The Faces of Strangers (19 page)

NORA

Ann
Arbor
November 2004

Just as Paavo had suggested, as soon as she began to understand her condition, Nora left the version of herself that was frustrated, angry and bitter behind. After the spate of psychology classes she took to finish her degree in that summer after Paavo had left New York City, she was shedding that version of herself, leaving the anxious, worried Nora behind to try to understand herself better. She applied to a number of combined master's/PhD courses in psychology and the following year, packed herself up and headed off to Ann Arbor. The University of Michigan had offered her a scholarship as well as a teaching stipend, and she'd already begun correspondence with some of the professors over the summer. She found a quaint apartment in a walk-up building off campus in downtown Ann Arbor that had a courtyard and a twin building facing it.

On her first night in the apartment, she wandered down Main Street clutching her black notebook, browsing in used bookstores, ducking into breweries and cafés before ordering a take-out sandwich to eat in the privacy of her new home. The living room was brimming with suitcases she hadn't unpacked, boxes of cheap furniture from IKEA that she'd had delivered straight to her apartment but hadn't yet constructed, psych textbooks that she'd brought from the courses she'd taken in college. Her bed was the only furniture in the apartment, and she spread a towel over the naked mattress and opened her sandwich. From the window, she could see through the window of the adjacent apartment. Solid blue curtains were drawn across them, but there was still a narrow slip of space between where they met. She hadn't noticed how close the other apartment had been before. There was movement behind the curtains and suddenly the curtains whipped back to reveal a man framed in the window. He was dressed in a blazer and jeans, resembling a darker-complexioned John Cusack.

He waved and Nora jumped. She smiled nervously and made to grab her sandwich and move off the bed, but he had anticipated her flight and rapped on the glass sharply and shook his head, petitioning her to stay. She looked at his face. It looked smart, well-read. He must have been in his late twenties, and his skin was the color of very milky coffee. She liked that he had a slight underbite. She waved back, feeling very conscious of herself. He mouthed something, but she shook her head in confusion. He held a finger up and disappeared out of sight.

When he returned a few minutes later, he held a piece of white paper with the words, “What's your name?” written in black marker. Nora smiled, embarrassed, looking down at the floor. She shook her head. He knelt briefly, and then stood back up, holding another piece of paper. “Shahid. That's me.” She smiled. He pointed back at her. She shook her head, and he pointed to his head and shrugged.

He scribbled, “Rumpelstiltskin?” Nora giggled and shook her head. She mimed looking at her watch, tapping it and pointing at herself and then away. She waved again. The man pouted, sticking his lower lip out.

She cursed herself for not having put up curtains yet. She waved at him, turned away and ate on the living room floor. She hoped that they wouldn't run into one another on the street. It would be embarrassing and would remove the allure of communicating with him across the way.

But the next night, she sensed movement again. It was like clockwork. Each evening she would return from the Psych building, toss her bag on the bed and stretch out. Each evening, she would hear the sounds of life coming from other apartments—chopping, chatting, singing, but she would lie on her bed with a book between her hands and wait for the curtains to part. She still wasn't sure she recognized him each time, but the underbite helped, as well as his aquiline nose with its high bridge. She wasn't close enough to see, but she thought he might be showing the early tracings of a goatee. He parted the curtains as though he expected her, and she glanced up from her book, pretending not to care, pretending not really to see until he gestured toward her, waving spasmodically until she had to laugh.

Now he held up a piece of paper. “I know you can see me. Don't play hard to get.”

Nora looked away. She wasn't sure what she was supposed to expect from him; what were they supposed to do? Become friends? She watched him across the alleyway. His face fell when he realized she wasn't going to respond, so he walked away, letting the curtains fall behind him. She waited there with her book on the bed until the room darkened and she dared to leave the apartment to hunt down some dinner.

