It turned out that what Jim could do at the hostel, without a bunch of German tourists to distract him, was what he probably should have done before he ever set out: plan his trip.
He already knew he was based in Sydney, because he’d bought a week at the hostel and being a salesman (even a good salesman) at a small paper company in Pennsylvania didn’t really get you “have more than one hotel room a night” money, even in the off-season in Australia. Plus he’d been desperate when he’d bought the tickets but now he was more despairing, and while desperate meant spending money, despairing meant lethargy. So he wasn’t spending more than he had to in order to salvage the trip and make it something he could talk to people back home about without having to say “I moped about Pam the whole time.” And maybe even tell himself that too.
Despite it being winter, it turned out there were actually a fair number of things to do in and about Sydney in the early days of June. Just after…a certain event that would remain nameless…was the Queen’s Birthday. Not actually Elizabeth II Regina’s natal day, of course, but the official celebration that stood in for it so that the ritual calendar of empire didn’t have to change. He supposed it would be the King’s birthday if Charles ever became king, not that that seemed likely anytime soon. A change in the Queen of England was like the discovery of a new planet: you heard tell that things like that had happened, once upon a time, but you didn’t expect to live through it yourself. It didn’t seem like the holiday actually had a lot going on, but there were special hours in some of the museums, and he supposed, given the jetlag, he should take advantage of things like that that might otherwise be closed when his body felt like going out.
Besides the holiday, there were of course backcountry (or more likely, extremely managed pseudo-back-country) kangaroo tours, which were a must (or at least the zoo...) and whale-watching tours, which he supposed might be a good distraction, assuming a) he managed to see a whale and b) no one ever mentioned Moby-Dick to him. He had had the peculiar misfortune to read that book at the age of 15 in an English class, and thinking (inaccurately, as it happened) that his sophomore English grades were going to matter in the grand scheme of things, he’d actually read it with some care. It hadn’t necessarily stuck with him, but there was no way he could think of hunting for whales without thinking of Ahab and the White Whale, and that was just too metaphorical for his present state of mind.
But there were still parties on the long weekend, and he supposed it might be a fine time to explore some of the sports that were new to him: varieties of football he’d only vaguely heard of, cricket, and so on. He imagined himself strutting back into Scranton pretending to Dwight to be an aficionado of some obscure sport even Dwight didn’t comprehend, and it was a satisfying vision for the ten or so seconds before he remembered his plan was not to go back to the Scranton office ever again. Still, the sports seemed like a likely place to start, so he gathered some brochures from the front desk of the hostel and set forth in search of a ticket office.
**
Pam awaited the descent into Sydney with more bated breath than the flight officer’s extremely well-managed jarless landing deserved. After all, for her it was not so much a matter of whether the landing itself would go well (she actually spent almost no time worrying about that) but about what would happen after. She’d gone round and round and roundabout in her head, playing through all sorts of reactions Jim might have to seeing her (from her favorite, enfolding her in a carbon copy of the warm embrace that she’d felt so cold after slipping out of in the office a month ago, to her secret fear, a blank look of disdain and the cut direct and everything in between, including several glorious blow-by-blow arguments that had let her alternately confess all the things she felt she’d done wrong [in the voice of Jim arguing with her] and let him know in no uncertain terms all he’d done wrong to her [in her own responses]). She’d thought about how she’d greet him, how he might look, what he might be thinking.
But she hadn’t really been able to answer a major question: how was she going to find him? Because “Sydney” wasn’t, actually, an address, and Toby had either clammed right up or just plain not known any more details. She was pretty sure he’d stay downtown, because Jim hated commutes and talked a lot about how much he’d loved central Philly whenever he visited his college friends back there. She knew it couldn’t be expensive, because, well, Dunder Mifflin. But beyond that…Sydney was still a major city, and there were dozens of places he could be staying. And even if she somehow guessed right, maybe he’d be at a bar somewhere, rebounding or moving on or whatever you called it when you finally realized you didn’t need to be lingering around a dowdy receptionist who’d rejected you when you offered her your heart on a silver platter.
Well. That was a thought to bate anyone’s breath.
But she didn’t really think that was what Jim would be doing, or she wouldn’t be flying across the Pacific to tell him that she’d just needed time. No, she was if not sure then at least moderately hopeful that she could count on Jim to be…well, Jim if she could find him.
But she’d have to find him. And for that she’d have to rely on what she had, at one low point right after Casino Night, doubted most: her own instincts about how Jim would behave.
