There is a video I keep watching on my computer. A famous performance artist is in a large museum space. Black hair, senescent and grey flecked; a vibrant rose red dress. People wait hours to sit across from her, to gaze into her eyes. Why? Because we, as a species, like myths. Especially myths about artists. The poet who spurns easy pleasure to live ascetically on an island. The artist who spends a lifetime not attaching herself to anything, convening honestly with the sorrow of loss and death. The artist who, through continually opening herself to absence, transfigures that pain into provender for the rest of us.

But this video is not about us, the faceless, rapacious horde. It’s about the artist and a man. He is an old lover from the 1970’s, when both of them were painfully young and painfully beautiful. They lived in a van then, were precipitously in love. But that flame soon devoured itself. They both decided that a torrid, beautiful affair deserved a spectacle of an ending. So they went to opposite ends of China’s Great Wall, and they walked. When they eventually met, they embraced, and then turned around, and vowed never to meet again.

But now that man is here, in the museum. The years have exacted their toll. His lean face is gouged and gaunt; his lanky body is stooped. He’s here, like everyone, to see her, the artist. The video camera is waiting. It zooms in on her, her bowed head. She hasn’t seen him waiting in line. She lifts her eyes, and the smile that breaks her breaks me, too. It’s a helpless, impulsive fracturing of her stoic, faintly Middle Eastern face. The tears come soon after. They stare into each other’s eyes. They have one minute. Maybe they remember their bodies as they once were. Or they remember stars along some mountain road in Tuscany. Or a cigarette they shared. Or maybe they remember making pancakes for twenty people crammed into a flat in Jerusalem.

I think about the long walk they took on the Great Wall - the loneliness, the terrible anticipation. To move towards an intimate body for the last time. To be so alone, to have no choice but to walk. And I think about the moments after that final embrace, as they begin the walk back. Did they turn and watch, waiting for that last glimpse of the other? We don’t like to think about what comes after a narrative ends - after the last embrace, after the reunion. I think about the final scene of ‘The Graduate,’ the two lovers alone in the shadow of their euphoria. We don’t like to imagine the mundanity that follows the catharsis.

The old lovers’ time is up. They reach out to each other. She wipes her tears, he touches his heart. I hope they shared a memory in that minute, that their minds traversed the same lost terrain.

I watch this video over and over. The lift of her eyes, the smile, the tears. What strength they had! To let go of each other with such astonishing grace.

She wipes her tears, he pats his heart.

Then she stares into the lapidary blue-green eyes of a twenty-something from Brooklyn who has been tweeting her progress in line. He takes a piss, hops a cab to his hotel. He looks in the mirror and asks if that one moment was worth all those years apart. He tries to weigh that one luminous moment against all those lost, mundane years they could have had. Those years no one would watch a film about on the internet.

~


Alan and I flank El Presidente. He’s lying down, and the wind rushes over us.

“Nathan, please, lay down with me.” He pats the bed of the truck.

“No, it’s ok El Presidente.”

“Nathan, please. Please, just lay down, it’s comfortable down here.”

He takes me by the wrist; his grip is still strong, and he drags me asunder.

“Ok,” I say, “ok. Ok.” He pulls me next to him, so my head is in the crux of his meaty shoulder. He’s crying. From here, I can make out the unmistakable sounds of sobs.

“I’ve wasted my life, Nathan. My life has come to nothing.”

“That’s not true, El Presidente. That’s not true at all. You’ve got many friends, so many people who care about you.” I can see that Alan is looking away from us, looking at the stars and supporting El Presidente’s oxygen tank.

“Yes, it is. This is the fact of it. My life has come to nothing. Every woman I have loved, did not love me. Every woman stopped loving me.”

“That’s not true. You had three wives. Marriages fail sometimes, not because of lack of love.”

“No, it is true, Nathan,” he gasped. “All three of them, when I gave myself fully, eventually stopped loving me. My Italian wife? Gianna? She left me for a man half my age, for a painter. She left me and said that he had ambition and I was a lout. She said that sex with me made her cringe. That our life had been a lie.”

“People say these things when they’re hurt, when things are ending. We say things to inflict pain.”

“I never saw her again, Nathan. Never. Not for forty-two years. And then do you know what happened?” He doesn’t give me time to answer. “One day a letter arrives. From her third husband. It says that Gianna died of a brain aneurysm, suddenly, one day, while making breakfast. That she dropped dead after finishing potting a vase of roses. But he went on to say that he had no idea I existed, no idea that we’d ever been married. She pretended I didn’t exist, Nathan. They only found me by accidents, because they found a letter I had sent her.”

