“Five minutes,” she said. Just a brief excursion into the world, that was all she wanted. A group photo with progress, a selfie with the march of time. So, what was it I was doing? Why did I suddenly decide we should stay out? What was I searching for? Or perhaps I should say, what was I trying to make up for, to excuse? I ask myself that sometimes—the times I forget that I already know the answer.

Whatever. We went downstairs hand in hand, never to return together.

A couple of men, not from the city as far as I could tell, asked me for a blanket, and though I’d brought two blankets with me, I was selfish and said, “No.” I wanted them, one for the earth and one for the heavens. The men nodded and went on sitting there on the bare ground, cross-legged.

We laid out on the edge of the sidewalk, next to a cluster of small tents and blankets on which some people were sleeping, while others sprawled, uncovered and awake. The stars seemed close when we looked up. The glare from a streetlight was impossible to ignore. “Just reach out and switch it off,” I said. “I want to sleep.”

She began to hum. She said, “Do you know the outdoor lullaby?”

“Never heard of it.”

She brought her lips right up to my ear and began to murmur. I was trying to make out the words, and watching the streetlight flare beneath the starlight, I asked myself if the light was happy for us, or whether, in its loneliness, it envied us.

Alya sang. Like all the singing I’d ever known all run together in one moment, in that tune: my mother’s songs, the honey-seller outside my school, the laundromat’s radio carried to our ears as we turned out the lights to sleep.

I remembered something. I said, “This once you guessed wrong.”

She looked at me, questioning, and I reminded her of the night she’d woken full of foreboding.

Through the rough music of the crowds she stared at me, quite silent. Then, as though we both knew the answer, she asked, “You really think I was wrong?”

14

COLD THEORY

“It came to me during a storm,” said Bahr. “Back when Europe was home.” He hooked his forefingers around the word “home,” a bookish gesture quite out of keeping with the neighborhood through which we were walking, in search of a football field we weren’t even sure still existed. But Bahr didn’t care, and went on as though he were reading from a book: