The great advantage to being an American when traveling is that there is a place like this in almost every city on the planet: the quarter where all the Americans live, the stores where they shop, the restaurants where they eat, and the bars where they drink. Local squalor remains remote and picturesque. There is always a thriving black market for U.S. dollars and Yankee porn. And the stories born in these places are the half-lucid narratives of unmoored privilege, the delirious fever-dreams of paranoia in exile.

How did I get here? The details of the journey are lost in the immense fog of my indifference. I drove my car, day after day, until it seemed unwise or impossible to continue in this manner. I sold it under conditions of questionable legality and resumed my passage by train, day after day, in a second class compartment filled with peasant farmers steeped in the history of a feudal land. I could not imagine any of them with a name, or at least anything more than a single name they all shared. They were the anonymous damned, unremarked by the forces of official remembrance, completely unaware of it and who probably would not have cared if they were. The scale of a man's concerns tends to shrink to the level of his material welfare.

I am, by nature, no traveler. Necessity alone has compelled me to venture on occasion beyond the borders of my own country. If, as the cliche goes, the pleasure is in the journey and not the destination, I would just as soon stay home. Neither necessity nor desire for adventure alone urged me to set out on this journey, but an improbable combination of both. The necessity that drove my departure into these nights redolent of rotting vegetation was that I was leaving my wife. As the spiritual harmony between us fell into dissonance, our material possessions swelled with symphonic opulence. She invested more and more of her emotional life into what were, for me at least, meaningless acquisitions and accumulations. So I left her, with her metastasizing pile of crap, the only bag missing from her collection the one in which I had packed everything that was truly my own. The element of adventurousness in my impulse to go was inspired by the last letter I received from Brent Custer, with its strange combination of the celebratory and the conspiratorial; even as he reveled in the freedom and exoticism of his surroundings, there was an underlying desperation, a struggle against vaguely malevolent forces he could neither name nor understand.

Brent Custer stayed in a hotel on the very outskirts of the American sector, the front of the building facing the last western avenue of white exile, the back overlooking an alley, dark and sinister in the implications of its foreignness, its unilateral terms of violence toward the stability of entitlement. The complex was originally intended to host tourists who, of course, never arrived. I directed inquiries to the desk clerk, a small thin man whose pale skin seemed a sign of ill health in a region of such heat and high, dry radiance. His reply came in an accent I could not identify beyond that of involuntarily displaced European. His rigid formality bristled with confirmation.

"I was informed you are to make yourself at home," he said, the incongruity between the familiar idiom and its issuing voice lending the air between us a tremor of low level but intense discomfort. The words seemed to end before a conventional meaning could take hold.

Brent Custer's room was on the second floor, up a flight of concrete stairs, edged in metal, the invitation to ascend frozen with architectural purpose, the neglect of its maintenance providing a dangerous counter-argument in favor of the forces of decay within time. The first thing I saw upon entering the room was the note lying on the bedside table. "Be back shortly." I had never told anyone I was coming here, so how did Brent Custer know to leave word at the front desk that I was to be let in? How would he know that I might arrive while he was out on what this note promised was nothing more than a short absence? Was I even the one he was expecting at all? I was reminded of the odd tone of his letter, the strange lenticular effect of its prose, as if holding the paper in my hand I could change the appearance of the words on the page by looking at them from different angles, his descriptions of local produce sold at the markets giving the fruit more weight in the mind than it would have in the hand, linguistic misadventures with cab drivers given the gravity of tragically mistranslated disarmament talks between world powers. I sat down on the bed, made up with the standard hotel housekeeping tightness that always struck me as slightly contemptuous of the guest, and took the letter from my bag. Was there some hint of an invitation, any clue that my arrival was somehow expected, that I had been conjured up and summoned to this place, a dimension in which I was not merely a stranger, but an alien being? My eyes kept returning to the same sentence: "We have to invent the reality in which our existence becomes meaningful."

