Finders Keepers

Finders Keepers - Chapters 51-60

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Chapter 51
The Great Viking Hangovers

Budapest, Hungary - Keleti Pu Train Station
Saturday, September 10, 2005, 8:34 p.m.

Navigating the crowded Keleti Pu train station was proving difficult, as by the fifth night in Budapest, Theo was feeling rough. Unfortunately for Jason, he looked far, far worse.

            Despite their bold proclamations to the contrary, they discovered that there really was a limit to the amount of alcohol, marijuana, girls, churches, museums, shops, bridges, monuments, hills, bath houses and cheap food they could handle.

            That first night at the Your Best Days bar, as they spilled beers down their shirts, laughing like crazed Vikings on the warpath, nothing was beyond them. More chicken! More wine!

            Jason in particular had an especially good week. His realization about Lilly-that she had actually been in his dreams years before ever having met her-opened his mind to the possibility of fate, and that maybe Hank's advice had been right on the money. Uli smothering him in some serious bowm chicka wow wow only cemented those ideas. But that was then.

            For young men, Theo and Jason were feeling an oldness beyond their years-their backs and shoulders ached, their knees throbbed, their heads were heavy like sacks of potatoes-confessing that perhaps ... possibly ... their fathers weren't as totally lame as they wanted to believe. That they just might have exaggerated-although only by an itsy-bitsy, teensy-weensy smidge-the mythic tales regarding their own invincibility. Anybody, they reasoned, can be off by a teensy-weensy smidge.

            Not only were Theo and Jason crumbling like sandcastles beneath the waves of high tide, but Sven had moved on to the Swiss Alps, while Uli was on her way back to Hamburg, to begin rehearsals for Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, an opera about three ancient Egyptian women and a giant snake. Constant drizzle had rolled into Budapest.

            The cab ride to the Keleti Pu station had been no plate of fish sticks either. Theo was still hung over despite twenty hours of sleep. Jason, meanwhile, had already puked twice. At least the driver pulled over to let him spew out the door. He mostly hit the street.

            Their plan was to catch the 21:20 train northwest through Hungary, cross the Slovak Republic, and then make it to the Czech Republic, finally arriving 6:29 the next morning at the Praha Holesovice station in Prague. They would spend a few days there, and then leave their fates up to the gods. As if they had a choice.

            Inside the station, Theo stopped along the busy corridor, stuck behind an old Hungarian man with short, spotty whiskers and a black eye.

            Scanning for their train-Theo could see nine in all beneath the dim, overhead lighting-he wondered just how many stations he'd passed through since leaving New Zealand. There was a constant, familiar murmur that resonated throughout the railways. Nameless faces. Strangers. The motion of people, the buzzing of time. Theo knew this sensation as the marker of transition. The end of one experience, the beginning of another. Departures and arrivals. Change.

            Jason bent down on one knee. He took a deep breath. One train pulled in along the track behind them. Another hissed and then rolled away, expelling a trail of steam.