But though she'd been reluctant to communicate, she missed his presence. She went back to her bedroom each evening, waiting for the curtains to pull back. On the fourth night when he still hadn't shown up, Nora gave herself a talking-to and went to meet some of the psychology graduate students at a happy hour she'd originally declined.

But then, early the next morning, Shahid parted the curtains, seemingly to let whatever thin light trickled down from the sky and entered the partition between their windows into his room. Nora had been organizing her jewelry tree on her dresser when she perceived movement out of the corner of her eye. She moved toward the window and frantically waved. Shahid nodded knowingly and smiled. “Want what you can't have?” he wrote.

Nora shook her head, frowning. She held up a finger and looked around her room, grabbing a Sharpie and a dismantled cardboard moving box. On it, she wrote, “Where have you been?”

“Open the window.”

Nora shook her head furiously. It was imperative that they keep up this charade, or everything would fall to pieces. It was silly and maybe a little romantic, but she wanted to keep things in their places until the world shuffled and she could no longer have control over them. “Better this way.”

Shahid smiled at her.

“Student?”

Shahid shook his head. “Professor. Physics.”

Nora raised her eyebrows, impressed. “Young professor. Your students must love you.”

Shahid laughed. “You?”

“Grad student. Psych.”

“Am I the star of some social experiment?”

Nora laughed and shook her head. She was running out of room on her cardboard box. She held a finger up and disappeared from the window. In the living room, she frantically tore open boxes, sorting through them until she found her dry erase board and markers.

When she got back to the window, he had turned away and was fiddling with something on his phone. His face lit up when he saw her again. She held up the whiteboard. “Typical. Indian physics teacher.”

“Don't generalize. I'm Pakistani.”
He smirked at her and nodded at the whiteboard. “Environmentalist. I dig. :)”

She giggled. She liked this back-and-forth. It was so much easier than remembering a face, knowing that his would always be the one on the other side of the glass. But she wanted to keep things fresh. “Gotta go,” Nora wrote. “See you later.”

* * *

On the sixth day, Shahid wrote, “Let's meet.”
Nora grimaced. “One meeting?”
Shahid's smile was earnest
,
reflecting the intensity of his scribbling.

She had been tossing this idea around in her head for a few days now, usually just before she went to sleep. Meeting him in person meant that she would have to conjure up the face she saw from across the way. This way was easy—he would always be there. From across the way, he would always be Shahid. On the street, in a coffee shop, in a bar...who knew what he would look like? Who knew if she would recognize him? Her secret would be out, and that was more shameful than flirting with a complete stranger from across an alleyway. She shook her head.

“So you're just a tease.”

Nora smiled, biting her lip. She knew that was her signature move. That meant she was in it. She waved at him before lowering the shades she had finally installed. Then she shut off the light and left the room.

* * *

Once the school year began, it turned out that Nora's grad school schedule and Shahid's teaching one were in sync. On the third day of classes, she nearly bumped into him while he sorted his mail in the foyer. He was shorter than he'd appeared across the alleyway. She ran her quick assessment.

Gold earring

Latte skin

Pressed button-down shirts

Groove in his forehead

Slight underbite

Early 90s-style goatee

“Shahid?” she ventured.

Cheeky smile

“Rumpelstiltskin!” he cried. His voice was deep and flecked with the hint of a British accent as he rolled his
R
s. “At long last we meet.”

“It's Nora,” she confessed.

“Thank goodness,” he said. “I was starting to feel like we were in some Italian neorealism film, all that schoolyard back-and-forth.”

“I'm not sure what that means,” Nora said. “But it's nice to finally meet you.”

“It really is,” he said, taking her hand in his. She looked down at her feet and back up at his face, bracing herself as though it might rearrange into a jigsaw puzzle as faces usually did. But nothing at all had moved; his features were exactly where she'd left them within the curled sections of her fusiform. She sucked in her breath, shocked by the normalcy of it all. She closed her eyes and reopened them.
This is how it used to be
, she reminded herself, blinking back tears
. This is how it used to feel to meet people and remember. To recognize.

