“Ahoj,” the boy who leans into the room seems pleasant enough but is wearing a smile which reads: I need something from you. “Can he come in?” the boy asks.

I look around and see no other person. I guess that the boy is an assistant to one of the many special-needs students at the university, who is probably in the hallway. I say, “Of course, he is more than welcome.” I sit down.

The boy walks in the room and takes out his index. “He needs you to sign this,” the boy smiles, “if you have time.”

“I have time.” I am now searching the room for another sign of life. Nobody. Nothing.

The boy holds out his index, which is a booklet every student must get signed by every teacher they have had in any given semester, thus proving a satisfactory mark in that class. Sometimes a student brings a friend’s index; I figure this must be the case.

“Oh, OK, let me have his index.” I almost wink, take it and flip to the picture on the inside cover. It’s our boy, whose name is Honza, smiling the very same “I need something from you” smile. “Who was your teacher?” I ask.

“His teacher was Mrs…” Honza trails off as if he wants me to finish his thought. “He can’t remember her name.” Honza frowns, “Is that a problem for him?”

“OK, Honza, I have to ask you a question, alright?”

“Sure,” Honza smiles at me.

“Who is ‘he’?”

“He who?”

I foresee the Abbott and Costello skit from hell and decide to take a different approach. “What is your name?”

“Honza,” he says this as if speaking to a child who can’t remember the word for Squirrel.

“Say that in a full sentence,” I command. A thin dew of sweat makes its appearance on my forehead.

He taps his forefinger against his chest and gives me a condescending smile. “His name is Honza.”

“Well if he speaks to me like that again, he is going to get an index shoved into his ass. Does he understand?”

Honza pulls his hands in the air and apologizes with body language. “He understands.”

I press my fingers into my temples. “Holy shit, Honza, he is driving me out of my mind.”

“He apologizes.”

“Fuck.”

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I am supposed to be writing a tweet but instead I brew a kettle of coffee and pace around the flat. My pacing causes Běla to retreat under the couch to her happy place. I pour the coffee and head back to the computer.

I sit at my desk and dream up a deranged fantasy.

This fantasy reminds me of the films I’ve seen of the Nuremberg War Crime Trials. My students accuse me of using text-speak on Twitter, and they produce a great deal of evidence which is displayed on charts and backed up by traumatized witnesses. People are smoking cigarettes and murmurs run through the crowd. All the while I sit in a bulletproof cube and look humble.

I am found guilty and accept my sentence: Twenty-five years of rewriting all of Shakespeare’s plays in text speak on a black board. In Florida. In August.

2BRo2B, dat is da ?

This fantasy is like the ones I used to have in elementary school. In my elementary school day dreams I was often nude and forced to sing the “Perfect Strangers” theme on a table in our school cafeteria. Plus I always had the head of a monkey and it was usually tater tot day.

I spend fifteen minutes trying to make the post as witty as possible. I am seventeen characters over the limit and my frustration level reaches that of Gargamel’s at the end of every Smurf episode.

I give up on any semblance of humor, post the tweet and go for a walk. Walks are great for rationalistic epiphanies.

On my walk I realize that Twitter is the elementary school of online social networking. And by that logic I am surely the tuba-playing kid with a glandular weight problem, a hairy mole on his chin, bad dandruff and a forehead birthmark shaped like male genitalia. My name, in this epiphanous fantasy, is Dorkus Wenisface.

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I am walking down the corridor to my office and practicing my smile. It’s the teachers’ first day back after summer holidays and I am determined to go into it with an optimism reserved for sitcoms from the 1950s. I turn the corner.

“Hello!” I say to my colleague. But there is something afoot. She is surrounded by three other women and when she stands to greet me they demur like tanned-bosomed handmaidens to Colonel Kurtz. Her belly hangs low, like a Galeone man stepping away from a buffet of salty carbohydrates and deep-fried poultry.

“Hi,” she says. She caresses the dipping arc of her belly, and I mimic the action with mine. She seems a bit jealous that I appear to be in a further stage of fetal development and we square shoulders. I feel certain that her handmaidens are going to purify the floor with salt so that we can slam bellies against one another until one of us falls into a sushi-eating crowd.

No Sumo battle occurs, so instead I shout, “Congratulations!” (With 1950s sitcom optimism)

Pause

And then, “Oh my God, you’re pregnant, right?”

In response, she begins emitting a glow that paralyzes me into a semiconscious state. Her handmaidens send forth a series of coos meant to hypnotize me while they scan my finger for a wedding band and telepathically audit my family background and medical history.

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Somewhere in the middle of my dream there’s the click of my bedroom door opening.   I wake with a start.

She’s in. Again.

I was having an Alyssa Milano dream and it’s not what you think. Whenever this gorgeous woman appears in my dreams we engage in activities that would bore Al Gore. We have painted my bedroom and eaten ham sandwiches by the Vltava. In this dream, she has rented Rise of the Planet of the Apes and we drink prune juice. I am, apparently, a geriatric dreamer.

