And since it was July I didn’t have anything to do. School was closed and Birganj was an empty, freakish place, like a colonized spot of the sun, nothing less than a prison. A really hot prison.

Not that I want to sound negative, because back in July there was a lot to do yet. I was trying my hardest to do it. My two-month run at school ended on a Friday in the middle of June. The following Monday I was on a plane heading to Kathmandu.

My first two months in Birganj had seemed to last a long, long time. Since then I’ve hardly spent a solid month in Birganj without leaving for one reason or another. I don’t count day trips to Kalaiya or Narayanghat as getting away, since those are no longer than a night or two.

The fallen minaret of a mosque in the northern part of Nepalgunj.

So I had arranged with Peace Corps to go to Nepalgunj to work with Alayne’s faculty and do some trainings there. What a farce, but it was a hell of a good time and I wish I could have been there longer, since I was having a great time and I wasn’t quite ready to be back in Birganj.

But soon my time was up, my plane was in, and I was leaving scenic Nepalgunj, the only place more unfavorable than Birganj.

Not that I didn’t like the place. The people and the place just seemed more, well, doomed. You’d buy some milk and have a feeling that everyone there was starving to death and buying milk for yourself was affront to humanity when others clearly needed it more.

But what do you do? Buy milk for the whole of Nepalgunj? Nepal? No. You buy the milk and then you look into the eyes of the gaunt clerk, soaked from the heat, and ask, How much for that ice cream bar?

After leaving Nepalgunj, I had a few days in Kathmandu before I my flight back to Birganj. I saw a few folks in Kathmandu I hadn’t seen in a while, namely Kara, Lindsay and Erica. Erica was heading back to Dhunche in a Peace Corps jeep on Wednesday, the same day I was supposed to go back to Birganj

My original plan was to Birganj and then take a bus the next day, July 3, 2002, to Janakpur, another Terai town to the east of Birganj and then due south of the East-West Highway, where the PCVs had planned a Fourth of July extravaganza.

That’s where Kara and Lindsay had also left Kathmandu for a day earlier, since they needed more time by taking a bus. I had something of dilemma.

Either I could try and sneak on the Peace Corps jeep headed to Dhunche, which would just be an overnight stay in an astonishingly beautiful place, or I could head back to Birganj and see some more of the horrors that the Terai had to offer.

What to do?

Well, of course I wanted to try and sneak on a jeep and get a free trip into Lang Tang National Park, of which Dhunche is the first city within and also the main city of Rasuwa district. I made my plans and discussed with Erica details of the trip.

The night before I went out with Kara and Lindsay to tell them the news about missing the Fourth of July in Janakpur. Tough news. I have my fans.

OK, whatever, Kara said, shrugging with hands in the air, We’ll just celebrate tonight.

The next day they began their 12-hour bus ride to Janakpur. They were planning on late night on the town to help them sleep as much as possible on the bus.

It was a late night and the next morning, before leaving I saw Lindsay and Kara, both looking haggard and reacting to the daylight as if they were vampires, heading to the Kathmandu bus park, hoping to sleep off one celebration before beginning another.

I was feeling tense about sneaking onto the jeep without telling the office, but I knew that they were expecting me to get on a plane that day and head back to DMZ, love it or leave it.

It’s sad that I just can’t get on to the part about firecrackers and the Fourth of July, that I have to ramble on like this.

Kids tending buffaloes enjoy themselves while watering the animals on a hot day in Janakpur.

Anyhow, as soon as I got to Peace Corps office I began thinking that this quick trip wasn’t really worth making a bad name for myself around the office, so I went in to talk with my program officer, a half professional adviser and a half baby sitter of PCVs.

He was cheery enough and listened to my experiences in Nepalgunj. I talked about having done this and that and all sorts of professional crap and then hey by the way could I go with the jeep up to Dhunche just for a night before heading back to Birganj would that be fine please?

No, and that was that.

A few hours later that day I was on one of the terrifying local airlines’ planes, flying back to Birganj, the Twin Otter banging and undulating as I was certain I could sense the hull twist and contort as we skimmed over the foothills of the Himalayas.

When the plane finally landed, I still was glad I hadn’t taken a bus, which is, in comparison, 100% more frightening. Birganj didn’t seem so bad when I returned, perhaps because I knew that the next day, July 3, 2002, I was getting on a bus and heading to Janakpur for the first major get-together of friends since we swore in as volunteers on May 8.

