Baris returned from Suruc late, very late. It had been an exhausting day after an exhausting month, and he didn’t know what kind of city he’d return to.

The plane took his favorite approach, swooping in from the northeast. They dipped off the Black Sea, tracing the Bosporus, its black vein bisecting the lights of the city, before banking hard over Ortakoy, coming down low over the neighborhoods where he’d spent his childhood - the mosques of Fatih, the skyscrapers of Sisli.

He liked to think of the stories unfolding below, the millions of lives influx and at rest - the lovers and sinners, the bastards and cab drivers, the heartbroken and the romantic. It all seemed possible from above, and the city looked intact.

It was late enough that traffic was light. Again, the city looked intact. He’d learned during the protests that Istanbul was big enough that the world could be falling apart in Okmeydani and you’d barely know it in Osmanbey - to say nothing of the separate continents.

But even Kadikoy, despite what little he’d heard from his landlady (who admittedly had a taste for melodrama), seemed whole. The port bustled with the usual buskers and couples, stretching the final few hours from their weekends. Out on the sea, the lights of a few dozen boats bobbed on the tumultuous current, apparitions waiting to be granted passage down the River Styx. One of them, an immense monstrosity of a cargo ship, cruised silently across the lights of the old peninsula, its darkened silhouette slicing past the city like a thief. In his thirty three years in Istanbul he’d never learned why the large ships passing the strait during the night did so completely darkened. Their shapes were often only visible against the city’s panorama, or by the flurry of smaller ferries that scurried to veer out of their path. Why didn’t they turn a single light on? Wasn’t it dangerous?

Walking home, he stopped briefly to watch a dance circle. They were Kurds, all men, a dozen of them or so, gathered around a tanbor and a drum. It reminded him of his early childhood, listening to fuzzy, pirated Kurdish music on the radio with his grandfather.

The men were buoyant, defiant, but none of the couples - or the watchful gendarme - paid them any mind. They danced and chanted: We are all Kobane. You are heroes, Kobane.

If only they knew, Baris thought. Then, he walked home, and for two days he slept.

~

David was the only person to remember he was coming back and to get in touch.

“Let’s get a late lunch. Whenever you’re ready and wherever you want to go.”

He was just back from the States, and eager to compare notes.

“Do you know Akasya?” Baris asked.

“Where?”

“Just meet me at the Marmaray in Ayrlikcesme. We’ll go together.”

Akasya was one of the new malls sprouting up all over the Asian side of the city, most of them notable for how tremendously out of place they looked amongst the sprawling apartment blocks.

“You brought me to a mall?” David said after they passed through security, stepping into the enormous, domed courtyard.

Baris forced a smile. “I thought you’d feel right at home.”

The truth of it was that, after a month of barely sleeping, taking cold showers, and being perpetually covered in blood and grime, Baris wanted something sterile. He wanted the soft reassurance of capital. He wanted to drink tea looking out over the food court while teenage girls giggled over their new Victoria’s Secret bras and women with fake noses tried on their new sunglasses from Dolce and Gabana and men in three piece suits sans ties groomed their beards and ignored their daughters. He wanted sunlight marred by tinted glass and fake trees and a cheap fountain. He wanted unobtrusive Muzak.

David was endlessy amused by how much his Turkish friends loved shopping malls - and more than that, loved showing off shopping malls. During his first few months in the city, almost every new friend he made wanted to meet up at one of the European side’s massive shopping centers - Cevahir or Demiroren or Kanyon. Yet the longer he stayed in the city, the more he, too, came to appreciate the artificial calm of the places. They were refuges from the street’s madness - and, for him at least, reminders of home. Whenever a particular wave of homesickness came over him, he’d take the train out to Cevahir and sit in the food court, eating Popeyes and Krispy Kreme. Shopping malls, like the sky, were everywhere the same.

“It was a strange trip,” David said as they settled in at a British tea shop. He’d gone back to Philadelphia for a friend’s wedding. “Everyone seems to be getting married.”

“How old are you again?” Baris asked.

“Twenty-eight.”

“That’s the appropriate age.”

“But why?”

Baris sighed; he didn’t want to really delve into it.

“It’s expectation, right? Cultural expectation,” David said. “Family and friends saying, ‘oh, you’re getting old. You’re going to end up alone.’”

“Sure, probably. And a bit of biology, I suppose. If you want to have kids.”

