22.

When I first caught sight of you, what I saw was your light. You were wearing a white shirt with long sleeves draped over your slender wrists, you shone there among a bored crowd, but it was clear to me straight away that your brightness came from absorption of black. That’s how light works. Under a bright surface there is a sarcophagus of darkness, while a thin black surface glaze most often shields a flawless inner light. This attracted me. And then your gaze. No bottom to it, in place of the pupils only a narrow well of unease and a very familiar restlessness. Everyone else stood back a little from you, while Filip sat to my right, always to my right. We grew up together, he never pulled back, not when they watched me, and not when they chose not to watch me. When a pack of unruly kids appeared in the yard demanding an explanation for why I’d said I preferred to be called Ivan, he stepped in front of me and let them know he knew who from our street had put ground glass in the dogfood dishes so they spun on their heels and left. When I told him, “I have something to tell you,” he only squinted into the smoke of the cigarette he’d pressed between his lips while sketching on a piece of paper. “Well thank goodness you finally said so out loud,” was all he said, and we never spoke of it again. At the time when I was taking in your brightness, only he knew what I was preparing to do, only he addressed me properly, while with others I was always looking for a way to advocate for more fitting pronouns. Something closer to me. My name was in perfect discord with myself, so most people who knew me at the time called me by my nickname, Doks, at least that way they could somehow bridge the gulf that yawned open when we adhered too rigidly to form. I saw that you could see me. Why such sad eyes? I’d like to cheer you up. I’d like to drive you mad so the glittery gravel down beneath the murky water swirls up to the surface, so you throw out the shells, grass, silvery fish and crabs, so the surface roils and you pour yourself out. To spill onto me, flood me. You do not pull back from me. This is thrilling. As if I drink you in with each sip of wine I pour into myself. I go out, I’ll wait for you. After two minutes you come out looking for me, though your eyes are elsewhere. Here I am. “Have a cigarette?” you ask. “So where have you been all this time?” I ask in answer. The sediment is starting to swirl ever so slightly. “Well I’m here now, couldn’t get here sooner,” you answer matter-of-factly, and a laugh bubbles up under your tone. We exchange looks, time passes and slows to a standstill, moves backward, there is no time. Time is merely a dimension that serves as a backdrop for us recognizing each other. This helps us connect the us from the past to the us now, and opens a way for the future us to move in all sorts of directions. I suddenly sing, you made me do it, from out of me comes music, I climb onto a podium, erect the stage set for our encounter and everything that will follow, I move close to your unhappiness, my unhappiness sniffs your fur, the words find their way, as if someone wrote them for us, we wrote them once long ago, “My Funny Valentine,” you stand alone amid the crowd that has passed through life and you look at me, your looks are laughable, I look at you, unphotographable, yet you’re my favorite work of art. “Doks, where the fuck did you go with that cigarette?!”

You’re not going to call. I know you won’t. I am way too much. But in the time we had I felt like we accomplished everything. The day after that first night I sat for a long time outdoors on the terrace, serene because I’d seen you, I didn’t get up though my cell phone had been buzzing inside in the room for the last hour. Maybe it’s jobs, maybe it’s people whose picture should be taken so they can last forever; they don’t know what forever is. Lazily I climbed down from my floating raft. An unknown number, the message: “Greetings, I don’t know if I have the right number, but I’m looking for the Singer in the Night, I would like to find him, if you know how to reach him, I’d be grateful. L.” I stood over these words, you wrote to me an hour ago while I was aloft in my serenity, in our serenity. Ah ha, so that’s why. I answered you: “Dear L., you have the right number, the Singer in the Night is free every evening from now on.” And then I wanted to add, he sings pop songs, plays serious music, Romany music, fusion and dirty jazz, and anything you desire. Then I erased the dirty, and then the rest. You’d figured all that out anyway. I have always been short on words, but in my thoughts—insatiable. Now I am sorry I didn’t tell you more, that I didn’t write, yell, sing, so much more, but I didn’t dare knock down your walls. I have never been happier and never sadder.

You arranged it so Martina would walk between us, maybe so your friend and I would get to know each other, maybe so she’d see how nice and interesting I am, mostly—admittedly a little odd—entirely normal, and that she’d come to accept me. And maybe so we wouldn’t arrive at the exhibit as an obvious couple, so your friends wouldn’t ask questions about me right away, to obscure the relationship between the two of us a little. Wanting to fit into the thing about arriving at an event, while you go around greeting and hugging people you know from somewhere, and I stand not far from you, wait my turn, and eye the purse you set down on the chair between my chair and yours. You are being deliberate, let everything be free of obligation, we’re hanging out, we’re open, different, but actually the only thing of value is the picture of us that all your friends will be talking about tomorrow. The better half of our crowd. Actors, intellectuals, writers, fighters for human rights who will be wondering the whole time where the photographer’s prick is while nodding benevolently with eyes wide shut. Fuck me, sometimes things go easier with the worse half. Filip’s grandmother, for example, who has known me since the dim days of childhood. When he told her, without looking up from the mlinci pasta she was cooking Grandma asked, “Is he a good man?” “Yes, he is, Grandma.” “Has he deceived anyone, has he ever stolen?” “Come on, Grandma, you know him!” “Well then, what! Who cares about that if he’s a decent man!” And that year like every other year she sent to Zagreb a jar of apricot jam and a bottle of plum brandy, each, for me and for Filip. But then the journalist who had been treading water for years in Women’s Studies, an afficionado of an assortment of minorities, worms his way to peek at what we’re drinking, peer into our pants, under our dresses, see what is going on there. He could smell something was up, he still didn’t know me so he kept his distance, but you interested him, nothing similar had been associated with you yet, and when someone who is perfect like you is tarred with the brush of the bizarre, with a whiff of secrecy and tragedy, this becomes a cause for celebration in your whole community. I know how much this hurts you, it isn’t easy to be in that place. Probably because you were bestowing all your attention on the knucklehead across from you who looked like Hugh Grant and played at being an artist—as if he understood things. And you nodded, approving, because you, too, understood things. The two of you were united in agreement and your understanding of nothing, sure and protected by your own appealing exteriors, with only a little more luck than those on the edge of town who were shaking their heads at the same time while above them hung the symbols of the state, religion, soccer club, political party. All of you understood things, except what it means to not belong. Radically. To anyone. Not to this crowd, or a different crowd, or any crowd for that matter. So that is why I felt bad for you. While we were driving home, when you started crying in the car yelling, “Sorry, sorry, but you just don’t understand!” I understood that this hurts you, it hurts us, each glance, each time we go out, each venture. And then you and I were again alone and I knew you loved only me, me alone, and nothing could convince me otherwise, even your denial. This is why I was never happier and never sadder. The only thing I wanted was to free you, more than anything, that and only that.