Chapter One

It was a very special day but John didn’t know it yet; he was still asleep. His room smelled like morning breath as his nose was stopped up and he was breathing through his mouth. It was pitch-black.

He overslept due to the blackout curtains. Usually an early riser, sleeping in a foreign place combined with unnatural darkness rendered the usual impossible for John. Subsequently, he missed the entire first half of the day.

He awoke with a start but had no reason to since all was quiet. The bed was too soft and the pillow too hard; John lay there a minute trying in vain to gather his bearings but he couldn’t remember where he was. He played back the last things he could remember.

He took a sleeping pill before he got on the plane but he only slept in spurts as it was bumpy ride. Customs was vague but he did remember standing in line. Then there was a taxi and streetlights and there he was.

Buenos Aires, he was in Buenos Aires. He didn’t want to go but Megan did. She was dying to backpack through South America and he got her the tickets as an early birthday present but she broke up with him before he had a chance to tell her. Of course he got the non-refundable ones so there he was. In Buenos fucking Aires.

He got up, went to the bathroom, turned on the light and was instantly confused. There seemed to be two toilets, one with a very shallow bowl and another more normal-looking. John stood there, blinking the sleep from his eyes, trying to figure out what to do. The first thing that came to mind was to flush the regular toilet and see which way the water spun. He tried it but realized that he didn’t remember which way it turned in the States so it didn’t matter.

He looked at his face in the mirror. He had slept for a significant amount of time but there were still some heavy bags under his hazel-colored eyes. His widow’s peaks seemed to have grown since the last time he looked; there was pale scalp where there should’ve been light brown hair. He leaned closer to the mirror and pushed back his hair as if that helped him look at his hairline better. There was a bulging pimple, swollen and red with a pinprick of pus resting atop. He tore a sheet of toilet paper off the roll as he had seen his kid sister do, and used it to break the skin. He looked at his handiwork, realizing he had made it worse and his thinning hair wasn’t long enough to cover up the swelling. He took a step back before he could find any more.

John was no longer as muscular as he had been in college. Getting a desk job and being too tired to work-out after work took its toll. But he didn’t have that job any more and somehow that thought alone encouraged him to do a set of push-ups. He went back into his room and did fifteen of them, his arms shaking at the eleventh. He thought about taking a shower but hell, he told himself, he was in South America–he was supposed to be dirty. He got dressed. It was supposed to be fall in the Southern Hemisphere, so he put on a long-sleeve shirt and jeans.

He double checked his bags, locking away the iPhone and mini computer with a TSA lock that could have been broken by a toddler before leaving the room. The steps creaked as he descended down the narrow staircase and the same guy that checked him in was still on duty. The guy gave him a rude smile as John left the key with him. As he stepped outside the blaring sun whitened out his vision. Heat was already steaming off the black sidewalk and threatening to do so with his matching shirt. He swore at the writers of the guidebook that assured him it was autumn in Argentina in April and vowed he wouldn’t be led around by the nose anymore.