Impossible Vacation by Spalding Gray

Author:Spalding Gray [Gray, Spalding]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780307800688
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-11-01T13:00:00+00:00

I NEVER STOPPED looking down onto that clear, clear day. It was as though a whole part of the earth had been swept free of clouds just for my view. I saw it all: the mountains of Pakistan; sweeping, endless desert; and then we were suddenly over the Pyramids. There they were! The pilot didn’t even announce them. I could say I’d seen the Pyramids and I hadn’t even been in Egypt. I craned my neck even more as my breath fogged up the window. Then we were over the Greek Islands. All of them! I was amazed at how barren they were, like scattered fragments of moon rock, broken and strewn in azure. As soon as I saw the islands, I wanted to go there. I wanted to be there. As soon as the plane lands, I thought, I will vacation in the Greek Islands. But before I could dwell on that, we were over the Swiss Alps, and then the lush plains of Belgium, and then slowly coming in low over the flatlands of Holland, and then bump, bump, and we were down. We had landed at the Schiphol airport in Amsterdam. I didn’t want the flight to be over. Six hours had gone by like six minutes. That dizzy feeling of too much freedom came over me again, the feeling that I was no one and everyone everywhere, and that I could do anything I wanted, except there was hardly any “I” left to operate out of. Then, pulling away from the window, I realized that my head was locked to the right from having stared out that way for six hours.

I strolled into the almost empty Amsterdam airport with my head locked to the right, walked right past Dutch immigration officials, who all looked like stoned-out hippies in uniform, and it occurred to me that I could have been bringing in pounds of hashish and opium and it wouldn’t have mattered to them.

Yes, Amsterdam felt like a little paradise of freedom, and all my plans to get on the next flight to New York City began to dissolve and crumble. “Why not spend one night in Amsterdam?” the little gremlin voice was saying in my ear. “Just one night.” After all, what was the rush to get back to New York City in summer?

So I called Hans and Sonia and said, “Hi, it’s Brewster. I’m just in from India and I’d love to come over and see you.” It felt so exciting to be able to say “just in from India.” Never in my life did I think I’d be able to utter a phrase quite as jet-setty as that.

“But of course,” Sonia crackled in her thick Dutch accent. “What a surprise!”

I caught a cab and was off, sitting in the back trying to force my head to the left, overwhelmed by the large, hypertrophied prosperity of all I saw out the window. The wealth of that city! Never did I think Amsterdam would look so luxurious.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.