I see a family led by a guide. The dad is white, and dressed very poorly – he’s at least British, but probably American. (Some of the sharpest dressers on earth are American; but like most things in the U.S., style is not very evenly distributed.) He wears cargo shorts, just as a sort of preamble to his sartorial pronouncement. He has managed to load the segments past his knees – n.b. these shorts have pockets past his knees – with the most freight. His jacket is North Face, and red. It is not a color combination so much as a pitched color battle. His haircut is very good, technically: he wears it poorly, and asked his barber for some things he shouldn’t have; but the shading and blending cost dollars. His wife is Chinese, with a face that says, “This is the best he could do at the time.” He seems to have more money now.
The kids scuffle around a stone monument; barely caring about the view. Their clothes fit; their skin has laboratory sheen.
The future isn’t China: the future is half Chinese, and just generic white sadness for the other half. It’s every character Kevin James has ever played shacking up with a middling Chinese striver. It’s those guys you feared (for?) in the freshman dorm, who just like really really wanted you to like fucking get it, you know? and were very about Area 51. It’s those guys and fanged, bony brides.
But the future is also bright: These kids travel the world, probably know a few very influential languages, and will have more perspective on the way of things than their parents. They’ll also look better.
They’re all in the way of my view: all of Lisbon, laid out like a postcard. Tile roofs cascade into the sea. There’s a massive bridge – a dead ringer for the Golden Gate – that crosses to another landmass. Jesus – arms outstretched; towering over the land – watches benignly from a hilltop. The city is San Francisco without the tech boom; Spain, from 70s stock footage; and just enough Rio to remind you of Portugal’s waned power. (Ironically, Portuguese Jesus arrived on the scene because of, not before, Brazilian Jesus. As pop-science and Ted Talks remind us, everything is a remix.)
I’m here because I walked in no direction, up hills and down alleys; and found a coffee stand at the edge of a stone shelf whose sheer edge reveals the city in all directions. I also found egg tarts in this coffee shop, and holy Christ do I love egg tarts.
Back in China, my friend Tom Collins introduced me to these. On our Christmas stay in Hong Kong, I found a tiny streetside bakery and asked, “What are those?” (I assumed Tom knew everything about Hong Kong; he was patient with this assumption.) They were small, yellow pies: you could fit them in your hand. The crust was thick, relative to the size, and flakey. The egg in the center was slightly bruised in the middle; burnt and black in spots. They were rich and sweet and crumbled to the bite, and I immediately ate two of them, and had at least another before we came back. The knockoffs in Shanghai didn’t stand up, but that didn’t stop me from trying to recreate the magic, like any addict would.
Here, I find the exact same shape. I buy immediately, but the feel is different: these are compact; slightly heavier (yes, I know the weight of the Chinese version; those things were fucking life; shut up). It’s pastry dark matter. The first bite is so good I worry I’m going to black out. I’ve felt this way exactly once before, and afterwards she rose off her knees and snuggled back into bed. The thing is deeply sweet, and heavy; it sinks your tongue in your mouth. It’s not like the sugar shock I know from soda and candy; there’s none of the sickly lightness; the sense that you’re eating day-glo fabric; the anxious twist of your stomach. This thing is wholly good; it is art and beauty. I have two of them, and two coffees, and don’t leave the view for at least an hour.
I still don’t know where I’m going. Standing at the overlook, stuffed with pastry, I see ferries sailing across the way. I decide to get on one, and find out where I am when I get off it. I just have to find a terminal.
—
America is weird, because – well, American is weird; full stop. Get another place, and the places start to be normal; not to you, as an American, but in and of themselves. Laos, I can only assume, is perfectly explicable by being in Laos.
So: America is specifically weird in this (but not only this): it fights against the Earth. I like jet travel and cities; this is not the first salvo of an environmentalist broadside. Rather: America fights the earth in that most of its varied regions are constructed against the land; against the flow and shape of the earth, there.
I grew up in Florida, which is all swamp and ocean. The tangle of tropical grass and marsh is effectively impassible; and the beaches can be naturally thin and muddy – those white-sand shores are only slightly more authentic than Epcot. Mosquitoes blanket the ground, and alligators roam the waters. It’s brutally hot, and there are sinkholes spaced irregularly under what you might reflexively think of as land. The ground that is there, in the southern end of the peninsula, rises over Swiss-cheese limestone. Every year, hurricanes brush it; every few, they pass through. Florida is not made for buildings; for carrying industrial weight. And it is definitely not made for humans.
