The Golden State

Behind him on the screen is his mother’s tidy apartment, which is where he stays. He says “Finally, Defne”—in Turkish I’m Defne—and I laboriously flip a giant rusty lever in my brain to speak Turkish again and I say “Look Honey it’s your baba look look” and she looks at me with some suspicion to hear the strange words and she looks at him and there is a pause and I am holding my breath and thinking please don’t cry please don’t squirm please don’t hide but she smiles and stretches out her arms to him and he says “My cub, my darling, do you miss your daddy,” and they coo back and forth at each other which puts off the moment when I have to apologize for running away and Honey touches the screen and says “Hi! Hi! Hi!” and I say “Say merhaba to your baba” and then my mother-in-law Ayşe is in the frame boxing Engin out entirely and there is a torrent of affectionate pitter-patter for Honey and it fills Sal’s coffee shop and I look around at the proprietress and the teens and the old woman but nobody seems to care very much. Ayşe brushes away a tear and blows a kiss to me and says “Come to us my love, we miss you,” and then she recedes and Engin lights a cigarette—it seems we’re both smoking—and addresses himself to me and Honey stares rapt at the screen. “Don’t smoke in front of the baby, yaa,” I tell him, I mean come on, and he stubs it out with a rueful look and I feel guilty and smile and say “How was Belgrade,” a sally whose fundamental insincerity he perceives and brushes off accordingly.

“Why are you in the steppe? Don’t you have work?”

Although I have had plenty of time to ponder this I don’t have an answer for myself let alone a soothing lie for Engin, which would be a reason of some kind, any kind, and not just a sudden urge for flight.

“Things were, ahh, not busy at work,” I say, in Turkish, always in Turkish, I loved Turkish before I loved Engin. “And I thought I haven’t been up to the house for a while and I should go look at it.” My grammar is distressingly lumpy. “Okay,” says Engin in English, but I can tell he thinks it’s weird, it is on its face weird, because had I been planning some recon mission I would have let him know in advance.

“Are you okay?” he asks. I begin to cry so suddenly and so copiously it’s not a taktik or a refleks but more that my tears are a well-trained army and always mustered ready to unleash hell.

“My love, my soul, don’t cry.” Turkish has lots of endearments freely deployed. “Come on, why are you crying?”

I don’t want to make him feel bad by saying I am crying because I am here and I am here because you went to complete a certificate course on postproduction in Istanbul and when you came back halfway through to see us surrendered your goddamn green card to DHS under pressure and under false pretenses that contravene established immigration practice and U.S. law and are undoubtedly rooted in xenophobia not to say Islamophobia, and because you were then sent back to Istanbul on the next flight at our expense rather than spending three desperately needed weeks with your wife and child, and because your second application submitted through the even more arcane National Visa Center for overseas consular processing is stuck in limbo due to what I learned after twenty-six nonconsecutive hours of waiting on the phone and the eventual expenditure of a thousand more dollars may in fact be a “click-of-the-mouse error”—theirs—and which we have already paid an attorney to ameliorate and resubmit through the correct channels and will presumably have to pay more to stay on top of until it is seen through and I am alone with our child whose first steps and first words you are missing and I sometimes fantasize about meeting you at the airport with her and kissing you passionately and then throttling you until you die, so I just say “I’m feeling sad,” which is also true.

Honey twists around, bored, with her last bit of banana in one hand, and gives my descending bun a yank. Engin smiles at her while somehow simultaneously frowning at me. She finishes the banana and starts putting her fingers on the screen of the Institute’s computer and I am still crying. The teens in the corner are openly staring. “How was Belgrade?” I manage to get out again. “Nice, actually,” he says, joining the folie à deux of normalcy. “Really nice. We should live there.” We are always opining about places we should live, which are always somewhere else than the place where either of us is living. “Tolga’s thing is shit, though—really disorganized” but now I am crying again and unable to take in Tolga and his endless dubious multipronged film and web marketing schemes. Engin in his heart of hearts wants to be a video artist—make outlandish Björk videos and such—but to make money he signs on to shoot Tolga’s promotional videos for private schools and Eastern European banking concerns instead.