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One Day, Baby

Summary:

Merab meets his eye—grins—holds out the cigarette. Here, he says. We share.

I told you, Tomer says, no lighter. No Feuerzeug.

We pretend, Merab says.

Tomer follows his friends to Berlin and meets a dancer.

Notes:

Caveat lector: am not Jewish; have never been to the Middle East; speak neither Hebrew nor Arabic nor Georgian nor German. Also, it’s been two years since I’ve seen And Then We Danced and the details are fuzzy.

I enjoyed Sublet, which had two of my favorite things—a scruffy dark-haired love interest and his kind, offbeat, wise mother-who-cooks—and of course Merab owns my entire heart.

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

There was no getting around it: Tomer had fallen in love. He had fallen in love with an old man, a strange, blank-faced, straitlaced, nondescript American graybeard whose chief talent was that of invisibility, of fading into the walls. And a certain lyricism in his writing, Tomer supposed; Tomer’s English was good, but it wasn’t that good, he knew that Michael’s memoir had received praise and assumed it was warranted, but there was nothing in Complications that had seemed like poetry, not like The Autobiography of Jean Riven, which had been shortlisted for the Sapir Prize and had made Tomer cry. The life Michael had lived—New York City in the 1980s, AIDS, heartbreak and musical theater—it was as far removed from Tomer’s reality as life on Mars. It was a book for people who flew into Tel Aviv on business class and bought their breakfast from Sweet Box a baker’s dozen at a time. It was a book for people who, like Michael, had survived a deadly fire, but a fire that was now so distant a memory that the ashes were cold and black; people who said, now wait a minute, I remember what it was like to be young but in the next breath would scoff and say, oh, you youth, you call THAT a fire? As if these newer fires, these wars and recessions, were soft and couldn’t burn you. As if the ashes of the old fire had settled around them, turned to clay, hardened them against feeling. When they kissed, Tomer had noticed how Michael had kept his eyes open, how Michael had stared not at him but through him, like his mind was somewhere else.

Oh, gross, Daria had said, when Tomer told her.

I thought you’d understand, he’d said. You with your unusual taste.

Fuck off, Daria said. Amir’s Palestinian, he’s a man, not an alien.

Michael’s a man too.

Amir, Daria said, talking over him, is young and beautiful and suits me. He sings and dances and brings joy to my life. You want to talk about aliens? This Michael, when he met us, he looked at you and me like we were the aliens. Like we amused him. Like he didn’t care to understand us, the real us.

In five days…, he’d said, trying again.

In five days you learn nothing. What did he learn? That the best pomegranate juice is from a corner stall in Jaffa Market? That your mother makes the best pumpkin hummus in the kibbutz? That you hate raisins, onions, and rosewater?

He’d wanted to say, he learned that I like to get my nipples twisted, as a prelude to a blowjob, but he was hungover and didn’t want Daria to screech at him.

Exactly, Daria had said, if you’re not an alien to him, then you’re just an animal with unusual dietary needs. Stealing his joint, she’d taken a long, satisfied pull and graciously allowed him to change the subject.

Speaking of his mother and her pumpkin hummus: Malka had said, a few dinners later at the kibbutz, it’s my fault, I think. A boy without a father is always looking for one, in one form or another. You may not miss him, the father, you may not need him, but you look for him. Sit up straight, stop picking at those onions. What is it? Why are you looking at me like that, didn’t you say it’s a type, Daddy, on Atraf?

He had dropped his fork to cover his eyes. What? Malka had said. What did I say? What, what? Half gleeful, half abashed, she had carried on whatting him all the way to the gate.

He had thought she might be angry.

He had thought she might offer to buy him a plane ticket.

He had written Michael, using the messaging function on Subaba, the subletting website, since Michael had not left other contact information. (You see? Daria had cried, wildly, waving the joint at him. You see?)

Hello dear Michael, I miss you.

No answer.

