Kapitoil

JOURNAL DATE RECORDED: DECEMBER 5

I worked on the epidemiology project, but by Friday I still had no ideas for what to do with Rebecca. And then I decided to yield to my difficulties: I would simply not plan anything. It had the potential to be a growth experience. So I emailed Rebecca and told her to meet me in Central Park on Saturday at noon.

We met in Sheep Meadow. Rebecca blocked her eyes from the sun with her hand and asked, “What’s the plan, Stan?”

“I do not have a plan, Dan,” I said, because I thought she was doing a play on words with me and the only other American name I could think of that rhymed with “plan” was Dan. To boot, I now had a response for Dan when he called me “Karim the Dream.” “I thought we could walk around Central Park.” I had walked through parts of it before, but not much of it, and always by myself.

At first I wondered if we would discuss the events of Thanksgiving with each other, and because I was distracted our conversation was rigid, and I asked her several questions such as, “What did you do to entertain yourself last night?”

Rebecca said, “I know I always say this, but, really, you can let yourself go some. We’re not in the office. You can curse or whatever.”

I considered this, then said, “Fuck. Shit. Asshole.”

Rebecca laughed, and that softened the rigidity of our dialogue, and then we talked about a play she had seen the previous night that her roommate acted in, and about her brother and how he had joined his university’s newspaper, and then about how that might interest Zahira as well, as she was an excellent writer.

We entered an area called the Ramble which is known for birding. We spent several minutes watching different species, many of which we didn’t know the names of, but Rebecca made interesting analytical observations, e.g., how multiple birds frequently partner on a tree after a few birds first land there, as if the first birds are scouting to certify the tree’s safety. Although I didn’t learn as much as when I was with Mr. Schrub, it was more stimulating because I prefer problem solving to receiving data passively.

When we reached the end of the Ramble, we decided to progress to the reservoir at 96th St. By then I forgot about what happened on Thanksgiving and it was like we were still coworkers at adjacent desks, although we weren’t talking about work anymore.

At the Reservoir, Rebecca asked if I had anything else I wanted to do. “I am enjoying this,” I said. “Would you like to continue walking around?”

She said she would, and we shifted over to Riverside Park on the West Side and walked along the blue and green and gray water of the Hudson River, and through the Upper West Side aggregated with Jewish families and Asian restaurants, and finally all the way down to Chelsea and the variably angled streets and cafes of Greenwich Village and the classy and minimal clothing stores in SoHo and the less clean streets and caged athletics areas of the Lower East Side and the East Village. And although we ended up spending almost no money, minus water and some snacks (e.g., in Chinatown, where we ate dumplings and something called red-bean-paste bun), that’s not why I wanted to do it, but I’m glad we did that instead of paying for external entertainment. Sometimes merely partnering on a walk is sufficient.

When we were on Sullivan St., she was discussing her brother and the art classes he was taking at university, and I was asking her questions about art. “You know, there may be a bit of a language barrier, but you’re pretty easy to talk to,” she said. “Most people here, their conversations are intellectualized middle-school sarcasm. They’re just trying to prove how intelligent or cool they are. You’re not like that.” At first I thought she meant I wasn’t intelligent or cool, but then I understood she meant that I didn’t try to prove I had those qualities, and although I believe I am intelligent in certain modes, I’m of course not cool in any modes, so that part remains true.

We were both exhausted at 6:30 p.m. Rebecca asked if I was hungry, and I was, but so far restaurants in New York had caused problems for me with questions about halal food, and also I didn’t enjoy waiters serving me. So I proposed cooking dinner, and Rebecca suggested we do it in Brooklyn because groceries were cheaper there.

We discussed what to cook on the way there. Rebecca said she was trying to become a vegetarian, so we shouldn’t buy meat. She added, “And I’m not just saying that because it’ll be harder to find halal meat.” I told her I was glad she’d said that, and how I disliked it when Americans corrected their behavior around me. She didn’t say anything else about it.

We selected pasta with peppers and cauliflowers and a salad and divided the cost equally and took the food back to her apartment. Her roommate was out at her play. Rebecca asked if I wanted to hear music while we cooked.

“I liked the musician you played for me before,” I said. “The one who sings the line ‘Your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm.’”

“I remember,” she said.

This time she played a song called “Suzanne,” and it was equal in quality to the song she had played in her room. The line that intrigued me most was “And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers,” because sometimes there is no difference between garbage and flowers, and things that people discard or ignore or forget or lose often contain the most valuable material or data, as Rebecca once said.

“Are you a good singer?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “If you consider the anguished cries of a fatally wounded dolphin ‘good.’”

She opened a bottle of white wine and poured herself a glass but she didn’t make any comments about how I could have some if I wanted. So I finished my glass of water and poured myself some as well.

We ate dinner in her living room, and when we finished we drank more wine, although I was careful to drink just a small amount. I discovered if I drank at the rate of 0.75 glasses/hour it slightly relaxed me but didn’t negate my control, which was optimal, especially in a situation like this.

In fact, I was still very nervous. When I kissed her previously, it happened because I temporarily didn’t strategize. Now I was strategizing too much, with ideas such as (1) the lighting was too bright; (2) we were both holding glasses of wine and a sudden movement could spill them (even though it was white wine and therefore less permanent); and (3) we were one foot apart from each other on the couch and moving closer to her would take too long.

I understood why movies about romance, such as the one I partially watched on television on Monday night, are so popular in the U.S., because they present high quantities of conflict, although I typically dislike the way those movies depict romantic conflicts, as they result either from simple misunderstandings or because the two main characters initially hate each other before falling in love, and although I am a novice at these situations, even I know that that conversion is illogical. In fact, frequently it is the opposite: People fall in love soon after they meet, and over time they lose it.

I said, “This wine has some pear notes.”

She smiled slightly and didn’t respond, and I had no other evaluations of the wine. Then I remembered my gift. “I have something for you,” I told her, and I retrieved my coat and depocketed R #1.

“It is an algorithmic drawing,” I said. “I created it using the discrete Fourier transform, by mapping each spatial frequency band of a picture of a watermelon to its own color—”

She linked her arms around my neck and said, “Thank you.”

I was still nervous about what to do, but then I thought: You have to accept responsibility for your own decisions. She may reject you, but you will not know until you try, and if you do not even try, then it is as if you are rejecting yourself.

And then I shifted my head and kissed her, and she kissed me, and we stayed like that for a long time on the soft couch, and I thought how strange it was that two people could enjoy contacting their lips and tongues and hands for so long when most of the time we avoid contact.

She brought me to her bedroom, and our actions didn’t equal what I did on Halloween, but it was still stimulating. We enjoyed each other’s bodies but we didn’t say anything about it, as I did with Melissa. Rebecca wasn’t as thin as Melissa, but I preferred that. In addition, when I had difficulty releasing her bra, she whispered “It’s okay,” and did it herself. I also accidentally crashed my hand against her glasses at one point and they became asymmetrical on her nose. I apologized and was slightly humiliated by my poor dexterity, but she said “Look,” and intentionally made the glasses even more asymmetrical, then put her hands out in the air and rotated her head and eyes rapidly as if she could not see anything and was panicked. It was humorous, so I laughed, and she said, “Thank God glasses are sort of in now and being a nerd is almost cool. It was a rough stretch there in high school for people like us, right?” Initially I disliked how she accurately classified me as a nerd, but then I valued how she did not mind calling herself one and therefore I was careless that I was a nerd as well.

When we were finished we didn’t say anything for a few minutes, until I asked, “Goldman is a Jewish surname, correct?”

“Yeah,” she said. “My family isn’t really religious, though. Is yours?”

“We are. My father is the most,” I said. “Both your parents are Jewish?”

“Just my father,” she said. “But he’s not really anything.”

“What is his job?”

She yawned and turned her body away from me. “He’s a surgeon.”

I was asking about a subject that wasn’t my business, but I didn’t stop. “Why do you not see him anymore?”

“Are you trying to find out if I have daddy issues?” she said.

I said I didn’t know what daddy issues were, and that I merely wanted to know why she didn’t see him, but if she didn’t want to discuss it, then I understood.

She turned to face me again. “He wasn’t abusive, he wasn’t an alcoholic, he wasn’t a philanderer,” she said. “Hope I’m not disappointing you with a mundane tale of middle-class neglect. He was a workaholic and never really paid attention to my mother, or my brother, or me. Sorry — he paid attention when he thought I would become a doctor, and when I accidentally-on-purpose failed bio, he gave up. They finally divorced when I was seventeen, which made for a fun senior year, we moved in with my grandmother in Wisconsin, he remarried, and I stopped talking to him four years ago because he never really seemed to care about talking to me. Satisfied?”

I didn’t say anything for a while. Then I said, “I have some daddy issues as well, although they are different.” I didn’t say anything about my mother, though, because it would seem like we were exchanging personal data for the sake of exchanging it. I would also ask her another time about why she took Zoloft, which I had researched and learned was for depression and/or anxiety, because it was not necessarily caused by her relationship with her father, e.g., that is why I don’t tell people about my mother, because they might think everything I do is caused by that, when human actions are the result of infinite factors and are complex and sometimes impossible to decipher.

connoisseur = expert in a field

daddy issues = conflict with one’s father

philanderer = a husband who is disloyal to his wife

workaholic = someone who works constantly to avoid the remainder of his life

JOURNAL DATE RECORDED: DECEMBER 12

Rebecca and I didn’t see each other at all the next few days, as I was busy with Kapitoil and the Y2K project was ramping up. My test results were enhanced, and I believed that with some additional work and more specific knowledge of epidemiology, which I lack, it might truly have value.

However, to apply it to other fields would require opening up the code and the idea to others who have more specialized knowledge, e.g., via an academic paper. And this would mean the termination of Kapitoil, because Schrub would no longer have a monopoly on it, and if everyone had access to the same predictive patterns, then they would cancel out on the market.

I considered that (1) I was performing very well with Schrub now and was getting to know Mr. Schrub more; (2) possibly it would be foolish to interrupt my progress with an idea that might hurt the company’s prospects; and (3) Kapitoil, for oil futures, was the best program I had ever created, and even if it worked well in another area, I would destroy its perfect value for oil futures, and it is rare for something so ideal to exist in the world.

So I decided to be quiet about my program for now, and if I was 100 % certain it functioned and I felt I was close enough to Mr. Schrub later, then I would bring it up.

Shortly after 5:00 p.m. on December 7 there was a small bombing in Jordan at a U.S.-owned hotel. Ramadan had just started there. Kapitoil would benefit again from the volatility in the market.

The next night I went to the mosque after work to pray. December 8 was also the day John Lennon was killed. At home I played some of his Beatles and non-Beatles songs, including “Imagine,” which my mother adored. I enjoyed it, as I always did, but when I heard the line “Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too,” I replayed it several times. Lennon was correct in that religion has caused some wars, but it has also created alliances where there might have been other wars, in the same way that countries fight with each other, but they also restrict potential fighting within their borders.

Zahira called at 4:00 a.m. in Doha. “Why are you calling so early?” I asked.

“Because he is still asleep,” she whispered.

“Oh,” I said.

“We had an argument last night,” she said. “About my studies.”

He and I had agreed always to conference about her academics before talking to her about them. I tried to lower my volume. “What about them?”

“He thinks I should not consider a career as a scientist.”

“What does he want you to do? Work in the store with him?”

“No. He wants me to change my classes next semester and apply to the Nursing Technical Secondary School for next year.”

“That is foolish. Nursing is valuable work, but your skill set should be applied to science.”

“That’s what I said, but he won’t listen to me!” Her voice divided and she started crying.

“Stop crying,” I said. “You are stronger than that.”

It took her almost a minute to stabilize. It was difficult for me to listen to over the telephone.

Finally she stopped and inhaled and asked, “Will you talk to him for me?”

She didn’t know he and I had had a fight. But I said, “Of course I will,” and told her I would call him tomorrow while he was at work, and that she should call me again tomorrow night at the same time to discuss it.

