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Every day near sunset, I swam out to the plastic raft that was tethered near the buoys about a hundred meters from the shore. I lay flat on my back on the warm blue plastic, listening to the sloshing of the waves and to all the inner noises one’s head made after swimming. The sun dipped toward the horizon, a little earlier every day. I lay with my feet facing the shore and thought about how five thousand miles that way, toward the sun, was Boston; whereas Tokyo, where Ivan was, lay five thousand miles in the direction of the encroaching darkness. Five thousand miles farther in the same direction—clockwise, from the North Pole—was California.
I was usually the only person on the raft, but one afternoon I became aware of a man headed in my direction. He was swimming the crawl, unhurriedly and somehow inexorably, turning his face to breathe every four strokes. On reaching the raft, he treaded water for a minute, squinting—he was in his forties or fifties, with a shaved head—and pulled himself up on the metal ladder.
“Is okay?” he asked, pointing at the raft. I nodded. He lay on his back a couple of feet away from me, propped on his elbows, water glinting on his arms and his rising and falling chest. You could tell from looking at him that he was Russian. The raft continued to rock and splash for a while, then slowly settled down.
I decided to try to talk to the man. Outside of school, I had never spoken Russian to anyone who was actually from there. I told him I was studying Russian in the university.
“Is that so,” he said. Sounding only slightly bored, he asked where the university was, where I was from, where my parents were from, where I was born, and what I studied: all questions I knew how to answer. I asked what he did by profession. He said he was a businessman.
“Is it interesting?” I asked.
“The point isn’t whether it’s interesting,” he said after a moment, and rubbed his thumb and index finger together. I felt a jolt of sexual current, and I was appalled. What was so attractive? His indifference to boredom? The way he had invoked money? What did I care about his money? I remembered how alienated I had felt in the Hungarian villages, listening to the Beatles sing about money and women—I’d thought it was some weird 1950s thing. But what if my body also responded in some way to money? What if that was the way women were?
“So,” said the Russian man. “Are you here alone?”
I shook my head. “My mother and four aunts are here.”
“Four aunts,” he said. “That’s a lot.” He squinted at the shore, possibly looking for aunts. “And in the evenings?”
“In the evenings?”
“Do you spend the evenings with your four aunts?”
I immediately felt the same sense of insult and injury I had felt at times with Ivan—as if he were making fun of me or trying to trick me. “I don’t know,” I said.
“And what don’t you know?”
I looked over at him—at his arm, which had a brown birthmark and a smallpox vaccination, and at his mouth, which was so clearly, though for reasons I couldn’t articulate, not an American person’s mouth.
“It was very pleasant to meet you,” I said, and slid to the edge of the raft and back into the cool water, which seized me all at once, all over my body, not forgetting a single inch.
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For the first five or six days I didn’t suffer at all, carried along by the change of scene and the sense of a progression. This was the next step in the story. Ivan was in Tokyo and I was here. It was like when two characters in a movie went to two different places.
Then something changed. My life no longer seemed like a movie to me. Ivan was still in the movie, but had left me behind. Nothing extraordinary was happening anymore, or would ever happen again. I was just there with my relatives, living pointless, shapeless days that weren’t bringing me any closer to anything. It seemed to me that this state of affairs was a relief to my mother. From her perspective, I thought, the past weeks had been a perilous, temporary adventure, something to be endured, and now things were back to normal. It was painful to feel at such cross-purposes with her. Almost everything that was interesting or meaningful in my story was, in her story, a pointless hazard or annoyance. This was even more true with my aunts. They didn’t take anything I did seriously; it was all some trivial, mildly annoying side activity that I insisted on for some reason, having nothing to do with real life. I couldn’t challenge or contradict this view, even to myself, because I really didn’t know how to do anything real. I didn’t know how to move to a new city, or have sex, or have a real job, or make someone fall in love with me, or do any kind of study that wasn’t just a self-improvement project.
For the first time in my life, I couldn’t think of anything I particularly wanted to study or to do. I still had the old idea of being a writer, but that was being, not doing. It didn’t say what you were supposed to do.
I got physically sick. My stomach hurt, I felt nauseated all the time and especially when I tried to read, my legs and shoulders ached, I lost the strength to go anywhere or do anything, or smile, or hold my mouth up in a normal position when people talked to me. My face just fell like a cake. My aunts thought I was sulking or angry, and teased me. I wasn’t sulking—I just couldn’t move my face. I couldn’t eat, or think about eating. I couldn’t begin to think about sitting through the dinner buffet—about listening to everyone say passive-aggressive stuff to Yudum, to Yudum trying to accrue social capital by mocking me and Defne, to Aunt Seda plying me with lamb and teasing me about how I used to be a vegetarian, and to Murat saying the béchamel needed more butter. My mother told everyone I had an upset stomach, and ordered tea and toast from room service. The toast came lined up on a silver rack, like outgoing mail, with quince jam—a kind of jam I had always made fun of in the past.
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After a few days, the physical symptoms passed. Inside my soul, I still felt like I had fallen off the end of the conveyor belt, but I was able to eat, read, swim, and hold my face together such that I wasn’t constantly staring at people with the stricken eyes of death.
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