After college, Jake had floated for a bit, uncertain what he wanted to do next. He had enjoyed working on Brown’s organic farm so he got a job at the New York Botanical Garden as a researcher. But he soon realized that biology wasn’t as interesting to him as space, and the way plants and buildings could fill it. He enrolled in architecture school the following fall. Within two years he had his master’s and, weary of the East Coast winters, chose a job in Los Angeles, to the delight of his parents, and started working at Space Solutions. Once he settled into that it seemed that he settled into everything. Life became pleasant, compartmentalized, and predictable. The job was good, the people were nice, the high school friends who like him had come back were happy to reconnect, the guys he met were fit and a little dim, but open and friendly and never hard to catch or lose. His apartment was spacious, his world was small.
Now someone had joined him, and the apartment no longer was empty. Suddenly he wondered why he was running away from home, not toward it. What would Bhim say, when he woke up? Would he regret this? Jake’s breath caught in his chest. This had been one of the best moments of his life, the first time he had felt truly with someone else, in sync with him. What if Bhim hated what they had done, what if he woke up horrified with Jake and with himself? He tried to shake off these thoughts, to run again, but his feet had turned to lead. He walked home, dragging his body the few blocks back to his apartment, and opened the door with dread.
Bhim was still in the bed, sleeping. His lashes formed spiky uneven crescents on his cheeks and Jake felt a sense of relief that there was something in Bhim’s face that wasn’t perfect. He watched him sleep deeply and got into the shower. Jake washed himself off briskly, trying to ignore the fear that had struck his heart. What if, what if, what if resounded in his brain and he wished he could drown out the noise of his worries. He almost wanted to wake Bhim up, to face his judgment and his disgust sooner rather than later, but each moment gave him more time to feel like they were together.
He struggled to clean his back, working to reach the space where his hand refused to reach, right underneath his shoulder blades and above his tailbone. Suddenly he felt a hand joining his, washing that area for him, spreading the soap gently up and down his spine. He held his body perfectly still, not wanting the moment to end. He felt a handful of water spill down his back, washing away the soap.
“Feeling dirty?” he asked, his voice a strange croaking sound. He closed his eyes, regretting the stupid innuendo of the question, although he wanted a genuine answer. He wanted to know if Bhim felt unclean after what they had done but had sheepishly used a line from a teen drama.
“Maybe.” Bhim’s voice whispered the response in his ear. “Help me wash?” Jake turned to see Bhim’s face, earnest, smiling, cautious, and amused. Hopeful. He kissed him, and fell in love all over again.
Later, he tried to get Bhim to run with him, but Bhim hated it. Bhim could manage only a few blocks at a panting, halting stride before giving up, claiming that his heart would explode. It was a relief to find something Bhim was so bad at, something that ruffled his serenity. Still, it was disappointing. Jake knew that with Bhim he would have a future of running alone. He tried to accept that, he did, but he realized that his routes became circles, wider and wider, but always pulling him back to the same place. Whenever Bhim came to stay with him his runs were short and left him with that same fear, that if he went too far or stayed away too long Bhim would be gone, that he would return home to an empty house and a vacant life. Jake could run well only when Bhim returned to Berkeley and he was alone. He ignored that, though, refusing to examine the fact that the two things that made him feel best were mutually exclusive. He tried to stop feeling afraid whenever Bhim left, but he couldn’t hide it from his dreams. In his dreams Bhim ran, and he outpaced Jake, even, getting farther and farther away forever.
The last time Satya Roy had been able to look himself in the eye it was in the small cracked mirror that hung in the communal bathroom of his old Sunset Park apartment. He did not know it was his last time, although if he had been asked, he would not have said he minded. Before moving to the United States he hadn’t seen his own face very much. The bathroom in the apartment in which he had grown up in Bangladesh, in the city of Sylhet, was a tiny one, with a squatting toilet. He had always bathed outside near the waterspout, rubbing his body with mustard oil, when he could afford it, and rinsing it off with a bucket while the others in his apartment complex waited nearby, eager to use the facilities. These did not include a mirror. His grandmother, with whom he had grown up, had a small hand mirror, which she had used to let him check his hair from the back when she had cut it on the second Sunday of every third month. Otherwise, he saw mirrors only in shops. Once he moved to America, he looked at himself in a mirror every day. He showered in a ceramic tub, and the water was always there in the pipes, waiting for him. The toilet had been difficult to manage but he had figured it out, eventually, by perching awkwardly over it in a spindly squat. In his first two months in America, Satya had realized that his favorite thing about the country was his own bathroom.
There had been a repeated knocking at the door. Satya didn’t realize it at first; he thought that this was just the throbbing of his head.
“Just a minute!” He heard a muffled response in a language he didn’t understand. Satya shrugged and looked at himself again, patting his cheeks and wondering when he would have enough hair to shave.
The apartment was his because he paid four hundred dollars a month, an amount he couldn’t afford, to live there, but it also belonged to the four other immigrants who called the minuscule two-bedroom home. Two of them were Mexican, Juan and Ernesto, and after they returned home from their job at a restaurant, they split their bounty of leftovers with each other over beers and hushed conversation in Spanish. All of the sounds seemed to Satya at once nasal and soft, like a sweet-sour pudding of a language. They stuck together, mostly, always quietly speaking with each other, but when they had extra food they always shared it with everyone, meticulously dividing each dish with almost surgical precision to ensure fairness in distribution.
One of the other residents, Kosi, was from Ghana, and though he had been an engineer in Africa, now he worked at an auto parts shop in the neighborhood. His voice reminded Satya of a thick stew with chunks of meat and bone in it. Satya, who prided himself on his fluid command of English, both the proper construction as taught to him in school and the slang he’d learned from the MTV videos he viewed in electronics stores, couldn’t understand a word his African housemate said. Satya decided that the poor man must be struggling to learn, and he generously tried to teach Kosi in between his own searches for work. Thus far these lessons had not progressed well. At times it seemed that Kosi thought that he was teaching Satya instead.
The last roommate was Satya’s only real friend, in America and in the world, Ravi Hafiz, his fellow immigrant from Bangladesh, the man who slept near him nightly on the floor of the kitchen and shared his dreams. They had been friends since they were six years old. They had snuck into America together. They had made a pact to help each other survive. And that morning, Satya was going to steal Ravi’s job.
Ravi and Satya had grown up together in Sylhet, which sat on the northeast corner of Bangladesh, very near the Indian border. They were not friends because of a shared religion, or even a shared language. Satya was Hindu, one of the small population still left in Bangladesh, and Ravi was Muslim, one of the overwhelming majority. They had gone to different schools and lived in different neighborhoods, and they had very little in common in background or family life. And yet, they had been thick as thieves—and sometimes they were thieves—since the day they met. They were friends because they were a part of the same club, and it was a terrible club indeed. They were both the sons of Bangladeshi war babies, inadvertent heirs of their country’s