A woman, slightly taller than David, sidled up next to him, smoking a cigarette, looking diffidently across the room at nothing in particular. She was, he thought, the most beautiful woman he’d seen in a long time. She had long, straight black hair, a prominent chin that seemed perpetually turned up at the world. Her eyes were large and, even in the darkness of the bar, were lapis, lustrous. When she smiled at something - which was rare - these eyes remained deadly serious, the kind of eyes that very rarely betrayed happiness.

She was the kind of woman he would never have spoken to in New York or Oxford; her beauty would’ve cowed him into silence, the fear of failure overwhelming him. Better to watch from afar, to take solace in the occasional glimpse his direction. To build a fantasy from those glimpses as opposed to spoiling them with the reality of rejection.

But he was in Istanbul. No one knew him. He had no reputation to worry about, no name - good or bad - to risk.

“What do you study?” David chanced.

She looked at him, took a sip of her wine. Her name was Ana. She knew Lala from school. The two of them often snuck back to her apartment during breaks to smoke joints, to laugh about nothing in particular. She’d seen him talking to Lala, and liked the way he carried himself. It was something she couldn’t have put into words, one of those things you sense beneath the noise or clutter of a room - the way a person holds their beer; the way they laugh, which seems somehow deeper and more genuine than most laughs. If she’d been asked - and who would ask something like that? - she would’ve said he struck her as being un-tethered from normal degrees of self consciousness, like someone who had suffered enough to no longer care about social graces. If she’d been forced to go deeper than that, she would’ve said that she liked the fact that he didn’t immediately look her over from across the room, that he didn’t immediately classify her as beautiful and nothing else.

“Architecture,” she said coolly.

He smiled with bizarre confidence for such a curt answer. She liked it.

“I’ve dreamt about buildings since I was a little girl,” she said. “When I saw Prague for the first time, I thought that building a city was the most incredible thing a person could do. Like building a life from nothing. The streets like arteries, the buildings like the organs. But a city even bigger than a life. Even more complex.”

He smiled. She angled towards him. He put his hand briefly on her back.

“I’ve thought of Istanbul like that,” he said. “I don’t know anything about architecture. But I like thinking of the city as a living, breathing thing. An organism that we’re all just little cells inside of.”

He bought her another glass of wine and they took a seat, far from the band, which started to play again. They were pressed against a window, the street six stories below them teeming with people - Istanbul’s red blood cells, flush with alcohol.

The conversation didn’t move easily or freely. She was content to sit back and watch. He asked about school, about where she was from. Her answers were rarely more than a sentence or two, the words carefully measured. This, she would’ve told him, was because she wasn’t confident in her English, though everyone told her it was very good. He spoke well, easily. She was worried of embarrassing herself.

Instead, he talked about himself, and she liked listening to him. He talked about preferring Istanbul to New York, and though she’d always wanted to see New York - the Flatiron building, the Chrysler Building - she nodded, almost smiling.

She smoked skinny cigarettes, and he bummed them from her at regular intervals. This often filled the gaps in the conversation. Across the room, Lala - who was dancing wildly - caught Ana’s eyes and motioned suggestively. Again, Ana nearly smiled. She remembered something her mother told her, many years ago.

“You don’t know happiness. Why don’t you ever smile? You make yourself so ugly with all this scowling.”

She looked at David and smiled.

He leaned forward and put a hand on the back of her neck, the way you might with a lover.

“You have the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen,” he said over the noise of the crowd, the band.

It caught her off guard, and it made her smile - this time honestly.

“I know a café near my place. The view is lovely. Would you like to go there?”

She went with him, kissing Lala on the cheek as she left. They walked down Istiklal without talking much, moving mostly against the flow of the crowd, which was dense. He’d heard somewhere that Istiklal was the busiest pedestrian street in the world - maybe from Andrew? - and he believed it. He suddenly wanted to tell her about Andrew, thought he saw something in her steady eyes that understood loss and would listen to his story and not find it maudlin, not find his fixation on absence disturbing. What he felt, walking with her, was that she was a woman who understood chasing things, too.

The café was set below Tarlabasi boulevard, a hidden little alcove nestled into the hillside, overlooking the Halic, the hills of Fatih.

“This is beautiful,” she said as they sat down at a table. The place was nearly empty, a plastic awning over them, the noise of the boulevard far off and muted.

He smiled and took off his jacket.

They’d picked up a bottle of wine along the way, and ordered tea to go with it. The waiter, a teenage boy, opened the wine for them and brought them tea glasses to drink it out of. He poured it for them, and then they toasted.

