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  Hall continued: once out to sea, the crew was followed by a black cloud, beneath which trailed a huge waterspout with three smaller spouts orbiting around it. In the ensuing hurricane the wind sent a fuel-loaded pontoon boat careening toward Hall (he had by now “lashed” himself to the mast), which sheared off the bottom half of one leg. Constantine at this point in the story glanced at the hairless, intact legs of Richard Hall and decided it was time to leave. But Hall kept on, his face ghoulishly lit by firelight. There was an awful lot of talk about his dreams, ancient Indians hiding in the hills above Newport, the lost library of Montezuma, and an octogenarian couple that kayaked from San Diego to Panama during the Great Depression. All ending with that grin and Richard Hall’s obscenely frightening laugh. Constantine excused himself and headed for his room.

  He packed his bag, walked quietly across the grounds, and spent that night in the bed of a waitress from the Southside Marina bar. In the morning he caught a ride to LAX, where, he booked a flight to New Zealand. He had picked New Zealand because of its distance, because he felt that he had seen the States, and because the country reportedly had no snakes. Constantine sat in the airport bar and drank vodka over ice for eight hours, eating 10-mg Valiums at regular intervals (a gift from his waitress friend), then stumbled onto the plane and fell asleep before take-off. He awoke once in Honolulu (the baggy-eyed stewards and stewardesses were all wearing leis) and once more to urinate, and the next time he opened his eyes he was touching down in a strange country on the other side of the world.

  Constantine bought a map at the tourist information desk from a cute blonde with crooked teeth, and hitched out of Christchurch. He was picked up quickly by an older couple who drove him through hours of green hills dotted with sheep. They dropped him that evening at a campground on Lake Tekapo, where they told him to “bust off.” He guessed they meant to wish him a safe trip.

  In the morning Constantine drank coffee on the gravelly shore of Tekapo and listened to the honks of geese as the morning sun blazed off the lake against the rise of brown, snow-capped Southern Alps. The mood was shattered by the crack of .22 rounds coming off the opposite shore and the sudden flutter of geese. Constantine grabbed his pack and hit the road.

  He stopped at the sportsman’s paradise Queenstown, nestled beneath the splendor of the aptly named mountain range, the Remarkables. Constantine pitched his tent on a hilltop campground at sundown and walked down to town, which was colorfully lit by Christmas lights below. He talked to a man walking a Newfoundland pup on the way down. The man said, “Check you later, hear?” as they parted, and Constantine headed for the nearest bar.

  He found a stool at a pub named Eichard’s by Lake Wakatipu, and slowly drank a couple of tall dark Steinlagers. Next to him sat a man named Neville, who remarked that he was glad to be drinking with a “Euro” instead of another “fuckin’ Japanese.” New Zealand was a beautiful country, and its people very friendly, but Constantine had long ago decided that ignorance was everywhere, even in paradise. After a while he tuned out Neville and focused on the bartender, a big-boned brunette named Joey with wet brown eyes. She seemed to have a hearing problem, as she constantly had to retake the patron’s orders (one young man said, “Read my fuckin’ lips, Joey,” to the laughter of his friends), but she took it in stride. Constantine liked her and told her so before he left for the walk in the cool night air up the hill to his tent.

  The next morning Constantine took a gondola up to the top of the mountain and stood with his hands in his pockets amid a group of gawking tourists. On the trip down he rode with a man on a holiday from his western Australian sheep station, and two giggly, unrelated girls from Auckland who called themselves the Smith sisters. He lunched on grilled hupaki with marmalade sauce and green Indonesian mussels, then found himself back in Eichard’s, thinking of Steinlagers. Joey put one on the bar as soon as he walked in. She seemed glad to see him.

  At dusk the two of them took a walk on the wooded trail that wound around the lake. Joey stopped Constantine in a grove of birch trees to listen to the song of a bellbird and then she kissed him on the lips for a long time as the lake flowed almost inaudibly near. They said good-bye after their walk and Constantine slept alone at the top of the hill under what seemed to be thousands of stars. He had been with plenty of women, though the number was not an issue with him, but for some reason he would not forget that kiss.

