1. Yosef, Charlie, Isabel, and Mira

The room is a forest of long shadows and on the kitchen table a champagne bottle is standing on ice in a battered Tupperware container – like a golden jewel in a plastic crown. Yosef – his friends call him Yosi – can’t name the emotions running through him at the sight of it, except to say that he feels like he had sat in an anthill and is now crawling and itching all over.

When Yosi and his friends first moved in together two years ago in the summer after their sophomore year they had pitched in to purchase this expensive bottle and agreed to drink it together the night before graduation. Well, tonight is that night. Tomorrow at noon this life will be over. Charlie, always in a hurry to forget the past, will leave right after the ceremony. He’ll be going on vacation with his family. Isabel, regrettably, will move back in with her mother shortly after. A week from now Yosi will be taking Mira to the airport – she will be starting a Fulbright Scholarship in Europe. Yosi wishes he didn’t have to stay here alone with her for three days. Alone with Mira, like a pretend couple. Yosi dimly knows that it would have been better for him if the lease on his New York apartment started sooner, like tomorrow. Then he wouldn’t have to see his friends leaving him one by one. But the lease starts in three weeks, as does his new job… “They are not disappearing! They are not disappearing!” Yosi reminds himself. “I can see then again soon. I can see them again soon.” To no avail. It is a family Yosi is after, and as a cohabiting group, a family unit, they are about to dissolve forever. As Yosi waits for his friends to gather he wills his mind to conjure up their essence, the aftertaste they would leave in the mouth if they were each a different sort of wine.

Charlie. Charlie would taste very sweet. Giddy. Strong. Not very refined. Best paired with bar food. Great for a fun party. No aftertaste at all. Charlie never ceased to amaze his friends with his ability to live exclusively in the present. He was born on a different continent and had spoken a different language once, when he was little. Once he had had another life. But his family, it seems, had invested everything they had into erasing whatever struggles came before so that their children would have the best chance at having a charmed life. They seemed more American than America itself.  Yosi, who loved books, seemed to know more about Charlie’s ancestral past than Charlie did himself. Once Yosi had mentioned something about severe political unrest in Charlie’s birth country around the time his grandparents were young. He said that Charlie’s grandparents must have suffered. Charlie had looked at him with eyes like reflective ponds and smiled absently. “I guess so,” he had said dismissively, and Yosi never raised the topic again.

Isabel. Issy. Very dry. Too dry. Very strong aftertaste. The sort of aftertaste that slightly ruins the taste of any food that comes after it. Issy was born in a really small town where everyone was either drunk or high much of the time. Her own mother, who specialized in giving trashy ladies “chic New York haircuts,” was often high, even at work. There was no father. Despite everyone’s best efforts to keep her tethered, Issy managed to become the first person in years to escape the abject desperation that was her town. You’d think she’d be really happy. And she was, for a moment. Like a climber who had summited Mount Everest, the sum of all desires, she stood on the peak victorious on her first day of college. But where should she go now, no oxygen left in her lungs and everywhere she looked the frozen bodies of those who were not as lucky as she? Survivor guilt set in like a crushing headache and sucked the vitality right out of her. She squashed one opportunity after another with such amazing dexterity that her friends had to be a little awestruck, even as they raged. How could she keep doing this? A paper she had finished on time “accidentally” didn’t get submitted. An internship she was perfect for – that her professor had wanted her to get – went to the person who didn’t sleep through the interview. She was like a person who manages to get rained on out of a completely blue, cloudless sky. Oh, they loved her. They did try to help her. But it was feeling more and more as though there was a perimeter of despair around her and lately they have been sort of leaving her be.

Mira. Because he loves her, thinking of her as a wine is difficult. He is tempted to just imagine the best taste in the world and assign it to her. But still he tries. Mira. Complex. Confusing. Subtle. Lots of undertones. Exacting. The sort of wine that leaves you feeling guilty that you were incapable of appreciating it more.  Mira, the shrewdest of pawns. Unwavering, straight-shooting, endowed with as much energy as necessary. Others may meander their way across a chessboard, sacrifice themselves in the heat of the moment or for the greater good, but not Mira. Mira was always going to cross the board in one clean, straight pass and become a queen. Mira carries a spotless, gleaming résumé around like s shield. Mira is never late. But most of all, Mira never allows anything, or anyone, to get in the way of her dazzling climb to the top.

