The Little Black Book

In Rijeka, it had taken Lewis two days to find a licensed Harley dealership. His needed a change of tires, which he wanted to get done before he went any further south along the Adriatic and, he hoped, eventually into Greece, Turkey, and from there into the deserts of the Middle East.

“Tree days,” the proprietor had told him in broken English. “For two tau-send.”

Kuna?, he had briefly thought to ask. Outside of the Eurozone, Lewis hadn’t had much luck with the random red-headed stepchildren of European currencies, so he had no real concept of how much he was looking at in USD. His money situation, regardless, wasn’t looking great, and after leaving his trusty metal steed behind to venture into a strange foreign city, he was once again left waiting for a faint smile of fate to let him luck his way into the next leg of his trip.

His small Airbnb room was little more than a fold out couch, toilet, and dirty kitchenette, but for its price it did boast an arresting westward view of Kvarner Bay and the shimmering Adriatic Sea rolling out past the islands. As luck would have it, the nearly hour and a half-long walk from the dealership to his building took him there just as the sun was setting, and looking out from his single window the horizon of the cloudless sky was drenched in deepening reds and dark oranges, while farther above a deep, marine blue was settling in, dotted by the earliest and boldest of the stars that would be visible against the modest city lights.

He opened his minifridge. By that point, not much was left in his food supply other than a few cans of soup and vegetables, a half-eaten kabob, leftover döner, and a few cans of a strange, Eastern European lager with a label in a language he didn’t recognize. He grabbed one of the few remaining bottles, cracking the top off with his ring, and stepped out onto the tiny balcony overlooking the alley. Taking a sip and ignoring the muted bitterness, he took a moment to watch the subtle vibrations of the setting sunlight reflected on the water, even then visible over the top of the few buildings that lay between him and the sea.

Still four days till the Aquariids, he thought.

Or, was it five? He had, in truth, lost track of the exact date somewhere near the Alps, the time slipping away among the labyrinths of the mountain roads he travelled.

But it had been 28 days since he lost the notebook. That was the only measure of time he was still certain of.

The first time I had seen the water in weeks, he thought to himself. The Mediterranean? The Tyrrhenian? They all really just blend together.

He took a sip of beer. He had first landed in Portugal back in late February, taking a ferry from the U.K. He bought a cheap, used Harley off of Portuguese Craigslist, placing all his trust in the seller’s word as to its actual mileage and level of maintenance. He spent a week or so driving around the Iberian Peninsula, which was, for the season, still pleasant enough in the late-winter of the Western Mediterranean. His goal, though, was to make his way to Scandinavia at some point before the Summer Solstice, getting there just in time to see the Lyrids in one of the few dark sky locations left in Europe. Starting out, he had little on his person save a worn sleeping bag, his battered American passport, and a few hundred dollars.

And, of course, the black notebook.

Behind him his phone rang. It was set to vibrate, but the cheap coffee table he had set it down own shook enough under the vibrations to be audible all the way out on the balcony. He turned around. It was a surprise—both his phone and his charger were somewhat old, and half the time at least one couldn’t be bothered to work whenever he managed to find an outlet. He took another sip and made his way to the table. The screen on his phone simply displayed Unknown Number.

Debt collector? he thought. He had changed the number a while back, but there were, he assumed, always ways for them to find you.

The phone vibrated again, for however long it had already been going. He took another sip of beer. Here, he would, in most cases, let it go to a voicemail he would almost certainly delete immediately. From behind him, a cool, oceanic breeze blew off of the nearby water and into the dank enclosure of his small room.

Harbinger of the meteors, he thought to no one, not even himself.

The phone vibrated once more.

He picked it up without any further thought, so abruptly he was somewhat surprised when he found himself holding it against his face.

“Hello?” he said. After however many days it had been since he had spoken any pleasantries, he was struck by the raspy monotone of his voice.

“Hello?” a female voice on the other end said in English. From that one word, she sounded fluent, though in possession of an accent he couldn’t place.

“Who is this?” he said.

“This is Lewis Heller?”

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

The conversation, he thought, was out of order, though for all of his social graces it could very well make perfect sense to most normal people.

“Who…who is this?”

“Good evening,” she said. “It is evening where you are, yes?”

If this were a spy thriller, he thought, this is where a sniper would take me out. He downed another sip of beer before replying. Fortunately I’m not that interesting.

“Yes,” he said. “Can I…uh…ask who this is?”

“I found your notebook,” she said. The beer sank to his stomach as the breeze brushed against him again. In her accent he couldn’t assure himself if any of this made sense.

