The Separation of Meat and Milk

Judah Stein drove towards Lindsey’s apartment building on Pearl St., one block and a half beyond the cemetery. It was a small Christian one whose bodies tanned on sunny days under their tombstones and crosses set like beach umbrellas – and kept tanning just the same by night. As Judah drove past it that night he held his breath, intensifying the pressure of his toes on the accelerator. He had learned that habit as a child when the schoolbus passed the huge cemetery in Flushing, Queens and a boy told him severely, “You have to hold your breath,” showing him how with two pink bulbous cheeks. The implication being that if you didn’t hold your breath you’d lose it for good. Judah no longer pumped his cheeks but still never breathed. On the rare occasions when he caught himself at this he wondered, is it a Jewish or a general superstition? He would have to investigate. And if it turns out to be Jewish, he would have to stop. But always he waited until he cleared the last of the yard’s overhanging elms before exhaling.

            Lindsey’s building, typical for Middletown, Conn., is an old, skinny, three story brick box with no elevator. A teenage boy and his girlfriend, maybe sister, sat like hobbled pigeons on the front stoop smoking cigarettes. Like imps they stayed put as Judah walked by, forcing him to pass narrowly between them; the only tribute he received was the boy’s cough and a floating puff. Those two were there always, without fail, every time he visited Lindsey. They never even spoke to each other; as far as he could tell, they communicated through puffs of smoke like Indian chieftains. Judah squeezed between.

Inside the building Judah climbed the stairs slowly as he took in the peculiar animal scent. Forty minutes earlier she had texted him to come and here he was, coming just as he was in his jeans and steel grey fleece; Lindsey was not a girl he dressed up for. Because of strange nerves, because of his hyper-preparedness and boredom, he took out his phone and reread the message. It said: Come over please? Soon as you can, I need you – with no closing period, which signified a critical something waiting to be done. And shadowed beneath the glowing text: Received at 7:22 PM.

            It (the message, the summons) was written in what his roommates Mike and Brandon called Lindsey-speak, or “classic Lindsey-speak,” a terse yet theatrical, provocative style that rolled eyeballs (of others; hers were frigid blue despite her dark hair, which added to her drama). Both she and Judah were majoring in Biology at Wesleyan and had no interest in theatre or art, whereas Mike and Brandon acted in the play; Brandon also wrote messy poetry in a green spiral journal, which he sometimes left in classrooms for a day and imagined that people read. When each time he reclaimed it he felt the excitement of reunion, but also tiredness, sameness, repetition. Judah wondered how Brandon could leave his journal unguarded; if he were ever to write poetry, he would sure as hell hold onto it somewhere safe.

Here and there – stored on his phone, archived in his email, memories firing off in his medial temporal lobe, and even in an actual handwritten letter with a thousand pounds of weight hidden in a desk drawer – Judah still had the relics of another’s elaborate and beautiful communiqués. Comparing this trove with Lindsey-speak was a lesson in the evolution of language: Lindsey showing the primitive symbols and roots, while in Dana’s notes you had the modern pinnacle. Except, perversely, Lindsey was now the real and the present while Dana had become the speculative and the history. Judah paused before the peeling maroon door.

            Suddenly he was worried – was there still some chocolate in the crease by his lips, or on his cheek? He licked his lips and wiped with his sleeve. Maybe on his teeth? He took out the phone again, this time only to use the blank glossy screen as mirror to smile and preen into. The hallway by the door was not very bright but he satisfied himself that he was clean – clean enough for Lindsey. In the mirror-phone he acknowledged the stubborn, dark, brutal bags under his eyes.

            “You have some shmutz there,” Mr. Schreiber had told him only about an hour earlier outside the supermarket near campus, pointing with a long accusatory crooked finger. Judah was surprised and stared first at the finger, then at Mr. Schreiber; neither made much sense to him, so the latter went on to explain: “Chocolate on your cheek.” Judah began licking blindly, in radius and circumference, but he quickly felt uncomfortable – it was grotesque and awkward to wiggle his tongue like that while Mr. Schreiber watched and pointed. Judah wanted to ask, What are you doing here, but couldn’t summon the focus or nerve fast enough. He was embarrassed; on his cheek, under the alleged chocolate, he burned and blushed. He wanted to shake hands but in one there was a shopping bag of groceries, in the other a bright orange package of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, diminished by one Cup melted on his face.

            “Thanks,” he muttered.

