“How do you like it?” he asks me.
“Wow,” I say. Without taking my eyes off it, I get out of the taxi. The wind lifts up my scarf. “You look even better naked!”
The photo is in black and white and he’s wearing nothing but the skimpiest of shorts. His body stands out like a silver figurine against the gray backdrop, each muscle patiently carved out in vivid detail. One leg is bent forward and trailed by the other, which is stretched right back to the tips of his toes. His foot doesn’t touch the ground. My cousin looks weightless as he peers down on us anxiously. The faintest hint of a frown line etched on his brow, he’s like a fallible angel on the Day of Judgment.
“Why the serious face though?” I ask.
“Dance is a serious business,” he replies.
“All your chest hair is gone. Did you have to shave your whole body for the photo?”
“You’re cute,” he says. “Let’s go, the show’s over and I want you to meet someone.”
We both pause a moment in front of the entrance. Warm light streams through the glass facade. Inside the palatial foyer, a good way inside, we catch sight of men and women mingling with champagne glasses.
“There’s something so homey about it from the outside,” my cousin says.
“It looks more beautiful on the outside than it could ever be on the inside,” I say. For a second, I feel an urge to stay outside.
“Come,” he says. He pulls me inside by the sleeve of my coat.
The young man he greets with a kiss on the lips is slightly shorter than my cousin and called Nick. Nick looks at me and past me at the same time, his eyes darting around the room. His whole face is twisted into a smile. His teeth are bleached white. He says something, but nothing that strikes up a conversation, then disappears into the crowd. We watch him go, and I’m filled with loathing. His whole vibe screams America to me. He’ll fuck my cousin like a power athlete but he’ll never love him.
My cousin takes my coat. “I’ll be right back,” he says.
“A drink would be great!” I call after him.
Standing alone at the edge of the room, I see statement necklaces. Gray hair with asymmetrical undercuts. Crepe-soled brogues. Nick is now talking with an older couple. He’s a compulsive eye bulger and I can’t bear to look at him anymore.
My cousin comes back with two gin and tonics. We quietly sip our drinks, not saying anything to each other. A few people casually wave at him. Others give him a thumbs-up, seemingly a little awestruck. One of them shouts: “Hey, Kenny, can’t wait!”
“They call you Kenny?” I say. “It’s weird, you’re spread almost naked over the facade, but nobody in this room really knows who you are.”
“Says the first-person narrator of their own book! You’ve revealed yourself just as much as me. But do your readers really know who you are?”
He points to the white sculpture in the middle of the foyer. It depicts two women carved from white marble, their faces obscured. They stand close together, almost like conjoined twins.
“We’re like them,” he says.
“Who are they?” I ask.
“It’s titled Two Circus Women. That’s all I know about it.”
“Our grandfather, the father of our fathers, grew pistachios on his land,” I say.
“Right. Isn’t it crazy what we’ve become? You’re here in New York doing a reading from your book, and I’m the star of the Paul Taylor Dance Company.”
I don’t say anything.
“Let me show you something,” he says, and downs his glass in one gulp.
The auditorium is empty but still brightly lit. For a moment, I’m overwhelmed by its sheer size. I hadn’t realized just how many people come to watch my cousin. He checks that all the auditorium doors are shut.
“Sit down,” he says to me.
I walk through the empty stalls and take a seat in the middle, row four. I put my glass on the floor and my bag with my book inside it on the seat next to me. My cousin has disappeared.
I’m sitting all alone in the theater. It’s quiet. I look up. An enormous globe of a chandelier hangs from the ceiling directly above me.
My cousin leaps out of nowhere onto the stage, positioning himself on the thin apron in front of the curtain. He fixes his eyes on me, bends his upper body forward, stretches his arms out to the sides, and starts spinning like a propeller. His feet lift into the air, one after the other, then touch down. Tap, tap. He keeps eye contact. If he loses it for a brief moment while spinning, his eyes return to me straight away.
“It’s called the barrel jump,” he says mid-leap, “because it looks like you’re rolling on top of a barrel. I can picture it so well: me on a slope, riding a barrel endlessly downhill.”
He does a few more, then stops suddenly mid-jump. “Do you remember when you found out about it?” His voice isn’t louder, but seems fuller.
