SLEEP DRAWING

We wore long black coats that whipped like capes in the wind, the sun behind us casting our shadows on the ground like thin, tall alien forms. Below the high crest of the hill, we were able to look out over the levels of the elderly city; marvelous in it's structure and design, it was built on a series of high slopes and looking at it from up there in the citizen square, everything seemed to spiral neatly downwards. The herculean bodies of the massive, snowcapped Alps stood looming in the distance; beyond the crystal blue water of Lake Geneva they seemed to form a natural fortress of intimidating size, repudiating the outside world.
I still had some cigarettes, and that was the most important thing to me in that moment. Everything cost so much -- even more than in England -- and cigarettes seemed to be at the apex of the list. The day before I had started smoking the remnants of the pack in sections -- a few drags and then I'd put it out, saving the rest of it for several hours later -- and now I stunk like the unemptied ashtrays that sat untouched in the downtown barbershops I used to inhabit as a child in America.
Hicks put his hands on the railing and sighed, marveling to himself at the innate beauty of this place.
"It's funny," he said to me once. "that we stumbled into Switzerland by accident."
We had been given eight days off by the Red Cross in England, where over forty five us had gathered together from all over the Earth almost three months earlier. When they announced the break, everyone scrambled to book last minute flights around Great Britain or Western Europe, and I had just managed to escape the ever-gray skies of southern England by hitching a ride with Hicks and several others on a $45 Easy Jet Flight to Geneva.
We arrived in the middle of the night, maintining our consciousness by never ending streams of coffee that they provided on the plane. The train from the Geneva airport was long and slow, and as the frozen drafts found holes in the old windows we held on desperately to keep from the sleep that craved us.
When we reached Lausanne the streets were deserted, and aside from the several lit-up windows scattered throughout the higher buildings in the city, there was no sign of any life. The four of us walked in a tired shuffle through the cold empty streets, passing parked cars and closed nighclubs. We passed shops that rented motorbikes and hosted wide, dark windows, and we braced against a chilly wind as our long walk led us to an international Hostel on one of the lower levels of the hill. Hicks had told them we were coming, and they had left us a key, finding our room after struggling with the Hostel directions that were printed everywhere in French and Italian.
Sleep came like a welcome lover, cradling us each in it's arms and whispering us into it's peaceful dreamland.
I awoke to the sound of excited shouts, and as I opened my eyes and adjusted to the light that flooded through the sliding door that led to the rooms balcony, I saw what my sort-of-friends were excited about.
The colossal bodies of the Alps were directly across from us, shadowing the outskirts of Lausanne with interesting shadows that formed strange shapes over the streets. The sky was a homemade comforter of rolling, layered clouds, all different shades of gray and black and white, a piercing dark blue sky peeking out here and there the way a young, shy child hides behind his parents.
I looked at Joel -- who had earned the nickname 'Genius Love Poet' on account of the constant creative output he documented in small moleskin journals that he kept in his back pocket -- and smiled.
"Glad you came?" he said.
"Yea," I said quietly, looking back out the window at the view which totally eclipsed any natural thing I had ever seen in my 18 year old life. Hicks cleared his throat, his thick British accent content and quiet.
"Suppose we should find some breakfast then, eh?"
We walked through the bustling streets that were crowded with the friendliest faces of children running to schools; beautiuful women wrapped up tight in coats and scarves smiled at us as if we were long lost friends; men young and old nodded and grinned and asked us how we were in French or Italian, or German. The air felt healthy and fresh, and we saw no factories pouring out thick, trickling trails of pollution.
We found a small coffee shop where we pointed at what we wanted on the menu, smiling like buffoons, slightly embarrassed. The man behind the counter laughed with a booming roar and scratched his thick black beard, winking at us while he poured us fresh coffee.
That second night I awoke to find that I had drawn a picture in my sleep; the dark black lines of mountains slanting at heavy diagnols; the sky above colored a messy blue.
In the year that followed, I travelled all over the world, living in and visiting places that in the years before I couldn't have pointed to on a map. Each place was like a new world being discovered for the first time, and whether haunting and mystical or frightening and futuristic, every place became a romantic verse carved into my heart.
