John Heartbreak has gotten old. He ruminates, remembers.

He is sitting over a cup of coffee in downtown Bucharest, wondering why rehabilitated Commies couldn’t make a decent cup. Maybe they’d gone without it for so long they didn’t have a baseline. Maybe they just didn’t give a damn. John sighed and sipped a slovenly afterthought that didn’t help kill the time between now and when his flight left Coanda Airport for Zurich in three hours. From Zurich, he’d catch a flight to Atlanta and then a connecting flight home. John put the cup down, tapped his fingers, and studied the geography of his coffee. The guy he was meeting was twenty minutes late.

The Herastrau Hotel was across the street from where he sat. To the left of the hotel was Vlad the Impaler’s old palace. A line of working girls strolled back and forth between the two places. Not all of them were Romanian. A couple of Slovenians were in the group, and John could tell one of the girls was from Kosovo; she kept looking up at the sky, nervous and worried. 

“Shimmy shimmy cocoa pop,” John said softly. And then, “Shimmy, shimmy, no cocoa, no pop,” because the girls looked bored and tired. They didn’t know one would become America’s First Lady in just a few years. John didn’t know that either, but he knew life was full of surprises.

John’s guy was taking his time. That was no surprise. Guys were always late. John knew the guy was parked in a dark corner, looking at him, surveying the room and the people in it. Was John alone? Was his stoop-shouldered waiter just a waiter or a bad-side spook? What about the granny-haired tourist taking pictures of the room where John is sitting? Was she sightseeing? Or tracking John and his visitors? 

John didn’t care. It didn’t matter if he was seen or unseen. He was unimportant, a low-level government contractor with the security clearance that allowed him to get money for working in backward towns and countries with bad coffee or no coffee. Why the security clearance? So low-level government good-side spooks could grill him about who he’d seen, and where, when, and why he’d seen them.

Today’s guy would focus on Gjakova, a small town in Kosova full of Albanians and broken-souled widows. John had spent the last thirty-five days there, six months after the war ended. He was auditing relief agencies while United Nations troops patrolled bombed-out streets and dodged mountains of trash, looking for nothing and nobody. Joe Tito was dead, Yugoslavia was dead, the war was over, and everybody wanted to go home.

Including John. But first was yesterday’s closeout meeting in Bucharest with a multinational cadre of UN supervisors who pretended to listen when he reported his Kosovo audit. These supervisors were six Italians wearing sunglasses and silk scarves, and four Frenchmen who filled the French role of knowing everything all the time, a pair of Germans who may have listened, and nine chubby Yanks who paid the bills, including John’s.

But that was yesterday. Today was sitting, waiting, and drinking bad coffee. John wanted his guy to hurry up and forlornly hoped he wouldn’t have surprises. John was weary of surprises. 

One surprise was that he lived in Berryville, Arkansas, a small town in the Ozarks filled with chicken farmers of Scotch-Irish ancestry and Hispanics who gutted the chickens for the poultry giant Tysons. A Walmart Supercenter graced the western entrance to Berryville. The County Jail occupied the eastern entrance. Fifteen percent of Berryville’s population could be found in one or the other location within any given twenty-four-hour period. So far, John had avoided both places. So far.

He and his wife lived three blocks off the Town Square in what his wife called a Dutch Colonial Cottage. John called it an Equal Opportunity Employer since every plumber, electrician, roofer, and water diviner in town made a living off it. Cottage or EOE, the house was equidistance from Walmart and the County Jail. When they moved to Berryville, Mrs. Heartbreak opened and ran Heartbreak’s Pretty Good Books and Okay Coffee, a retail operation selling what the name said. She was fulfilling her retirement dream and impatiently waiting for John to retire and join her dreams. 

John had assumed he and Mrs. Heartbreak would retire and live in downtown Philadelphia, in a condominium six blocks from Dr. Franklin’s house and half an hour’s walk to the Philadelphia Art Museum where Thomas Eakins’ pictures hung on every wall.

Phillys’ downtown was quiet, the most residential of America’s central cities, full of mom-and-pop grocery stores, small shops, and cafes. It was ninety minutes from Washington, DC, where John’s employer was headquartered. 