I’m not sure what he’s talking about. Still, I reply: “I think I was in my early twenties.” Almost twenty years ago.
My cousin and I never talked about it before. We hadn’t even tried. I hadn’t tried.
“That late? Why do you think no one told you about it before? When it happened, I mean.”
“I was only ten,” I say. “That’s probably why.”
“Didn’t catch that, can you speak up?”
“I was only ten!”
“And I was only twelve,” he says. “If I hadn’t gone through it, I wouldn’t want to know anything either.”
Something ignites inside me, a hot flame flashing around my belly. I’m glad I can lean forward for my gin and tonic.
My cousin unbuttons his shirt and takes it off. He slips out of his shoes and removes his pants. He leaves his discarded clothes in a heap and walks slowly to the far left of the stage in his underpants and socks.
“One of them,” he says, “walked like this.” He hunches his shoulders and bends his upper body slightly forward. He dashes to the far right of the stage on tiptoes.
I laugh, even though I sense it’s not meant to be funny.
My cousin’s face stays serious. “Who told you about it?”
“My father,” I say.
“How come? What made him do that?”
“He just wanted to badmouth your mother. He said she made you miserable. I don’t think he intended to tell me at all.”
“I love my mother,” my cousin says. He closes his eyes, as if needing a moment to revisit his feelings.
“Another one walked like this,” he says. His arms suddenly leaden, he pulls them up strenuously as though they would otherwise weigh him down to the floor. He pushes his shoulders and head forward. Bowlegged, he trudges back to the left of the stage. There, he arches his back and lets his upper body fall forward.
“Do you ever do this, just let your whole body hang loose?” he asks. He looks at me upside down through his dangling arms.
“Too rarely, I guess.”
“Yeah,” he says, “you’re always tense. I can see that.”
“Force of habit,” I say. “It’s the migrant kid in me.”
He laughs and stands up straight. Then he clasps his hands together as if praying and presses his fingertips to his mouth. He pulls his shirt over his head, spreads his arms, and puts on a theatrical voice, as if channeling an actor on a regional stage:
“Let us imagine one of the third world countries, as they were still called then. A Muslim-majority country. Take your pick. Our grandfather cultivated pistachios there in an arid landscape. Feel free to swap pistachios for any other fruit. In this landscape, a short distance from ancient archeological sites but far removed from modernity, our fathers grew up in a small town. They didn’t come from wealthy families, nor from clerical backgrounds. Even so, their families enjoyed a good reputation thanks to the pistachios. They knew poverty and wealth, moving in both worlds. They saw the gulf between them and couldn’t help but think politically. In the sixties, before they became fathers themselves, our fathers went to study in the West. A great number of other fathers did the same.”
He jumps into the air. Right, left. Feet flexed, knees pointed outward, there’s a touch of whimsy to it. “They studied medicine, civil engineering, electrical engineering. The more self-centered among them studied architecture.”
“My father wasn’t self-centered,” I shout, cupping my hands in front of my mouth.
“Shh,” he says.
A door opens. A man in a dark blue uniform sticks his head in. When he sees my cousin on stage, his face relaxes. “Kenny, is that you? Everything ok?”
“Everything’s fine, Bob. Just one thing: would you mind bringing my cousin from Europe another gin and tonic? Before the bar staff go home? I’m in the middle of a performance right now. Thanks!”
Bob looks puzzled. I’m guessing he’s not much older than we are, but his cap and mustache, the shirt straining over his belly, and the keychain on his belt make him seem older. He looks at me as if he needs to make sure I’m actually from Europe.
I smile, showing him my slightly crooked, unbleached teeth. “Sure thing,” he says and leaves. The door closes silently. My ears prick up, but there’s no sound from outside. The foyer seems to have emptied.
My cousin lies down on his back, perfectly still except for the rise and fall of his chest. How nice it would be, I think to myself, if this were actually a performance. If I wasn’t so uncomfortably aware of the pain the performer is tapping into.