*

Michael’s article is published in September. Tomer, Googling idly, finds it on the first day of Rosh Hashanah and reads it on the computer while his mother clatters around his kitchen, letting her questions flow around him like the tides. Where are your plates? Do you call this a cup? It looks like someone took a bite out of it! And of the old Sweet Box box on the counter: I thought you kids were all about recycling? He gets up to snatch it from her hands. Don’t throw that out, it’s mine, it’s special.

Daria’s family had invited him over for seder—him and not Amir, Daria was furious—but he had declined. Daria’s parents were fine, he thought, but stuffy; and they were serious about the high holy days, and this year—Daria’s last year in Tel Aviv—there were bound to be tears and recriminations. Please come, Daria had said, or else Mama and I are going to spend the night throwing plates at each other. Daria, he had said, you are going to do that anyway. That afternoon, before the trains stopped, he had gone to the station to pick up his mother.

She had arrived with bags upon bags of ancient Tupperware containers. They’ll miss your cooking at the kibbutz this year, he’d said. Oh no, Malka had said airily, this is only half of what I made, the rest I left with Itzik.

“What are you reading?” his mother says now.

“Nothing,” he says.

“Come help me with this honey, it won’t flow.”

“In a minute.”

“Then it’s not nothing, is it?” She bustles up behind him before he can hide the browser window. “The Intrepid Traveler,” she reads. “Are you planning a trip? Rabinowitz, Michael Rabinowitz…oh! Move over, let me see!”

She’s in there, and so is Tomer. Michael mentions them as “the mother and son who welcomed me to Gezer kibbutz,” and she, the mother, is Gezer kibbutz’s chef extraordinaire, warm and friendly and charmingly offbeat.

There is nothing more about Tomer, none of the comments Michael had asked if he could quote, no description, no elliptical reference to a last magical night or the best breakfast in Tel Aviv. But Michael does say, The heart of this city is young and strong and hard-beating. It yearns to live and to love. If you aren’t careful, you’ll find yourself dancing to its rhythm.

“Print this for me,” his mother demands. “Print it, print it. I want to show Itzik.”

*

In October, he flies with Daria and Amir to Berlin, to get them settled. To see them off and see the sights. With his birthday money, a handful of editing gigs, and another sublet, he had scraped together enough to book himself a little holiday: five days total, out of a sense of poetic rightness, an idea that he was continuing the circle Michael had begun, if not completing it. In preparation for the trip he had found one of Michael’s older columns for The Intrepid Traveler and put pins in each location on Google Maps, on a list he saved under Michael’s surname. Some of the places had closed during covid; most were out of budget.

By some miracle, his exchange with Michael on Subaba had never expired, and he had written Michael again, just to let him know. Between airports, he daydreams about a rendezvous. What are you doing here, he will say. I thought you never visited the same place twice. Tomer, Michael will say, without expression, and in the blankness of Michael’s face, Tomer will read love.

That’s your problem, Amir says, as they jostle for the last Lufthansa biscuit, Daria’s, while she sleeps. You’re a filmmaker, so of course you’d fall in love with a man who is basically a canvas, a screen for projection, not a muse but a medium. What did you see in him, really, actually? The answer is nothing.

Let’s face it, Amir says, it’s just that you’ve never been turned down before.

What did you think, Amir says, did you think he was going to leave his husband for you?

Of course not, Tomer says stiffly.

His job? Amir persists. His New York City?

Travel is heartbreak, Amir says, and to Tomer’s alarm he sees that his friend’s eyes are filling with tears. To come and go, to fall in love for a day, what kind of life is that? Fuck, Amir says, fuck, Tomer, I’m going to miss you so much. We both will.

Hey, he says. I’m still here. The week hasn’t even begun. Let’s enjoy the now.

Tomer surrenders the biscuit and watches Amir eat it, slowly, tearfully, swallowing around the lump in his throat. He says, I think what Michael does is amazing. Travel requires openness and trust and a good stomach.

It requires, Amir says, an essential coldness of spirit.

You weren’t there, Tomer thinks. You didn’t see his face, his last morning in Israel. He smiled at me, threw bread at me; I know he loved me then.