One of Judah’s best friends from high school was Jake Schreiber, whose mom divorced his dad in the middle of 10^th grade. Everyone suspected some kind of philandering but Mr. Schreiber was soft-spoken, warm, and very religious. He didn’t seem especially lustful, but that judgment is as easy as detecting polyps on someone’s colon without doing the colonoscopy; with these things you have to go inside to really find out. Yet ever since the divorce Judah’s adolescent mind had imagined him as incredibly lustful, beyond all scale: the nice Mr. Schreiber became a man boiling like a soup, a cholent of testosterone, pheromones, inconvenient erections, indomitable sexual prowess. Judah had not seen him since 10^th grade, when he left New York for Hartford, where his children visited him for holidays and some weekends. It was amazing that Mr. Schreiber even recognized him.

“I’m here for my daughter – you remember Sarah? She’s thinking about coming to Wesleyan next year, so I told her I would swing by and check it out for her. I live in Hartford now.” Mr. Schreiber spoke softly and candidly. Judah was surprised to be treated almost as an adult, an equal, belying the heroic male persona he had invented for him; of course, divorce and exile are humbling.

“Oh, really? That’s great. I’d be more than happy to give her some information or answer any questions she has.” Jake’s little sister Sarah had always had an obvious crush on Judah, which greatly annoyed and embarrassed her brother. Judah wondered if, maybe, his presence was part of her motivation for wanting to attend Wesleyan.

“Great. I’ll have her call you – I think she has your number.” What this meant, if there was something hinted here, Judah could not guess. Mr. Schreiber’s voice was warm, sharing a texture with his full, greying hair. His nose rose and fell at the bridge; it was the same nose which looked fine on Jake but marred Sarah.

“Definitely.”

“So, how are you? You must be almost graduating. Do you still keep in touch with Jake?” Judah felt Mr. Schreiber’s eyes sweep over the top of his brown hair. There was a circular patch of hair which was hidden for years beneath a yarmulke; this patch, having been carved out since boyhood so methodically, never blended back with the rest of his hair; Judah still felt its separate dimensions and weight, like an overthrown king who continues to strain his neck as though balancing a crown. Mr. Schreiber’s glance at the naked tuft caused Judah, oddly, to shiver.

“Yeah, we do, but not so much. We really should be better at it.” After high school Jake went to learn at a yeshiva in Israel; he stayed there for two years, a streak of intense devotion, at the end of which he promptly disavowed religion and moved to Vietnam where he taught English. Jake had done that with everything – seizing and examining it too closely, too intimately, until it sickened him and he tried to hurl it out of the solar system: girls, old buddies, his parents, music, God, etc. Judah had not spoken to him in almost a year.

“Oh. Yup, he’s a good boy. Incredibly adventurous and–”

“Yeah, definitely.”

“We could all use more adventure in our lives, you know? We all could. It’s guys like Jake who realize it and have the guts to go ahead with it. I tell you what,” Mr. Schreiber said as he shook a finger, “he’s out seeing the world…”

Mr. Schreiber was obviously eager to speak to a familiar face from his remembered, wrecked life. Judah wondered at his comments: an adventure, like what – an affair? Like a divorce? He had the sense that Mr. Schreiber was looking to justify his own choices, his family, his manliness, his very existence. And he was brazenly using his son to do this. The whole act repulsed Judah; he smiled dumbly and looked down at the asphalt of the parking lot. The twilight air, cool and fast darkening into an insubstantial cloud, was perfumed with stale gasoline. Judah was desperate to leave.

“Do you want some?” Judah asked, offering his remaining Reese’s Cup. By this point he had nothing else to do or say. Mr. Schreiber held up his palms defensively and laughed. 

“No, I’m meat.”

Judah gaped at Mr. Schreiber, whose body blinked for a moment in passing yellow headlights, with all the grip of a simple, weighty mystery: You’re meat. Like how the captive chimpanzee stares at the scientist through the cage, asking: What are you? What do you mean? And then further: What do I mean? Plus or minus the fur, the chimp will consider, plus or minus the tail, we are both essentially meat –similar meat. So what is this cage? Judah looked at Mr. Schreiber and was confused, as if lost in the implications and sheer density of evolutionary theory. Mr. Schreiber sensed the confusion.

“I’m fleishig,” he translated into Yiddish, and Judah of course understood. He hadn’t forgotten from his days of observance that between eating meat and milk – you wait. Standard was three or six hours, unless you were of Dutch ancestry and waited just one: one measly hour, sixty minutes, a piece of cake. He knew the concept and the practice but had unexpectedly lost the English of it. For decades noted scientists have been trying to teach chimpanzees English with limited success.

