The Believer

by Joakim Zander

  Now she stares out over the river and the city’s compact, gray skyline, and it feels like her life is ending again, like she’s reached the limit of whatever her life is or has been—again. It surprises her that despite everything else that’s happened the feeling is connected to David. She’d always imagined the moment when she finally left him as very different from this. Cleaner and clearer, somehow monumental, not as part of something bigger and more important.

  Now everything she owns is lying next to her on the seat. A U.S. Navy duffel bag she’d bought before her first trip to Ljubljana six months ago. Inside is her sketchbook, computer, some underwear, T-shirts, a few pairs of socks, a dark-blue, knee-length skirt by an English designer that was so expensive it made her dizzy when she ordered it from eBay a few months ago, and an M51 parka in the smallest size, but still too big, which came from the same army surplus store as her duffel. Plus a phone and a maxed-out American Express card in her pocket. That was all she’d brought with her. Everything else belongs to the past. To another one of her pasts.

  She takes her phone out of her pocket again, feels the vibrations of the bridge reproduced in the tremors in her hand, feels the phone shake and jump. It feels warm, just as it did a month ago when she sat on another subway heading uptown to a customer near Grand Central. She doesn’t remember anymore to whom or what, just that the phone buzzed in her hand, and she felt a slight rush that was equal parts shame and joy when she saw who the sender was. An email from Parisa. Shame because it reminded her of all the other emails she never answered. Shame because it dragged her thoughts back to Bergort, to her old life, to everyone she’d abandoned, to Ignacio, to Fadi.

  But also joy that Parisa persevered and still wrote to her occasionally, maybe once a year, even though Yasmine never responded, even though Parisa couldn’t know if Yasmine was reading them. Even Fadi stopped writing to her at some point. In the beginning she’d intended to at least answer his emails. She’d formulated letters in her head as she lay on the mattress on the floor in Crown Heights. Long and detailed letters full of explanations and promises to come back.

  She still did that, even now, even though it had been three years since Fadi’s last email. But she never wrote them. Not because she didn’t want to, but because she didn’t know where to begin. Her break with Bergort had been so sudden and so complete. It had also been the only way: she’d left Fadi and gone directly to the airport with David. And Ignacio? Had he known what was going on? That she was going away? That that was why she’d left him even before she met David? Ignacio’s emails finally stopped too.

  She and David were drunk when he bought the tickets with his scholarship money, and she closed down her Facebook and Instagram. Erased everything that held her captive in Bergort’s net. Everything except an email address, one tiny lifeline. Everything except her shame.

  How could she have left everything behind so quickly? Bergort, which shaped her. Ignacio, her first love. But most of all Fadi. How could she? Her brother, her own blood, who she protected and watched over as long as she could remember. But there was no other way, it was as if Bergort was threatening to pull her down into something deep and dark, something she always had known was there, and had somehow always expected to become a part of.

  But when she met David, it was as if a completely different path appeared. Another direction, another life. And she chose it, almost without thinking. Sometimes in order to move forward, it’s better not to think through all the consequences.

  Hi Yazz,

  Is this even your email address anymore? Anyway, I don’t know how to tell you this, but your brother is dead. I don’t know what you know, but he went to Syria. Now they posted on Facebook that he died in battle. Mehdi talked to your parents. I’m sorry, sister.

  She remembers pulling into West Fourth just as she read that last short sentence, standing up, and pushing her way out of the train, then running up the escalator toward Washington Square Park.

  Then nothing else until late in that night when David found her huddled beneath the window facing the street in their messy studio in Crown Heights. It was as if the rest of that day had been erased, as if it never existed.

  “You have to call your parents,” he whispered and crept up behind her, for once not impatient or speedy, but quiet and warm.

  But she’d wriggled out of his embrace and just shook her head and stared at the wall.

  The following morning she woke up with a new feeling in her chest. A desolation she didn’t know was possible. David had disappeared, and the room was empty and cool. A glowing ray of sunshine had found its way through the dirty window, splashed like a spilled glass of orange juice all across the concrete floor.