In a photo album I kept after my father’s death, there’s a photo from 1982. My cousin and I are in it. I’m three years old and he’s five. We’re holding hands. I’m in brown cord dungarees, and we’re both wearing the same striped velour sweatshirt. The background is a sandy rock face, which would have been a natural spot for us to hang out. The rock casts no shadow because the sun is at its zenith. Its rays blind me. My cousin is wearing a baseball cap. It’s almost impossible to make out his eyes. But I know he had very long eyelashes. Sometimes he would hug me when we fell asleep next to each other at night, and I could feel them on my cheek. He was very handsome and charmed people everywhere. In the supermarket, in the park, in front of the ice cream parlor. Our relatives used to say he should have been the girl, not me. Somebody must have taken the photo shortly before my parents took me to Germany. My uncle, his wife and my cousin stayed behind.
The door opens again. Bob is carrying my drink and walks over somewhat stiffly.
My cousin sits up. “You don’t mind leaving us alone again now? Thanks Bob, you’re the greatest.”
His tone of voice! Had I not known better, I could have sworn he’d always spent his summers in the Hamptons.
I turn to Bob. He does what my cousin asks, but hesitates as he puts his hand on the door handle.
“Bob, please.”
I swivel my head around. The sudden chill in my cousin’s voice sends a shiver down my spine. The door closes.
It’s just the two of us again.
I want to be closer to my cousin, so I move to the front row. “Aren’t you cold?” I call out to him across the orchestra pit.
“Why yes,” he says, then suddenly gets up and rushes over to the left of the stage. “One walked like this.” He goose-steps across the length of the stage. “Another one like this.” He tiptoes back. “And one like this.” He lies down on his stomach and wriggles to the other side. Once there, he takes a beat.
“No kidding,” he says, still lying on his stomach, “his legs became paralyzed overnight. But no one cared. No one got him crutches. He used to be one of the really nasty guys, and a lot of the others now got their revenge by stepping on him, just like that, whenever he got in their way. They acted like they had stepped in dog shit. I was glad because I’d always been afraid of him. On the other hand, I felt sorry for him, honestly. You know me.”
“Yeah,” I say, “you’d never hurt a fly.”
My cousin’s face crumples.
I don’t want to ask this question, but sense that he’s expecting me to: “When that guy could still walk, what did he do to you?”
“Drop it,” he snaps at me.
I look down into my lap. He’s entitled to react like that, I guess. He has every right in the world.
“Where were we?” he asks.
The front curtain suddenly jerks upwards, startling me. I put my hand on my chest. Behind the curtain is a room, completely lined in beige material that looks soft. As if you could throw yourself against it without getting hurt. Even the corners are rounded. It must be the stage set for the performance that played this evening, the set for the final scene, still lit up.
My cousin takes a look too. “It feels like being in a womb,” he says. “Look how much space I have now!” He runs around the room, his body hugging the walls, which he brushes with his left hand.
“I’m tickling my mother from inside,” he says.
I laugh.
“You laugh like your father,” he says, stopping still. “Our fathers, that’s where we were. They went abroad to study, so full of hope. They were dinosaurs who believed they could change the course of history and defy their own extinction. In just a few years, they soaked up all the knowledge they thought could help transform their third world country into an advanced nation.” He forms a circle with his thumb and index finger and kisses where they touch. “Bellissima! Then they returned to their homeland, as they still called it back then. Homeland.”
He spreads his arms and starts laughing, but not like his father. He laughs like a stranger, and a palpable feeling of discomfort washes over me. Like sand running through my fingers, it eludes my grasp. But it has been there all evening, as I was realizing only now, and when my cousin abruptly stops laughing it doesn’t completely go away. He runs in circles on the stage, his arms outstretched like wings. The circles get smaller as he spins faster and faster around his own axis. Then drops to the ground.
“A top non-aligned country,” he says breathlessly. “What a pair of dummies! Uppity dummies! If only they would have settled for less in life.”
I’ve a feeling someone else is there. I turn around in my seat and look behind me, but I’m still alone.
“Hey,” I say, “don’t you think we should go home? They’re probably closing up soon.”
“Yep, almost done here,” my cousin says.
He takes off his socks and slowly stands up, walking to the front of the stage. His toes grip the edge and he leans forward to ask me, “Did you write about me in your novel?”
“Yes,” I reply, “but only in passing.” I feel cornered, even though I’d been expecting the question.
“Only in passing? I’m not the main character?” His disbelief seems both put-on and genuine at the same time. He walks backwards, retreating into the void. “What about this passing mention? Is it really me or did you make me different?”
