Here’s an excerpt from my new book, Your Friends Will Carry You Home. It’s set almost entirely in England, which is where this section begins. Get a copy of the book here.
I didn’t hear the bone break like you do in movies, but I knew something was wrong. (No, it’s fine, I thought, worry about that later.) God I was happy lying on my back, arms and legs spread like an X, the floor a sea of crushed flowers, soft as deep carpet beneath me while my friends danced to the music of the band on stage in front of the wall of stained-glass windows—the ancient shapes of stake-burnt clergymen flat in the planes of glass, dark with evening.
Breathing in the smell of red wine soaking my shirtfront and the flower shop scent of a thousand trampled roses and orchids, I shut my eyes and felt the bass humming in the medieval floorboards—a deep, low, churning vibration like the voice of some old cosmic god. I imagined the sound raising my spent body up and carrying me off like an army of ants bringing me as tribute to their queen.
Let the fucking ants take me, I thought happily, staring up at the stone ceiling, the blur of movement encircling me, my friends ankle-deep in flowers, and the lights from the stage flashing on the walls lined in mounted jousting shields.
Let the ants carry me out the door of the feast hall (leaving a trail of flower dye like a river of blood) and along the dark corridor past the glass display cases of swords and knives and into the courtyard and bring me down beneath the hot black earth to their queen.
Hello Queen of England Ant, I am James Jackson Bozic, human American, and this heatwave summer I am fighting a tragic curse. Lift my curse, bestow the title of Knight of Smashed Flowers upon me, and I hereby swear I shall become an ant too. I will carry ten thousand times my weight because work is what I do best. Your majesty, I, your servant, promise to fight in any wars you care to start, and I won’t ask why or what we’re fighting for. (In fact I will love it.) Ants forever, I will say. It shall be my war cry and those with the bad luck to hear it will drop their weapons and flee into the woods, clutching their heads in terror then fall to the ground with shame, shouting, “Why O’ why hath this dark age come?” Because fuck a broken bone, I thought. Because fuck the pain. Leave me on the carpet of flowers with my friends dancing all around and I will sink into the night and laugh forever.
_
Four days earlier, the curse not yet upon me, my red-eye flight from Kansas City International hit London Heathrow near sunrise. I unsnapped my seatbelt, pulled my shoulder bag from under the seat in front of me, then shuffled down the aisle past the smiling, nodding flight attendants, and took a series of windowed hallways and tunnels out to customs, too tired to think or care about anything but setting one foot in front of the other and getting outside.
At baggage claim, a crowded, featureless, gray room with no windows, I picked up my luggage—a small, red leather, handheld suitcase from the 1960s—and took a hallway to another hallway to another featureless room. I changed my two hundred in US dollars for British pounds at a kiosk, then caught an Express train to Heathrow Central Bus Station and asked directions for the National Express coach to Bristol.
The bus ride was warm and drowsy and quiet. Nothing like the Greyhound in the States with people smoking in the tiny restroom even though it’s illegal and shouting into their phones and arguing with each other and the driver. It was quiet enough I missed the rowdy Greyhound at first, but a few minutes into the ride I was glad for the quiet and felt lucky and settled in with a fine, sweet pleasure.
From my seat I watched green England flash by the window. “Green England,” I said under my breath. And gray England too. The gray sky like black-smudged watercolors. Low clouds to the east, dark with rain. The ash gray motorway. I’d been away five years and it was a nice thing to watch the familiar green fields and hills racing by from the comfort of a bus seat and to know my friend Andrei Merce would be waiting there in Bristol for me.
I daydreamed out the window at the small farms in the distance and the white dots of sheep clustered on the edge of the woods; the fields and hills crossed by the gray lines of stone walls; the kind you make while clearing rocks from a field to build pasture. And it should be said ages ago you made that stone wall and ages ago you cleared the field because everything in this part of England seems ages ago; except in the city when you are faced (often unexpectedly, if you’d been in the countryside long enough) with rows of drab tenement apartments and somber housing projects, severe against the sky like Soviet tower blocks. But the farms could as well be Victorian—the rough, gray stone buildings, comfortable, good-looking places with ivy massed over a front wall and smoke rising gray-blue from a chimney. Near the farmhouses stood tidy stone barns or any manner of walled-in paddock, chicken run, or hog sty. While beyond and around the gray farms stretched the lovely green fields and hills with sheep and cows in small groups; clean, well-fed animals surrounded by the broad expanse of unpopulated distance. (Never the feedlot horrors you see in Oklahoma or rural California or Texas—those vast acres of black mud and filth and animals to their knees in it, and not a blade of grass or tree in sight.) Here, you might catch the naïve, uncritical part of you thinking, “Oh how serene” or “What an idyllic place to live.” It was (or it seemed) a still, quiet world; and an unrealistic one because passing by in a bus, the picture you’re shown is nowhere near the full story. Like anything witnessed from afar or viewed across brief, scattered, transitory moments, you are given fragments, sparsely detailed vignettes at best.
“Oh, the gin,” I said aloud without meaning to then looked around to see who saw me.
No one. The seats mostly empty—an elderly couple in the front of the bus behind the driver, the woman’s snowy head higher than that of the man; a teenage boy a row ahead of me, knees to chest in an aisle seat looking at his phone, ear buds in.
I twisted the cap off the mini gin bottle from the flight, shoved it (the cap, no bigger than a cherry’s pit) into the left hip pocket of my jeans and drank half then the other.
The gin flushed my face and lifted my spirits and I caught myself sighing deeply with the warm, joyous satisfaction of finally (after too long gone) returning home. Which of course I wasn’t. (Returning home, I mean. This was something else.) I stared out the window—happy, my thoughts coming fast to me as we passed travel plazas with rows of parked cars and white delivery trucks, motorway crash barriers blocking the view of small towns, graffitied railyards in the mist. And the rain had begun. But when? I hadn’t noticed.
Get to work, I told myself, then slid my manuscript out of the shoulder bag I’d carried on the flight, took off the five or six rubber-bands that held its pages in place and began to make notes in the margins.
Now time passed without mark or impression. Inside a story you can leave the painful, frustrating real world behind while you build your own. Even if what you’re writing about is just as painful and frustrating and real, you can take a sort of escapist gratification if it’s distanced enough from the time or situation you are in. The joy in that is something I look forward to, and without fail rushed through each morning the past few years, skipping breakfast and hardly waking in a proper sense before sitting down to work, and ended the day sapped out and brainless.
Each winter since the onset of the pandemic three years prior I’d published a book and was at the time of the bus ride to Bristol wholly wrung out and emotionally spent. I’d kept up this schedule because writing and publishing serves both as a means of therapy and a way to feel like life isn’t just a fruitless march toward old age, sickness, and death. The pragmatic side is I had no other way to feed myself and keep a roof over my head, and each year both grew increasingly expensive. I saw no way free of that other than working hard enough to make the kind of money where I could slow down a while. The year before, a book of mine had gone viral and money poured in for months, and when the hype ended, and sales returned to normal, I had to readjust. I “made it work” was my positive spin on scraping by each month, but I found no way to come out on top or move forward or put money aside for an emergency. I made it work. Yes. But no matter how many books of mine sold, the amount of money I made was steadily less sufficient against the rising cost of basic human existence. So, I worked. Each day and without rest.
The rain came in earnest now, spraying in sheets and wild gusts against the windshield of the bus as the driver slowed down; the brake-lights in front of us a smear of polished red like wet paint while the wipers beat back and forth with their pleasant tock-tock sound. Stopped in traffic now on the edge of a town, with the absence of road noise and the bus engine quiet, you could hear the rain drumming against the metal rooftop—a bright, percussive sound like popcorn popping. I felt tired and content as the water ran in marbled patterns down the windows obscuring the outside world in glossy, aqueous silver.
I worked a while longer then shoved my manuscript back in the bag between my copies of The Odyssey and Lawrence Durrell’s book on Cyprus. Zipping up the pack before stuffing it under my seat next to the red suitcase, I pulled my legs up onto the bench and got sideways and tried my best to lie down. The view of the window across the bus aisle in the opposite row was of rainy glass reflecting the colors of the traffic outside and the lights of the town in warbling veins, gold then white, gory red on wet mercury. At that moment, I remembered the second travel bottle of gin and was excited for it then immediately felt silly. God how stupid to be thrilled about something as nothing as a plastic bottle of airline gin and a bus seat to myself. You sappy, romantic amateur, I thought. No. Stop. What point in questioning your happiness like it’s something you need to regulate or appraise or contextualize? You go to war with yourself over trivial things and that awful, nagging voice you know is not quite your own will win out over your true self. You will become your anxiety. You will listen to your unquiet thoughts until they are the dominant voice. Anyone knows a quick way to kill off your true, braver self is to listen too often (and with enough attention paid) to the inconsequential doubts that talk at you when you are trying to enjoy a simple thing. “Relax, you stupid piece of shit,” I said under my breath. I unscrewed the little brass-colored cap, pinched the edges of it flat like a duck’s bill for no reason other than to do it, and jammed it into the pocket of my jeans along with its twin. “Fuck it,” I said, louder now, because no one was there to hear me, then sipped the little bottle and got comfortable. Now the bus began to move, and we headed west again to Andrei and Bristol.