The next day I was on a bus heading due east for a few hours, then turned off the East-West Highway (also called the Mahendra Highway) and headed south on a narrow, local road for 20 km into Janakpur.

The local road was narrow and uneven, since on either side spanned endless rice fields, freshly flooded with monsoon rains and covered with Indian migrant workers, cutting grass and contracting malaria. It was spectacularly beautiful—an image of Nepal I won’t soon forget.

I was staring out of the windows when I the bus slowed and came to a halt. I only noticed because it wasn’t one of the quick, rapid stops the buses make when dropping off or picking up folks. This was gradual and tense. In Nepal, traffic moves to the left.

I was sitting on the left, admiring the beauty of the countryside, when the bus began to lurch rightwards. Women passed weeping. My stomach twisted. I’d seen rolled buses, old with rust and long absent of glass, and I’ve seen sections of guardrail missing along a cliff, with ominous dark skid marks leading to the edge, but I’d never see the human of it.

Lynn and your author, Scott, in Janakpur on the Fourth of July 2002.

The women were grouped together, crying, spastically throwing about their arms. When the bus crossed to the other side of the road I could see ahead a crowd of people standing in the road.

The bus straightened and I lost my view until we passed the crowd. They were standing quietly—I don’t remember any yelling or commotion—and perhaps 20 feet away in the road was a man, dead, laying in more blood that I’d ever seen in one spot, his cycle nearby equally mangled and contorted.

But just as if it were on television, we moved on, passing to more pleasant scenery—other sights I won’t soon forget.

Janakpur looked a lot like Kalaiya in that it was busy and dusty. Janakpur, though, was more developed. The roads were dusty and wandered in ways that couldn’t have not been planned. I found the roadside pasals to be little more than temporary shanties.

I took a seat at one of these shanties and had a coke while I waited for Ken to meet me and take me to his place. He and Lynne, a married couple, lived with Chris, another volunteer from our group who was a science teacher. All three of them are individuals and rather gregarious, but Chris above all.

The town seemed a maze as Ken and I walked to his place. There was one landmark that we passed I thought was exceptional. I had been told before that Janakpur is the only city in Nepal that has a train.

It’s a small arrangement: a single steam engine pulling two cars with the majority of the passengers riding on the roof to escape the heat. I thought of Michael Palin’s Around the World in 80 Days, seeing Michael peer out of trains racing across some desolate part of India with a city riding on top of the train.

At Ken’s I had a happy reunion with friends: Jeff, Yvette, Lynne, Jennifer, Lynne, Chris, Matt, and others I’m forgetting. Others were still coming in.

In fact, Lynne told us in the midst of the chit-chat, Lindsay and Kara are at the bus park waiting to get picked up.

Kara and Lindsay after arriving in Janakpur from a night bus from Kathmandu.

I was excited that they weren’t at Ken’s when I came in, because I was hoping for a chance to surprise them since the day before they had seen me putting my bags in a Peace Corps jeep headed to the northern edge of Nepal

A day later, though, I’d beaten them to Janakpur and was, geographically and culturally, as far as I could ever be from the beauty of Dhunche.

Let me get them, I said, asking for directions and maybe a map, too, to the Janakpur bus park, I want to surprise them.

They were supposed to be waiting near the Janakpur dhoka, a ‘gate’ that was being built in the middle of an intersection just south of the house. It wasn’t hard to miss, though all Ken said was that it was a big concrete mess.

After seeing it I can’t think of a more articulate way to describe it, so maybe that’s what makes him Ken from Janakpur.

It is a winding of concrete snakes, making something of a shape; though Ken’s words are the best description, they don’t quite emphasize the immensity of it. It’s big. It’s lots of concrete. And it’s clearly a mess. Sort of like Janakpur.

As I walked to the table where Kara and Lindsey were sitting, snarling at their steaming cups of tea, I could see that they were still hung-over and clearly unhappy. It became that my surprise wouldn’t be met with smiles.

I readied my camera and walked near, framed my shot, and told the girls, Hi.

The girls squinted in the foul monsoon sunshine, Scott?

