Summer waned. Its death was in the cool, clear nights; the splatter of fresh figs on the sidewalks; the rich aroma of burning firewood drifting up the hill from the gypsy squats in Kasimpasa.

It was also in the crowds. Istanbullus came back from their summer vacations to find their city packed with tourists and new students. Everyone wanted to prolong the final warm weeks, t-shirt and jeans weather.

One Friday in early September, David met Benjamin at the used book pasaj near Galatasaray. Though it was just a half block from Istiklal, which teemed with people, it felt a different world. Subterranean and cool, it was mostly empty, save for a few quiet patrons.

Built over two levels, the pasaj contained forty or so shops, most of them used book stores. A few sold prints and old postcards, most of which had writing on their backs - missives to lovers and families, written in the bygone forties and fifties. Istanbul in black and white, smoke shrouded.

The shops are family-run, mostly by older, bespectacled men who sit out front in rickety chairs, drinking cay and reading newspapers (usually Radikal or Hurriyet). There are a few women, too.

Inside, the stores are in varying states of disarray. The most ordered among them still resembled an unsorted section of the college stacks, with English and Turkish and French books all mixed together, novels with romance, history with theology. The majority, however, were in complete disarray, leaning towers of books balanced against termite infested book shelves, themselves jammed full of paperbacks. David’s favorite shops were quite literally mazes of books.

Amongst the chaos, there were gems to be found: first printings of Fitzgerald and Steinbeck, a vintage Penguin edition of “Crime and Punishment,” pulp paperback versions of Hemingway. And even among the flawed, the dog earred, the water stained, there were minor miracles - inscriptions from fathers to sons, receipts from bookstores as far away as Cape Town. In a copy of “Housekeeping,” David found a movie ticket from Haverford, Pennsylvania.

Hours could be lost in the pasaj - hours and hundreds of lira. Most of the books, even the first printings, never went for more than twenty lira. The problem was, there were just too many too buy.

“A microcosm of the trial we all face: too many books, too short a life,” Ben said, grinning, holding up an orange-cover Penguin of “Moby-Dick” and a tattered copy of “Othello.”

Ben made good company for the pasaj. A Londoner, he and David had a few shared spaces in their past. More than that, as a romantic poet, he and David shared a sensibility. At least twice a month, they got together at Ben’s place on the seaside in Kadikoy to read poems, play guitar, smoke joints, drink whiskey, and bullshit about women. Baris frequently joined them, and the three had formed something of a trio - the literary bros, Ben affectionately, but teasingly, called them.

They snaked their way through the mazes of books, searching for jewels amidst the endless yellow pages of worthless words.

“So many people spent so much time writing these books. Poured their souls into them, and now here they are, buried under a dozen copies of ‘Twilight’ and a dozen copies of D.H. Lawrence,” David said. “Does that ever occur to you?”

“What? The futility of artistic endeavor? All the time.”

David smiled. “Something like that.”

David’s favorite store was on the bottom level, nestled between two showier fronts. The owner, Orhan, was a former literature professor at Bogazici, a short fat man with wispy grey hair, high suspenders, and scratched, circular glasses. The prototypical book lover, so to speak.

Whenever David came, the two of them shared a glass of tea, speaking in broken Turkish and English about their favorites.

“Only the classics,” he liked to tell David.

He showed off his newest arrivals - a brilliantly preserved early Penguin of “The Plague” and a musty hardcover of “Typee.” Both were magnificent. Ten lira for the Camus, twenty for the Melville, or twenty five for both. Twelve bucks. David bought the Camus but left the Melville.

After his tea, he searched the skyscrapers of books. Orhan’s store was as disheveled as they came. Sometimes, David would wander in, thinking it was empty, and stumble into a couple making out, well hidden in the back of the shop. It was the kind of place that smelled, perpetually, like an ancient paper back - that sumptuous scent of slow decay; of words gradually, imperceptibly turning to dust.

Though he loved the disarray, it made searching for books complicated. David was often supporting one stack with one knee, balancing a platter of books in one hand, and perusing the double-stacked bookshelves with the other. Under such circumstances, the occasional disaster was inevitable.