*

Day one. He shows Daria the Rabinowitz itinerary. She groans. We barely have enough to last the month, she says, you barely have enough to last the week, and you want to eat at this bistro, you want to spend thirty euros on schnitzel? All because some American fart who sucked your cock said it was authentic? Put that list away and come with Amir and me, the dance company is treating us to dinner. To welcome us.

But I’m not a dancer, he says. And I wasn’t invited. And I wasn’t going to get the schnitzel, I was going to get a coffee, a three-euro coffee, and…

“And what, sit in the seat he sat in?” Daria rolls her eyes. “Touch ass-cheeks across the gulf of time?”

In his Berlin column, Michael had written, With fragrant oil on my lips I watched the crowds go by, a ceaseless fashionable stream under storm-dark skies.

Daria says, you’re not a dancer, sure, but it’s not because you can’t dance. And you are invited because I’m inviting you. If you want to spend tonight moping by a café window I can’t stop you. But Tomer, I don’t know the next time we’ll see each other, I don’t know if I’ll ever go back to Tel Aviv. It would have to be an emergency, it would have to be, God forbid, if someone were ill.

Tomer sighs. “Fine,” he says. “I’ll come.”

“Say thank you, Daria.”

“Thank you, Daria.”

*

The dance company takes them to a Turkish restaurant in Little Istanbul, where the director, Simon Becker, orders mezze for the table, hummus and olives, eggplant, yoghurt, feta, mussels, almonds, meatballs. Tomer eats with his lips trembling against hysterical laughter. We could have stayed in Tel Aviv, he thinks, and had better on Derech Salame.

He thinks Michael would have found this dinner charming. This restaurant with its low lights, its low tables and glimmering tasseled cushions for seats, this company of dancers as beautiful as angels. Michael would have written about it, he would have slipped his blue book from his pocket and started taking notes.

How do you describe food, he had asked Michael in Tel Aviv. Michael had said, looking vague, well, you know, Tomer, food writing isn’t the same thing as travel writing.

Don’t you do both?

I dabble. Then Michael had quoted, unexpectedly, some macho American writer from the 60s, some outdoorsman Michael had idolized as a housebound child in suburban New Jersey, who said, Language makes a mighty loose net.

Okay, Tomer had said, and?

Evocation, Michael had said, still quoting, is the goal. I don’t want to describe the food—I mean I do—but the point is to capture the feeling it inspires in me.

The feeling: grease. Bloat. Loneliness. Leaving Daria and Amir laughing with Dafne and Anna, Tomer excuses himself and slinks into the drizzling rain to catch his breath. A shadow that isn’t his own follows him to the door.

Hast du ein Feuerzeug? the shadow asks him.

“Sorry,” he says. “English?”

“Oh,” the shadow says, joining him in the neon spotlight under the restaurant’s sign. It’s one of Simon’s angels, a hot pink angel: hot pink curling hair, hot pink skin, clear red eyes. A boy with a girl’s pretty face. “Feuer,” the boy says. “Fire, but not fire, what is it, how do you say…”

“A lighter?”

“Yes, lighter.” The dancer casts his red eyes back, a quick glance at their table through the glass. “I tell Simon I quitting. I say”—wrestling a wrinkled cigarette from the front of his very tight pink-black jeans—“I say, this just for safety, just to hold. In my fingers. So was.”

He demonstrates. Tomer watches. “I have a lighter,” he says, “but not here. It’s in my suitcase in Daria’s room. Sorry.”

Kein Problem.”

He gets the gist. He smiles.

The boy smiles back. “Merab,” he says, pressing his palm to his chest. “You are Amir.”

“Tomer,” Tomer says. “That’s Amir, in there.” Kein Problem, he says, when Merab starts to apologize. “We’re basically twins. You know, ‘twins’?”

Wirklich?” Merab says, wide-eyed. “Das ist echt geil.

“Oh,” he says. “No. Just a joke. Because…the hair and beard…” He gestures. Circles the aforementioned hair and beard until Merab nods. Tomer thinks he understands. It really is a joke, he thinks, a political joke: one Israeli, one Palestinian, but no one in the West can tell us apart. “Merab, is that Turkish? Merab? Your name, Turkish? You picked the restaurant?”

