Read Online Brief Encounters with the Enemy by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh - Free Book Online

facing the railing. They had a ghostly quality, as if someone had leaped and left behind his imprint. I wanted to ask the landlady if she might be able to clean away those feet at some point, but I didn’t ask and I took the apartment anyway.
    Now I opened the balcony door and stood outside. It was raining lightly. Perhaps today was the day it would stop altogether. No one was out on the street. In the distance was a lineof dense trees that in the dim light seemed closer than they actually were. Beyond the trees were the mountains. The mountains and the trees made the city seem rural, or on the verge of becoming rural, as if civilization were working in reverse and nature were reclaiming the land for itself. The mayor had countered this by referring to the city as “The Emerging International City.” He hoped the moniker would catch on. So far it hadn’t. On local television, there were commercials every fifteen minutes, poorly made, with people on the street pretending to make unprompted remarks about why the city was already an international city or deserved to be one. But it was clear that none of them really knew what they were talking about. Furthermore, the phrase “emerging international city” was so cumbersome and took such great concentration to say that you could detect, after watching these commercials over and over, the way people paused ever so slightly before uttering it. The very fact that everyone managed to pronounce the phrase without stumbling once was evidence that the whole man-on-the-street conceit was fraudulent.
    Below my balcony, two black boys were riding by on bicycles. They were drenched from the rain and they were laughing and they were full of bravado. One of the boys happened to glance up at me. “What are you looking at, white man?” he yelled out, speeding away as if I might be able to swoop down and get him. I was humiliated, not by the use of “white” but by the use of “man.” He sees me as a man, I thought. When I was eight years old, I had spent the afternoon playing with a group of my friends and a lone black boy who lived in the next neighborhood over. All afternoon we played, until another one of our friends showed up, making the lone black boy superfluous.“Time to go home, fella,” my friend had told him. But the boy had refused to go home, and an argument ensued. My father heard the argument and threw open the kitchen window.
    “Go home, boy,” he said, assuming that the black boy was the cause of the trouble. “Go home before I come down there and slap the taste out of your mouth.”
    When I woke in the morning, it was raining hard. My downstairs neighbor hadn’t taken in his newspaper yet, so I sat in the vestibule and read it.
    Business is bad. That was the big news. Business is bad and the rain won’t stop. Business is going to get better, but first it’s going to get worse. The rain is going to get worse too. And then the rain will stop.
    When my neighbor came down, he was wearing a gray bathrobe.
    “Here’s your paper,” I said, as if I’d been standing in the vestibule with his newspaper in my hands for the purpose of handing it to him.
    He looked aggrieved. “Thank you,” he said. Hollow words. He folded the paper and put it under his arm; his armpit was stained. He nodded at me. “Have a great day,” he said.
    Later, I did my exercises. I do them every day. If I ever end up joining the military, I will be ready. But I have no intention of joining the military. A couple of years ago, on the basketball court, an older guy had come over after the game and talked to me about life. He was friendly and showed interest, and I thought he might be gay. He smiled at everything I said.“Is that right, son?” At the end of our conversation, he handed me his business card: Sergeant Robert Alton. “Stop by, son, and talk to me sometime.” I thought about stopping by, but what I really wanted was for him to come back to the basketball court and ask me