by Jake Wolff
S’s head came forward. A lot of my images from that day are blurry, but this I remember: His mouth. His lips parted and dry. I’ll wet them for you, I wanted to tell him. Bring them here and be mine.
“Am I dreaming?” I asked.
“Dor is like a dream,” Gavril mumbled into the floor. “It’s something you can’t explain.”
“What is that word?” I asked. “Dor?”
“We told you,” Gavril answered. “Impossible to translate.”
“Try.” My father was running laps through the warehouse, weaving in and out of the stacks. When I was a child, he would jog every morning, always the same route: the FDR from 120th to East 81st. He ran so slowly that people walking their dogs would pass him. I would say, “Don, what’s the point of running if you’re running slower than you walk?” And he would say, “Samuel, let me explain to you Dr. Robert Trivers’s theory of self-deception.”
Gavril push-upped to his knees and sat cross-legged with his back against Bogdi’s couch. “Dor,” Gavril said. “Dor, Dor, Dor. It’s a word you see in poetry and songs. It is to miss somebody, or to want something you can’t have. It is desire and sadness. It is your heaviest pain.” Gavril put his hands over his heart.
“Mm,” said S, either moved or asleep.
Livia ran her toes through Gavril’s hair. “Only romantics think Dor is some great mystery. It’s very simple: Dor is when you regret not fucking someone when you had the chance. Which, thank you very much, is what most poems are about.”
Gavril swatted her foot away. “You are an animal, really. There are monkeys with deeper thoughts. I sang a song about Dor at my mother’s funeral.”
“Okay, okay.” Bogdi’s impatience suggested he’d listened to this debate before.
Gavril stood and serenaded us with the song. By the time he reached the final verse, he was in tears. “‘Mi-e dor de tine … [sniffle] … mamă.’”
For the next thirty to sixty seconds, all I could hear was ssssssssssss. Like bacon sizzling. When the sound stopped, I was standing far from the couches, eyes closed, lifting a box of baby aspirin. I held it over my head like the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy.
“I told you,” I heard Bogdi say. “It makes you want to pick stuff up.”
I opened my eyes. Livia was attached to Bogdi’s neck like a lamprey. Her hands caressed his chest. He was having a conversation with S as if nothing were happening, but I could see his eyes go glassy. Bogdi said he was pursuing an elixir of life because God told him to, but really he was just in love, and that love came with a price: the dread of losing it.
“You need to tell me everything that’s in here,” I said.
I expected an immediate no, but Livia surprised me, saying, “That can be arranged.”
“I’m pumped you like it,” Bogdi repeated. “Because we have a request.”
I saw S blink himself to alertness.
“We need to get more Dor to the States,” Livia said. “The Underground is growing.”
“I’ll do it,” said S immediately. “No need to involve him.”
Livia shook her head. “American citizenship required.”
“Plus you look like a terrorist, Sadie,” Bogdi added. “No offense.”
I was looking at my hands. I felt as if there were multiple versions of us—many Sadiqs, many Bogdis, a hundred Livias—having this conversation at once. I felt as if I were being pulled apart. “What would I have to do?”
“Very simple.” Bogdi sat forward in his seat. “You give Livia a photocopy of your passport. She gives you a bag. You check the bag. That’s it. You don’t even need to pick it up at baggage claim.”
“And then what?”
“And then you’re one of us,” Livia said.
S touched my hand. “If you’re caught…”
“Never happen!” Bogdi protested. “No way.”
Livia leaned her head on his shoulder. “If you want to work with us, that’s what it takes.”
So I agreed, and amazingly, that turned out to be the least interesting part of my trip. It went exactly as Bogdi described. I checked the bag, had anxious diarrhea the whole flight home, and then returned to my apartment as a member of the Immortalist Underground.
But let’s go back:
S and I left the warehouse around midnight. It had rained while we were inside, and the streets were shiny. We leaned against each other and breathed deeply. Silver lindens shed pollen onto the road. Their leaves broadcast the sweet smell of honey and lime juice. S threw his arm around my shoulders. From up close I could see his bristly nose hairs, the imperfections in his skin. We had to walk to the subway.
