Henrietta called again a few hours later. I was still in the office working long after everyone else had already left except for Dmitri the guard, who sat in the courtyard, his shirt still on, who, regardless, never said anything to me, and likely wouldn't say anything about my penchant for sitting directly under the air conditioner which I did without concern of the censorious eyes of my colleagues. She called to tell me that there were two parties happening on Friday night, that's all. Besides Alyssa's party, there was the party of a friend of a friend of hers, a brilliant Harvard-trained Uzbek economist, our age, and worked at the World Bank. Often, I thought how interesting and useful it would be to talk to someone like this, someone who might be able to shed some light on why it was that I carried around bricks of Uzbek cash to make some of the most basic of purchases, and why it seemed that those bricks were growing larger and larger, and why I had to go to tiny stalls or black marketeers around the bazaars to exchange my dollars, but how now suddenly we were seeing official exchange booths opening up everywhere, though, never busy, and the one time I inquired, they said they were out of cash. I could never quite wrap my head around how this all worked, but it was the system that everyone had been used to for years in their closed economy, from the time that Uzbekistan's economy closed, only a few years before I arrived, and then before that in the Soviet days when someone get hold of some rare hard currency. And no one questioned it, except for the occasional fluctuations in the black market rate, which had been happening with greater frequency these days.

I decided to head home, starting to feel a little tired, even though the sun had only just begun to set. The streets around the office were deserted, though you could hear the occasional dog bark or chickens clucking from behind the brick walls of the compounds. As I got closer to the park near my home, there were the small groups of boys, some sitting on benches, some squatting around them, with gelled hair and roaming eyes that followed me as I approached and passed, and ignored what seemed to be their calls to me in the distance asking for the time and their laughter.

It was already dark when I got home, and I had the usual dread entering into the building's drab and poorly lit entryway and stood their completely silently as I waited for the elevator, as if I were trying to hide and listening for any other human sounds in the corridors in the staircases. But nothing, the whole way up to my apartment. Though once I had opened all the locks on my door, got inside and locked them all back up, I felt relieved and safe, as though running from some kind of silent threat. I settled into one of the velvety purple chairs in the living room, its fibers prickly against my sweaty back and neck, turned up the noisy Soviet air conditioner hoping to cool off, and wanted so badly to let my weary eyes close, surrender to jet-lag, but knew that I should resist sleep at such an early hour. Then Henrietta called yet again, suggesting we meet outside in the park to walk her dog. I agreed without hesitating, if only to keep myself awake. She said she desperately needed to be out of the house.

In the center, Tashkent at night, in the summer, actually felt like a city, not like the ghost town that it usually felt like during the daytime. At night, people emerged from their houses, took walks in the streets, which would still feel hot with its heavy, still air, but still, it was cooler than in the daytime. In the little park near my house, I could hear couples sitting on benches under the trees in the shadows, just voices in the dark. From the walkway, with its lamppost lights burned out, I could see some familiar gay fixtures from the park, sitting around tables at the blue domes cafe, passing around a bottle of vodka that they poured into teacups, laughing and talking.

The big stores were all closed, but little kiosks that sold snacks, cigarettes, vodka, condoms, and I suppose any of the other things that folks desperately wanted in the middle of the night, had their lights lit up, their proprietors sitting behind windows, usually middle aged women, their hair blown by stationary fans. And a few small makeshift outdoor cafes of plastic chairs and tables with umbrellas with the coca-cola logo on them were open, blasting popular music from the radio, as a few customers sat around the tables, as did the waiters and waitresses, listlessly, the heat draining the energy out of everyone.

I walked to the Uzbekistan Hotel, the "Uzbechka," the Uzbek girl, behind the Tamerlane square, from which flowed the night butterflies -- the polite expression in Russian for prostitutes, who milled about awaiting the occasional car that would pass, perhaps stop for them, and drive them away.

Henrietta's figure, silhouetted in the shadows, was easily distinguishable from theirs. Besides the distinctive feature of Izzi, her overly friendly dog, pulling on his leash and her as well to the tree stump besides which he relieved himself, her figure, though lovely, was not the long, svelte figure of the night butterflies, and her shorts and T-shirt were distinctly American sporty attire in contrast to the halter-tops, the micro-miniskirts, the high-knee boots that the girls wore here, clearly inspired from the movie "Pretty Woman," which was so popular here and had a tremendous impact on the fashions of even more proper girls.

I liked to think that their love of this movie, a movie I found ridiculous and practically unwatchable, betrayed a desire for fairy tale endings that belied their general cynicism, misanthropy, fatalism, that was not just characteristic of the prostitutes, but of everyone in general. How many times had I been told in my conversations, with Yulia, with others, that my positiveness, my hopefulness, my optimism, was just characteristic American naivete and that there were so many things about life in Uzbekistan, and life in general, that I did not understand. Whereas I did believe that I had many things more to learn, I knew that they confused naivete with an essential belief in the goodness of people, optimism, and hope, just a different perspective of humanity.