“Oh.” Judah again had nothing to say. “How long do you wait?”

“Six hours. It’s forever, isn’t it? And at my age, you never know if you’ll even live that long.” Mr. Schreiber chuckled softly, almost to himself. “I might keel over and, kaput” – he rubbed his palms together twice as though, having dug his own grave, he now brushed off the dirt – “just waiting to be milchig.”

It occurred to Judah that he didn’t know how old Mr. Schreiber was; it was too hard to guess now that it was dark. The conversation was turning morbid, and was past dead anyway. Luckily Judah’s phone vibrated just then and he excused himself, wishing Mr. Schreiber and Sarah and Jake well, the best of luck. It was the text from Lindsey begging for help.

When he knocked on the door and Lindsey opened it, she had (like usual) already turned away and began walking down the long hall simply expecting that he follow. She didn’t smile or greet him – things were too desperate and grave for that. She strode ahead wearing a white tank top with one twisted shoulder-strap and a pair of bright green panties; her legs and ass were so skinny and they cut such edges in the air as they moved, they seemed like two golf clubs swinging themselves. Her shoulder blades winged out. Lindsey turned abruptly into her room and was already collapsed on her enormous high bed with a plush green cover, unmade, by the time Judah caught up.

“How are you doing?” he asked. Looking away from her, he surveyed the piles of books on her night-table and shelves, and the large wooden dresser with golden knobs. The wall on top of the dresser was a display of sticky-paper notes in her jagged handwriting which Judah had never bothered to read, though he was suddenly curious. They had been at this for over a month now, it was perhaps time to read those.

“My life is falling apart. I haven’t eaten a thing in two days.” Lindsey’s voice was muffled because she was face down – so she was starting to eat, Judah mused darkly, if only her pillow. He had seen her like this before and was not overwhelmed. Instead, he sat down on her bed and stroked her spine gently with his middle finger. All the vertebrae were countable, they responded to his touch; he studied her back like an animated textbook.

He told her things he had already said: how her lifestyle is incredibly unhealthy, how she should seek professional counseling, how she really must speak to her parents about this. She would respond bitterly, obstinately. A list of the biological effects of her eating disorder would follow, as though she were lecturing to a cavernous auditorium: my bone mass is decreasing rapidly; my body is consuming my muscles, especially my heart, so my cardiovascular system is forced to operate with far less power thereby starving my other organs of oxygenated blood; speaking of blood, my menstrual cycle has vanished entirely…

Lindsey was actually amazingly smart – when it came to biology she was “like a sponge,” as Judah’s mother would say of anyone with a good brain. He noticed this when she got an A on the midterm which he, by good fortune, narrowly passed. Over the course of three tutoring sessions she methodically caught him up to speed, while simultaneously seducing him with equal methodical talent; when the time came for her to lean forward offering herself, propping up her torso with a hand smartly planted at the angle of his thighs, he was already conquered: she had been steadily filling him with her knowledge, her smell, her voice, her chemicals, until he became the saturated sponge and all she had left to do was squeeze.

On this night, though, he was tired of her. The dialogue continued as if pre-recorded.

“Lindsey, please – you know this isn’t healthy. I’m worried about you.”

“You are?”

“Yes, of course. I care about you.”

“I didn’t know that. You never tell me.”

“How could you not know? Of course I care about you.”

He tried to convince her to see a professional but she refused. “Why not?” he asked. She shook her head: “I just can’t. You don’t understand.” When they had exhausted their useless conversation Judah decided they should simply watch a movie on her laptop in bed, so they scanned through Netflix and settled on a ghost story in Spanish called El Espinazo del Diablo – “The Devil’s Backbone.” The movie was not halfway done when she began nibbling at his neck, then bypassing his clothing with her hand to find his flesh. This meant the film would have to wait.

Sex with Lindsey was pretty boring, and abrasive (she was very bony), like performing on a chain link fence. Just like that, a memory popped into his empty, bored brain: the chain link fence surrounding the pool at summer camp, where as a child he would reach his arm through (his being the skinniest arm of the group, and sometimes he had a hockey stick attached for better reach) to fetch a stranded ball flown-over the locked fence or simply to touch the nice pool water, showing off his talent – his arm went inside the fence up to his shoulder socket. While stretching he would fold his lips in on themselves, pure concentration, and when he finally reached the pool his eyeballs would flash with pride; he, Judah Stein, was useful and needed, while the most athletic and charismatic boys, even Benjy Goldberg and Jake Schreiber, were helpless, not daring to hop the fence. What memories to be conjured up, at what times! While now, grown up, he thrusts through the fence with his outstretched skinny nether-arm seeking out the gratifying pool.

