‘At the demonstration!’ he screams into the phone. ‘You didn’t call. I didn’t know. Where are you?’

‘Listen to me,’ Yassim says. ‘Get out of there. I’m taking a taxi to the Four Seasons on Cornichen, the boardwalk, in about twenty minutes. Repeat what I just said.’

‘Four Seasons!’ Jacob shouts. ‘In twenty minutes.’

And with that Yassim is gone. And everything else too. Jacob stops in the middle of the crowd, which is flowing like a river around him. He doesn’t notice it at all.

*

Later the two of them are walking westwards along Charles Helou, past the Four Seasons and the new skyscrapers, and the darkness around them feels gentle and alive, full of holes, not even darkness really. The traffic is sparse here, when they get away from the protests and chaos down near the border between East and West Beirut.

Jacob coughs; his throat is dry like always after a day spent breathing in the smog and the stench of trash. It’s hard to really take in that he’s actually walking beside Yassim again; it feels more like a memory. He glances at his friend, who smiles at him, amused.

‘You didn’t think you’d hear from me again,’ Yassim says. ‘You thought I’d disappeared?’

Jacob shrugs and turns his eyes to the blackness above the ocean. ‘Where were you?’ he says, too quietly. His voice is drowned out by a motorcycle weaving in and out of traffic. ‘Your trip?’ he says again, more loudly now. ‘Where were you?’

Yassim turns to him and says nothing at first, just looks at him with those sad, curious eyes. ‘Syria,’ he says finally. ‘Near Aleppo.’

Jacob stops, gets goosebumps on his arms. ‘What?’ he says. ‘Aleppo? What… Oh my God, what were you doing there? How did you even get there? I don’t know what to say.’

Yassim holds up the camera hanging across his chest. ‘Taking photos,’ he says. ‘That’s what I do. I’m a photographer.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ Jacob says.

He’s speculated about what Yassim does for a living, imagined a thousand scenarios for why he disappeared, trying to avoid the suspicion that Yassim just didn’t want to be with him.

‘How could you know?’ Yassim says. ‘We barely spoke last time.’

Jacob blushes, and they slowly start walking again. Yassim guides them away from Charles Helou and the sea and in between the new skyscrapers, in towards the chaos, towards the city.

‘I don’t know anything about you,’ Jacob says.

Yassim laughs again. ‘There’s not much to know. I’m a photographer. And right now, you know, with the war, there’s a lot of work in Syria. That’s the only good thing you can say about it. A lot of work in the area.’

It doesn’t sound cynical when he says it, more resigned, like a reflection.