Her end of the semester show was to be at a gallery in Sultanahmet, not far from Aya Sofia. It was surrounded by carpet shops and overpriced tourist restaurants where all the menus were in English. The neighborhood depressed her, but it was the only gallery she could get at such a late date.

She didn’t have a ton to show - a few designs for a convention center, the models for the eco-friendly houses she’d done in Spain - but it was still rewarding to see her work gathered in one place.

She met Okan the second day she was setting up. She’d been up all night finishing her models, and she came in early the next morning, unshowered and wearing no makeup. She kicked herself when she saw Okan. He was tall, dark eyed and muscular, and, as she learned, a fondness for v-neck t-shirts that showed of his mane of chest hair. It was one of those electric moments, where a current surged beneath the surface of things.

That night, she met David. He’d texted her a few nights in a row, but she’d been busy with final preparations for her show.

They sat on the steps of Gezi Park, drinking tea from paper cups. It was a languid, late spring night. People milled lazily around Taksim, old gypsy women selling overpriced cups of birdfeed that a few tourists scattered amongst the square’s ubiquitous pigeons.

She struggled to focus on their conversation. Her thoughts were with her work, and with Okan. If she was being rational, she’d go back to Prague at the end of the summer, and what then? David wasn’t going with her, nor would she want him to. If she was being honest, all of Istanbul was fleeting. But David intimated more than that, with his seriousness and his sadness, with his desire to ask ever more personal questions. And because of that, there wasn’t much place for him in her life in Istanbul, where everything burned red hot but briefly. She wasn’t going to tie up her lone summer here with one man, regardless of how well he treated her, how special he made her feel. This wasn’t the time or place for that. He was in both the wrong place and at the wrong time. In the fall, in Prague, perhaps. But in Istanbul? Now?

“You know, they’re planning to tear this park down,” David said.

“Really?”

Across the square, heavy machinery lumbered and lurched, erecting a new traffic tunnel.

“For a mosque and a shopping mall.”

Ana quickly guzzled her tea, ready go home, where she would finger herself imagining Okan bending her over one of her models in the gallery.

“They have enough of both, don’t you think?” David said.

“I guess. It’s not much of a park. It’s just perverts and trannies. You can’t walk through there without getting groped.”

The next day, Okan took her out for drinks at a café in Cihangir. He told her that normally he worked as a director of photography for commercials but was between projects. He’d once met Terrance Malick. He smoked indifferently, let his gaze wander across other women. He wore a v-neck t-shirt, and was outlandishly good looking; his hair almost defied logic it was so perfect. She felt the eyes of other women on them.

When they got into a cab, he told her that they needed to go to her place.

“Are you loud?” he asked. “I live with my mom.”

Her studio was small and all the way out in Levent. She went to the bathroom to brush her teeth and when she came back he was already naked in bed. His body was impeccable.

“Who’s your lion?” he asked while atop her.

“What?”

“Am I your strong lion? Am I a big lion, hunting you in the wild?”

“… um. Yes? Please … catch me?”

“Oh god, yes. I’ll catch you. I’ll hunt you down.”

He lasted less than five minutes. They went to the roof for a cigarette. One of her neighbors trained pigeons, and the roof smelled vaguely like shit, the birds cooing sonorously. She could see the Bosporus Bridge. They had nothing to talk about. When they got downstairs, he put his clothes on.

“You’re leaving?”

“Mom gets pissed if I’m not home for breakfast.”

The second time they went out, he took her to a party in Besiktas. She was the only non-Turk there. They were the guys Okan had grown up with - friends from primary school, and cousins. They hung all over one another, especially Okan and his best friend, Emre. They shared chairs, kissed playfully on the cheek, mostly ignoring the women that had come with them.

Later they went to an all night club in Ortakoy, in the shadow of the bridge, where one of the cousin DJ’ed until dawn.

“What about your mother?” Ana asked Okan as they went for breakfast.

“She doesn’t mind if I’m out with Emre. We’re like brothers.”

When she got home after ten a.m., she noticed she had a text from David. Instead, she wrote Okan.

“great nite. Thanx. see you soon ;)”

It was strange to her. David was not unattractive. In fact, he was handsome, in a wholesome, unassuming way. And, in truth, he was a better lover than Okan - patient, generous. With time, he’d grown more attuned to her particularities. He was a good judge of her body. She suspected Okan had not once given a woman an orgasm - that he wouldn’t even know what one felt like if he accidentally encountered it.

