3:00 am – The Leaving

The city is dead, save for the rodents. Dublin at this time is a place of post-mortem lividity, after the world sighed its last breath. Every store is shuttered. The street lights drone insidiously above the sidewalks. There are faint metallic noises in the distance like delayed tremors. It seems like nature is already trying to reclaim the cracks in the buildings. I never thought a city could be so dead at any one time, but here I am, feeling like the last man on earth, walking to my bus step in Dublin after dark.

It isn’t until I reach the bus stop that I see signs of life. A group of three, all with their hoods up, stand in a triangle in front of a little casino. A drunken man with the Maryland state flag sewn into his jacket walks by and taps me on the shoulder, saying, “Too cool for school,” then disappears into an alley. One or two stick figures drift across the street several blocks down without any animation. There’s an animatronic dinosaur above a children’s museum at the street corner that is frozen in mid-roar, its neck-up being absorbed completely into the vacuum of the night sky.

I wait twenty minutes or so for the coach to the airport. I’m doing okay on time, as my flight doesn’t leave for another three hours, and it takes maybe half an hour to get where I need to go. But instead of the huge steel coach bus pulling in, a taxi van races down the street and drops from 60 to zero in two seconds, stopping right in front of me. A pudgy man exits the car, holds his arms out star-fashion, and asks, “You’re going to the airport, yeah?”

“Um, yeah,” I say.

“Seven euro, same price. I’ll take you.”

I see through the windows that the van is almost at capacity. I shrug, figuring there’s not much difference to be made here, and the driver opens the passenger door, motioning for one of the riders to get out so he can fold the seat forward. I move into the back seat next to a tiny Asian woman. The rider gets back in, and we’re off. Everyone’s totally silent, not even risking differentiating themselves and creating some kind of contention. The streets are deserted as if the world just opened up and swallowed everyone but us whole.

The taxi driver tears down these streets, taking turns widely with great liberties when weaving in and out of lanes and getting brief airtime when crossing over small river bridges. There’s some sort of flow going on with the driver—deep focus, tunnel vision, nothing exists but the road—and nobody wants to break it. At my side, the Asian woman giggles nervously to herself at the speed. I feel outside the law, outside the limits of matter and my own body, as the intersections blink by. They’re not supposed to do that, I think. We’re in a city. Movement is never this fast and singular. I feel as hollow as a ghost.

Fifteen minutes later, we’re at the airport. My legs feel numb when I get out and pay the driver the seven euros. He doesn’t count any of the money he’s paid. Instead, he just jams the cash in his pocket, gets back into his dinky little van, and peels off into the night. I guess nighttime brings out a different kind of person and riskier modes of movement. So quick and so dangerous. It’s one of those lives you just have to be acclimated to, such as how organisms can survive only in certain climates. It’s an existence between the cracks. I look in the direction where the van disappeared and think, “God speed, taxi man.” Then, I walk inside to wait for Yaro, Victor, and my plane to Brussels.

9:00 am – The Landing

We’ve landed in a city under construction. There are the final skeletal remains of a building being demolished right outside the airport, a simple frame on the side of a warehouse standing in a pallet of rubble, like one of the black and white toriis that stood above the ashes of a nuked Japan.

Taking the bus into the city only brings more of the same opulence: blue and yellow gates leading a maze of walkways through the streets, zig-zagged around uprooted streets and sewer pipes. There are ditches already filled with cigarette butts, concrete walls hiding corner stores, diverged traffic, and growing pains all around. It’s reminding me of a quarantine zone (everyone walk single file, get your food rations here) as we ride the bus a few kilometers through this city in its ugly, in-between stage between blight and prosperity.

We get off near a sex shop and a Starbucks with a military van parked out front. It doesn’t take much winding through the blue and yellow lanes for us to get to our hostel, which sits across the street from a half-demolished office building. Only Victor speaks French, so we elect him to be the one who checks us in, but the woman at the desk speaks perfect English, leaving Yaro and I (or me at least) feeling a little dense. The check-in process takes a while, so I take the time to scan the walls and the main room that the front desk area opens to.

