. This was pretty much the truth. But there were other things, and they were supposed to matter, too. The woman in the Roeg film reminded me of my wife. A Debbie Harry kind of look--fierce and tender and elsewhere, a woman who could love ugly men. A woman who kept a switchblade in her purse. The movie kept cutting between her dying in a hospital, hooking up with Art Garfunkel, a psychoanalyst, and a third layer of story that was her with other men, one of whom played a colleague to Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones character in the Indiana Jones films. (He eventually sells Indy out to the Nazis if I remember correctly.) There’s a scene in which they drive halfway across a bridge and stop in the middle under a banner that says Bratislava, and I have to Google what is Bratislava to find out it’s a city, the capital of Slovakia. Which I must admit I didn’t know was still a country. The only thing I knew about Slovakia is that it was close to Trieste, Italy, where James Joyce lived on and off. I loved Joyce. People in the literature departments at massive state schools in America weren’t in to him so much any longer. It was tragic, yeah? No? The actor who looked a little like my wife and Debbie Harry I didn’t Google because I didn’t want her to exist outside of the film. She was perfect in the film. She had me convinced. Wait, maybe that’s Slovenia that borders Italy. All that was left for me to do was go to sleep. And so I did. On the couch. I woke up at probably three or four in the morning and stumbled to the bathroom to puke in the toilet. I wasn’t accustomed to drinking six beers in a night. I was at one time. I’d drink a case of beer over a late afternoon and into the evening and beyond. The wretching gave me a headache but I was too lazy to fetch the Advil. I drank water from the faucet. I laid back down and rested my head on one of those disgusting rugs that wrap around half the base of a standard toilet. It was the plushest rug we owned and it reminded me of my grandmother’s living room and her collection of spoons. It was a deep red color--a royal color. Long ago there were people in my family who possessed great wealth. I can’t say that I slept, but there was dreaming, a painful semi-conscious dreaming that hurt because the dreams were better than my life--surely there’s a word for this in the German. When everyone was finally up at about nine in the morning, making tea and moaning again in harmony, I marched upstairs with what little energy I had, into the white light of a cold new day in January, to announce that I would be joining them, that I was sick, too. No one gave a shit. I tore a stale hot dog bun in half (it was all that was left) and put each side in the toaster and watched it burn and smoke. The hard butter melted into the blackened bread. When I was a child my mother once burned some toast and my father, hungover like I was, grabbed her by the neck with his coarse workingman hands and spit in her face. She didn’t look like Debbie Harry, my mother. She looked like Isabella Rossellini. She left us that morning. But only for the day. That night they had sex in their bed and I listened with a lump in my throat, not mortified, not thrilled. I had an ALF poster on my wall. I read a lot of Peter Straub that year. I mixed myself drinks at night when everyone had gone to sleep--rum and diets, gin and grapefruit juice. I drank them on the back patio and looked up at the stars. I was ten or eleven. I took a bite of the toast and felt a tiny bit better then threw the rest into the trash. Through the sliding glass door I could see the bird feeders. I felt bad about not filling them all winter. A cardinal hung out beneath them. He knew they once had food in them. He was waiting for them to become full again. Jake Lancaster is a writer from Minnesota. SHARE - Issue: 1.8 / April 2026 |