But bringing him around her friends was easier to explain. They swooned. And, he opened up aspects of the city that David didn’t know existed. If she wanted to experience what Istanbul offered beneath the surface, Okan was a conduit for that; David was not.

She had a whole lifetime ahead of her to settle for kind, generous men like David. She only had one summer in Istanbul.

~

Life at the paper was consuming. David took a ferry from Kasimpasa to Uskudar at nine every morning, drinking his morning tea while watching the city glide past. Lunch was at one, followed by the midday prayer (which he usually attended with Hasan). Afterwards, they’d usually walk down to the sea, where they’d get baklava and tea.

Oftentimes on these walks, Hasan would explain the finer points of his faith. He talked about Nursi and al Ghazali and other scholars of Islamic jurisprudence, explaining the difference between major and minor jihad.

“Major jihad isn’t what a lot of people think. There’s a misunderstanding there. Major jihad is the quest to conquer your own carnal soul. The part of us that lusts after strangers, that wants to indulge in sweets, that wants to lie and cheat and steal - that’s called the nafs, and the whole point of jihad is to learn to control the nafs. War, defensive war, is the minor jihad, which is far less important in Allah’s eyes. Much more important is mastery of the self.”

He liked the way Hasan talked about his faith, and also how rigorous he was in observing it. He liked that anywhere they went, he asked to see the restaurant’s “halal” certification. He liked that Hasan often came into the office bleary eyed, having woken before dawn to pray and then to get his boys to school on time.

David’s approach to faith had resembled an all you can eat buffet. He took what he liked, and discarded the stuff he found inconvenient or difficult. He admired Hasan’s diligence, even to the inconvenient aspects of Islam.

“Maybe we lose a bit of sleep, but what is sleep in the face of serving the Almighty? We have twenty four hours in a day. All God demands of us is one. That’s not so much to ask, is it?”

He looked forward to their walks, and especially to the different mosques they would pray in. Some of them were small, neighborhood mosques, old stone buildings tucked between towering apartment buildings. Some of them were centuries old, monolithic buildings built on false platforms, their courtyards punctuated by elegant fig trees. He liked the ritual of washing his hands, face, and feet. He liked the symmetrical quiet of the prayer, the prostration, and the way the wind came in through the open windows, or how the sea was sometimes visible beyond the green of the fig leaves. Only occasionally, on his way out, would you see one or two women, hidden in back behind screens.

“The separation of sexes for prayer is natural. It’s not saying one is superior than the other,” Hasan explained. “It’s that prayer is for focusing on God completely. You rmind must be empty. How could it be empty if a woman was prostrating in front of you? She’s all you would focus on. It’s just how men are, unfortunately. We’re like animals. We can’t help ourselves.”

He and Amjad often stayed in the office until well after the rest of their co-workers, leaving when all the lights had been turned off and only the cleaning crews remained. Afterwards, they would sometimes go out for dinner, swapping stories about their childhoods in Pennsylvania and Tehran.

“It’s funny,” Amjad said, “that we all tend to hold onto similar things. Grandmother’s stories. Summer afternoons that seemed bigger than anything else, free and young. Running water. Have you noticed how all kids love running water? They do. It’s just something inside all of us. I have cousins, two, three years old, and they love water falls, they love sprinklers. We can’t help it.”

“Do you miss being home?”

Amjad shrugged. They were sitting at the café atop Camlica Hill in Altunizade, the highest hill on the Anatolian side of the city. The sun was setting over the old peninsula. Boats, dozens of them, were lined up, waiting to pass through the Bosporus.

“What is home, right? I don’t mean to be glib, brother man. Don’t think that. But what is it? It’s just places that spark something in us because we loved people in those places. I spent two years in Indonesia and didn’t love a soul in that place. Everything there is hollow. I wouldn’t recognize Tehran if I went back. It’s changing. Like everywhere. The places I loved aren’t real anymore. Bulldozed, shut down, turned into mosques or malls.”

“You have malls?”

“Hell, brother man, open your eyes. Everywhere has malls. Philly, Tehran, Istanbul. In fifteen years, I bet this fucking hill will be a mall. That or a mosque. Probably both. Home, man, it’s just a few people. My sister, in Boston. My father, my mother. Maybe a girl here and there. It ain’t a settled thing, nor should it be. I’m a nomad. You’re becoming one, too.”

David smiled. “What do you mean?”