“You’re a bit different, yes.”
“What’s different about me?”
“You’re a fund manager, not a dancer. It seemed too clichéd to me.”
“I see. Am I gay?”
“No. That also seemed too clichéd.”
“My whole existence is a cliché to you?”
“No, you’re anything but a cliché. Just not at first glance.”
“Read the passage about me, will you.”
“It’s in German, you won’t understand a word.”
“Doesn’t matter. Read it to me. I’ll get the gist from the rhythm.”
I take the book out of my tote bag and start flipping through the pages. For a moment, it feels impossible to get my bearings, which is exactly what the book is about: the overwhelming disorientation when life falls apart. I picked up all the pieces and stitched them back together for this novel, hoping that the semblance of a relatable story would emerge for someone else.
I flip the pages, read half a sentence, and keep thumbing through. The passage where my cousin appears could be anywhere, the story could begin or end with it. Maybe it’s in the middle, or even nowhere at all. It might have existed only in my mind while I was writing. I take a moment to focus.
The cousin shows up in Rome, where he goes to an expensive restaurant with the main character. After traipsing around ancient ruins all day, they feel ravenous and the cousin texts an Italian colleague in New York for a recommendation. She suggests a simple but classy trattoria. The main character and the cousin waltz in wearing sneakers and looking generally scruffy. Dark, too. Darker than the Italians around them. The waiter treats them with disdain, which they do their best to ignore. Just like they’ve been doing since they were children, ignoring everything that clashes with how they view themselves. Now that they’re adults and earn a lot of money, it’s easier. This fund manager cousin, richer than my cousin, sits comfortable in the knowledge that the credit cards in his back pocket will clinch him victory over the waiter in the end. The main character is an actuary for a big insurance firm and also makes way more money than me. Apart from that, they remain true to life: she and the cousin share a close bond and meet up anywhere they can. In every corner of the world, except for the place where they were born.
One more nugget of unadulterated truth is that they’ve never talked about what he went through as a twelve-year-old boy. This, too, jars with how they see themselves. But the main character thinks that now is the time to talk about it, just this once. They’re mature and stable enough, for one thing, but still young enough as well; midlife crises, depression and high blood pressure haven’t yet pushed them apart. After their aperitif, over a plate of vitello tonnato, she pops the question: do you want to talk about it?
He says no and orders a bottle of wine.
“Finally found it?” my cousin asks.
“Yes, just now. Page 115.”
I start reading:
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asks. “No, I don’t. I want a bottle of wine.” He raises his hand very slightly, just to the edge of the table, making a loose peace sign. The waiter nods and scuttles off to the cellar. They sit in silence until he returns with a bottle of white wine. He pours Iman—
“You called me Iman? Like the model?”
“I did. Is that bad?”
“It’s fine. Keep reading.”
He pours Iman a glass.
I stop for a second. My cousin is dancing to my sentences. I want to look, but I can’t look and read at the same time. I continue, listening to the sounds he makes while dancing. To his feet as they pad and brush against the floor, to the rustling of his shirt as he twirls, to his breathing. I can hear his body cleaving the air.
He pours Iman a glass. Iman takes a sip and smiles at the waiter. It’s a nominal smile, no more than one corner of his mouth turned up slightly. Now he knows how to communicate with subtle gestures. He’s learned so much from the upper echelon of New York society. He learned even more in a Thai prison. In both worlds it pays off to be tight-lipped about your personal life. Everything can be used against you one day.
Even now, no one knows his story. How would his friends, who spent their childhood summers in the Hamptons, react if they found out? Iman had just turned twelve when his mother decided to leave Iran. She was dead set on leaving right away, although Iman’s father didn’t want to. He tried persuading her to stay, and when that didn’t work, he tried encouraging her to apply for a Canadian visa. But she didn’t want to wait for that. She had to get out, whatever the cost. Fake papers cost a fortune. She sold everything she owned. With dollar bills hidden around their bodies, she and Iman boarded a plane to Bangkok, from where they were supposed to fly on to Toronto. But then they were pulled aside at passport control in Bangkok and the game was up. They took his mother to a women’s prison and Iman to a men’s prison. He was held there for six months. None of their relatives were keen on broaching the topic afterwards. Hushed up and sealed off, those six months became a Chernobyl-sized hole in a family history that was already on life support. For various relatives scattered around the world, the last bit of lore worth holding onto was that their grandfather grew pistachios on their family’s land.