While reading for an old copy of “Huck Finn,” David felt the stack his knee was bracing begin to wobble.

“Oh shit,” he said. But Ben had slipped out, drifted to another store.

He didn’t want to sound the alarm yet. With his forehead, he tried to level out the imbalanced books, groping desperately to set down the platter in his left hand, but only finding more precarious towers.

Though summer was breaking, it was still hot in the store, and David could feel sweat slipping down his spine as he tried to fight the inevitable. He fought with the books for a few minutes, and just when he thought he might avoid disaster, the whole tower tumbled down atop of him, a shower of paperbacks like falling leaves clambering over his head and onto the floor.

Orhan appeared in the doorway, a smile beneath his moustache.

“Oh, yok yok yok!” he chuckled.

“Sorry. Pardon. Sorry!” David said.

The two of them gathered up the books and tried to rebuild the tower, but in their haste, set off a chain reaction that brought two more skyscrapers crumbling down. They were buried in books to the knee, both of them laughing, dust sticking to their sweaty forearms.

“What the hell have you done?” Ben said, choosing just then to appear.

“Book demolition,” David said.

The three of them finally rebuilt, achieving a temporary stability. They backed out carefully, like fathers creeping out of a crying baby’s room.

Afterwards, Ben and David took the back roads that snaked parallel to the throbbing chaos of Istiklal. These streets - full of meyaned and kokorec stalls - weren’t much better. It was the end of summer; the city wanted one last party.

They hopped the metro out towards the end of the line, Seyrantepe, a bizarre neighborhood halfway to the Black Sea, a pastiche of new glass skyscrapers and teetering gecekondus. The metro left them atop a hill. From it, they could see to the Bosporus in the distance. The skeletons of buildings still under construction were lit from within and without by the sunset. Just the day before, at one of these buildings, a construction elevator had plunged thirty two stories, killing ten workers.

Though the main street was full of brightly lit bufes and bakals, the side streets quickly enveloped them in their silence. Old women hung out of windows, smoking. Baskets hung like life rafts from the upper floors.

They found Ali and Samantha’s apartment at the bottom of a valley. Their place was on the top floor, an addition - likely illegal - perched above the main building. It recalled the bridge of a ship.

The place was already crowded, the countertop filled with homebrewed booze smuggled from Tehran, where Ali’s family was from, and bottles of Jack that Samantha had brought with her from Utah. They were recently married in a private ceremony - one of Shia Islam’s temporary marriages.

“So how does this kind of affair end?” Ben asked, pouring himself a large glass of Iranian scotch.

“Well I just say ‘I divorce you,’ three times in a row,” Ali said. The two somewhat resembled twins, both of them short but muscular - and both sporting pony tails that they pulled up in the heat.

Ben lifted his eye brow suspiciously.

“Like, I would look at her,” Ali turned to Samantha, a voluptuous blonde who was a good six inches taller than him, “and say, ‘I divorce you, I divorce you,’ -” he stopped himself, breaking into laughter. “I won’t finish. I don’t want to divorce!”

“I like this,” Ben said. “All marriages should be so simple.”

Ben and David’s significant others had not joined them for the evening. In fact, Gozde and Nur had gone dancing together. Before leaving, Gozde had breezed into her living room, finding Ben sitting with his guitar.

“How do I look?” she asked, spinning in her tango dress.

“Dashing, darling.”

She frowned.

“You’re not jealous? I’m going out with guys, you know.”

“Lovely. I’m going out with women.”

Ben sipped his whiskey quickly. It had been five years since he’d been with a non-Turkish woman. Though Gozde was exceptional in a lot of ways - his first Turkish lover, Merve, had thrown a tantrum whenever he so much as eyed another woman - she still nodded to conventional Turkish tropes, from time to time. Ben loved her; why did he need to show that by raging against any other man dancing with her, or touching her hips? She could do what she wanted with other men; it was her body. As long as she was there in the morning to roll over and kiss him, what did the rest of it matter?