“I just see it in you, brother man. The taste for movement. It’s taking you.”

They watched the ships out on the sea, little islands of light amidst the larger dark.

On the nights he and Amjad didn’t go out, he took the ferry home, usually as the day was burning itself out. He would stand alone on the back of the boat, where the motor churned, watching the endless lights of the city, wondering about what Amjad had said, wondering if Istanbul might eventually be full enough of people he loved to feel like home - whether it could contain more than the ghost of his brother.

He usually got off at Karakoy, where the fish market emptied itself of tourists, the smell of blood and brine hanging so thickly that no amount of water could wash it away. He walked through the market in his shirt and tie, the fish shimmering and opalescent under the dangling lights. Sometimes he bought a half dozen stuffed mussels, drizzled with lemon, and ate them before walking up the steep hill past Galata tower, its plaza filled by kids drinking and playing music.

He never thought he would enjoy the structure of office life. He looked at his friends who worked in offices with scorn, as if they’d sold out their dreams. But there was something deeply, inexorably satisfying about these long, exhausted walks home. He felt women watching him - his clothes fit him well - and he walked easily, insouciantly, the pleasure of a day of hard work behind him, the energy of another Istanbul night enfolding him.

Some nights, he’d stop in a bar for a beer, or meet up with his roommates at a café for dinner. These nights routinely spiraled out of control, leading to more drinks, then dancing, then late night snacks - sheep’s intestine sandwiches or cow stomach soup - then getting home with the dawn call to prayer, sleeping for three hours, and showing up at the office, functioning on the pure adrenaline of feeling himself being defined, perhaps for the first time.



~

On the last of May, Ana had her show in Sultanahmet. David went directly after work, taking the fairy to Eminonu and buying a fish sandwich for dinner. It was a warm night after a splendid day that had been hot but clear.

The gallery was tucked down an alley behind Aya Sofia, across the street from a Nargile café. It was in a courtyard, quiet and placid, removed from the tourist rush. He walked in feeling good, imagining her surprise. He imagined spending the night at her side, his hand on the small of her back. The thrill of being in public with her had not worn off. The proximity to such beauty enlivened him.

He was twenty minutes late, but the gallery was still mostly empty, which meant when he walked in the door, everyone noticed.

Instead of coming over when she saw him, she immediately turned back to the man at her side. He was tall and bearded, wore a silk shirt and had immaculate, slicked back hair. David knew, instantly, that they were sleeping together. If he’d seen them through the window, he wouldn’t have entered.

Finally, he went over to them.

“Hey,” he said.

She feigned surprise.

“David, oh my. You came.”

“Yep. Here I am.”

She strained to smile. The man beside her smirked with bemusement, having assumed the role of privileged bystander. He was now the figure of envy.

“Have you met my friend, Okan?” Ana said.

“No.”

Okan smiled and they shook hands.

“Nice to meet you,” Okan said blithely, seeming to mean it.

“Nice shirt,” David said.

No one said anything.

“Well. Okay. This looks great. Congratulations again,” he said. “Did I congratulate you? Congratulations.”

“Thanks,” she said, accepting a kiss on the cheek.

“Okay. I’m just going to take a look around.”

That he stayed any longer was simply a matter of pride, though what that pride was, he couldn’t say. No one but Ana knew about their situation, and wouldn’t have given him a second thought if he had left immediately. But he wanted her to understand that he was a bigger person than that; that he hadn’t come simply because he was fucking her, but because he actually cared about her work.

Unlike that hairy, greasy dickhead, he thought to himself.

But then, he knew nothing about that. He shouldn’t loathe or immediately assume the worst about any other man who pursued the women he cared for; their attention, of course, was the very thing that so piqued him when he was the one in favor, when he was the one taking the woman to bed …

No, if he was going to be cast aside like this, he was going to linger, to remind her that she was throwing away a decent, attentive man. And he was going to prove to himself that his ego wasn’t so fragile as to be wounded by her choice of someone else - that he still cared enough about her, as more than a sexual object, to support her work.

He circled the room as slowly as possible; the gallery filled up. He tried to pour all his energy into focusing on the plasticene models of homes and office buildings, nodded with feigned attention and curiosity, murmuring to himself. But his mind was consumed with thoughts of Ana and the man with her, wondering if they were watching him, if she was following him with her eyes. Yet every time he looked, she seemed to be intensely engaged in the act of ignoring him or pretending he wasn’t there. He had to accept that his discomfort was precisely that - his. No one else could see it or feel it. No one else cared or noticed his presence or his ego.