I hate to interject with this, but El Presidente smells awful: like stale alcohol and like a pig that just climbed out of shit. I’m trying to listen, but the smell sometimes gets caught on the breeze and swirls back to me, and it’s noxious.

“And my English wife. Samantha. Beautiful Samantha with her cunt like clean water. Samantha that would keep me up until dawn just talking, the two of us just talking. Do you know how she died, Nathan? She died with her first husband in the room. In the delirium of the cancer, she asked for him to be in there. She screamed whenever she saw me. Screamed and kicked and sometimes pulled out the IV’s. The only thing that would calm her, the only thing she asked for, was her first husband. So I call him in England and he flew down. And he was in there when she died. I was sitting out in the hall.”

His arm goes lax beneath me, which allows me to sidle away from his arm pit slightly.

“But my Turk, of course. My Turk is the one I cannot forget or forgive. We lived in Istanbul then. In a small flat in Beyoglu. We had a window that overlooked the city. It was not much, but we had fought for it. She was always the one I loved most. She was the one I wanted to show things to, to show everything to. She was the one, no matter where I was, if she was there, I could not be lonely. Our life was never easy. We worked bad jobs, as you called them. In restaurants or where we could find them. But we had each other, and for me, that was enough. One day she came home from her restaurant and said, ‘Nikolai, I can’t do this anymore. This is not enough. I don’t love you anymore.’ She started to cry then, big, heaving crying. I tried to put my arms around her, but she shrugged me off. ‘The thing is, I don’t think I ever loved you.’ All I could say was, ‘No, no. This is not the truth. No, this is not how you feel. This is not the truth.’ She said, ‘Please, do not touch me. Please.’ I said, ‘Lucia, we spend thirteen years of life together. Thirteen beautiful years.’ And she just cried, shaking her head. ‘No, no. It was a lie. It was a lie. I did not love you.’ So then I sat there and she took her things and put the important things in a bag. And then she kissed me on the cheek and said, ‘I am sorry I do not love you. I am sorry. Please, forget me and have a good life. Please, forget me Nikolai. Forget me and live your life because I must live mine.’ And then she was gone.”

He’s pulled me closer again, holding me tightly around the shoulder so that I can feel the tears coming off his chin. I do the only thing I can think to do: I take his hand in mine. He squeezes it tightly, the way he always does, so tight that I fear my fingers might snap.

“I would have gone to the end of the earth for any of them. For any of them, but for especially the Turk. Especially for Lucia. And all three of them, at the end, when I had given myself, stopped loving. They stopped, Nathan, and they changed. So I have wasted this life. Loving the wrong women. Failing at love. All the other beautiful women…what have they mattered? What have they mattered?”

The only thing I can think of - aside from Susanna, of course; Susanna so stark and severe in that field of snow; Susanna arching herself in bed to accept more sunshine; - the only think I can think of aside from Susanna is a poem. One of the few I have memorized. I remember the summer I learned it, the first summer of Susanna and me. I would sit in the office, reading it quietly to myself. One of my co-workers, who had noticed me talking to myself, came over.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Memorizing this poem.”

“Why?”

I shrugged. “It reminds me of my girlfriend, I guess. And because it’s beautiful.”

My co-worker shook his head at me, threw a few papers in the air.

“Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew,” I say, beginning. “It's the same when love comes to an end, or the marriage fails and people say they knew it was a mistake, that everybody said it would never work. That she was old enough to know better. But anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Like being there by that summer ocean on the other side of the island while love was fading out of her, the stars burning so extravagantly those nights that anyone could tell you they would never last. Every morning she was asleep in my bed like a visitation, the gentleness in her like antelope standing in the dawn mist. Each afternoon I watched her coming back through the hot stony field after swimming, the sea light behind her and the huge sky on the other side of that. Listened to her while we ate lunch. How can they say the marriage failed? Like the people who came back from Provence (when it was Provence) and said it was pretty but the food was greasy. I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph.” I take a breath of the fecund, spring air. El Presidente is silent beside me. I can’t believe I remember the whole thing still. If he asked me to repeat it again, I don’t know if I could. He gives my arm a squeeze. He doesn’t say anything.

This is a truth I’ve learned: poems can save you.

~

It takes all three of us to help El Presidente off the back of the truck. He tries to push us away.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” he insists. “Please, let me be. I’m fine.”

Vangali takes El Presidente on his shoulder. Alan and I follow at a close distance, in case anything should go wrong. Vangali lugs him to the steps of his caravan. He asks something in Greek, to which El Presidente raises a hand. He turns and sits down on the steps. Vangali whispers something to him, urgently. But El Presidente will have none of it. Vangali turns in a huff, tossing his hands up in exasperation.

