When I’d first seen those faded photos, I’d thought that drawing Ishak Pasha Saray in real life would mean something far more to me than just filling another page in my sketchbook. But after three months on the road I didn’t know what I’d been meant to find. Feeling nothing, I drew the castle anyway. In my piece, I ignored the renovations. With spider’s lines, I set the building back in its past, among hills that could have been anywhere.
The guesthouse owner followed me everywhere. As I walked through the ruined impossibilities of Ishak Pasha Saray, he stayed close behind me. I ignored him, turning my gaze instead to the mountains. Snow dusted their tops, and the sky was vast above. Afterward, he insisted on driving me to see a crater near the Iranian border, through roads dotted with military checkpoints, while blaring quasi-legal Kurdish music from bootleg cassettes. It was a crater, but I looked at it politely, while he stared at me hard.
The next afternoon, he presented me with a set of plastic jewelry. I couldn’t tell if he was being kind to a young foreigner who was alone, or if he wanted to sleep with me. But in the mountains it was just the two of us. My stomach knotted.
Doğubayazıt was six kilometers away, not that I knew enough to walk the complicated roads through the mountains. I forced myself calm. I am going to die, I remember thinking. It felt melodramatic, but not inaccurate. Maybe now, maybe later, but it’s going to happen someday. This has been an adventure. What’s the point of being afraid?
After handing me the jewelry, the guesthouse owner finally put his hand on my leg.
I burst into tears—not of fear, but of humiliation. No matter how far I’d strained against the rules for women, I was right back in my body, this fuckable, vulnerable shell.
I would never have the right to travel or to take up space. At best, I’d be tolerated by someone who’d demand sex as payment the second we were alone.
Butterflies danced, and Ishak Pasha Saray shimmered pale gray against the mountains. I looked at the guesthouse owner, ashamed to be crying. “We just don’t . . . we don’t . . .” I stammered.
He stared back, mortified. In those seconds, in those mountains, it was as if we’d seen each other for the first time. Not our preconceptions of each other, borrowed from pop culture—the dangerous foreigner, the foreign slut—but the flawed humans, who had each misjudged the other. It lasted only a moment before we both looked awkwardly away.
His face soft with concern, the guesthouse owner drove me to his home in town, and introduced me to his family. I must have looked pretty hapless; his mom hugged me hard, fed me lamb stew, and put me on a bus back west the next morning.
I love the adrenaline that comes with travel, the feeling of being tougher and braver than the men I knew. But on that thirty-hour bus ride, I realized what a sorry thing it is to use other people’s homes as a proving ground. However violent the police, brutal the war, or recent or tentative the truce between the government and the PKK, I wasn’t special just because I’d gone to eastern Turkey. If parachuting in for a few months implied I was tough, what did that make the people who lived there?
I pressed my forehead to the hot window, hating myself for being callow and young.
When there was nowhere else to go, I always had Shakespeare and Company. I headed west on buses and trains, hitching rides through Bulgaria and Bucharest, until I was back in those book-lined rooms. But the Tumbleweeds were a crop of strangers, and an encounter with mosquitoes left my left eyelid swollen shut. An email from Victor, the photojournalist, saved me: “Will I ever see you again?”
The next day, I showed up at his flat in Brixton. I stood in his shower for an hour, under water near boiling. It was a luxury I’d not had for months.
As I dried my hair, words spilled out of me. I wanted to keep traveling, I told Victor, and to keep drawing. I wanted to be like him.
The Lower East Side had once been Loisaida, a Latino neighborhood filled with community gardens tended by abuelas, and dominated by hole-in-the-wall Jewish shops where generations of immigrants bargained for discounts on weekends. As you walked east, letters replaced the numbered avenues, earning the neighborhood the nickname “Alphabet City.” Mi padre taught me a saying from the city’s more dangerous days: “A, aware. B, beware. C, caution. D, death.”