A few minutes of that and they once again divided up the space of the bed with one lying next to the other. She hardly needed space. They finished the movie, which turned out to be genuinely creepy.

Of Dana’s tangible love he remembered one thing most of all: how once, curled by his side, she kissed his shoulder, her pink lips, moist, handsome lips which blurred and ran over their edges like she was colored-in by a child – these lips formed the tiniest audible suction against his bicep then desuctioned. He watched her as she approached her target, with her eyes shut but scouting with her soft-sloped nose first brushing his skin. The movement lasted a second. Suction, desuction. It consumed all of him like a dry August brushfire. Judah never recovered.

When Dana finally told him it was over, that it “just [wasn’t] working” and she couldn’t “wait around” any longer for “it” to “work,” Judah didn’t quite understand – did she have to catch a train? Those were actually the words which occurred to him then, as she double-wrapped his hand with two of hers and looked smack into his eyes, but almost not looking, more like modeling for him as a final courtesy her sympathetic, swampy emerald eyes, eyes cut from a lime peel, allowing him to photograph her in his head one last time for nostalgia’s sake or masturbation or proof of her reality, because she must have known that she was already transforming into a memory, and must have known as well that being a memory she was far more dangerous to him, and still all Judah could think to say was, “What, do you have a train to catch or something?” His Mom would ask him that as a child whenever he whined or got antsy about doing a chore like he had somewhere to go. Luckily he didn’t say those words out loud because he was embarrassed to blurt out a phrase so infantile and irrelevant at such a moment, and anyway he was shaking too fiercely to speak, as if they were standing on a subway platform while the train hurtled by with a terrific clamor and rumble, snuffing out the conversation. You just had to wait for the train to pass before trying to speak again.

Turns out she was catching a flight. Less than a week after breaking up with him she was off to Egypt, taking a semester abroad at Cairo University to study Arabic and Political Theory. Judah of course knew that she was going; they had discussed and planned it and, though very nervous about transitioning to long-distance, he was even excited for her. But he hadn’t realized that she was making those plans without him, that she was arranging all along for him being out of the picture. When this dawned on him the thought hollowed out his stomach, replaced it with gigantic spleen. Beforehand he had invented a kind of romantic notion, imagining himself as attached to Cairo through Dana, almost as though she was his beautiful emissary or ambassador to that country which made him a sort of political personage, a member of the ruling class. And then she cut him off and went on her own – it was like the popular revolution which had drawn her there in the first place: he felt overthrown and outcast and, most of all, betrayed, almost by the Egyptian people themselves in all their protesting masses. He should have known better, what a fool, trusting women and Arabs.

   

Judah, in his unclothed furry chimp-body, got up from Lindsey’s bed and began to pace around the room: from bed to dresser to closet to mirror-in-closet and back. He picked up his jeans from the floor where Lindsey had tossed them into an almost perfect pretzel shape. He was preparing to leave; with Lindsey, unlike with Mr. Schreiber, you could just go, without pretexts. Meanwhile she produced from somewhere, he didn’t notice where, an off-white 9½” envelope. She held it out to him like a boarding pass.

“I need a favor from you. Can you drive to Kristen’s and give this to her? Please?”

“Now?” His jeans and underwear were stuck at his knees, which seemed like a much more urgent problem.

“Yes. Now,” she said tersely.

“Can’t you give it to her tomorrow?” Kristen lived in the dorms; it made sense to deliver it tomorrow when they would all be in school anyway. But Judah saw she was insistent, and the drive wasn’t far. He took it from her and examined it; she had sealed it and written on the back in green, Kristen: FYEO. Judah, weirdly, didn’t have the slightest curiosity about its contents. He put it in his pocket unfolded so it stuck out.

“Tell her I’ll be there soon,” he said. And for the first time that evening, even through the lovemaking, Lindsey smiled.

As he left her building he almost didn’t notice the teenage couple on the stoop; instead of forcing his narrow passage they had split apart so wide. He thought that perhaps he had finally earned their respect, or they thought he was someone else, or they somehow sensed the importance of his letter. Then he heard soft sobs coming from the girl, who was wearing a dark sweatshirt and rubbing the toes of her sneakers against the concrete. As he strode between them he glanced at her face: small nose; wide, full lips; her forehead and chin wrinkled with her crying. The boy kept on smoking like nothing had happened. Whatever trouble or fight had occurred, it hadn’t hoisted either of them from the stoop. Judah wondered if the two edges of this concrete stoop, for these kids who settled it and knew all its inches and nothing else, could feel like worlds on opposite points of the solar system. Could it feel as far off as Cairo?

