'To make this place another.'

Railway timetables, the imagination’s aphrodisiac. In Remembrance of Things Past, one from Paris to Balbec provides the young narrator with fantasy to feed on. He pores over the pastoral names, conjures the destination as a savage, wind-ravaged, medieval coast. Once he finally sees Balbec, the dream explodes—the beach is sunny, touristy, prosaic.

Reality without fantasy is impossible. I don’t mean impossible as in unbearable; they’re locked together, each engenders the other. In the coming years, Proust’s narrator would impregnate Balbec with yet another dream: on the shore, Albertine.

My first months in Ukraine, I listened often to Mozart’s Prague symphony. The strings held—if I can, like Proust, trace a memory to its essence—a golden, autumnal melancholy. In them, alleys and balconies in evening, a Europe clinging to lost grandeur with dignity.

So I summoned grand images, maybe as a respite from my surroundings—also in decay, but without, it seemed, dignity or romance. I summoned Milan Kundera’s Prague—Tereza in The Unbearable Lightness of Being climbing Petrin Hill: “On her way up, she paused several times to look back: below her she saw the towers and bridges; the saints were shaking their fists and lifting their stone eyes to the clouds. It was the most beautiful city in the world.”

This summer, Mozart in my head again, I looked for that city. My friend Maggie put me up for a week and squired me around. Now, some people will tell you Prague’s become a Disneyfied parody of itself, a kitsch-littered tourist hell. This isn’t wholly untrue. But like anywhere else, you have to know where to look. Rather, how to look.

“Look up,” Maggie told me—past chain stores and boutiques’ sanitized sameness, past knick-knacks and tourists sloshing beers—up, where an older Prague abides in stone. Art deco’s angular geometry, elongated female figures, demons and cherubs. And then the astronomical clock: dark-gold rings on rings like celestial spheres, emblazoned with Zodiac signs. Bells rang the hour while wooden saints and hermits scrolled through tower windows, as they have for hundreds of years.

My visit coincided with the gay pride parade. We walked with Maggie’s various expatriate friends, including adorably plaid and beardy Indiana boys (Midwest, yet again, is best). Giant balloons bounded up ahead. One of them accidentally fell down a subway staircase (I imagined it bowling over herds of gray-faced, Kafka-esque bureaucrats on their commute). In our incongruous, abundant mass—flags and signs, peacock plumes and glitter eyelashes, smells of beer and sweat running down face-paint—we streamed beneath that medieval, somber splendor.

At night I became obnoxious. Meaning, Maggie introduced me to Becherovka, booze which tasted like Christmas and provoked me to recitations of Yeats and Ukrainian folk songs in bars. Also, to kissing Indiana boys. On the MOUTH. I think I humped a lamppost. OK, I definitely humped a lamppost, then stepped in dogshit, then swore loudly and excessively as Maggie crouched down laughing on the pavement.

In all these moments, the city’s intricate system of cobblestone alleys formed a riotous, sensual net in which I tangled. It reflected my desire and returned it. But one night, the sun went down in Maggie’s windows. Cathedral spires and the theater’s gold roof blackened against those bloody streaks. It hurt me; it looked like somebody else’s photograph, and so not mine.  

…

The dream is to say, I have never seen this before. In the hostel in Estonia, I already knew everyone. They slung around names of cities they’d seen in an international dick-measuring contest, they over-shared at the bar, they used the word “faggot” unironically.  Natalie and I drank beers with them by the port, in mist and rain and post-Soviet gloom. Nowhere, I began to think, could offer anything new.

Still, there’s nothing, not even the drab disappointments of modernity, that Lady Gaga can’t fix. It was for her we’d come to Tallinn. Say what you will, Gaga’s always intrigued me with her drag performance of glittery femininity and her possibly Freemason imagery.

Natalie and I prepared by dressing like … well, sort of like very fancy whores. From space! Or from Eastern Europe. As we stood on a street corner consulting a map (as if, I imagined, looking for our way home to Whore Planet), a group of Russian men ran over, yelling, “ Devchonky!—Girls! Are you lost?” Space whores, it would seem, are the Russians’ girls-next-door.

The concert offered me everything I like: Spectacle! Soap bubbles! A mechanical horse and moving castle! Girls in glittery bikinis writhing on a motorcycle (which also was a piano?)! Half-clad man-dancers making out with each other! Black Jesus! We danced our asses off, unfazed by the stoic immobility of surrounding Estonian tweens.

Yet at spectacle’s center, there’s the threat of emptiness. “Born This Way” makes me uncomfortable, its be-yourself feel-goodery suddenly hollow when trussed in various incongruous props (fake guns, meat, violent space-opera choreography). In that lack, I substituted my own swell of nostalgia: dancing with Christopher to “Bad Romance,” when everyone at the bar stopped to stare. 

…

I’ve dreamed America for two years. This winter I’ll apply to MFA programs in poetry. I don’t know where I will be in a year; this makes my situation romantic.

The map on my wall feeds this romance. No country but America has such a motley assortment of city names, sonorous and borrowed or invented. I’ve charted the polysyllabic, sibilant music of Tallahassee, Tuscaloosa, and the European aspirations of Athens or Oxford or cities with “-polis” slapped on the end. Today I rode the electric train, and in passing forests I saw marshes along the Mississippi, four years ago, driving to New Orleans. A heron had lighted on a bare tree in water. “This staunchless wound,” Susan Sontag writes, “the great longing for another place. To make this place another.”

On a night train this month, a man in my wagon took a dislike to me. He already reeked of beer when he boarded at 9 p.m.; by midnight he slumped, seated on the edge of my cot, slurring loud and vaguely sexual insults. I moved to the end of the car and sat up until we reached my village at 2 a.m., sick with exhaustion and fear, listening to the Walkmen. Snow is still falling, I’m almost home, I’ll see you in the new year. I wanted to cry, because I saw, as I always do, Chicago in winter—a friend silhouetted against his apartment windows, waving to me on the street. Hands in my pockets, the street lamps and snow. 

If I sound precious about my nostalgia, writing here on fantasy, it’s because fantasy is so often born from nostalgia. Maybe it’s not the never-before-seen city we long for, but an impossible city, impossible for belonging to the past. Because of this, I understand now that the Prague symphony will one day remind me not of a Prague I invented, but rather of afternoon walks in my village, a gold-painted statue of Lenin in gold light, a goat by a ruined wall, chestnut trees. So too that Walkmen album will bring me back to trains full of sleeping people, the half-awake hour of steel and loneliness.

As I jumped down from the train, clouds swirled around the moon. There were so many stars. I stumbled under that cold, vertiginous sea, almost home but not yet.