7 January 2010

A countryside youth-hostelly hotel, off 9G in Dutchess County, New York, or in the endless outskirts of Rouen, making some dinner in the communal kitchen. As I'm spooning something creamy out of a saucepan, the teenage son of two overweight and slightly standoffish blond Americans is recalling seeing me on the road a few evenings before. Yes, the night it was thundering, my father and I were staying at the campsite, I reply, and I put my head under the canopy of your camping vehicle as we were leaving - we were considering hitchhiking.

Then I am in a car with a young sandy-haired white boy who might be my son but is sitting in the front passenger seat for some reason, and the driver, a beautiful, statuesque woman who I am assuming to be Ethiopian. I am sitting in the center of the back seat, she picked me up hitchhiking and is taking me where I had mentioned I was headed. But I panic a bit when she makes a dangerous turn off a highway ramp onto that endless Rouen street, and a cop car is lying in wait just after the turn, and then I am saying, in Japanese for some reason, daijohbuh~? is this okay?, and we're coasting along, I'm leaning forward between the seats, and the driver seems to be handling it okay, going slowly. But we notice then that the cop car is tailing us several cars back, and I think we're looking for a side street to dart down or a place to pull over, but there isn't any, and then the rush of the street has faded and we are on the edge of the town, everything is shut and run-down factories and warehouses. It's only us and the cop car now, and then the cop is outside our window, a lone woman cop with fierce eyes, an angry look, demanding we stop. The driver is edging the car forward very slowly toward the tall brush growing on both sides of the road, some dusty factory churning dully in a gully below, and I am saying, okay, hanasasete, let me do the talking, pretty sure if I've got that complex verb right but wondering anyway, and at the same time wondering again why am I speaking Japanese, but the driver is leaning her seat backward low, hands off the wheel, and she looks up into my eyes and in a low, tearful voice says, She wants my jizzum.
I'm waking up then, were standing at the side of the car trying to reason with the cop, and I'm (considering) doing something mistakenly valiant like kicking the pistol out of the cop's hand, then rewinding and trying various versions, but the cop is angry and committed, or really hungry as the Ethiopian woman seemed to be saying, and I'm wondering what that jizzum was, what was she sensing, was it some language mistake, no her English was accented but very good. Was the cop was threatening to take her life, or her fluid...