“Georgian,” Merab says. “I…from Georgia. I dance.”

“I can tell,” Tomer says, looking him over. He’s built like Daria, slender but strong, his muscles like whipcords. Tomer thinks, those pants must be 98 percent Spandex.

Merab meets his eye—grins—holds out the cigarette. Here, he says. We share.

I told you, Tomer says, no lighter. No Feuerzeug.

We pretend, Merab says.

*

In the morning, Merab’s hair is still pink: pink-gold in the light of dawn as he arrives at the hostel to escort Daria and Amir to the studio. He’s wearing a loose black sweater with a low scooped neck and yesterday’s tight black jeans, and his eyes are every color: gray then green then copper in the sun. Tomer dresses him in a crown of laurels, in winged sandals; casts him, mentally, as Hermes, splendid Hermes, joy-bringer. Except, Tomer sees, Merab limps.

“Hurt yourself?”

Merab blinks at him. He points. Merab thinks he’s indicating something on the floor. He stoops and brushes Merab’s ankle and feels him shiver.

“Tomer!” Daria scolds him.

“Sorry. Sorry.”

Kein Problem,” Merab says.

He says something to Daria in German, and Daria snaps at Tomer in Hebrew, “He says it was a bad sprain. For fuck’s sake, Tomer, it could have been a new injury, what were you thinking, digging your fingers in—”

“I didn’t dig.”

“Grabbing someone’s ankle without permission—”

“I didn’t grab!”

But I had permission, Tomer thinks. He gave me permission, last night, when he took the cigarette from my mouth and slipped it into his own: the tip, wet with my saliva, glowed pink under the neon. Watching me while he hollowed his cheeks and pretended to suck.

Merab is watching them now, green-gray-copper-flash, smiling in that universal bemused way people smile when Daria and Tomer are squabbling. Perhaps, like Michael, like the clucking women at Jaffa Market, he’s wondering, what’s between you? Nothing, Tomer thinks, except ten years of friendship, of pushing each other on the playground, and sure, when we were old enough I put it in her, she let me put it in her and it was fun until she skipped a period and we almost died of fright, and when she started bleeding three weeks later, we agreed that we had been lucky and would never do it again.

Women, men, I don’t limit myself, he had told Michael breezily, showing off; that had been a lie. His mother had wanted a child, Michael had wanted a child, and Tomer had known since the age of fifteen that he didn’t, and the easiest way to avoid that fate, he had thought, had been to sleep with men.

“Now what,” Amir says, banging open the door with his duffel bag swinging. “I was halfway to the street, now what are you shouting about?”

“Tomer is harassing our kind guide,” Daria says in English. In Hebrew, she says, “Tomer is being a horny bastard.”

“Alhamdulillah,” Amir says. “That’s progress.” He claps Tomer on the shoulder. “We’ll bring him back for you, if you promise you won’t look at the Rabinowitz list today.”

*

Tomer spends the day talking himself out of buying secondhand German tracts on Weimar filmmaking, shoveling two slices of cheap and bad “American-style” pizza into his mouth when he gets hungry. Evening comes, and he meets Daria and Amir at a park with a fountain.

The water is stopped for the season. Merab balances on the lip with his knees drawn to his chest. One foot is firmly planted, taking his weight; the other is angled, toes dangling toward the empty green basin: like a bird with a broken leg.

“Well?” Amir says. “Were you a good boy?”

“I didn’t look at the fucking list, if that’s what you mean.”

“Great!” Daria says brightly. “In that case, we’re going to get some groceries. See you later!”

What is the Rabinowitz list, Merab asks him, in gentle, hesitant English.

He’s prepared. He opens the Google Translate app on his phone, changes his keyboard to American English, and flips It’s nothing into Georgian. The alphabet is cute, he thinks: round, cheerful, flowery.

Merab holds out his hand, palm upturned: may I?

You may. He passes his phone over. Merab types, slides it back. Your friends said it is an expensive list your lover gave to you.