  He was picked up hitchhiking the next morning by a young Auckland college student named Chris and his girlfriend Julie. They drove a small camper van loaded with gear and Dead tapes, which they played the whole day. Constantine could see that they were loaded on something, and when the endearing Chris offered him some mushrooms, he shrugged and chewed a fistful, choking it down with a DB beer from the cooler.

  They drove on one dirt lane, cliffside around Lake Wanaka, then headed into Mount Aspiring National Park, whose snowy peaks, waterfalls, and massive evergreens surpassed everything Constantine had seen in the American West. It was a fine place to be while doing psilocybin. They picnicked at Davis Flat, then stopped near the Haast Pass, where Constantine slept shirtless in a bed of pine needles in the woods, thinking happily as he drifted off that there was zero chance of snakes. Afterward the road opened up to the Tasman Sea and an expanse of northern California-style coastline, complete with tropical fauna and white beach.

  Chris and Julie dropped Constantine at the foot of Mount Tasmin and moved on. There was a rainbow coming out of the clouds, reflecting off the mountain and its main attraction, Fox Glacier. Constantine watched it for a while and walked to Fox Glacier Motor Park, a campground in the middle of a meadow. He took a room there on the end of a cinder-block row, and settled in for the night. He could not have known then that he would sleep in that room for an entire year.

  What made him stay was hard to determine. He would tell himself that it was the white kitten who adopted him the next day, though he suspected it was the job he landed almost immediately (Constantine could never resist a no-tax restaurant gig) as a cook in the no-name local that sat on the edge of the campground. The pub housed two pool tables, kept a friendly staff, and had Speight’s and DB on tap. Most of the talk was about the glacier (the townies called it the “glaah-sheer”) and the daily stream of tourists it brought into town. Constantine only went up on the glaah-sheer once, led by a guide he knew named Kevin. He was surprised it wasn’t colder, standing on the ice.

  Mostly he spent his mornings walking in the woods and the mountains, his days at the local, and his evenings reading popular novels left by travelers in the bar. The white kitten grew to be a slow and heavy cat; beyond that, Constantine noticed little change in himself or his surroundings, though the feeling he had then was in general a wary contentment.

  That ended, too, one night behind the pub. Constantine was sweeping the kitchen when he heard a woman’s cries through the rear screen door. He walked out the door with the broom in his hand and saw a group of three young men raping a Dutch backpacker in the dirt. After that he recalled swinging the broom handle, and the sound of it as it collapsed the skull of the largest, smiling man. The pub’s staff got Constantine under control eventually, but not before he had taken the other two almost completely out, ramming one man’s skull flat into the cinder-block wall of the pub. Later, he remembered that the blood smelled like the jar of copper pennies he had kept in his room as a child.

  His expulsion from the country was political—one man’s father was a prominent landowner—but it was something he did not resist He never met the Dutch girl, and was never asked to identify her attackers. The authorities told him that the wall-rammed man was critical, and that Constantine was an alien working illegally in their country, and strangely, that they would pay for his ticket of departure. Constantine pictured a map in his head, selected a place at random, and told the men that he would like to go to Thailand. Before they escorted him to the plane that would wing him to Auckland, the one cop who had remained silent throughout the ordeal fina
lly met Constantine’s eyes, and thanked him.

  Constantine had a night to kill in Auckland. He took a room in the Railton on Queen Street, a temperance hotel run by the Salvation Army that had the smell of old age and decay embedded in its lobby. After a bath he stopped at a place called Real Groovy Records, bought a pulp novel, and walked downtown with the paperback wedged in the back pocket of his jeans. He stopped at the Shakespeare Brewery and had three of the best and most potent ales he had ever tasted, Macbeth’s Red. After that it was hot beef salad and chicken larb at a side-street eatery called Mai Thai, where he washed down the fiery dishes with two Singhas, then back to Shakespeare’s for five more Macbeth’s Reds. He had a load on now, but the walk back to the hotel was long, and he stopped for a short one in a chrome-heavy bar at the top of Queen Street. At the bar Constantine met a Kiwi named Graham and his girlfriend Lovey, and the three of them got stinking drunk trading shots of ouzo and Bailey’s Irish Cream. Constantine ended the night dancing on the bar to Curtis Mayfield’s “Give Me Your Love,” a song he had selected from the jukebox. He did not remember the walk home.