I tried to relax, but I couldn’t. Zahira and I had both worked too hard for her not to become something like a scientist. He may have contributed equally to her tuition, but it was not his decision to make.

The next morning I called my father after I arrived at the office. “What is it?” he asked after I greeted him.

“It’s pleasant to hear from you as well,” I said. “Zahira says you want her to think about a different profession.”

“I told her there was a nursing shortage in Qatar,” he said.

“She said you asked her to change her classes and apply to the nursing school.”

“If she is going to pursue it, she needs to begin now,” he said. “Nursing is a growth profession, the Women’s Hospital is an excellent facility, it does not require additional schooling, and she can stay in Doha very easily to find work.”

“Stay in Doha?” I asked. “Why is that important?”

“It’s not safe for a young female to work in a foreign country the way you are doing. You underestimate how many problems she could encounter.”

“I thought we agreed to discuss her academics together before making any major decisions,” I said.

He said, “Well, you’re not here now.”

“That is unrelated. You can easily call me or email me.”

“I don’t have email,” he said. “You’re the one who loves computers so much.”

I forced my voice to remain calm. “We’re both contributing to her tuition. If you prefer, you can pay all of it and then you will not have to consult with me at all. Or I can pay all of it, and then you will not have to be involved.”

He laughed. “You think money is the solution to everything? I can pay for her tuition next semester. I’m her father. She grew up in my home. You are her brother. Just because you earn more money now doesn’t mean you are in charge of her.”

“I know I’m not in charge of her,” I said. “I am letting her be in charge. I am only trying to keep her options open for her future.”

“She has no significant options that I am closing off,” he said. My upper and lower teeth compressed.

“She possibly has more options than I do, and she certainly has more options than you,” I said. “You have no right to restrict her. And I hope you do not let your own backward position destroy her life.” I disconnected. My hand holding the telephone was vibrating.

I did very little work the rest of the day. Zahira called me at night, and I asked if she had talked to our father.

“I studied in the library all night to avoid him,” she said. “What happened?”

“He said…”

“Tell me,” she said.

I was about to tell her that our father was illogical and had obsolete values, but increasing her anger with him wouldn’t result in any net gain. It’s an issue I often have to resolve, because although she did grow up in his home, I truly partnered with him in raising her, and I sometimes oppose his ideas, but I have always tried not to reveal our conflicts to Zahira and to make it as peaceful an environment as possible.

“Some of what he says is logical,” I said. “Being a scientist is a difficult profession and requires graduate school and does not pay well. There is always a need for nurses, especially in Doha now.”

“Are you serious?” she said.

“It is necessary to have a backup plan. You should take preparatory classes next semester, and maybe you will discover you prefer nursing. It is an integral job.” My voice sounded deeper and quieter and slower than normal. I had to say something else, so I added, “If you disagree with him, you must talk to him. I cannot do it for you. You are an adult now.”

“He doesn’t treat me as an adult!” she said. “That is exactly the problem!”

“I am sorry, Zahira,” I said.

She made an angry sound by exhaling loudly through her teeth and said, “I thought I had a good brother,” which was the worst thing she could have said to me, because while I am not boastful about much, I am proud of my skills as a brother. Then she did to me what I did to my father: She disconnected.

She didn’t call back. I felt doubly bad, for (1) not defending her against our father and (2) lying to her. When I returned home, I could talk to him again and try to convince him. I could resolve to pay for her entire tuition, but she would remain in his home, and he might still reject the idea, and in fact it would probably make him even more certain. It’s even more difficult to change someone’s mind on a subject they have strong beliefs about than it is to make someone interested in a subject they are careless of.

I was about to call her to tell her this, but I hypothesized that she was still upset and my predicted outcomes weren’t very optimistic, so I decided to wait for her to stabilize and let her initiate contact with me when she was ready.

In bed that night I kept replaying what my father said about me not being in charge. I always thought earning a high salary would delete the lion’s share of problems for our family. But some problems are problematic independent of finances, and he was in fact correct: Money was not the solution to everything.

I didn’t see Rebecca again until late on Friday night. We had dinner to break my fast, and I was even more inferior at conversation than normal because I was focused on Zahira and also on Kapitoil and whether it meant Schrub leveraged other people’s problems even if we weren’t the source of the problems.

In her room she asked if I knew the musician Bob Dylan.

“I do not know most musicians, except for the Beatles,” I said.

“Why’s that?” She started playing a CD. “Are they big in Qatar?”

“No,” I said. “I merely know them well.”

It was enjoyable even though his voice was not as luxurious as John Lennon’s, and we kissed while we listened. He played a song called “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” The melody was beautiful, but some of the words didn’t make sense, especially the line in the chorus “My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums.”

I paid attention the first time I heard it because of the word “Arabian,” but “warehouse eyes” frustrated me for two reasons: (1) A noun (“warehouse”) modifies another noun (“eyes”), which is grammatically poor, and (2) what does “warehouse eyes” mean? It does not present a logical visual analog for the listener.

So I asked Rebecca what “warehouse eyes” meant, and she said, “It’s a metaphor. But sometimes it’s just about the sound.”

I listened to the rest of the song, although it frustrated me that a musician could write something that he wants to be indecipherable, but then I remembered that Pollock’s paintings frustrated me initially before I adopted new strategies for viewing them. So I listened without analyzing the meaning in my conventional mode. And the fifth time he sang it, I suddenly had a mental tableau of a warehouse with two lighted windows, and even if my analysis was not parallel to Dylan’s original plan, his method now seemed like a slightly more valid way to write a song.

By the time the song was over, all our clothing was on the floor. I told myself it was incorrect behavior for Ramadan, but my body defeated my brain.

The CD changer switched and soon the song “With God on Our Side” played, and I continued listening. Like Lennon, Dylan was arguing that religion had caused many wars and made people act foolishly, e.g., “And you never ask questions, when God’s on your side.” Lennon and Dylan assumed that all religious people don’t evaluate what their religion tells them to do, when in fact some of the most thoughtful people I know are the most religious, because religion focuses not exclusively on spirituality but also on morality, which many people forget to consider.

And then I considered where I was: in bed with an American female, with both of us naked. I didn’t feel the way I did with Melissa, when it was as if I had committed a major crime, but possibly that was not a positive development. I remembered what Mr. Schrub said about how every day there are shifts that are so small you do not identify them, and finally you become a different person without even recognizing it.

I was truly not doing Ramadan this year.

“I should go home,” I said. She didn’t respond, so I exited the bed and replaced the white sheets partially over her body. “I am planning to be at the mosque all day tomorrow and will need to retire for a full night of sleep.”

She was quiet for a minute. Then she said, “Usually guys want to leave after.”

I didn’t want to explain why I wanted to leave, but I also didn’t want to make her feel bad, and I heard her incorrectly and thought she said “Usual guys,” so I said, “Well, I am an unusual guy.” It didn’t make her laugh, although I was uncertain if it was because (1) the logic of the joke was flawed from the launch; (2) she was not in the proper mood to laugh; or (3) it was merely humorless.

I told her I would call her soon, and left before I further damaged our relationship. It was a long subway ride home, and whenever the doors opened, the cold air entered the train like a strong punch to my body. The whole time I was thinking how I could instead be warm in bed with her, but I couldn’t go back. It was like wanting to return the suits after I purchased them. Once you make a significant decision, it is difficult or sometimes impossible to reverse it.

I was afraid that if I called her she’d still be upset with me and I would say other foolish things, and she would wonder why she had consented to be with me originally, and then reject me. I also wondered why she was with me. I didn’t possess the very handsome face of someone like Jefferson (although I knew Rebecca wouldn’t want to be with someone like Jefferson), or the knowledge base of music and movies and original clothing like her male friends, and I made many foolish errors in conversation, and now I was causing problems in other ways.

But some of it was possibly her fault, e.g., she didn’t truly consider how I might feel about seeing her during Ramadan. And in fact most Americans I had met only thought about my religion in relation to food or alcohol, not about the spiritual areas. I walked around my living room in a rectangular pattern, and the more I thought about this, the more upset I grew, and I decided to write an email. It wasn’t to Rebecca, however:

Mr. Ray, I am responding to Mr. Schrub’s request about a contract he has for me to sign. Can you please tell him I am available to meet him at his earliest convenience?

big in = popular in

warehouse eyes = an example of a metaphor that may not have a directly logical meaning

JOURNAL DATE RECORDED: DECEMBER 13

Rebecca didn’t contact me the remainder of the weekend, and on Monday I avoided her in the office. In the morning I received a response from Mr. Ray that Mr. Schrub could meet me that afternoon for lunch. I was nervous of course, but I also felt confident that my epidemiology proposal would intrigue him.

The restaurant had an Italian name and was in the Financial District, so I walked there. Every table was full of business-people, but it was also very quiet and partially dark even though it was lunchtime.

I waited for Mr. Schrub at the bar and ordered a Coke, and in ten minutes he arrived and the main guard led us to a long table in a private section behind a door. Most of the eaters watched him as we walked past but pretended not to, and I felt their eyes observing me as well, and although attention usually makes me feel uncomfortable, now I felt stronger and sexier.

“I already arranged to do the chef’s menu,” Mr. Schrub told me. “And I made sure your food is vegetarian and otherwise appropriate.”

I reminded myself how much he had given me and that he was considering my needs and how luxurious the room we were in was, with paintings of apples and pears on the wall and a very white tablecloth that was simultaneously rigid and soft, and I told him I appreciated it.

Our waiter was probably the same age as Mr. Schrub, although he looked older. After he gave Mr. Schrub the wine menu, I said, “I have a new idea relating to Kapitoil.”

He put down the menu. “George said you hadn’t come up with anything.”

I felt foolish that Mr. Ray had said that, and it validated my fear that they were less impressed with me now, so I quickly explained how the epidemiology program would work and how my test results were robust so far.

Then, to conclude on another positive, I said, “I believe its applications are something your wife would find especially intriguing, as it can significantly enhance quality of life in the Third World.”

“How would you develop the program if, as you say, you don’t know much about epidemiology?” he asked.

“I would write the concept and reveal the algorithms for Kapitoil in an academic paper and release it to the public.” I turned my eyes to the wallpaper’s complex repeating pattern design of flower petals. “This means we would lose our monopoly on the program and it would no longer be valuable on the oil futures market.”

The waiter returned. “I don’t like to talk business over good food,” Mr. Schrub said quietly to me. “We’ll discuss it after the meal.”

He continued looking at the menu, and after 20 seconds the waiter said, “We have an ’88 Chianti that perfectly complements chef’s menu.”

Mr. Schrub didn’t look up from the menu, but his facial muscles compressed and he said, “If I wanted a recommendation I would have asked for one.”

The waiter’s face was already pale, but it seemed to turn paler. “I apologize, sir,” he said.

Mr. Schrub ordered a different wine I had never heard of, and the waiter said “Excellent choice,” and exited quickly.

Mr. Schrub didn’t discuss the contract at all while we ate, and he didn’t even talk about finance. Instead, he told me about the food we were eating. He and Mrs. Schrub owned a house in Tuscany and they went there every summer for at least a week and bought food at local markets and cooked together. “I recently cooked my first Italian meal,” I said. Then I added, “I taught myself.”

When I ate several gnocchi and grilled zucchini ASAP, he said, “Don’t just gulp it down like a philistine. You have to rotate between the flavors, savor them.” I decelerated my pace and was afraid he would find other flaws in my method of consuming and that it would somehow hurt my chances of convincing him to pursue the epidemiology project. “Break the taste apart into discrete essences — the fresh sweetness of the basil against the earthiness of the gnocchi.” This is why I could never be a restaurant critic, because my only descriptions for food I liked were “delicious” or “flavorful” or simple adjectives in that class, and if you lack specific vocabulary to describe something, it is almost as if you are also restricted from specific thoughts, parallel to how if you do not know a coding command, not only are you prevented from implementing the idea, but you may not even innovate the idea initially.

After we received coffee I thought we were finally going to discuss my idea, but the owner of the restaurant entered and greeted Mr. Schrub.