“My friends are interfering assholes,” Tomer says in Hebrew. Loudly: Daria and Amir are loitering on the other side of the fountain, huddling over an imaginary shopping list. Daria flips him off as she skips toward the street.

Merab just looks at him, waiting.

Tomer writes, He is not my lover.

“He,” Merab says carefully. “She? Bist du…gay?”

I thought it was obvious. Aren’t you?

Sorry,” Merab says, pronouncing it the German way. “I don’t like to…”

Label it?

Es ist gefährlich, danger.” Merab frowns, takes the phone, and says, I know this is Berlin, but I prefer not to write it. In my country, you can be attacked for this. Even here, you can be attacked.Aber yes, I…yes.”

As Merab speaks, his gaze turns inward, his eyes become silvery. He stares at Tomer’s next sentence, unseeing. That elsewhere look, Tomer thinks, feeling a squeeze between his ribs. That look I love, the look of love.

Tomer’s screen says: That’s good, because my friends have set us up on a date.

Merab’s expression stays cool, but his skin gives him away; he flushes.

Michael, Tomer thinks, it’s happening: time is a circle, the circle is turning. “Will you give me a local’s perspective? Show me authentic Berlin?”

Bitte?”

He wonders, which of us is older? There are fine lines at the corners of Merab’s many-colored eyes: stress? Sun? Smiling? Merab is smiling now, sudden and irresistible.

I accept, Tomer writes. I would like it very much.

*

Using the app, gestures, and German-fractured English, Merab explains, I’ve lived in Berlin for ten months. Before that, Frankfurt. To save money I eat bread and potatoes and food that my roommate’s parents bring when they visit from Potsdam. So you know better than me, probably, what things there are to see in the city. Show me the list.

We can’t afford anything on it, he says, or at least, I can’t.

We can still visit. Merab looks impish. After that, I take you to the bar.

Between a high-end bakery and a hat store that survived the second world war, Tomer and Merab find a crater. The gouge is sectioned off, ringed by chain-link fencing and bristling with scaffolding. Huge machines surround the beams and concrete, silent now in the encroaching night, but Tomer can imagine them working the earth like prehistoric animals, roaring, digging, beeping. Merab stops, his fingertips light on the chain-link, and peers into the pit. His face is unreadable, but into it Tomer reads wistfulness.

Construction: heavy dirt, clashing steel. Not the sort of thing someone like Merab—light, translucent, untethered even inside his clothes, floating—should feel wistful about. But, Tomer thinks, who am I to judge? In the days and weeks after Michael's departure the sight of a blue shirt buttoned to the collar was enough to make Tomer's throat tight, and he turned with a crumpling face from old men with briefcases marching toward the towers of Rothschild Boulevard.

We are at the end of the list, Tomer says. Unless you want to try on hats.

Nein.” Merab taps Tomer’s screen, where the display reads 20:32. “Bier,” he says firmly.

Yalla,” Tomer says.

*

Tomer’s no lightweight, but Merab could drink him under a table. Merab could drink Daria under a table, and that’s saying something. The bar gets noisier, the crowd rowdier; Tomer loses track of the number of shots, the beers, the sweet drinks with umbrellas. At some point in the proceedings they abandon Google Translate and make do with pantomime and shouted nouns. MONEY, Merab yells, and Tomer reaches for his wallet, but Merab grabs his wrist. YOU, GUEST. SIMON PAY.

Payday. He gets it. DANKE. And danke, Simon.

Merab takes him by the hand and leads him away. How would I evoke this? Tomer thinks. I know how I would film it—wide angle, hyper-saturated, black and red, every light a firework—but how would I write it, how could I capture this feeling? Nighttime in a strange, fey city with a strange, fey man. Is this how Michael felt? Is this how I made Michael feel? He swallows and licks his lips and thinks of the wet end of Merab’s cigarette, shining in a pink haze.

THIS CLUB, BEST CLUB, Merab tells him. On a faraway stage, drag queens are lip-syncing; closer to the door, men gyrate in cages above a roiling mass of bodies. Tomer buys molly—two for you, two for me, swallowed in smiling unison.