Slowly people arrived: Liz and Drew arrived from Jhapa; Tony, Laurel, and André from Rajbiraj; and Kira from Biratnagar. That night we were ready to celebrate the Fourth. We were happy, we felt patriotic, more American than perhaps ever before, and we had fireworks.

Just before Chris lit the first of the fireworks, we all had a worry that we’d probably never had before. These will sound like gunfire. The police will come. The Maoists will come. They will shoot. Is this is a good idea?

And I noticed that they were already lit. We stood back, anxious, and giddy with guilt, knowing that we were happily entertaining a bad idea. They were loud, they were bright, and they were getting everyone’s attention in the area.

Traditional but not a good idea, fireworks can give the impression of gun fire.

Those fireworks, my friends, were American. But before another round the downstairs neighbor rushed upstairs, begging us to cease igniting more fireworks, clearly scared of being taken for a rebel and dying for some US holiday. He was calmed, the music was turned back up, and we were back to our merry-making sans faux gunfire.

Earlier that evening, in Ken’s living room, I had been sitting and talking with Lynne. She turned away for a moment to answer the phone, and I sat back in my chair, thinking about Dhunche, about places I could be where I wouldn’t be sweating at nine o’clock at night, quickly drinking my beer while it was still cold from the store where we’d bought them.

It’s for you, Lynne said, asking, as surprised as I was, It’s someone from America.

America indeed. Still it seems magical that someone on the other side of this planet, separated by an ocean and sea or two, depending on which way you go, can pick up a phone, dial a number, and my phone, or the Bests’ phone, will ring moments later. Whereas getting a package here is like reliving Christmas, getting a phone call is like Santa Claus himself calling you.

For ten minutes with rock music loud in my ears, friends calling my attention, I spoke with Nikkie back home, her hearing the background noises of my new life in Nepal, and me feeling a little less far from home.

Which is where home was, way back in July.

Testing evaluates, but when that means of evaluation is ineffective then the answer is to find some other means, which as of time of print I haven’t figured out exactly. It’s coming, though.

Just as few days ago I found myself being on the other side of an exam for the first time in Nepal. I signed up for the Foreign Service written exam, which was given Saturday, September 21, 2002.

More than anything else, the test was an excuse to take a break from my school situation (recently improved thanks to a visit by my PO from Kathmandu) and see some friends.

At the Vishuwa Mandir in Birganj, kids light candles on the occasion of Buddha Poorima, Buddha's birthday.

I had gone to the Birganj bus park on Thursday, September 19, 2002, to get on a bus to Narayanghat where I’d stay just one night to break up the long bus ride to Kathmandu. I hadn’t taken a bus all the way from Birganj to Kathmandu yet, but I have been told that it is long (8–12 hours). I thought a trip to Narayanghat (only 3 hours) would help break up the travels.

I taught my classes and then rushed to my deraa to get my bags. I told my family that I’d be back in a few days and boarded a rickshaw for the bus park. However, when I finally got to the bus park by 4:00 p.m., I found that all the buses for Narayanghat had left.

Very danger, I was told by a man in the ticket office.

Because Narayanghat is in one of the regions heavily affected by the Maoists, the buses don’t run at night for fear of being attacked by the Maoists or the police. People see both as equally dangerous in affected areas.

So I bought a ticket for Kathmandu for early the next morning and left my bags in the bus agency’s office and went home, dreading explaining to the family why I wasn’t leaving until the next morning. Their questions would be fired at me much like an automatic submachine gun.

The next day’s travels seemed to last forever. Unlike the Air Bus’ air conditioning, traffic was thick and constant the entire way to Kathmandu. And by the time we got to the final ridge just outside the valley, a landslide had reduced the main pass to one lane, holding us in backed-up traffic for nearly three hours.

You know what I suggest you bring to Nepal? Bring endless and enduring patience to sit in a crowded bus with no moving air, so you can watch for hours a trail of buses and trucks crisscrossing the mountainside and not feel complete desperation.

By the time I finally got to the Spice Deraa (the name of the apartment in Kathmandu I share with a number of other volunteers, pronounced “e-spice”) it was half past 7 o’clock, the time I had arranged to meet friends in Thamel.

I showered and took to the streets, hoping that I’d just run into folks in Thamel, which is exactly what happened.

I finally found people at Pub Maya. I hadn’t time to finish my first beer before Zach left the pub and returned with five new N/195 PCTs who’d just arrived in Kathmandu on Tuesday, September 17, 2002.