Judah often imagined Dana’s trip, but he really had almost no actual information to work with since they stopped speaking. The result was that, entirely by accident, unconsciously, he invented for her two experiences which were completely different from each other. Irreconcilable stories. In one line of imagination she was in university and roomed with an English girl, Mary, whose father was Egyptian so she understood Arabic pretty well, and a German guy named, what else, Dirk, who was handsome and steadfast but not intelligent, and frequently hit on Dana with mixed results. She also befriended an elderly Egyptian woman from the suk, Fatima, who treated her almost as a daughter.

In the other line, Dana had taken a day trip alone to Sharm el-Sheikh but left her bag on the bus – losing her wallet, passport, visa. Not wanting to call and terrify her parents, she decided to beg for the assistance of strangers, some of whom asked for sexual favors. Judah recognized the silly pornographic logic of this line of imagination, but found himself developing it anyway; since the breakup (even after starting with Lindsey) he had sunk into Internet sex clips, in up to his nostrils, which must have influenced his thinking. Anyhow, he cycled automatically between these two lines, now one and now the other, not fully aware they had totally split.

Kristen was a friend of Lindsey’s, medium height, a bit overweight. Judah had met her only twice, each time at a large party which he was leaving just as she arrived. He didn’t remember a thing of what they said to each other. But he knew that she and Lindsey had a somewhat volatile relationship, which made sense to him knowing Lindsey. He would hear of her in Lindsey-speak: “Kristen is such a perfect balance to my personality”; “I really enjoy being near her, but I never feel I can trust her”; “She is too afraid to be vulnerable and let herself need me.” Judah hardly knew what to say to this, so he would ask shallow questions which poked at a word, such as: “What do you mean by need?”

The Wesleyan campus was unusually dark; somewhere bulbs must have burned out. Judah parked in the half-empty lot where a guard dozed or simply spaced out in a booth. He walked quickly towards the four dorms over the large central lawn. The grass was wet: had it rained? Despite the darkness, three guys were playing football using some kind of rotating quarterback system, shirtless. It was chilly but they were sweating up and didn’t seem to mind. Maybe the cold was the whole point.

Past the athletes Judah walked by the campus bagel store, which had the narrowest seating area you’ve ever seen; the tables (for two only) were set up in a long hallway, or tunnel, which forced anyone going to the back to turn sideways and sidle along, squeezing through while brushing the sitters with either their bellies or asses. Judah and Dana ate there often. In fact, she had eaten her first bagel ever there, a fact which completely floored Judah. “You mean you’ve never had a bagel?!” he prodded. She wrinkled her forehead and leaned in hotly: “What, so now you’ve taken my bagel virginity – are you happy?” He replied that he doubted her Jewishness. And, in truth, he almost did.

Inside her dorm building, called Davidson, a group of male students watched hockey on a big lounge TV. They wore mostly shorts and sweatpants and ate cafeteria food everywhere, making a mess out of a mess. “Ooooo!” A huge, coordinated sigh filled the room, either because a shot had barely missed or someone had suffered a concussion. In any case it roused the security guard and he shouted, in a peculiar mumbled shout, “Hey! Y’got ah-dee?” The guard was bald and in his mid-forties; he looked run down, exhausted, except for his astonishing red lips which he licked every few seconds as a tic. There was no name where it should have been on his nametag, just empty silver. Judah took out his wallet and flashed the guard his student ID. The guard responded by licking his lips, as though that was a kind of stamp on his passport clearing him through. He became annoyed when Judah didn’t comprehend and move on: “A’right, g’on!” he mumble-shouted. Judah took the elevator to the sixth floor.

It was brutally hot out and Sharm el-Sheikh is a resort town, so Dana wore a yellow tank-top and shorts. She just wanted to know when the next bus back to Cairo was, and hoped that she could beg or borrow enough for the fare. She figured her blonde hair would be an asset since that usually earned her favors, but really it was her shoulders, thin and tanned into golden minarets: those bare marvels had the power to reorient the Nile’s flow, not to mention the jumping frogs in every pair of trousers. First, second, or third born – she struck them down just the same. She figured bus change would be rather simple. “A piece of cake,” she thought.