John liked cities and thought Mrs. Heartbreak would like Philadelphia since she was from a small town and Philly was… well, it had a small-town feel. To John, anyway. Just the right size.

Mrs. Heartbreak had other ideas. 

“You’re on the road, John,” she had said. “You live in airports. I don’t. I live in our home. Alone. Alone, waiting for you, two hundred and thirty days out of three hundred and sixty-five. I get to pick where we live. We’re going to live in Arkansas.”

Which was fine. John lived in his head. Wherever he went there he was. Arkansas? Fine.

John pushed his coffee away and started to get up. 

“Don’t get up,” a voice said. “Let’s have our talk, shall we?”

His guy. Wearing a grey suit and a blue and yellow tie off a Joseph Banks rack from a skidding somewhere mall. Fifty years old, grey as his suit, stuck in Bucharest, retirement treadmill, grilling nobodies, checking boxes on papers no one read. He smiled at John.

John sat back down. His guy sat across from him and looked expectant, his eyebrows a question mark. 

Ah, password time…

“They fuck you up, your mum and dad…” John said to the eyebrows.

 “They may not mean to, but they do,” his guy answered, still smiling. 

Passwords accepted. The guy was his guy.

Nods traded. They’d met before. Langley? Ah, that bar on D Street. Where on D?

“The Holiday Inn,” the guy said, answering John’s thought. “The one on Rhode Island Avenue. Behind the White House.”

“Yeah,” John said, remembering. “You were handing out forms—instructions on how to claim mileage for travel in places with no roads.”

“You were sleeping in your chair. I had to wake you up.”

“I must have just gotten off a plane. From a faraway place.”

“With no roads.”

“With no roads,” John repeated. Then, “What’s with the Larkin poem? It’s a tad unexpected, even under our circumstances.”

“It’s a poem?” The guy asked. He was mystified. “What kind of poem has a ‘fuck you up’ line?”

 “It is a poem. Larkin was a British poet. Cranky. A little low on the shall I compare thee to a summer’s day scale.”

“Ah,” the guy said, flicking his eyes north. “Now I get it. I mean the Brit thing. We’ve teamed up with The Circus here. Cost cutting, both sides. What you tell me I tell them. They’re running the show. They came up with the Larper thing.”

“Larkin.”

“Larper, Larkin, whatever. Every Brit fucks you up. But in a poem? That’s a bridge too far.”

“You want some coffee?” John asked.  

“Are you kidding? I’m in Bucharest working for Limeys who couldn’t find their socks in the morning, let alone a non-fucking poem, and you ask me if I want some piss? No thanks.”

“My plane leaves in two hours.”

“Let’s get to it then.” 

The guy pulled a Moleskine notebook from the grey suit's chest pocket and flipped it open. His eyes were streaked with last night’s scotch and soda, rimmed with chronic boredom. They made a watery run down the small page and stopped midway.

“Vjosa Kalmendi,” the guy said. “Tell me.”

John had stayed at a busted-up hotel room in Gjakova with no running water and a 40-watt lightbulb at the end of an extension cord. A couple in the next room traded punches and ancestry sketches for an hour or two before making up for another hour. John was too distracted to read and too jetlagged to sleep. He got up and fumbled down the hallway and through the vacant lobby. He walked east, maybe north, but the direction didn’t matter since he was moving in a circle with no control over whether he was circling the drain or a portal into a new cosmos. The Gjakova circle was riddled with shattered buildings, smashed windows, craters, and six-language DANGER! signs every twenty feet. Just before the circle met, he found the office where he would work. He’d arrived there that afternoon and knew there was a makeshift kitchen and a coffee pot along a backway hall. John needed coffee. They had given him a key.

The building had been a travel agency before the war. Its walls were dotted with posters peddling Mediterranean beaches, shopping sprees in Zagreb, and gambling cruises on the Adriatic. Windows perpendicular to the posters were strung with Venetian blinds fronting plywood sheets, but the toilets worked, and the building had power. John saw a desk light in the back corner. A woman was sitting at the desk, smoking a cigarette, softly crying. She glanced in John’s direction.

“Mr. Heartbeat, you are too early for work,” she said. “You should go away. Go now. Goodbye.”