“So what do you think?” S asked me. The streets had been busy when we arrived, filled with sidewalk vendors selling cotton candy and snow cones and multicolored shoelaces. It was quiet now.
“I don’t know. I definitely feel something.”
“Me, too.”
We followed the stairs belowground, paid our fare, and waited for the train to arrive. This was the hard part—to sit with our feelings, to keep the flame of our happiness kindled. It’s how all of my experiments go: I feel good, the way I’ve always wanted to feel, but then that goodness slips away like a tide going out. I can’t hold on to it. And what’s worse is that the loss I feel isn’t something being taken from me; it’s my brain healing itself. It’s my body trying to help. I can’t tell it, No, don’t you understand? By healing yourself, you’re killing me.
The train came, and S took my hand and led me inside. We sat in the rear of the car, and he leaned his head against the scratched plastic window. The intercom spoke to us in Romanian. Lights from the tunnel whizzed by.
“I feel like I could outrun this thing,” he said. “Or pick it up like the Hulk.”
“I’m not tired at all.”
An image of C came into my mind. Her cute nose. Her round, pale eyes, blue and soft like shallow water. By the time the train arrived, S and I had been touching for as long as we’d ever touched. Our hands were entwined, sweaty and grimy from the stale underground air. When we emerged topside, it was as if a test had been passed. Heracles escaping from Acherusia.
We walked to the hotel but lingered in front of the doors. I could see the receptionist staring at us, unsure if we were guests. I wished we had cigarettes or something to explain why we were just standing there, delaying the decision we were about to make. S stared at our feet, uncharacteristically nervous. “Do you want to come to my room?” he said at last.
My mouth went dry, and I said nothing. In my mind I was already in his room, but S took my silence as reluctance.
“It doesn’t have to mean anything,” he said. “I would never tell anyone.”
“I know.”
“We can tell her we slept at Bogdi’s.”
I didn’t want to think about what I would tell C. I wavered.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just, I don’t want you to be my Dor.”
Two minutes later we were in his room. We rode the elevator, willing it to be faster, and when we reached our floor, crept as quietly as we could away from the room I shared with C and toward his. I held my breath as he swiped his card. Red light. Red light. He blew on the magnetic strip and tried once more. Green light. Inside, he offered me a drink from the minibar, which I declined, then he sat on the bed while I pretended to admire the view from his window. I closed the blinds and switched off the bedside light.
I sat next to him, and he found my face with his hands. He gathered my shirt and used it to guide me on top of him. I kissed and kissed and kissed him. He breathed heavily the way English people do, with a hint of something, a groan, as if the whole world were too hot for them. He took off my pants and somehow knew to take his own off for me. My fingers barely worked.
I started to turn him around, but he said, no, like this, and I felt his leg land on my shoulder. The hair on his calves tickled my cheek. When we started, in earnest, I didn’t last long.
Afterward, lying n
ext to me, he said, “I was telling the truth when I said this doesn’t have to mean anything. But for the record, I’d like for it to mean something.”
I rolled onto my side to see him better. “Doesn’t my life bother you? What I’m planning with Bogdi?”
“It should, probably. No, it does.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I let him keep talking. I liked knowing this about him: he would always keep talking.
“I worry for you,” he said. “But I think I can be okay with it. It’s worth being okay with it if I can be with you.”
The next morning, I woke up early so that I could sneak back into my room. S didn’t stir. I opened the door to leave his room, and there was C, sitting on the floor in the hallway with her back against the wall. Crying.
“Oh.”
“Asshole,” she said through her tears. “Asshole, asshole, asshole.”
I had no words. My vision pixilated. I sat next to her on the floor.
“Don’t sit next to me,” she said, but didn’t move away. “And don’t deny it. I’ve been sitting here all night, like one of those girls who does that.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“All I want to know is, how long? I’ve seen you two flirt, but, Jesus, everyone flirts with you.”