As she drank, she started to open up more. There was something about him that put her at ease, teased her out of herself. Part of it was his own easy storytelling - how he laughed and talked about strange encounters with bums or homeless in New York, or how he liked to talk about journalism as something meaningful, a kind of higher good he aspired to.

“Maybe it’s not the work,” he said, “but the form. The written language. To write a perfect sentence, right? Can it be done? Probably, sure. You can write a beautiful sentence, it can be perfectly weighted, each part playing off the other parts to create something whole. What about a perfect paragraph? Can you write that? A perfect story? A perfect book? The task gets harder and harder, but at least in some way, it seems possible. If you can write a perfect sentence, then it should follow that you can replicate that until you have a perfect paragraph, so on and so forth. But then, it’s not just a technical pursuit. Writing is more than mechanics, right? It goes deeper than that, to something in your gut. You feel something inside you - something real - click when you write a perfect sentence.”

It made her feel like he understood her fascination with architecture.

“I get that sometimes in my own work,” she said, lighting a cigarette. She wore a white blouse, tight black pants. She sat with her legs cross at the knee. “I was working on some houses last summer in the south of Spain, a series of environmental projects. Old houses being re-built to make them environmentally better, but also to make them beautiful. And the houses seemed so perfectly cut from the land. They were of the land. And most architecture fails at that … what would you call it?”

He didn’t know.

“It usually fails. It forces itself on a site. When it doesn’t, when it builds off the site? That is beautiful to me. You see it here sometimes, the old homes,” she motioned towards Fatih. “They are decaying like nature. I like to feel it when I design something that grows from nature. It feels like what you said. A click in your stomach.”

He poured them more wine.

She talked about her childhood, which she rarely did. She talked about her brother, who was older than her by two years, and who she could never live up.

“Everything he did was perfect to my mother. And everything I did was wrong. We both played piano. Our parents would have guests over, and I would play Beethoven, and I thought it was beautiful. Then my brother would play some pop song, and all anyone could talk about was how great it was. My mother would look at me and say, ‘why don’t you play music like that? Why don’t you play happy music?’”

He thought of Andrew, and how easily things between them could’ve turned into that - a rivalry. To him, Andrew’s path had always been the path to follow, the right path, and if he could never follow it as well as Andrew could, well, he was the younger brother. He wasn’t supposed to follow it as well. Even when they were young, he never felt jealous of his brother. He just admired him, wanted to exist with the same confidence.

“It was always like that. My whole childhood. My mother once told me that only my brother had been planned, and that she’d never wanted a daughter.”

He studied her as she was, in three-quarters profile. She had pale skin, almost classical in its whiteness, and wore no makeup but for red lipstick. She seemed, he thought, to have stepped from a Vermeer - a sad girl from a small town. She glanced at him and smirked.

“Now my brother is living in our town and his life will be nothing. I am here, in this city, and my life will be something. And all my mother can say is, ‘your brother is such a good child, staying close to me. Everyone in town respects him so much. All they do is wonder why you’ve chosen to go so far away.’”

“What’s your father like?”

“A good man, but very sad. I get my sadness from him, I think. My mother does not love him. I don’t know if she ever did. She has been sleeping with his best friend for years and now everyone knows it. Even my father. But he loves my mother, and all he knows is our small town. Where else could he go?”

She sat very still while she talked, the only movement her hand lifting the cigarette to her mouth. There was a stillness to her he found riveting. Like she could witness anything and not flinch. There was courage in her stillness, he thought. It made him aware of how much he moved when he talked - she loved how animated his hands were when he told his stories, as if his whole body were aching to get his point across - and he wished he were less dramatic in his stories, more composed. It seemed to him like acting, as if he worried the stories weren’t interesting on their own.

“It is hard for me to be away from my father, but I cannot stand to be in our town anymore. I feel like I cannot be myself there, like I become small and angry and petty, like everyone else there. Everyone except my father, who is a good man. But he is trapped. I cannot save him. He has to accept that I am gone, that I would die if I had to stay there.”

She put the cigarette out delicately, as if lovingly suffocating a small, terminally-ill child. She looked out to the water. She could feel that he watched her, but it was different than most men watched her. He saw the beauty, but he didn’t just see it. He wanted to hear more. He wanted her to talk about architecture. He wanted to see her drawings. Her beauty would infect them, and they would enhance her beauty. There was a wholeness that she felt, which she liked, even if it was disconcerting. She was sharing too much. But if he asked her back to his place, she would go.

