I am somewhere in southern Bulgaria. That much I know. I know some other things too. Nutmeg sales have plummeted and if I don’t reach my annual quota I am sure to be sacked upon my return to New York. Staring into the face of poverty I direct the full force of my physical and mental powers on seducing and subsequently defiling a local peasant girl, one Ekatrina Percockovich. I win her heart in under three minutes, quite possibly a Balkan record, by showing her an American dollar bill and a wallet-sized photo of me and the Empire State Building. Soon enough we are humping like feral beasts six, eight, maybe even twenty times a day.

During the brief interludes, when Ekatrina and I are not in the clammy throes of coitus, I try to fend off the earth scorching heat by dousing myself with bottle after bottle of crisp Bulgarian pilsner. Darkness arrives to the silent joy of the townsfolk. The devil’s heat dissipates into the stratosphere as if the doors to a giant pizza oven are thrown wide open. A playful inner voice tells me it’s time to switch gears and start sampling some of the local red wine. The one-two punch of alcohol serves its purpose; my brain fever is put on ice and I become as giddy as a pigtailed little girl playing her very first game of hopscotch.

In the wee hours of the night I succumb to a quick and dreamless sleep. An involuntary flip of a switch, the circuit is broken, brain comfortably dead; body sticky and stained in various places, salty and sunburned elsewhere. I wake around midday and remain in bed, riding out the siesta, which because of the massive unemployment actually ends sometime Thursday morning.

My head pleasantly swims in cool dense water as I drift in and out of sleep. Sweat pools in the hollow at the base of my neck, quickly overflows and rushes toward my navel in a tiny flashflood. Strangely, I find the newfound stink of my armpits most agreeable. The odor is reminiscent of diced yellow onions sautéed in ham fat and it sets my stomach agrowl with hunger. One might say I have gone local, throwing deodorant to the wind.

My lovely peasant girl has quietly vanished during the night, as is her routine. Home to mama to help clean house and bake bread. Eka is not really a peasant girl. She doesn’t plow the fields behind a team of oxen. Nor does she scrub her soiled clothes against the river rocks. In fact she rarely leaves her house without some accessory from a top Bulgarian designer.
I affectionately call her my peasant girl because that is the great American ideal. The dream of importing an innocent, somewhat subservient Bulgarian waif with advanced degrees in foot massage, wart removal and grilled meats is beyond my wildest imagination. Yet, here I am, wallowing in the decadence of the ex-communist bloc, romanticizing about intercontinental marriage and spit-roasted boar.
Eka dutifully returns every afternoon with a doggy bag from her extended family lunch. I have yet to receive a personal invite to dine with the family, but for now I am content with a black market meal, smuggled fresh daily from under the nose of her fretful mother and cantankerous father, who just happens to be the local ball bearing magnate. When Eka arrives and the scent of charred meat fills my room I know I’ve reached the pinnacle of my existence and the last thing on my mind is New York or the price of nutmeg. I sing to myself in Bulgarian operatic tenor: Moon in your eye, vampire bat pizza pies. That’s amore!

During these lazy afternoons, when this dusty little town is caught in the death grip of siesta, I am fraught with bouts megalomania; an affliction common among Americans who spend too much time abroad "finding themselves". In the midst of a happy orange haze, I imagine myself as one of the world’s great literary swashbucklers; Henry Miller combing the streets of Paris for desperate women in heat; Hemingway blasting furry animals on the Serengeti; Jack Kerouac catching chlamydia somewhere on the road. And then there’s me, sweating it out in Bulgaria, waiting for my daily goat.

There is not even a hint of a breeze outside to wash away the sounds of the sputtering mopeds and rhythmic catcalls of the street vendors. "Patzarjik, Ambalaz, Ragustava! Pazarjik, Ambalaz, Ragustava!" I get out of bed and don my fedora — for what better reason to be in Bulgaria than to wear ridiculous hats that your American friends would make fun of. The cool cement floor feels lovely on the bottom of my feet as I pad my way to the bathroom. I splash some water on my face, making sure my lips are firmly pressed together, for a single drop of the tepid water contains enough paramecium to lay me out for a week or maybe even forever.

Despite the beer and wine totals of yesterday I feel great. Years of training have inoculated me from the headaches and nausea and proverbial hirsute morning-tongue that plague the commoner. Not a hint of a hangover, but nevertheless my brain fever returns and my mind is quickly overcrowded with unpleasant thoughts, each one clamoring for top billing like letters in a fiercely boiling pot of alphabet soup.

I return to bed until Eka arrives and stare at the cracked scalloped ceiling and bullet holes sprayed across the far wall; leftovers, and intentionally left unspackled, since the Second World War. The holes are quaint and regal markers of death. Time has given them a droll aesthetic quality like an autographed solitary smear by Van Gogh or a priceless smudge of Andy Warhol.

Fortunately, they are high along the ceiling and remain clean and fresh and virginal, beyond the reach of fingering tourists. I myself couldn’t resist, but I have relinquished my tourist status weeks ago. I am now in the import-export business and the town’s new local loco.
On more than one occasion I have stood drunk atop a folding metal chair set atop a coffee table and gently, quietly fingered the WWII pockmarks. With the delicate hands of a surgeon I close my eyes and imagine the firefight that went on in my room a half century earlier. Blood and innards have been pasted along these walls and, for some strange reason that I could not even begin to explain, I feel quite pompous about knowing this. I was there when it happened and was the only one to survive. Collateral damage to the eardrums maybe, some scrapes and bruises; cement dust in my eyes. If you spend enough time in this room alone, staring at the ceilings, scaling the walls, fingering the holes, they become yours. You can take them home with you. Back in New York there are no such bullet holes dotting the walls. And I think that explains a lot about the differences between Americans and Bulgarians.