Merab pulls him onto the floor: and then they dance.

*

It’s the MDMA, no doubt, but Tomer swears that Merab shapeshifts. He’ll swear to it in the morning, he’s sure, when his head is splitting and the sun and Daria’s voice are working in tandem to try to kill him. On the dance floor, Merab becomes a swan, a soldier, a proud porcelain princess. The planks are uneven and sticky with known and unknown substances, but Merab’s feet never catch. When they leave the club, Merab keeps dancing in the street, spinning, unafraid. He dances them all the way to the U-Bahn, all the way to the second-floor apartment he shares with a student named Sasha on the western fringe of Marzahn-Hellersdorf.

The apartment is dark, its ceilings low and grimy; Tomer feels the oppressive weight of the floor above. Sasha’s door is closed. Merab’s room is the living room, his bed the foldout futon in the corner.

When I was in Georgia, Merab tells him haltingly, drag queens saved me. I dressed like a queen and I danced like this, to this song. Listen. Watch me.

There’s no sound but the distant sweep of traffic. Merab hums the tune: not a traditional Georgian folksong but Honey by Robyn.

Tomer starts to laugh and stops.

Merab arches until Tomer thinks he’ll break his spine, then snaps up with his eyes on fire.

You’re so beautiful, Tomer gasps, and he doesn’t know what language he says it in, if he even says it in words, but he knows Merab understands.

*

This is Sasha’s, Merab says, coming out of the bathroom with a quarter-empty bottle of lube. He gives it to Tomer with a shiver. Tomorrow, rehearsal. So be gentle.

He settles Merab on top. The idea is to let Merab take the lead, to set the pace, but after two abrupt minutes of brutal fingering, Tomer realizes his mistake: Merab can’t be gentle with himself, doesn’t want to, doesn't know how. Merab squats over him with his powerful thighs and leans back, hands braced on the futon, then slams his body up and down, hissing through his teeth.

Ouch, ow, Michael had said, when Tomer fucked him. Go slower, please, and remember that I’m much older than you are. Michael had put his hands on Tomer’s ass, to guide him, his eyes glassy and fixed on the ceiling.

Merab’s eyes are closed. His cock bounces, as pale as the rest of him, and Tomer thinks, I’m being ridden by a ghost, a poltergeist. The futon is squeaking, the floor is creaking; at any moment the cabinets will fly open and plates will rain down on us like hail. The roommate Sasha will be rolled out of his bed.

Hey, he says. Hey, wait, halas, enough.

Irakli, Merab says, irakli, ira. It’s Georgian, Tomer thinks, some kind of command: harder, faster, please? Stop. Don’t stop.

But I can't start or stop, he thinks, I haven't done anything, I'm just lying here, taking it, watching you taking it.

Halas, Tomer says again, halas, Merab, Merab, and he puts his hand around Merab’s ankle, the site of the old sprain, thicker than its twin, and squeezes.

Fuck,” Merab says. Fuck in English, yes in German. So Tomer squeezes harder, and Merab squeezes him, and then Merab wrenches one hand off the futon and squeezes himself, pumping until he starts to come, spattering his chest then Tomer’s, one ghostly blue-white spurt after another.

Tomer comes too, and Merab takes it, swaying above him, moaning. Earlier, while they were kissing, taking off each other’s clothes, Tomer had asked for a condom and Merab had said he didn’t have any and neither did Sasha and was that okay, and this, Tomer thinks, as he begins to be able to think again, is another knife-edge that Merab likes to dance along: he thinks that Merab is a connoisseur of pain because he is a dancer and knows every kind of twinge and stab and grind, that once upon a time someone cut Merab to the core and now Merab chases pain the way some people chase highs, that particular pain, that agony that was so exquisite.

Warum?” Merab asks breathlessly, pressing wet fingers into the corners of his own mouth. Why do you smile?