“Sure, of course. A little bit of that. But none of my friends particularly want to have kids. And they’re all getting married.”

Baris shrugged.

“I’ve got a theory.”

“Let’s hear it, Dave.”

“It’s long. But I thought about it when I was watching football this weekend - American football. Which I love doing, by the way. I fucking love it. I love sitting with my friends and doing nothing. I love drinking beer all day and eating chicken wings and chili and cheese and crackers. I have the fondest memories of my whole family getting together on Sundays to watch the Packers.”

Baris smiled.

“But, you know, I haven’t watched a game since I’ve been over here. I guess I’d forgotten about all the bullshit around it. The commercials? Holy shit, man.”

Baris laughed then. “What?”

“It’s like hitting yourself in the fucking face with a hammer. ‘You aren’t a man unless you go chop wood … and drink this Dr. Pepper with ten calories. Do you want this smoking hot woman to fuck your brains out? Then use this hair cream, and if you just had a bit more hair and if you only fucked this hot woman that gnawing absence in your gut would go away. Wear this deodorant and you’ll drive a fucking race car with fucking lions and every chick in the world will want to fuck you.’” David shook his head. “It’s … it’s preposterous, man. It’s outlandish. And like, I look at that and I think, ‘we are fucked, man.’ That’s it. Our culture is broken. I agree with ISIS about that. In given up on transcendence, we’ve lost ourselves in all this material horseshit.”

“What does this have to do with marriage, Dave?”

The waitress, a cute girl with a stern face and very dark eyes, brought out their cappuccinos and biscuits. Across the café, a tiny blonde girl on a toy phone - Mickey Mouse emblazoned on the back of it - locked eyes with Baris and waved. He brought his hand to his ear, pretending to call her.

“It’s about absence. The advertising, and everyone getting married: they’re both about this fear of incompleteness that is stoked from the time we’re little kids in the US, man. And it makes sense. For us to be constantly buying shit, there has to be some hunger there. And if there isn’t this absence, we aren’t hungry. And this, man, this is what all that bullshit - the manly soda commercials, the dick pills, the superhero deodorant - is all about. It’s about poking us right where we’re most vulnerable: our very human sense of mortality. ‘YOU are incomplete. Buy this and you’ll feel better.’

“But that’s the thing: if it actually fulfilled you, then you wouldn’t be hungry, and you wouldn’t need to buy shit anymore. So we’re existing in this constant state of being piqued and being sated - of being reminded of how incomplete we are, and then being told: ‘but just this one last thing will fulfill you.’

“It works on both a micro and macro level. I’m telling you.”

“I believe you,” Baris said, laughing.

“At the macro level it’s all about the linear milestones, the ‘American dream.’ Graduate high school. Graduate college. Get a ‘real’ job. Get married. Buy a house. Have kids. And that’s supposed to fill the void, but all it does is restart the cycle. Because at the micro level, we’ve been conditioned to fulfill our every desire, no matter how small, almost immediately. You’re hungry? Great, get a burger from Micky D’s. you’re thirsty? Fucking awesome. Buy this 78 ounce soda from 7-11. You’re bored? Perfect. Click on this link about the greatest products that existed in the nineties - and then go to Ebay and buy them!”

David shakes his head. “We’re fucked, man. We’re literally conditioned to, a) be constantly empty, and b) immediately take the shortest possible route to quenching that emptiness. So you get married because you’re twenty-eight or twenty-nine, and thirty is just around the corner, and good lord, do you really want to die alone?”

Baris allowed himself to smile again, now that his friend’s rant seemed over.

“So you’re saying you agree with ISIS then?”

David laughed, loudly, drawing the attention of the cute waitress.

“Kidding.”

“I know.”

Baris bit his lip, looking down to the food court below. A fountain burbled softly, and children played on a playground. He thought of an old man who’d come through the clinic in Suruc. He came in sobbing, his daughters and granddaughters trying to calm him down. But nothing would stop his crying, his beard soaked with tears.

“I want to die,” he said. “How could you take me away? How could you bring me here? That is our home. This is not our home. I’ll die on the streets of this Godforsaken country, and they’ll bury me far from my home.”

“We didn’t know where to take him,” his eldest daughter said. “He’s been like this for two days. He keeps trying to go back. He’s too old to fight. They’ll kill him.”

“What do you want me to do?” Baris asked.

“You’re a doctor.”

“Not that kind of doctor.”

“Please. Just give him something to make the pain stop.”