“I did a funny thing last summer,” she said. Something kept opening her up. She felt like she wanted to tell him these things, like he actually cared, like he wasn’t just pretending he cared so he could fuck her. But, maybe he was. Maybe he was just a better actor than most men - most of whom didn’t even bother acting.

“What was that?” he said, smiling. He loved listening to her talk. He loved feeling her opening up. It was partly the power of it, of course - having navigated well enough to reach this point - but it went deeper than that, was less selfish. This was the real thing, he thought - why you asked a woman if she wanted a drink, why you stopped a stranger on the street because you saw something in the way they walked. You went through the possible risk of failure not to get them naked, not to fuck them once and never see them again. You didn’t do it for the flesh, you did it for this - the spirit. You did it for the flesh, too, but not just the flesh. One was worthless without the other.

“I promised myself that I’d commit suicide at thirty.”

He laughed, poured her more wine.

“I did,” she said, feeling her face flush, smiling preposterously. “I was home for the summer. All my mother wanted to talk about was my brother and his stupid job at the market. ‘He runs the whole market. He has such responsibilities. The old ladies all love him and they think you’re so cold.’ I wanted to say: ‘His life is meaningless. Your life is meaningless. You are two cowards afraid to live outside this worthless town.’ But I just listened. I always just listened. But I promised I would never get old like her. I would never get trapped. I would create great beauty and then I would die before my ideas would grow tired and I would waste away.”

“I hope you’ve reconsidered,” he said, helping himself to a cigarette.

“I have,” she said. “I haven’t decided for certain. It hangs in the balance. But Istanbul has made me reconsider. Who would want to die when they know Istanbul is still there, out in the world, waiting?”

He’d known all night that he was going to ask her home, but he knew then that she would say yes.

His flat was close by, and they walked the seven flights in silence.

“Can you show me your room?” she asked as soon as they stepped inside. “I want to see where you write.”

He sat down at his desk and she walked up to him, straddling his knee. He reached up and kissed her, reached behind her and unzipped her pants. She stepped deftly out of them, as if it was a dance step she’d rehearsed until reaching mastery. Her legs were splendid; he couldn’t have said anything more than that.

They kissed standing at the door for a moment before he took her to the bed. She kicked twice at the light switch on the way there, casting them into darkness with the second thrust. She laughed as he fell atop her. Before their eyes adjusted, they were completely suspended in darkness, their mutual heat the only thing encroaching upon the emptiness.

He kissed her neck and took her shirt off. He worked his way down her stomach - again, splendid - parted her legs with a nudge of his chin, and slid off her panties, tossing them somewhere into the blackness.

She was beginning to come into focus. The moon spilled through his small window, which opened onto a ventilation shaft. She was more silhouette than body, a white shadow moving above him, like the outline of a fish beneath the sea.

It took a while before she relaxed, before she finally let herself fall into the act. She was rigid, and then finally she wasn’t, and he felt himself go hard when that happened. He went down on her until, once more, he felt her tightening, the slight gasp, and then her entire body contracted once before unspooling, like a taut coil suddenly severed.

He moved up to kiss her, and she ran her hands through her hair before pushing him down, climbing atop him.

“Wait,” she said, scampering naked - a fleet glimpse of light - across the room to get a condom.

She came down on him slowly, patiently. There was a restraint to her, a composure that she didn’t want to lose. She thought that he was too restrained in his passion, that he wouldn’t get out of his own head. He never stopped being himself. It didn’t concern her. It was their first time; these things took exploration, practice. They would find a rhythm.

Afterwards, they lay on their bellies, sharing a cigarette, having cracked the window. They could hear the music from the club across the street. They were together at the shoulder, their legs gradually angling away from each other. She’d draped the blanket over her ass.

“I have fat legs and a fat ass,” she said, mostly out of reflex.

“You’re ridiculous,” he said, grabbing her ass and shaking it in a way that made her laugh before he kissed it, which also made her laugh.

“So are you still deciding whether to kill yourself at thirty?” he asked.

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

He laughed, rolled onto his back, watched her smoking. She kissed him between drags. He’d turned into a little kid, gleeful, playful.

“I talked too much,” she said. “Tell me about you. I like how you tell stories.”

“I’m an idiot. I tell the same stories over and over.”

“Well, tell me one you don’t usually tell.”

He smiled slightly.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

He thought about Andrew. He hadn’t told anyone here about him. Once that door was opened, it was impossible to close. He would be marked, again, by tragedy. By mystery and absence. He’d come here in part to chase Andrew and in part to escape him, the way his ghost hung over his life. In New York, in Philadelphia, he would always be defined by what wasn’t there - his brother, his brother’s body. But he couldn’t exist forever without a past. One would eventually come into focus. That was unavoidable. To live fully looking forward is impossible. We are bound by stories to who we once were.