“You must be a very important young man if you’re lunching with Mr. Schrub,” the owner said after Mr. Schrub introduced me, and I did feel like a VIYM again.

“He’s only as important as I let him be,” Mr. Schrub said. They both laughed, and the owner asked about our meal. Mr. Schrub said the food was excellent. “The waiter was perhaps a little big for his britches. You may want to have a word.”

The owner apologized and said he would speak with him, then left us to drink our coffee. Mr. Schrub didn’t say anything for almost a minute as he breathed on his coffee, and I was afraid of deleting the silence. He was like Barron in that way, because when they were mute I knew they were having thoughts they were withholding but I didn’t know what the thoughts were, except Barron usually made me feel relieved after.

I finally said, “Have you thought about—”

He put up a finger as he poured milk into his cup. After he tasted it and licked his lips and dried them with his napkin and replaced his napkin on his lap, he said, “The epidemiology proposal sounds like a brilliant idea. But before we do something that rash, I think we should investigate further. Why don’t you give my programmers access to the code, they can bring it up with some confidential partners who know more about this subject, and we can figure out if this thing really does have a fighting chance.” He retrieved the contracts from his briefcase. “We’ve also gotten you some more money.”

There was something about his “Why don’t you” sentence that bothered me besides the fact that it was less a question and more a statement. I looked at the contracts that I still didn’t 100 % understand on the rigid white tablecloth. The solitary thing I did understand was the amount of money, which was boldfaced and double the initial amount.

“If it is all right with you, I prefer to update my prototype further before I release it to your programmers,” I said.

He replaced the contracts in his briefcase as efficiently as if he was a printer feeding paper. “I understand,” he said. “You’re a perfectionist. So am I.” He discussed the snowstorm expected next weekend, and we finished our coffee and he refused to permit me to pay for my share and told me to recontact him when I was ready.

I walked slowly back to the office. I replayed his sentence that bothered me, and I deciphered what caused turmoil for me: He used the phrase “my programmers,” but I was also technically one of his programmers. Later in the sentence he said “we can figure out,” so he should have also said “our programmers.” It was a minor word choice, but it indicated something negative to me.

I had to consult with someone. There was only one person I could think of who was not upset with me now and who I thought could help me.

“No, you’re not bothering me,” Barron said on the telephone after I told him I didn’t require a ride. “How’s your lady friend?”

I said Rebecca was fine. But I truly wanted to speak about Mr. Schrub, although of course I couldn’t reveal the full details of the situation to Barron. So I said, “Barron, what do you advise in a situation like this: Another party has given one great trust, and one would like to trust the other party, but one slightly believes one possibly should not trust everything about the other party.”

Barron said, “Slow the hell down. If you say the words ‘trust’ and ‘one’ and ‘the other party’ one more time, I’m going to hang up. This is about Rebecca, right?”

This would be a convenient way to discuss Mr. Schrub, but I didn’t want to lie to Barron. So I said, “I would not like to identify the party or parties involved.”

“You don’t make this easy,” he said. “Let me ask you: Are you the kind of guy who doesn’t usually trust people?”

I stood in the middle of a cluster of business people waiting to cross Pine St. “No, I believe most people have positive values and goals and merit faith.”

“That’s a nice attitude, but it’s dangerous. Especially in this city — it’s full of phonies.” I asked what phonies were. “Fakes, frauds, exploiters, if that’s a word. You’ve got to watch your back. And if you think someone’s trying to stab it, you have to turn around and confront them.”

I was afraid Barron would say this. Typically people know what the correct answer is when they search for advice, but they need someone else to state it first. It is similar to flipping a coin to make a decision but knowing what decision you want to make independent of the outcome. Or possibly of praying for an outcome that ultimately you have the power to influence.

“On the other hand, Rebecca is no phony,” he said.

“Rebecca is not the other party. Please do not hang up.” It was time to ask him for a major-league favor. “I have a contract someone wants me to sign, and I am uncertain about its contents. Are you skilled at deciphering legal language?”

“What, because I’m a cabbie I can’t read?” he asked.

“No, I only meant that the language is—”

“I’m messing around with you. You don’t always have to fear the wrath of the black man,” he said. “I’m okay with that stuff. But my wife deals with it all the time. You could fax it to her.”

“I would prefer not to transmit it via fax.” I thought for a few seconds. “Would you and your family like to come to my apartment for dinner?”

“Your place?” he asked.

“Well, shit, like I said, it’s nothing fancy, but you’re welcome to come over here.” He was surprised and confused by my words. “That is the same sentence you used when you permitted me to do Thanksgiving at your place. I was messing around with you as well.”

He whistled and said, “You’ve got a steel-trap mind there.” He told me he would have to check with his wife but he was fairly certain they could come. I gave him my address, because he drives so many people around and therefore does not have a steel-trap mind for that.

I prepared the same pasta meal I had cooked with Rebecca but utilized gnocchi this time and also blended the multi-fruit juice Michelle enjoyed at Thanksgiving. Barron and Cynthia brought nondairy cupcakes for dessert. It pleased me to be utilizing all four chairs for the first time. We had a pleasant conversation until they discussed what instrument Michelle should learn next year in school.

“Barron wants her to take saxophone,” Cynthia said. “He used to play it. Horribly.”

“And you’d rather have her learn the flute?” Barron said.

“I didn’t say it had to be the flute,” she said. “I said a woodwind.”

“The saxophone is a woodwind!” Barron said. Michelle was creating scalene triangles by lining up pieces of gnocchi on her plate. “I don’t want my daughter playing the flute. The flute is…” He shook his head and cleaned his mouth with his napkin.

“What?” she said. “Say it.”

He removed the napkin. “It’s bougie,” he said. “It’s a bougie instrument for bougie music that bougie people listen to.”

“I listen to classical music,” Cynthia said.

“I’m not attacking you. But we do enough bougie shit already. And I never complain. You want to spend a grand on a couch, I don’t complain. You want to fly to Paris for Christmas, I don’t complain. This is the one thing I’m asking for.”

“Daddy’s asking for,” Michelle said, which was illogical, but children often repeat statements they hear without consideration, even if they are illogical and lacking context. Frequently I had to correct Zahira.

Cynthia was quiet. Then she said, “Let’s talk about this later.”

“No, let’s talk about this now,” Barron said. “Let’s ask Karim what he thinks.”

“Don’t bring him into this,” Cynthia said, and I mutely agreed with her, but Barron was looking at me and I felt I had to provide some input because I was asking them for help as well.

Michelle was resuming her triangles. “Possibly it is best to present her both options, and see which she is interested in and excels at,” I said.

“And she’ll be interested in the sax, like any intelligent person,” Barron said. “Good advice, Karim.” Cynthia looked upset. “Fine, we’ll discuss it later,” he added. “Okay?” Cynthia quietly said okay. It wasn’t the ideal parenting technique, but in some ways it is preferable for both parties to state their opinions, even if it produces arguments.

I said loudly, “I hope the gnocchi has enough earthiness.” No one responded for a few seconds until Cynthia said it was very tasty.

After the cupcakes, I made tea and Cynthia read my contract and I discussed politics with Barron, who knew much about American history and taught me about the 1960s political movements, which was another area I wanted to broaden my knowledge of.

Finally Cynthia said, “The language is complicated, but it looks to me like if you sign this, you’re transferring ownership of the intellectual property to the company.”

She explained the details, but I didn’t 100 % listen to them. I was mute for several seconds before I remembered to thank her. I didn’t want them to ask more questions about what the intellectual property was, and fortunately Michelle yawned and Barron said they should get going. I walked them to the door and closed it behind them and sat down on my floor for several minutes.

Mr. Schrub had lied to me, or he had not told me the complete truth. And possibly he had only invited me to spend time with him not because he liked me, but because he wanted me to trust him enough to sign the contract.

I thought of what Barron said about confrontation. I emailed Mr. Ray again:

Please tell Mr. Schrub I would like to proceed with my own proposal and meet with him again to discuss it.

Then I understood that although Barron’s advice wasn’t about Rebecca, and although she wasn’t a phony like Mr. Schrub was, it was applicable to her to boot. It was cowardly of me to not contact her. You have to confront obstacles and not hope they will be resolved without hard work.

I was going to shoot her an email, but even that was cowardly, so I called her. She answered in a flat voice.

“Rebecca, this is Karim,” I said. I hadn’t strategized, which was possibly foolish, but sometimes it results in saying truer things. “It is my bad for the other night. I have some issues that are independent of you.”

She said, “Uh-huh.”

“Let us see if we can’t resolve this problem,” I said.

“What exactly is your problem?” Rebecca asked.

I hoped she would already understand, but I said, “It is difficult to explain.”

“I can handle it,” she said. “You don’t want to see me anymore.”

“No,” I said. “I mean, ‘No, that is false,’ not ‘No, I don’t want to see you.’” I find the usage of “no” as a prefix confusing because it’s not always clear what the negative applies to. Then I told her my recent thoughts about Ramadan.

“Uh-huh,” she said again, and I could tell she was uncomfortable, but she asked me more about Ramadan and how I felt about it, and how I felt about being with her during it and in general.

I said I didn’t feel good about it but I enjoyed being with her. It was difficult both to decipher my feelings and to state them initially, but the more I did it, the easier it was. “Possibly I should learn not to view my values as a series of binaries and instead find a compromise,” I said.

“That’s what relationships are about, right?” she said. “According to my last issue of Cosmo.”

“Do you classify this as a relationship?” I asked.

“I don’t really know,” she said. “It’s just been a couple of weeks.”

“We are not in Kansas anymore,” I said.

“What?”

“I have not been in a relationship previously,” I said, “so I do not know the appropriate amount of time before it is technically considered one.” When I said it, I realized it was the class of statement that someone like Angela from Cathedral would reject me for, but I hoped Rebecca would be careless.

“I’m no expert, either. But this is pretty quick,” she said, and my heart slightly plummeted, but then she added, “Though we could keep seeing how it works. And I’m joking. I don’t read Cosmo.”

“I do not even know what Cosmo is,” I said.

We made plans to see each other after work on Wednesday night, and for a little while I forgot about Mr. Schrub and Kapitoil, but only a little while.

big for one’s britches = lacking humility with a higher-up

bougie = bourgeois; middle-class or materialistic

chef = used without an article, the term for a chef at a classy restaurant

Cosmo = Cosmopolitan, a magazine for females that frequently analyzes romantic relationships

exploiter = someone who leverages; this is a word

lady friend = either female friend or romantic partner

philistine = someone ignorant of quality culture

phonies = false people

stab someone’s back = practice deception

steel-trap mind = a brain that does not forget many things

JOURNAL DATE RECORDED: DECEMBER 16

Mr. Ray replied and told me that Mr. Schrub would be very busy over the next week but he would contact me when he was free.

I should have said I was ready to sign the contract but that I wanted to meet with Mr. Schrub directly first. Now they knew I had reservations about the contract, and they were forcing me to wait so that I might reconsider. My father frequently negotiated with suppliers who used similar tactics, and I have read several business manuals on negotiating, although this was the first time I had ever had a real-world negotiating opportunity, which was why I made an error.

Of course I could simply write my proposal and try to publish it in an academic paper without telling Mr. Schrub, but he would fire me instantly for being too big for my britches and I would never have a chance to work for him again. Possibly if I waited and got him to see the idea from my POV, we could compromise.

I was relieved that Rebecca planned our date for Wednesday, which was to see her friend’s rock-and-roll band’s concert on the Lower East Side. The friend was the man from her party with long hair named James. He sang and played guitar, and although the crowd was not very bottlenecked in the dark room, several females stood in the front and watched him nonstop. People danced merely by rotating back and forth on an axis over their feet and not truly moving, so I didn’t have to worry about dancing poorly and looking foolish. I asked if Rebecca wanted a beer. She said, “Sure, but you don’t need to buy it for me,” and I said I would purchase this first set and she could purchase the second set. “It’s called ‘buying a round,’” she said.