I tried to take her hand, but she pulled it away. “It was just this once. I didn’t mean for you to know.” In spite of myself, I asked, “How did you know?”
“Are you joking? When you got off the elevator, you were singing.”
I didn’t remember this at all.
“Some Romanian song. I heard your voices and came to check on you. He was unlocking his door, and you were draped around him, kissing the back of his neck. So that’s an image I have, now. Forever.”
I blushed, ashamed, not just that she’d seen me but that I’d been so forward with S. In my clearly unreliable mind, I had been more reserved. But apparently I threw myself at him as if it were prom night.
She was waiting for me to say something, but I didn’t know what to tell her, or what I even wanted. So I said, “I’m not writing a book.” When she didn’t respond, I said, “I haven’t taken my antidepressants since the day I hurt you.”
“The day you hurt me,” she repeated quietly. “Which one do you mean?”
An hour later, the cab came and took her to the airport. I’ll never see her again, probably, and I don’t know what to think or feel. I am alone and on drugs. I have Dor. It must have been Gavril’s song we were singing when C heard us. The funeral song. I’ve since looked up the lyrics. I miss my village, the song says. I miss my country. It’s about someone who wants to go home.
Good night.
16
The Tourist
I sat across from Sadiq at Big Wharf Fish ’n’ Chips, a seaside diner for tourists. Before he arrived, I tracked his flight from London, watched the little airplane avatar blip across blue ocean. It was Saturday. I’d spent the morning pacing my bedroom until I couldn’t wait any longer and left for RJ’s. In his car, I kept peering over the seat in case anyone was following us, kept checking the side mirror as if I were on the run from the law. Maybe I was. We still didn’t know who had broken into Sammy’s apartment and storage unit, and I carried my fear of this person like a collar around my neck. We arrived at the restaurant a full hour early, and as I walked to the entrance, alone, I half expected to find the door destroyed.
By the time Sadiq showed up, scanning the claw-foot tables with tired eyes, I’d already apologized to the waiter on ten separate occasions. My mood was penitential. When I saw Sadiq’s body in the doorway, damming the light of the sun with his baggy T-shirt and duffel bag, straight from the airport, I almost slid under the table. This wasn’t a name on a postcard, an S in a journal. This was Sadiq, Sadie, flesh and blood, the man Sammy loved long before he met me and who had no earthly reason to help me—but must.
“I saw your postcard,” I told him as he sat and arranged his bag under the chair, saying whatever I could to fill the silence, which had settled over our table the moment he saw me wave to him and went slack-jawed—me, the one entrusted with Sammy’s journals and research; me, the one entrusted with Sadiq’s phone number; me, a fucking teenager. “From the Republic of Guyana.”
“Well, it was nice of him to keep it. He sure as hell didn’t respond.”
Over the phone, I had told him that Sammy had died and that I, his best friend in Littlefield, was in possession of his research, his storage locker, and a cryptic note. My use of the phrase best friend should have given away my age. Just as I certainly looked young to him, he looked old to me—Sammy’s journals never mentioned that Sadiq was ten years his senior. He was handsome, but the clean-shaven face described by Sammy was gone. His beard was heavy enough to make him look older, more foreign, more out of place in a small Maine town.
“When did you last see him?” I asked.
“Oh, not for years. I only had his address here because I sleuthed for it in a moment of weakness. After his betrayal, he went incognito.”
He would use that word repeatedly throughout our conversation, and soon it became capitalized in my mind: Sammy’s Betrayal. After Sammy dropped out of NYU, his journals became denser, slower reading, full of scientific theories and terms. I’d only read far enough to know that Sadiq and Sammy became a couple after the events of Romania. If a betrayal was coming, that was news to me. But Sadiq seemed to assume Sammy had talked about this betrayal, his mind so wracked with guilt he would confess his past sins. I didn’t have the heart to tell Sadiq that Sammy had never talked about him, even when I pressed for details. “He’s just a guy,” Sammy would say, his voice going hollow. “An old colleague.”
“I can’t imagine him teaching high school,” Sadiq said. “You were his star pupil, I take it?”
