I wanted to exit unnoticed, but this was the country where always someone seemed to watch, a country with millions of eyes. In the streets, the presence of a foreigner invited stares, like living in a fishbowl. The more menacing aspect was that even if no one was in sight, there was no ruling out that there was someone watching. The most paranoid would say that as they walked in the empty echoing corridors of their apartment block, they could feel peering eyes, through the tiny door peepholes watching them. Mostly it seemed harmless, like the time Sergei, my neighbor who worked at the photo developing shop, said that he had heard from someone that I was in the bazaar buying apples. This is what people talked about, I wondered. It seemed harmless, but then when you thought about it more, it seemed sinister – enough to make you think that your every move might be monitored. And I would wonder how likely it was that I could avoid Yulia. Her calls became more persistent – I could feel the phone which I had turned on silent, vibrating. Maybe someone had seen me since I returned and told her that I was back. Or maybe she had heard from that uncle of hers who was a “big man” in the secret services. I thought of how nice it would be to have the power to become invisible, to disappear without a trace, and for now, to leave this place.

In the courtyard, outside in the night heat which did not let up, there was an older couple that I had met a few months earlier in the waiting room of the international clinic. They were very nice and I felt bad that they remembered my name, even, but I had forgotten theirs, though I remembered so many other details about them -- that he had a slipped disk and had to go on a medical evacuation to the US shortly after, that they worked at the US Embassy, that had been career foreign service officers for 25 years, nearing retirement, had grown children my age who lived in San Francisco and Madison, Wisconsin. I also remembered that unlike most of the other expatriates, they didn't have lots of people looking after them -- housekeepers, drivers, cooks, etc., they learned the local languages, both Russian and Uzbek, ate out frequently at the restaurants that I went to, rather than at the international hotels where most of the expatriates usually ate. They read the local papers, tried understand the country. Often the people at the embassies lived in a bubble, didn’t interact with many outside diplomatic circles, and had a doctrinaire party line by which they understood the country where they live.

The husband put out his hand to shake mine, and I asked after his back. He had been out of the country for nearly three months since I had seen him and he said he felt like brand new following a very invasive operation. They headed to their car, the usual standard issue white jeeps with the red diplomatic license plates, as I walked down the quiet dirt road, towards the main street. Trailing up beside me, he slowed down, pulled down his window and asked if I needed a lift home. Most people assumed that you had your own car here. A car, and usually a driver. In fact, you could often tell who was at a party of foreigners based on the cars parked outside, and the drivers sitting in them. “Or wherever else you might be headed,” his wife chimed in; after all, it was still early, and they probably had heard that I had the reputation of hanging out at night in the city’s various watering holes.

I’m going home, I said. “Early night.” After all, the Lucky Strikes was closed. I was keeping a low profile because of Yulia, coward that I am, uncertain as to how I was going to manage that. I am very bad at breakups, bad at managing the consequences of my own caprices. I told them that I lived by the Zhemchug jewelry store, which was as good a point of reference as any, as the street names had changed so many times since the end of the Soviet Union, as the history of the country was revised, the pantheon of heroes of the nation changed, along with the attendant nomenclature. The 14-story building, one of Tashkent’s tallest outlasted all of the revisions. They knew exactly where it was. They were nice. They knew the city, didn’t rely on drivers to get them everywhere. I wondered why I didn’t become friendlier with them, or with people like them. But my friendships so much revolved around going out drinking. Being a non-diplomat, there was always a question running through my head as to how close one could truly become to someone who lived in the diplomatic bubble. Were they even allowed to become friends with people outside the circle, a journalist no less. Was I too young, perhaps, to outrageous, too non-socially acceptable.

They spoke with anxiety about the way things were developing in the country; though the country seemed frozen in a bad moment, a stagnant economy, a repressive form of government, corruption everywhere, and it almost seemed like things could get no worse, that they had for so long been this way, they said they felt that something got worse, nuances of badness. They said they detected a change in the people, an aggressiveness, ever so subtle. Minor macroeconomic changes lead to a diminishing of living standards, the reduction in the spread between the black market and bank exchanges of the local currency had jacked up prices, and whereas filling a refrigerator on $100 dollars/month had once been possible, it now didn’t. Red light districts, of which there were jokes how in civilized cities were only in distinct territories, now sprawled around the city, around all busstops, hotels, some residential areas, nightclubs, restaurants. There were prostitutes everywhere, and they were no longer just the abandoned Russian women with their Europeanized and sexually liberated ways. They were also the pure, virginal daughters of proper Muslim Uzbek families. Drugs were everywhere and visibly, no longer just among the street boys who sniffed glue on the streets at night and slept in the crawl space under buildings or in the entryways. Zombielike junkies wandered dazed in the bazaars, where you could buy a gram of heroin for less than the cost of a pack of cheap locally produced cigarettes. There was a sense of despair, there was only bad in store.

