My name is Constantin, but it's not really anymore. I am not even supposed to tell anyone, but this is my diary so I don’t think it matters much. I got my name changed at the Interior Ministry near Hostivice. I am called Lawley now. I like it because it sounds like the English word laundry. I never spoke English until about three months ago. I mostly spoke Czech, sprinkled with bits of Knaaic and Yiddish profanity. When my mom told me we were moving to America, she enrolled me in an accelerated English course in a large building called the English House. It was really hard for me to settle down in the English House because I wasn’t ever planning on speaking english. Originally my mom and I were going to move to Crimea, where I would learn Crimean Tatar and Turkish, and maybe even keep speaking Czech, but not anymore. I wouldn't ever go to Crimea. I got this diary at while I was saying goodbye to my teachers at my old gymnázium. Its actually a Czech mathematics book, but something had gone wrong in the production and all of the pages ended up being blank. They gave it to me because they didn't want all of the paper going to waste. I like writing in it. Its so big and weighty, holding it in my arms makes me feel like an author. Being able to write had distracted me from crying so much. I was crying a lot when we left because I didn’t want to leave my home. The hardest part was leaving my mother’s cunicology farm. She sold our rabbits to some man with no hair. That's all I could remember from that man. Now every time I see a bald man I start to tear up, which has led to a lot of tears because a lot of people in airports are bald. Does flying in an airplane make your hair fall out? Is that why all of the people here are bald? Will it grow back if you stop? I saw a service dog lick a bald baby’s head so maybe dog spit makes your hair grow back. That's gross because dogs eat everything in front of them. I never had a dog. I've only had rabbits. Now I want to cry again.
I fell asleep crying a little. I was still holding my diary when I woke up so that's good. We are almost to America. I don't know what I will do when I get off the plane because this is the last plane of the trip. We are over Nebraska now. Nebraska looks like a quilt this high up.
I thought I saw a wall like the one in Germany. I wonder if Nebraska has a communist problem like Germany, but a family friend who moved to America told me America is far from communist and will try at every cost to keep it that way. She moved to America a couple years ago from her little house farther east of the Czech Republic near Slovenia. She sent me many cards with big glossy pictures of parks and big letters that read MARYLAND on one side and a long paragraph that was a toss up between English and Czech, like, even the words in English were spelt with slavic digraphs– but anyways, these cards she sent me felt more like complaints than greetings. She told me she was called a dirty commie by kids no older than myself, which confused me because I didn’t even think people knew where Bohemia was, nor did they think it was a communist country. Technically, I was born in Bohemia, but Bohemia is no longer a country. Its the Czech Republic. I grew up in a transitional state from the Czechoslovakian Velvet Divorice. Now everything that once was is now gone. It makes my mom sad.
I asked my mom if what I saw below us was a wall, but someone sitting behind me overheard, and, in an accent that was hard for me to grasp fully said, “that's a highway”. Highways are usually not that big, I said, but he insisted it really was a highway. He told me it was called “Document Highway”. I asked him why it was called that and he shrugged. He told me it was just a mystery, just like all of the murders that go on there. My mom promptly scolded the man behind me for “trying to scare me” but it was fine. I didn’t mind.
šťastný nový rok!
The house was here before the cornfield, and the cornfield was here before the funeral home across the road, probably. I woke up on the bare mattress upstairs and had a floral pattern on my face in the morning, which really scared me because when I looked in the mirror I thought I had a bullseye rash.
I drew a picture of my new house
I am standing in the kitchen right now. The clock on the stove says “11:46” and the sun is shining. I don’t even know what to do right now, I am feeling so much right now. My mom got up at 4 am to a call from the freight terminal telling her that our belongings had just arrived on a train coming all the way from Rhode Island. Before they were in Rhode Island they were on a cargo ship in Germany, and before they were in Germany they were in our house. We don’t have a car, so my mom got on the public bus. I looked up the name of the bus and apparently they are called Greyhound buses. I wonder if they are called that because Greyhounds are fast.
I cant remember exactly what I packed because it was hard to see through all the tears. We left a few things in the Czech Republic, like our kroje and some cookware and a few other things in boxes I never looked in because they were shoved under the beds. Those things we left behind are with my grandma, who isn't even my grandma. My mom isn't even my mom either. It's hard to tell if I was adopted or just a hitchhiker. That's what people in my village called me because I suffered from statelessness, which means that the Czech Republic, Slovenia, or any country for that matter didn’t recognize me as a citizen. I got my citizenship in the end, but it doesn’t really matter anymore. I live in America now.
My grandma refuses to say I'm adopted. Instead she calls me a wild animal because my mom found me in her rabbit pen in the middle of winter. My grandma says I had a tail and large cornets sticking out from the sides of my head. I don’t really believe her now, but when I was little I did. I told all of my classmates that I was a víla and I got a punishment for lying.
My grandma owned the rabbit farm before my mom did, so I think that's why she doesn’t like me too much. I am a víla hitchhiker.
I haven't been busy besides unpacking my things from the freight terminal and taking apart and putting back together the television remote countless times. That's actually the problem. I don’t have anything to do now, but there is so much to do. It’s endless. I could read the television guide, I could paint the house, I could walk the dog that we don’t have, I could hitchhike until I don’t know where I am anymore. That's what I was made to do; hitchhike.