Henrietta, I liked to believe, was my partner in my naivete and hope, perhaps it was that naivete and hope that lead her to think that she could marry her Uzbek husband. And it was her naivete and hope that made her, like me, open and eager to exploring and finding out more about this place where we lived. She emerged slowly out of the shadows, following a hyperactive as always Izzi, who rushed towards me, climbing up my leg in way that had I not known him, I might have thought was aggressive, but was just his usual eagerness for attention and love.

"Sit!" she commanded weakly and he deferentially obeyed, restraining himself, sitting on his hind legs, looking up with eyes full of longing. She sloppily ran the back of her hand across her eyes and flushed cheeks and I gave in to the instinct to put an arm around her, as she lowered her head, closed her eyes and swallowed. "He even hit Izzi," she said looking up, but then quickly choking up. "I mean, who hits a dog?"

"Did he hit you?"

"No."

"Was he going to hit you?"

"I don't know."

We walked along in silence past a small group of three prostitutes, in the direction of the Tamerlane square. The city seemed completely still and silent, without a car passing us by, without any people in sight, the air completely still, not a breeze shaking a leaf on a tree. I couldn't say anything for what seemed so long, since this seemed to be to be one of the saddest things I'd heard in so long. "When did things get this way," I asked.

"I don't know. He wasn't like this before we got married. Before we got married -- we stuck together. It was like the two of us against the world," she wiped her face again. "He was fighting all this resistance from his parents about us being together. And now it's like it's all of them against me, that I'm supposed to be like any typical wife here and have babies. Shouldn't leave the house. Shouldn't work. I mean, who is supporting us? I am. He's not even working now."

As we got closer, we could see all the activity in the Tamerlane square, and I felt myself a little distracted by the sight of the small groups of prostitutes, of gays, of teenagers milling about. I had steered us in the direction of the park. "Are we walking there," she asked.

"The quiet streets here freak me out a bit. Like someone could pop out of the bushes," I said.

"Izzi can protect us," she laughed a little. Izzi was a loving creature, but probably useless in that respect. We spoke in more hushed tones, as we tended to do in public, not drawing too much attention to ourselves. "So you'll come with me to the parties on Friday night?" She asked.

"Ali is coming along?"

"No. He said he won't come." Izzi gave her a jolt at the leash. "He also said he didn't want me going either."

"Why not? Do you have other plans."

"No. He always goes out with his friends on Friday nights. I always stay home."

"I hate the sound of this," I said.

"Oh shit," she said, walking away from me, off to the side.

"What's the matter?"

"He needs to go again. He just went." Izzi pulled her towards the tree. "Can you just wait here for me? Don't follow us. Police always bother me when this happens in the park."

She was always worried about breaking the law here, and I sometimes wondered why. The police were just some subhuman form of life, rarely gave women problems, especially if the women batted their eyelashes at them. She disappeared under some lush bushes. I stood alone on the walkway, where young men walked by, squinted at me in the low lights. I walked towards a lamppost where no one stood. From the shadows, with a cigarrette in his hand, a young man appeared. It was Sherzod, the young guy some months back who said he knew me, or that I knew his brother and who I, in turn, pretended to know. He was the one who said he was studying at the KGB academy and was on assignment surveying Tamerlane square, where all the gays and prostitutes hung out, for possible terrorist activity. He called me by my name. "Hello," he said, putting out his hand to shake.

I took his hand. "What are you doing here?" he asked.

"I'm just walking with a friend. What about you?"

"Working. You know... we have independence day in a few weeks, and we need to be very careful. Terrorists always plan their attacks on holidays."

"I see." I said and shrugged. "You know, they say that every year. But we never have had an attack on a holiday. You must be doing a very good job." I didn't believe he was working for KGB. I decided he was just here like every other guy milling about this park at this time, with the same agenda. I felt Izzi rubbing himself excitedly against my leg. Henrietta was not far behind and Sherzod quickly excused himself. "Say hello to your brother," I began. But he had disappeared, before I knew it.

"Who was that boy you were talking to?"

"It's some guy who says that he knows me, and that he's at the KGB training academy and that he has to watch this territory."

"That's creepy. You should be careful around people like that."

"I don't know whether to believe him or not about being sentinel for the KGB. This is the second time I've seen him here at night and he gives me this line. For all I know, he's just cruising, but is embarrassed for me to find out because I know his brother and maybe he thinks I'd tell his brother that he's hanging out with gays."

"Who's his brother?"

"Actually, I don't know who his brother is. But he told me that I know his brother...and I just went along with it and I'm sticking by it."

"Strange," she said. "Just be careful, OK. Maybe he really is with KGB. Maybe he's here to give you a message."

"A message? Such as?"

"Such as: be careful," she said. And we walked out of the park in silence. Just when this whole little intrigue seemed to make life seem kind of exciting for me, she continued. "I just can't wait to get out of here."  ¶ 12:40 AM