He refilled his glass, going for the Jack this time. Five years he’d been in the city. What had it given? A relationship, sure, and a good one. A small cavalry of friends. He’d expected more, he supposed. Maybe the city wasn’t entirely to blame for that.

Drinking games were played. Ben hadn’t played most of them since secondary school. It was a young crowd, but earnest.

The games eventually dissolved as most people in the room reached a sufficient level of drunkenness. Then, the pairing off that inevitably happens at such parties took place. Ben found himself sharing a large throw pillow in a corner of the living room with an older Iranian woman. A scientist from Tehran. She was demonstrative, but not in a way that belied some larger insecurity. She was demonstrative in a way that felt honest, which he could live with. She spoke grandiloquently about her journey to the city from Tehran - losing out on a prestigious scholarship, at the age of seventeen, due to a vote rigged by the ruling regime; the crushing realization that her options, as a woman, were almost nil - and even less than that because her family had no money; the decision to choose Istanbul, a city that she loathed for its lazy intolerance and privileged indulgences. And yet, like so many before her, she couldn’t leave.

The story took quite some time, but Ben enjoyed it. She spoke English with a posh accent; she spent two years as an au pair in London. She called him his full name, “Benjamin,” and it drove him mad in the way that only language could.

“Say that again,” he said the first time she did it.

“Benjamin,” she purled.

“Lovely, dear. Just lovely.” He’d once slept with a woman because he saw she signed her named “Katerina O.” The extra “O” was impossible to resist.

“What about you, Benjamin? How did you end up in our fair city?” she asked.

“Oh, a woman I was chasing.” He finished another whiskey. “Didn’t work out.”

In the kitchen, David was picking his way through a series of Persian and Turkish dishes, eating too much - which he always did at potlucks like this - and not drinking enough. A French photographer, Julienne, had followed him in to talk politics. She’d seen him from across the room and noticed when, during “Never Have I Ever” he drank twice for fucking someone in public.

“Everyone says the Kurds, the Kurds, as if they’re somehow preferable to ISIS or really anyone else. As if, just by the sole nature of having suffered, they’re innocent.” She had short hair that was sticking a half dozen directions in the heat, thick glasses that slid down her nose as she spoke. Her lips were large and unmade up. She had small teeth. “The Kurds have their agenda. Does everyone forget the PKK? They just executed two people last week!

“And let’s not talk about ‘the Kurds’ as some monolith. The Turkish Kurds hate the Syrian Kurds hate the Iraqi Kurds. They can’t get along about anything. When they aren’t fighting ISIS, they’re fighting each other.”

David shrugged. “So you’re saying that all this democracy stuff, all this female equality stuff: just a political stunt?”

“Absolutely. To buy American support. Or, more precisely, to sell Americans oil.”

David smiled. His country was always, always to blame. He must have heard his country eviscerated by half the ethnicities on the planet by now. Not that they were wrong.

“It’s all political maneuvering. Trust me,” Julienne said, pushing her glasses up her nose, flashing a mostly toothless grin. “I did a photo project in the Southeast a few years ago. Horrible, horrible conditions.”

“Well part of that is that the Turkish army firebombs their villages. And no one hears about it.”

“Sure, of course. But you also have fourteen year old girls married off to their forty year old cousins to ‘protect them from strangers.’ And then they’re treated like dogs by these slovenly, fat old bastards. It’s no different, really. So they don’t cut off your head if you’re an apostate? Big fucking deal. That shouldn’t be the bar we’re setting for an ally within the region.”

“Okay, well then if not the Kurds, what’s the force for good in the region?”

She shrugged. “The Christians.” She burst into laughter, pushed her glasses up again. It took him a moment to smile.

~

He and Ben left earlier, hoping to catch the metro before it stopped running. The government did its best to dissuade debauchery, shutting down all public transit at midnight. It only led to more drunk driving, more fights over taxi cabs.

They shared a cigarette on the way to the train. Ali had given them a small bottle of whiskey for the road - not that they needed it.