By the time we were on Rebecca’s round, James’s band was done. After they put away their equipment, he located us at the bar and hugged Rebecca. “Thanks for coming, Becks,” he said. “Looks like you’re the only one who made it.”

She nodded at the females. “You’ve got plenty of groupies.”

“They’re a pale mimesis of you,” he said as he compressed her around the shoulders with his arm.

Rebecca retracted very slightly, just a few inches. “You remember Karim from my party, right?”

“No, nice to meet you,” James said, and shook my hand with great force. It was very loud in the bar, and I heard him say, “You a fan of Indian rock?”

“I am not Indian,” I said. “I am from Qatar.”

James’s upper lip rotated to the left when he laughed via his nose, but Rebecca didn’t and she said, “No, ‘indie rock’—it’s short for independent. Music not released on big record labels.”

“In that case, yours is the first band I have heard that is in that class, and I did enjoy your music,” I said, even though I didn’t truly enjoy his music and thought his voice was impure, unlike that of Leonard Cohen or John Lennon or even Bob Dylan, whose voice is impure but intriguing.

James said he could obtain free alcohol for us, and soon he had three small glasses of whiskey and three cans of a beer that tasted mostly like water, and we drank the whiskey and then the beer to reduce the burning, and after we finished the beers he produced a second round and we repeated our actions.

I was slightly dizzy, but Rebecca was very unstable, and when she almost became imbalanced James held her and her body became fragile in his arms, and he said, “Your hair always smells so fucking good, like strawberries,” which doubly angered me because it smells in fact like watermelons, and then he slowly danced with her even though the band was playing a fast song.

I wanted to leave so I wouldn’t have to see what was happening, but I was afraid that if I left James would attempt even more. So I stood by the bar and watched them dance in the middle of the room and felt my body heat up like a microwave at James every time he whispered something in her ear and also at Rebecca for frequently laughing at what he said and for acting like this directly in front of me while we were on a romantic date.

When James lighted a cigarette for himself and let Rebecca inhale from it as well, I decided that if this was what she wanted to do, then it was her choice, and I left.

Outside the wind burned my ears as I determined the location of the subway. Before I walked away, Rebecca exited the bar and almost fell. “Wait,” she said.

I rotated but didn’t speak. “Why are you leaving?” she asked. Some of her words blended together.

“You do not seem to require my presence,” I said.

She leaned against the wall of the bar. “I don’t normally act this way,” she said.

“Then why are you doing it now?” I asked.

“I don’t know. For attention,” she said. “Sometimes. When I drink. Even from sleazeballs like James.”

“But why do you want attention from James when I am already paying it to you?” I asked.

“Because,” she said, and she decelerated her words. “I really like you.”

I leaned against the wall next to her. “Then those are not logical actions,” I said.

She collapsed but I hugged her before she fell. She pocketed her hands inside my coat to keep them warm and got close to me and our breath was the only non-cold thing near our faces, and she kissed me and it made my entire body feel hotter, but not like the temperature spike of a digital microwave as before, as it was more like an analog toaster with gradual heat. “You want to come home with me?” she asked.

“Of course I want to,” I said. First we went into a store and I bought her a large bottle of water. She nearly crashed into a stand that stored snacks. When I helped her outside she almost fell again, and I said, “Maybe we should go home independently tonight.” She nodded. I retrieved a taxi and gave the driver $30 and wrote down his car’s ID number and said if he made her pay I would contact his employer.

After I linked Rebecca’s seat belt, I told her I would call later to certify her safety. She pulled my tie and body close to her and said, “You can hate me if you want.”

“I do not hate you,” I said. “Obviously, I also really like you.” She asked, “Yeah?” and I said yes again, and then kissed her on her hand. She smiled when I did that and touched the spot with her other hand, and I closed the door and watched her drive away.

When I returned home I had an email waiting for me from Mr. Schrub’s secretary. My heart became stimulated because I thought it would be about a meeting with Mr. Schrub, but she was forwarding me a message from Mrs. Schrub that read:

Dear Karim,

Would you care to attend a holiday fund-raising event next Wednesday the 22nd that I’m organizing?

The event was to raise money for refugees from Kosovo. I knew she hadn’t told Mr. Schrub she was inviting me, because if he was there he would not have wanted me to also be there after my last email to Mr. Ray. And this would be my best opportunity to confront him again about my proposal.

buying a round = purchasing alcoholic drinks in bulk for several people

groupies = females who desire musicians

indie = independent

mimesis = imitation

sleazeball = James

JOURNAL DATE RECORDED: DECEMBER 19

On Friday afternoon a few small white objects fell from the sky, and for a moment I thought someone was ejecting shredded paper from a window above me. I opened a window and put my hand out to touch the snowflakes, but they deleted almost instantly on my hands. I wanted Zahira to be able to see them.

I called home. My father picked up. I disconnected.

Rebecca had invited me to go out to a bar with some of her friends and Jessica that night in Brooklyn, because she was leaving for Wisconsin on Tuesday for almost a week to work remotely on the Y2K preparations. We had to go to her apartment first to drop off some of her possessions, and we decided to eat something there first. When she looked out the window after we finished, she said, “You mind if we ditch the bar and stay in with this weather?”

“I am not dying to go to the bar,” I said. I didn’t feel like talking to new people, even though I liked Rebecca’s friends, minus James, and I also understood why Rebecca once said she liked Jessica but didn’t 100 % connect with her.

She had a selection of board games, and I chose one that I thought would enhance my English: Scrabble. I would lose but I didn’t mind playing poorly in front of Rebecca.

She explained the rules to me and we started as we sat on the carpet next to her coffee table. “We can listen to some indie rock that’s better than James’s band,” she said, which made me smile to myself, “or this CD of ’50s songs.” I said I was unfamiliar with music from the 1950s so I would prefer that, and she said, “Me, too. There’s only so many scratchy-voiced tales of postgraduate alienation a girl can take.” I didn’t always understand Rebecca’s ideas, but I valued the way she stated them.

I was robust at understanding the structure of the game, although my limited English restricted me, and Rebecca won the first game easily.

We replayed, and when Rebecca created the word “C-A-NC-E-R-S” she clapped her hands and said, “Bingo plus triple-word score!” She laughed as she counted her points. I didn’t say anything, and she looked up and said, “What’s wrong? Afraid of getting blown out a second time?” It reminded me of what Mr. Schrub said after he won a point in racquetball. Americans enjoy boasting when they are winning competitions.

“I do not mind losing the game,” I said. “Your word made me think of my mother.”

She stopped scoring her move. “What about her?”

Before she could say something such as how she was sorry, I explained the basic facts of my mother’s death. I didn’t discuss the night of my birthday.

She didn’t say anything the entire time, just as Mr. Schrub didn’t. When it was over, she said, “I think you’re the first decent guy I’ve actually liked.”

“Decent means ‘average,’ correct?” I asked, because it did not seem like a compliment.

“No, not average,” she said. “Unusual.”

Suddenly I wanted to feel close to her in a way I hadn’t yet. I took her hand and we walked to her bedroom. It felt simultaneously familiar and new, which was an intriguing combination, and I thought that is how all experiences should feel, or how you should make them feel to you, but often they feel too familiar or we desire something exclusively because it is new. After a few minutes she said, “Do you want me to get a condom?” and I said yes, and she retrieved one from the bottom shelf of her clothing drawer.

My performance was slightly better than the time with Melissa. I paid attention to which actions produced no effect and which yielded a net gain, as in a boosting algorithm, and I utilized the strong ones in variable patterns so they wouldn’t become predictable, but after a period of time I merely let myself enjoy our actions, even if I wasn’t the cream of the cream partner. At one point we stopped moving and looked at each other at highly magnified range and she removed the perspiration from my forehead with her hand and I did the same for her and we both smiled, and I knew what it was like to know that your happiness was making someone else happy and have reciprocity for it, which was a true example of something that wasn’t a zero-sum game.

When I terminated, I lay down and was ready to fall asleep, but Rebecca took my hand and guided it on her body and instructed me on what to do until she also terminated. After that, she turned her back to me but placed my left arm around her body and my hand over her right breast, but soon she reversed and made a motion for me to reverse as well, with her arm around my body, and we fell asleep and remained that way, as if we were two open parentheses.

When I woke up in the morning, she was gone. The snow was several inches high on her windowsill and growing. She and Jessica were in the kitchen making pancakes.

“It’s pretty miserable out, and the trains are running a Saturday schedule,” Rebecca said as I served myself coffee. “So if you wanted to spend the night again.”

“You do not need to make external excuses for why I should stay,” I said. “I would like to even if it were pleasant out and the trains ran a non-Saturday schedule.”

Jessica laughed as she deposited chocolate chips in some of the pancakes. “Does he always talk like that?” she asked. But it didn’t make me feel bad. In fact, it made me feel unique, as when Barron said I had a sense of humor.

We stayed inside all day while it snowed and watched movies they owned and listened to music and read. I told Rebecca I had enjoyed the two Steinbeck books and she scanned her bookshelf and selected The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s sentences were more complex than Steinbeck’s and my progress was slow, but she told me to keep it until I finished. We played more board games and cooked a large lunch and dinner. It was one of the most enjoyable days I had spent in New York so far, even though nothing we did was exclusive to New York, but Rebecca and Jessica weren’t the class of people I would meet in Doha.

Jessica left at night, but Rebecca and I watched the movie Platoon on television. When it was over, I said it was interesting to observe the deviations from Three Kings in that they were about the U.S.’s two most recent wars, and of course the Gulf War movie was more optimistic, but they shared some parallels, especially in the way the male characters related to each other.

“Yeah,” she said. “Though they threw in a female in Three Kings and the Other is depicted in a much more generous light — concessions to PC tastes and Hollywood sensibility. Yet they both affirm the dominance of patriarchy and masculine excess transferred from father to son in warfare.”

After I asked her to define several of the words she used and to clarify her idea, I said it was very intelligent, and she said, “Good film critics borrow; great film critics steal.” I asked her to reclarify, and she said, “I lifted it from an essay I read in college. I’ll show you.”

She took me into her room and retrieved a book of essays on movies from a large bookshelf that incorporated, in decreasing quantity, books on history and culture, novels, computer science, finance, and poetry.

I tried reading the beginning of the essay, but it contained many larger words I didn’t know. Then Rebecca said, “It’s been a while since I’ve looked at it myself. Want to read it together?”

We sat on her bed and Rebecca read the first paragraph. Then she defined each larger word and explained the argument, and asked what I thought about it. We did this for each paragraph. The essay was 20 pages long, and it took us almost two hours. However, by the end I understood the idea very well and had gained some new vocabulary from it and the dictionary in the rear, e.g., “mise-en-scène” and “phallologocentric,” although I’m uncertain how valuable some of the words will be to know.

When we finished I said, “Rebecca, you will be a good teacher someday.”

She was quiet for a few seconds, then said “Thanks.” Similar to me, Rebecca doesn’t like to look boastful when she has performed well at something she truly is invested in, but I believe she was proud.

I also think she enjoyed that night’s activities more, because my skills were enhancing and I wasn’t as nervous about making an error.

The next morning it stopped snowing, but there were over eight inches on the ground. We read the Sunday New York Times, which was the solitary time the whole weekend I thought of Kapitoil, until Jessica suggested we go to Prospect Park.

The park was like a lake with thick white waves that were static. Many children rode sleds down a hill and built statues with the snow and some threw snow at each other, which caused at least two children to cry. Jessica worked as a waitress and had taken an orange tray from her restaurant, and we used it on the hill. It was one of the more stimulating exercises of my life, much more than racquetball, and Rebecca also said she missed doing winter activities in Wisconsin.

Jessica had to leave early to meet someone, but Rebecca and I stayed longer. We sat under a tree on a rock and cleared the snow off it and watched the sun set until just a few children remained. I wasn’t wearing my watch, and the only way to estimate the time was from the sun, and I wished we could spend several more days like this. It was as if time didn’t truly exist outside of us, which reversed how I always felt at work, when the world moves forward with or without you and you have to maintain progress with it.

