SATURDAY
05 OCTOBER, 1996
DORIAN

               You've haunted me for six years. It's for that reason that when I see you, I don't believe you to be real.

I think, I've seen you in every crowd, at every bus stop, in every silhouette I catch between bookshelves. After reciting the berakah over my solitary meals at the dining hall in Rav Eliraz Yeshiva and later at Julliard, I'd catch movement in the periphery and, for a split second, I knew you were standing at the entrance. I bite into an apple, see someone else bite into an apple, see an apple, and it's you — it's all you: the apple, the mouth, the bite. Someone laughs in a library. I catch the scent of castor oil or the moringa perfume you tried to mask it with, and, without fail, regardless of how improbable the reality might be, you're with me.

I think, this is just another mirage of my longing.

But you're not.

Rather than any style of braids, his hair is twisted into locs, the top half gathered with a scrunchie and the rest left to brush his neck. They're just long enough to pass the corner of his jaw, which is sculpted by his short shaped-up beard. The spinning Poundland party light catches structures in his face that used to be hidden by boyish roundness. He's not wearing a kippah, but then, neither am I.

He's alone (why does that simultaneously make my heart flutter and break it?), slumped against the wall with his eyes shut. There's no drink in his hand. Of course, there isn't. Unlike me, he never cares what people think of him.

It takes me a moment to recognise the loose jeans he's wearing. They sit differently, though I can't tell why because he hasn't grown taller or become less skinny. There's no doubt they're the same though: a couple shifts out of the way to reveal the apples embroidered on both knees to patch holes. The shirt tucked into them — lilac, floral, and a third unbuttoned — would've been out of the question while living with his mother. A Whitney Houston tee was enough rebellion.

All these add up to prove that you're not a ghost of the last time saw you. You're real, Isaiah. You're real and my heart stops beating.

Then it convulses.

A cold flush races from head to foot. I cram myself into the wall around the corner as my knees quiver. My body hollows in a single exhale and becomes so feeble a single touch might turn me to dust.

I can hardly make out the figure who pauses to check in on me. 'You alright?'

'Yeah. Drank too much.'

I glance at my can of cider. Someone thrust it into my hand when I arrived an hour ago. To avoid making myself a lighthouse of social ineptitude, I've taken sips that barely wet my tongue whenever the same group of friends has been in my proximity for longer than a few minutes, but it's still full.

Not once during my bachelor's at Julliard did I go to an after-dark event of any kind. I can confidently say there's nowhere I'd like to be less than a "frat party"... At least a third of my Black and Jewish forebears just disowned me for thinking that.

I got personally invited to this one, though. Well, as personally as you can be by a classmate who you happen to be caught in the doorway with, and they say "you should come" without ever asking for your name. This is my last chance, I thought. Next term I'll be far too busy, then I'll be out of university for good and parties won't have the same culture anymore. Then I'll be twenty-four without ever having gone to a party in my life.

I'll go. Stay at least an hour. I don't have to drink anything, no one will judge me for it.

I nearly scoff at myself. My mother is right: I am hideously malleable.

All this to say, no, the issue is quite the opposite of "drank too much".

Still, what is the correct thing to say to a good samaritan worried over your well-being after being guillotined in half? How do you respond to a passer-by who finds you, after six years of fasting, gnawing an apple core until you choke on the seeds? Pace yourself, they might quip, but that's easy to say if one lives in an orchard.

The sight of Isaiah rescued me from drowning only to throw me into much harsher waters and I don't know whether to be grateful or terrified and am simultaneously both. How do you explain to a stranger the predicament of someone holding you under at the same time as they give you CPR?

Ergo, "too much to drink".

The figure steps back. A stranger can be kind but that doesn't mean they want your sick on them. But they linger. 'You want me to get you some water?'

I shake my head though my throat is knitting a wool lining for itself. 'I feel better already. But thank you.'

They offer me an uncertain smile before they disappear into the crowd.

I take a deep breath, visualise the air circulating to my legs to stop them from shaking, and peek around the corner. Isaiah is nowhere in sight. He has disappeared so entirely, I'd be convinced he was a mirage after all (maybe three sips is enough to get me drunk, how would I know? I don't drink, save for ritual wine and even so, opt for grape juice whenever offered) if I didn't know I'd never imagine him dressed in purple. For a split second, the yearning to look for him wrestles the urgency to escape, until, naturally, the latter wins.

I leave my can of cider on the nearest surface and dash for the door. I am the most pathetic of G-d's cretins; I've prayed for a chance to see him every day and now that it's here, I run.

