he seen him walk in? How had he noticed? And where does one pick up such skills? “He’ll buy me coffee, then a pastry, and then he’ll want to tag along.” Of course, no sooner had he told me not to look than I’d already turned my head to see who it was. “Didn’t you hear me say don’t look now?” “Yes, I heard you say don’t look now.” “Then why did you look?” All I could do was apologize, say I’d always been slow on the uptake. “But this slow?”
Sometimes there’d be a woman he was trying to avoid. Big embrace if he couldn’t duck in time, big introductions, kiss-kiss, and kiss-kiss again, then immediately turning to me, “Is he here?” “Is who here?” I’d ask ingenuously. “The immigration lawyer we’re supposed to meet?” he’d hiss, brandishing his stiletto grin, ready to hack at me for lacking the remotest sense of man-to-man complicity. It would take me a moment to understand. “No,” I’d reply, “he said he’d be waiting at the café across the street.” “Waiting at the café across the street, waiting at the café across the street,” he mumbled under his breath as we’d rush out of Café Algiers. “How long must it take you to come up with something as stupid as waiting at the café across the street?” “Why was it stupid?” I’d protest, knowing that it was completely stupid. “Because she could have easily asked to join us!” Never had I felt so useless and callow in ordinary day-to-day affairs. I was a flea tagging after a titan.
One day, as I walked into Café Algiers, I noticed a girl reading a book at what was my usual corner table. The table next to hers was unoccupied. So I walked over to the free table, put my book down, and sat down. She was reading Melville. I was rereading Spenser. When eventually she lifted her head, I caught her gaze and asked where she was in Moby-Dick. She told me. I made a face. She smiled. She looked over at my book and said she’d studied Spenser the previous year. The two of us were reading impossible English, I ventured. “It just takes getting used to,” she said sweetly. We continued to talk. About the teachers, about our books, about other books. She liked many authors. I wasn’t so sure I liked so many. Then, with the conversation drying up, I let her go back to her reading, and I picked up mine. Not long afterward, she stood up, left some change on the table, and was about to leave the café. “Maybe you should reread Melville,” she said before walking out.
“Maybe,” I said.
I felt I had made an enemy.
“Couldn’t you tell she wanted to keep talking?” Kalaj said when he walked up to my table. I hadn’t noticed he’d been watching me all this time. He asked what we’d spoken about.
“So you spoke about books. Then what?”
I didn’t know that there was a then what.
“You could have said something about her, or at least said something about yourself. Or the people around us. Or tea leaves, for the love of God. Anything! You could have asked questions. Helped her answer them. Suggested things. Made her laugh. Instead you told her you hated things. You’re a champion—seriously.”
“It’s where the conversation went.”
“Because you let it go there.”
“Because I let it go there.”
“Exactly.”
“What will you do the next time you speak to a woman in a café?”
My silence said it all.
“Do you not understand women or are you just inept?”
I looked at him in dismay.
“I suppose both,” I finally said.
The two of us burst out laughing.
He knew the whereabouts of everyone, understood why and how things worked, trusted no one, and at all times expected the worst from each and every one. He foresaw what people might do or say, figured things out even when he couldn’t understand the first thing about them, and sniffed out deceit and shortcuts most mortals were simply unaware even existed. In this, as in so many other things, he belonged to another order of beings. Gods, heroes, and monsters hadn’t been invented when he burst in on the fifth day of creation all wired up and set to go. Mankind would arrive much, much later.
Kalaj also remembered faces. While walking with him one day I ran into a Syrian fellow I knew and said, “He’s a good guy.” “He’s a sick fuck,” Kalaj replied, and right away related how, a few