Across the street she spotted a lone guard in a booth who looked pretty bored, propping up his large gun on his forearms while trying to readjust his dirty beige beret. He snapped to attention when he noticed her approaching. She asked, very slowly, “Hi. Do. You. Know. When. The. Next. Bus. To. Cairo. Is?” making a gesture for bus that more closely resembled a fish.

“Bus to Cairo,” he repeated.

“Yes. The next bus.” She stepped inside his booth to get some shade and to reduce the glare, so she could see him better; nonetheless, his black mustache glittered from the midday sun. The booth was really tiny, and the guard fat. He may or may not have understood, or maybe it was a protocol or ingrained habit to ask: “Visa? Show me visa.”

“I lost it. That’s why I need the bus to get back to Cairo. I’m studying at Cairo University, I’m American and I lost my stuff, my documents. I. Lost. It.” Dana was worried, but enjoyed the guard’s plain confusion. It gave her a feeling of control, that he was in a sense more lost than she. He seemed not to understand a word.

Kristen opened the door wearing a long black dress, like she had just been to a formal affair. Maybe she had, but it was strange to Judah regardless. Her dorm was small and opened directly into a drab, dirty kitchenette lit by a fluorescent white bulb. Kristen’s hair was unbelievably frizzy, owing to the rain he had missed.

“Hi! Lindsey told me you were coming to give me something. Would you like a drink?” She smiled at him. He had forgotten about the letter, but as soon as she brought it up it began to weigh like lead and poked out of his pocket uncomfortably. Something about its shape or existence caused his thigh to stiffen.

“No thanks,” he said, shaking his head while pulling out the envelope. It had wedged itself into his jeans and didn’t slide out smoothly. “Here, this is for you.”

“Thanks.” She took it but hardly glanced at it, just flipped it over and over in her hands, almost automatically. Judah watched it flip and no longer knew what to say.

“So how are you doing?” was what he hit upon.

            “I’m doing great! I have this really big anthro paper due soon and I’m so behind on the work. Everyone else has been doing all this research for weeks and I barely have a topic! I mean, I think I have a topic but I’m not even close to a thesis, so I need to do a ton of reading before I can even start. Whatever. I always do that, leave things till the very last minute. Everyone makes fun of me for it. A few years ago I signed up to run a marathon and raise a lot of money for breast cancer awareness, but I totally delayed and procrastinated until the last second, obviously…

“Breast!” said the guard abruptly, pointing at her chest. “Show me!” Having never before been asked to flash only one breast, she was amused. With one hand she clasped the right side of her yellow shirt and bra and tugged downward, exposing for the guard’s chocolate eyes her pale luminescent cup; the rest of her skin had tanned well but, God, she hadn’t let her breasts out in a while. It seemed cut from dough. She watched her nipple make furtive, suspicious eye-contact with the guard, as though sizing up him and his uniform; she guessed it was especially wary of his mustache. The man was obviously shocked that his amateur ploy had worked so well and was too taken with disbelief to consider his next move: he froze and stupidly let his gun swing around by its strap. Seizing her moment of dominance, Dana sent one hand to the crotch of his standard issue military pants and took hold of what was formerly his flesh, now a Kalashnikov, pumping mercilessly. The guard bit on his mustache and softly blessed his good luck.

“Basically, in the end I had to go literally the morning of the marathon and knock on the doors of everyone on my block begging them to sponsor me. At 7 AM, and I was wearing my running shorts. It was so embarrassing. This was in Boston, by the way, where I’m from.”

“Oh,” Judah said. “Well, good luck with the paper; I’m sure it will come together fine.” And then, before she could respond, “Mind if I use your bathroom?”

“No problem, right over there.”

Judah came out of the bathroom and found Kristen by the table holding the letter, the envelope lying torn and mangled. She looked at him and said, “I don’t even know what to say. I’m speechless.” This wasn’t quite true because she went on.

“I’ve never, ever said anything like this to her at all. I swear, I really haven’t. And I don’t even feel that way anyway. I have no idea where this came from. Like, what is she talking about? Does she think I’m some psycho bitch trying to steal people’s boyfriends? Ha, I just really don’t get it. It’s so weird, maybe someone said something to her? Do you have any clue where she got this from?”

Judah took this as a kind of invitation and took the paper from her hands. He scanned the letter, composed in Lindsey’s jagged hand with a gushing green fountain pen.

