"That was my closest friend in Tashkent. One of my main reasons why I'm happy there," I said finishing a small drop of vodka left in the shotglass, which I noticed quickly disappeared off the table. "In fact it's kind of an amazing thing to think that halfway around the world I meet such a friend. We see each other practically every day. We're like survival buddies because she's married to this awful Uzbek guy. We're so tight, people there think we're sleeping together...but mostly because they are clueless."

"Are you sleeping together?"

"No. It's just becuase she'll come to meet me at the office at the end of the day and we'll walk home together. And it that culture, that's kind of construed as sleeping together." The same phrase in Uzbek language for walking together was used for people dating each other or sleeping together. It wasn't the richest language in terms of nuance. But also, the local imagination didn't have much of a grasp of a man and woman just being friends or of a man being gay. We can sort of get away with it since we're Americans. We're different and they don't completely understand us.

"So, you're not having sex with her. But you're having sex with the ho?" Adrian asked accusatorily.

"It's not like I'm this complete pussy-crazed heterosexual," I insisted.

"Then what's the deal with the ho?"

"I suppose it's just a midlife experimentation with my sexuality."

"Funny, you don't hear much about gay guys swinging back that way," he mused skeptically. "Then again, you don't hear about guys moving to Uzbekistan. You move to Uzbekistan, you turn straight."

"I'm not turning straight, just living my life."

The waiter returned and laid in front of me another shotglass filled with vodka. I hadn't remembered asking for it. When I looked up to him to tell him I hadn't ordered it, he said, "on the house," he said with a smile. I could detect something Slavic in his face, and asked "Russki?"

"Czech," he said and walked away.

"Someone's sweet on you," Adrian teased. "Maybe he could go home with him. Oops, I forgot, you're straight now."

"Enough,' I said, holding up my glass in somewhat drunken solemnity. I raised the glass to him, to Adrian, "to life," I said, though in Uzbekistan I'd learned to make long involved toasts, that included citations from Pushkin, that waxed philosophical, that spoke of friendship, of good fortune, of the meaning of life, of life being more than that dash between the year of birth and year of death on the tombstone. It was the vodka toast that seemed these days to be the height of my current intellectual life.

Adrian answered, "l'chaim." I feared that at the moment, he would break out in a refrain of "Fiddler on the Roof," that decadent American creation, a musical adaptation of lofty literary achievement, as Yulia had once pointed out of what was a classic, revered by the Soviet literati. "Only, in America," she had said. Adrian had a tendency to break out into songs from musicals. I never had pictured him as the type who did musical theater in high school; he wasn't exactly a creative soul, an artistic soul. But he did sometimes break out into little musical numbers. My fears were well founded. Even my vodka buzz couldn't stop me from cringing. I had to stop him from singing. I asked, "have you read Sholom Aleichem?"

"No." he answered. I wasn't too surprised. If memory served me right, he wasn't much of a reader, didn't have much of a collection of books in his home. "Have you?"

"I did, a long, long time ago." I said. "But it's really popular there. Even my ho, who has nothing more than a high-school education, has read it."

"Is she Jewish?"

"No, just the Soviets really liked him." I thought of all of those old Soviet style households with their bookcases full of books, protected by glass. Those were the only books to be had in Tashkent, those sitting in peoples' homes. There were no bookstores, except the official ones that sold school textbooks and the thirteen tomes written by the president about the official ideology. There were some stands on the streets near my house where people were selling their old books. But rarely did one find a new book, something published after 1991. In fact, sometimes I thought about how intellectually isolated we were -- in a world full of new, developing ideas, new books being written and published daily, and how far away I was from it. On the other hand, I didn't feel so sad about the impoverished intellectual environment that I lived in.