  She didn’t leave that room for several days, not until Brett finally tracked her down after she missed a meeting with him and forced her to go to a café where she choked down half a bagel. They’d never spent time together outside of their work relationship, and Brett wasn’t exactly the comforting type, nor was she the type to be comforted. So they mostly sat in excruciating silence until she met his uncomfortable gaze.

  “Get me an assignment,” she said. “Anything. Just as long as it’s far away.”

  Anything to avoid thinking about Fadi, to avoid having to talk about it with David. Anything to avoid having to call her parents or to go back to Bergort. Anything to escape herself and her own betrayal.

  Brett nodded and paid for her breakfast. Three days later she was on a plane to Detroit then Baltimore and finally Tokyo. She hardly had time to wash her clothes in between. She ran from hotel to airport, between meetings with artists and advertising agencies, uninterested in content or the world around them. The only thing that kept her upright was her direction and speed.

  It was on a Tuesday in Tokyo, in Shibuya somewhere, in a dull, modern hotel full of right angles and blond wood, sometime in the middle of the night, when she got the second message. It was the first time she saw her mother’s email address, and for a moment she considered deleting the email unread. But she was too exhausted to resist and opened it. The text was brief, just a few sentences:

  It says on Facebook that Fadi died last month, but he was in Bergort just a few days ago. I don’t understand, Yasmine. Please come home.

  She had sat up in bed and turned on the lamp. Four images were attached to the message. She clicked on the first one, and the phone’s screen filled with the image of a young man in front of a concrete wall, side toward the camera. He seemed to hold a spray can in his hand, with which he was writing or painting something on the wall.

  Under the light of the streetlamp, the man’s profile was surprisingly clear. Yasmine had dragged her trembling fingers across the screen and enlarged the photo as much as she could until only a grainy, pixelated face appeared on the screen. He was thin and haggard, thinner than ever, thinner than when he was a child, almost someone else. But Yasmine would have recognized her brother anywhere, in any image. It was Fadi, without a doubt.

  Yasmine limps off the train at Bleecker and up the stairs toward Houston. Brett is in the parking lot of the gas station, leaning against a black SUV monstrous enough for an oligarch. “ARE YOU SAFE ENOUGH?” asks some company called Stirling Security in meter-high letters on the billboard above him. Yasmine steels herself and tries to will away the pain in her foot. There’s no room for that now.

  David has spent all the money she’d tried to save up. Only Brett’s contacts and her own street smarts can get her on a plane to Stockholm. She sent Brett the three other pictures her mother attached in the email. Three images that show something is up in Bergort. It’s enough to make it worth the trip, a chance to make things right again.

  5. BERGORT—SPRING 2007

  IT’S SPRING, A miracle, impossible to believe, and the jackets we shoplifted from a sports store in the inner city in November melt off of us, revealing our pale, gaunt arms, our eyes still reflecting a winter spent playing Halo and FIFA. We have no references beyond TV screens. With weak sun on o
ur faces we sit on the broken, graffiti-covered benches of the playground and start to remember, start to invent another life.

  “We could grill, len! Get some good sausages!”

  “When can we swim again? In May, I guess?”

  “Ey, just sucking down a cold one in the sun is enough for me, man.”

  But it’s not summer yet. We’re shivering, even if we refuse to put on our jackets. We bounce the ball between us down to Camp Nou, our joints stiff, our breath still smoke streaming out of our mouths.

  When we get to the coarse, artificial grass of the field, there’s shitty, hard-packed snow still lying in its corners. We shoo away the kids kicking around a plastic ball, and then divide into teams of three. We stretch ourselves and kick the ball so hard that the rattling of the chain-link fence around the field vibrates like thunder through the concrete. It’s Lois, Fox, and me against Mehdi, Bounty, and Farsad, and it’s unfair of course—Bounty is two hundred pounds and Mehdi’s asthma whistles in his breath—but I don’t care, I just want to win, just want to feel the wind on my back, feel spring on my face, summer so close you can touch it. And today I can run forever. I can do a fucking back heel and scissor kick. I’m Thierry and Eto’o. I’m Zlatan. And when I put the ball into the top corner from midfield, I can feel the whole world inside my chest, and when I stretch out my arms and run in a circle on that stupid-ass artificial grass, I hear the crowd roar all around me, feel my arms grow, my wings unfurl, my body getting lighter until I take off and soar over the artificial grass, high above Mehdi’s asthma, high above the concrete.