“The old fuck says leave him, leave him. He wants to see the sun rise. If that’s what he wants? Fuck him.”

“I’m fine,” El Presidente says to Alan and me. “Don’t worry. I just want to enjoy the air, watch the sun come over the sea.”

“Ok,” Alan finally says. “Get some sleep. We’ll see you soon.” He pats El Presidente on the shoulder, glances at me as he walks back to the truck. El Presidente has been looking at the ground. He’s slumped on the lowest step. He looks up at me, his mouth crusty with vomit, his eyes sunken from crying. I give him my hand. He squeezes it, as tightly as ever.

“Good luck, Nathan,” he says, very softly - so softly that I barely hear it.

~

I come out of the bathroom and Alan has vanished. Sabina’s alone behind the bar. I sit down.

“I need to pay.”

“Alan paid for you.”

“He did?”

She nods; I smile.

“So, Istanbul?” she says.

“Yes. Istanbul.”

“Then where?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ll just keep running.”

“As long as I can, I think. Yes. Until someplace feels like home again.”

“And if no place does?”

“Then I don’t know.”

She brings her hands down noisily on the bar. Her arms shake. She makes a fist with her left hand and brings it to her mouth. She closes her eyes.

“I’m not going to cry,” she says.

“Ok.”

She opens her eyes in laughter; they’re rimmed in moisture. The tears finally break down her cheeks. I’d like, more than anything, to reach out and wipe them with my thumb. But I can’t; she’s too far away, out of arm’s reach.

“My husband’s a good man.”

“He is. Your life,” I open my arms. “Your life is a good life. I’d give just about anything to have it.”

She wipes her cheeks and laughs brusquely, lifting her eyes sardonically.

I’ve played our good bye out in my imagination. Maybe, I think, she takes my hand. Or, she hands me a photograph of herself. Or, we kiss, I wipe away her tears. And then the novel ends with that: with catharsis. With that final beautiful image wrought from this ruinous, doomed affair.

“Well,” I say.

“Yes. Well.”

“I have to leave.”

“I know.”

“So that’s it?”

“What do you want me to say?” she asks.

“I don’t know. Something honest.”

She takes a breath, closes her eyes again, opens them and forces a smile.

“You’re going to forget me,” she says. “I’m going to be lost amongst all the others.”

“No,” I say. “I’ll remember you asking me if you could be a dancer. I’ll remember your boots. I’ll remember you flirting with the old men in here. I’ll remember those things, at least. Probably many more.”

She closes her eyes once more, and this time her face wrenches.

“I will miss you, Nathan.”

“And I’ll miss you, Sabina.”

She opens her eyes one last time.

“A shot for the road?” she asks, unable to keep from smiling. I laugh, finally start to cry myself.

“Fuck. I feel like I’ve spent half this trip crying.”

She laughs, pivots, strolls to the bottles.

“Whiskey?” she asks.

“Whiskey,” I say.

She pours two big glasses, hands me one.

“Yammas, Nathan.”

“Yammas, Sabina.”

We touch glasses. She downs hers in one gulp. I take mine slowly, taste the rye. Her fingers are on the edge of the bar. I bend over and bite them, then kiss them.

“Good bye,” she says.

“Good bye.”

“Kali nieta.”

“Kali nieta.”

“S'agapo.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Get out of here.”

“Good bye. Good bye.”

She holds up a hand. I back out the door. Alan’s waiting in the car, with the lights off. I get in. He turns the car on. Sabina walks to the door, doesn’t look out, locks it and turns out the lights. We pull away, drive out past the butcher, the mini-mart, out to the main road and turn left towards our village, towards home.

“Thank you,” I finally say.

He shrugs.

“You’re a good man,” I say.

He breaks into a smile. “Well, I, well…”

I put my hand on his while he’s driving, pat him on the head. We make the familiar drive through the groves, the trees that dance in the headlights. We pull into Malona. The streets, tonight, are quiet. People are still recovering from the festival. We wind down the alleyways. He pulls up in front of the house and turns the car off.

“Well,” I say.

“A lot of good byes for you tonight.”

“Yes.”

“Such is the life you’ve chosen, ay?”

I laugh.

“I want to tell you one thing before you go. One last story,” he says. “About me and David. My best friend’s brother. The love of my life. David.”

“The one whose parents offered to buy him a house if he got married?”