“I’m not that kind of doctor,” Baris said helplessly. “There’s nothing I can give him.”

Baris looked at David, who was eyeing the waitress.

“I’ve thought about this with Turkey a lot,” Baris said.

“Yeah?”

Baris nodded and sipped his cappuccino.

“It’s interesting to me those tensions between a place like the US and a place like this.”

“How so?”

“What I mean is, you see a place like Syria or Egypt or Libya, and those people are fighting for what you guys take for granted. Or at least, in the abstract that’s what the fights began as: fights for democracy, for an open and fair economy, for free speech, for the right to a boring, comfortable life. For this, basically,” he said, opening his arms to encompass the shopping mall. “People have died for this, for your commercials, for your existential crises. They’ve died for the right to have them.”

Now, David smiled. “And yet, in the US, they’re taking away all these things. But we’re too comfortable to notice. Or, too comfortable to fight.”

Baris pointed at him. “That’s it. And that’s what’s happening here in Turkey. It’s why the protests ended last year. Erdogan knew that if he could just ride them out, eventually people would get tired of sleeping in tents. They’d want hot showers. And as long as he keeps opening shopping malls, as long as he keeps the power running, people are only going to grow more and more complacent.”

“Or they’re not going to give a shit that he built, what, a half billion dollar palace? And at first he was like, ’oh, it’s for the Prime Minister.’ But then they couldn’t change the rules, so now it’s for the president.”

Baris shook his head. “I see it in my friends. The kids I grew up with. They were kids who all said, ‘we’re going to learn Kurdish. We’re going to go the mountains. We’d rather die as Kurds than live as Turks.’ Where are they now? They’re working for TurkCell, for the government, for fucking Halkbank. They’re living in nice gated communities out near the airport. They’ve forgotten how to speak Kurdish. But they vote! they tell me. They post statements of solidarity on Facebook.”

“To be fair, that’s a crime nowadays. They’ll put you away for ten years for threatening the Turkish state.”

Baris laughed. “These guys were anarchists and socialists. Now?” He dismissively flipped his wrist.

“How was it down there?” David asked softly, keeping his voice down.

Baris drew in a deep breath. “It’s … fucked up.”

Both men laughed, against their better judgment.

“You don’t say?” David teased.

Baris lifted his glass in a mock toast.

“It’s hard to explain.”

“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. But …”

“But you’re curious.”

“Of course.”

Baris shrugged. “I mean, it’s a lot of dead injuries. Most of what we get on this side isn’t life threatening. Broken bones, serious cuts. The biggest risk is infection, because they don’t have medical supplies over there. That was what we spent a lot of time doing - trying to sneak stuff in.

“We didn’t sleep much. The shells go off all night, and you guys are bombing them, too. So you drift off for ten minutes, and then a shell explodes and you wake up, drift off, wake up.

“Some of them landed on our side, too. Most of the town is empty except for doctors and the gendarme.”

“So they’re bringing people over for medical help?”

“Daesh is. The Kurds are only coming as refugees.”

“So you treated ISIS?”

Baris shook his head. “No. There were two hospitals set up. Or, there’s the state hospital, and Daesh went there.”

“They’re treating them there?”

Baris couldn’t help smiling. “Of course they are. They come over, they treat them, pop them up with drugs, and then send them back.”

“And the YPG?”

“If they go to the state hospital, they get arrested. So we set a clinic up on the outskirts of town, in an old factory. Close to the border, which made it more dangerous.”

“Are there really tanks lined up on the border?”

Baris nodded. “And people, too. Everyone comes out to watch - all the old men who sit in the cafes drinking tea. Those that are still around, of course. I saw couples having picnics and watching the battle.”

“Christ.”

“Also, and you won’t like this, but your wonderful government is intentionally bombing the wrong targets.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean they make it look like they’re doing something, but then they bomb some part of town where no Daesh are. It’s all a show, so that they don’t have to support the Kurds because that would piss off Ankara. They need to keep Ankara happy. So they pretend.”

“Fuck.”

Baris shrugged.

“So now you’re back?”

“For a few days.”

“And then you’ll go back down?”

“I will.”

“Why? Come on, man. You’ve done your part. Stay here. I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

Baris laughed. “You wouldn’t understand.”

David lifted his eye brows.

“Look at you,” Baris said, motioning to David, his inherent white maleness.

“What?”

