[FMAL - 02] Well, we're here
There is a window overlooking the rain and the street. There is a pile of antigen tests on the bed. There is the detritus of a long voyage, and a tired boy trying to sort through it all.
Welcome to Fondue, and Maybe a Lake, with me, Bernard Soubry! This is your second email.
How to get here: Check your bags one last time. Wonder about the wisdom of bringing a folding bike and a whistle to a UN negotiation. Clean your counter for the fifteenth time while waiting for the taxi. Rehearse a panic attack that's half about air travel and half about not having done this in two years. At the last minute, swap out some shirts and underwear in your bags, and marvel that you haven't learned how to do this better in the four years you've been doing this job.
Survive the airport, its bright lights, its too-full security line, its terrible food selection, by showing up four hours early. Get a text saying your plane has been delayed another two hours; incredibly, accept this. For that night, be the Dalai Lama of getting on planes. Spend the extra time reading about the last meetings of the Convention on Biological Diversity and impressing air stewards with your gateside handstands. Get the blood flowing however you can.
Recall, for the first time in two and a half years, that--for all its miracle and wonder--air travel is a unique and terrible way to feel alive. Every detail washes over you; with it, the impossibility of getting away from the experience. A meditation through small discomforts: the rattle of turbulence that flips your stomach like a half-done pancake. Your lower back, pinched into submission by a too-straight seat. A middle-aged woman whose velvet track pants say CHOOSE JUICY on the butt.
In a line on the way to customs, realize: no one here is wearing masks--or, no, that's not right; no one here is properly wearing masks. Switzerland removed its mask mandates a little bit ago, so these passengers who were required to nostril-cover for their respective flights are now in this weird limbo. What used to be a rule is no longer. There's a lot of the right-under-the-chin, quite a few noses-flopping out. Feel inordinately prudish about your KN95 strapped on like a second skin, even though everyone is--you try truly to believe this--doing their best.
Get luggage. Take train downtown. Unpack bike. Have a couple of blessed moments of pedalling to your hotel, wind washing all the tiredness off your face, finally noticing a hint of mountains on the horizon. Check in as a wave of tiredness/leftover nausea/confusion washes upon you. Desperately try to keep awake by checking email, realize it doesn't work, and make your way to the conference venue to register.
Later on that night, remember nothing about the venue save for a single school of medusa hanging from the ceiling as you enter, little white and blue ghosts floating through the cement/carpet/oak landscape. Brain like medusa, you think. Still there, not quite sharp, just floating.
One last memory: after registering and caffeinating and conniving with Secretariat members, get out of dodge and pedal down the hill and see it: the lake. A lake! Yes, there are mountains and crowds, an enormous fountain, copper statues of an absurdist cat along the shore, but there is also the shore, and the water, which is deliciously and life-givingly cold when you finally step in and breathe and go, whew, I'm here.
Tomorrow, it all starts. Tomorrow, we get our shit together, line up the ducks, get ready to write. Today, though, we just got here, and that feels like more than enough.
First Real Email. Wheph. I'm cooked, but just wanted to say--I recommend not trying to keep up with each of these. Just make a little folder in your email called "Fondue" or something, and put each email in there as you get it. Then you get a little novella at the end of the month.
Remember, you can send me an email by replying. And you can unsubscribe anytime with the link below.
Yrs in zonkedness,
B