A mannequin stuffed inside a 1920s deep-sea diving suit stands beside a fireplace, flags of all the Allied powers ring around the ceiling, and a single cylinder motorcycle sits near the back, framed with flight propellers, bayonets and shrapnel. Around the walls are pictures of Lugar pistols, Mike Connelly raising his fisticuffs, fragments of airplane sidings, and one picture that says, “DON’T COUNT THE DAYS. MAKE THE DAYS COUNT.” I spend a considerable amount of time looking over a cabinet that holds WWI helmets, old war documents, and bullet casings. It evokes thick leather and the concussive sounds of mortar fire.

I’m trying to weigh in the rugged authenticity and artificial hip factor, the aura of which seems to be the most prevalent, but whatever the case, I’m digging it quite a bit.

We get our keys, drop our things off in our room, and try to set an itinerary. After some empty suggestions, we decide that the Grand Place should be a good center point, from which we can work our way out and orbit around. We set out, once again zigzagging through those off-grid walkways. Surprisingly, none of the storefronts are in French, but unsurprisingly, there are just as many homeless people here, sitting under the storefronts, as there are in Dublin. Just copy and pasted cardboard signs and all. I feel bad ignoring their pleas, but I know if I entertained every one of their solicitations, I’d be dead broke in ten minutes.

The Grand Place is packed with hooded figures shuffling along in eight different directions— trying to get out of the mist—passing by art stands held under umbrellas and Chinese-language tours ready to begin. The guildhalls are as Gothic as Dracula. The homes are predicated on baroque stucco designs that must have taken decades to carve. The architecture is immaculate and haunting: the Town Hall, the city museum, the houses of Dukes—all so full of mystery and shadow. The Town Hall, in particular, seems to lean forward, looking down upon me in conscious superiority when I look straight up at the statue of Saint Michael slaying a demon conceived atop its spire.

I have never felt so aware of my own skin crawling as I do now, standing here and bearing witness to the results of city fires, military seizures, and tug-of-wars between religious sects. I wonder, “How many lives did it cost to erect these? What sort of society saw fit to build these? Where were the beheadings, the exchanges of power, the acts of martyrdom—where in this square did they take place?”

There’s a restaurant in the square where we go and get our taste of Belgian waffles. Victor orders for us because the waiter only speaks French. Stuffed dolls made to look like jesters, princesses, and the lower class are hung by their necks from the ceiling, their heads lopsided for added effect. What a way to own the past: take the bad with the good and run with it. I’m sure there’s some important historical context to these dolls and what they symbolize, but it goes right over my head.

The waffles come, lathered in warm cream and coffee-flavored ice cream. I won’t go into great detail about the experience of eating them, but they’re something you need to savor and let melt in your mouth. They’re so good that my mouth is ahead of myself by the time I’m done with it, and a minute and a half later, I’m craving more. The sugar content could probably kill bats, and even though another one of those meals could destroy my kidneys, I develop this longing feeling, almost like nostalgia, for another one. But I don’t go for it. More waffles will come later, I’m sure, and too much goodness all at once can be a disastrous thing.

1:00 pm – The Laughing

After walking through the Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert, a shopping arcade with a cast-iron roof and a place where I’d imagine spice sellers and plague doctors used to linger, we come upon the Comic Strip Center. Inside,  three floors detail not just a history of Belgian comics but the creative process in general, from doodles to script to first draft to publication.

The displays light a fire inside me and shoot inspiration straight to the veins. I’ve been slacking a bit as a writer, but seeing how these comics were created and what it takes to be a successful artist gets my blood pumping quickly and my mind thinking persistently: “Saddle up, boy. You have to put in the hours to become a writer, and you’ll do it, too, dammit!”

