Passport

On a beach in Mexico, there is a man with a parrot who will make it fly for bright-eyed children. Can I trace a solicitous fingertip down a map of Clare County, Ireland, to the day when I fell apart? Can I set gentle footstep after gentle footstep down a well-beaten path to the library where I tumbled into a pit of blankets?

All I remember of my childhood are airports and telephone booths, one after another, blurring together in a muddle of daydreams and Turkish delight. I passed by duty-free shops, eagerly slipping my hands by the gate, passport stamped. Johannesberg, Paris, Melbourne. I bought a journal the day before I left for Africa; four plane trips later, it was filled with smudged puerile handwriting: song lyrics, quotes, a novel. I stayed up all night and did cartwheels down the hallways, waiting for the sun to rise. I could not leave the hotel room for fear of being mugged, raped, kidnapped. Johannesberg at night is fearful and oppressive, apartheid still lingering in the moist air. In the jungle, the 4×4 parked atop a cliff while the sun set. The adults drank champagne on the rock and I heard the whispers of the forest and sang softly to myself.

The French are a people of memories; alleyways lined with mossy stone and grapevines filled the small town on the Mediterranean I stayed in. There was a swimming pool in the backyard and I fell in. There were oppressive rocky walls seemingly suspended over the village. I climbed them and looked out over the city and felt nothing; no sweeping spectacle of grandeur, only the fear of being too high with nothing to ascend and no way to descend. I remember little from Australia and New Zealand, only the images I should feel. The kiwi, animal not fruit, pecking good-naturedly at some gravel. Perhaps I left handprints on the knoll by our villa, perhaps not, I remember a tropical rainforest enclosed in an aviary and clutching a koala in my arms, not knowing what I felt.

The phone booths in Chinatown are shaped like pagodas; they are garish red and gold. The phones are normal, however, and the outrage I felt at this as a child was understandable. If a phone booth is a pagoda, the person you call should be speaking in Chinese as well. The phone booths in Germany are the way a mime shapes them, boxy and gray, and the interior makes one feel trapped. I huddled in my denim jacket, unable to speak or hear, waiting for the rental car to take me back to America, back to a world I understood.

Traveling as a child is erratic and startling. The rules of space and time are transcended as you hurtle through the great amplitude of the globe, limitless and omnipotent; you are at once impossibly powerful and utterly alone in a world much too large to comprehend. As a very little boy, you see, I told third-person stories where the orphan always woke up and it had all been a dream. What does that say about my character?