I peer over my covers and see the tip of her gray-striped tail and hear the light clicking of her nails on the floor. I remain frozen like a boat wreck survivor watching a shark fin slip about and feeling it nudge against the rubber of my floating device.

She leaps onto one of my bureaus and drops something that lands with a clunk and then she’s gone.

At least it’s a drop off and not a pick up, I think, and then I go back to Alyssa and our movie.

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The waitress asks again, “Bez co?” Without what?

I repeat, “Bez kohouty.” Without pants.

“Um, OK,” she takes the camera and my brother and I start up the spiral staircase that lead to the second floor of The Horror Bar. We reach the mid-point, push the noose out of the way and make sure that the skeleton hanging from the ceiling isn’t blocking our faces. The waitress readies the camera and Chris gives her rudimentary instruction in the international language of mime.

Then we drop our pants.

She laughs at us, gives us a ‘your mother must be so proud’ look and snaps a shot. From the corner, a man chirps away in a language that we easily ignore.

She hands Chris the camera and says, “You said bez kohouty.”

I reply, “Ano?”

She says, “Kohouty means roosters, kalhoty means pants.” She walks away and picks up her beer.

“Ah,” I say to Chris, “I told her we wanted a picture without roosters.”

“That’s probably why she had no problem with it.”

And so begins the Pantless Tour of Český Krumlov.

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The train has the consistency of a Malaysian sweat shop as it chugs through the Czech countryside. Sweat is dripping off of our foreheads and chins. My brother is praying to the gods of train disasters to create a collision in the hopes of causing a breeze. He nods, telling me that he now understands why we all erupted into laughter when he asked if the windows would be open on the train.

Nobody else on the train seems in the slightest bit uncomfortable. We four Americans feel hot and stuffy, the Czechs feel comfortable. In the U.S. we are obsessed with our cool air, whether it’s coming from a window or a glorious box that fills the room with freezing arctic love.

The discomfort level multiplies when an old Czech man picks up his guitar and plays for the train. Again, we Americans are the only people stressed by this, me more than anyone. I hate public guitar people, no matter what their country of origin. This combined with the stuffy air helps the U.S. to a quick lead.

Advantage: U.S.A

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“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” the pilot says.

This is bad for two reasons. In the first place, we are being addressed by the pilot in the departure lounge before boarding the plane. Pilots don’t just drop out to chit chat with the masses before a flight.

This means trouble.

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As we walk into my uncle’s house, we are greeted with instructions according to appetite. “Ham and roast beef in that corner, potato salad, stuffed peppers and dips on that table over there.” My aunt works like a traffic cop, sending people to the delicacy of their fancy. “Beer and wine are in the fridge and there is more in a cooler in the garage.”

I say a quick prayer for my rising LDL cholesterol and load up a plate. I am not the only one who sheds a tear of joy.

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“I’ve got a funny story,” my mom says. It’s my brother’s birthday and we are celebrating with carrot cake. It’s my two sisters, my brother and Mom and Dad. With my mom’s promise of a humorous anecdote, we cast glances around the table at one another.

There is cake in front of my dad, so he is essentially furniture. My brother decides to do it.

He lays down his fork. “OK, Mom, go ahead.” My sisters and I brace ourselves.

This time she tells a tale about some kids who got killed and dismembered in front of their parents on Christmas Eve. I think the murderer was Santa Claus. Not a mall Santa, but the actual Santa Claus.

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“Hey, you, what you writing?” The man is Wall-eyed, so though he is facing me it appears that he is staring at my right ear and the bartender.

“Just some notes,” I say. I have found that by sitting at the bar at The Horne and writing in a notebook, I become irresistible to the other patrons. They must talk to me.

“Yeah.” When he drinks at his drink – a double Canadian Club whiskey and Coke – I notice that the ring finger on his left hand is missing from the second knuckle. “You write books or something?”

“Yeah, I got one coming out next week.” I drop this in with casual coolness. I have been test driving statements such as these recently, just to see how they feel.

“It any good?” Obviously I have failed to impress Leonard, my new comrade. He’s wearing a T-shirt that reads Piggly Wiggly Giggly and features an ecstatic cartoon pig doing a jitterbug.

“I hope so.”

“What’s it called?”

“Senseless.”

“What’s it about?”

“A guy loses all his senses.”

“Pbbbt,” he flaps his lips. “What do I get if I buy it?”

This question throws me off a bit. “Um, a book about a guy who loses all his senses.”

“Ain’t enough.”

We’re quiet for a while and Leonard buys me a shot, a gesture I am unable to interpret. I open my Moleskine and go back to jotting notes. Leonard gets on his phone and has a colorful conversation with a gentleman named Fuck-for-Brains.

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