The sun made the field of white look pink like the clouds at sunset, and the sylvan trees without branches were like the hands of elderly people. I told Rebecca it would be nice to take a picture.

“I don’t own a camera,” she said. “I don’t really think visually.”

So I looked around at everything and at Rebecca and removed my left glove and put my hand inside her glove next to hers and inhaled the air and listened to the sounds of the children, and closed my eyes and saved all the different sensations to my nonvisual memory.

But then I wanted to save the emotions I was feeling, and it was more difficult to classify and categorize them, so I concentrated exclusively on the feeling I received from the cold air that removed all odor except for a minimal amount of Rebecca’s watermelon shampoo, and it was still complex to classify it, but I tried anyway.

When I opened my eyes, the sun was almost 100 % down and it was time for the Salatu-l-Maghrib prayer. Rebecca asked if she could watch. I consented, and afterward I taught her about the different prayer positions and the translations of what I was saying. Then, because she seemed interested, I discussed a few other subjects, e.g., the Five Pillars. “I’m pretty ignorant about this stuff,” she said.

“As a parallel, I now see I did not truly know much about the U.S. before I came here,” I said. “And I am ignorant about movies and music and books.”

We were quiet for a few minutes until she received a telephone call from her brother. She gave him advice on where to search for an airplane ticket and how much to spend. When she disconnected, I asked if he was visiting her.

She shook her head and picked up some snow and compressed it with both hands. “He always flies the day after Christmas to see our father.”

“I did not realize he still spoke with him,” I said.

“They have a little more in common than I do. Though not much. But David tries, and when my father isn’t caught up with his family, he deigns to let him visit a couple times a year,” she said. “He’s got a lot of lingering anger at our father. I mean, I do, too, but I’m aware of it, thanks to several hundred hours of therapy. I’m not sure he’s really conscious of how upset he is.”

She continued compressing the snow into a sphere. “I think I understand what you mean,” I said.

Her body vibrated from the wind, and she said it was getting late and that we should return. She was about to throw the sphere, but contained it in her glove, and it remained there as we walked home in silence until she dropped it outside her apartment where it blended with all the other snow.

decent = possessing positive values

deign = lower yourself to do something

ditch an event = do not attend an event

mise-en-scène = visual arrangement within a movie

Other = term for people who are not the majority

patriarchy = a society controlled by men, or a family controlled by the father

PC = Politically Correct; fearful of offending the Other

phallologocentric = I still do not understand what this means

JOURNAL DATE RECORDED: DECEMBER 23

After burning the midnight oil for several days, I completed a draft of the epidemiology paper at the office on Wednesday. The writing was Karim-esque, but it stated the central ideas clearly and the math and programming examples were elegant. It could be a strong launch pad from which connoisseurs in the field might refine Kapitoil.

That night, as I put on the rented tuxedo Mrs. Schrub had delivered to me at my apartment, I debated ditching the party. I was not 100 % certain that Mr. Schrub was being dishonest with me, and I was also not 100 % certain my epidemiology idea would function. At significant crisis moments some people feel confident about themselves and some people lack confidence, and although I ultimately trust my skills, I do not think I will ever be the class of person who is infinitely certain of himself.

The fund-raising event was at a hotel near the Schrubs’ apartment. It was in the ballroom, and when the young female guard asked for my name, I identified myself, and she said, “Issar…I don’t see you here.” I became nervous and I spelled my name in case she didn’t see it. Then she said, “My mistake — you’re on the special guest list of Helena Schrub. Go on in, sir.” The people behind me on line paid more attention to me as she allowed me to enter.

The ballroom was littered with men in tuxedos and females in black dresses but no fur coats like there were at Mr. Schrub’s luxury box in Yankee Stadium. There were also many waiters carrying food, and since I didn’t see Mr. or Mrs. Schrub, I ate some stuffed vegetarian grape leaves.

Then I saw Mrs. Schrub in the middle of a cluster. She waved for me to come over. “Karim, I’m so glad you could make it,” she said. She introduced me to the five people with her, who were all her age or older. “Karim is from Qatar, and he’s worked his way up to a top position at Schrub Equities in just a few months. Derek says he’s one of his most gifted employees.”

Even though Mr. Schrub made a similar statement at the Yankees game, I didn’t know he had said this, which sounded much more impressive because he said it to his wife and not to his associate. The only thing that bothered me is that she pronounced it “Ka-tar” instead of “cutter,” which most Americans do, so I am typically careless, but I had used the correct pronunciation with her several times in Greenwich.

Two of the men in the circle also worked in finance at other firms, and soon we launched our own conversation. I was surprised that they wanted my opinion, especially on the 1,000-mile view of e-commerce.

“There are golden opportunities now,” I said, “but I believe investors are overestimating the value of the Internet. At the end of the day, consumers still sometimes prefer the human interaction that machines cannot deliver.”

Two other men joined us, and they continued asking for my theories, and soon I forgot why I was at the fund-raiser. When a waiter brought us a tray of small pastries containing cream, I took one without thinking, and it was so delicious that I remembered it was haraam but I couldn’t restrict myself and I consumed two more.

I was talking so much about my ideas that I was unprepared when one of the men, who was the senior member of our cluster and ran a rival hedge fund which was less powerful than Schrub, said, “Your boy Karim is giving away all your secrets,” and Mr. Schrub placed his hand on the back of my neck and said, “Not all, I hope,” and winked at me and compressed his hand slightly harder than necessary.

I didn’t know how to approach asking to speak to him privately, so I didn’t say anything as he greeted the other men. They all moved back a few inches to let him center himself.

“I take it Karim’s been tutoring all you dinosaurs on millennial advancements?” he asked. “This kid is the future. He’s got brains and vision.” I had to bite the inside of my lip so that I wouldn’t smile.

Then he said, “Just goes to show, being smart and hardworking still counts for something in America. You don’t need to come from a wealthy family or go to an Ivy, or even have a business degree.” Even though he was overall complimenting me, I quickly felt less like a VIP again, and I wondered if all the men now thought my previous ideas lacked value because of my poor qualifications.

Soon a female started speaking on a microphone. She thanked everyone for coming and spoke about her organization’s goals. One of Mr. Schrub’s friends, who was the youngest and whose name was Mr. Slagle, motioned for a waiter. The waiter was a Mexican man who waited as Mr. Slagle selected three dates contained inside bacon. After he consumed them he had a remainder of three toothpicks, and since we weren’t near a trash bin or a table and the waiter had left, he dropped them on the floor.

Mr. Schrub whispered to his friends, “Remind me who we’re giving our money away to for this one?”

Mr. Slagle said, “Kosovo.”

“Kosovo,” Mr. Schrub said. “It’s beautiful there. They don’t need any money.”

Mr. Slagle laughed. Mr. Schrub looked at him. “You find that humorous, Dick?” His tone of voice was as serious as when he yelled at his sons.

Mr. Slagle’s eyes rotated to the others. “Sure,” he said.

“Well, it’s not,” Mr. Schrub said. “My great-grandfather was from there.”

His friends looked uncomfortable. “Hey, I’m sorry, Derek,” Mr. Slagle said.

“You’re sorry?” Mr. Schrub asked.

Mr. Slagle looked at the others as if he required help. “Honestly, I don’t know what to say,” he said. “I thought you were making a joke.”

The female finished her speech and the crowd applauded, but Mr. Schrub remained silent. I wanted to say something to help Mr. Slagle, but I didn’t know what I could say and of course I was afraid.

Then Mr. Schrub said, “I’m just joking, Dick,” and he contacted him on his shoulder and smiled. “What do you take me for, some kind of monster?”

Mr. Schrub laughed and then Mr. Slagle did and the other men followed, and the tension around them deleted. However, my muscles still felt restricted, as if I were exercising with weights. It reminded me of when Dan pretended he had cancer.

The others began talking again, and Mr. Schrub seemed to be in a positive mood, so I said to him quietly, “I am ready to discuss the contract.”

He looked at me and said, “Let’s go to my car.” He told his friends he would see them later, and he called Patrick to bring the car around. We exited the ballroom together. Walking with him was again parallel to walking through the restaurant: People pretended not to observe him, but they were all doing it.

We had to wait a minute on the street for the car, and I didn’t know what to say, and Mr. Schrub said nothing either, and I again felt a lack of confidence and wished I hadn’t told him I was ready to discuss the contract, but now I was there and I had to continue my plan.

The limo arrived and we got inside and Mr. Schrub told Patrick to drive us around the area for a few minutes. Mr. Schrub raised the internal divider between us and Patrick, and the world outside muted. The windows were also cloudy from the combination of interior heat and exterior cold, so it was as if we were contained inside a small egg with no sounds and few lights as we drove down 5th Ave.

“So?” he asked. It is difficult to proceed when someone launches a conversation with that.

I commanded myself to be strong and said, “I have finished the epidemiology paper. But I am not signing the contract, because I believe it transfers ownership to you.”

The lights of the luxury stores and their neon Christmas decorations passed by our dark windows in undefined shapes. “It transfers ownership so we can improve it,” he said. “You still get a healthy raise and plenty of stock. You’re not getting a raw deal here in any way.”

“It is not about the money,” I said. “Kapitoil has already independently outpaced quants revenues from all of last year by 3 %. Possibly this can help people.”

“You already are helping people,” he said. “This is not a zero-sum game, Karim. Do you know how many people in our office would be looking for jobs now if not for Kapitoil? Or how many other people it’s created opportunities for?” I didn’t say anything. “Look, I want to help people, too. But I’m a realist. The program might work for predicting the spread of diseases. But it definitely works for predicting oil futures. You don’t cut open the goose that lays golden eggs.”

“I understand I am helping some people,” I said. “But Kapitoil is a zero-sum game. It leverages problems elsewhere and transforms a loss into financial gain.”

He shook his head. “If we don’t do it, someone else will. Maybe you wish otherwise, but those are the rules of the game. If you can’t play by them — well, then, you’re not man enough to be in this business. And I had you pegged wrong.”

The car stopped quickly, and to stabilize myself I placed my hand on the window and deleted a section of the moisture. It was interesting how by making something clear I simultaneously left a mark. Through the small hole was St. Patrick’s Cathedral and its two tall towers in the front that looked like antennae.

“I’ve discussed with George promoting you and giving you a raise,” he continued. Then he stated a figure I never expected to earn in my life.

“Don’t answer now,” he said. “I’ll be away for Christmas, but my secretary will set up a meeting on the 30th with a new contract and all the terms spelled out clearly.”

He asked if I wanted to return to the fund-raiser, but I said I could walk home. Before I exited, he said, “Remember what I said about the goose, Karim.”

But as I walked home, instead of considering the goose or the rules of the game or if I was cut out to be in business, I thought about the toothpicks Mr. Slagle had deposited on the ground, and I wondered how long it would take until someone located them and picked them up, and how they would probably remain hidden for weeks or months with small pieces of dates and bacon on them and turn rotten. It was not the correct subject to be thinking about, but sometimes it’s difficult to control where your brain routes itself.

in the ballpark = an estimated value

man enough = possessing the strength and power to succeed

raw deal = a deal that is unfavorable for one party

JOURNAL DATE RECORDED: DECEMBER 26

The next day I still didn’t know what to do. I could consult with Barron, but (1) I still didn’t want to reveal what Kapitoil was, and (2) I was afraid he would think I was greedy for considering taking the money. And I had already not told the 100 % truth to Rebecca and couldn’t disclose to her all the details.

My mother would have also been a valuable advisor in this situation. She would not have judged me like my father would. And she would not have been as inexperienced as Zahira is in subjects like this. She also would be able to see multiple POVs, e.g., maybe the epidemiology proposal wouldn’t function and I might lose this program that would certify Zahira and I had sufficient funds for the future, or maybe it would function and some ventures like this merited the risk.

On the day of Christmas Eve I watched television for several hours. Most channels displayed shows or movies with Christmas as the subject. In one, a family invited a homeless man to their Christmas dinner, even though they were poor themselves. In the end he revealed that he was in fact a millionaire, and for their generosity he rewarded them. It was unrealistic and false although it still made me feel slightly enhanced at the end, but the more I thought about it after, the less I liked it.