If anyone ever wondered how Mira came to be this way their curiosity was quenched as soon as they met her family. Her entire predictably high-achieving clan was a marvel to behold. No one with anything less than a professional degree. No one with anything less than a Lexus. No one with anything less than two pieces of real estate. Living like this seems like the simple choice for them. Not easy, but simple. Spend a day in their company and doing anything else starts to look almost absurd.  Yosi is not sure whether to call what Mira has ambition. Ambition, as he imagines it, is when you don’t have something but fiercely want it.  Mira seems to be feverishly fighting for what she already has. Yosi is confused by this, but there is one thing he knows for absolute certain: He is spellbound by Mira. Completely and stupidly blinded.  

Well, that leaves Yosi himself. How funny to think of oneself in this way. Yosi smiles as he tries to imagine what he would taste like. “I guess,” he realizes, “that depends on whom you ask. I think I might get a better review from others than from myself.” White wine. Fresh and sharp. Sparkly. Goes well with a meal out of doors and melancholy music.

Yosi was born in a refugee camp where he lived with his parents and five older siblings until he was five years old. Having been so young, he has no solid memory of his time there, but he does remember that he was loved. Kissed. Cried over when he was hungry. Carried in big strong arms with endless devotion. He heard later that at five years old he was skin and bones and had hungry eyes wreathed with the dark circles of deprivation.  His future was looking bleak. Then it turned out that he had a distant relative, an uncle, who had come to America years before the war and was doing well there. Yosi remembers having been confused. He remembers that he was never sure how the uncle found them, how he processed the adoption, or whether he was ever in a position to do anything more for the rest of Yosi’s family. All Yosi knows is that he was adopted by his uncle and left the camp and the rest of his family behind.

In the camp Yosi had never learned to read or write. He didn’t know any English. His uncle spoke to him in his native language, and in the first few years of Yosi’s life in America his uncle pretended to write letters to his parents on Yosi’s behalf and would sit Yosi down to read letters he got from them in reply.

When Yosi was eight, while sitting in class one day, it finally dawned on him that technology had penetrated the farthest reaches of the world and that even people in refugee camps were liable to have access to cellphones – he had seen this on TV. The idea that he could ever see his family, or even just hear their voices, had never crossed Yosi’s mind before, and on that day he flew home like a sparrow. His buoyancy was short-lived. His uncle looked at him darkly and sighed a sigh of defeat. He told him that about a year after Yosi had come to America the camp where his family lived had been decimated by an air raid and a fire. Many hundreds of people perished. As the camp was poorly run, none now knew who lived and who died, or what had happened to those who lived. His family was likely dead and, if any of them had survived, they could be anywhere. 

Yosi knew that his uncle had likely saved his life by adopting him. He knew that he had been trying to protect him by not telling him the truth about his family. He knew that, within the scope of his solitary, slightly joyless nature, his uncle had done everything for him that he possible could: good education, nice clothes, trips, vacations, tutors. And yet, the absolute horror of that conversation – the rage, the despair, the terrible pain – exploded and settled like radioactive dust on his uncle and everything that came with him or from him. Yosi was never able to forgive him for what had happened to his family, even though he knew that this grudge was madness. The most terrible thought, the one he knew he would never be able to voice even if a day came when he was able talk to his uncle about everything else, was that the youngest of his older brothers was very close to him in age. Couldn’t his uncle have adopted him also?

Yosi came to love his uncle eventually, but it was a very muted, respectful, and reserved kind of love. Even though he was very little when he last was with his family, he knew that the love he had had for his parents was different. It was abundant, unchecked, unrestrained. It was a kind of love he longed for and also deeply feared. Without knowing it, he was grateful to Mira

that she protected him from that kind of love. Mira, constantly consumed with climbing and always busy weeding out any influence that could slow her down, passed any love offered her through a sieve of careful scrutiny, and in so doing tamed and subdued it. People assuage their survivor guilt as best they can. Issy did it by denying herself success and Yosi by denying himself love. Issy found a dead-end job and Yosi found Mira.

2. Convergence

            Yosi lovingly straightens the couch cushions, nervously runs his fingers along the edge of the table, walks back and forth from the living room to his bedroom and back, mentally looking through each of his friend’s closed bedroom doors. He is fidgety and hopes that his friends might start arriving soon. Waiting freaks him out.