It's funny because my mom has always told me that I was made to listen, like a therapist or Michael the angel. That either means I become a therapist or protect Israel.
(Lawley draws a smiling face here).
The bank on the hill named “Saint Sebastian Bank” slants downwards at nearly an 180 degree angle, and has a big blue PVC banner tied to the front that reads “now hiring”. They would take me in, my mom says. Just like everyone else in my life; taking me in from the cold.
I am ironing my best shirt for my interview tomorrow.
For the thousandth time in my life, I was taken in. I got a job at Saint Sebastian Bank, which wasn't actually a bank. A therapy organization had bought the building, but the building still had the words “Saint Sebastian Bank” in blue and white on the front, and a small caricature of a man impaled with arrows, tied to a tree that had money for leaves. When finding the directions from my house, I noticed the building was still under the name, “Saint Sebastian Bank”, like the therapy organization who had clearly been there was completely unknown to the outside world. It was like the therapy organization was stateless, just like me.
It smelt like sawdust on the inside, which almost had distracted me entirely from the ridiculously large old fashioned vault just past the receptionist’s desk. There were large pots of flowers and rows of chairs lined up against both walls, which forced you to look at the other miserable people sitting across from you. My interview was with a lady who had messy brownish-blonde hair. I avoid calling it dirty blonde. Her name was Sandy. She wore navy heels with a silver buckle on the toe of each shoe. There was a thin line from her skin-toned tights on the back of her legs which reminded me of all the times my friends and I would paint with clay on ourselves to either make us look like we were wearing expensive stockings or makeup.
Sandy was sweet. She looked happy to interview me, happy to take me to a room in the back, happy to give me a job. I didn’t need a masters degree, she said, which was nice to hear because I'm not in school. I haven’t even thought about school ever since I graduated from my old international school. I was seventeen when I graduated, which was young apparently. It's because as soon as I got my Czech citizenship at age four, my mom rushed me out the door and right into school. She’s since apologized for pushing me so hard at such a young age, which, I don't know— It was the only thing that I could do at that age anyway.
I wonder when the constant adoption or espousement will stop. I wonder if one day I will house myself. My mom doesn’t want me to live alone. She has always scared me into staying with her by telling me some gruesome story about a sibling I had who ran away and was killed on the railroad tracks in Germany. My grandma tells me I never had a sibling because my mother was a virgin.
When I jumped the fence,
I landed on my ankle,
and crushed it into two.
The next day in the manger,
They cut my leg open,
And sewed it back with glue.
Sean asked me if I remembered anything from the day we met, and, as I was sitting cross legged on the foot of his bed, I suddenly felt the fabric underneath me disappear. I put my arms out to catch myself even though I wasn’t falling. I told him I didn’t remember. Sean moved closer to me and took one of my hands to the bed and held it like a clamshell. His face was pensive. It reminded me of my teacher at the English House who would look at my English process reports in confusion, like, “how could someone be so terrible remembering something they’ve clearly seen and learned”. That's what speaking English to me meant– remembering.
Sean made sure I was listening. He asked me with his eyes and I answered with mine. He told me about his cousin Denver, the quarry, and the therapy office. I knew what the therapy office was. It used to be a bank. I go work there almost every day. He told me that, we, the both of us, killed his cousin Denver. He told me we smashed his head with a rock until it was completely detached from his shoulders and then threw him off a cliff. I'm not sure why he said “we” did that. “That doesn’t sound like something I would do”, I say, which is probably the dumbest thing you could say in a situation like that. He repositioned himself, still holding my hand and reworded what he said. “Well, I carried it out. You laid in the bushes towards the trees. That sounded more like me, which I didn’t think I was proud of or relieved to hear. He went on to tell me we drove down to the beach and used one of those machines that sprays the sand off your feet or legs to wash the blood off. He took me home to his house and I was soaking. Suddenly I remembered the peeling sound of wet denim off my legs and sloppily collapsing onto his downstairs couch. Then I remember feeling warm, and then I remember feeling slightly damp again.
"I wonder if it had to do with the bushes you were in. When I came to get you, I noticed the plants were datura. That stuff can make you real sick".
Sean said his aunt got in a car accident but she only knew about it because someone told her. She didn’t remember it because it was so scary her brain forced her to forget it. She thought it was just a big prank. She thought the neckbrace and the hospital and letters of condolence were just elements in some sick joke. She was so bewildered that she killed herself before she could even get out of her neck brace.
I knew that your brain could hide things from you, things that reminded you of bad things. It made me wonder what else my brain was hiding from me, and if my body and my brain were really one, and who am I to refer to my brain as its own separate person, and if my brain is a separate person who is hiding things from me, then what am I thinking with right now?
“Dont kill yourself over it though”, Sean said to me. I realized then, in regards to the story about his aunt, that I had actually believed what he said, that I had actually believed I had done those things. I didn’t know why I believed him, I guess I had to because denial would probably kill me faster.
What I do remember from that day was how shaken I was by Sean’s height, how his knees stuck up like the roots of a tree when he sat down at the velvet chair. His voice was like an air conditioner humming flatly. He is coyote faced just like his cousin.