Like many immigrant neighborhoods, the Lower East Side, and the East Village to the north, became magnets for rebels. Patti Smith lived there, and Allen Ginsberg. In the 1980s, a tent city of homeless youth filled the East Village’s Tompkins Square Park. In 1988, when the police tried to evict the squatters, hundreds of protesters marched with banners reading “Gentrification Is Class War.” The police beat them bloody, provoking a riot, and the park became a war zone.
By 2002, the year I moved out of the FIT dorms and into the LES, the neighborhood was poised on the cusp of gentrification. I was there as it happened.
My first apartment was a single lightless room in a tenement on Tenth Street and Second Avenue—a “junior one-bedroom,” in real estate speak, with a shower in the kitchen—that I shared with two roommates. We divided the room with curtains and slept on mattresses My roommates were two sisters, recent immigrants with sparkling good looks and a commitment to devout evangelical Christianity.
For the first week, I sat cross-legged on the floor of my side of the apartment, painting a self-portrait for school. It was supposed to be dark, like a Rembrandt, showing me drawing patterns on my own Spanish shawl. Carpet fuzz got into the oil paint. Turpentine stank up the air. I yelled at myself to do a finished piece each day.
When my hands got too tired, I wandered down to the East Village, chatting with the mosaic man gluing broken mirrors to Astor Place’s lampposts, or leafing through foreign magazines at St. Mark’s Bookshop. I walked down Rivington Street, past the anarchist art center ABC No Rio, its facade crawling with graffiti and women’s profiles. Up the dilapidated stairs, they held letter-writing nights for political prisoners.
Further east, punk shows played in a tenement called C-Squat. Squatters had taken over the building in the 1970s and had held on to it ever since. A sign reading “This Land Is Ours” hung over the door.
Spaces like C-Squat nurtured a subculture of punk illustrators. Fly,with her red dreads and pierced dimples, chronicled the neighborhood’s inhabitants in a series of portraits, then wrote their stories in loopy script around their faces. The poster artist Eric Drooker wheat-pasted his work around Avenue A. Using woodcuts, or ink that looked like woodcuts, Drooker captured prisoners and brownstones, gardens and mechanization and death. In his work, hands reached through prison bars. Jazz exploded out of tenements. Office workers scurried beneath subways, their skeletons visible, united by the beating of their hearts. A girl in a white slip took on the empire. Under bare lightbulbs, artists painted phantasmagorias powerful enough to threaten armies.
When I needed to escape my claustrophobic room, I hid out in May Day Books. The anarchist bookstore was little more than a rectangle of shelves in the lobby of the Theater for the New City, selling Slingshot organizers and the reliably romantic anarchist newspapers put out by Crimethinc. May Day’s walls were decked with huge pen-and-ink posters from the Beehive Collective, a group of artists who turned ecological disasters like strip-mining into Bosch-style allegories, with insects and animals standing in for humans. Thousands of animals built evil machines—or blocked their construction with their bodies. Like the paintings in medieval churches, these epic posters—detailed as jewel work—were legible even when no common language existed. A dozen volunteers might work on one poster. No one signed his or her name.
I was too shy to speak to most of the people who worked at the shop—Wrench, the crustpunk with his entourage of underage groupies; the Iranian cartoonist; the handsome carpenter; or the labor organizer who was trying to unionize Starbucks. Instead, I drew flyers for the store—spidery Emma Goldman, Sacco and Vanzetti, the anarchist’s claw-hands holding up a banner with the store’s name. The aesthetic too archaic for May Day to use.
To make someone love you, see them as the person they want to be.
I met John Leavitt during Professor Grey’s art crit, in Book Illustration 101.
Art crit was supposed to shape our critical thinking skills. The ritual went like so: Students taped their scribbles to the wall. One by one, the teacher walked through them; then other students raised their hands and explained why the scribble was bad. With luck, a teacher could fill three hours this way, saving her the trouble of writing a lesson plan.
Professor Grey was in her late seventies. It had been decades since she’d last worked, but she liked to remind us that she’d once drawn advertisements for Gimbels, the long-shuttered New York department store. Sometimes she’d put on a movie for us to watch, then fall asleep in the back of the room.
