[rendezvous]

By Mohammad Razai

Rendezvous (I)

Last night in my dream you smiled in a way that meant more than friendship, so I am checking if that’s what you mean. We frequent that lamp-lit cobbled street, slaloming in some misty labyrinth so hazy I’m waiting for a foghorn to alert us to danger. Fingers laced together, we walk and walk to a place we don’t yet know though I sound cocksure where we’re headed. You leap in some kind of pirouette and I catch before you slip, feel the warmth of your breath in my mouth, hoping against hope that this is not a dream again. And what if you stopped coming here, what would I do then?

Rendezvous (II)

Do you remember that afternoon in Sidney Street? The homeless man flourishing a copy of the Big Issue: “Don’t be shy, give it a try,” he said in his soft northern sing-song. I reached into my pocket and felt the cold surface of a tarnished penny. It was snowing when we got back, standing at the college porch galled by the porter’s menacing eyes—you stomped down the corridor to dislodge the slush. There wasn’t enough snow to build a full-grown snowman, which like my pubescent beard came to nothing in your gloved hands. We looked at each other disappointed as if it was our fault.

Rendezvous (III)

We sat for dinner in those candle-lit halls as if a great discovery was about to be made. The hand of history hovered with a popsicle that attracted us like ravenous flies. I felt much wiser then, as I enveigled my antennae into your soul looking for any trace of Dante’s Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona. Is there really such a law somewhere that the one who smites shall be smitten too? Besotted, I desired to be a shadow, the shadow of the candelabra that fell on your face as the punch-drunk night staggered into the distance. I was the tipsier as I fixed the lace of your gown admiring its tailored frill.

Rendezvous (IV)

I wielded the scalpel to dissect the placid lifeless bodies as the stench of formaldehyde hung heavy in the air. The more I felt detached from those mutilated corpses the more I felt lost in your smile, studying its cartography like an avid explorer. The superior and posterior draw of your zygomaticus major pulling so artfully the orbicularis oris in its upturned grace. I would tear up in some ecstasy of my own marveling at your latinized muscles, the seventh nerve—how they conspired to structure your smile to tug at the strings of my heart, the strings I couldn’t find in any anatomy textbook.

Rendezvous (V)

I was mute as I followed you to the station, noting the random numbers that appeared on the side of the train. I wished for that de rigueur waving from inside the carriage, but you didn’t know I was there. I tried to raise my tremulous hand but wasn’t sure whether you would wave back if you did see me, so my hand made a fist instead. As I imagined the chug chug of the train leaving, I couldn’t see anything in the twilight haze. I wrote your name in the condensation on the bus window with a question mark, as if it had been a great mystery why you left and why you would never come back.

Notes:
Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona from Dante’s Inferno: Love, which spares no one who’s loved from loving

This story originally appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 18.

Photo by Lucas Larsson.