Right before Adham went to the South of France for a study abroad architecture program, he printed out Jack’s Instagram profile picture on his mother’s Canon Inkjet printer, cut out Jack’s face in a little oval, and pasted it into a ring locket he bought on Etsy. He wore that ring every day of the summer. It was an analog program—no internet or correspondence, like a destination rehab—but he memorized Jack’s phone number, bought and transcribed for ten dollars from a Whitepages site, and called it over and over on the emergency phone. Later in life, when Adham couldn’t even recognize his daughters, he could still recite the number by heart: four three zero, nine six four, two three oh five. Jack never answered—the French Nokia probably registered as spam—but it didn’t matter. Adham hoped that Jack could karmically intune his reaching out and feel honored, special, maybe a little royal.
If the world was fair, Jackson Zheng would have been born a prince of some ancient civilization, dripped in tiger skins and licking fig juices from Adham’s trembling, spit-shiny fingers. But the world was what it was and Nurse Zheng was an MRI assistant in the Brunswick Public Health center who’d treated Adham’s sprained shin from a soccer injury that spring.
If Jack thought about Adham for even a minute of his day, Adham fantasised, that would be better than his wildest dreams. But of course, Adham dreams were ever wilder, and if he had a minute, he wanted another, and another, until the only thing in Jack’s head was him. It only seemed fair, he thought, when one considered the amount of time Adham spent thinking about Jack: his marbled muscle, his clean sweat-smell, his experienced, gentle hands.
Later in life, when Adham’s own hands shook too badly for him to hold a cup without spilling, he would start to write letters to Jack as if they were young again. He couldn’t get too far—only a handful of sentences—but the scrawl was legible in a way that the rest of Adham was not. Dear Jack, he’d write. The air in Auvillar is wet and hot. Did they make you an MRI tech yet? We all went skinny dipping in the river last night. I wish you were here.
It would not be a lifelong fascination. When Adham returned from his studies, the Imam at the New Brunswick Islamic Center would command him that it was time to grow up. Adham would listen. He’d get a wife, a family, a respectable home with a Basmala in every room. The locket-ring would lose itself. He’d gradually stop thinking about the nurse with shoulders like a luchadore who tenderly lifted his shin to the MRI table. It would only be in his final years, as he lost control, that the memory would jostle free, lying in wait his whole life.
Love was pushing it. If there had been a single outside observer, they would have described it as infatuation, obsession, even idolatry. But it wasn’t about Jack, not truly, though Adham would still rise, untethered, from his soiled cot one night at Sunnyside Retirement Home without ever realizing this. The wind outside the window would blow. The papery sheets would still. In the little beige room between life and death, a muscled forearm would reach down from the popcorn ceiling and take Adham’s spotty hand in his: Nurse Zheng, in his youthful, Achillic splendor, asking Adham in a kind voice if it hurt.
