Cyrus didn’t seem to mind that I sometimes went on and on about brain modeling. In fact, it seemed like he had been waiting to talk at length and in detail about various things himself, and that for the first time, he had the right audience. Me. When I wondered out loud if the Empathy Module was ahead of its time, he told me that in the third century, an engineer called Ma Jun invented an entire mechanical puppet theater powered by a waterwheel for the emperor Cao Rui. What happed to Ma Jun? Nothing. Just that there were no water-powered mechanical puppet theaters for at least three hundred years after that.
We were together all the time. We talked and talked. We talked while walking the baking streets of Cambridge. We talked while eating. We read the same book, a Korean novel about a woman whose family freaks out when she stops eating meat, and then we talked about meat, and about Korea, and about our families. Cyrus had none, so I did most of the talking that afternoon, telling him how my parents existed in a halfway world between Long Island and Bangladesh, too comfortable to go home, never comfortable enough to stop longing for it.
In the middle of July, a heatwave made it impossible to go anywhere, so we stayed inside and watched the entire five-year run of Babylon 5. We followed the fan as it rotated on its pedestal. Julian was spending the summer in Hong Kong, so we had the place all to ourselves. We found a thumb of pot in a kitchen drawer, and after we got high, we stood on chairs and made Oscar speeches.
Cyrus lived with Julian, and Julian, or rather, his family, owned the house. It was gray with red trim and a steeply pitched roof. It was enormous. There were rooms crammed with heavy furniture and the kind of curtains you wanted to call drapes. There was a library, a glass conservatory, and two dining rooms. This was Julian’s father’s way of showing his disapproval—saddling him with the family home in the fancy part of Cambridge, where he received letters from the neighborhood society requesting that he mow the lawn and please take his mail out of the overflowing box on the curb.
When the heatwave passed and the evenings were cool again, Cyrus invited me to a wedding.
“Who’s getting married?”
“I haven’t actually met them,” he said. They were friends of friends and they’d asked him to come up with a ceremony.
“So you gave them a theme?”
“Sort of. You’ll see.”
Cyrus wanted to do something—many things—with his life. He wanted to travel and paint murals and get a law degree so he could run for office. But another part of him was already tired, and maybe that was why Julian had been able to convince him to move in. He held on to a lot of those old plans, but in the meantime, he continued to earn his living by conducting baptisms and cremations and writing little prayers for people to say at the bedside of a sick relative. There were so many others out there, he explained, for whom God served as a placeholder for what they really wanted—something that was greater than they were. He just helped them find that meaning without the baggage of religion. Released from compulsion, they were free to build whatever kinds of scaffolding they chose around their lives. I dubbed him a humanist spirit guide, and this made him happy.
* * *
The wedding was two hours outside of Boston in a bookshop that used to be a sawmill. We rented a car and Cyrus drove and we listened to Jeff Buckley singing “Hallelujah,” which put me in a very somber mood even though I was wearing my most cheerful outfit, a red tunic which was one half of a matching set my mother’s cousin had sent from Bangladesh. Cyrus was dressed in a not dissimilar shaped shirt with a small round collar and a navy waistcoat.
We pulled over at a rest stop and Cyrus unpacked two triangular-shaped rice balls he called Onigiri. He was always making me taste things—mostly Japanese things—I’d never heard of. He unwrapped one and showed me how to put the seaweed around it so it looked like a large samosa. It was delicious, filled with pickles and sour plums. As I plucked off a piece of rice that had stuck to the corner of my mouth, I felt his hand cradling the back of my neck, and then he was hovering over me, and I can’t remember which of us leaned in first, but soon we were kissing, and a little sound escaped from my mouth, a noise that appeared to originate elsewhere, deep down inside where my brain couldn’t reach.
He tasted like rice and vinegar and his lips were very soft. I tried not to count the number of years I had been waiting for this moment. Until this morning, we had hardly touched. A few days before, we had run into someone Cyrus knew on the corner of Harvard Avenue and he had introduced me to her—it was a girl—as “my friend Asha. Asha, this is Ling, my Chinese tutor.” Being called his friend nearly killed me, but then last night he had called me and said he had booked a room in a small hotel and would I consider spending the night with him? And that is how I knew for sure that we weren’t just friends.
The kiss lasted a long time and lingered on my mouth for a while after that. We arrived in Montague; the mill was perched by the side of a river and there was a long driveway leading down to a cluster of buildings. Strings of lights decorated the path like a tangle of fireflies. We were early; Cyrus deposited me inside and went to attend to the bride and groom. I found myself in a large rectangular room with wooden beams holding up a low ceiling. The shelves were built along the walls and over the windows, which looked out onto the river below. People were unfolding chairs and moving large vases of flowers, and over the bustle you could hear the sound of the water as it rushed by. I tried to make myself useful by carrying in a case of wine.
Cyrus returned with a small purple wildflower in the pocket of his waistcoat. There was a little time before the ceremony, he said, so we went to an adjacent building where, in a nook, we found two small stools next to a bookcase.
“Do you remember, in high school, there was a talent show called Lip Synch Battle?” Cyrus said.
Until that point, we had both resisted starting too many sentences with “Do you remember, in high school?”
“Yes, of course I remember.” I’d sneaked out of the house because I didn’t have the words to explain the importance of Lip Synch Battle to my parents.
“Well, one year I signed up.”
I was so surprised I slapped his knee. “Serious?”
“Yup. I think it was before your time.”
“All by yourself?”
“I didn’t have any friends.”
This I knew. “That’s because you never bothered talking to anyone.”
“I was going to do ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’?”
“No.”
“I bought the outfit, practiced the hell out of it. I think I was pretty good. But then, at the last minute, I choked. I had to beg Mrs. Stanley not to announce my name, and I went home and cried myself to sleep.”
“I would have really liked to see that. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ I mean, not the crying. What did you do with the outfit?”
“I went home and put it in the trash.”
“I am super turned on by the thought of you in sequins.”
“You should be. I was so hot.”
We kissed again. He circled his arms around my waist and I leaned toward him. Suddenly I couldn’t wait for the wedding to be over.
A man in a gray suit came and waved to us. “It’s time,” he said.