“Are you—are you okay?” Shahid asked her. “You look a little pale.”

Nora nodded vehemently. “I'm absolutely fine.”

From: EESTIRIDDLER723

To: Noreaster

February 5, 2005

Hi Nora,

Are you married yet? Don't forget to send me an invitation! All your emails are all about Shahid. Are you getting any work done while you're there? Only kidding, of course.

Things here in the army haven't been bad, though I am grateful for all the training I had with the wrestling team back in New York. It set me up for a good athletic regimen. I have completed all the obstacle course drills as well as the running and lifting. But I just found out last night that I am getting a reprieve from army training. CallMe petitioned the government and I am being pulled out in order to return to the implementation work I had been working on for the past year. Jaak and Riki, the founders, said we are getting state funding to complete the initial stages of our research and to implement the pioneer program of CallMe within Estonia! I'm really looking forward to it.

I know you can't ever be “healed,” but you have come such a long way, Nora. You should be proud of yourself. I am very proud of you for turning your “condition” into something you have begun to understand and that you are turning into a career. Remember what I first told you about
dusha
? I don't want to get ahead of myself, but perhaps Shahid has it, and this is why you can see him for who he is. Maybe your soul has sought his, and determined that it is worth recognizing.

I have one for you: I touch someone once and last a lifetime.

Hugs,

Paavo

P.S. Give up? It's LOVE. :)

NICO

New York
City
June 2007

It wasn't that Nico went looking for love; it was more that it seemed to find him. In his first year of college, the charisma he'd cultivated in high school seemed to attract girls almost as soon as he set foot on campus. Two different women in his semantics seminar vied for his attention—a risky situation, as the class size was only twelve. There was something alluring about him, about the way he focused mostly on his studies, his collegiate wrestling career and student government. His charm extended to everyone. Between classes and while lounging on the grassy knoll in front of his dorm, he almost always found himself deep within a scrum of students, all vying for his attention. It was no surprise that he ran for and won class office every year he was nominated.

“So what's wrong with Middleton?” Nico asked Toby. The boys were on the phone in their sophomore year of college. Nico wound the phone cord around his wrist as he pushed off the floor with the other hand. He puffed and grunted into the receiver.

“I think I made a mistake coming here. I think I might want to transfer,” Toby said.

“Where to?”

“Anywhere else. Dude, are you working out?”

“Just some push-ups.”

“Could you be here, in this phone call, for maybe five minutes?” Toby took a deep breath in.

“Sorry, man. The coach here makes Coach back home seem like my grandma. He kicks my ass like you wouldn't even imagine. And I went down a weight class, so I need to make sure I'm at the top of it.” Nico rolled over onto his back and started a set of crunches, breathing through his mouth so Toby might not hear. “So tell me about Middleton.”

“I just don't feel like I fit in. People are so different here.”

Nico snorted some air out of his nose. “Well, go join some stuff. Do some Ultimate Frisbee. That's a good way to make friends.”

“It's not a question of making friends. It's more than that.”

“Hey listen, Tobes, I'm so sorry. There's a class board meeting I have to attend. Can I call you back tomorrow?”

Nico started writing a few articles for the
Varsity V
that year, claiming his own masthead and column in the second semester. When his classmates all started applying to study abroad programs in their junior years, Nico declined the opportunity.

“Been there, done that,” he told them. “I was in Estonia for half a year. Not sure I need to repeat the experience.” Instead, he stayed behind at school, heading up the school paper and taking the train into the city in the evenings to intern at the Francis Foley for Staten Island City Council District 52 campaign office. It was a makeshift office, run out of a storefront next to a sandwich shop in St. George, so that salami and mortadella wafted through the shared vent and circulated in the air above the phones where volunteers made cold calls for donations. Francis Foley was a client of Arthur's, and once Nico had mentioned his desire to work on an electoral campaign before graduation, Arthur secured all the details for the introduction, including the fact that the headquarters were within walking distance of the ferry.

On his first day, while he was disappointed to be greeted by stacks of fund-raising letters, envelopes and stamps, Nico finished the job in a few hours. Martin Foley, Francis's nephew and campaign manager, told him to sit tight until the copy shop down the block completed the next round of envelope stuffers. In the meantime, Nico wandered around the office. He read through the press binder stationed by the door, aligning himself with Foley's policies and points of view. He read articles the staff had printed out and pinned to bulletin boards. He found some stray papers that had been abandoned by the printer and began reading through them. It was a speech—one that Foley was scheduled to deliver that evening at a fund-raising dinner that cost four hundred dollars a plate. It was good, but it could be better. There was no arc to the oratory, no pluck to the heartstrings. Nico took a pen and highlighter to the pages, writing notes in the margins and scoring through redundant sentences, reforming and redefining passages. He retyped the whole thing, printed it and left it there.

He couldn't have orchestrated it better himself. Just as he sat back down at his desk, Francis Foley opened the door to his office and strode out toward the printer. He collected the pages, his eyes scanning the words.

“Martin,” he called, “this isn't what we talked about.”

Martin took the pages from Foley. “That's because this isn't it. Where'd you get this?”

Nico stepped forward. “That's my take. Here's your original. I thought there were some facets of civil liberties that could have been brought to the forefront. Also, it kind of glossed over the whole police truancy situation, which is top of mind right now, don't you think? And the first draft danced around minimum wage, so I addressed it head-on.”

“Who the fuck are you?” Foley asked the question almost tenderly.

“The new intern,” Martin said. “I did not give him access to this. Sorry, Uncle Frank.”

“Are you shittin' me? An intern?” Foley perched on the edge of Nico's desk. “Where are you from?”

“Here. New York,” Nico said. “I'm in my senior year of college.”

“Thank God for that,” Foley said. “You're coming to work for me after you graduate.”

Martin looked at the papers. “It's good?”

“It's fucking brilliant. What else you got?”

“What do you mean?” Nico asked.

“I have a press con tomorrow afternoon on the transportation hike. Are you up on the issue?”

“I can be.”

“You sure you want to go back to school? If you can write like this, I'll hire you full-time right now.”

“I have to finish college, sir,” Nico said. “But I can work remotely if you want.”

Within the first month of his time with the Francis Foley campaign, Nico graduated to deputy campaign manager, much to Martin's chagrin. Between term papers and putting the paper to bed on Sunday nights, Nico wrote speeches and press releases, helping Foley transition from potty-mouthed politico to silver-tongued Staten Island council member. And when Nico graduated, Foley stayed true to his word, hiring Nico as his chief of staff and head speechwriter.

Nico Grand was the youngest chief of staff ever appointed in the history of New York City politics, though one would never have known it. His voice—both literal, behind the scenes, and literary, as it was translated through countless communications—was mature in its intonation and intent. Nico brought a lyricism, an empathetic consideration to his words that hadn't been heard in the political arena before. Constituents were astounded when he stepped onto the stage from the wings after Foley delivered one of Nico's speeches in order to clear away any detritus or notes that Foley had left behind. And Foley gave Nico a lot of leeway when it came to Nico's own agenda, insofar as it aligned with Foley's own policies. Nico headlined at the weekly city council meetings, opining on issues that held a personal stake for him: the cleanup of the piers at Arlington, an investigation into the clean water habits of a renowned pizza parlor in Battery Weed, whether a halfway house in Sunnyside was operating up to code.

After two years in the Foley administration, Nico's fame had spread, not only across borough borders, but also specifically into the heart of the city. Just as legislation was passed for reclamation of the borough's landfill—a major coup and one of Nico's initiatives—the city comptroller's office called in a favor. His chief of staff had absconded over a petty disagreement and was now working in the public sector. The office needed someone almost immediately to smooth over the backlash, and was Nico interested?