The Centre(30)

“Just like, overnight,” I said. “How the fuck?”

He raised his hands in bafflement.

“I know! Since when, by the way,” he continued, pointing to my mug, “do you drink your coffee black?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Just prefer it that way now. By the way, did you find that your dreams were different when you got back?”

I was still having dreams that felt like they belonged to Peter.

“Oh yeah, that happens,” he said. “Honestly, you notice those kinds of things more in the beginning. After going a couple of times, you don’t even remember whose story is whose anymore.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Although sometimes—oh, this can be a mind fuck—sometimes, it’s like, two of them mix in your head, and it’s as if you’re holding a party in your brain for people who’ve never met in real life and who’ve never met you either.”

“Shit.”

“The whole process is crazy if you think about it—”

“You shouldn’t say that.”

“Huh?”

“That word.”

“What word?”

“Crazy. Say, like, absurd or terrific or something. Crazy is offensive to those with mental health—”

“Anisa.”

“What?”

His look became steely.

“The things you’re preoccupied with. You think they’re deep, but it’s really the opposite. You make people your enemy for no reason.”

He got up off the sofa and flicked at the ivy trailing down my bookshelf. I knew he was thinking about the qualms I’d sometimes raised regarding his masculinity or whiteness. It felt like Adam had forged a case against me in our time apart.

“Sorry,” I said.

“No … no. You know what, you’re right. Forget it. I was trying to say that it’s … very cool, isn’t it? What do you think you’ll do now? With the language, I mean.”

“Well, so far, I’ve just been chilling. I don’t think it’s sunk in yet. But I guess I’ll start reading some German novels, watching films? And then, scope out translation opportunities.”

“I’m sure you’ll be great,” he said. “You’ll be very … strategic.”

I felt like he’d said the word with some bitterness—strategic—and I wondered if he thought I’d been strategic in dating and then disposing of him when it suited me. It wasn’t true, of course. If I were strategic in the least, my life certainly wouldn’t look the way it did. In fact, if anything, Adam had been the strategic one. His last girlfriend had been a Brazilian lawyer, and before that, he’d been going out with a Sri Lankan academic. The man clearly had a type. But whatever. I let it go.

“So, when you were at the Centre, did you come across someone called Shiba?” I asked.

Billee meowed an order for petting, so I shifted from the sofa to the floor to oblige.

“Oh yeah, I remember her vaguely. She’s one of the managers, right?”

“Yeah. She was my supervisor.”

“She’s fit.”

I laughed. “Yeah.”

“Did you two become friends?”

“I think so.”

Billee, who’d been blissfully purring while I rubbed his belly, shifted without warning into a murderous lunge for my hand.

“He’s excited to see you,” Adam said.

“I’m glad. I was worried that he’d forget me.”

Adam scooted off the sofa and sat next to me on the floor, cross-legged. He rolled a little ball around. Billee leaped enthusiastically.

“He’d never forget you.”

I felt an urge then to lean into Adam, to have him hold me like he used to. I sensed the urge float its way over to him, felt him catch it midair the way only he could, but we refrained. There was no point, he’d said to me again and again, if I wasn’t going to commit. I thought this was, I don’t know, somewhat cowardly, that we needed to let our feelings emerge naturally and follow them, do their bidding, not the other way around. Ultimatums … well, ultimatums are an insult to the heart. In Adam’s mind, intimacy could only come from deep commitment, but in mine, it was the other way around. Commitment could only come from deep intimacy. Maybe this was the fundamental problem between us. But I don’t know. Maybe I would have felt the same in his shoes. And so, we allowed the urge to pass, and it did, but not before leaving a certain softness between us in its wake.

“Seriously, Adam. Thank you so much for telling me about that place.”

“It’s a big deal, you know, that I used up my referral on you.”

“I will be forever grateful.”

“Save yours for someone special, okay?”

“I will.”

He said this in a sweet way, not implying that he had wasted his referral on me but that he had indeed used it rightly. That familiar earnestness touched me. When we first broke up, I would long for Adam incessantly. Well, incessantly until he arrived. Then, more recently, things had flipped, and I would cringe when I thought of him, wondering why we’d ever dated in the first place. But in that moment, I could see both: why I had dated him and why we broke up. A necessary step, I thought, toward real closure.