One display that still hangs with me is a room with all four walls fully lined with Dickie panels. Each arc seems to be nine panels long, with Dickie, a balding everyman, doing some sort of inane task and screwing up everything by blowing his own head off, stepping on a landmine, or nuking the entire planet by the final panel. Nude bodies of prostitutes and bloodied intestines hanging out of corpses are on full display, and yet, little four and five-year-olds gaze up at these panels, calm faced.

Is this a children’s comic? I guess things are generally more socially liberal here.

We finish off the museum by eyeing the comic store on the ground floor. The obvious ones are there, the Tintins and the Smurfs, but there are hundreds upon hundreds of other comics for sale. Oddly, so many of them are Westerns, the covers of which suggest Belgium’s perception of the Wild West hasn’t progressed passed the era of John Wayne. Everything’s overpriced, of course, but we hang around, taking mental notes of comics we might want to check out back in America, where the prices are probably reduced.

My eyes catch the cover of a Tintin comic that stops me cold. A grimace develops as I pick up the comic and flip through the pages. I can’t believe what I’m seeing. A children’s comic on special display! In the comic, Tintin goes to Africa to meet the “natives,” who are all anatomically incorrect, big lipped, bug-eyed, savage-looking things, the archetype you can only find in The Jazz Singer. I flip back to the front cover, and yep, those drawings are right there under the title.

I call Victor and Yaro over to show them, and. we’re all silent for a second as we look at the drawings. Then, we exchange looks and start dying of laughter. We can’t help ourselves. The ridiculousness, the total lack of self-awareness, overcomes us completely. What a thing to exist. What a thing to be doing, laughing our asses off in some comic book store. I don’t know if I should feel dirty or not, but I don’t. It’s just too absurd. But we calm ourselves down, look at each other one more time, and then head out, now with this shared inside moment of disbelief between us.

6:00 pm – The Leaking

We’re lost. Google Maps is not in the mood to cooperate. Our satellite position keeps jumping around several blocks, turning us around and upside down. We’re not getting anywhere with it. We’ve been wandering around for several hours, trying to find more things to do, and now we’re sitting in a park in the purple hue of twilight, with the air cool and crisp and the city drying out. The park is open and vast with barely anyone in it when Yaro suggests we find a place to eat and maybe find another landmark or two before we hit the sack.

We get up and start walking through the park, looking up at the open sky and feeling the freshness of the air. We don’t know where we’re going in a city we’ve never been to, but that’s okay. We’re feeling good, like nothing bad can happen to us. I come to an elevated gazebo and take a peek inside, only to see about a hundred homeless people in a collective slumber in the darkness. I back away, trying not to wake any of them. Then we leave the park.

There isn’t much detail to the blocks we wander past; that is, until we reach a train station nearly an hour after wandering aimlessly. The entrance to the station is arched in graffitied threats, and I get a vague feeling of imminent doom as we approach it. A neon sign that reads “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE” hung above the entrance would be the icing on the cake. We walk inside the station, hoping to find a map.

There are couples making out in the corner, people drinking out in the open, and a thick scent of pot lingering in the air. Loose scraps of newspaper seem to twirl atop the ground from a nonexistent breeze, and, of course, there are the obligatory penis drawings all over the walls. All the details come together to create the perfect venue for debauchery.

A woman about my age walks by and looks at me, biting her lower lip, and when we pass, I wonder if that means anything.

No map. Shucks. We cut through the train station to a lower street corner where a street musician in a trench coat and wide-brimmed hat plays a melancholic tune, staccato style on a guitar. What else can be added to our situation? The parts are all appropriate to the sum. We’re lost as all hell, as Google Maps appears to work, and then it doesn’t. We keep wandering, coming across another musician on another block, this one playing Despacito on the sax.

On this block, we head into a French/Belgian restaurant where we don’t exactly play with fire in ordering our food, simply opting to get some pizza. Nothing too risqué tonight. I’m pretty thirsty, but tap water ends up being more expensive than beer itself, so I don’t get anything to drink. European restaurant music never fits the setting, as I’ve come to realize sitting here, listening to Simple Minds provide the soundtrack to such a high-brow, authentic looking place. We don’t stay here long.