Iman empties half his glass in one gulp and says: “Never mind what I went through when I was twelve. It’s not important. We turned out great, didn’t we?”
I stop reading, falling quiet.
My cousin breaks off mid-step. “That’s it?” he asks.
“Yep, when she wakes up in her hotel room the next morning, he’s already gone.”
“Sounds a bit over dramatic,” he says. “They went to sleep in the same bed?”
I don’t respond.
He comes to the front of the stage and sets himself down right in the middle, letting his legs dangle over the edge. “I’ve noticed that you never stop to take a deep breath, neither in your writing nor when you read aloud. You have to give yourself more space. Like I do.”
“Is that why you became a dancer? To give yourself more space?”
No sooner do I ask the question than a loud rumbling noise startles me. I look up and see two plexiglass walls descending in tandem like a stage curtain. My cousin slowly gets up. He takes three steps back and stops. One wall comes thudding down in front of him, the other behind him.
I turn around. Is someone there? I still don’t see anyone.
“Kian, what’s going on?” I shout.
My cousin doesn’t react. He starts moving about between the walls. I see him jumping, spinning, or least trying to, throwing himself against the walls, bouncing off, falling down. I want to cover my ears, but then I hear his voice piped over a loudspeaker: Ninety centimeters, that’s how wide my mattress was in the cell. That’s all the space I had, basically. But then one of the inmates— he darts to the left of the stage and then hobbles, as if his joints are all stiff, back over to the right side.
One of the inmates took me under his wing. Already on the third or fourth day. I called him Stihl, because he had a Stihl chainsaw tattooed on his forearm. Stihl never left my side. The others respected him. In return, I had to entertain him. “You’re so pretty,” he told me, “show me what you can do.” What could I possibly show him? I was twelve years old and didn’t have a clue. “Just do it, show me what you got!” He shouted at me. Then it dawned on me. One of the other inmates had a funny walk like a gorilla. Out of desperation, I did an impression of him. Stihl laughed his head off. “More!” He yelled. I did an impression of another inmate, a short man with stumpy legs. Stihl couldn’t get enough of it. I put on a show for him several times a day. He’d send everyone else off to a corner, clearing out the cell to give me enough space. And I got better. I started observing the others more closely and experimenting with their gaits, letting them flow into each other. I made it into a dance. Stihl had a grand time. He had a simple mind, God knows how he managed to command any respect. Sometimes I had to blow him too. I got better at that as well. He always gave me a candy afterwards. If I hadn’t had Stihl—
I only notice the trickle of red dribbling down the plexiglas when it is almost level with his head. I look up. More rivulets have appeared to the left and right, behind and in front of him too. They gather into a stream that’s soon gushing down the walls and pooling into a lake on the floor.
I jump up. “Kian! What the hell is going on?”
He stands there perfectly still. His voice rises above the fray:
. . . to finish the story of the fathers: they returned to their homeland and carried out a revolution. They wiped themselves out, these dinosaurs.
It suddenly goes dark. I can just about make out what looks like my cousin’s outline behind the blood-red wall.
“Kian? Kian!”
I grab my tote bag, knocking over my glass, and run towards the exit. The door doesn’t budge an inch. Leaning against it with my full weight, I slowly push it open.
A sea of raised heads in the dark catches me off guard. The heads drop and scores of eyes settle on me. I can hear my own breathing in the heavy silence. Stepping forward a bit, I notice the red plexiglass walls on a screen above. A few people start clapping. More and more people join in until everyone is clapping. The applause grows louder, someone shouts “bravo”, and when my cousin takes his place next to me, now wearing a bathrobe, he’s greeted with whistles. He takes a second to look me in the eyes, though I’m not sure if this is just between us or still part of the show. He puts his arm around me, and as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, we take a bow. The clapping and whistling and cheering swell even louder. The faces in the crowd are full of empathy, compassion, respect.
The only ones unmoved, it seems, are the marble circus women protruding impassively from their midst.
“Sold out,” my cousin whispers in my ear. “Let’s get going, I could really use a warm bath.”
