THE DAY I WENT TO ZAKRZÓWEK, A BOY DIED. HE’D leaped from the cliff thirty feet above the water. Just as I was leaving my apartment that morning, my landlord told me. I asked whether he meant suicide or for fun. “In Poland it’s hard to tell the difference,” he said, laughing.

I released my own dry laugh, clutching my backpack strap. I’d only been in the country a few days but I’d already been startled by the blunt expressions, tired eyes, and clenched lips of men shouldering by.

Upon arrival in Krakow I’d been warned of general hazards: pollution, neo-Nazis, the PiS Party, none of which seemed to apply to an afternoon of lake swimming on the outskirts of the city, but you never knew. I would have canceled the outing but it was with Marek, my ticket into Poland, a queer theorist who’d written the recommendation for my postdoc history fellowship. He was insistent on showing me all the city’s offerings.

As I passed the muscular monuments of Old Town on my way to cross the Vistula—stallions and saints and a soldier bear—I assured myself: I had to go. Besides, in three days my girlfriend Rosie was due for a visit from Belarus, where she was on a sculpture grant. I was nervous to see her, nervous to tell her about my upcoming changes, which I’d come to Krakow to work out. A dip in a greasy Eastern European waterway could take my mind off her. Even if exposing my curves in a bathing suit was my personal tailored hell.

At Zakrzówek I found Marek waiting for me on a flat expanse of stone cut into the cliff above the water. The entire platform was coated with men collapsed on towels, bellies high and proud, children picking their way between them like survivors among the dead. Marek’s barrel chest was out, his round pale head confidently cocked. I asked after the dead boy, worried what had killed him could harm us too.

“Machines are under that water,” Marek said, as we advanced into the bodies. At the bushes on the edge of the platform, we passed a wild boar dining from a trash can.

“Is that okay?” I asked.

“Of course not, but what can we do? We can’t delete machines. Think of the nonsense!”

“I meant that animal.” The boar sported a mohawk of wiry hair down his spine and an aggressively wagging tail. A block of wrapped krówki had lodged in one nostril—I recognized the treat from my landlord’s “Hello!” package. The boar was muscular and streamlined, like a hoofed torpedo that could knock us down and consume us with his orange rabbit teeth.