A little silence while everyone waits to hear if there is more because that isn’t such a big thing.  Not much of a discovery – not at least on the scale of curing cancer or making objects fly. Then he spots Fredrik’s face.  It’s like looking at a retrospective mirror – a glass that shows the reflection of your past self.  That silly word, delicatessen, is revealing its nature to him and his face shows the surprise of discovery as plainly as though he were staring at six-foot high neon letters.  Danny and Fredrik laugh, sharing that same bizarre excitement that only comes from something perspective-shifting yet truly trivial.

Damn.  It seemed so perfect.

Fredrik and Danny are looking at each other wondering how they can hold onto this little fiction they’ve shared, and suddenly the ongoing dinnertime chatter (that doesn’t stop just because two are lost in space) catches them in their daydreaming.

    “What would you bring?”

    “What?”

    “What three foods would you choose?”

“You’re stranded on an island and you have to choose three foods that you will have for the rest of your life.  What are your three?”

“Beef, pork, and veal,” Fredrik shoots back as though he is a contestant of a game show.  What is the capital of Switzerland?  Amsterdam!  No?  Wait, what was the question?

Danny clamps a hand on his mouth to keep the mouthful of Raclette from bursting out.

Jan pipes up in his proper sit-up-straight accent and a determined-not-to-laugh expression, “I’d bring pizza, a cow—“

No one heard what third food Jan named for the disaster across the table.  Danny, two hands holding in a mouthful of warm tea, doubled over and keeled over onto the floor.  He suffered there on the floor with one of those debilitating fits of painful laughter.  It wasn’t even that funny.  Not like the rabbit-who-wants-a-carrot joke.  But everyone else was still unable to keep from laughing—not, I’m sure, at Jan’s deadpan, but rather at Danny’s performance: doing the landed fish, flopping and gulping for air on the floor.

Fast forward to the same flopping fish routine on the padded mat in an indoor climbing gym.  The camera clicks off its self-timer but Danny is out of the frame.  Fredrik and Sebastian hop down from their awkward poses four foot up on the contoured wall and their heavy footfalls bounce Danny even more on the mat.

“Set it again.  Quick,” Danny says, scrambling back to the wall.  No time for planning or posing.  They fire off a dozen photographs trying to get it right. Each of the three manages to peel off the wall too early in a couple photos so that arms and heads and entire people are missing from the collection of photographs.  If they’d gone on more, trying to get a group photo of three falling through the air, they might have made a game of it.  Like up to the top and jump or catch the tennis ball mid-flight.  Instead, they sit on the edge of the mat sipping Apfelschorle and Fanta, listening to the click of carabiners.

He didn’t tell them then but he’d thought of what he’d add to the story back home.  He’d found it.  His feet were on the ground, while all around him people were climbing and dreaming themselves up off the floor.  They’d scrap the ceiling soon if not for the way he stretched things with his mind.  When you’re freed up finally, no boundaries bind you.  The multicolored handholds that peppered the walls shifted like word-magnets on a refrigerator.  He moved them with his mind.  His face was blank and staring into another reality.  He slid the words into place with enough sense of himself to allow the daydreaming to mould the story.  Out of the concrete and air-conditioned climbing gym—into the fresh and green, the turbulence.  Out of the artificial and into the real.

He daydreams a Swiss kind of place: full of dark, rich earth and heavy green.  The hike with Sebastian the day before whispers to his imagination, giving hints.  Of course, he brings his sense of home—those places speak loudest—but you can’t help notice the moment-to-moment influence.  What trees stretch overhead with what creatures among the leaves?

 

    “Odd how the daydream makes a daydream,” he thought as though he were the storyteller and the audience at once.  In truth, we are all performers and the audience at once who may be wise enough to be our greatest fans.  Then the mind-film rolls again and the daydream tells itself the story.

    Now find the thread of Switzerland and of a Raclette dinner and false etymology.  Free yourself from the tight climbing shoes and let your toes straighten themselves.  Ride your bike home through the gathering rain.  You’ll take a path that runs parallel to a stream with dark, moss-covered stones and clear, glacier-cold water.  The rain pushes clumps of gray mud into the stream as you ride past, leaving splotches of cloudy, churning water.  As the rain picks up and begins to splatter the bottoms of your pants, you’ll turn into the driveway.  There’s a double bump as you vault the low, cobblestone curb and head for the carpark.  Shake off the rain, kick off your shoes, and peel the wet socks off your pale feet.  You can smell grilled sausages and feel the heat from the baked potatoes when you step inside.  Wash up, sit down, toast them, smile and then grin to yourself at the way you’ve cut and pasted and stapled a few days in a few places into one composite evening around a single table.  “It even seems true,” he thinks as he asks where they were able to find such delicious sausages.

“Just down the street, near the old Lenzburg town center, there is a little delicatessen…”