“I guess I’ll let you go, then.”
“Okay.”
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
? ? ?
Murat and I had dinner at an Indian restaurant, and then he went back to his hotel and I came home and found Ivan’s email. I started to cry as soon as I saw the subject line: byeselin.txt.
Dear Sonya, he wrote. I won’t try to talk to you anymore. If there are misunderstandings you want to talk about, I’m ready to do it. If there are misunderstandings you don’t want to deal with, that’s fine, too. He had thought a lot, he said, about whether to keep meeting me. Lately, he was really into existentialism. The existentialists said you couldn’t make decisions based on preexisting norms or codes, which were always too general for any given case. Rather, every decision you made created you. The decision (existence) comes first, and creates essence.
Ivan’s decision to meet with me had created something that he thought was good. But he had always known it was harder for me. He had always tried to make sure that he didn’t force me or pressure me to do anything. He hoped I was still going to Hungary, which was a big enough country for two people not to meet if they didn’t want to. You should get over this Vanya, and these wild dreams of atoms, sparks, Rolexes, and everything else, he wrote in conclusion. Let it not create destruction, but growth and life for the future.
I started to walk around the room, dazed with pain. I had no idea what to do with myself. I couldn’t imagine how I was going to dispose of my body in space and time, every minute of every day, for the rest of my life. I didn’t understand how he was okay with never seeing me again, or why he was acting as if it were my idea, or whether I was supposed to not go to Hungary, or what I was supposed to do there without him. More painful and incomprehensible still, he had, with no warning and for no reason I could see, taken back what he had said about the atom—that it was allowed to come out and play, and be a crazy spark, and lie on his fingernail. He had called me, and now he was sending me into a rock, like my grandfather had sent a stomachache.
It seemed so impossible that for a moment I thought maybe I had imagined that he had said those things before. But I looked up his emails and they were right there, plain as day.
I think your atom, it will never go back to peace, to cereal or rocks or anything like that. Once it has been seduced there is no way back.
That seduced atom has energies that seduce people, and these rarely get lost.
I summon you words, o my stars.
Without you there is nothing.
Then I reread what he had written now—that I had to get over the wild and crazy dreams, and abandon destruction, and build life for the future. He meant I had to go away, so he could build life for the future. He meant: disappear and become nothing. I couldn’t wrap my head around such perfidy. There just seemed to be no reason for it.
I wrote back right away. I wrote terrible things—the worst things I could think of. I called him a movie director. At the end, I copy-pasted the lines he had written to me before, the lines that had moved me so much, and which he had now recanted so mystifyingly, and then I hit Ctrl-S. It was over.
Part Two
JUNE
The day after my nineteenth birthday, my mother drove me to the Pakistan Airlines annex at JFK: a narrow temporary building with dusty windows, shared by Air Poland. The Air Poland logo was a skinny, malnourished-looking birdlike creature. I kept misreading things. ONLY ENTRUST YOUR LUGGAGE TO UNINFORMED PORTERS. I saw Ivan everywhere. A tall angular woman with a briefcase, a worker’s chrome ladder. Walking through security was like dying—the way you had to say goodbye to everyone, the way you became just your name on a paper and gave up your money and your watch and your shoes. “I’m so happy you’re going to see Paris,” my mother said, and I saw tears in her eyes. My mother had never been to Paris, but my grandmother had, as a young girl, and said it was the most beautiful place on Earth.
I was going to spend two weeks there with Svetlana and her high school friends Bill and Robin. The fourth member of their party, Fred, had unexpectedly gotten an internship at Merrill Lynch and Svetlana didn’t want to be the third wheel. She said I was the only person who could be asked to fill in at such short notice—I was the only person she knew who did things like that. “You could be my European traveling companion, like in a novel,” she said. “Afterward you can go straight to Hungary.” The plan had been for everyone to stay in Svetlana’s aunt’s apartment, across from the Musée d’Orsay. Fred’s father, a currency trader, had booked four economy seats on the cheapest plane across the Atlantic: the first leg of a Pakistan Airlines flight to Islamabad. Svetlana transferred Fred’s ticket to my name, and that was the end of it.
? ? ?
The flight was delayed two hours. I had never been unaccompanied in the international terminal before, and wandered around for a while reading my horoscope in magazines and looking in all the shops. Brookstone was selling a “quiet hair dryer” that let you hold a phone conversation while blow-drying your hair, without the other person knowing. Finally, when there didn’t seem to be any point in putting it off any longer, I got on the moving walkway.
The gate was in its own glass-enclosed room with another round of security. Waiting at the metal detectors, I looked through the windows and scanned the crowd for Svetlana. I didn’t see her. The one I saw was the Ivan look-alike—apparently, every room had one. This time he had a crew cut.
Once I passed through the security check, I saw Svetlana right away, sitting in a bank of orange swiveling chairs with a handsome all-American-looking couple.
“Selin!” she cried, throwing her arms around my neck and kissing my cheek.
“Selin!” mimicked Bill, and hugged and kissed me, too.
“I thought you wouldn’t come,” Svetlana said. “With you, I never know. We would hear from you weeks later, from Brazil. Bill and Robin kept pointing girls out and saying, ‘That must be her’—and it would be some super-normal-looking girl with a ponytail and hiking boots.”
? ? ?
Svetlana and I made our way to the bathroom, passing right behind the Ivan look-alike, who was waiting in some kind of line, talking to a girl with wispy blond hair.
We were so close that I could read the back of his T-shirt. It said HARVARD MATHEMATICS 1995–96, followed by several columns of names. Ivan’s name, Ivan, was in the last column.
“Oh—hello,” Svetlana said. “Ivan” didn’t turn, but the girl did.
“Hey, Svetlana,” she said slowly, as if figuring something out.