He took two days off to go to Auschwitz.

The problem was that he didn’t know what anything was called. Names and names and names—streets, neighborhoods, trains, all made of syllables that passed through him like elements of a dream. Directions were the death of understanding: links at this incoherent set of sounds, rechts at this one, and through all of it his mind whirring with impotence.

Thankfully he had his friend with him, Adam, who knew German. Meanwhile A. was a baby, pointing and wishing for things, but a baby who never learned, never grew.

They took a rideshare with a long-haired Polish man. Afterward A. would remember the rutted roads, the scarred tar across the border, how bumpy it was. His friend sat in the front and talked to the man. A. sat in the back and felt the emotional turbulence of leaving one country for another—leaving one country that was not home for one that was even less like home. So he listened to music. Music was international. It was the language of feeling! He listened to hip-hop that spoke of blowjobs.

It was 2015, and he was a Jew, heading into the ancestral land. He imagined unmown pastures blown by the ghosts of Europe.

The first place they stopped was a gas station where he had to pay to pee. He had euros and the woman who ran the bathroom, seated at a table outside, insisted they pay in zlotys. After he and Adam did a stupid dance of mild begging—“Just euros,” pointing at the coins, that sort of thing—she eventually accepted the currency, which was apparently exchangeable only in the continent’s most prosperous nations. The long-haired Polish man stayed in the car. He was going home.

The man let them out at another gas station, told them to take a bus. He seemed embarrassed to abandon them and didn’t say goodbye. “That guy was an asshole,” Adam said, and A. wondered if he had been an asshole while they were talking in German for two hours or had just become one.

They waited for the bus with some ladies. It was reasonably hot, hot in a way A. could deal with.

Once onboard, they began to panic. Everything was in Polish—one did not expect this; it seemed there should be English somewhere. “Train?” Adam asked the people standing near them. “Train station?” A. felt a perverse satisfaction in Adam being reduced to childish ignorance in the way A. so often was.

Two teenagers offered to help. One held a vape pen. “Follow us, we’re getting off there.” As happens often, one was chubby—the one with the vape—the other thin. They rode in a silence that was awkward only to the non-Poles, to A. and Adam. Should they say something? Make an attempt at small talk? An offer of money? But of course they didn’t have any zlotys yet.

“This town sucks so much,” said the chubby one, laughing and pulling on his vape. After a quarter mile, the group had reached the train station, which, because of repairs, did not exist aboveground. “You have to go under there,” the chubby one said, pointing at a tunnel under the building, paneled with plywood.

At the mouth of the tunnel, A. and Adam became afraid of abandonment and gave their guides a despairing look. Adam offered them five euros, which they declined. “Okay, we come with you,” said the thin one. “Where are you going, anyhow?”

Adam explained that they were going to Oświęcim.

“Fuck that place, I’m never going back there!” said the thin one. “Never!”

At the ticket counter the boys translated Adam’s and A.’s desires into Polish. This time the friends accepted their five euros, in addition to euros for the tickets. “Thank you, good luck!” said the chubby boy, pocketing the denomination, enjoying his vape pen.

Poland was in the EU, but it had its own historic currency, which sounded like a dessert. The zloty. I’ll take two zlotys, please.

Adam and A. sat on the train for an hour and a half, full of wishes—to talk about the boys, the long-haired Polish man; to go over their itinerary—but without any energy to fulfill those wishes. A. tried to read but it occurred to him that the book was the world and he was in it.

The train let them off at a station that was also a mall, at Katowice. A. used his debit card to buy espresso, willing to pay the foreign transaction fee for caffeine. It was roughly eleven in the morning.

They got zlotys from a woman in a window. From another woman in a window they bought their tickets to Oświęcim. “I wish I lived behind a window,” A. said to Adam.

“Can we sit down?” Adam asked, and they hunted for a pair of seats like two seagulls searching for discarded food. At last they sat under a loudspeaker that seemed to be playing two pop songs at once, interspersed with announcements in Polish, then in English. A. felt at home in some minute way.

Adam was tall, or taller than A., which wasn’t difficult. An olive-skinned Floridian who now lived in Berlin, the child of a Domino’s franchiser, Adam translated German into English, the language of commercials and department stores, of worldwide miscommunication.

“How much longer?” A. asked, like Adam was his dad, but it turned out that Adam was taking one of his frighteningly efficient naps: he could sleep for two or three minutes, sitting up, like an intentional narcoleptic.

The train from Katowice to Oświęcim was hot and stuffy, trembling as it wheezed through the countryside. A. read Hannah Arendt and glanced out the window at the shimmer of summer, the limping willows, the electrified fences of railyards. It was toward the end of June: he would stay with Adam for another week before returning to the States, the dark-robed rulers of which had just declared gay marriage to be legal, and where continued social progress seemed so inevitable it had become sort of boring to observe.

He drifted between reading Eichmann in Jerusalem and staring out the window, the caffeine from Katowice leaving an upset stomach like a bruise.

Adam napped, and as A. watched him, he realized that this month with his friend was the most intimate he had been with another person.

When they stepped off the train—not in Florida, not even in Berlin, but in Oświęcim—they faced an advertisement for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Less than one kilometer to the left, it indicated beneath the arrow. Links was the word in German; A. knew this much of the language.

“Links oder rechts?” A. asked. When he spoke the language successfully he had a new feeling, as if he were suddenly on an adventure.

They went to the right, away from Kentucky Fried Chicken and toward the camps.

They checked in at the hotel that A. called in his head Hotel Auschwitz, then he spent twenty minutes shitting.

“Are you okay?” Adam asked when A. emerged from the glassed-in bathroom, which thankfully was opaque.

They ate at Hotel Auschwitz, but not before A. asked at the front desk whether they had a gym, a request treated with polite condescension by the pretty Polish lady working reception.