  He woke the next morning with a top-ten hangover, realizing suddenly with a painful smile that he was fiercely drunk and in the bowels of a temperance motel. His back hurt from the paperback that was still stuck in the pocket of his jeans. Constantine vomited, took a bath, then grabbed his backpack and fell into a cab for the Auckland airport.

  He caught his flight to Thailand and rode a taxi into the heart of Bangkok. Upon exiting the cab, he realized that it was very late at night, and that he was an American and without prospect in a country of Asian faces. The streets were narrow and unevenly paved, and rats moved freely around the closed stands of vendors.

  Constantine stopped the driver of a three-wheeled tuk-tuk, who told him of Soi Cowboy, the party district whose bars were largely populated by expatriate Vietnam vets. The driver took him there and dropped him in front of one such establishment, Inside, Constantine made friends over a half-dozen Mekong beers with a bushy-sideburned American named Masterson, a burnout for sure but less of one than the others in the bar.

  After a couple of shots to back up the Mekongs, Masterson took Constantine to Patpong, the area noted for its commercial prostitution. Constantine was a bit surprised at the organization of it all—the tuk-tuk driver, undoubtedly with his hand in the till as well, dropped them at the “most very clean place”—and at his first sight of women onstage wearing cardboard numbers strung around their necks. Two more beefs and a joint of something sweet, and Constantine had chosen a woman who stood with a dispassionate smile on the plywood stage.

  He came in her in the back of Masterson’s place, a two-room affair down another dark alley. Afterward, she pulled a crumpled piece of yellow paper from her jeans and read a poem, in English, to Constantine. Her ability to speak the language puzzled him, as she had repeated the words “No English” to him several times before they stripped off their clothes. It puzzled him, too, that she slept in his arms the entire night, until he reasoned that his room was probably nicer than anything she had to go back to. He settled with her in the morning. Later, he casually mentioned to Masterson the whore’s “No English” mantra. Masterson laughed and said, “But it don’t mean ‘no speak English,’ mate. It means ‘I no suck your dick.’”

  Constantine left Bangkok quickly, hearing of the beautiful south and huts on the beach. After an overnight train ride and the ferry to Ko Pha-Ngen, he rented such a hut, at less than two American dollars a day, a serviceable dirt-floored living arrangement that housed a corner slab of cement with a hole drilled in the cement for excrement. The beach and green water were some of the finest he had seen, and there was a nearby eatery called the Happy Restaurant that served “special” mushroom omelettes, which kept him right for half of every day. But he soon tired of the fierce mosquitoes and the repetitive conversations of backpackers—where to eat cheap, where to sleep cheap—and after a few weeks on the Gulf of Thailand he headed north.

  In the course of his travels he found a guide and trekked up into the hills close to the Burma border. Small tribes practiced slash-and-burn farming there, and each tribe had an opium professor, opium being the most prized of crops. In one village he visited the hut of the tribe’s opium professor late at night, and lay on his side on a straw mat as the professor prepared his pipe. The hut had been built up on stilts, and Constantine could hear the sound of pigs running beneath him as the mixture was carefully heated to its boiling point. Constantine did three bowls, and stared without thought at the candles in the hut until he fell to sleep.

  His months in the hills were uneventful, and later he could not remember exactly what he had done to pass the time. He bathed irregularly and ate very little. In the ancient walled city of Chiang Mai he smoked some heroin offered to him by his guide, then sat in a folding chair on a riverbank, under a black sky. He sat with his guide the entire nights both of them uninterested in conversation, as the muddy river flowed by.

  Eventually Constantine made his way south once again. His intention was to leave Asia and visit Europe. He spent nearly the balance of his cash on a cheap flight out of Bangkok, and took it all the way to Brussels. In Brussels, very late one night, he caught a train headed for Paris.

