Dusan Lajovic

The first thing I should point out about Dusan Lajovic, the man, is that he is the kind of guy who ends up on television — it was the night before, I remember, and I’d been sitting there for about 20 minutes. You couldn’t say that he was famous, just that in my 20 years of living in the United States, I’d met five guys like him — not exactly names that any pop culture site would likely link to an article in the world of real men. But it was as if they belonged to a secret club, an underground one, where they’d been carefully chosen and groomed for a certain hour. My five friends and I sat with our eyes glued to our laptop screens for about 30 minutes — Dusan Lajovic looked like he was ready to dive head-first into the abyss. When we lifted our heads, he was already gone.

“Did you see who that was?” a friend asked.

“No,” the other three of us chimed in.

Dusan Lajovic is the kind of guy who ends up on television. We watched the scene from a corner, and before long — it’s like a horror movie you’ve seen — you had it. You recognize the face on the video, and it might only be 10 minutes after he left: long hair, kind of the way I’d first noticed him — as an outsider, slightly different even, but still just the same, and nowhere near as tall as I remembered him from a decade before. (He was 36, I was barely 19.)

I know what you’re thinking: You’re thinking, don’t you remember that face? For someone who was 20 years old when my father died, Dusan Lajovic seems so … different, so much older. I could imagine him in a movie, in a comic book, as an alien or god: the kind of guy that’s turned out from a sci-fi writer. I saw the guy in a movie once before: when he was 16, when he was young, with long, wavy blonde hair and blue eyes, and it just lit up his face and made him seem like something wonderful.