Tomer can’t explain. Michael knew I had condoms, he thinks, he wouldn’t have come near me otherwise. He was fussy, fastidious. He asked me three times, are you clean, do you test, are you sure. Knowing his past, his history, I understood; I answered patiently. When we were finished, I pinched off the condom and slung it into the trash. Goodbye, all my millions of potential little Tomers. I’m smiling because I can see myself trickling out of you, Merab, and suddenly I think it’s such a pity. I’ve left myself behind but only temporarily. There will be no phone call, no awkward letter, message, email; no surprise in nine months, no permanent ties between me and you.

He lays Merab down tenderly and spreads Merab’s legs and eats Merab out, eats Merab clean, eats himself away.

*

December. Michael writes in Subaba, Dear Tomer, thank you for your messages. I am very glad to hear that you and Malka liked the article. It has been a busy time here in New York, but now that I’m on paternity leave I can finally catch up on my backlog.

Yes, you read that right! David and I had a little boy. He was born two months early and had to stay in the NICU. Last week, we brought him home. His name is—

Tomer, Tomer prays, but Michael writes, Daniel Uri, after my father and David’s father.

Michael concludes, I hope you enjoyed your time in Berlin. Best wishes, Michael.

There is a 500-character limit. Tomer scrolls down, looking for an addendum, a postscript, anything, and hits the bottom of the page.

*

“So?” Amir had said on Tomer’s final day in Berlin. “Are you still in love, or have you come to your senses? With the help of our red-haired friend?”

Their red-haired friend wasn’t with them: as part of the dance company’s sponsorship program, Merab worked part-time at the box office, selling tickets, ushering patrons to their seats, practicing his German.

There had been no taxi to take Tomer to the airport. His transportation was the U-Bahn. But, standing on the platform with Amir and Daria, he had dawdled, letting the trains go by one after another.

“You’re going to miss your fucking flight,” Daria had said. She was already starting to cry.

“Maybe I’ll stay,” Tomer had said. He wasn’t crying yet but his eyes were stinging, his mouth was wobbling. “Become a refugee. Live on potatoes. And Art.”

But they had agreed, weepily, that he’d never leave Israel and his mama in the kibbutz.

The last night they slept together, Merab had said, I have a brother in Georgia, I have nephews, my brother’s sons, the youngest is just a baby. My brother is named David. He’s stupid but I miss him. I miss my mother and my grandmother and my best friend Mary. But I can’t go home. I can never go home.

Home is here now, he had told Merab.

Ja, Merab had said, with a glint of irony. Then he had said, Ich werde dich auch vermissen.

What?

Mir deine Nummer geben bitte, bevor du gehst.

I don’t understand, Tomer had said. Merab had revolved in his arms with the silky whisper of skin on skin, plucked Tomer’s phone from the floor, and typed, I’ll miss you. And then a phone number. And then an email address, m dot lominadze at minoradance dot com.

Before he had switched his phone to airplane mode, he had Googled “Irakli” and learned that it was a name. Hercules.

*

In his sleep on the first and last night they had slept together, Michael had mumbled, Davey, meaning not David Saphirstein, his husband, but David Raleigh, his boyfriend who died in 1993. Tomer had whispered, Michael, the shakshuka is ready, Michael, I got challah, and half-asleep Michael had said, five more minutes, Davey, baby, just gimme five. As they reached cruising altitude, Tomer had queued up the Mojos’ Reckoning Song, one day baby we’ll be old, and felt the phantom press of Michael’s dry lips. He had wondered for the first time what Michael thought about being old without Davey. The last chapter of Michael’s memoir Complications had been addressed to him, dead departed Davey; it had begun, Davey, my dear, you’ll never guess who I just saw on Charles Street.

Whose name, Tomer had wondered, will I mutter in my sleep one day? Whose name will I cry out, shaking with passion? Will it be Michael? Merab, Mama, Daria? Someone I don’t know yet, someone I have yet to meet?

*

He skips class to go to the beach and sends Merab a picture of the sea. Tel Aviv is an hour ahead of Berlin: Merab, Daria, Amir, they are an hour in the past, distant but not unreachably so. Unlike some.

This is where I live, Tomer says. This is me.

His screen reflects the sun and the waves. His phone buzzes in his hand and begins to sing.

 

Notes:

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