Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by C. D. Rose

Author:C. D. Rose [Rose, C. D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2024-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

TROUVÉ

To pass the time while we waited I was telling Anna a story I’d heard about a guy in Turkey who gets wasted one night then wakes up in a forest or something, unsure where he is. He gets up, dusts himself off, then stumbles across a search party, all in hi-vis, I suppose, with maps and whistles and stuff, and they’re out looking for someone, so being essentially a good citizen, he decides to join them, to help out. Only then—

‘He hears them calling his name? He realises it’s him they’re looking for?’

‘Ha, yes. That’s it.’

‘I’ve heard that one before,’ she said. ‘Only, when I heard it, it was in Iceland. A tourist had got off the bus and changed her hat, or something.’

‘I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘She’s changed her hat and they think she’s lost?’

‘Something like that, yeah.’

‘And she joins the search party for herself?’

‘Yeah.’

She didn’t seem interested in what I thought was interesting so I shut up and went to have another look at the arrivals board, which said my friends were going to be twenty minutes late so I sat down again.

‘What’s that film?’ I asked, ‘The one where the guy slowly realises it was him, that he was the one who did it?’

‘I don’t know that one,’ she said, and then we were quiet again for a bit.

And then she said, out of the blue, ‘Same thing happened to me once.’

‘What?’ I said. ‘You got lost and found yourself?’

‘Kind of, yeah.’

I thought she’d go on to tell the story, but she didn’t. Anna was odd like that.

There was a pause for like five minutes or something.

‘What’s that film,’ I asked, ‘where they’re sitting around waiting for someone to arrive?’

‘Waiting for Godot.’

‘No. A film.’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘but there was this time, a few years back now. Maybe twenty. God, ages ago. I was in Paris, was passing through, en route from somewhere to somewhere else, can’t remember where. I used to travel a lot, work, that’s what it was usually, but sometimes I just went roaming. Out with the camera. See what turned up. That kind of thing.’ Anna was a photographer and I’d known her since school, though she wasn’t a photographer then. ‘I remember having one eye on my watch and worrying about getting to the station or the airport on time.’

‘Like now?’ I said. We’d run because we thought we were going to be late to meet my friends but then we got here on time, and now they were late.

‘I always worry when I’ve got a flight or a train to catch, so I decided to walk. Walking’s the best way to kill time. And it was Paris—a great city, the best, for wandering and watching, so they say, though when I get there I always find it too crowded and everything’s, I don’t know, already seen. Like I’m looking at pictures of the place and not the place itself, even though I am actually, literally there.’

‘I haven’t been there for ages.

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