During crit, I drew in my Parisian sketchbook. I was proud of that book: fat, jammed with drawings, it looked like the traveler’s diary I’d dreamed it would be. As I scratched in cross-hatching on my drawing of a cancan girl, I heard a sharp whisper behind me: “Hey!”
I turned. There sat a boy wearing a shapeless green hoodie, his baby face flushed, half hidden under a tangle of brown hair.
“Yeah?” I tried to look indifferent.
“Where’d you get that sketchbook?”
“Paris!” I elevated my nose.
“What the hell were you doing in Paris?”
Our eyes met. He looked eager, and very young. His face was covered in zits and peach fuzz. His khaki pants were stained, and his shoes looked like they might fall off his feet. But his eyes were the color of Listerine, intelligent and manic.
“Working at a bookshop. God, I wish I was back there. I hate this stupid crit,” I said.
“Me too.”
We must have stared at each other for a long time, grinning like conspirators.
John had never eaten Thai food. He’d never smoked shisha, though shisha cafés had become ubiquitous after Mayor Michael Bloomberg banned smoking in bars. After class, I remedied both conditions. After a cup of tom kha gai, we sucked mint smoke at Sahara East and I told him stories about traveling, inflating my own bravery with each telling.
“I’m writing a novel about a New York where magic is real!” John told me.
“I’m writing a novel about time travel,” I replied.
John grew up with a single mom in the New Jersey projects. He was a year younger than me, gay and dorky, obsessed with computers, robotics, sci-fi, and the new phenomenon of blogs. John worked as the art director of a gaming magazine, once photoshopping a decrepit male porn star onto the cover as Super Mario. The magazine kept losing his checks in the mail. John had gotten into Princeton, but like me, he couldn’t afford to go to the fancy school he’d pinned his heart on. We were stuck at FIT with our resentment.
At the shisha café, John stared at me through thick glasses.
“Isn’t this a terribly bohemian place? Like nineteenth-century Paris?” I exhaled theatrically, half making fun of myself and half hoping it was true.
John looked at me and burst out laughing.
“Are we bohemian yet?” we asked together.
Later, he drew this moment as a cartoon and sold it to The New Yorker.
The next day, John sat next to me in class. He passed me a mixtape of songs glorifying the road: “Sheltering Sky.” “The Passenger.” “One More Cup of Coffee for the Road.”
Back in 2002, we still burned our friendships onto cassettes. I played the tape over and over as I drew each day’s illustration homework. I thought of standing on those roads. The wind would be in my hair. I’d be redeemed as a girl on a postcard.
After that, John and I never left each other’s side. We were poor students, late to class and sullen. We spent our nights in diners, or bumming bagels at the corner café. We plotted grand futures, and we dreamed alternate, fantastical presents. One night, at one A.M., John and I ran through the sewer-steam gushers of Times Square. On Forty-second Street the billboards flashed, electric Apollos shining their artificial dawn.
“This is like Rome,” John screamed, running the light. A car swerved to miss him. “And I will be a Roman god.” We chased each other past comedy touts and peep shows in an ecstasy of words. At the end of the night, he’d go home to his rich boyfriend. I’d go home to my roommates. But on the streets we were crowned with capitalism’s halo. John dove onto the curb before the light changed. “What will you be, Tartlet? Tartanian?” he asked.
We could never be ourselves.
Ds winter came, New York grew so cold that every trip to the laundromat became a death march. Our shared room shrank ever smaller. But I had nowhere else to go. Claustrophobia weighed down on me until I fell into a depression. All I wanted was to escape.
The previous semester, I’d taken a class in Islamic art history, studied Modern Standard Arabic at night, and haunted the Islamic art rooms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art after school. I leaned over the velvet rope guarding the entrance of the Damascus Room, a reproduction of the sitting room of a wealthy nineteenth-century Syrian family, and listened to the fountain sing. The walls of the Damascus Room were paneled in wood, inlaid with mother-of-pearl curlicues; the floors were colored marble, interlocking into spikes. On the poplar ceiling, gesso and tin formed patterns as intricate as mountains. I loved the abstract rigor that ran through most Islamic art, thanks to the prohibition against displaying living things. How could anything be so intricate, and yet link up at the end? I thought, trying to follow the patterns. It was art made religion made math.