"It's sad," the wife said, and I had forgotten her name completely. "We have a nice life here. We're thinking to renew our contracts to stay a few more years here, even joke about retiring here. But I know that eventually, something is going to give and we'll have to leave."

We approached the jewelry store, and I directed them to make the turn before the shoe store, beside the empty car show room, which had a BMW display when I first arrived in the country, but had been empty in the years since. And we slowly rolled into my building’s courtyard, to the third entryway. We slowed down, and I popped open the door lock, about to thank them for the ride, when the wife interjected with horror that my front entrance didn’t have a door. It didn't and I never thought about it. I assumed that most buildings didn’t, though I had seen some that had a locked front door that had a coded keypad lock. To be honest, I always did feel a little nervous entering the building, especially at night, fearing that there were killers hiding by the elevator or in the stairwell. Looking in nervously to see if there was anyone lurking, stepping in silently so as not to alert them of my presence.

"It's incredibly safe here," I said, though I didn’t believe it and she didn't seem particularly convinced by my response. I had been very cavalier, I thought then and there. I had been rather brash, stupid even. I did lots of risky things, went to lots of risky places, walked around in a happy, stupid and often drunken ignorance of what dangers there probably were. If they knew the hours I wandered the streets, using gypsy cabs at all hours, brining near-strangers into my apartment, they would be horrified. I was amazed at how foolish I had been. I was lucky – probably had some guardian angel looking over me, protecting me from the dangers faced by those who didn’t live in the high-walled compounds that diplomats lived in.

"Please do take care of yourself," she said. "Maybe we'll wait down here and you’ll phone us when you make it upstairs to your apartment safely?” I obliged, took their phone number, and went inside. Even though they were right there, watching me, watching for my safety, I walked soundless with soft steps through the echoing, empty, gutted entrance, its decaying walls and loose tiles on the floor, swelling gas pipes, and small piles of trash in the corners. I took small silent breaths as I pressed the elevator knob, silently entered the cabin when it noisily opened its doors, fearing that the lights might be out on my landing, as they sometimes were. And in the pitch blackness, I feared killers in wait, much like there reportedly were in the gruesome murder of an American businesswoman, shortly before I had arrived in country. She was heading out to one of the American Chamber of Commerce Friday evening happy hours and as she left her apartment, they pushed her back in, cut her up into pieces and stuck the pieces into her living room sofa. Many foreigners who knew her, even those with a passing acquaintance were called in by the Uzbek authorities for interrogation, asked absurd questions, like how they cut an apple. Of course, this was all I had heard through the town rumor mill, along with the gory bits about the murder. No one really had a clear idea of what had happened.

The lights on my landing were on. I unlocked the door and locked both of my doors, the steel front door and the wooden interior door behind me. My apartment was quiet and still as ever. I phoned downstairs, thanked them for their concern and for the lift. I looked at the clock – the only thing that made a sound in my apartment. 10:00.

It was early and I felt restless and bored. I decided to put myself to bed, though it seemed too hot to sleep, too early to sleep. It was too late to go back out and start the evening again. I didn’t know who to call. There were no cigarettes or beers in the refrigerator. I hadn’t bothered this week to fill the house with food, since I was eating all of my meals out in restaurants. It was too late to go out and get any, though I could troll the streets to find an open kiosk. Perhaps the one where they sold the midnight bananas would still be open. Or I could just go out to any random bar that would serve me all the beer and cigarettes to my heart’s content, and maybe while at it, find some new and interesting company.

But all I could think about right now was this guy Jason, and how it would be nice to have a friend like him. Someone I could speak to in English, someone who might understand what I was going through. I wanted to talk with Henny, but it seemed like she was busy with her economist. With Jason, there would probably be so much in common to talk about, and the possibility of sex. Why, I wondered, did I leave that party so early. If I had only waited, stuck around, allowed things to develop. As I lay undressed in my bed in the dark, I imagined the fantastical possibility that he might be interested in me, that he might ask someone at the party for my phone number and that he might call. In the event that that might happen, I turned my phone on, after I had turned it off, for fear of more calls from Yulia. And with those comforting thoughts, I found myself descending into a peaceful space between wakefulness and sleep.  ¶ 4:17 PM