Free The Travel Writer by Jeff Soloway

about money,” I said. “I have no family and no girlfriend and no one to depend on me. I live for moments like these, in strange and new places. Moments I won’t forget. New stories to add to the old ones.”
    “But when you get home, who do you tell the stories to?”
    “I don’t need to share them. I just need to remember them.”
    “That sounds lonely.”
    “I don’t mind.”
    “You will someday. And then you’ll fall in love and get a job and start worrying about money like all the rest of us. But some of us have so much more to worry about than others.”
    “They don’t pay you a lot, do they?” I said.
    “And I have to send so much to my aunt.”
    I took her hand. I hoped she didn’t mind that my fingers were soggy with sweat.
    She didn’t. She beckoned me down to her, with a smiling laziness so appropriate to the jungle, and unbuttoned my cargo pants as we kissed. That night she snuck into my pitch-black hut again and slipped under the mosquito netting. I liked that better; after we were done, our huddled conversation amid the darkness and the weird noises of the jungle symbolized for me the triumph of human rationality over chaos.
    Pilar somehow managed to maneuver me onto almost every one of the press trips she helped organize for the next eighteen months; I forsook even superior freebies for Guilford, without a second thought. Sex with a beautiful, contemplative foreigner was another type of freebie, to be cherished even more than a weekend in an all-inclusive on the Virgin Islands. I had no qualms about accepting Guilford’s hospitality on false pretenses, but I did mind continuing to lie to Pilar. We didn’t—thank God—analyze the psychological consequences of our orphanhood every time we met, but she did bring up the topic now and then, most often in ruminative emails sent just after one of our encounters. I felt I was capable of experiencing the emotions I described to her and convinced myself that I had endured similar ones the last time I’d hung up on my mother, but I discovered that being a hypocrite and being desperately in love were, for me, incompatible. So I wrote her a letter admitting the lie, apologizing, and openly begging for theforgiveness I knew I didn’t deserve.
    I didn’t get it.

Chapter 8
    Our cab joined the swarm of vehicles swerving, backfiring, lunging, jostling for position on a wide road without lanes. Kenny gazed out the side window, unconsciously mouthing the words to some song playing on his mental stereo. There was a lot for his gaze to take in: the Tom Joad–model trucks beside us, their backs loaded with workers packed as close as pencils; the Indian women in full sail of petticoats striding along the roadside where sidewalks should have been or squatting over mounds of produce for sale; the half-constructed or half-decayed two-story structures of cinder block or adobe or both. Giddy anticipation rose like bile in my gut. A week in La Paz and at one of the world’s finest resorts, and all of it paid for; a disappearance to investigate; a reunion with Pilar. Was Hilary really alive? What would Pilar tell me tomorrow? Where would she spend the night afterward? Black spiderwebs began to flutter before my eyes, and I commanded myself to empty my mind and concentrate only on dragging the oxygen out of the stingy high-altitude air.
    The driver tried a shortcut through a skinny side street rutted with potholes and moguls. Our headlights lit up a long bank of whitewashed walls emboldened with political graffiti, either generic slogans (“No a Neoliberalismo!”), or party abbreviations (MNR, ADN, MSM), or the full names written out (Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario, Acción Democrática Nacionalista, Movimiento sin Miedo, Condepa). One of them was unfamiliar.
    “Condepa? What is this?” I said to the cabbie in Spanish, hoping to start a conversation and thus find something less dizzying than Pilar and less immediate than my breathing to focus on.
    “A