In the moments he pulled himself out of his self pity, he noticed that there seemed a strange energy to the gathering. He couldn’t place what it was. People were huddled in groups, checking their phones, whispering passionately and eyeing the door.

He went up to the roof for a cigarette. A small elevator led to a terrace that overlooked, in one direction, the scaffolded minarets of Aya Sofia, and in the other, the hill rising to Galata tower, and in the distance, Taksim. Spindles of black smoke rose from near the square, and along with the swarms of gulls circling Galata, two helicopters banked low, casting floodlights over the city which occasionally passed through the minarets of smoke.

A woman he recognized was smoking across the terrace, also alone.

“Hey,” he said.

She turned and smiled.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

She shrugged. She’d been out with Ana the night he met her. She was shorter than Ana, with close cropped black hair. A strapless lavender dress exposed her chest bones, the tops of small, pert breasts, which rose whenever she took a drag.

“Something about a protest.”

“What kind of protests?”

“I don’t know. That’s all I’ve heard.”

They stood by the railing together, close enough that someone watching might have assumed they were lovers. They stared off into the hazy night, the helicopters flitting through the smoke. Below them, Sultanahmet was calm. Tourists filtered down the street, gorging on dondurma ice cream. Groups of college kids smoked nargile and laughed. Without a word, she slipped away, leaving him alone with the vista.

Back in the gallery, he overheard another group talking.

“Apparently it’s bad over there.”

“How so?”

“Tear gas. Water canons. Twitter says people have been shot.”

“I don’t believe it. It’s so quiet over here.”

“I heard it, too. My friend said it’s like a war zone.”

His pride had endured enough. Something was pulling him away, an imminent sense of missing something essential. He thought that Andrew wouldn’t have been wasting his time here, scorned for a lesser, dumber man; he would’ve been over there, on the streets, with his camera. He was still following the wrong streams, failing to pick up life’s most important currents.

He practically sprinted out of the gallery. Once he reached the street, he did break into a sprint, loosening his tie as he ran, picking up speed, ignoring the curious glances of tourists and street vendors alike. Curiously, the tram wasn’t running. He thought it stopped at midnight. Was it really that late? Had he squandered so many hours?

He ran easily, despite his dress pants. He unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt, feeling the breeze as he turned north, towards the Golden Horn. When he felt his breath giving out, he hailed a cab.

“Taksim,” he said.

The cabbie looked at him like he was crazy.

“Sishane, then. Galata. Tunel. Whatever. Just get me over there.” He pointed across the harbor.

Traffic seemed normal, and the driver let him off just down the hill from Galata. David didn’t even care that he hadn’t turned the meter on and charged him twenty lira for a ten lira ride.

He jumped out and quickly made his way up the hill to Istiklal. It was preternaturally quiet, most of the bufes and tekels closed down. A few of the teahouses were still open, but they had their doors and windows shuttered so that only slivers of light spilled out to the street.

The part of him (which exists in everyone) that craved the sight of raw destruction - to come in contact with the affirming facts of death and horror - was disappointed. It was the part of him that was fascinated by plane crashes and serial killers, that. Maybe it was what had driven his brother out into the world, to ever more remote locales - to witness the honesty of death up close. And in the pursuit of this truth, he’d lost himself. Maybe this was what drove anyone from their homes, out into the world - to see the real thing firsthand, and to return altered. It was not the journey they chased, it was the return after that journey.

Whatever it was, he’d been on the cusp of it. He’d missed it because of a woman who pretended not to see him. Because of pride, and ego, and because he didn’t have the right instincts for honesty. He missed it because he was, at heart, fraudulent.

He found the south end of Istiklal empty, littered with trash, every business closed up. What time was it? He had no idea. He continued to move, a few other people joining him now, propelled by the same urge, having heard messages on Facebook or Twitter, having received texts from their friends.

As they approached Galatasaray, the crowd grew. A noise came to them, swelling down the high buildings of the old avenue. Faint at first, but growing and multiplying and echoing until it became an all encompassing cacophony.

Her yer Gezi, her yer Taksim.