So naturally, it’s now all highways, A/C towers, and concrete for hundreds of miles. It is going to literally sink into the swamp; probably in my lifetime. It is nothing but high-rises built on sand. Jesus said the wise man built his house upon the rock; and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on the house; and it did not fall. And when he had finished these teachings, Florida rose up, with a loud voice, and was all like, “Nah,” and built so many houses on the sand that they eventually drowned the global economy, taking out loans for sandcastles they couldn’t afford in defiance of rising waters and typhoon winds.
America fights its land, and it is sometimes hard for me not to root for the land. In the face of Republican death pacts, it’s hard for me not to root directly for global warning, even though I will miss the idea of polar bears and probably die when a tornado crashes through downtown Allentown, PA, which at that point is gentrified, temperate beachfront property. (I’m assuming I move up in the world at the end, financially. Go with me here.)
The land in and around Lisbon is curved; smoothed; swirling. And then jagged at the edge: in rocks along the water, which is itself breathing glass under the eye of playful hills. So as the land, the city is built by details: the streets are small, and where there are grand plazas there is no warning: they suddenly are, at the end of a narrow walk. The buildings are smooth and hard; sea and rock, and the figures and figurations on the stone and tile bear the reflection of the hills and the water.
The city starts to kick further along, where they keep the castles and museums and public squares. On my accidental way to one of these tiled, statued courts, I turn down an alley (“alley” being the rough translation of the Portuguese word for “small highway”). A city worker sweeps the stone road. He whistles.
The air in Lisbon seems thin, even though the city dips toes in the river. It reminds me of Colorado, this way: Hearing a sound right behind you that turns out to be forty feet back. The tiles helps: you can nearly see the sighs of wind and scrapes and clicks of shoes refracted, as light, across the streets in dizzy arrangement.
So when a city worker whistles, you think he’s far away and up the street, and he’s ten feet to your right; working his way slowly down stairs. The sound doesn’t come from him: he gifts it to the walls and to the wind, who twirl it between themselves; kids playing catch. Now a choir of whistlers in a cathedral; a cathedral with no roof, so that birds can offer counterpoint from down the way or right above, for the difference it makes.
I’m an angry person, and I’m generally unhappy. People sometimes ask me about this. They say – “they” being usually American, so – “follow your dreams” and “it all works out in the end” and “Jesus is, like, my friend.” And I say: no one asks permission to be born. Once you are, you are stood at a queue of unsolvable problems; and you have to solve them all, on a timer. And you didn’t start any of them; yet, somehow, you join the line. And now everything’s your fault, and you have to get a job and insurance and utilities, and then holy shit you have to figure out what Brexit is, and then you’ve elected a television personality as President. And you learn about debt (“It’s an investment!”) and heartbreak (“No, you want to die because you’re learning!”) and depression (“Aren’t you excited to be learning so much?”) and so you find alcohol, if you’re lucky, and Oxycontin if you aren’t.
And people say you’re being grim and reductive – n.b. they don’t always use the word “reductive” – and so you reduce: Nobody asks to be here, everyone hurts, most lose family, many are stabbed, some raped, still more starve, and literally every last one dies; most uncomfortably, except as far as we know maybe all uncomfortably. This, indisputably, is life.
It’s just not all life. There are moments of simple grace I find that seems too beautiful to be real. And when I find them, I feel unworthy to be alive; like all the chores of existence and the loneliness of time are a comically cheap price for the witness of casual magic. For thin air; liquid breeze; sea and stone.
I walk on and take a sip from my water bottle. When I open the bottle, the click and hiss curl around my hand, and they peel off the rooftops.
—
I worry when I find myself in serious agreement with morons. I would like to say that this is because I am wise or brilliant or simply higher, other, and above; but really it’s because I worry just about all the time that I am a moron, and there is evidence backing the fear. (I still do not know the difference between a light switch and a doorbell, if you had not heard.)
