Nap Time in Madrid
Published 29 August 06
After twelve years of friendship, it was now clear—James was a jackass. In high school he seemed okay but, with my perspective sharpened by jet lag, his jokes were no longer funny, his confidence was no longer reassuring and his obsession with dental hygiene was no longer a charming quirk. All this insight came after only a couple of hours in Madrid—by the end of the day I would prove the existence of God, decipher the service charges on my phone bill and convince pandas to mate in captivity.
“What are you doing?” he asked as I dropped my backpack against the steps of the closed tourist office and planted myself in the sidewalk like a stubborn camel. “Everyone is going to know you’re a tourist and you’re gonna get mugged.”
I was an obvious tourist, wandering for the past hour looking lost and feeling alone. A little mugging would at least mean someone noticed me.
I looked at the map. If I didn’t find the answer here, I’d have to ask someone. They’d respond in Spanish, and then it would be just like high school. Mr. Lucero, my Spanish teacher, would appear and ask me to conjugate the verb tener in the past tense.
“Tuve, tuviste, tivo… tutu….”
“Wrong! Again!”
And then he’d make me recite a memorized dialog from the textbook about the annual wool exports of Argentina. I’d stand up in front of the class with another kid, pretending to be an exchange student, and talk about Argentine sheep, as if this were a perfectly natural topic of conversation for young, virile teenagers. There was no way in hell I was going to let this happen again, so I just stared at the street map.
“Just give me a minute and I’ll figure out where we are.” He wasn’t convinced but he also knew that sometimes it was a lot easier to let the camel to starve to death than try and pull it out of the ditch.
Jet lag is kind of like dressing up for a night out and then suddenly finding yourself in an alley with a massive headache and a stranger’s name tattooed on your left thigh. In Newark, NJ I boarded the plane thinking I was prepared: sleep on the plane, wake up in Madrid, and then stay awake until the following evening and everything will be fine. Now that I actually was in Madrid, with at least 16 sleepless hours ahead of me, I wanted to lock that naïve kid of 12 hours ago in a utility closet in the Newark airport, where he’d be peacefully sleeping right now.
After we dropped off our stuff at a hostel we were back out on the street. We walked past the Prado and I made a mental note to return once I’d regained my ability to stand still in quiet rooms and look at paintings without passing out.
It was Sunday afternoon and in nearby Retiro Park families sat on the grass, and teenagers floated in canoes on the artificial lake at the center of the park.
James and I sat down on concrete steps along the shore of the lake and watched the world’s most pathetic drug deal. A teenage couple in a canoe was trying to navigate up to the edge of the steps and make contact with their dealer, but they kept over-shooting their target and floating helplessly back and forth. I felt sorry for them and if I’d been in the habit smuggling marijuana into foreign countries, I would have pulled some out of my pocket, stuffed it into a bottle and tossed it into the water as relief aide to ease their suffering.
By early evening the dealers had all gone home and we explored an outdoor book sale. There were rows and rows of tables on either side of the street, piled with old Spanish textbooks, magazines, old prints and poetry. Elderly couples were out for the evening, the women in black dresses and their husbands proudly wearing slight paunches from years of late-night tapas and sangria. The couples held hands tightly as they strolled past the booths.
I knew this because I bumped into them. My jetlagged body had done a decent job driving me around most of the day, but my mind had finally given in. For an instant I fell asleep while still walking, like a stagecoach whose driver had been taken out by a golfball.
“What’s going on? What are you doing?” James had seen me walking with my eyes closed.
“Nothing. Fine. I’m not okay, I mean I’m not tired, okay?” As soon as I got the words out my eyes were closed again. I jerked myself awake and asked if we could sit down on a park bench.
And I fell asleep again. But just for a moment. And then again. My body was trying to make up a 24-hour sleep deficiency in 10 second increments. The moment I recovered from one of these little micro naps I could remember a fragment of a dream, as if the stage had been set, but I hadn’t been asleep long enough for the actual dream to take place. I mentioned this to James and he started quizzing me.
“Where were you now?”
“I was preparing for my SATs, but all the instructions were in Portuguese, and because I wasn’t wearing any pants, I couldn’t remember Portuguese.”
“And just now?”
“We were going bowling and you insisted on bringing your own shoes, but they were actually Elton John’s shoes and he called the cops.”
“And now?”
“We’re fishing in the Pecos river, but with our tongues.”
We sat on the bench for an hour, as I dozed and woke up repeatedly. The sun was setting as the Spanish couples strolled past, now safe from being rear-ended by a sleeping American tourist. Everything was peaceful and perfect, as I graciously accepted the Nobel Prize for Physics and carefully placed it in an old cedar box with my Cub Scout badges and perfect attendance awards.