The buildings there bore signs of conflict, their facades painted with graffiti, their windows splintered by bullets or fractured by blunt force. Piles of garbage burned like sentinels in the middle of the street, acrid smoke spiraling into the mauve night above. In the distance, a crowd, thousands, clotted the avenue. They carried banners, and more were joining them, spilling in from Istiklal’s dozens of capillaries, joining the main artery, their faces wrapped with scarves or t-shirts or homemade gas masks. The chants echoed and reverberated, seeming infinite.

Beyond them, a barricade of police blocked Taksim, their riot shields glinting in the street lights, their hundreds flanked on both sides by white tanks, water canons mounted atop them.

He moved quickly now, all of them did, driven forward by the same curiosity, pushing through the other assembled bodies, until nearing the front, the crowd stopped. A no-man’s land, no more than ten meters, separated the protesters from police. The police behind their shields looked from man to man. The protesters continued to sing, serenading the police.

Diren Gezi, Diren Taksim.

One of them, a shirtless bard, dancing into the space between, played a flute, high stepping to the music.

He could see the police. They were there, behind their layer of plastic and their masks. Boys, he thought. All of them are boys, much younger than me.

In that moment, he knew he needed to run. He’d gone too far. Later, he would wonder if his brother had a similar realization, lost somewhere in the wasteland of Kazakhstan. But in that moment, his only thought was a sinking, a sudden awareness that he’d transgressed a line he wasn’t prepared to cross.

It was too late. As he turned, as they all turned, he heard the thwomp, thwomp, thwomp of gun barrels launching canisters of pepper gas down the narrow street. They moved like a wave, the bodies pushing him from behind and from within, the space in which he moved growing smaller and smaller until there was only one direction to move. He ran as fast as he could, but the gas had been shot behind them, and to escape they had to pass through it, the canisters rattling to the ground and hissing to life.

First, his nose burned, then his eyes, then his entire face, and then he was consumed by the gas, barreling blindly through it, pushed and dragged and pulled by the herd, none of them able to see, all of them trusting the hand in front of them that they reached out for. He thought he would never get through it; he thought he would suffocate or fall.

When they came out the other side, into clear light, he could barely open his eyes. It was like burying your face in an enormous bag of freshly cut onions.

Yavas, yavas, yavas, voices called out. Slow, slow. Slow.

Blinded, a hand grabbed him and pulled him down a side street. He couldn’t see, and he trusted it implicitly. Behind him, the rattle and hiss of more gas, the prattle of rubber bullets. They wended their way down the labyrinthine alleys, the nest of vessels leading to the main street. The singing started again just as the gas started to overtake them.

“Abbi, abbi,” a voice called, and he didn’t know if it was directed at him, but he and the hand leading him moved towards into, down a flight of stairs into a small shop set beneath the street. As the gas languorously filtered down the street, the owner slammed the door shut.

His eyes began to regain their focus. There were a half dozen of them, five men and one woman, slumped on the floor or atop milk crates. Their eyes, bloodshot and raw, looked as if they’d been clawed. Quickly, but deliberately, the store owner - a man in his fifties or sixties, and with very few of his teeth remaining - and his wife, a stout woman wearing a plain headscarf, went from one body to another, spritzing their eyes with lemons and then rinsing them with water.

The burning subsided. Outside, they could hear the muffled singing, and the road of the water canons. The owner distributed beer amongst the patrons, and then cigarettes. None of them could speak. He felt like one feels after a long swim, or after depraved sex - gutted, but alive. They drank in silence, shaking their heads. The man next to him, about his own age, put his hand on David’s shoulder.

“Abbi,” he said. “Abbi.” Brother. Brother.

He finished the beer. The police had moved on, down different streets. The gas had cleared. Three of them stumbled out into the street, bleary eyed. He didn’t know the way home, so he followed the other men. Soon, they joined the other stragglers, the dozens and hundreds of protesters emerging from the apartments and shops that had given them shelter.

As the wound their way into Cihangir, a new sound overtook them. A clamorous, immense wave of noise. He realized that people were banging pots and pans. They were hanging out of windows, children and shirtless men and covered women, all of them singing, banging spoons to pots, knives to pans. They serenaded them as they moved through the narrow streets, the high buildings so close together that laundry was strung between many of them, flapping like banners in the wind.

He looked up. Some of them were throwing toilet paper, and it rained down like confetti. They sang, they played their domestic instruments. It seemed the whole city was asong, every light turned on, every body either on the street or hanging out a window. They sang, and cheered, and those on the street moved forward, carried on a wave that was bigger than them, a current they could feel but not see, plunging deeper into the night, into a canyon of sound.