By nighttime I felt quarantined in my apartment. I had seen advertisements on the news the entire day about Midnight Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and driving past it with Mr. Schrub had already made me think about attending it, and I had nothing else to do.

I walked along 50th St. to the cathedral. The black sky was littered with snowflakes like rays of sun underwater. I thought of how they would melt and sink into the ground for trees, and then the trees would eject water vapor, which produces more rain in return. The world can be so elegant when it is left alone to itself.

I wished I could share that moment and that thought with Rebecca, or with Zahira.

On a large monitor a few blocks from the cathedral, an anchorman was discussing a story about a famous female singer who sang for soldiers at an American base on Christmas Eve. Below it the scrolling font displayed: INSIDERS PREDICT “ANY GIVEN SUNDAY” WILL WIN HOLIDAY WEEKEND BOX OFFICE…

I followed the crowd entering the cathedral and powered off my cellular. The interior had long white pillars that curved at the top to form a ceiling that reminded me of the New York mosque’s dome. White lights looked like the snowflakes from the nighttime sky, and the blue glass windows were like the daytime sky. Although it wasn’t midnight yet, members of the church wearing white robes that looked like the class men wear in Qatar were singing in the front in Latin. There were no open seats, so I stood in the rear and closed my eyes and listened to the singing for several minutes. Of course it was a foreign language, but it was simultaneously not foreign at all.

The rest of the service was a combination of music, reading from the Bible, and rituals with candles. I imitated the people around me, and different religious ceremonies usually follow similar classes of algorithms and procedures, and although I looked different, I believe I merged well with the Christians, except when they launched the ritual of communion and I remained in the rear.

When I left, it was snowing more heavily and the frozen ground looked like a clean tablecloth. I didn’t want to ruin it, so I walked only in the paths other people had produced.

I woke up on the morning of Christmas and remembered I had powered off my cellular. I had two messages.

I was surprised to hear my father’s voice on the first one. He sounded volatile and all he said was to call him back ASAP. The next message was also from him and provided a different number.

I called, and a female voice answered “Hamad General Hospital,” and my lungs inhaled air too rapidly.

It took me several seconds to ask for my father. In a minute he was on the telephone.

“There has been an accident with Zahira,” he said.

I could not speak. My brain produced a series of images similar to the ones from the bad dreams I sometimes have about her.

A small bomb had exploded in a trash bin in the Mall early in the morning, he said, and Zahira was there. The bomb did not hurt her, but the explosion knocked her against a wall and she hit her head. She had a concussion and was taken to the emergency room.

“Is there any serious damage?” I finally asked.

“Not from the concussion,” he said. “But the doctors say they found something abnormal with her blood and are running additional tests.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“I do not know,” he said. “The way they speak, it is impossible to understand. We are allowed to talk to her in a few hours.”

I didn’t know what else to say. So I asked, “What was the reason for the bomb?”

He spoke slowly. “They say it was a group here that is protesting the development of new malls in Qatar.”

“Did anyone—” I paused. “Did anyone else get hurt?”

“A few other people had minor injuries,” he said. “But there was a boy standing between Zahira and the trash bin.”

“What happened to him?” I asked, and immediately I wished I hadn’t.

His voice became very quiet. “I think he was taken to the burn unit.”

We were mute for a while. I asked him to have Zahira call me at her earliest convenience.

I disconnected, then sat up in bed and looked out my window. The Schrub monitor displayed: MERRY XMAS…BRONCOS VS. LIONS 4:15 P.M. KICKOFF…MIX OF FREEZING DRIZZLE AND LIGHT SLEET THROUGH DAY…I watched for several minutes, but there was nothing about the bombing.

My eyes moved up to the neon-green Schrub hawk against the gray sky. It was strange. I always thought of it as setting down the S and E, but now it looked as if it were picking them up in its talons.

The solitary positive was that Zahira was too young to remember which hospital it was.

I didn’t leave the apartment because I wanted to certify Zahira could reach me. I prayed, but not for Zahira’s health, because I know that only frustrates you when it fails. Finally my cellular rang in the afternoon.

“It is me,” Zahira said when I answered it. She sounded exhausted.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I’ve felt healthier,” she said, “but I’m okay.”

“Father said they were running tests,” I said.

“That is why I am calling,” she said, and again my stomach rotated. “They think I have something called ulcerative colitis. It’s a disease in the colon. I have been losing weight for several months, and this is why.”

I closed my eyes with force. “How serious is it?”

“Because they found it early, they’re going to put me on medication, and they believe it will help,” she said. “If they had discovered it later, it could have required removal of the colon.”

I opened my eyes again. Three of the chairs at the table were in order, but the fourth one was out of line, and the asymmetry bothered me. “What causes it?”

“No one knows,” she said. “It’s just poor luck.”

“Maybe you have been losing weight because you have been studying so much. When I work hard I sometimes forget to eat well.”

“No. I have been eating less because everything I eat makes me feel ill,” she said. “I did not tell anyone what was happening to me because I was humiliated.”

“You should get a second opinion,” I said.

“Three different doctors here all agree.”

“Still, doctors are sometimes wrong.”

“I have it!” she said. “All right? I have it.”

I aligned the fourth chair with the other three and sat in it. “This is not right. It is not fair for you to get this.”

“Stop it, Karim. Don’t make me sad about this.”

“I’m not trying to make you sad. I am upset for you.”

“Well, don’t be!” she said. “I’m trying to see the better side. It could have been worse. They could have discovered this in six months and I could be preparing to lose my colon. Or the accident could have been worse. I could have been that boy.” She stopped.

“I am going to fly home tomorrow,” I said.

“No,” she said. “I can handle this. They say I am anemic and require a blood transfusion and they want to observe me here for a few more days. The visiting hours are short and there is no need for you to miss your last week of work if you are already coming home on the 31st.”

I hadn’t told her that if I signed a new contract, Schrub would therefore probably extend my stay beyond my initial departure date. We argued more about it, but finally I said I would call her each day. Then I asked, “How is father?”

“Haami and Maysaa are with him now,” she said. “It is hard to tell with him. He has been very quiet.”

Before the nurse made us disconnect, I asked, “Zahira, why were you in the Mall?”

“I was buying a gift,” she said.

“Who was it for?”

She paused. “It was for myself.”

It was difficult to continue talking, but I said, “I have missed our conversations.”

She said, “So have I.”

At night I called Rebecca. “We have family friends over, so I can’t talk long,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

She talked about the activities like cross-country skiing she had done with her family and the many milkshakes she had consumed and a class of cheese she enjoys that she consumes there. “I may even need to set foot in a gym to shed these 30 new pounds,” she said. I didn’t respond, and she laughed and said, “That’s an exaggeration. I’ll never go to a gym.”

I said, “My sister has had some health issues.”

She immediately said she was very sorry and asked how she was. I told her, but I didn’t include the bombing. “What about you?” she asked. “You all right?”

“It does not matter how I am,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “Is it a good hospital?”

I felt pressure behind my eyes as I did in Rebecca’s bedroom at her party, and my throat began restricting itself. My voice was unstable as I said, “I am receiving another call. It may be my family.”

“Take it.”

“Good-bye,” I said, and now my voice was very volatile.

“Bye,” she said. “I guess I’ll touch base with you when I’m back.”

I disconnected and stood there for several minutes with my eyes closed until my body stabilized. When I opened them, my black table and its four ordered chairs looked very spacious and voided.

touch base = reestablish contact

JOURNAL DATE RECORDED: DECEMBER 30

I talked to Zahira each day. She was still fatigued, but her mood was enhanced, and she told me everything about her disease that she had learned from the doctors and her own research. She used many jargon terms I had never heard before, and I had difficulty following her, although I didn’t want to tell her that while she was stimulated, but when she started discussing a chromosome named “1p36” in English, I finally had to confess that I didn’t understand.

“I think that is the first time you have admitted you don’t know something,” she said.

Normally I would be slightly angry, but I could tell she was smiling, so I merely said, “You are skilled at biology, and I am skilled at computers. If you studied computers you would excel in them, and if I studied biology I would excel at that,” although that is false, as I was never strong at biology.

Talking to her distracted me, but I was still uncertain about what to do at my meeting with Mr. Schrub on Thursday afternoon.

Rebecca was working overtime in preparation for Y2K and was too exhausted to see me, but I went to her apartment on Wednesday night. Jessica was there with a man she had recently launched a relationship with named Colin who had almost parallel facial features to her, and the four of us cooked a dinner of couscous and vegetables and a stew together. When Jessica couldn’t find their blender (which was inferior to my Juicinator) and I found it in a cabinet, she said, “Time for you to move in with us,” which simultaneously humiliated and delighted me.

Colin and I partnered to purchase olive oil at the market. He asked how long I had been dating Rebecca. “Since Thanksgiving, so five weeks minus one day, although I have known her for almost three months,” I said.

“You seem to really like each other,” he said.

“We are very different in some ways, but similar in others, and I have not met anyone like her before,” I said. Although I always attempt not to be boastful, I added, “And I believe she has not met anyone like me.”

After dinner we played poker and bet quarters. I played well, as did Rebecca, although I was cautious and only bet when I knew I had a high percentage of winning. At the end Rebecca and I continually raised each other, and Jessica and Colin exited the game. I had two pairs, but Rebecca raised so rapidly that I began to question the relative value of my cards, and finally, even though the money was insignificant to me, I exited as well, because it’s still always preferable to minimize losses. Jessica asked what we both had. Rebecca showed her cards, which were valueless. “Just my ability to bullshit,” she said as she aggregated the quarters. “You’ve got to learn how to bluff if you’re going to be a card shark, Karim.”

We divided into the two bedrooms. I selected a CD by Bob Dylan without asking her permission and reclined on the bed with my head on her stomach and listened to it while she petted my hair. My preferred song was called “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” which was a strong example of the art I had been enjoying the last few months in that it blended positive emotions with negative ones. I still of course appreciate art that boosts positive emotions, because that is rare and necessary, and although the Beatles will always be special to me because of my memories and because their instrumental and vocal skills are the highest quality, musicians like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen are also appealing because they sing about subjects that reject binaries and are mysterious in the way math can be mysterious, e.g., sometimes you locate an answer and the universe becomes almost magical because in the middle of chaos there is still order, and sometimes there is no answer, and because of that the universe is even more magical since it has secrets that humans can never understand.

I told Rebecca this, and she said, “You’re turning into a real postmodernist,” which I understood from the movie essay even if I still didn’t 100 % understand the concept of postmodernism.

“You haven’t mentioned Zahira,” she also said.

I told her what I had learned about her disease from her, and that the doctors believed she could control it with medication.

“If you have your health and family, nothing else really matters,” she said. “My apologies for turning into a human Hallmark card.”

Without evaluating it, I asked her, “What would you think if I created a computer program that might have a significant impact on health in developing countries?”

“Is that what you’ve been working on?” she asked.

“Yes, but if I pursue it, I may need to leave the country for several months,” I said. I was regretting telling her this much already. Even explaining further a partial detail such as how I would need to leave the country temporarily, because Schrub would fire me and I would have to find a new employer in the U.S. to sponsor my visa, would require full disclosure about Kapitoil.

“So it’s like a fellowship?”

I looked at one of her brother’s paintings and its strange colors. “It is similar to that,” I said.

The music compensated for our muteness. Then she said, “If it’s something you want to do, don’t let me hold you back.”

I was hoping she wouldn’t want me to go, to facilitate my decision, but I said, “I will know what I am doing in a few days.”

She received a call, and I asked if she wanted me to exit to give her privacy, but she said it was her mother and she would require just a few minutes. She talked in a different voice to her on the telephone from with me. I heard her mother ask a question, and Rebecca slightly rotated her head away from me and she said a little more quietly, “I can’t really say right now.” Now I felt I was being invasive, but if I left the room it would appear that I was aware of my infringement, so I moved to the bookshelf and examined her books but couldn’t restrict myself from listening.