“Yes, the prick. The lovely prick.” He looks at me, shoots me a saggy-eyed grin. “He was fifteen when we started things, and I was twenty-one. He got married when he was twenty. So we had five years together. Five years and not a soul knew about it, or the depth of it. And then it just ended. I left, obviously, the same way you’ve left. I know how that feels. When you have to leave. And we didn’t speak, or see one another for, oh, boy, probably eight or nine years it was. Until his brother got married. The wedding was at this outdoor estate, a farm, in northern England. A gazebo along a creek. Very idyllic. And I suspected David would be there, but I didn’t know. He’d had a bit of a falling out with his brother. Well, I showed up early. And I was walking around the grounds, smoking cigarettes while people slowly filtered in. The grounds were surrounded by these beech trees. Anyway. You don’t need to know all this. The point is at some point I see David from afar, for the first time after all those years. I’d moved on. I’d taken new lovers. I’d fallen deeply in love with them. But when I saw him, Jesus. And he felt it, too. I knew, instantly, from the look in his face, that he felt it, too. He was with her, of course, and they had a son by then. He said something to her, and he walked over to me. I wish I could describe that moment to you. Maybe if I were more articulate. It felt like having the air sucked out of me and then rushed right back in. I wanted to fall over. We hugged, of course. Just embraced completely. I cried all over his suit. I didn’t care.” He looks at me. “I have no idea what he told her about us. I hadn’t told anyone. But we embraced for a long time. And, you know, that embrace was so beautiful. What is it worth, in the end? What is it worth? Was it worth the fact that we haven’t spent our lives together? Did it make up for the fact that he was a coward, and that he was living a lie? Did it make up for the years that I felt empty and lonely because I’d lost him? I can’t say. But that moment was beautiful. And I’ll remember it as one of the five most intense, gorgeous moments of my life.”

“What happened afterwards?” I ask.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, after the hug.”

He laughs at this, covers his face.

“Fuck, mate, I don’t remember. We watched the ceremony. I probably tried to make eyes at him. We danced ‘Twist and Shout’ together, I remember that. And I watched him with his son. He was fucking beautiful with his son. It killed me, Nathan. That fucking killed me, to see him dancing with his beautiful son. To know I wouldn’t have given him that. So all of that happened, yes. But what I’ll remember. What comes back to me. It’s that first moment I saw him, walking towards him. That hug.” He smiles and winces at the same time. “And I wanted to tell you this because I hope, someday, you might find something like that with this lost girl of yours. I don’t know if you’ve earned it yet, to be honest. But I hope someday you do, and I hope you have it, and I hope, maybe, it can at least make you consider these lonely days as something other than a waste.”

“Well, and if not, at least I got drunk with you a lot.”

He laughs at this, bows his head, rests it on the steering wheel.

“I appreciate that, Alan. I do. I don’t know if I’ll find that. But maybe. I guess it’s something to hope for.”

He shakes my hand.

“The bus stops at six,” he says. “Sometimes it’s a few minutes early. I’d get there at quarter of.”

“Thank you for everything.”

“Safe travels, old friend.”

I go inside. I look over the house, make sure I’ve scrubbed down every last surface. I check and double check my backpack. I make sure I have the books I want to read on the ferry ride; I make sure I have a pen out, too. It’s only three, though. Sleep seems like a waste. So I take my shorts out of my bag. I put on my running shoes. And then I quietly slink out my door and go for one last moonlight run in the hills.

~

I walk past a house on the way out of the village. The door is open. Inside are comforting voices: females, laughter, the voices of easy friendship. I sit across the way and listen for a time. It doesn’t matter that I can’t understand the language. The rhythms and cadences, the timbre - this is intimacy at its easiest and most thoughtless.

There are two kinds of loneliness, I think. The first is tangible, and it is preceded by presence. This loneliness ebbs and flows over a life. It is death, the failure of a relationship, moving away from home. Perhaps the major pursuit of adulthood is learning to accept that this loneliness is an inevitable part of love, and must be handled with a modicum of grace. It’s also having the patience and foresight to understand that this loneliness will eventually lapse, and that the wound it leaves will, with time, be filled with gratitude.

The other loneliness is trickier. It has been preceded not by presence, but by mystery. And it can strike at anytime. Who hasn’t been in bed, naked with an old lover, only to be surprised by a chasm that’s opened in their gut, a chasm that your lovers body, or their words, can’t begin to bridge? Who hasn’t looked at an old lover and felt that - no matter how familiar their body is, no matter how at ease you are in their presence - this other person is, ultimately, a complete stranger to me? Who hasn’t felt this, even, about their own parents, or their closest friends?

　
What can possibly be done about this loneliness? What can any of us do?
　

