Atrium

I had promised myself to stay away from the garden.

Come Monday, I found myself there again, right before 8.30 AM, protected by the old coat I’d nicked from the wardrobe of drama group some time in 1998. I had dug out my watch so I could leave my phone in the bag, all the better to savour the thrill of seeing my high school crush appear in the passageway by the camera store.

Hi, he said, how are you. That was all, and it was not really a question; nevertheless, I cherished those mumbled words in his dark, clipped voice just as I had back then. I used to spend my evenings poring over the simplest phrase or glance, scrutinising the banal lines we exchanged on irc as if they were parts of the Vedas or a particularly prescient line from some anarcho-syndicalist thinker.

He looked at me quickly and sat down. Like the coat, by the way.

I smiled. Thanks.

The garden was not much, a mere slash of greenery among the steel and concrete of the media building. I’d often passed through it on my way to work. It was one of those vaguely Japanese-inspired corporate atrium gardens from the 1980s: flowerbeds of bare rock and shrubbery in concentric circles, a dried-up fountain at the centre, a circular arrangement of benches. When I first moved to the city, right before the turn of the millennium, the soaring towers had been the headquarters of a bank. My first girlfriend used to work in the cafeteria. In later years, the whole block had been partially demolished and remade into a media hub of sorts, brightly lit and bustling with activity; broadcasting, lectures, conferences. There was a huge open space facing the street, the centerpiece being a sculpture which drew my gaze each time I went past: a dark crystal, somehow animated from within and flickering with sparks of light that seemed to float to the surface and wink out. Like headlines, I thought, two seconds of the news cycle flashing past, rising just to sink. The cafeteria was long gone, transformed with the rest. Instead, a tiny espresso bar had cropped up where I sometimes got a coffee to go from the taciturn guy with the teardrop tattooed on his face. It would often strike me that this scene of waiting for coffee on my way to work was, in fact, nothing like my life, rather like a representation of what I imagined my life to be like back when I had no clue who I was or what I was doing. It reminded me of those essays I wrote at age 12: I will marry at 20 and have two children. I will work in a company. I will buy a house.

The first time it happened, I was certain my past had finally caught up with me: some late-20s mushroom experiment gone wrong, something in my brain tumbling down an unsecured hatch in the dark. I would probably have dismissed him if he hadn’t stood up and addressed me by name; there was nothing to make me recognise him, not at first. As he repeated my name, I turned to look at him. Not-quite-recognition hit me like a wave of cold water, when did he have a son and how could I not know alternating as I counted backwards, finding the timeline would work. Then he spoke again, and I knew beyond doubt that it was him.

What happened to you? I blurted. He looked at me, confused.

How do you mean?

Your face. It’s like you’ve turned back …

I gestured at him, searching for words. Over the years, I’d run into him on the street every now and then. He was one of those people who aged almost imperceptibly, just a few creases at the corners of his eyes to suggest that time had passed. But this was clearly not his face in this timeline; it was an impossibility, a joke of time and space: the face of him at 17 or 18 or 19, the face of someone who knew about the Balkan wars and the Srebrenica massacre, but had no inkling of the future 9-11 or July 22, could not imagine what the war on Afghanistan would entail, nor imagine the invasion of Iraq or the bombing of Libya, the invasion of Ukraine, the reduction of the Gaza strip to smoking rubble. Tabula rasa, I thought and considered him, struggling to connect this face to memory. It was his voice I remembered, mostly, the voice I’d noticed in every room, the voice that made me speak up to be noticed. This was not the face of the person I came to know and like, but the face of a projection.

We looked at each other mutely and turned to face the mirrored wall of the passageway.

Our reflections were slightly distorted in the silvery surface, like looking into moving water. The white streak in my hair that I now took pride in was gone, my frown lines a mere suggestion. The boniness that had set in was blasted from my face, replaced by a vague softness. But my eyes were unchanged: They were the eyes of now.

After that first encounter in the garden, I went back once, twice, every day for that week. I scratched some Frank Ocean lines into the tired wood of the bench, like those mornings between French class and Socioeconomic Perspectives when I would write a few lines of some song on his desk with a soft pencil. We had no classes together; I liked to think of him walking into the classroom I’d just left. I caught myself arguing with the teacher about the Paris commune or Keynesian economics as if trying to impress a silent listener. When I returned the day after, there would be a new line of lyrics where I had left off.

I heard him before I could see him, the barking echo of his shoes ringing out in the passageway. It was always a few minutes before 8.30.

I missed you, I said, but I have no idea who you are now.

Did you ever, he said, and likewise. I missed you.

I was probably queer all along, I said.

He laughed. You know the theory, right? About being drawn to what you are.

I know.

He reached into his bag and pulled out a book, held it out to me.

I believe this is yours.