The volume of her voice lowered even more. “It’s far from that stage yet, so you don’t have to worry about it. In fact, it’s not even your place to worry about at all.” She listened more. “Fine. Yes, fine.”

She said good-bye and disconnected and made an angry animal sound with her throat. I went to the restroom to give her some time to stabilize. When I returned, she was drawing lines with her finger against the cold glass of her window. “Are you all right?” I asked.

“Hmm?” she said. “Yeah, she’s just…I don’t know.”

We listened to the remainder of the CD without talking. Our bodies were in contact on the bed, but it felt again like we were magnets with similar poles.

She fell asleep before I did, and when I petted her arm I felt a square object under her sleeve. I lifted it and recognized from advertisements a nicotine patch. I hadn’t seen her smoke or smelled it on her clothing recently. I was happy to see the patch, but I had two other thoughts: (1) It is hard for me to understand why someone needs to rely on any drug to resolve a problem (which is the same reason I find it hard to understand why Rebecca requires Zoloft), although I know that not everyone is like I am and wants to problem-solve independently, and (2) it is intriguing that to overcome an addiction to a substance, the addict frequently requires a certain amount of the substance before she can 100 % remove it. It supports my theory that extreme reactions aren’t necessary and are often less efficient than moderate approaches.

I removed my arm from under her head without waking her, which was difficult because her head seemed so soft to me, even the small bump centered on the back under her hair, and I exited to the living room window and looked at the yellow streetlights on the snow and dialed my cellular.

My father answered at his store. I asked how Zahira looked.

“Not good,” he said. “Although that is temporary. But this disease will still make it difficult.”

“It will make what difficult?”

“Finding her a husband,” he said.

It was a mistake to call him. “I cannot believe that is what concerns you,” I said.

“Her health concerns me as well. But this presents an additional problem.”

“If a man is foolish enough not to be interested in her because of this, then he does not merit her anyway.”

“Is that all you called to say?” he asked. “That I’m an old man who doesn’t understand how the modern world works? I’m merely looking out for her.”

“That isn’t looking out for her.” The few lights of the buildings in the neighborhood produced yellow constellations against the black sky. “And she doesn’t need you to do so.”

“Then I should let her go where she pleases, and maybe next time she will end up in the burn unit as well?”

“Unless you quarantine her in a room, there are too many dangers in the world to defend her against,” I said. “And even if you quarantine her, there are still some dangers you cannot prevent.”

He didn’t say anything. “Is the hospital room comfortable for her?” I asked.

“It has been updated since I was last here, but it still has a certain smell I dislike,” he said. “And the doctors speak to me as if I am a child.”

“That must be very frustrating for you,” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

“She tells me the doctors are informing her well, and that she is doing her own research.”

“Yes,” he said again.

“Is she explaining the concepts to you?”

“And to Haami,” he said. “Which is even more difficult.”

I almost laughed, but I interrupted myself. “It is unfortunate the doctors there do not possess the communication skills she has,” I said.

“Yes,” he said for a third time.

The door to Rebecca’s room was still closed.

I said, “I am in a relationship here with a Jewish female.”

He was mute for such a long time that I thought we might be disconnected. Finally he said, “It is not my preference. But I cannot quarantine you in a room.”

Then he added one word: “Either.”

That word was an important one. And when I heard it, I knew what I had to do the next day.

There was some noise, and he said he had a customer. I said, “I have one question.” It was difficult for me to ask, but I forced myself to state it as if it were a strategy question in a business conference: “Do you remember the Beatles song mother often used to sing to me when I went to sleep?”

I heard him ask the customer to wait. My eyes became fatigued, and the lights of the buildings across the street spread out like gold dust.

Then he said, “I do not remember it, but I know the title was a female’s name.” The customer yelled at him, and we disconnected.

I put down my cellular. I still couldn’t remember the song.

My eyes refocused and the yellow lights outside sharpened into small squares and one room powered off its lights while another one near it simultaneously powered on.

This line entered my brain:

Her hair of floating sky is shimmering, glimmering, in the sun.

And the metaphor of floating sky suddenly made me access a brief memory of my mother singing that part of the song “Julia” to me while sitting on the side of my bed. That was all I could recall. Then I lost the memory of the sound and image. But at least I had it for a few moments, and I remembered that the Beatles also sang about blended emotions, and the pressure bottlenecked behind my eyes again, and I told myself to be strong and to repress it, but then I considered that maybe it was in fact stronger to allow it to happen, so I let myself release, and for several minutes I could not control it, which typically panics me but now it didn’t because it wasn’t exclusively sad, it was also blended, and Rebecca entered the living room and petted my back in a circular pattern with her hand and we stood there mutely for several minutes until I stabilized, and she kept her hand on my back and we returned to her bed and remained mute, which I valued.

bluff = display confidence when your holdings are valueless to leverage the ignorance of the other party

card shark = a card player who bluffs and succeeds

JOURNAL DATE RECORDED: DECEMBER 31

The day of my meeting with Mr. Schrub I let Kapitoil run on autopilot. The scrolling white numbers on the black monitor blurred like a snowstorm the entire morning.

In the afternoon I walked all the way uptown through the snow to Mr. Schrub’s apartment. My external concentration was so low that a garbage truck almost crashed into me on Broadway. It was almost amusing to me how you can be so focused on macro concerns, but it requires only a micro event like that to impact everything.

When I arrived at Mr. Schrub’s apartment, I had to check in as before. The receptionist called upstairs and then told me that Mr. Schrub was coming downstairs. I waited 20 minutes, however, and each minute I grew more panicked. But I reminded myself that this was possibly part of his negotiation strategy.

Finally Mr. Schrub arrived with his briefcase. “Let’s take a walk,” he said. “I’ve been cooped up all day.”

We crossed the street to Central Park without talking. As we passed a white horse with black markings attached to a carriage, Mr. Schrub asked, “Feel like a carriage ride? I’m always up for one, but Helena says it’s cruel to the animals.”

I consented, and he arranged a ride with the driver, an Indian man with glasses that were highly concave.

We covered ourselves with blankets and the horse pulled us into the park, away from all the dirty snow where people had walked and onto a clean interior path. Our breath made small clouds in front of our faces like exhaust from a car.

Mr. Schrub put his briefcase on his lap over the blanket and opened it. “I’ve got the contract ready. You can sign now, but we’ll wait until you have a lawyer cosign it so you can be sure you understand all its terms. I think you’ll find it very generous.”

He handed me the stack of papers. In bolded font was the price for the program. It was even higher than what he said at the fund-raiser. Something happens when you see a number attached to a currency symbol, instead of just thinking about it. It becomes more real. Sometimes I enjoy examining my bank account for that reason: Unless I observe evidence, I still don’t believe someone is paying me for what I would also do for free.

There was a division in the path, and Mr. Schrub asked the driver to turn left, but because it was windy and we were behind him and the horse made so much noise, Mr. Schrub had to yell at him three times before he finally heard, and the horse angled northwest. Its body was perspiring even though the temperature was below freezing.

Mr. Schrub added, “And we’ll give you a team of programmers to direct. Any resource you want, you’ll get. We’re going to groom you for a leadership position.”

I considered my options:

1. This was of course what I wanted most of all when I arrived here in October;

A. and in some ways it was what I still wanted;

B. and as a leader at Schrub I could make some enhancements in business practices;

2. but Kapitoil would still operate and exploit problems elsewhere;

A. and as Mr. Schrub said about himself, I would change slightly daily in ways I wouldn’t notice;

B. and one day I would be a different person and no longer Karim-esque;

i. and possibly being Karim-esque, although it is not confident or experienced or a strong negotiator or many other factors that make a skilled businessman, is still a positive class of being;

ii. and is in fact superior to being Schrub-esque;

1. and I knew that if I signed the contract and told my father what I had done, he would be disappointed.

I folded the contract in half.

“I cannot sign this,” I said.

“Is it a money issue?” he asked. “We can get more.”

I shook my head. “I will be publishing my paper.”

“What if we confidentially provided the code to a few select partners in the sectors you’re interested in, and continued running Kapitoil?”

I had already evaluated this idea. “The code must be on the open market for the best people to utilize it. And there may be applications we have not thought of. The only way to know is if it is available to everyone,” I said. “I have made my decision.”

He exhaled with force through his nostrils. His muteness made me nervous, as it always did.

Then he said, “Kapitoil was fully funded by the company and written on company time. We could take you to court and easily block you from disclosing it to others, and my programmers could get access to the code or write a version of it on their own. You wouldn’t come away with a cent. We’re offering you a lot of money to avoid that.”

Although the horse accelerated on an empty path and the wind sliced my cheeks, my body heated up under the blanket. I couldn’t believe I was so foolish that I hadn’t asked Cynthia about this. I hadn’t 100 % created the program on company time as he stated, but they had funded me. He had the best lawyers in the country, and the solitary one I knew was Cynthia.

Mr. Schrub was correct: Possibly I wasn’t man enough to be in business.

And I could make my family secure for years, not months, if I merely signed the contract.

He was the more skilled player. He knew how to leverage the rules of the game.

The horse slowed down and stopped as a large cluster of Asian tourists crossed the path in front of us. I looked down the side of the carriage as we waited. A small piece of bread sat on top of the snow like a topping on a cake with icing, and dozens of ants were aggregating around it. It again wasn’t the correct subject to be thinking about at the time, but it made me happy that such a small piece of food was sufficient for so many ants.

The other incorrect subject to be thinking about was Mr. Schrub’s comment that his programmers could innovate their own version of Kapitoil. It was a complex and beautiful program, and although Schrub has the cream of the cream programmers, I don’t believe anyone else could write a parallel program, even launching from the proposal I presented to Mr. Ray, and it angered me that he thought other people could.

But maybe he didn’t truly think his employees could rewrite Kapitoil. Schrub had continued to offer me more and more money to have access to the code. They had probably attempted to create their own version and failed, and they knew that their only opportunity was to buy the program from me.

Then I thought of Rebecca’s advice from our poker game and had an idea. And it was as if I were observing the entire galaxy of stars while I was simultaneously struck by lightning.

I retrieved my voice recorder and accessed the saved recordings folder and selected a short file and pressed play.

Mr. Schrub’s voice came on: “Well, in better news, I have a proposal for you. My business people emailed it over this morning…I don’t fully understand it, but apparently they want you to de-encrypt Kapitoil and allow our programmers access to the code, so they can make modifications to the algorithms, too. You’ll still be the point man on all this, and you’ll get a corresponding bump in salary…As far as I can tell, it’s a win-win for everyone.”

I pressed the stop button. The skin around Mr. Schrub’s eyes trisected.

I said, “That is proof you tried to mislead me about the original contract.” Then I bluffed. “I can sue you for that. My lawyer has a copy of this recording, and because I did not in fact create Kapitoil on company time but on my own time, and it is copyrighted in my name, she says that the rights are mine. You will have a few more months to use the program until the paper is published and before the algorithmic signal loses its power.” I added something that I didn’t believe, but maybe Mr. Schrub would: “And if you take us to court, the concept of the program will be revealed to the public immediately and someone else will gain enough information to create a similar program and Kapitoil will be valueless for the futures market, and you will not come away with a cent.”

Then I was mute, and for once I could tell he was the nervous negotiator. He rotated his head and observed the snowy trees that looked like cauliflowers. “I’d like you to turn off the recorder for a moment,” he said.

I powered it off and showed him.

He watched the Asian tourists, who were stopping to take photographs and still blocking our progress. He quietly said, “Do you know what a cipher is?”

I said, “It is a jargon term for an algorithm that encrypts or decrypts.”

“No,” he said, even though my statement was true. “A cipher is a zero. A nothing. It doesn’t exist.” Finally he turned his head to me, and his face was slightly red from the wind, although his voice still remained quiet. “You, Karim — you are a cipher. You are a nothing. A nobody. You don’t exist. You don’t make a difference.”