  These early spring days never end, even after the sun sets, even after the temperature drops, even when it’s almost winter again. Not even then do they end, but when the shadows return, we pull on our jackets. It’s a retreat, not a surrender. We sit on the benches in the playground and smoke and drink Cokes and dream new, vast, meandering dreams, with the sweat from the game drying off our skin.

  “Daaaamn, Ana Maria, you know her? Jorge’s little sister? Great tits? Wallah, I swear man, she’s hotter than Rihanna.”

  “We should figure out how to get some cash and go to Barcelona, yao. Go see a match. Doesn’t Jorge have an uncle there?”

  “I wanna go to Australia, len. That shit is cool, kangaroos and all that?”

  “Australia? Jesus, what a fucking bati you are, Bounty. Kangaroos? Ha ha ha ha ha!”

  “Kangaroos!”

  We laugh at Bounty until we’re lying on the hard, still-frozen sand, until we can hardly breathe, until Mehdi’s lungs almost give up with asthma, until Bounty almost cries and finally gives up and walks away.

  We stay there until the laughter drifts away over the rooftops and leaves us silent and restless, while the light around us turns from a clear, pale gray to the deepest blue. The evening isn’t spring, it’s freezing, the stars are still winter stars, clear and distinct against the blue, and I turn away, close my eyes. Perhaps it’s the strange light or a spring that comes and goes in just one day, but suddenly anxiety rushes through me like a wave, and I gasp, barely able to get any air. My heart is pounding so hard that I lie flat on the ground in the sandbox.

  It’s not something you talk to your brothers about, unless you want to end up like Bounty. I pant and take in gulp after gulp of ice-cold air, feel the frozen sand against my lips, forcing myself to calm down, forcing my heart to stop pounding.

  “Ey, Fadi? What the fuck are you up to?”

  I force my eyes closed, force that feeling down into my stomach, force myself onto my feet.

  “Nothing, faggot,” I say. “Let’s go.”

  So we go. Up toward the footbridge that crosses the tracks, freezing with just T-shirts on under our winter coats, but with spring still crackling on our skin. We hang out on the bridge above the subway tracks with our backs to the fence. We spit and smoke and watch trains roar by beneath us—white light and single-minded direction.

  We high-five Adde, who arrives from the row houses wearing his Canada Goose and carrying a jingling bag.

  “Damn, it’s cold?” he says. “Thought it was spring.”

  We nod. I think of you when I see him. I haven’t seen you in a week, not even your shadow. I want to ask him if he saw you at the studio, but I choke. I pull on the fur collar of his enormous coat instead.

  “Niiiice,” I say. “You’re like Diddy in that coat.”

  He shrugs, his bag clinking.

  “You got booze?” Mehdi croaks. “Give us some!”

  “Knock it off,” he says. “There’s a party at Red’s. Wait a few years and you might get invited too, brats.”

  He laughs and disappears across the bridge.

  “You’re fucking cheap!” Mehdi shouts after him.

  Adde doesn’t even turn around, just flips us off and continues walking toward the concrete.

  So we walk up and down the cracked asphalt, across frozen, yellow grass, under the broken streetlights. We tag buildings and electrical boxes with our worthless signs. Boing. But the o is a star. It doesn’t mean anything, we don’t even know where it comes from, but we tattoo all of Bergort with our trashy pointlessness. I keep my eyes on the black asphalt or the dark gray buildings, because if I slip up, look up at the dark blue emptiness above, I don’t know what will happen.

  Something has to happen. This can’t be it—so endless and quiet and empty and poor. So I leave the others in the playground with their smokes and stupid jokes. I unbutton my coat and pull my jeans even farther down on my hips.