The next day they were due to leave for their host families near Butwol. They seemed nice enough, and I found their complete disinterest in my advice outstanding indicators of better sense than what I had exhibited. I know there’s some cliché I can use for such courage, like “The dead have no fear,” or some such nonsense.

Anyhow, the next day I took the exam and ate nachos at Phora Dubar, the American Club where the test was administered. We met a guy named Richard who was passing through Kathmandu on his way back to America after finishing two years as a JET volunteer in Japan.

That Saturday was a full moon and several of us had made plans to visit Bouddanath, a Buddhist temple in the valley that has a huge candle lighting ceremony. It’s quite a peaceful place. Andrew, Richard, and I got there somewhat before the ceremony began and did a bit of wandering around the temple.

The one thing that was disappointing about this temple was the lack of monkeys. Some things you just come to expect of holy places in Nepal. One of those things is monkeys—lots of monkeys.

When it came time to light candles, Andrew and I entered one of the rooms where candles were kept. It was not much larger than a walk-in closet (here I am explaining the size of a holy place in relation to a closet) and quite hot, since the room held nothing more than a full sized table covered in oil lamps, most the size of tea light candles.

At the Bal Mandir school during Laxmi Puja, one of the younger students prays (until disturbed).

In the center of the table elevated on small stands were several very large oil lanterns. Being in that room crammed with smal fires was not unlike being in Birganj.

When our turn came around to light some candles (sort of for prayer, sort of for vigil) Andrew looked at me solemnly and said, I’m going to light one for Thumba. Thumba is a Doberman pincher that Andrew bought for a friend from Kolkata. Thumba is not well. Actually, Thumba is long of this world.

As the English dailies in Nepal would report, it was an auspicious occasion. Heartiest felicitations. Et cetera. Shortly thereafter, we met up with several other PCVs, namely two PCVs who were being sent home for stealthing.

Stealthing is the Peace Corps term for being away from post without informing anyone officially. Most every PCV does this at some point, except these two were caught and paid a hefty price that most would say was excessive.

Anyhow, these two knew of a hidden Italian restaurant near Bouddanath. It’s one of those places you have to know someone in order to find. Getting to the dining area including knocking on someone’s front door, walking through a family’s kitchen, and finally sitting in the dining area, which was clearly the family’s living space.

Oddly enough this wasn’t your normal family in Nepal. The woman who answered the door, a small, stout, and cheery woman who seemed to heave with excitement when she spoke, was something of a surprise. I came in first and began speaking to her in Nepali, asking her about where we’d sit and other questions that she answered in Nepali.

I asked her, quite stupidly, where she’d learned to cook Italian food.

In Italy, she answered in Nepali.

I then asked where she was from.

From Italy, she answered again. Here I was speaking Nepali to an Italian woman who’d been living in Nepal for some time.

The dinner, my friends, was splendid. What she made for us was nothing more than home-cooked Italian food. I’ve never had an experience like that before.

There we were: eight or so volunteers, sitting in an Italian expat’s living room, drinking wine that had already been opened (no doubt they’d been drinking from it earlier), over-looking the still glowing candles of Bouddanath, and I couldn’t help but think, What a strange, strange life I’ve gotten myself into.

We were the volunteers to the southeast or Narayanghat: Jane-Erie, also going to Birganj; Patty, a forestry instructor heading to Hetauda (due east of Narayanghat, due north of Birganj and where we would turn south towards India); and Lee, a science teacher going to Kalaiya, a rural village near Birganj.

Emotions ran high, and I hadn’t expected to see so many people in the morning wishing us off. Since leaving the States, I’ve been the one leaving, never the one to stay behind to wave and smile to people on their way.

At the Vishuwa Buddhist monument in Birganj, a woman prays by candles on Buddha Poornima

After two months of incubated friendships, many of us were parting ways with close friends—I felt in some ways that they were my only friends—with whom we’d shared phenomenal experiences. We’d meet again at the All-Vol, the ‘all volunteers’ conference in January, eight months away. What I’m trying to say is that it was sad. Really sad. Grown men-crying sad. Women wailing and beating their breasts sad.

Of course there were easy goodbyes, the token, We’ll write. It was exactly what I didn’t need as I was driven off to what I knew would be an awful few weeks. In a matter of hours, I was unloading my bags into my new deraa, wondering, bedless, What now?

I left for a hotel, overwhelmed by the settling in I would have to begin in the morning. The enormity of a simple task of, let’s say, finding a bed turns into, How do I ask to buy a bed in Nepali without buying a water buffalo?

That night, eating alone, thinking about people who I missed, people who I knew where finding out how much the presence of others had made our previous adjustments easier, more communal. But now I alone. Alone. Just me. Big time. Lonely? Yes. Acute? Indeed.

There were a couple other PCVs living near me in Birganj, Luke and Rob, but both were gone from site for the next few weeks. The anxiety and sadness that I had felt leaving the States had been manageable, but now it began to erupt—almost uncontrollably.

Staying in a hotel was awful. Nothing exacerbates loneliness more than sleeping in a room overtly symbolic of the transient nature of my presence. And here I was, doing two years hard time in the inferno-like heat of Birganj, spending one more night in one more bed that I’d never see again.

I was not sure of being a nomad by choice. I had eaten at Himanchal Cabin, a restaurant with a Nepali-speaking staff, in comparison with Birganj’s large Bhojpuri-, Hindi-, and incomprehensible Nepali-speaking populations. (A combination of all three of these is something I call ‘Hippurali.’)

But man was it depressing. It was like I was in Hopper’s Nighthawks, alone with the soda jerk, who could only speak Nepali and with whom I could only discuss fruit preferences let alone my feelings of unrelenting depression. Now that would be a painting.

But that was weeks ago. I might have not been able to make it if I hadn’t broken the rules, though.

We’re not supposed to leave our site (also called ‘post,’ as in a big stick that is stuck in the ground that doesn’t move) for the first three months, which isn’t that tough since we’re just getting settled in and beginning our work. (I had walked into the school year in progress and was playing catch up with the book as my students hadn’t had an English teacher all year).

It was announced after I had been at school for two weeks that we would have a long weekend in celebration of the Buddha’s birthday, born in 5 BCE on a Sunday, apparently in Lumbini, a village west of Narayanghat by about seven hours.

A good friend, Chelsea, had taken her assignment in Gaidankot, the village where our training had taken place. Her school, in fact, was about 500 meters from our training site. She had found a deraa in nearby Narayanghat.

Chelsea was living with Shana, another volunteer from our group who worked with an NGO that promoted sexual health awareness and offered assistance to sex workers. Good work. Interesting pamphlets.

Matt, a science teacher and secretly Canadian, with whom I’d drank Glenfiddich with at the bar way back in San Francisco, also lived nearby. It was going to fun, old times recaptured, and it was going to save (or at least distract) me from my discontent.

Then on the morning I was to catch my bus, I heard on the BBC that Nepal’s Prime Minister, Deuba, had dissolved the Lower House of Parliament, a major elected body. Nepal had been under a state of emergency since the previous November, and the House was to vote to either reinstate or discontinue the state of emergency, which, in effect, is martial law.

I live under martial law. I never thought about it like that before.

The police and army are a constant presence. On my way to the bus park at exactly 5:30 a.m., I passed a formation of army marching and armed. Apparently the House had told the PM that it would vote against reinstating the State of Emergency.

So the PM took action by getting support from the Crown to simply do away with the elected (and also dissident) faction of the government. I expected to go home then, that Peace Corps would be calling me shortly to warn of impending riots.

But there weren’t any riots. There wasn’t even a peep of social unrest in Birganj. I had been told about a Bollywood actor who had been quoted making anti-Nepali statements, and there were huge displays of violence in Nepal. Buses were burned.

There were riots and the army and police had to be deployed until the actor assured the public that he had been inaccurately quoted. But for half of the government being tossed aside, there wasn’t even that. Buses ran on time, including my bus with me on it, and I even got to Narayanghat ahead of schedule.

The Makalu line is the one to take. Outside the Makalu ticket office in the bus park there is a gorilla-like man working for Makalu who chants, quite passionately as if he’s trying to get a batter to miss a pitch, Makalu, Makalu, Makalu, Makalu, Makalu. Hey! Hey! Makalu, Makalu . . . .

It wasn’t until this past Tuesday when I went to Kalaiya to visit Lee that I had a bad bus ride. Experience has proven that on any given bus ride, you’re definitely along with at least one or two people who will suffer from motion sickness. Vomit will be sprayed along the side of the bus as it roars down the road.

