Like everyone, I loved him instantly. I don’t mean romantically, I was long since gay, but with a surge of affection, an urge to help him. At the bar of the only bar in town, Ilyas slid onto the stool next to mine, and though I never speak to men in bars, especially not when I’m alone, especially not when I’m holding a book, when he asked in that gently downturned accent what I was reading—no, he said he disliked the book but loved Elizabeth Hardwick’s way with a phrase, or no, he said that passage about misbelonging in your birthplace hit hard, that’s right—I engaged.
Cloaked in a hoodie and band tee, hair unwashed, I had dressed hoping to signify to the queers I had yet to find in this fleck of a town. Ilyas at twenty-five, eight years younger than me, with his casually luminous skin, thick brown hair both sculpted and wild, carried himself like the writing professor he was about to become. His jeans were dark, his blazer crisp, a faded T-shirt spelled out something in Cyrillic, and the beaten but well-tended brown leather of his shoes glowed like a wood-paneled library.
When his burger came, he turned it upside down to eat.
Contrarian, I remarked.
It’s easier this way, he said.
I was already four napkins into a sauce-drenched vegan burger. I flipped it and found that Ilyas was right. The flattened thin half of the bun rested on top, while the thick cap made for a sturdy cushiony base.
Cleaner, right? he said.
He ate his French fries with a fork and knife.
*
Ilyas kept his life immaculate—tucked, tidy, and under control, all the way down to the cute backslanted cursive that flooded the margins of his students’ stories and captioned the clever drawings he’d slip into my office mailbox when I was crushed by the workload. I had no order for things. Papers and jackets and books cascaded all over my house and office. The prospect of organizing seemed prohibitively expensive, both temporally and monetarily.
I always eventually found what I needed, so I claimed the chaos as process. I claimed pleasure in rediscovering a draft I’d forgotten or given up for lost. I didn’t yet know the clarity of laying all the pieces into place. Or what story I might miss.
*
Over pints of regional beer named for a famous shipwreck, we discovered we had each interviewed for the same visiting assistant professor position at the college. We then learned we had both been hired: one posted position became two. High fives. Joint luck.
Like me, Ilyas was an alum. He had bounced directly to an MFA program and back, while I had been away for over a decade in a West Coast city, making a socially rich but subsistence-wage life I’d now abandoned for a good paycheck and the prestige of a job title. My first week back in this Midwestern college town had been hallucinatorily lonely. I knew all the streets and houses but not a single person in them. Ilyas exchanged fist bumps and cordialities with every bartender and half their patrons.
Ilyas did no social media—I don’t like to feel watched, he said—so we exchanged phone numbers and street addresses, and the next morning he texted to invite me to the college’s annual bike auction on the town square. We arrived late and bought the worst bikes the previous year’s students had abandoned. Then we cycled for miles down the leafy rail trail on a hot August afternoon, cheerfully cursing the bikes and shouting jokes and discoveries to each other. For the first time since I had arrived, my temporary life felt like life.
*
Of course there’s no such thing as temporary life. As any amoeba in a lab dish could tell you, you can spend an entire life in a suspension.
Read the rest of "Bystanding" in issue 54/1!