            Isabel comes first. She possesses the weary look of someone who had done something very boring for too long. Her lovely, long blond hair appears slightly oily and her eyes are dull. She gives Yosi a hug and when she looks at him, her dullness lifts and is replaced with a perfect mirroring of his sadness.  They sit side by side on the couch and silently contemplate what is to come.

            Mira comes next. She arrives exactly when she said she would and time quickens with her arrival. Her friends joke that Mira can serve as a walking calendar notification – when she walks into a room people are suddenly reminded to check their calendars. She looks preppy. She had just been to a last-minute meeting with some professor about some award.

            Charlie is the last to arrive and with him blows in the perpetual air of summer camp. Yosi can hear him in the street. He is yelling something to his brothers. Yosi looks out the window and just catches the tail end of a lewd gesture that Charlie had directed toward a moving car. A teenager’s shaggy mane, unmistakably belonging to one of Charlie’s brothers, can be seen sticking out of the car’s window. The boy in the car had obviously repaid Charlie in kind and both were laughing.

3. Toast to the future

“Let’s drink a toast to five years from now,” says Mira. “Let’s each say where we’ll be then. I graduated from Yale Law and I’m clerking for a circuit court judge.” She drinks a big gulp out of her glass.

“Cheers to Yale Law!” say the others and drink.

Yosi can’t help himself: “Do you have a boyfriend five years from now?” He knows he should stop, but he can’t help himself. “Do you think you’ll have a family in ten years?”

The others look down and Mira frowns. “Would you have asked a guy that? If a guy said he wants to go to Yale Law, would you have asked him about a family? And anyway, we are talking about five years, not ten!”

The others are relieved that she seems to be letting it go, and Issy picks up the game quickly, before more can happen between Yosi and Mira. “In five years…”

She pauses. She had jumped in just to keep the peace, but she actually can’t see herself in five years. Can’t see anything good, anyway. Her three friends don plastic smiles meant to hide that they are annoyed. It’s no use. She can almost see the scorn slowly spreading out like an oil spill, reaching for her.

“In five years I am living in my own apartment… I have a job… maybe I’m…engaged. Yes…” She drinks a small sip of her champagne.

“Cheers to Issy!” say the others and drink without enthusiasm. How impressive, they think. Issy has a job. She has SOME job. Probably engaged to an underachiever.

            “Who’s next, boys?” asks Mira.

            Yosi has something to say and he is sweating because the whole evening so far has been so superficial and he doesn’t want it to end this way between them. He knows that if he is to say what he wants to say he should go now, quickly, before he loses his resolve, and definitely before Charlie, the resident clown, has a chance to speak.

             “In five years, it is possible to travel back to where the camp had been. I go look for my family. In five years, I know what had happened to them, and… I find…” He wants to say he finds them all, but knows immediately that this hope is dead, that even in the form of a wish he can’t utter such a thing. “I find one… I find someone.” Then he adds quickly: “And I’m not scared anymore…”

Everyone knows what he means. Yosi lives with a sense of impending doom. One time Charlie didn’t get back from a trip when he was supposed to and the others thought nothing of it, but Yosi became convinced that there had been a car accident. Tears are streaming down Yosi’s cheeks and Issy puts an arm around him. Mira looks down.

“Oh, that’s great, man!” says Charlie. “Totally! You’ll find them! That’s awesome! Cheers to Yosi and his family!”

Yosi can feel Charlie’s love through his amazing cluelessness and smiles despite himself. “To my family!” he says quietly and drinks.

Charlie is in a hurry now, like Issy had been before. He really doesn’t do well with emotions. He is not that sort of guy. “Five years from now I’ve made a shitload of money and I’m a fucking millionaire and I’ve retired to the Caribbean and I’m on the beach with a hot chick!” he says quickly. Yup! That sounds about right.

 “To Charlie being a retired millionaire on the Caribbean!” says Mira, and they all finish their glasses.

4.  Toast to the Past

            Issy doesn’t shine in the future the way she had shone in the past, so it makes sense that the next toast comes from her. “Let’s drink to our favorite memory from the past four years,” she proposes.

            But she instantly regrets that, too. Her favorite memory is her first day on campus. It was all a slow descent from then on. Her friends look at her expectantly, but she remains silent.

            Yosi helps her out. “It was that day – do you remember? – in the summer when we all went out for drinks and decided to rent a place together. That was a great day!”

