Home. Orange lamplight smeared like oil on canvas. Lying in my own vomit I try to remember. When was that? Where did it happen?
What do you call this city.
All the arcades a blur. Strolling the streets at night: Haze of place-names and out-of-joint watering holes.
I remember the bar on the balcony, the indoor balcony of the arcade. Stairs leading up into the glass and steel frame. Columnar windows beneath the pediment.
And below–rows of shuttered storefronts. Was it like that in Paris?
I remember the bar. Elevated, view of the arcades. Indoor and outdoor at once. In the dark.
Where was it? Where was anything?
Nobody loved a city so much while knowing it so little. Enough to follow her, watch her. Let be led on. See her go.
Absinthe and dubbel and pomace and Scotch.
Last year the Modiano market hall, worn and decayed from nigh a century of use and disuse, was shuttered up and offered to Mall-building conglomerate of partly Gulf-based interests with a prayer for restoration. In keeping with the Aragon style and the national character, shopkeepers responded with a fusillade of complaints, juridical threats, and insubordination.
Never found that bar again. Maybe it didn’t survive. Maybe it never existed. Maybe it wasn’t half as cool. The thing about memory, foreclosed or not.
the Budafoki amended 