I won’t let Judah come between us. I care about you too much for that. If you want him so badly, if the jealousy absolutely consumes you, then here: I give him to you. Take him for tonight, take him forever: I don’t care. Really. Just come back to me and make things the way they were. That’s the only thing I care about. I need you, love. I really do. My life is a mess and I need your kindness, your truth, your love, your wisdom, your beauty, your

There were at least eight or nine more virtues of Kristen’s which Lindsey desperately needed, but Judah couldn’t finish. He looked at Kristen, first at her face then her chest and thick, plump curved body, and imagined her wearing fitted running shorts beneath her black dress which was long enough to sweep the floor.

            In Fatima’s small, circular kitchen several pitas were about to leave the oven; she was busy preparing the zaatar dip on a plate. Dana and Mary sat on the worn couch in the salon, which was draped with gold embroideries and heavy dark curtains on the walls, sipping Arabic coffee. Soon Fatima entered the salon with the trey of fresh pitas, accompanied by the baker’s aroma. The two girls ate exuberantly. “My God! This is so good, we have to make this! What is your recipe?” Mary exclaimed. And Fatima spoke in bursts of Arabic and began to rub her hands in a large oval in the air, apparently showing how to prepare the dough.

            After a few minutes Dana said to her, in slow English, “We are going to Tahrir Square today. Tahrir. Square. The protests.” Dana pantomimed waving a poster with an invisible slogan. “You know?” It was always difficult to tell when Fatima understood, she would nod whether she did or didn’t. Dana looked at Mary questioningly.

            “Tahrir? No no no,” Fatima said decisively. “No no no. You no go Tahrir.” She was staging a mini protest of her own, and this was her chant. “No no no.”

            “Why not?”

            In response Fatima simply pointed at Dana and Mary, both of whom were wearing sleeveless solid colored tops and shorts; it was, after all, hot. Dana didn’t get it, but Mary understood.

            “She’s saying we’re dressed too revealingly,” explained Mary in her shrill Mancunian accent.

            “Oh,” said Dana. This was, in fact, the furthest thing from her mind.

            “I fix, I fix. Wait,” Fatima said and she rushed up in a swoosh of dark robe to her bedroom. In a few seconds she returned with two, full length, actual black hijabs. Mary and Dana gasped at each other in near shock; Dana smiled hugely.

            “Alright then. These are lovely. Thank you very much,” she said. And she grabbed her new, heavy hijab.

Downstairs in the lobby the hockey-watching crowd swelled. It must have doubled or tripled just while he had been speaking to Kristen; the game was close and nearly over, had turned exciting. Everyone stood and a few jumped. They were all boys except for a handful of baffled girlfriends, ignored by their boyfriends. With the intelligent movement of the puck, with the slapping sticks, the boys jeered and cursed, celebrated, pounded high fives to whoever was around. “Yeah!” “Oh, come on! What was that?!” One boy was a flood of indignant, devastating criticism.

Judah didn’t watch hockey much, he found the plays difficult to follow. And you had to wait so long for a goal, he’d get bored. But now he was taken with the spectacle, the dancing on the screen and in the lobby, and stayed to watch. He didn’t recognize anyone else there, and no one seemed to recognize him; he blended into the student mass of activity, tense like bottled pressure. The Bruins were playing somebody: somebody was up a goal.

The puck transfixed Judah, sliding in its blackness across the clean ice sheet without leaving a trail. The players passed it from stick to stick; it had a message, it was a message, which everyone needed to read. But it smartly slid away, rounded the boards, deflected off a knee, squirmed through the narrow opening between two skates. The players looked clumsy, hapless. Judah remembered how he and Dana had been at an engagement party and he poured soda; he took the tongs to fish for ice cubes but kept coming up empty. He swiped seven, eight, more than a dozen times, but nothing – the ice was too slippery, he too maladroit. It was ridiculous. Dana grabbed the tongs from him and got the cubes effortlessly, like they were magnetic or bewitched. She snarled at him and flatly said, “It’s OK babe, you have other talents.”

A sudden, violent cheer broke out in the room, though Judah had missed the action somehow. One section of boys in the center jumped up like aggravated chimpanzees; one of them accidentally flipped an enormous trey of French fries, scattering the fries, painting the surrounding boys red with ketchup dots. Just like that, he jumped up in celebration and was upset before even hitting the ground. Judah left to his car without seeing who won.

            Nobody in the immense crowd of humanity at Tahrir Square seemed to notice the addition of two more women in hijabs. Which is to say, no one suspected. All around them people swayed and pumped fists, wailing, chanting, not in unison but with unified fury. Dana and Mary held hands to make sure they didn’t lose each other. They were trying to find Dirk, who was supposed to be there somewhere. Mary was texting him continually but the directions were vague, the confusion overpowering. A six foot blond German could not only get lost in a crowd like that, he could be consumed by it.