My time awaiting Brent Custer's return was spent in wandering the city, using his letter as my guide. It was a peripatetic form of waiting, as the days slid away, one after another in anonymous procession. The moment I entered the bazaar each morning I found myself immersed in strictly localized space-time, "here" and "not there" being identical terms for where I was now. Some vendor would count out my change, rubbing his constantly running nose, his fingers filthy with the labor of third world citizenship, the bills, all U.S., worn soft as bed linen, dead American presidents who still retained the power to propagate disease across the planet, to visit plagues on unsuspecting populations who contracted and spread an infectious fiscal policy indiscriminately. In the end, the Land of the Dead is the only true democracy. I dined in the same restaurant every day, even though I was in a constant state of unease. Every waiter with whom I interacted would go through the swinging door that led to the kitchen and return a different person entirely. A pretty young girl with the flashing brown eyes of an incurable flirt would transform into a stooped old man, gray eyes clouded with cataracts. What I was served was never what I ordered. But even such equatorial stasis, with its minor fluctuations returning to a languid equilibrium, can be subject to more radical metamorphosis.

There was a knock at the door, not loud but with a surreptitious insistence that had me bruising my shins on the metal bed frame in haste. The door opened to reveal a woman who seemed to have been distilled from a mixture of tropical fruit, warm rain, and smooth black silk.

"You are here," she said, the plain statement of fact filigreed with subtle accents of reproach, bitterness, and a sadness, for herself, for me, or both I could not determine. Before I could reply, she drew me to her, my lips lowering to meet hers rising toward mine. To say she kissed me is to say nothing. It was neither peckishly chaste nor drunkenly sloppy; it was the purest essence of the act itself. There was the joy of love and the sorrow of loss, the thrill of discovery and the chill of foreknowledge. As our lips parted, "farewell" was its final message, made without reticence, affirmed by the liquid sadness swirling in her mahogany eyes, and set to repeat every time I dropped my lids in sleep. She turned and ran away, gliding down the corridor with no sound but that of bare feet lightly touching pavement and the soft rustle of a bustling red skirt. I was sure I would never see her again, but I was wrong. I would glimpse her one last time, when I walked back into the room and, in my meditatively confused state, went to the window that overlooked the alley. There she was, beauty among the urchins scratching through the gringo trash in search of life's necessities. Her bare white arm shot out through the moonlight, forefinger unmistakably pointing toward my room. Two figures crossed through the light from the far side of the alley, the shadows of which were considerably reduced thereby. The thought of flight came to me on a sudden rush of panicked wings.

I grabbed a bag and started filling it indiscriminately. Toothbrush, hotel towel, alarm clock, several pairs of socks but no underwear. Passport, sandals, sunglasses. The overstuffed bag gaped open at me, about to vomit up its contents, when I noticed the name 'Brent Custer' written along the zipper on the upper edge. I scanned the room, looking for my bag, but came up with nothing more than a handful of brochures for the local attractions, the glossy photos of which bore little resemblance to the places themselves. I shoved them into the bag, the zipper's metallic teeth chewing my knuckles to the bone as I struggled against laws of mass and elasticity I could neither understand nor subdue.

As I left the room I could hear footsteps echoing their way up the front stairwell. Until now I had always avoided the back stairs after nightfall, but I suddenly found in the darkness bestowed by the empty light socket a cause for gratitude. Hoping that timing my footsteps to coincide with the beating of my heart would somehow muffle the sounds of both, I trotted down the hallway, which seemed to lengthen at only a slightly slower pace than my progress. When I finally reached the staircase I ducked around the corner and cautiously looked back toward the room. Two men, immense despite the distance between us, had taken up stances of impatience and aggressive readiness at my door. Presently, one of them began pounding on it with a fist of what was surely polished brown stone, sending frightened birds into flight from the nearby cemetery in which they slept among the dead. Like those same dead, none of the hotel's other guests rose to see what all the commotion was about.

"Mr. Custer, you have what is ours. The payment is come due. We know you are here. We will wait. We have all the time in your world."

In my haste to escape the rightful fate of Brent Custer, I took no notice of where I was going. Finally, firmly embedded in the small hours of the new day, I realized that panicked flight was only the initial stage of my next great journey. When I paused at last to catch my breath it finally occurred to me to check my surroundings, ascertain my position, and find the fastest transportation that could return me to the land from whence I came. Two dogs barking and one drunken call in the darkness were the only sounds I heard. Electricity seemed not to have encroached on this precinct and the single lane road was indifferently paved. With terror as my guide, it seems I had been led to the outskirts of the metropolis, where the only source of mechanized redemption would be found at the local bus stop. I wandered through the night, searching for the most dilapidated structure I could find that had on the premises a bench, an awning, and a gas pump. A handful of locals with battered luggage and the stoic faces of those for whom no destination holds promise beyond mere relocation would confirm that I was in the right place to exit the stage of this land's history. In what I took to be the city's final insult, a policeman approached me.