“Your name and number were written on this inside,” she continued, answering a question he hadn’t even formulated. “I could read it, despite the water damage.”

By that point, the breeze had secretly made its home inside his room, as if the oncoming meteors knew, by heart, the space he had forged for them.

•

Four days later he stood at the old barn in a field in the South of France. His view was eastward, though, and he was treated to a dark expanse that only hinted at the colors blazing into the low horizon behind him. It was chilly, despite the Spring air, and his jacket had already accumulated more holes in the trip over there. Veronica, the mystery woman on the phone, had managed to get his Harley ready and done the day after their brief talk, and the road trip from Croatia to Southern France had been less hazardous than the first leg of his journey.

“Lewis?” a voice said behind him. Though they had only spoken once several days ago, he immediately recognized her. Turning around, the first thing he noticed was her hair, a shimmering gold that bordered on white were it not framing a thin, youthful glow in her face. She was dressed in a casual business suit, though what he noticed, before anything else, was what she held in her hand.

“Should I bother asking how you know who I am?” he said.

“You are the only one standing at this exact spot near a motorcycle,” she said.

He nodded. She extended the notebook cradled in her hand.

“This, as you may remember me telling you, came to me by happenstance,” she said. “I saw it floating in the Mediterranean while I was only my yacht. It’s amazing that I even saw it there, given how much this binding blends in with the waters around this time of day. But the moon was full, and this emblazoned imitation gold, I think, caught just enough moonlight to catch my eyes.” She smiled. “Providence does play games with us.”

Lewis didn’t think his expression revealed anything, but he kept a close watch on hers to see if she picked up on something he was missing. “That was mine, yes,” he said. “But I, uh, don’t have any reward money, unfortunately.”

“You threw it in the sea,” she said. This wasn’t a question. At the angle she was standing the sun cast her in a vague silhouette.

“Can I ask why this couldn’t be discussed over the phone?” he asked. “Why I needed to drive through multiple countries to see you in person?”

In the fading light he caught a faint, sad mask blow across her face.

“Where else did you have to go?”

He didn’t respond.

She opened the notebook. The pages were bend and water-damaged, but he could tell that his ink and charcoal etchings were still clear in many of the center-most pages. He could see the complex, intricate lines and patterns, meandering and weaving across the pages.

“These are the meteors, yes?”

His mouth went dry.

“You were following them.”

The wind picked up again, as if to prompt him to respond.

“…a…a year ago,” he began. “I was in a motel room, somewhere in Illinois, or Indiana, I can’t remember, off some interstate. I had a gun, there in the bathroom. I had been drinking all day, trying to get enough courage, or numbness. It was around one AM, and I decided, I might as well see the stars one last time before…before…well.”

“It was the Geminids, that night.”

By that point he was only half surprised.

“The first illustration,” she said, opening an early page. “I recognized the pattern.”

“I saw them, there outside, they were everywhere in the sky, igniting and burning out, in seconds, but also, so slowly. And I wanted to sketch them, trying to capture them, on the paper. But, it was just…”

“..incomplete?”

“…and I couldn’t, even then, go through with it, until I had them all cataloged, whatever maps or contours they were tracing in the sky. I couldn’t…end it, then….until I had gotten that down, on paper. Something to leave on the earth, that would last longer than they would burn out.”

“And when you had them down?”

“It, wasn’t enough. I wanted to keep chasing the meteor showers, following them to Europe, to Asia, into the Southern Hemisphere, wherever they took me. I emptied my bank account, flew out here, followed them around. I guess I was hoping that, if I got enough down, something would be clear…but…”

Veronica opened another page, one marked with crude scribbles and angry, cacophonous tears.

“That night I was drunk, lost, angry. I was near the sea for the first time since coming out of the Alps…I guess I was a bit impulsive.”

“And your plan after that?”

He dropped his head. “I don’t know, just trying to survive, go eastward, get to the desert and may the Earth would just shake me off at some point.”

She handed him the notebook. “The Earth, I think, has different plans for you.” He noticed then that a thin slip of paper had been placed between the pages. Pulling it out, he saw it was a check.

“It’s for 20,000, American,” she said. “That’s it for now, but there will probably be more in the future. My friends in the art world were quite smitten, as I believe you Americans say.”

The wind was light but constant, a gentle touch of intimacy in the coming night.

“You might want to, eventually, consider something larger than a notebook,” she said. “But for now that should do just fine, water damage and all.”

He closed his fingers around the notebook, blanking on anything to say.

“You may want to get started soon,” she said. “The Aquariids are tonight.”

He looked up. As if summoned, the first meteor erupted and burned out between the night’s first stars.