Between the loveliness of those rooms and the hellish tundra of New York outside, I grew nostalgic for Morocco. There the streets were warm and labyrinthine. Around every corner lay some swooping archway, some bit of art history still alive and useful—or just some stray cat I could bribe. In New York, I could barely force myself to draw. In Morocco, I couldn’t stop. Of course, I was too shy to make any Moroccan friends, but aside from Leavitt I hadn’t made many in New York either.
Besides, it was cheap. In Marrakesh, a showerless hotel room cost a dollar. It was ten cents to wash off at a bathhouse down the street, and another ten for tagine at a café.
My relationship with Anthony was slowly fading, and the gaps were filled by constant long-distance conversations with Russell. Since our weekend together in the south of France, we’d been exchanging emails, talking about travel, history, and art—things Anthony couldn’t understand.
Though Russell was in his forties, he lived like a hippie. He had a cabin in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, and he took frequent trips to Peru to drink ayahuasca, a brutal hallucinogen derived from rainforest vines, which makes its drinkers vomit and shit themselves. They often think this is a benefit—that they are purging some inner evil. Immersed in his spiritual discipline, Russell chided me for my decadent tastes. I would be much improved if I moved closer to him.
“I’m going to Morocco,” I told him. He invited himself along.
Russell and I stood on the deck of a ferry crossing the Strait of Gibraltar. As we watched Spain fade into the distance, Russell described his last ayahuasca trip. “I went to the land of colors. Three beautiful women approached me. I thought they wanted sex, but they tore off my limbs and juggled them. They were laughing.”
I tried to say something enthusiastic, but the hallucination just sounded like an allegory for his problems with women.
As the coast faded, my shoulders sagged with the relief that always hit me when I headed off someplace I had no business being. Far from Anthony, from John, from my city, I felt so calm. I rested my head on Russell’s shoulder.
“Did you learn any French?” I asked him. It was embarrassing to expect others to speak English.
“A few words,” he answered.
I frowned. “I really wish you’d learn some French.” Then, trying to salvage the afternoon, I softened. “You should listen to me. I studied French at Pretensia University, Isle of Pretensia.”
“You made that joke
last year, Molly. You haven’t grown up a bit.” The boat rocked beneath our feet.
In an effort to save money, I told Russell, I’d spent the last year living off Snickers bars. He looked me up and down. He had a cruel way about women’s bodies, once telling a lover that he couldn’t get it up with her because the stretch marks from her pregnancy looked like signs of violence.
“It shows,” he smirked.
We got off the ferry in Tetouan, a city on Morocco’s northern coast. The place hit me just as it had two years ago. Its streets were filled with people: shopkeepers screaming; hustlers trying to sell you carpets or drugs; unemployed young guys hanging out under store overhangs, hissing at women like you’d hiss to get the attention of a dog; older women in djellabahs, faces framed by white hijab, elbowing through to run their errands; street vendors hawking gutted electronics off blankets. What looked to outsiders like chaos was the meticulous order of a city ferociously alive. I squared my shoulders and walked to the bus station—Russell behind me—afraid to look in any direction, lest someone take my gaze as an invitation.
“Don’t talk to anyone,” I nagged as we dove into the crowds. “They’ll be drug dealers who want to sell you hash. They have deals with the police. They’ll arrest you and you’ll have to pay a bribe.”
“That can’t be true.” Russell laughed.
At the battered plastic table of a café, a teenager poured us tea into a glass that was stuffed with fresh mint. The teapot was silver, incongruously elaborate, and he held it high, so that the stream of tea cooled before it hit the mint leaves. Two young men in soccer jerseys sat next to us.
“Hey,” said Russell. He was so blond, so blue-eyed, such a gringo. I hated him.
“Welcome to my country,” one of the men replied. “Do you want to buy some hash?”
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