How could I have ever imagined the fog covered grassy flatlands of central China; huddling with a group of farmers on the outskirts of a tiny village that barely had a name; sipping concoctions of grit-black coffee and vodka, watching the smokeclouds encompass the tiny cement huts that stood ugly and strong like old World War Two bunkers. Huge flocks of strange colored birds flew above us in the mist, their bodies like the distant silhouettes of rocket-fueled ships from another world. At night we would gather around a large bonfire and roast meat to be mixed wild hot peppers and rice; then the calming clearness of midnight would come, the sky finally visible before another day enclosed by the strange hazy curtains of clouds that floated on the fields.
Instantly I knew I would never forget the cramped little dusty neighborhoods of the Bolivian slums, and as our bus struggled forward through the streets like mudslides the way all of the locals came out to watch us approach. In the mornings Ulysses would walk with me across the Barrio to where there were Mango Trees; the morning the stranger was murdered by a man with a machete in a nearby vacant lot, he climbed up those trees like a small brown animal, spying on the situation and writing short messages with a black sharpee on the skin of the ripe mangos before dropping them down to us. The rain would come in horrible waves --as if God himself was trying to wash the Earth of it's sin -- and the smell of the slick inner city streets in the moments after was a thing of unparalleled freshness.
And it was like this everywhere. It was in the ancient and statuesque monuments that stood guard on the cobblestone streetcorners of Christiansands in Finland, as if they were soldiers of the old world frozen in time to make sure this new one was kept safe. It was in the unknown dangers laying in wait beneath the surface of a murky Panamanian river, the possability of death every time we lept hurriedly over the edge of the boat to try and push it past an unseen sandbar. It was in the chaotic, nonsensical mayhem of trying to walk down a sidestreet in Bangkok, attempting to escape the thieves and brilliant conmen who kept to the fringes of the constant rave-like party that erupted through the cities streets all day and night. It was even in the shit-stained opened sewers of a tiny town in Singapore; and in the unfriendlinest glares by groups of Arab men staring at us incredulously in a Dubai airport. I fell in love with it all; from the gangmembers who shot dice and rapped about superheroes in Norwiegan slang while they sat crowded into the back of a trolley in Oslo; the apocalyptic noise and technology of the four-story-tall television billboards that reminded me that Bruce Willis movie 'The 5th Element'; the uncomfortable emptiness that stalked about heavily as me and my friends drank ourselves stupid in a deserted Trafalger square on a lonely Thursday London evening.
I thought about it all for a very long time, and when I returned to my little corner of NorthEast America, I remembered it all with a vividness that shot through my brain as if I had injected the memories into my bloodstream.
But soon, when people started asking me about it, I noticed one question that was always the same; What place was the best?
Everytime, I answered with the same word; Switzerland.
In Switzerland we survived off of shreds of cheddar cheese that we stuffed into hard, half frozen loaves of French bread, not being able to afford any other meal. We stole cups of coffee from the cavernous lobbies of city banks, or from an array of street vendors who sold crops and food and drink in a certain section of town. In Switzerland we walked so much that my sweat-covered feet almost froze to the inside of my shoes. We were kicked off of trains for accidentally buying the wrong tickets, and we were sent off of buses by screaming drivers with bursting veins, furious that we did not speak French, and therefore could not answer his questions. Hicks and I were chased by police after we tried to get into an invitation only party that spilled out into the street one night; the security had told us to stop and answer their questions but we had not understood. The police chased us until we escaped by jumping a high rock wall that was sandwiched in between a long skinny alleyway, cutting it in half. We laughed at first, but our hungry stomachs started to twist with pain.
In Switzerland we were followed by an Homeless Italian man whose matted mess of unwashed dreadlocks made his silhouette appear to be a massive-headed monster, stumbling after us in a drunken zombie two step trance. I spent over two hours mesmerized, my eyes glued to the fingers of a busking classical guitar player who smiled every time his fingers did something he especially liked.
We saw skies that were too beautiful to put into words; evaded trouble that we always found accidentally. We laughed as we fell asleep on the floor of the deserted midnight train that took us across the French border. We missed our plane back to London and were forced to camp out in the airport for twelve hours, eating cheap bars of chocolate and re-reading the only magazine in English that we could find.
As we left, I had no idea what was in store for me. The turbulent plane ride across the channel was exciting enough. But looking back, all these years later, I know I was part of a special time, a time that will neither live on nor die, but will simply exist somewhere in my memory.
In Switzerland, I made a drawing in my sleep.