            The people were protesting the continued power of the Military Supreme Council and its chairman, the Field Marshal, who had taken over in the wake of Mubarak’s fall. They demanded that elections be pushed up. They vigorously waved great placards, some with pictures equating the Field Marshal to Mubarak, some equating him to Obama or Netanyahu, some not equating but depicting him in a submissive, puppylike stance towards them – and some of these submissive-stance posters were lewd. An endless supply of slogans raged from an endless number of bullhorns. “GET OUT GET OUT ELECTIONS NOW!” And: “FREEDOM DOES NOT WAIT!” In addition, they were protesting the army’s handling of the previous week’s protest, in which there was considerable violence. The people were practiced at protests, one simply led into the next.

            The army, for its part, set up an enormous barrier or gulf in the center of the square, essentially dividing the crowd into two segments, thereby reducing the people’s overall momentum and enabling easier access for the soldiers to any particular point. But it also channeled the crowd’s rage inward to a definite point. The bisected crowd formed, due to the arc shape of the military barrier, what looked like two enormous, quivering lips.

            Mary said that Dirk texted her that he was on the south side of the square, which was the other lip, or what they thought was the other lip. They couldn’t be sure where they were, exactly. With incredible difficulty and slowness they made their way to the very center, at the edge of the military barrier. Soldiers in full riot gear tangled with protesters, occasionally dragging one or two into a truck for arrest. Dana and Mary had almost no space to breathe, and they sweated wildly under their hijabs. They tried to look for Dirk but were being tossed around by the volatility of the restless mass, all the while holding hands so as not so separate. Lots of protesters were linking arms too, but this was for symbolic purposes, yet it also created a kind of domino effect when one screamer inevitably lost his balance.

            At various points along the central barrier, now and again, a group of protesters was able to overwhelm the soldiers and cross to the other side. There was no real purpose in doing this, but they all cheered it as a critical victory. At these points the two monstrous lips actually kissed, briefly.

            The two girls were being shoved around by no one in particular, falling forward then falling backward, always falling over their hijabs. The angry in their tens of thousands had come out that day, and they swayed and rocked their anger as though nursing a baby. Nothing stood still. The two great lips shook and compressed, at times kissing and at times retreating. The girls, indeed the whole crowd, were compelled forward then backward, in then out, as if by the force of a huge, repetitive suction cup. Suction, desuction.

            And then, by sheer luck, Dana spotted Dirk’s blond hair elevated above the crowd on the southern lip near the barrier. Or at least what she thought was Dirk’s blond hair. They tried to shout but everyone else was doing that already, and better. And besides, there was no way to get across except at one of the kissing points, and that was madness.

            Judah drove towards his apartment trying to block the letter from his mind, failing to do so. He hadn’t called or texted Lindsey and didn’t think he would, in fact, unless he could think of something especially magnificent to say to her. He doubted it, and preferred to simply excise her from his life like a tumor – which, apparently, was fine with her as well. The one problem, though, is that Dana would soon come back from Egypt and he would still be single. He’d wanted to avoid that scenario, but there didn’t seem any way out now. Barring divine action.

            Mindlessly, he turned the corner onto Main St. and drove past the two college bars. He glanced at the front looking for people he knew – maybe Mike and Brandon were out. But there, there was Mr. Schreiber! It was him, right down to the wavy nose! Except he looked bareheaded – but you couldn’t say for sure just passing by in the dark. And Judah thought, “What the hell?”

            Then he recalled that heroic figure, that sexual juggernaut who no woman denied, no pair of legs shut out, which he had always imagined Mr. Schreiber to be. “Ha!” he thought. “So there he is!” The image of Mr. Schreiber buying a drink for a college girl amused him, but was also sickening and sad. He was divorced so there was pain at play here, and loneliness. He had heard how divorced men in every city haunt the streets looking for sex, like zoo animals let out of their cages and lost. Was this now Mr. Schreiber, up late outside a college bar? Why else be here, and now?

            Judah looked at the clock on his dashboard. A quarter to one. And so he had a strange, straight-forward thought: was Mr. Schreiber just waiting up to eat dairy? It was, after all, not yet six hours, so he was still meat. The more Judah thought the less he could rule out the possibly that, in fact, here he was, wandering the streets simply waiting to stop being meat. And anyway, Mr. Schreiber didn’t have a train to catch.

            Judah kept driving as he felt the rising urge to say, not knowing why or to whom, precisely, “I need your help.”