There. I said it.

I peer out the window and I see my little lamb chop skipping down the alleyway. I blow her a kiss. She is carrying a smoldering goat head in a wooden pail. Her knees are scarred with raspberries from the prior week’s festivities and her sinewy ankles are splotched with mud. I shiver with joy and dance a waltz over to the bidet for my daily ablutions. There is no doubt about it: I am in love.

As far as I can tell the feeling is mutual. Ekatrina is in love too. And not only that, she can’t bear the thought of living without me.

She enters the room, sets the goat pail on the coffee table and starts disrobing without so much as a nod hello. No matter how many times I have seen her naked over the past few weeks the sight of her ample body hair still shocks and excites me on some primitive level. Even though it looks like a pair of tarantulas is hiding out in her armpits, ready to strike, I am fully aroused within a fraction of a second. Eka is one of those people who are as comfortable naked as they are fully dressed. Just before we make love she always has this odd look of concentration as if she were about to serve a tennis ball.

She walks over to the bed, removes my hat and places it on her head at a seductive angle. This is the stuff of dreams and Playboy photo shoots and I’m afraid if she so much as pokes me with an index finger I will go off like a grenade. I lie there motionless, a bit fearful, a bit in awe, as she shimmies down on top of me and begins her patented process of grinding me to a pulp.

I force my eyes closed to forestall eruption, but I can clearly see the movie version of Ekatrina’s gymnastics on the inside of my eyelids. It is the first time in my life that I am having my brains fucked out by a beautiful girl in a fedora and I feel that congratulations are in order. I want to alert the media, shout out to the world, write a letter back home. Look Ma, no hands!

"I love you!" Eka cries in the grips of a near-fatal orgasm.

"Don’t stop," I implore.

"I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you!"

Excuse me? I couldn’t hear you. Come again?

"I love you! I love you! I love you! I love you!" Etc.

There’s a lot of loving going on, so much love that there is barely room to breath. I am flattered and overwhelmed, bowled over, hyperventilating. I have a pleasant nauseous feeling in the pit of my stomach that most people are lucky to feel once or twice in a lifetime and I never want to let go of it.

"I can’t live without you!" Eka screams with finality as she falls on top of me in a wet sobbing heap.

I finish a moment later, coming inside her for the umpteenth time. When I came in her the first time I knew it was a mistake, but then I didn’t see much of a difference between the first and second time, between the second and third, third and fourth, fourth and fifth. Then I lost count. Then I stopped caring.

She can’t possibly be pregnant, I remind myself. Why not? Because she just can’t. It has something to do with God’s will and luck and the fact that life cannot be so cruel. But I think back to high school biology, about how sperm and egg unite to form a child and I suddenly feel the urge to vomit.

A preemptive beer is needed to derail the anxiety attack that is coming at me like a freight train. I hurry out of bed, disregarding the requisite petting and gazing into each other’s eyes, and take the shortest route to the refrigerator. I pop the top off a cold one and stare at Eka sprawled out on the bed like a spent prostitute. Somewhere, deep in the recesses of my underdeveloped brain, little red flags rise; rise and flap, snap and crack in a scorching wind. I start asking myself a few pertinent questions. For example, Could this girl possibly be pregnant? If so how does one say papa in Bulgarian? Am I playing the patsy here? What the hell am I doing in this God forsaken country anyway?

The cynic within takes over and postulates that little Ms. Ekatrina Percockovich is not actually in love; that she is, in fact, feigning love. The cynic within looks out and sees this gorgeous nymphet with the large black eyes, hairy armpits and heart-shaped ass lying in bed, staring at me like a lost child, but he doesn’t buy it. He takes another sip of his beer and sneers at the Bulgarian beauty. He is certain that she is merely trying to get her hooks into the first American that comes along, even a pathetic nutmeg salesman; the type of guy who would call it a good night back home if he made it with a gimpy circus carny. The cynic within further postulates that the nutmeg salesman will carry the Bulgarina to the Promised Land where he will marry her so she can remain in-country and suckle the great American teat for the rest of her life. But soon after the start of the rest of her life, she will conveniently find someone better and dump him.

I finish my first beer and simultaneously reach for a second and while that transaction is taking place, in that short expanse of time, I devise a trap; a trap that will expose Ekatrina for the fraud she is. The trap is quick and painless, but ingenious, incorporating both basic common sense and a touch of paranormal psychology. I will whisper her name and when her eyes meet mine, in that first infinitesimal instant of metaphysical contact, I will be able to look directly into her soul and uncover the truth.

"Eka?" I call to her softly from across the room.

She lifts her head and looks toward me. A child’s smile spreads across her face.

"Yes?"

I take two giant steps forward, stiff scary ones. I lean forward, bug-eyed, so close that I startle her. I peer into the black holes of her eyes for the slightest trace of malice; for the gears of deception churning just behind the façade, but all I see are sweetness and love staring back.

"Is something wrong?" she asks fretfully.

"Would you like a refreshing beverage?"

Eka takes my hand and joins me at the table. We are as naked as Adam and Eve. A plan is set in action. I will meet her family in three days time; the day before I return to New York. She will profess her love for me and I for her. She will ask her father to use his wealth and influence to snag a visa so she can come stay with me in New York for a few months. The plan is mostly her idea. She is charting our future. I can see it as clearly as the backyard treasure maps of my childhood. A few weeks will turn into a few months, months will become years, and somehow I know with dead certainty, that in the end, where X marks the spot, I will hate her guts. And she mine.