“I have an older brother. Or, had an older brother. I’m not sure whether it’s past or present tense anymore.”

She’d rested her on the pillow, but now she sat up on her arm.

“What do you mean?”

“He was living here in Istanbul, three years ago. Teaching English. He’d been in Jerusalem for a year and a half, but he’d been fired from his job and his girlfriend had left him. So he came here. He’d wanted to be a freelance journalist, to travel around the world writing stories. But he could never get any of them published.”

“Were they good?”

“I never read most of them. He wouldn’t show anyone.”

“What happened?”

“I’m getting to it.”

“Sorry.”

“No, it’s fine,” he said, rolling onto his stomach. “Andrew was here for a little over six months. He would write me sometimes, these long sprawling letters. But then he would never respond when I wrote him back. It was always a mystery when you’d write, and how much he would tell you. Sometimes they’d reveal his deepest fears, and sometimes they’d only talk about the weather.

“He said a magazine in the US - he wouldn’t say which one - had commissioned him to write a story he’d pitched them. About the Aral Sea, in Kazakhstan. Do you know about it?”

She shook her head.

“Basically, it vanished. Like my brother,” he said, smiling at the joke. “I’m sorry. Bad joke. Back in the sixties, the Soviets dammed up the rivers that fed the Aral Sea so they could irrigate their cotton crops. And it destroyed the sea. By the time they realized something was wrong, 90% of the sea had vanished. Fishing communities were suddenly stuck in the middle of the desert. Families, livelihoods were ruined. And the idea fascinated Andrew - boats stranded in the middle of the desert, ghost towns where old men smoked cigarettes and talked about what it was once like. So he planned to travel to Kazakhstan and write about it. And then he just vanished.”

“What do you mean vanished?”

“I mean he never came back.”

“Well don’t you know where he went? Can’t you find what happened?” she asked.

He smiled.

“He was reckless. He didn’t tell anyone where he was going, except that he was flying to Tashkent and then crossing into Kazakhstan. Or maybe staying in Uzbekistan. He just told us he was going, and that he’d be back in a week or ten days. And then two weeks passed and we hadn’t heard from him. We contacted the consulates in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Of course he hadn’t registered with either of them. They said they’d keep an ear out, but that there wasn’t much they could do. They didn’t have the resources to go on a wild goose chase.”

“So what did you do?”

“What could we do? We waited. We hired a private investigator, who tracked him as far as Tashkent but said that after that, as far as he could tell, he’d hitchhiked and nobody had heard from him. The last anyone had seen of him, he was walking with his backpack on the highway out of town. But he can’t even say for sure it was him.”

“So he’s just gone?”

David nodded.

“Poof, like that.”

“Jesus,” she said, reaching for her cigarettes. He watched her light it, the tobacco sparking to life. She kissed him, almost guiltily.

“So yeah. That’s the story. It’s been over three years. I mean, they’ve found a couple bodies, but none of them were him. That was hard. Waiting on the identifications. I was never sure if I wanted it to be him, just so I could know for sure, or if I didn’t want it to be him. If I wanted to hold out hope.”

“Do you think he’s still alive?”

He took the cigarette from her, thought about the question for a long time.

“No,” he said very slowly. “But I don’t think it’s impossible. My parents do. They’ve given up hope, had a funeral, made a gravestone, tried to move on. But I can’t. I knew Andrew better than anyone. He always talked about disappearing, about the logistics of it. About what it would be like to be a wholly new person, without history. I don’t think it’s impossible.”

“But who would do that? Why would he do that to you?”

He shrugged, rolled onto his back. She nestled into his shoulder, and he threw his arm around her.

“That’s what I struggle with. If he did that, I’d want to hate him. But I don’t think I could. If he did that, I know it’s because he needed to, for himself. And I like to think of him out there in the world, living in some forlorn village in the middle of the desert, or in southeast Asia. Maybe with a family.”

“You shouldn’t think like that,” she said. “That’s not good.”

“No, I know. And I usually don’t. But I can’t help it.”

She sighed deeply, kissed his ribcage, which moved him deeply. Why? he thought. Because it was such an organic gesture, an extension of nature. She could hear his lungs filling with air when he breathed, the circulation of blood and oxygen, the roads and boulevards, the architecture of his body.

“That makes sense,” she finally said. “I guess I would do the same.”

How could she have known this, she thought, when she saw him from across the room? How could anyone really know anything until you got close enough.