  “I’m just gonna check something,” I say.

  “What’s that, bre?” they ask.

  “Nothing, I’ll be back soon.”

  I cross the square, pass by the kebab shop where the Finns are drinking themselves to death, pass the Syrian’s store and the yellow light from the subway, pass the high-rises, and head for the low-rises, whose facades are barely visible behind the satellite dishes that cover them like ivy, nostalgic wormholes to another time, another context, another reality as false and static as a fairy tale.

  It doesn’t matter that I’ve forgotten where exactly Red lives because I hear Ghostface and Trife through an open balcony door on the ground floor, hear the whole party rapping along to the chorus of “Be Easy.” And I see you at the railing wearing a green plaid flannel shirt, tight tank top underneath, jeans not tight like the other chicks, but loose and sagging like a guy. Your hair is straight, your skin lit softly by a lighter you’re using to light a joint. I carefully slip up to the balcony railing, don’t want the whole party to see me, clear my throat.

  “Shoo, Yazz,” I say quietly.

  But you can’t hear me. You’re talking to Blackeye, Igge, and Ignacio, and you take a deep drag on your spliff and let the smoke flow out of you, away from the balcony and out toward the streetlamp. I’m standing just below your elbow in the shadows. “Be Easy” ebbs away, and I hear your laughter for a moment before the beat starts again. I open my mouth again, extend my hand to touch you, to tell you I’m here. But you withdraw your arm, take another drag from your spliff, and hand it to Igge, before you rush off the balcony and back into the apartment and the party and what is very much your own life.

  I stand still for a second, unsure of what to do, or why I’m here at all. Behind me I hear the door open and Adde stumbles out, pupils almost floating in his eyes, his face contorted and green. He bends into the bare bushes and pukes up the whole bag of beers he had with him just a couple of hours ago. When he’s done, he turns around, a half smile on his lips. He wipes off his mouth with the back of his hand, slurring slightly and swaying.

  “What the hell you doing here, len?”

  I shrug.

  “Nothing.”

  “Get outta here then, abri. Nothing here for you, right?”

  Len? Abri? He’s not even from here. He’s from the row houses, a suedi. Fuck him. But I don’t say anything, just stare at him, button up my jacket, and leave.

  They’re still in the park when I get back, looking at
something on Mehdi’s phone.

  “Damn, look who’s here!”

  Jorge stands up.

  “Come on, let’s go over to Bounty’s and play some FIFA. It’s freezing.”

  I shake my head and feel the emptiness growing inside me.

  “Räv?” I say. “Do you have a tube, you know, for gas?”

  Räven nods and smiles.

  “I got everything, bre. You know that.”

  “Good, go get it. And a crowbar.”

  It takes Räven less than five minutes to go home and dig up what we need. Not even five minutes for him to get back, his face is red, his eyes narrow and ready for anything.

  “What’re we doing, brother?”

  “How much do you hate the Syrian?” I say. “How much do you hate his sorry style and his cheap fucking store?”

  They nod. We’ve all been caught stealing by him, all had his farmer hands on our ears, all had a talk with the police.

  “It’s goddamn time we teach him a lesson, ey? Time to school him.”

  They look at me with something else in their eyes now—FIFA is forgotten, the cold is forgotten. This is something else.

  “Have you seen him in his new Audi?” I say. “New? Ha, it’s a hundred years old, but new to him. Have you seen him in it? Proud as a fucking beard, like he thinks he’s somebody, that fucking faggot.”

  “A-ight” says Mehdi. “About fucking time, I swear.”

  So we gather together, put the hose and crowbar under our coats, put our hoods up over our heads, feel the blood pumping healthy and strong through us for the first time since Camp Nou. It takes a few laps around the parking lot to find the Audi. A station wagon that’s probably ten years old, green, dirty, a piece of shit. At first we walk past it, pretend not to see it. Take a couple of rounds to make sure the parking lot is empty. We don’t talk, we just glide quietly over the asphalt, Shaolin, Wu-Tang, like fucking gangsters. Then, in the shadows: