Just landed in Philadelphia, Uber to the hotel we stayed in a few nights ago, but this time the view is different. I put on a pair of shorts. The sun is shining. I’m not wearing socks in my leather loafers. The street in Philly is full of people in the mood for life. A queer street festival, music, some people dancing. I watch them, then I look at my phone, then I turn the corner.
The staff at the German restaurant are wearing lederhosen or traditional costumes that have no actual tradition. The fabrics look like they shouldn’t come anywhere near fire. Inside the place it’s so cold that the hair on my legs stands up. I sit at the bar and try to explain to the waiter which match I want to watch—German football, I say, and he hands me the remote. After I find the Bundesliga channel, Aleksandar Pavlovic scores the 2–0 for FC Bayern Munich against the club I hold closest to my heart. It’s the ninth minute of the match. My forehead rests on the polished wooden bar, a waitress sets down a Beck’s glass filled with Jever Pils next to me. “Are you okay, honey?” “Yes, it is just that my team is losing,” I say. “Ah, that sucks,” she says. “Yeah, they suck,” I say. “But they just got relegated after trying it for seven years, and now we are where we belong, you know,” I say, but she’s already carrying off a pork knuckle.
While I watch Bayern score three more goals, an older man tries to prepare his much younger partner for her first Oktoberfest visit in Munich. “I was there a couple of times,” he says. He orders every German beer on the menu one after the other, but she doesn’t seem to like any of them, and she’s not particularly into the roast chicken either. She turns to me: “But I love chicken.” “You have to prepare for Germany,” the guy says, looking at me. “Yes, I guess,” I say and signal to the waiter that I want to pay.
The next day Sonali and I meet in front of the hotel. We lift our suitcases into the Uber, mine growing heavier every day. In the car the driver asks where the hell we’re trying to go. “That’s outside of Philadelphia,” she says as she zooms into the map on her phone. “That’ll take over an hour,” she says. We ask if she didn’t see where we wanted to go when she accepted the ride. “No, it just said: long drive,” she says. And: “They don’t tell us shit. I will only get 20 dollars from this.” We’re paying over 100. Or the Goethe-Institut is. Meaning the German taxpayers. “That is fucked up,” we say. “Yeah,” she says and steps on the gas. She’s in a bad mood, we are too, but we also don’t have a driver’s license, and the place where we’re performing and reading our texts tonight is only reachable by car. When she drops us off in West Chester and we tip her, her mood improves a bit, but not really, and we still think it’s unfair.
West Chester looks like Stars Hollow from Gilmore Girls, I say, and Sonali agrees. We’re told that this street used to end in a cornfield; now the town is growing here. I drink an iced Americano, Sonali drinks a tea, and we’re back in a car again. The road has many bends because it curves around the old trees; this is Quaker land, we’re told. I read the Wikipedia article on Quakerism on my phone until I get nauseous. There are many trees here.
In the old barn, the books are stacked so high that the wood beneath them bows. Every step through the barn makes the floorboards creak. Three ghosts live here, the lovely older woman tells us, who runs Baldwin’s Book Barn in Chester County together with her equally lovely older husband. For U.S. standards, it’s an old building; it smells of old wood, old paper, and cold stone, like in Europe. I think of ghosts. Outside, the sun is shining. The building stands in one of those fields where the light falls the way the cliché of American films looks: lush green, solitary trees, hanging branches, and somewhere a U.S. flag blows in backlight.
We sit at a long wooden table and drink cider. Sonali reads a text, then I read one of mine, then we talk about our writing and answer questions. Some are ones we’ve heard before and many we’ll hear again on this trip. The women in the group have the most to say; the men stay mostly quiet, many haven’t even come, and I listen too. I often don’t know what to say about my work or where to begin. But again, Sonali gets addressed more often, like the character she writes about. “People assume literature from you,” she tells me later in the car, “and from me they expect personal testimony.” “But your text is much more fictional than mine,” I say. One of the women in the group said she wouldn’t forget one of my sentences. It’s one of the few that isn’t true: “I don’t have much text, but I have a machine gun.”
We drive into town. We’re stopped at an intersection. Out the window we see people in front of a church, some of them on their knees, and it looks like they’re praying. They’ve leaned a two-meter-tall picture of Charlie Kirk against the outer wall of the church. A few of them have tears in their eyes. Then the light turns green.
We want to eat something before our train to Washington. We order burgers; I order a beer. Sonali orders a Coke. I try the local beer; I like it. We’re sitting outside, the street is closed to cars, people stroll past us. For the first time since we arrived, we see people wearing MAGA caps. Sonali and I look at each other, then our burgers arrive. Then everything escalates.
On the opposite side of the street, two men are screaming at each other. One is pro-, the other anti-Trump. One says: “Donald Trump is a pedophile,” the other says that’s a lie. Then they want to fight. I’m not sure they would survive it, they should be careful not to fall. They are really old. We keep eating. Next to us, three women are eating, all of them also wearing those caps. All of them are white, and they seem to have a problem with Sonali. I ask Sonali if she wants to leave. The women at the next table ask if everything is okay with us. It’s clear they don’t care about the answer. They’re not really asking; they’re threatening. Now they’re speaking extra loud, so we understand them, about how hard it is for them to be white women, especially today.
We’re waiting at the Joseph R. Biden Railroad Station in Wilmington and I’m still thinking about ghosts. When the train departs, it’s dark by now, I think about what lies ahead.