See, local buses are what you take between the big city and the village. Local buses stop and pick up anyone—or any thing for that matter—along the way. This is also means that most of these people on local buses are rural folk, less used to vehicular transportation (in contrast to animal-powered transportation).

We were so close to Kalaiya when this woman sitting two rows ahead began to lose it. Boy howdy did she.

I first saw the men sitting in front of me jump up into the isle as the woman made quite a mess of herself. She then got her head out of the window and made a mess of the bus. And then I sat and watched streams of vomit splash along the outside of my window.

Suddenly, turning to talk to the man next to me who had been pleading with me to give him a US visa was the better option. That’s why bus rides can be awful. But not for my big return to Narayanghat.

The bus arrived early and I had enough time to take a tempo to Gaidankot to visit my host family. I saw many old faces, drank chiye at all the old pasals and was appalled by the same tremendous wave of heat that is Narayanghat.

A brother and sister pose for me near Shana's place near Narayanghat.

The second pose is more natural, probably because I waited for it.

It was nice, though. It didn’t take long to feel an absence of the people who had made these places special. My host family clearly had no idea of what to do with me. I sat in the room where I had ‘grown up’ in Nepal, although it had become again what it had always been: my host parent’s room.

I could see that as long as I was in Nepal, I would be a drifter. In the early evening I met Chelsea on the Narayni Bridge. She and Shana were living with the old host family of one of the language teachers, followers of Sai Babba, one of the most popular living Hindu gurus.

I have only met one Nepali who didn’t like Sai Babba. He ran the Nepali Guest House, a hotel in Narayanghat with the finest daal bhaat around. Andrew and I were eating lunch one day when he began examining an extremely kitsch photo Andrew had bought of Sai Babba.

It was a gold-flaked photo, like Gustav Klimt posters you can buy in the mall’s artmart. He had said, in Nepali, “What a great picture, but what a bad man.”

The followers of Sai Babba, as far as I can tell, have two distinguishing features from other Hindus. First, they hang pictures of Sai Babba instead of the usual orthodox Hindu gods. He’s a funny looking man, somewhat portly in an orange robe, sporting a massive Harlem Globe Trotter’s-esque fro.

They also keep a small ornamental chair near their Sai Babba shrine, a sign of respect and hope that perhaps some day Sai Babba will pop by to visit and need a place to sit.

Secondly, the have a daily call to prayer that initiated by a high pitched bell, rung with incredible fervor by a true believer, at least every morning at 5:00 a.m.

The weekend went well. All sorts of people showed up from the area. I met a volunteer, Renee, a science teacher stationed in Monglepur, 30 minutes away by bus from Narayanghat, who had gone to UNT, who had finished up in the fall of 1998 and who had lived in Bruce Hall that semester, my old dorm.

We knew a few people in common, namely Bean, my old roommate my first semester in Bruce. There isn’t much to say about what actually happened that weekend but about what I saw, what I felt, and how far I have come since then. Birganj is home, and I feel planted. There was one special moment.

We had gone to Sarauha, a scenic, tranquil city on the edge of the Chitwan National Park, home to Bengali tigers, where elephants are as common a sight as cars or bikes. To go to Sarauha, you take a bus east from Narayanghat and then south at the city of Tandi Bazaar, when the scenery becomes more distinct.

Instead we walked most of the way from Sarauha back to Tandi, through pastures with dozens of water buffalo, to see a clear horizon where the sun was setting. There were seven of us, and I felt then that I was really a part of something cohesive. We crossed a small foot bridge and then came to the main road. And tempo happened across us. We decided to hitch a ride back to Tandi Bazaar even though the tempo was already more than full.

Matt took the roof with two other Nepalis, and Shana, Renee, Naomi, and myself hung to the sides and back of the tempo as it buzzed along rural Nepal. It was cool by then—evening is the only time when Terai weather is bearable—and scenery rolled by not unlike summer trips across Kansas to visit grandma’s.

Boy, that’s some sentimental garbage.

But emotions seem to run high in Nepal. Things are better now, good even, and I’m looking forward to a summer full of adventures. There’s a Fourth of July event in Janakpur (four hours by bus). I’m planning on going: many friends, many stories, and many chances to be sprayed by vomit.