“It’s just something you have to be born into, man. I don’t mean that in a bad way. I’m not trying to play the persecuted card. I’ve had a fine life. If I wanted to, I’d go live with my friends in the gated communities. In some way, you and your fucking shopping malls did more for the Kurds in Turkey than anyone.”

David almost smiled.

“Look, it’s just that everyday, I see someone down there who reminds me of my grandfather. I remember sitting with him while he taught me the language. I remember his stories about how they burned down his village and raped his sister. I remember the police coming to our apartment and breaking his tanbur. It was the only time I saw him cry, Dave. I was six and I still remember him telling me, ‘a people without music are not human.’”

This time, David did smile.

“I’ve lost plenty, you know,” David said.

“Dave, I’m not trying to say you haven’t. You do this. You get all defensive as if I’m trying to call you privileged or spoiled. I’m not. You have your losses and obsessions, and I have mine. I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if I didn’t help out.”

“Then why are we here at a shopping mall?”

Baris laughed. “Because even revolutionaries need a cappuccino sometime. Because maybe this is what we’re fighting for, at the end of the day: the right to waste an afternoon at a shopping mall.”

“I hope it’s more than that.”

“Of course. It was a joke, Dave.”

At least partly. But he worried about this. He’d been to Erbil, seen the night clubs and glittering skyscrapers there. He’d shuddered as the sons of oil barrens tore past him on the highway in their Porsches and Lamborghinis, as if it they were in one of the Gulf states. They were fighting for their music and their language, for their grandparents and their parents. But what happens if the fight ends? What happens when there’s nothing threatening their music or their culture? What happens when the shopping malls and gated communities beckon: who would still be willing to stay out in the cold?

After coffee, they walked through the mall. David got a donut from Krispy Kreme and Baris bought fries at Burger King. It was all strangely calming - the running water, the big skylights, the soothing music, the well-to-do citizens of Istanbul safely cloistered in the church of commerce.

They rode the train back to Kadikoy and shared a long hug.

“Hey, before you go,” David said.

“Yeah?”

“Did you hear anything about … about white jihadis?”

“You mean Englishmen?”

“Yeah, sure. Englishmen … or Americans.”

Baris shrugged. “Nothing concrete. Just rumors. Probably just propaganda. Don’t believe anything coming out of Kobane.”

“Not even your stories?”

Baris smiled and hugged his friend once more. He watched David walk down the pier, toward the brightly lit ferry beyond.

“Hey, Dave,” Baris called out.

David turned and Baris jogged toward him.

“I forgot to ask: did you see your parents.”

David smiled.

“I’m sorry,” Baris said. “I’m an asshole for not asking.”

“It’s fine, man. Really. I spent a weekend with them.”

“How are they?”

“They’re okay, I think. Dad’s talking about going back to the Midwest. But I don’t think Mom would go with him.” David shrugged. “It’s strange. They’re not sure what to do with themselves anymore. And they have a real absence to fill now. But they just keep filling it the same way: we watched football and ate snacks all weekend.”

“We’ve all got our absences, Dave. How else are we supposed to fill them?”

David laughed. This time, the men shook hands. David watched Baris vanish into the crowd, the couples drinking beer by the sea, the old men in their baggy suits coming home from work, the musicians hawking homemade Cds, the simit vendors smoking cigarettes, the fishermen languorously casting their lines into the pitch black sea.

He sat outside on the ferry, where it was empty. The engines purred to life, roiling the sea. The bustle of Kadikoy slowly receded, the far shore - a new continent - drawing ever closer. On the water below, the nearly full moon cast a long, creamy track. The engines slowed. The boat tacked to the north and the east, gliding to a halt. There - and it seemed so close he could almost touch it - passed the enormous, silent shadow of a tanker, so big and close it blotted out the city beyond.

On shore, Baris watched the lighted ferries scuttle about like roaches, veering in every direction to avoid the mammoth silhouette.

Another dance circle had formed. The men sang and chanted - Kobane, you are our heroes; Kobane, we are united.

In Suruc, on the clear nights, when there was no wind, and in the interregnum between the explosions of the shells and the American bombs, it was possible to hear another sound. It drifted across the border, from the roofs and alleys of the besieged town: singing, the songs his grandfather sang in the middle of the night when he couldn’t sleep.

Once more, Baris turned to the sea. David’s ferry was lost now amongst the lights of the city’s other half.

Neither man knew it, but they would never see one another again.