G-d won't have any of my antics today. I step out of the overstimulation of a house, rented by a group of friends who grew tired of university accommodation after one year and held back no impulse DIY, only to freeze on the threshold.

Though he leans over the porch railing with his back to me, I don't take a second to recognise him. Even with the cigarette between his fingers. He moves only to exhale a ribbon of smoke and I stifle a cough. Does the pollution irritate my throat from the distance or is that guilt?

'Since when do you smoke?'

I grimace.

I've rehearsed a dozen different speeches, imagined every possible reunion from Isaiah running into my arms to him punching me in the face, and now that we're standing, not only in the same country and the same city but on the same porch, this is what I come up with? "Since when do you smoke?"

His response is a roll of thunder. 'What's it to you?'

Even when it's compact with venom, his voice releases a knot in my brain nothing else has managed to relieve. As it's undone, a rush of pent-up hormones swarms through me and we might as well be sixteen, and I might as well be having a crisis over my best friend, and he might as well be leaning toward me in the library to loosen my tie and undo the collar button of my uniform so I could "relax a bit".

Isaiah's voice has a cadence and intonation no one else can mimic, an intricate melody of his mother's Jamaican Patois harmonised by Suffolk phonemes and glottalisation. I'm relieved he doesn't codeswitch to the RP he put up at school, but the blossom wilts quickly — is that because he knows I don't care or because my opinion has become so insignificant to him?

I want to say it's not like you, I want to argue he'd never smoke. But then I'll have to admit how little I know him now.

So I shrug — nothing, it's nothing to me. What I mean is: it's everything. "Since when do you smoke?" is equal parts a rhetorical tool to express my shock and a literal question. I want to know the exact day he picked up his first cigarette. Why? Where? With whom? What could possibly make him when the Isaiah I knew couldn't pass a smoker on the street without shuddering?

The Isaiah I don't know pulls the cigarette from his lips and finally turns to me.

Leaning against the railing with his hip instead, his blouse droops to reveal the silver chain of his Star of David and the intrusive voice in my head tells me to dip my fingers into his shirt and fish the pendant into my palm. I need to see it. Kiss it. That is what will cement him as real. Despite the cold (which is twice as cold for you) he has no jacket.

The Christmas lights, either put out very early or left incredibly late, embellish him with iridescent kisses so the locs on his right are blue and the ones on his left are green. They colour his vitiligo too, which is nearly identical to the imprint in my memory: inner corners of the eyes, base of the nose, commissures of his mouth, his chin (still visible through his beard but maybe not from a distance), Adam's apple, jugular notch, both ring fingers and backs of the hands. It has spread only onto the space between his eyebrows.

With his face tinted, I can pretend the dark circles under his eyes are a trick of the light and they're not worse than I've ever seen. I can pretend he doesn't look ill enough for a hospital bed.

Smoke and mocking laughter hacks through his words. 'Let me guess, it's against halakah? I'm aware. I ain't that bad at being Jewish.'

Is that how he remembers me, as my mother? Is there anything more cruel?

Wouldn't you hate me if I equated you to your mother? I suppose he already does; there's nothing but hatred in his stare.

Shaking like a veal headed for slaughter, I stagger a step closer. The blade is my own regret and the blood my own guilt but it's the cruelty in his stare that slashes the knife across my throat. Nonetheless, I take another step.

There are so many things I want to ask him. How are you? When did you move to Oxford? Did they ever hesitate to grant you a scholarship? What books are you reading right now? Have you mended things with your mother? Is it possible to mend things with mothers? Did running away work out better for you than it did for me?

Did you survive? For which I simultaneously crave assent and disagreement; yes, I did, you have nothing to feel guilty about and no, I've lived six years in a coma and you're the only thing that'll bring me back to life, won't you kiss me, please kiss me.

From the wreckage, a single question untangles to bob on the surface. 'How's your mum?'

'Fine, she says.'

Somehow, this answers everything.

Isaiah returns the cigarette to his lips. He looks me over, takes in my jumper and trousers. I think I notice surprise flicker across his face when he finds my Adidas trainers of multiple earth tones and I prepare for him to say something like "you know only Yankees wear them those Adidas, right?" or "the world musta stopped turning for you to wear shoes that ain't black", but it must be a hallucination.

At least, when they latch mine again, there are no more morsels of interest to find than there were five seconds ago. Regardless, he plays along. 'When'd you get back?'

I tug at the sleeve of my zip-up jersey. 'A year ago.'

'A year ago?' He turns away as if to exchange glances with someone beside him to say "get a load of this", then licks his lower lip to draw it between his teeth the way he does to suppress expressions. Before I can justify myself, his eyes have nailed back to me. 'How's real life?'

