This is my first night in Budapest. Five hours ago, when I set out from my hotel across the Szabadság Bridge, hardly anybody had braved the cold. The few introverted faces I passed seemed disembodied against the tar-colored sky. I’d come here to do a story about brothels for an online magazine. Something personal and literary, the editor had chuckled in his impishly paternal way. Planning to grope my way through the job by sheer instinct and horniness, with little knowledge of the city’s history or present, I’d left the hotel without even checking a map. My rationale was that my own libido was enough to carry me into the unconscious of the place.

I zigzagged recklessly—playing with the dizziness of my jet lag—using the river as an obvious thread of orientation. Deep into the night, around 2 AM, I ended up on the Pest waterfront, where chilly gusts sharded the light on inky water. That’s where I saw him through wind-teared eyes, in front of the Intercontinental Hotel: a black form cut suddenly from darkness, topped by a fluorescently pale face; a nose like an enormous shield, over a pouty underlip; and eyes hollowed by hunger and fatigue, drawing me toward him. I broke the frozen silence by making up something—a club I pretended to be looking for—and he pretentiously claimed to know them all.

We crept along the streetcar tracks, enveloped by the echo of lapping waves and cars humming on the bridge above, leaving our wet, black footprints in the asphalt. That’s when he grazed my hand with those rough, coated fingers of his and I jerked it away, afraid of the feel of dry cartilage on his knuckles.

But I’ve stayed here anyway at the foot of the bridge, as a match flares in his face, bringing out small, distrustful black eyes and their stagy melancholy. His eyes aren’t searching mine for pity. They look dead.