Earlier that year, I had stolen a book called Man and Woman from my mothers’ shelves, at least, I thought I’d stolen it. In retrospect I think they must have left it out for me, as no book like that existed during the era when my mothers could have learned anything from it. Man and Woman was written in simple, direct language, and illustrated with pencil line drawings, carefully shaded, of men and women who were supposed to look ordinary, but in fact, because of the changes of hairstyle that had taken place since the book was published, seemed to have come straight out of the 1960s. For the first time, I saw clearly the difference between the sexes: the woman’s arms were crossed over her stomach, while the man rested a confident hand on his buttock. Late that summer I shared this information with Yesim. I told her solemnly that she had a uterus, as though I were a scout returning from a mission to a forbidden city.
Yesim nodded regally. “Let’s see,” she said, and we did. Our bodies looked nothing like the illustrations in Man and Woman, so I put my hand on my buttock and told Yesim to cross her arms over her stomach. The likeness wasn’t even approximate; I thought it would be better if Yesim wore her hair in a braid, but it was cut too short. Still we touched, and retreated, neither of us certain what had happened. Yesim pulled her pants up and we sat on the floor, not talking, because Man and Woman didn’t say what we were supposed to do in that moment, although it had a certain amount of information about what would come later, not all of it incorrect, as it turned out. And that was all. We didn’t take off our clothes again. The game of men and women ended and another began, I don’t remember which, maybe it was the game of Life, which Yesim liked, or Uno, which she also liked, but which I liked less than Life because it had no finely molded pieces.
For years afterward Yesim came to see me at night. She touched my imaginary hair, and in time she learned to do other things as well, but by then she wasn’t Yesim anymore, or not only Yesim; she had put on other faces and become general, a warm weight by my hip, a hand on my chest, she could have been anybody. I didn’t even remember what she looked like with her clothes off, I thought. But apparently I was wrong. As I lay on my grandparents’ sofa, drunk, my knuckles rubbing against the waistband of my underwear, I thought of Yesim again, not the woman but the girl, standing with her arms crossed over her stomach. I imagined myself placing my hands on her shoulders, kissing her, moving her arms out of the way, pressing myself to her flat chest. Was I grown up in this scene, or was I a child? We were both soft, I know.
SAN FRANCISCO, CITY OF GHOSTS
The phone rang just as I was falling asleep. It was Alice. She wanted to know if I was all right.
“I’m dead drunk,” I said.
“Your message was scary,” Alice said. “Are you losing your mind?”
“I don’t think so.”
“It sounded like you were going through some kind of Shining thing.”
“Ha. I’m not even alone up here. My childhood friends live next door.”
“But you’re drinking. You’re going to start seeing the twins.”
“Jesus Christ, I’m trying to go to sleep.”
“Redrum, redrum.”
Alice was coming home from a party too, it turned out. Her friend Raoul . . .
“Raoul? Who’s Raoul?”
“You met him, he came to the salon a couple of times.” No hair parlor this but a group of writers who met in a bar in the Tenderloin. When the salon started, a year earlier, there had been a lot of them, but as people found work or left the city their number shrank, until the salon became a group of bar friends like any other, who played pool and gossiped and argued about who owed whom a drink. I didn’t remember anyone named Raoul. “He works for Petopia, the pet-supply people,” Alice said. “He wants me to write copy for them.”
“How glamorous,” I said.
There was a beat of silence. “I just called to see if you were all right,” Alice said. “Not so you could cut me down.”
“I’m sorry.” Beat. “Was it a good party?”
“It wasn’t bad. There weren’t enough people and there was too much to drink.”
“And this Raoul, he’s a nice guy?”
“Will you be jealous if I say yes?”
“Not at all,” I lied. “I want you to be happy.”
“I don’t know,” Alice said. “I feel like I’m floating. You know? It’s like I’m floating in the dark, in a sensory-deprivation tank, and nothing I see is really happening.”
“Maybe it’s just that we’re drunk.”
“Maybe. But,” beat, “I just feel like that’s what we’re all doing now. Like we’re all just, like, floating.”
Beat. “Maybe we are.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“I wish you were here.”
“I’ll be back,” I said.
“And what’s going to happen then?” Alice asked.
“I guess we’ll find out then.”
“I’m sorry,” Alice said. “It’s the middle of the night there, isn’t it? Make sure you drink some water before you go to bed.”
“OK.”
“OK.”
“I’ll talk to you soon.”
“OK.”
“OK.”
Beat. Beat.
LOST THINGS
My uncle was back early the next morning, making things move in the kitchen like an angry ghost. I groaned and wrapped the quilt around my head. He asked what had happened to me, and I said I’d been hit by a car.
Charles laughed. “I know that car.”
He made coffee, and when it was ready he shook my shoulder. Instant. Charles pointed at me with his mug. “So, you were just drinking by yourself, or what?”
“I was at the Regenzeits’.”
“Ah, our enemies,” my uncle said.
I felt dull and sick to my stomach. I wished Charles would leave so I could go back to sleep, and in fact I didn’t know what he was doing, coming over when the sky was still green with presunrise light. Did he think that the world was full of people like him, angry men who drank bad coffee at dawn?
“Why are they our enemies?” I asked.
“Because they’re Turks, that’s why. The Turks are an Oriental people. They’ve hated us ever since the beginning.”
“Turkey is a Westernized democracy. It’s even a member of NATO.”
“Believe what you like, the history speaks for itself. Think about the Ottoman Empire.”
“The Ottoman Empire ended just after the First World War. Anyway, Kerem and Yesim were born in America.”
“But they remember,” Charles said, “they all remember that we won. The Americans and the Western Europeans.”
“That’s not true, the Ottoman Empire collapsed under the weight of its own bureaucracy. That, and the rebellion of the so-called assimilated peoples.” I couldn’t believe I was discussing the fall of the Ottoman Empire at dawn in Thebes with a bad hangover.
“Assimilated peoples, my ass, it was us. We won, on account of our superior military technology.”
“You must be thinking of the Cold War, although