            Issy smiles and raises her glass. “How funny! I was gonna say the same thing! To us!” She has cheated, but they let it slide and drink.

            “The day I found out I won the McPhearson Prize!” says Mira, and they drink again.

            Charlie is stumped. “I don’t know man… It was all good… We had a good time….”

            “Oh, come on, Charlie! No way!” says Mira. “There must be one thing that stands out to you.”

            Charlie looks uncomfortably this way and that, as though hoping to find inspiration. Suddenly he does something they didn’t expect. He says softly and seriously: “Do you remember that girl, Emily? The one I dated in sophomore year? We went to the beach together once. At night. She played the guitar for me… To that night!”

            They waited all this time to see this side of Charlie. Just for one second. Then the moment passes like a mirage. “But sex on the beach is way overrated, man! I had sand up my ass for a week after that!”

            Everyone laughs as they drink, but there is a sigh behind their laughter.

5. The Dreams

Yosi wakes up that night from a tortured dream. In his dream he is walking through wet blades of grass in a vast field in twilight. The blades are churning in an ever rising wind. He is either not dressed or his clothes are completely permeable. He can feel the wet blades like rain on his legs and arms. He sees Mira standing in the distance. Not moving. Only he is moving toward her. He works hard to push through the grass, but the wiry blades resist him. When he is within arm’s reach from Mira he stops. He knows it is her, but the dream obscures her features. She is only a shape, like a mirage. “I love you, Mira!” he says clearly, loudly, wholeheartedly. But no sooner are these words uttered then the wind blows her away. He can see her disappearing backward into a grey nothingness, and he reaches out to her and screams her name, then wakes up. He knows now what this dream means. He drank to the past and to the future, but much has been given up in order that he may have the future that now awaits him. Still, always, in the shadow of his mind there is a belief that if he loves again he will lose again.

Yosi was always a bad sleeper and he knows that his three friends, unlike him, have probably long since sunk into a deep sleep without dreams. But he imagines the dreams they might have had.

Here is Charlie, whose family erased their past in order that Charlie and his brothers may have a bright, cloudless future. Charlie is standing in front of a heavy, intricately wrought iron gate. He doesn’t know what’s on the other side of that gate, only that it is vitally important to pass through it. The gate is guarded by an armed knight.

            “Who goes here?” asks the knight.

            “I’m Charlie.”

            “Where have you come from?”

            “I don’t know”.

            “What brings you here?”

            “I don’t know.”

            “Then, you shall not pass!”

            “Oh, come on, man! Please?… What’s on the other side?” says Charlie. His tone

becomes hollow and a little whiney.

“The future. The future implies a past. You don’t have a past. You shall not pass.”

Charlie remains standing there, by the gate. Other people pass him by and are let through. They can answer the guard’s questions, apparently. Charlie can see a brilliant sky on the other side of the gate. On his side it is sunny too, but he can see clouds gathering far, far away – just on the edge of the horizon. He feels strangely heavy, which is unlike him. He tries to make a joke, but it suddenly feels inappropriate. Yosi shudders as he realizes that when its starts raining over Charlie, maybe soon, maybe not so soon, – but when it starts raining it will go on raining for a long time.

Here is Isabel, whose mother feels slighted whenever Isabel uses long words. She is a camp counselor and the kids are playing tug of war. Only there is no rope. Isabel offers them her own hands. The kids form two evenly matched teams on either side of her. Then Yosi realizes that these are not children playing. On Issy’s right are her mother, her siblings, her whole town. On her left are all their friends, their professors, even Yosi himself is playing. There she is in the middle, but instead of stretching as they pull, she just keeps getting thinner and thinner. She is so thin that she ripples in the wind like a ghost. A ghost that has no place anymore in her old life and no pleasure in her new one.

Finally, he sees Mira. Her dream is very simple. Mira is sitting under a tree in Central Park and reading an unnaturally thick textbook. It is so huge that a real one like it would have weighed a hundred pounds. She is in a hurry to finish reading because she must take an exam, but a shadow keeps falling on her, obscuring the text. The shadow is being cast by two enormous skyscrapers, except they are not real buildings – they are the figures of her parents towering over her.

            Yosi wanders between the ghosts of his friends’ dreams and thinks that this, this knowing what they ought to be dreaming, is love, and that he will lose yet another family tomorrow. Then he falls asleep, and the next day they graduate.

Copyright © 2024 Anna Braverman