How to Evaporate

I sat on a bench in a park somewhere near Amsterdam and inhaled my 5th cigarette of the day. I smiled as I watched the Japanese tourists giggling and covering their mouths with their clasped hands, with a gaze of envy. If only they knew how good they had it, knowing people back home are still longing for their safe return.

My name is George Jansen, one of at least 85 men in my age range with the same name in this country. A name given to me for a particular reason, to evaporate, like a sweat droplet on a sizzling pavement.

“Excuse me, mister?” I turned quickly to a tourist with a smarmy smile and dark sunglasses flashing a little red light.

It's still the unexpectedness of a conversation that makes me jump.

“Yes, son?”

“Do you know any good local breweries around here?”

“The Hopfather,” I pointed out, passed the Amstel River in the distance. “And plenty of pretty girls your age there.”

He thanked me as I lit another cigarette.

“Hey, bro. Can I snap your photo?”

“W-what?!” My eyebrows knitted together.

He smiled. “I just like to document my vacation, and you look kind of fire sitting there, smoking your cig....it's giving...mobster vibes.”

“No,” I said firmly, and I turned my face away as if he had burned me with his request.

He stood there smiling cockily, as if I had been acting coy. “C’mon. Here is my page. Look I do this for a living. I’m a professional.”

I reached down inside my boot and pulled out my switchblade before he could persist.

He stumbled so fast that he nearly dropped the phone in his hands and rushed away.

My life had been simple for a reason. I lived alone in an apartment with a few hundred tenants, kept to myself, never made enough small talk to make friends, but enough to avoid being labeled too quiet. I had enjoyed a night out in a red light district when I needed human connection, usually with the same woman, always with glasses I didn’t need, and a baseball cap for a team I didn’t recognize.

Later that night, I paid a visit to Brittany Heavenly, a 160 cm tall bundle of firecracker and serenity. She lived up to her name.

“What’s bothering you, grumpy?”

“Just a tourist, I said, lying my head on her warm lap as she caressed my earlobes.

“You’re getting into trouble again?” she joked, knowing I had always been unassuming.

“No. I just couldn’t get out of an unwanted conversation, and I resorted to my old self again.”

She began to undress as she guided me to the mattress, pungent with the odor of disinfectant wipes, a familiar scent from my previous life. After spewing my troubles, like she was some licensed therapist, I went home that night healed.

The next morning. I woke up to texts from Brittany Heavenly. It was a link to a video that had been circulating on social media. Now with 500 thousand views and rising by the second. “Angry Dutch man pulls knife on innocent American tourist gone wild.”

It was a surreptitious recording of me from his glasses.

I dropped my phone and my hands for the first time in years, rattling like an angry snake’s tail.

I run to the window to gaze out for anyone suspicious. I knew what to look for.

Out on the street, a nice luxury car drove through every small road. I know that it's looking for the bench I had sat on the day before. There are other people in the crowd, pretending to blend in with the locals, but I know an outcast when I see one. It’s the manner in which they dress, and how they walk, and linger a little too long when they stare at people. They’re here for one reason only.

I had taken the valuables I had, the fabricated documents, and had planned my escape.

There had already been calls made to find me. As I walked through the corridors of the apartment, the nosy neighbors peeked out from the curtains. I had rushed down the stairway, back towards the electrical room, before catching my breath, and then headed down an emergency exit.

“Mister Jansen, I need to speak with you!” a neighbor called out. I ignored him and continued. “Hey!” he cried out. “Stupid old man, can’t keep still,” he muttered.

There is a Chinese restaurant that I knew had been closed for the day. I stood in front of the door and could only hear my pulse as I probed it with my tool and gently pushed it open.

As I walked in, The Muscle rushed in directly behind me, pointing out the barrel of his weapon. He had caught me behind the counter.

“Never thought I’d see the day,” he said proudly. “They offered me 445 million yen, and I laughed at their faces. Just to be in your presence is enough. It is almost like finding serenity. Years of feeling cheated, and seeing you like this. Scared like a little girl and trapped in your own foreign snowglobe. It’s like I already won!” he started to laugh, a small chuckle turned into hysterical laughing.

Meanwhile, under the counter, my hands had been finicking for something sharp. I launched a piece of kitchenware at his forehead the moment he tossed his head back, and it stuck to him.

As I watched the muddy red drip down from the steak knife to his chin, I closed up shop and called a phone number I had hidden for years.

“Yes?” said a man with a thick local accent, a raspiness in his voice.

“Semper Agustus, please. Two dozen.”

“Delivery address?”

“Momo’s Asian Cuisine.”

A brightly colored pink van picks me up, and an old guy who should be retired is sitting in the front seat, with two men wearing rubber fake faces. One in the back of the van is holding a bouquet of pink roses, at least on the surface.

“Get on with it,” he grunts.

The one sitting in the front pulls out his phone and waits for me to make the wire transfer. It is a number I would feel ashamed to share.

I am quickly blindfolded after they confirm the payment, and I wait riding in the car for what feels like eternity. I fall asleep and wake up with new clothes, a new haircut, a new passport, and a ticket for a cruise to another country. I sit on a bench and am woken up by the sounds of waves crashing on shore.

All I need to do is wait again. I wait for my deus ex machina. It’s nothing new; I’ve been through this once before. I’ll need to learn a new language and accent, further away from who I am, forever longing to be me again. One of the mariners walks over to me and asks if I am Olavi Antilla because the ship is leaving in a couple of minutes. My eyes gaze down at the passport and I feel indifferent so I shake my head.

“No. My name is Hayashi, an Oyaban of the Hayashi family, husband and father of two little girls, and it's time for me to go back home.”