Somewhat drunkenly, we managed to order dinners and we talked about random things. I talked about the sad intellectual state my life was in, and how even though I seemed to be happy, it was something of a simpleton's happiness, where I was just happy to have my food, my drink, a few friends, work that I enjoyed. All that life of the mind from New York, intellectual, spiritual, ethical seemed to be somewhat barren, like those wide swaths of desert on the roads outside Tashkent, or the empty city squares and streets. I didn't even care much about the taste of my food, I told Adrian, just so long as it was filling and didn't make me sick, since the food was generally bland, and often prepared under sub-standard conditions of hygeine. And yet, we recalled the times back when I would cook in New York, read cookbooks, teach Adrian how to properly use goat cheese in cooking, something he had never tasted before. And he spoke about how he had been in a relationship with someone who just decided one day to end everything and now, their only conversations were about their joint custody of their dog. It didn't really make a lot of sense, he said. A lot of things in life don't make a lot of sense. Why I was in Uzbekistan, for example. "There is no logic to my being there. It just seems to be a bizaare twist of fate," I said musing about my state of mind the day the vacancy opened, some idea I had at that time about wanting to see more of the world, despite never having much wanderlust before then. And then, of all the places where I should end up is Uzbekistan, where the food constantly makes me sick and there is nothing to read.

"Maybe life is just a series of incidents," he said. "A series of relationships." He couldn't understand why his ex-boyfriend wanted to leave him without any explanation. I felt a little uncomfortable about the topic. "We each responded to 9-11 differently. I wanted to be near someone, but he said he just wanted to be alone. We were a casualty of 9-11."

Another shot of vodka appeared in front of me, just as I was feeling uncomfortable with the topic. "You're still alive, you should be thankful for that," I shot my glass down and felt a bit emboldened. "I think no one woke up the day after September 10th thinking that their entire life would be changed the next day. A lot of people lost their lives, so my dear, with all due respect -- it's overdramatizing a bit to call yourself a casualty. Maybe something else was going on, and you just don't know or haven't really thought about it enough." I remembered that I was the one always in therapy, speaking to a psychiatrist, endlessly talking about and analyzing problems, possibly too much. Whereas, he didn't seem to be interested much in mental health or introspection, he was of the school that "didn't believe" in "shrinks," psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts. But he then shocked me by telling me that he was "seeing someone" to talk about his breakup. Funny, I had forgotten that in New York, people said "seeing someone" here to mean that they were seeing as in dating and/or sleeping with someone, as well as talking to a mental health professional.

"That's good," I said. "I'm sorry if I was coming down hard on you."

He shrugged. For me, I told him, my experience of 9-11 was really different. On the one hand, the tragedy was frightening, and yet remote. But the consequences, the war in Afghanistan was a little more frightening and somewhat accelerated my life -- caused more work for me, some travel to Northern Afghanistan, to the south of Uzbekistan to the area around the newly built US airbase. In general, more adrenaline, and less time for introspection. And that's how I ended up in things like a relationship with Yulia. It wasn't emotional. It was purely for physical pleasure. "Strange to think that my real emotional connections are with men, like you and me talking right now. I can't have a talk like this with her."

"Why not?"

"Lots of reasons. First, she's homophobic. Possibly xenophobic. She's not very educated, doesn't read much."

"But she's read Sholom Aleichem."

"True. But so has everyone there. She lives in a completely different world from me. We live in a different world from her. There are things about their lives that we can never understand. They have very difficult lives. I get a sense that she gets by on her wits, on being beautiful, on being sexually aggressive, because someone like me is a possible life raft out of there. But I don't know. You know how there are things that you just don't want to know...There's a lot about her that is like that. Even though I have a lot of downtime, solitary time, it does seem that I'm not really thinking about a lot of these things in a lot of depth. I don't even think about 9-11 anymore."

We sat in silence for a moment. Our smiling waiter left a check down in front of us. "Have you been down there? To Ground Zero?"

"I haven't. I saw as it was happening, the smoke and everything from downtown."

"Let's go down there," I said, inspired as I got up from my seat.

"I have to work tomorrow."

"Then I'll go by myself," I said, heading to the curb, thinking to hail at taxi.

"Ok, I'll go with you," and he followed me into the first yellow taxi that stopped.

"Where do you tell him to go?" I asked Adrian. "It feels weird to say 'where the World Trade Center used to stand.'"

"Bowling Green," he called out to the driver as we drove towards the West Side highway and sat in silence, opening the windows, letting the strong wind blow numbly against my forehead. I didn't feel my vodka buzz anymore, just as stillness, as though I might be standing still with Adrian.  ¶ 6:56 PM