'It was– I... Well, it's not– I didn't...'

'Still ain't found it, huh?'

He gestures at me with his cigarette, inclining his head in a mock bow, and coats his voice with heavy RP. 'My sincerest apologies for creating a bottleneck. But, dear fellow, surely, you ought to have found something by now.'

He chuckles. He's enjoying himself. Of course, he is — if there's anything Isaiah is better at than love, it's cruelty. Just because the knife was forged in the fissure between his lungs doesn't mean it won't cut up other bodies just as well.

Before I can stop them, tears blur the sight of him. I try to blink them back, to turn away, but my body refuses to move and Isaiah watches me cry on somebody's porch, illuminated by Christmas lights in October as Wannabe by Spice Girls booms from the party inside. This isn't how it was supposed to go.

He's right, of course. I'm the one who left; I should have something to show for it.

Yet, I found nothing but the mausoleum of my own mistakes. Even if my intentions were good, I've spent six years in a pickle jar of guilt and I've rewritten the events so many times, I have no idea how selfless I ever was. I'm the villain of our story, I know.

There's only an inch left of his cigarette. My time will end when the ember dies.

'Shay–'

'Don't call me that.'

It's his turn to take a stride closer even if it means he has to crane his neck to look up at me. His breathing accelerates into wheezy gusts that spit the stink of tobacco in my face (there's no hint of moringa perfume on you anymore), a sting that only makes my eyes water further.

'You lost the right to call me that years ago.' It means: the gift has been withdrawn.

He'll never call me by my name again. Dorian, from the word "doron", meaning gift. I am no longer a gift to him. If I offer it to him, he'll post it back, return to sender.

His eyes are still so beautiful. Still too large for his face, still dark enough to swallow his pupils. After six years, their intensity has faded in my memory and looking into them now (if not looking into any eyes because I haven't made eye contact since I left) wanes me down to my most submissive instincts until I'm seconds from dropping to my knees and the only thing that stops me is the need to keep looking. Even narrowed into a glare, they steal the breath from my lungs.

Unless that's panic. Panic, because you hate me, and it's now that the severity of my mistake finally collapses onto me. HaShem has waited six years to deliver what is either the punchline or the moral, all the while allowing me to think the worst was over. His audience of angels bend over with laughter.

Just as I go to apologise, the music inside changes.

I snap my head to the face of the house as if looking at the windows will help me hear better. 'What is this song?'

'I dunno–'

Ignoring him, I swivel my backpack from my shoulder for my QFX shoebox tape recorder.

'You took that with you to a party?'

'Of course, I took it with me...' My impatient confidence wanes. 'Is that weird?'

'Yeah.' His lips struggle to wrap around his cigarette due to his smile.

Isaiah recovers quickly from the jarring change in topic (you're still the only person who does). As if he'd much rather hear this than an apology, he watches me with the recorder in hand and grows warm. As bitterness melts, a familiar fondness unearths.

'I keep telling you, cuz, ain't nun wrong with being weird–'

'Can you take your queer shit elsewhere?'

I snap to the voice to find a man standing at the foot of the porch steps. We're standing in the way.

'Ain't nobody tryna see it.'

In unison, we step back to clear the path. Arms heavy, I tap the side of the tape recorder as I stare at my feet, but Isaiah leans against the newel post that connects the staircase railing to the porch balustrade with a languid cross of his ankles.

Cigarette between his lip, his gaze follows the stranger as he passes between us with a four-pack of Smirnoff Mules under his arm. Sensing the attention, he glances at Isaiah and sucks his teeth, muttering a stream of threats and slurs.

Still, Isaiah doesn't look away. There's something in his stare I've never seen there before. It's not fear or anger or humiliation (or any of the other things I'm feeling right now), but some perverse curiosity. It makes stomach acid burn at the back of my throat.

The door shuts and, with a final drag, Isaiah pushes off the newel. I've turned invisible (I take it all back, this is the worst part). He puts out his cigarette and drops the butt into the minced ginger jar left on the railing for that very purpose before he retreats inside.

I stare at the weak ember in the cluster of damp ashes until it fades out and I die with it.

Notes

Berakah: A blessing recited before doing certain actions, such as eating.

Kippah: A head covering worn by Jewish men.

G-d: Observant Jews avoid writing the name of God because if that text is ever destroyed, you may accidentally commit the sin of erasing God's name. This is not a censor that all Jewish people do, as some interpret that this rule only applies when God is written in Hebrew and not other languages, like English. 

HaShem: Another way of censoring God's name. Literally means "the name".

RP: Received pronunciation. A British accent associated with the upper class.

Halakah: Jewish religious law.