I have seen many proto-brained, tank-topped men yell and post and generally alert pedestrians of their affinity for booze during business hours. “Team Daydrunk!” they or their shirts will yell. And I want to mock this rancid celebration of the boorish – this equation of performative intestinal mutilation with the execution of a joke – until I remember it’s 11:37am and I have a Super Bock in my hand, and I am fucking on Team Daydrunk, and I really want to tell people about it. Like, have you even tried getting drunk before noon? It’s super chill. Things that are chill are good. Good is chill. I am chill. You know who was fucking chill? Gandhi.
I grab a Super Bock to climb stairs and wander alleys. I balance a Super Bock against my ankle when I reach for my phone, to take pictures of graffiti lining Lisboan walls – pink; tan; yellow; pregnant with color. I ask for a Super Bock to go with this view: water licking rocks draped in seaweed; the massive central plaza of Lisbon behind. There’s a horse enshrined in copper, ridden nowhere by a copper monarch, and there is Super Bock in my hand. When I finally board a ferry to – whatever, I asked for the first ferry – I take a Super Bock for the ride. I contemplate a “Bock Life” tank top – in the spare style of the logo itself – and decide that I will order 37 of them, when they are sewn. I decide, relatedly, to develop upper-body strength in preparation for my wardrobe of Bock Life™ tanks. I will finally learn what whey protein is. I think I like Diplo.
The ferry I’ve boarded is taking me to Barreiro. I have never heard of Barreiro. If you haven’t heard of Barreiro, let me just tell you that Trip Advisor rates exactly one (1) thing to do in Barreiro, and it is an indoor go-kart track, and it has three and a half stars. Being a tragically hip young American, I am always about Authenticity, and I avoid Tourist Traps. Barreiro is a reminder that tourist traps sometimes work because they’re like really good traps. Authentic places, where Real People live, have the unfortunate habit of being sparse and boring, like life actually is. When you are looking for something Authentic, you are not usually looking for something actual.
So when the ferry – which does not have an open-air deck and smells like a Foot Locker – gurgles to a stop, I find myself in basically nowhere. The coast here is sandy, so there is the possibility of a beach. But the buildings are very far away, and the sand is not manicured. No tourists are trapped here. My immediate view is an empty parking lot and a dilapidated train station. It is not a Lisboan plaza. It is, however, a little amazing: wealthy America somehow can’t pave its roads, and yet Barreiro, Portugal has (had?) a train station.
I walk into town. It is mostly dusty, square apartment buildings. I am possibly the only tourist here, but I do find a sign for a tourist circuit; an otherwise completely unmarked walking tour. It reads:
“Authority agents raid and siege [at the same time?] the workshops and seize the locksmith Jose Francisco [n.b. fucking outstanding locksmith name], triggering a protest by the workers, some refusing to work in solidarity with the prisoner. Then a riot starts.”
This is an unbelievable amount of drama, generated at least in part by tense use: I check my six for this riot I’m suddenly hearing about. It could be fucking anywhere. I did not pack for a Choose Your Own Adventure. (The basics: swim trunks, insect repellent, and a rucksack full of condoms.) But if I have to be stuck in one of these, I appreciate an author who knows the word “solidarity” but does not know what a siege is, and who also writes the cues like he’s auditioning for the job of Assistant Hemingway.
I stroll on, and eventually I do find that beach. It is a slip of yellow dirt capped by a squat, afunctional lighthouse: more a sandbar than anything else. Families, kids, and handsy teens lie across the strip; the couples across each other. A small wooden café oversees the beach, spackled with ice cream brandnames. Naturally, they serve Super Bock. If I had to describe this beach, I would say that it is chill.
Barreiro stretches along the coast, gazing idly at Lisbon across the way. The larger city glitters in the dusk, and I walk a brick path along the water as the sun dissolves in the sea. This sounds romantic, except that I only brought a T-shirt, and the wind off the Tejo River bites, and the only thing keeping me warm is Super Bock, which is not very warm.
I shiver my way through town and back to the ferry. Barreiro is strange: it is lost in a different time than Lisbon, across the water. The buildings are low and unadorned: they are much newer, and they look older. Time punctures the mask: a crisp mall bursts through the streets at one corner of town. A few houses are new constructions, and jarring. But mostly, Barreiro is small and simple. I found no great truths, and no adventures, and a modest beach under a rippling sunset. I found something actual.