“It’s strange how quiet it is out here, don’t you think?” Ben asked.

David nodded, took the cigarette from Ben’s fingers.

“It makes me wonder what world I’m in. Like, wait a minute, I can see stars. I can smell trees. I can hear myself think. Is this still Istanbul?”

They caught the last train, which was mostly empty. They sat across from an older Muslim couple, who glared at them as they passed the bottle between them. They’d grown easy together as friends. Growing tired, David let his head fall against Ben’s shoulder.

“That Iranian woman. The loud one,” Ben said, shaking his head. “There was something about her. Something I can’t pin down.” He shivered. “Sexy, though. Mighty sexy.”

“I agree. I liked Julienne, too.”

“Yes, I saw you with her. The French can pull off sexy and alluring without actually being attractive.”

David laughed, taking the whiskey, drawing a stare from the old man, who stroked his beard like a talisman.

“She had quite a nice little rack on her, too,” Benjamin said.

“No doubt. Smart, too.”

“Most importantly.”

They laughed. Ben took back the whiskey.

“I don’t think they like us very much, do they?” he said, toasting in the old couple’s direction.

“No. They seem to think we’re up to no good.”

“Yabancis coming into their good Muslim country. Mucking it up with our carnal souls, our taste for women and liquor.” Ben raised the bottle. “Well sir, I toast to you and your life choices. I don’t castigate you for your fascist, childish beliefs, now do I? No, sir. I drink to you and your freedom.”

The old man got up and his wife followed at a safe distance. David watched them go, feeling bad about Ben’s outburst. He had no problem drinking in public, but he didn’t want to outwardly antagonize them. This, he supposed, was the difference between the American approach to secularism and the English: one accepted religion as viable, the other had decided it offered little.

Istiklal was somehow even more crowded than earlier in the night, packed to the gills with roving packs of horny teenage boys, Erasmus girls in short skirts, Kurdish dance circles, cripples on all fours, buskers playing music, Syrian families begging in their rags.

“Ah, what scenery,” Ben said as a group of girls passed.

“Always good scenery in Istanbul.”

Ben smiled and shook his head. “We’re awful, aren’t we? We’ve got beautiful women who wanted to take us dancing tonight. Beautiful women who would suck our cocks for hours, and instead, we want to go to a party and flirt with strange women - much less attractive women - instead of going dancing. And why? I’ll never understand it.”

They found a kokorec place near Nevizade, sitting on the brightly lit terrace. They ordered two sandwiches and a plate of medya dolma.

“I need to reorient my life, I think,” Ben said, rolling a cigarette.

“Yeah?”

He nodded. “Five years I’ve been here. And I’m split between two worlds. In one, I’m a committed, loving boyfriend and poet. I stay in. I worship the ground she walks on. I dedicate myself to my art.” He lights the cigarette, crosses his legs. Over the course of his night, the ponytail has become more and more disheveled and unruly. Now it’s a complete mess. “In the other, I’m a hedonistic teenage boy, out and about, trying to fuck everything in sight, chasing something, always something, but what is it?”

David smiled. “I felt that way when I first got here. Every night I didn’t go out, I felt like I was missing something essential.”

Ben lifted his eyes brows.

“But not anymore.”

“See, I still feel that way. I wish I didn’t. To be the man I want to be would mean that I stop drinking so much, I stop having so many friends, I stop chasing women and the ’true’ experience. I hole up in my room and write, give up on the teaching. But that would mean being a completely different person.

“The problem, as I see it, is that we want it all. Men, I mean. And women, I suppose, but especially us, me and you. We want amazing lovers who are also brilliant and have their own passions. We want to pursue our own passions, and we want jobs that pay us for those passions. We have all these boxes, and we want everyone checked off. And whatever life we choose, well, that means sacrificing some of those boxes. But none of us are willing to make those sacrifices.”

“Some of us are.”

