I. The Game

“...it’s about twenty minutes north of Mt. Sac, fantastic sandwich shop. Can’t miss it, really.” Fiek is explaining something to Kevin, who slumps forward in the pews of the Amtrak station, looking like a couple of synapses have just snapped in his brain. I’m guessing last night hasn’t completely left him either. All four of us are still reeling, really. I glance at the train station clock, which has little birds instead of numbers. It’s about half past the blue jay, and the morning fog has begun to settle on the drowsy little town of Davis. Vaguely, I wonder what happened to the rest of my friends since the cops scattered the party at our house hours before. With my final hours in town, I vainly hoped that they would all stick with me, but rallying a bunch of drunk people on a Friday night requires either music or more alcohol, and I had neither. There are people I want to see again, but my phone is several hours dead, and I have no idea what became of them. All I know is that when the big hand hits the quail, I get on a train, and all of this—the people, the town, the drugs—is gone. The thought of it makes me feel like puking and I probably would if it weren’t for these three miscreants staying with me until the end. I guess I got my wish after all.

Suddenly, Kevin twitches to life. “I think my brain just powered down for a few minutes.” Fiek, who has been leafing through the latest edition of California Rail News, hardly notices, and continues discussing with himself the finer points of Indian casino blackjack, or something of the sort. Fiek is the kind of guy who can convince the bitchy looking girl at the coffee shop to give him a free cappuccino because she made a spelling error on the menu. When he’s not talking business on the phone, he’s convincing a girl in Tokyo to send him nude pics on the internet, and when he’s not doing any of that, he’s telling you about sandwich shops and Indian gambling and how to fix a Vespa muffler.

Eventually, the quail strikes, and this fucking beast of a train turns the curve and charges down the rails. I'm trying to convert into language how much I will miss these people, but in this state I can produce only mumbling, guttural sounds. “I will see you all again,” I say, mostly to myself. I want to believe it. I do believe it. I know at least that I will see Kevin again in a couple of months, except it won’t be in Davis, nor even North America. We’ll find each other, and ourselves, at all costs, in the bottom-most tip of South America. The game is simple: players book their flight into one end of America do Sul, and book their flight out at the other end. Players are declared winners when they arrive at the airport in Lima, Peru and successfully board their exiting flight without ever being robbed, cheated, stabbed, enslaved, or otherwise sexually exploited on their route across the continent. At all costs, one must avoid missing their flight. And I never miss a flight.

Well, almost never.