We drive through Flagstaff. For some reason, all the events connected with this town have the flavor of a dream. This occurred in the winter of 2008, I was working for Reuters at the time. I came to work, put my knapsack down on my desk, and then from the studio I heard alarmed fragments of a report about an atomic attack. Soon afterward I learned that terrorists had dropped a nuclear bomb on Flagstaff, Arizona. My first thought was: Why Flagstaff? And then, interested in the news, I got up and went into the studio as though hypnotized. And there on the monitors the program was live, a reporter in Arizona was describing the consequences of the attack. Experts on terrorism were sitting in the studio, and all those faces were familiar to me from the broadcasts of the big television channels. And then I realized: this was all set up, it was an exercise run by a team from the Ministry of Homeland Security, which rented our studio from time to time to record their programs.
At one moment, one of the producers noticed the appearance of a foreigner (me), came up to me, and said: “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
“I’m from here,” I said, pointing to the archive, my windowless room. “I’m interested in the news from Arizona,” I said.
He asked me politely to leave and then closed the door, and I believe that he locked it. I was quite unnerved: the reporter’s dramatic voice, the aggressive graphics accompanying the living images, the names under the people speaking, and so on, that was all real television, I thought. The recorded program about this “nuclear attack” could one day be shown as a real event, live, in some future now. And that was a fairly troubling thought.
In the passenger seat, I endeavored to fall asleep. It was not yet midnight. The phone rang. Aleš from Ljubljana. I said I was traveling. I explained the reasons for our journey. I said that we were parked in the dark somewhere on the border between Arizona and Utah and that I felt as though I had gotten lost on my way home. I didn’t know where I was.
He laughed, and then explained: “In English they say ‘home, sweet home,’ while we say ‘Love home, wherever it is.’ In principle, no one can call an American’s home into question, so he can simply state that ‘home is sweet,’ while it’s different for us, for us the existence of a home is always questionable: you can love your home only if you have one.”
Clever Aleš. At the end of 1996, he was our first acquaintance from Europe to visit us in America. We were already in Washington then, still young thirty-five-year-olds. He arrived with a virus, stayed a few days, largely treating himself by putting drops of propolis on lumps of sugar. Do you remember propolis drops? A winter medicine from bees at the time of Yugoslavia. The last time I saw a little bottle of propolis was that week when Aleš Debeljak stayed with us.