“Okay, but none of us here, in this city. Which is why we’re here in the first place.” Benjamin smiled. “It’s what we love about Istanbul. It’s why we can’t leave - the old cliché. That this place can be everything to everyone. It has the religious shrines and the all night dance clubs. The big shopping malls and the neighborhood markets. The European art scene that paints photos of the President with a Hitler moustache and the conservative neighborhoods where they kick you out if you’re wearing shorts. Body and spirit. Both poles, one city.

“We all make fun of the fucking tourists that come here, spouting some shit about ’east meets west, old meets new,’ but we all buy into it. Everyone of us. You know the two things that this government has built the most of?

“Shopping malls and mosques.”

Ben smiled. “We believe this city can be all things. And maybe it ends up being nothing.”

He spit out his smoke. Their sandwiches arrived - steaming sheep’s intestines smothered in butter and hot pepper and slathered onto a roll of soft white bread. The mussels, stuffed with dried grapes and spicy rice, were warm.

“Do you know what makes me sad?” Ben asked, his mouth full.

“What?”

“I never really look at Gozde’s face. And do you know why? Because if you look at anyone’s face long enough they become ugly. Do we ever really look at the faces of those we love? No. We’re glancing away, looking at pieces of the whole, not really focusing. And I think this is because we’re afraid if we look long enough, we’ll see how ugly they are, how animal they are, how even the most splendid human face is still inherently beastly. It’s like words. Look at a word long enough, and it loses all semantic meaning. Think about even just a simple word, like ‘tree.’ What the fuck is a tree? Tree, tree, tree, tree, tree, tree. Tree. Tree. Tree. Tree. Tree. Tree. Tree. Tree, tree; tree, tree, tree. Don’t get me started on serious words, like ‘meaning.’”

He finished the bottle of whiskey, which sat between them on the table.

“It’s like what we were talking about last week over whiskey. About Maj and Nur.”

“What? The comparison between the two?”

“Not the comparison but the failure of the comparison. What you wanted to say was too complicated for what language or expectations allow. Because you’re supposed to say: yes, I’d give up this relationship, with Nur, to have Maj back. Or you’re supposed to say: no, that pain was worth it, because now I have this better, more fulfilling life. But neither of those is true, not quite. You can’t weight these things in opposition, but we have to weigh these things in opposition, because they’re all we’ve got, right?”

David smiled.

“Besides. The Maj you’d be trading for is a fiction. Maybe you would give up this relationship, this life, to be twenty-one again with twenty-one year old Maj, before she turned into the person she is now. But you aren’t choosing between that or this. You’re choosing between twenty-eight year old David, here in Istanbul, or a fiction. And there’s no choice involved in that now, is there?”

“Well isn’t that the crux of the issue? Choice?”

“Sure. We think we want choice. But then we get it, and we can’t choose.”

He smiled, butter spilling into his goatee. “Like that old couple on the train. Those miserable bastards. But you know what? Sometimes I wish I’d come from a family like that. Just marry me off, put a Qur’an in my hand, and tell me that if I reject it, you’ll disown me - or worse, cut my head off. Maybe that’s the key to happiness. A strict regulation of choices: there is only one choice.”

“I know you don’t believe that,” David said.

“No, of course. It’s too lazy. It’s too easy. Don’t get me wrong, it’d be fucking lovely. Salvation and everything I could ever possibly want? All I have to do is pray five times a day, make sure no one sees my wife’s legs but me, and refuse to eat one month out of the year? And then I get everything, without having to choose? Fucking lovely. Sign me up.

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to bash Islam here. Christianity’s the same bloody trick. At least Islam requires a bit of work, you know? Like, get out there five times a day. Get out of bed every day, instead of just one. It’s work!”

David laughed.

“But at the end of the day, it’s not a real answer. Not for me. Give me the messiness of choice. Give me a world in which my choices can be rejected by someone else. Give me a world in which Istanbul’s the best we can do. Who needs paradise when you’ve got this place, right? Do you know what my cabbie called it the other day?”

“No,” David said, dousing the mussels in lemon, slipping one of them into his mouth like a stone.

“He told me that Istanbul is the city for people God has abandoned.” Benjamin shook his head, stamped out his cigarette. “What a magnificent clusterfuck, eh?”