John had met the woman when he’d reported to the office that morning—yesterday morning. He’d forgotten her name, but she had been introduced as his interpreter. She had smiled perfunctorily during the introduction and shaken his hand. John remembered her hand as thin and cold as a birch tree standing alone on a winter prairie. She spoke Albanian, Serbian, and passable English. 

“I have no place to go.”

She sighed. 

“Then you have come to the right place.” 

She pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and wiped her luminous, dark, infinite eyes.

“I’m sorry I interrupted you,” John said. “I didn’t think anyone would be here.”

“I am not here, Mr. Heartbeat. I am in the land of your true name. A name I cannot say.”

John understood. He had been in war. Knew war. She could not say Heartbreak. Heartbeat was fine with him. Now, in the dark early morning, he was John Heartbeat. 

“I’m going to make coffee,” John said. “Will you drink with me?”

John and Vjosa Kalmendi drank coffee, watched the night pale and break, and talked. Her husband and son had been in the Kosovo Liberation Army. The Serbian oligarch, Slobodan Milosevic, had executed them two days after the war was over. Her heart was broken. But it still beat; it beat their names. 

They spent the next thirty-five days together, sun-up to sun-down, every day. She made John’s auditing and technical assistance consulting easy. 

“He’s a liar and a thief,” she said before they entered a certain contractor’s office. “All of Gjakova knows he is a bad man.” He was. 

Or, “He’s a good man. You can trust his books, his numbers.” You could.

And John made Vjosa laugh. He told her about his life in Berryville, what he thought about while waiting in three-hour lines for flights out of Zimbabwe, and about the always fascinating Mrs. Heartbreak. 

“She is beautiful,” John told her, “but she has a lust for supervision. Here in Gjakova, I am an International Expert. When I get home to Berryville, I’m the Village Idiot. She points, and I follow.”

“You are a funny man, Heartbeat. And your wife is a wise woman. She knows exactly what you need.”

Vjosa and John had become friends. He listened. She listened. The topography of grief was explored and mapped. Bread was broken, history shared, advice given, advice abutted giggly consideration. 

“You are a step away from old age, John” Vjosa had said. “It is time to step off the airplane and stay with Mrs. Heartbeat in Berryville.”

“Barelyville.”

“You can circle a drain or enter the portal to a new Galaxy. Your choice.”

“You’ve turned into a Quantum Mechanic, Vjosa.”

“Our lives are small, John, but small is infinite. War and politics—even the monster Milosevic—goes away. The pain does not, but the love does not either. And our coffee, here and now, is here and now. 

“Let’s drink it, shall we?”

The guy tapped the table.

“Where are you, Heartbreak? I asked you a question. Vjosa Kalmendi? Tell me about her.”

They’d said goodbye four days ago, laughing through their tears. “I’m coming to see you,” Vjosa had said, smiling. “I’ll see you in Barelyville!”

“Berryville,” John laughed. “You’ll see me in Berryville.”

John straightened in his chair and looked at the guy. He was still tapping, heartbeats, driving stakes into John’s memory, heartbreak. John looked at him, focused.

“What about her?”

“We think she might work out as a resource. Eyes and ears. We need you to vet her, and then recruit her. Quickly. The Albanians are gonna start screwing the Serbs. We want a heads-up when and how.”

“Serbs have been screwing Albanians for six-hundred years. And Vjosa Kalmendi is an Albanian. She isn’t going to help you.”

“She needs money. She needs to make a living. We need you to sign her up.”

John looked across the room. The granny-haired tourist was taking his picture. John smiled and waved. Granny turned away, ignored him, and pretended to look at the working girls across the street. John looked at them, too.

“Shimmy shimmy cocoa pop,” John said.

John’s guy raised his eyebrows, rolled his eyes. 

“Do I need to wake you up again, Heartbreak? Pay attention.”

John took a sip of coffee and set his cup down. The stoop-shouldered waiter came over to refill it. John waved him away and stood up.

“I’m awake,” John said. “I’m paying attention. Vjosa doesn’t need to make a living. She needs to make a life. Me, too. I’ll see you around.”

“Where in the hell are you going!”

“I’m going home.”

He got up and walked out of the room. 

John Heartbreak has gotten old. He ruminates, remembers.