“I guess so.” I had decided before Sadiq came that I would be honest—the kind of honesty, like a deathbed confession, that arrives only when one is truly desperate. “At least, that’s how it started.”
Sadiq stared. “It.”
I didn’t say anything. Outside, through the window, I watched a motorboat eddy in tight circles around the pier. Beyond the bay was marshland, and beyond that, the Atlantic.
Sadiq put his head in his hands. “Oh, Sam.”
He was the first adult to know about our affair. Watching him, I was glad no one else knew. I was thankful, too, for RJ, who had never judged me, and who was, at that moment, waiting outside in the car.
“I’m sorry. It’s just … you’re how old?”
“Sixteen.”
“Oh, Sam.” Sadiq glanced nervously at the other tables, as though he’d just realized what an odd pairing we made. The restaurant had a thin lunchtime crowd—most of the tourists had left before September. “Well, I’m here.” Sadiq steeled himself. “You better catch me up.”
I filled him in on everything that had happened. Sadiq sipped his ice water through a straw, watching me with eyes that looked intermittently alert and jet-lagged, their brightness coming and going like a flashlight turned on and off. He hadn’t been to the States in years. “I assumed I’d be tenured in an American Ivy by now. But after his Betrayal I ended up back home, with nothing. I teach at the only place that would have me: Online England University. Can you believe that name? It’s like something from a spam e-mail.”
The waiter delivered our food. The french fries were served in little replica lobster boats, their acrylic hulls emblazoned with the Big Wharf logo. Sadiq turned his gaze from me to the window. The noonday sun reflected off the water, which was more gray than blue, like sharkskin. Above our table, a decorative buoy was suspended in a fishing net. “We talked once about moving to a place like this. Somewhere on the water.”
“So you were a couple, after Bucharest?” I knew the answer, but something told me to let Sadiq speak, not to overwhelm him with how many details of his life I’d learned from Sammy’s journals.
“Not immediately.” Sadiq leaned back in his chair a
nd wiped a bit of lobster roll from his beard. The cold mayonnaise stained the edges of his mustache. “He wouldn’t return my e-mails when he first flew back to New York. He blamed me, along with himself. He could hold a grudge, as you know.”
“Yeah,” I said, even though I didn’t.
“I called Sam when I arrived back in the States, but he wouldn’t answer the phone. He’d changed his voice mail to nothing but fifteen seconds of John Bonham’s drum solo from ‘Moby Dick.’ Zeppelin was my favorite band, so this had to be a message to me. He was saying, ‘Enjoy this recording, because I’m never answering the phone.’”
“Did you want to be his boyfriend?”
My childish phrasing narrowed Sadiq’s eyes. “Yes, I wanted to be his boyfriend. In October, the AGE held a conference in New York. I camped out in front of his apartment building. He had a racist doorman who wouldn’t even let me wait on the steps. I sat on the curb. When Sam came back from wherever he’d been, he took one look at me and burst into tears. It confirmed the doorman’s worst fears about me.
“The dishes in Sam’s apartment were piled so high in the sink that later, when he was asleep, I just threw them out. He’d removed the furniture from his living room to make space for laboratory equipment. It’s really just the smell I remember. Did you know you can predict the offensiveness of an odor using its molecular weight and electron density?”
I could practically smell my dad’s breath. “Yeah.”
“Well, let’s just say Sam’s apartment was very electron dense. Can I eat the last of your chips?”
I sailed my lobster boat across the table. My phone vibrated in the pocket of my corduroys—RJ texting to make sure I was okay—so I typed a quick i’m fine.
The waiter came with our check, which Sadiq paid absentmindedly with crisp American bills. I didn’t say anything. We sat quietly, absorbing the clatter of knives and forks and stainless steel lobster pliers. Neither of us belonged there. We’d been brought together by Sammy, but even our conceptions of him were different; the holes in our hearts were different sizes, different shapes. An amputee and a widow have both lost something, but how much do they have to say to each other? It was a weird, sad scene—the two of us tourists in each other’s life, in a restaurant for tourists.