~
　

The morning before I flew from Philadelphia, my brother and I went for a walk. It was a monochromatic, flat January morning. Luke was in his stroller, and the three of us walked over to the seminary campus near my parent’s house. There’s a half mile trail that circumnavigates the quad. We walked to one end of it, mostly in silence. Then we began our slow traverse back. I remember thinking that I wanted the walk to last forever, that I wasn’t ready for it to end. The inside of the path was lined with tall, barren oak trees, and everyone we passed, Luke would reach skyward and say, ‘twee, twee.’

“What happens about Susanna?” Jackson asked me.

“I guess we become strangers,” I said.

“Twee. Twee,” Luke implored.

“It’s so strange, thinking back on things. Thinking back to my relationship with Jacqui. To some of the other women. They don’t feel real anymore. They feel like separate lives. Like distant lives.”

Jackson smiled, reached down to his son, tenderly adjusted the boy’s mittens.

“I feel that way sometimes, too,” he said. “About everything before. About those lost years. I was a different person then. I know it was still me, of course, but it doesn’t feel like it was. I don’t know how any of that happened, now. I don’t know how I made it to here. Those days feel like the shadow of a life. That’s all.”

I walked as slowly as possible, but the path grew irrevocably shorter.

“Twee, twee.”

“Yes, bean, tree. Tree, we know. They’re beautiful, aren’t they bean? Can you say beautiful?”

“Twee.”

“Yes,” I said finally. “A shadow life. That’s what will happen to Susanna, I guess. She’ll become a shadow life and a ghost. I wish I could stop it. But I can’t.”

“Well,” Jackson said, “we’ll be here for you when you get back. Whenever that is.”

“Thank you.”

He stopped pushing the stroller. We both turned to the end of the path, which drew ever closer. Luke kicked impatiently, reaching skyward.

“Thank you for not giving up on me,” Jackson said softly. “Thank you for being my brother still.”

I brought him close to me then, held onto him as my legs gave out, threw all my weight onto him. "I'm prouder of you than any person in this world."

We stood like that for a time, amidst the grey devastation of winter, my brother holding me aloft.

“Twee,” his son said, his beautiful son with his clear cerulean eyes.

“Twee.”

~

How does it end?

It ends with me on the road into town in the hour before dawn. The roosters are rousing. The mountains are silhouetted like primordial beasts against the canvas of stars. A mist levitates above the groves. In an hour I will be on a bus. In a few days, I will be in Istanbul. There will be new friends there, people that I do not yet know exist. Maybe there will be a woman there, one who likes smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee into the early hours of the morning. One who likes talking about literature and beauty and religion. One who, at least for a time, finds my body foreign and exciting. But eventually, it seems likely, she will stop feeling those things. We will run out of things to discuss. And then I will suffer a new wound, one whose shape I have not yet been privileged to fathom.

Or maybe there isn’t a woman in Istanbul at all, not for me. I don’t know.

I think that someday I will be very far from here, and my brother will visit me with his son. Maybe I will have a wife then, or even a child of my own. We will take a walk together, maybe throw a baseball in the last sun of the day. And I will tell him about these days, these lean stark days, and I will tell him that they feel like a different life - that I cannot grasp the shape of that loneliness anymore. I will tell him that Susanna is a ghost, and nothing more, and that some part of me wishes I could return to this place, could feel the size of her absence again.

All of a sudden a great ruckus arises from the groves. It seems that every dog in the village has begun to howl. What is this? I think. And then, out of the mist, steps a wolf. It can’t be more than twenty feet in front of me. It’s long and muscular, taller than my waist. The dogs suddenly, all at once, go silent. I don’t have time to think. The wolf takes three or four steps, I take three or four steps, and we pass one another no more than three feet apart. Neither of us breaks stride. You may not believe this, but I’m not scared. I take a few more steps and turn to look. This wolf - he’s beautiful, really, sleek and torsional - turns, too. We look at one another for no more than three seconds. I’d like to say that some understanding passes between us, but I don’t know. I shrug, and then the two of us keep walking in our opposite directions, and soon he’s sublimated into the mist.

A line comes to me, from a book Susanna lent me our first summer, back when she was still a luminous stranger, an exhilarating mystery to be untwined: “Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.”

I find that truer and truer every day. That I was ever with Susanna feels, more and more, like a dream. And this loneliness, for better or for worse, feels like my true state, feels more real than anything that has come before it. And that scares me. This loneliness...it is a weight, a very real weight, and it terrifies me. I feel it pulling at me, and I wonder, if at some point, I will be able to break free of it.