"You have, perhaps, some money for me, my friend," he said, his mustache lowering to meet his upturning leer to form the international sign of understated but unmistakable menace. I handed him the worthless local scrip until he stopped taking it.

I boarded a bus whose stops and destination seemed to bear no resemblance to those on any printed schedule. The landscape rolled by outside the window in hallucinatory waves. The faces of previously faceless peasants began to take on more familiar features, and random snatches of foreign speech I heard as English phrases which made no semantic sense. "Pink connections buttress giraffe priority." Somehow along the way back I had the possibly specious revelation that I was being called to account for the sins of Brent Custer. Those words, 'called to account for the sins of Brent Custer,' were the actual words that occurred to me in one of those many moments when I had no clear idea if I was awake or asleep. I was not at all sure what they meant. However, the specter of secular damnation was always before me, without the attached shadow of salvation.

By the time I reached the border I was in a state of near collapse, no longer able to summon up the necessary energy to have any concern for my fate. I considered it a certainty that I would be searched and detained for crimes which would always remain unspecified, but of which I would have to admit I was guilty. At the first checkpoint I felt the malice lurking beneath the grim neutrality of every face. As I steeled myself for the ordeal that was surely coming, I was waved through various lines and departments with barely a glance from what I had assumed to be my future captors and tormentors. At last I reached the final portal that opened out from the penumbra of bureaucracy and bad lighting onto full sunlight pouring down on my native land, the luminosity of mercy itself revealed. With a final shiver of trepidation I handed my passport to the gray and grave face that stood between me and freedom.

"Welcome home, Mr. Custer," he said as the official stamp of approval was punched onto my documentation.

I took back my passport, which, as it turned out, was not my passport at all. I realized that in my haste I must have grabbed the wrong one. But where had I left mine if not in the nightstand drawer alongside my wallet? I had a sickening thought. My wallet. Of course. Brent Custer. How had I not noticed? And how could he be wandering a foreign land without the articles of legitimacy? Or had he somehow infiltrated the hotel without my knowledge and absconded with mine, leaving me to founder in the consequences of his indiscretions and irresponsibility? With his bag and my fraudulent credentials I walked into a town that should have been instantly familiar, if not in detail then at least in the general way all places are to a native son. I could find nothing that gave me any sense of having returned to my homeland. The streets seemed to constitute a maze whose walls and corridors would shift and rotate with every turn I took. I finally came upon a small park, surrounded by a low wrought iron fence and containing plenty of shade, some benches, a small fountain, and the statue of a military man on horseback. I did not recognize his name; that of his horse went unrecorded.

Somehow, the one item I had managed to retain throughout my series of misadventures was Brent Custer's letter, now folded, refolded, crushed, and wadded to the point of disintegration. I took it from my pocket. As it slowly disappeared through my fingers and into the wind, the last words I could read, each underlined twice and every third word thrice, were "Order imposed is not order discovered."

I made my way home, by bus, by foot, by train, in cars driven by people whose kindness seemed to conceal some less altruistic motive. Darkness was my cape, stars winking in witness to my desperation. Night birds and crickets sang the ballads of my woeful fate. Gray dawns and grayer dusks bracketed days whose sunlight I could not countenance. With sporadic bouts of fitful sleep I attempted, with only partial success, to shield myself from the land outside, the unending undulations, the prairie brown, from drought or ripeness, I know longer knew which.

The day finally dawned when I was back in Suburbia, where hollow self-regard is reflected in the lawns, green and perfect, mildly threatening in their bland uniformity. I would never have recognized my own house if the car I had sold, how many weeks or months ago?, were not parked in the driveway. I looked in the mailbox. Bills, letters, junk mail, all addressed to Brent Custer, none of it forwarded from a previous address. My front door stands before and against me, a once warm invitation now irrevocably rescinded. Who will answer my knock, as I stand outside, a stranger in my own skin?