And for a few seconds, his words truly made me feel like I didn’t exist, which is possibly the worst feeling to have about yourself.

“People from your area of the world can encounter visa problems very easily,” he said. “Sometimes they can’t reenter the U.S. after they leave. Forever.”

His face returned to normal color and he looked relaxed again, as if he had hit a strong racquetball shot and knew I had little chance of returning it. My legs lost strength, and it felt like knives were stabbing my back. I also knew he had the power to do this to me. But Mr. Schrub’s warning didn’t target precisely what he thought he was targeting: that I could never work at a company in the U.S. again. That wasn’t what I was most invested in anymore.

He was forcing me to make a zero-sum decision, as the lion’s share of business transactions are.

A pigeon rapidly descended by my side to the ground. It stabbed the piece of bread with its beak and in a second it was deleted, and just as quickly the pigeon vibrated its wings and left behind the ants.

I rotated my eyes toward Mr. Schrub’s hands on top of the blanket. Although he had no cuts or scars on them, his skin had spots and looked as fragile and wrinkled as a used banknote. It seemed like the only thing he could do with them was type on a computer or use a pen. Most of his nails were trimmed, but the one on the second finger of his right hand was slightly longer than the others and slightly yellow and acutely angled.

I wasn’t afraid anymore. Instead, I was very sad, as if I were watching somebody, or something, die in front of me. And although he had insulted and threatened me, I felt almost sorry for him. He was more like his sons than he wanted to believe. They were driven only by having a good time. He was driven only by winning. And he could not see that one party’s victory always causes another party’s defeat.

“Good-bye, Mr. Schrub,” I said.

I pushed the blanket off me and jumped out of the carriage and merged with the Asian tourists just before the carriage restarted.

I walked with them for several feet as the carriage resumed down the path and Mr. Schrub turned back to watch me, and then I ran ahead of the tourists and deeper into the park.

My body was strong. I continued running northwest, even though it was difficult on the snow in my shoes, but I could not stop. I felt as if I could run infinitely. When I reached the Ramble after several minutes, I was the solitary person around, and I finally decelerated, and it was peaceful hearing exclusively the sounds of ice and snow crunching under my feet like almonds in teeth and of squirrels running and a few birds chirping.

I found a stone bridge with a small arch entryway just a few feet wide at its base. Inside the arch, I stood and put my hands on the walls and closed my eyes for a long time. I listened to the wind and inhaled the air and finally deleted my mind of thoughts in a way I had not been able to achieve in all my time in New York.

When I reopened my eyes, I didn’t know how much time had passed, but the sun was setting. I used the snow to wash myself as efficiently as I could, and the coldness of the snow somehow warmed me, and I performed the Maghrib prayer under the arch. The air smelled clean, as if the world had refreshed itself.

I finished and called Rebecca at the office. “I have to leave on my flight tomorrow morning,” I said.

I could hear Dan talking to Jefferson in the background. “You took the fellowship?” she asked.

“I will give you details later,” I said, and I asked her to meet me at my apartment after work. Then I called Barron and arranged for him to drive me to the airport the next morning.

Packing was simple, as my additional possessions were exclusively my new shirts and suits and my juicer. I had to retrieve a cardboard box from the doorman to store the extra suits and juicer.

Rebecca arrived and apologized for being late. I asked her to sit on the couch. It took me a long time to initiate my sentence, and she said, “The suspense is killing me.”

Then I told her everything about Kapitoil and the epidemiology project I was still going to move forward with, and how I had rejected Mr. Schrub’s offer, and that I was fired.

At the end she asked, “Well, can’t you find another job here?”

I explained what Mr. Schrub was going to do.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh.”

Then she took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes and while they were closed said, “This is maybe a moronic idea, but what if — I can’t believe I’m suggesting this, of all people — but what if we got a quickie marriage tomorrow to keep you in the country?”

My body’s interior felt an electric charge. “You would marry me?” I asked.

She removed her hands from her eyes and looked down. “It’s not necessarily how I always daydreamed about my wedding day, but I could do worse.” She laughed slightly. “For the record, I’ve never had a daydream about my wedding.” Then her eyes angled to me and were large and serious. “But, yeah,” she said, and she smiled for an instant before returning to a non-smile.

I knew she was not proposing a fully authentic marriage, but she would not have done it if her feelings were not at least partially authentic. And my feelings for her were authentic. In fact, except for Zahira, I was most Karim-esque around Rebecca, and to boot, I was even learning to be Rebecca-esque, which was possibly what relationships were about more than they were merely about compromise.

I thought about how happy I would be if I went to sleep and woke up next to her daily, and how much I would learn from her, and possibly how much I could teach her, and what it would be like for her to meet Zahira and for me to meet her brother.

Then I wondered what it would be like for her to meet my father, or for me to meet her mother, or to walk around Doha with her. And we had other differences that might make us incompatible for a long-term partnership.

However, Rebecca and I were both intelligent problem solvers, and even though emotions and relationships were in many ways more complex than programs and mathematics equations, I had developed my skill set significantly in these areas in the last few months. Possibly it could work.

But I put my hand on her arm and said, “I value that idea very much. But Mr. Schrub probably has the power to prevent it from helping anyway, and I do not want this to cause problems for you as well.” She replaced her glasses. “And although it is an idea I like, this is not the method to be together. It is like an arranged marriage.” Then I added, “Love cannot be produced by force. It should come from itself,” which is the idea I had when I smoked marijuana at her party, and it surprised me that I stated it now, because most ideas created with the help of drugs aren’t sound, but I truly believed this one.

She nodded and looked at my hand on her arm. “I’m going to quit, too, by the way. Don’t worry, it’s not just about you. But you finally motivated me to get the hell out of Dodge,” she said. “It’s an idiom for leaving a place you don’t want to be.”

“What will you do?” I asked.

“There’s still enough time to sign up for spring classes in a Master of Ed program somewhere,” she said. “In a couple years I can teach high school history in the city. Some idiot once told me I’d make a good teacher.”

I said, “You should be careful about taking advice from an idiot, but I also support your decision.”

I asked her to sleep over, and we talked for a little longer. When she was half sleeping, I touched her left ear on the soft part above her dolphin earring and said quietly, “I am afraid you will find someone else and forget about me.”

Her eyes were closed and I believe she slightly heard me but she was almost unconscious so she only said something I couldn’t understand and put her arm around me tighter, but I decided it didn’t matter, because if what I said was true, that love comes from itself and is the ultimate self-starter, then if we were meant to be together we would be together, and if she was meant to be with someone else, then I had to be an adult and accept my loss and instead try to remember the additions she made to my life.

When my alarm powered on in the morning, Rebecca and I were still linked and it was dark outside. I told her she could sleep longer and even stay after I left, and prepared in the restroom.

She was standing by the bed when I returned. “I’ll leave with you,” she said.

We went downstairs with my luggage and waited outside as snow fell on us from the gray sky like a shower. We didn’t say very much. It is always difficult when you know you are about to leave someone and you cannot prevent it.

Soon Barron parked his car in front, and he helped me store my luggage and the cardboard box in the trunk. He said hello to Rebecca, then sat in the car and waited.

“I almost forgot this,” she said, and she retrieved from her bag a CD. “I made this over Christmas. It’s a mix.”

She had written “Songs for Karim” on it. I liked how she didn’t have to write “From Rebecca” on it. I told her I would listen to it when I arrived home.

She bit her lip and the skin of her forehead compressed in the middle, and then she removed her own CD player from her bag and gave it to me. “Listen to it on the plane,” she said. I remembered I still had her copy of The Great Gatsby and had not finished it yet, but she told me to keep it as well, and I said I felt foolish that I had no gifts for her, but she said she didn’t enjoy receiving gifts anyway although she was framing the picture I made for her and was going to hang it in her room.

“I hate good-byes,” said Rebecca.

“I do as well,” I said.

“I just realized that, even more than I hate good-byes, I hate people who say ‘I hate good-byes.’”

I said, “I do not, but I understand what you mean.”

“You’ll be checking email over there?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “But I will send you a stone with symbols on it.”

“Your sense of humor is getting better,” she said. “I mean, ‘enhancing.’”

I thanked her, but instead of saying “You’re welcome” she said, “I don’t want to watch you go.” So I rotated her glasses on her face asymmetrically, and she put out her hands as if she couldn’t see me for a few seconds, and I laughed, and then she took them off 100 % and hugged me and opened the front door of the car and squeezed my hand one more time and kissed it, which no one else has ever done for me, and before she closed the door she said, “Take care of yourself, kiddo.”

We drove away and she walked carefully on the icy sidewalk until she disappeared through the snow and into the subway. Although we said we’d remain in contact, I knew that our emails would decrease in frequency over the next few months, and I wasn’t skilled on the telephone so we wouldn’t converse much, and we would discuss her traveling to Qatar or meeting in another country, although that would probably not happen, and then maybe we would email exclusively on holidays or birthdays, and finally we would go so long without communication that it would be too difficult to relaunch it, and our relationship would terminate.

I didn’t want my last memory of Rebecca to be of her entering the subway with that thought in my brain, so I recalled being with her in Prospect Park in the snow and the odor of her watermelon shampoo in the cold air. I hoped that would be how she would remember me as well. It wasn’t a hard copy, but for this I trusted more the power of my memory.

And possibly my prediction about us was incorrect. Human emotions and behavior often deny conventional analysis. People cannot always be quantified.

Barron was mute until we reached the tunnel for Queens. Then he said, “She’s good people,” and even though he omitted the indefinite article and used the incorrect plural, I said, “That is true.”

“I take it things worked out with that contract?” he asked.

I said, “I am satisfied with the results.”

He exited the tunnel and we accelerated on the highway. In the mirror, Manhattan’s tall buildings minimized until they looked like gray toothpicks. “So, you going back to your old job?”

I remembered what Jefferson had said about Dan: that he had a “narrow worldview.” With experience and training, possibly I could broaden my worldview and utilize computers in a nonfinancial form, as I was trying to do with the epidemiology project. And if Zahira’s skill set deepened with biology, we could even partner in the future.

But that would require me to master new subjects. Now I could afford to enroll in daytime university classes, although it was too late to register for classes in the spring and therefore I could not start until August. While I waited, I would need to find another job. I could do something with computers, but it would be difficult to find an employer who would hire me for just a few months. And my solitary professional experience was in finance.

“No,” I said at a low volume.

We didn’t talk the remainder of the ride as I considered what else I had the qualifications for. The roads weren’t bottlenecked because it was so early, and we arrived at the airport in a few minutes and I took out a $50 bill. Just before he took it, he pushed my hand away and said, “It’s on the house.”

He defined the expression, and I thanked him and said I could retrieve my luggage myself. We shook hands inside the car and said good-bye and I gave him my English business card. “Wait,” I said, and I crossed out my Schrub contact data and wrote my home telephone and personal email address.

I removed my luggage from the rear. As I took out the box with my extra suits and juicer, I had a quick mental tableau of Barron in one of my suits making juice for his daughter, and although I was stimulated to show the juicer to Zahira, the image made me so happy that I took out a pen and wrote, “(4) suits and (1) juicer for Barron and Michelle,” and replaced it. I closed the trunk and stayed where I was and waved at Barron while he drove away so he couldn’t see that I didn’t possess the box anymore.

Inside the airport, the airline employee behind the counter checked me in for my flight. “And would you like to purchase an upgrade to first class, Mr. Issar?” she asked.

“No, thank you,” I said.

She pressed some keys on her computer and observed my suit. “Will you be traveling to Qatar for work?”

All around me, business people in clothing like mine handed over passports and swiped credit cards and deposited pieces of luggage that moved along the rubber tracks before they disappeared into the void.

“No,” I said again.

I know what I will be doing. I will float through the sky one quarter of the earth’s circumference to the east. I will land and retrieve my possessions. I will visit my sister in the hospital that once held my mother. I will sleep at night in the home where she died.

And then, in the morning, I will wake up, eat breakfast, walk to the place where I have spent more hours than at any other job, and go to work for my father.