Through a series of accidents, there I was playing footsie with the apparatchik I was never supposed to have met at that bar. The conversation could only be nebulous. My English kept rolling through his Russian mouth, falling to pieces in helpless solecism like crumbs sprayed across the table in a paroxysm of laughter. He asked me to explain the Canadian rock music falling like heavy-footed upstairs neighbors through our miscommunications. As if my toes were not tracing the groove of muscle between his tibia and fibula through carefully distressed denim. I practiced shouting his list of most useful Russian phrases between his deliberately shy smiles. I played and he played along and we did not pretend we were more than cliché strangers in a cliché seedy dive. Whoever we were for those twelve drinks and four hundred minutes. Wherever we would end up in the churn of bodies at the end of the night.