I am walking through Karlin. Karlin is a charming little corner of Prague that spent a good deal of its past underwater. When the waters went away, they decided to make it a charming little corner of Prague that is always looking over its shoulder for waves or seagulls.
Normally, I would be thoroughly enjoying my walk through Karlin. This is true for two reasons: Every other place in Karlin sells beer and the places in between those places sell pastries. But I have a destination. Also, I am carrying around a futon that looks like a coffin for a baby elephant. I gawk at the pastry shops and pubs, people gawk at me.
Christmas was the time of ordering things online. It just was. And we did. I ordered a wall desk (a desk that attaches to a wall) and a futon. We decided to stay domestic for our ordering needs, a thing which made sense in early December. ‘Let’s keep it in the country,’ we said. The logic: if we choose domestic shops, we will A. be giving our money locally and B. get our things more quickly. We were probably drinking at the time these decisions were made.
Nevertheless, I felt the pride the adoptive son feels when he can do something for the adopter he loves. That is, until it came to the actual logistics of getting our things to us.
The desk came before Christmas. But – and this is sort of key – it came with the wrong parts. You see, it’s hard to hang a piece of functional furniture on the wall when they send you the wrong hinges, parts, and screws. We went to the Obi (the Czech Home Depot if you’re American), but it was to no avail and now I own a new drill bit and a few screws and a tube of strong glue. I considered using the glue to try and hang myself by the end of the day. I didn’t. I complained and sent pictures and, I guess after realizing their mistake, they said they would send out another desk. This desk has yet to reach me; it’s existence it completely theoretical to me.
The futon was ordered to replace an old soldier, a flip-open mattress that has carried us through 900 hours of movies and television. He died sometime in the year, which was fine considering the fact that he had become too clunky to exist peacefully within our small flat. He takes up roughly 1/3 of the living room and, though he was popular with our pets, who slept on him all day, it was hard to justify a pet bed that takes up more space than your kitchen.
The futon’s lateness, evidently, was based on the fact that they needed the uber-special all-natural filling gathered from the unicorn nests in the hills of south Brno. When it’s ready, I got an email. In that email, I noticed a distressing term: osobní odběr.
My Czech is not perfect (understatement), but I know what that means: personal pickup.
I won’t go into all the reasons this makes no sense. But I thought I had ordered the futon to be delivered. Unfortunately, the futon company had a whole different idea about that and if I wanted to get the futon delivered it would cost extra. I wrote an email requesting a delivery date and was told it would cost about 450 CZK more to get it delivered. I wrote another, mildly perturbed, email and was told they had made a mistake (huzzah!) that delivery was actually 650 CZK (Bah!).
And so this is how it has come to pass that I am carrying a huge package (teehee) through Karlin on a Wednesday afternoon in the bitter cold. In the thick milky plastic covering, it really looks ass though I am carrying a human body through Karlin. As I carry my futon to the bar where I’m meeting Burke, I try to configure the explanatory Czech, but there’s a lot they don’t need to know that I will probably tell them.
See, I can just say it’s a futon and be done with it. But my brain wants to address the underlying question these people might have – namely, why the eff are you carrying a futon through the freezing winter day? And for that, I need verbs and past modals. Also, this activity helps distract me from the fact that I’m carrying a fifty-pound futon around.
I get to the bar. Mercifully, as it’s 2 pm and the Czechs don’t start drinking for about 30 minutes, the bar is wide and empty. I maneuver my way through the door. It is as awkward as men in weather-lined plaid showing emotion to each other. I carry my futon across the room. The three people there give me the obligatory ‘what the eff’s going on here’ squint. I smile. I do not look at them.
I sit my futon on the bench and sit next to it. The waiter comes. I have arrived in the down hours and so he already hates me. I order.
‘Pivo, prosím.’
He nods. He looks at the futon.
I only give him the facts: ‘je to futon.’
I can only hope the facial expression and the subtext can carry the rest of my meaning. In any event, my futon and I will be afternoon tipsy soon and this will make it easier to explain things to my Uber driver. But that’s not for a while.
