It’s clear Tristan is realizing this too, half-checked out before the tour is even over. “Cool, thanks,” he says, heading toward the door. “I’ll email you about dates and stuff later. I have somewhere to be.” Is this really how they play it? Or does Anna usually do this part and Tristan is just really bad at it? It seems easy to figure out something isn’t it right. Although, I suppose a new immigrant would never imagine what kind of nonsense crime people in Milwaukee are capable of. If I still lived here, I would probably not let any strangers into my house ever. I guess that’s what happens as you get older. Not only do you become less trusting, but you also acquire things you’d rather not lose. You procure more locks, both real and metaphorical. More reasons to keep people out than invite them in. But you also, hopefully, gain some confidence? Once you look around and discover that almost no one knows what they’re doing, that they’re all figuring it out as they go, the world becomes a slightly easier place to navigate—especially if you happen to truly be good at something. This knowledge has made me far more brazen than I once was. My high school self would be too scared of looking like a fool to ever try any martial arts. Now, I can’t imagine how helpless I’d feel without it. How powerless. I wonder if this feeling is what changed Anna so much; maybe stealing made her feel powerful, at least for a moment. Knowledge and intelligence could be used as a tool almost as much as a body. But where had her moral compass gone? If I could convince her to join me in Israel, I know for sure she wouldn’t be acting this way. But every time I’d tried, she laughed me off like I was some crazy person in a cult. It wasn’t long before she stopped responding to my messages at all; as if my new religious beliefs could somehow rub off on her, thousands of miles away in Milwaukee.
Tristan walks slowly back to the door. For the first time I notice he’s walking with a slight limp. “What happened to your leg?” I ask.
He turns around. His eyes dart away from mine, narrowing sheepishly at the floor. “Oh. Dog bite,” he shrugs. “Had to get a lot of stitches, and it got infected… it’s whatever.” He takes a long drag of the cigarette, then takes another look around the apartment and asks, “Isn’t this where that girl—”
“No, it’s not,” I interrupt.
He looks back down the hall, towards the bedrooms. The first one once belonged to me; there’s a window that opens out to the roof, and I used to go out there to drink and watch people walk from bar to bar. Sometimes Emily and I would take these giant hula hoops up there to spin two or three at a time, and we’d throw them to each other like circus people. And June. June was also there, of course. It was always the three of us, even though I’d erased her out of my memory of those years.
“No, it is,” Tristan is saying. “I’m just putting it together. Yeah. I was around that summer, I remember the news. I remember that odd-shaped balcony. It’s the place where that girl hung herself from her bedroom doorknob.”
My stomach falls, like I’ve been dropped from the highest point of a rollercoaster without warning. I swallow, hard. “It isn’t.”
“I wonder if she haunts the place,” Tristan says, rubbing his chin.
I clench my fists until my nails are digging into my skin.
“That was so fucked up,” Tristan is saying. Backpfeifengesicht is also a good word I wish we had in English. It’s German for a face badly in need of a fist. Looks like gibberish but somehow isn’t. “Didn’t it take her roommates three days to find her body?”
“Shut up,” I say, furious now and unable to control myself. “Where did you even hear that?”
Tristan looks taken aback, as if confused why his questions would cause such an emotional reaction. “I told you. The news. I have a lot of free time during the day.”
I unclench my fists, inhale another deep breath.
It had taken three days to find June because the door was shut. And every time we tried to knock or check inside, we couldn’t get the door open.
Because it was so heavy and didn’t move.
Because, we would find out, her body was against it.
“What exactly are you learning Chinese for?” I ask. This interaction is not going the way I intended, and I need to change course. Immediately.
Tristan leans against the wall near the stove and takes another drag of his cigarette. “Just for fun.”
“No one learns Chinese for fun,” I say, watching him. I move to stand in front of the door, blocking his exit. In Portuguese, there’s a term, Saudade, for the feeling of longing for something or someone that you love which is lost. It carries with it the repressed knowledge that the object of longing may never return; a bittersweet, empty feeling of something or someone that is missing. It’s this feeling that comes over me now, like a wave. I have to close my eyes to push it away.
When I open my eyes again, the expression of a trapped bird has overcome Tristan’s face, before being obscured by an aggressive impassiveness. “Sure they do. Not everyone can afford to go to college.” He surprises me by saying something in Cantonese. Something I don’t understand because I don’t actually know Cantonese.
I feel suddenly exhausted. What am I doing? This is a job for someone competent, not a Russian tutor who only made it halfway through a linguistics degree. There’s a term in Estonian, Ei Viitsi, which means a feeling of such intense laziness you don’t want to go anywhere or do anything. I’ve gone from energized to Ei Viitsi in less than thirty seconds. I’m not a cop. I’m someone who has seen too many detective movies. I should tell my dad to talk to the cops once more and leave me out of it. I should go home. “Can you please drop the act?” I ask, rubbing my eyes with two fingers.
“What act?”
I lean against the door, giving him space.
“You’re Tristan, right?” I ask. But his face is unchanged. If he is Tristan, he’s not admitting it. “I’m not going to tell on you,” I add. “I just want to see Anna.”
Tristan’s head snaps to mine. “What?”
“Yeah. Anna,” I say. “She’s the mastermind behind this little scheme, right?”
Tristan looks past me again, blinking. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Everyone looks to the left when they’re lying. Easy tell,” I say.
“That’s not true. The only real indicator of a lie is a microexpression. You’re better off looking at eyebrows than eye direction.” Tristan takes a long drag from the cigarette, then looks down at the floor. “And I don’t know what you’re talking about, lady. If you don’t want to do this, fine…”
“I’m not the police,” I say. I point down at myself, my dirty black skinny jeans and David’s extra IDF shirt I always sleep in, my unwashed hair. “If that’s not obvious.”
Tristan takes another long drag from the cigarette, watching me. He seems nervous now, and begins slowly backing away towards the kitchen door. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I watch his eyebrows, but they don’t move. Still, I know he’s lying.
“Wait here for one second,” I tell him. I cross the checkered laminate floor to the kitchen drawers, looking through them until I find a marker and an old Center St. Daze flyer with a white back. I write down my temporary number along with the message, in Russian, “Call me ASAP. - M.” “Give this to Anastasia. Okay? No harm in that.”