Google Maps keeps failing as we keep wandering, but I don’t mind. Getting lost allows us to experience the city in a more organic sense because we walk down streets we wouldn’t normally pass through and see things that would have gone unseen. Yaro has it in his head to see the Manneken Pis before the night is up, but all his wrangling with Google Maps won’t help us find the way to the landmark statue. Nonetheless, I’m more or less in my own zone, taking in the streets as lights calmly emit from the Brabantine buildings.

After about an hour more of aimless moseying, we find ourselves back under the glazed roof of the Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert. That means we’re getting close to the statue of that uncircumcised baby, perpetually pissing away with hips thrust forward in a look-at-that! pose. It’s Brussel’s crowning jewel, apparently. We sort of know where we are, so we keep walking. The buildings subtly become increasingly Gothic as we putter along, which starts putting Yaro at ease. We’re getting close to the Manneken Pis.

Now we’re back in the tourist district, close to the Grand Place. Niche shops illuminate the night, and Tintin and Haddoch are plastered all over building facades, forever enshrined in the Belgian psyche. Closer and closer. Ah yes, we can feel it. That naked boy is upon us.

Our excitement deflates when we finally see it. Such a little thing! What’s the big deal? Even at this time of night, there is a bounty of tourists flashing their cameras at the little boy’s noodle. So what? I suppose I need an understanding of the historical context to get the hype, but it’s not grabbing me. It’s sort of reminds me of that Calvin decal that portrays him urinating with that smug look turned astray; that image I see on the back of so many pickup trucks.

“I guess,” Yaro says, “we should look for the girl one.” This comes off full of resentment, the throaty exhale when one has to do something they don’t want to do but are obliged to. Victor and I agree with a lame level of enthusiasm, and we head off with a malfunctioning Google Maps as our guide.

The next hour constitutes walking the same blocks five or six times over, getting turned every which way, trying to find this statue. We pass men singing to the sky, women flirting with other women, and a waiter with an apron wrapped around his mouth, belching out fake Arabic with his legs spread wide. Our position recalibrates, allowing us to check off blocks one at a time as we hone in on the statue’s location.

We somehow get to the corner where the statue should be, but it’s nowhere to be found. We look toward the roofs, thinking maybe it’s a statue that pisses from above. At one point, I’m tempted to cry out, “WHERE IS THIS GOD DAMN PISSING BABY?” but for obvious reasons, I don’t. Still, Google Maps has taken us outside a bar called the Delirium Café, located at the very end of an alleyway. This is a relief; I’m pining for a drink right about now.

We go in, only to see the place is packed. There’s a rhythmic sort of operation going on behind the bar, as three tenders flip glasses, wash them, and fill them with an OCD level of repetition, sliding past each other and repeating each other’s processes. There is no wasted movement. Their work is broken up only by their occasional shots—a group bonding thing.

There are over a hundred flavors listed in chalk above the counter, and I go with a wheat/grapefruit concoction that ends up having a sandy aftertaste. I can check that one off my list; I only have approximately a hundred fifty other flavors to choose from. Yaro’s in agreement about the aftertaste, having gotten the same drink himself. Victor’s the only one who finishes his drink. We don’t stay too long before we head out again.

Once outside, I only take two steps before Yaro’s voice flairs up behind me, saying, “Hey, there it is.”

I turn around, spot where Yaro’s pointing and see the almighty pissing girl, naked, in full squatting position behind metal bars. Only one other guy hangs around, looking at it. What an oddity that someone would carve this out of limestone. I’m sure there’s history here—there’s gotta be—but I just don’t know what. Still, there’s something endearing about its presence, the fact that this one and the male version are so adored. If anything, it just proves that the people here in Brussels have a sense of humor.

So I chuckle, not that it’s funny, but at the goodness of it all…