  Constantine chose an empty compartment, but soon the compartment was filled with three backpackers—two young British women and a thin Jamaican man—and a well-dressed Parisian woman in her early twenties, a transplanted Italian named Francesca. The Brits and the Jamaican stared at Constantine with a curious, grinning contempt, but Francesca broke the discomfort with some spirited conversation, buoyed by her delight at Constantine’s command of French. Constantine confessed to her that he was now quite broke, and Francesca gave him an address where he might find some work. Soon the Brits and the Jamaican were asleep, and then Francesca’s head dropped to Constantine’s shoulder, and later her face fell full in his lap. Constantine closed his eyes, eventually nodding off with an unwanted but unshakable erection.

  Constantine left the train at the station in Paris, giving Francesca a guilty kiss before he waved her off. The station was busy with well-dressed Parisians and backpackers, and the air was thick and aromatic with the smoke of Gauloise cigarettes. He hitchhiked south and was picked up by an amiable young man who was playing a cassette of Bob Dylan’s “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” loudly through his rear-mounted speakers.

  The tip from Francesca led him to Tours, a university town on the Loire, on the northeast edge of central France. The address she had given him turned out to be the local orphanage, and the mention of her name brought an instant smile to the chief of staff. Apparently Francesca was some sort of angelic philanthropist, making Constantine’s lecherous thoughts from the train seem somehow even more unclean. He was hired immediately as an interpreter, with a small salary to go with his room and board.

  Constantine settled in to the slow, easy life of the town. He rode an old bicycle for basic transportation, and to run errands to the local pharmacy. Mostly his job consisted of acting as an interpreter in the crucial first meeting between French child and English-speaking parent. He suspected that there was something a bit illegal in these transactions, and that there was much money being passed below the table. But he remained emotionally detached from the children and the dynamics of the adoption process, preferring to pursue perfection in the art of being alone. In general he stayed away from trouble, though he did steal a Citro?n one night, returning it to the unsuspecting owner’s parking spot before dawn.

  One year after he had arrived in Tours, Constantine packed his Jansport and rode the train to Amsterdam with the intention of having a short holiday. Once there, he took a room at the Hotel My Home, a boarding house near the station run by a couple of humorless but kind old men. On the first night of his stay Constantine had a few genevas with beer chasers at the pub below the hotel, the CafÉ Simone. He was surprised to see middle-aged men smoking marijuana at the bar. Other than that the p
lace was like any local, complete with the requisite, red-faced, cap-wearing drunk at the end of the bar doing his atonal rendition of Del Shannon’s “Runaway.” He took to Amsterdam immediately and did not return to France. A week later he took a job as a barback in a lesbian club named Homolulu’s, and a week after that he met a blonde named Petra Boone, who became his girlfriend until he left Amsterdam, quite suddenly and for no explainable reason except to travel, six months later.

  He drifted south by rail into Italy, and later took the ferry from Brindisi to Patras, in Greece. A bus dropped him in Athens where Constantine checked immediately into the local hostel. Athens was no place to experiment on accommodations if one didn’t know the language. It reminded Constantine of New York City with heightened emotions.

  The desk clerk at the hostel was a Greek girl named Voula, a tightly curled brunette with mahogany eyes and a small, wet mouth. The manner in which she used her hands to navigate through her broken English attracted Constantine, along with her low-stanced, hippy shape. They were friends immediately and lovers three days later, when Constantine moved into her room, the best and most private in the house.

  Beyond his desk duties at the hostel, which paid his room and board, Constantine did not work during his stay in Greece. He spent his days drinking NescafÉ in the cafeneions and his nights in the tavernas eating rich, garlicky food washed down with Amstel and the occasional retsina. Late at night he and Voula would lie in beach chairs on the roof of the hostel, smoking cigarettes and laughing over the sounds of crazed, honking cabdrivers in the street below. He was beginning to like Greece, revising his original opinion of its people from incivility to a kind of unrestrained passion.