Or, he wonders as he lies with his head on the pillow, looking out at the First Bosphorus Bridge, trying to sleep, was it two short, one long? He could never remember the combination.
It all began with Kristin, and that was more than two years before. He had come to the city to live cheaply and to assemble a body of work that would signal his transition from photojournalist to artist. Peter’s photo credit had, for some time, been a regular microprint feature in the Sunday supplements of several major newspapers. That work had felt like a continuous vibration between gravity and air. Gravity: journalistic assignments covering elections in Venezuela, earthquakes in Haiti and Tibet, the occasional war zone embed, et cetera. Air: commercial assignments shooting starlets at media junkets, insets for glossy music magazines, home décor arrangements for various catalogs, et cetera. The et cetera in his portfolio was the problem. If a photographer transforms the fleeting into the permanent, he wanted to create a lasting body of work, not just magazine snaps. “If you don’t make a vessel for your life to pass into,” a mentor of his once said, “it will simply pass into an urn.”
When Kristin first returned his call, following up on the grant application he had submitted to the consulate’s Cultural Affairs Section, he had run through most of his savings and was about to return home and to journalism. He had never wanted money from the government, as he thought it would taint the objectivity of his work, or at least how that objectivity was perceived. But he felt that he had no choice. To return to journalism meant to return to the ceaseless stream of body-bagged GI’s, a fondue of suicide bombers, natural disasters, man-made disasters, all of it: senseless. Like Warhol—whom Peter despised—just the same images repeated over and over until they lost all meaning.
When he arrived at Kristin’s office on the top floor of the consulate, a seven-story fortress in İstinye buttressed by concentric circles of security, he felt the same reservations as he had when he’d submitted his grant application on a lark. He still wasn’t certain that he wanted to exchange his independence for a partnership with the cultural attaché’s office. Then Kristin slid the terms of the grant across her desk and allowed Peter to look them over.
“The terms are generous,” she said, loading her emphasis onto the verb so that the weight of that emphasis would cut off debate.
While Peter read, she mixed a chocolate-powder nutrition shake in a large plastic cup with a special twist-off lid. She sneezed as some of the powder got up her nose, and it was a squeaking sneeze, a noise like a sneaker stopping suddenly on a lacquered basketball court. A pair of running shoes sat at the foot of her desk with sweat socks balled inside their heels.
Peter’s chin sunk toward his chest as he read. The terms were generous, uncomfortably so. It was enough to support his work for at least the next year, likely a bit more if he minimized his expenses. Kristin sipped her breakfast shake and checked a half dozen cellphones laid out in a single rank across her desk. She typed a text message on one and then set the phone down. It vibrated again, but she ignored it, and instead reclined in her office chair and finished off her shake, digging a straw from her cluttered desk drawer to suck up the dregs. Her landline rang. Chatter came from the other end. Kristin replied, “And you got that reading from her mouth or armpit?” She then listened intently with the receiver cuddled between her shoulder and ear. “If her temperature is that high, you need to take her in.” She shifted in her seat. “I don’t care what the doctor thinks.” Peter had finished reviewing the contract and his eyes met Kristin’s. “Listen, I’m in the middle of something,” she said, her voice descending into the phone. “Promise me that you’ll take her in.” Kristin looked down at her desk, away from Peter. “Yes, I love you too.” She set the receiver back in its cradle.
“If you’re busy, I could come back,” Peter offered.
“It’s nothing, just family stuff,” she said. “So what do you think of the terms?”
“You’re offering quite a bit.” Peter’s eyes canted upward, as if he was looking at a bank of clouds hovering just above their heads.
“You say it like it’s a bad thing.” She rested her clasped hands on the desk between them. “We could always offer you less … if that’d make you more comfortable.” A table fan in the corner circulated the air, which carried the delicate scent of Kristin’s sweat. “You’re an excellent candidate, Peter.” She swiveled in her chair toward a computer on the corner of her desk. Her fingers danced across the keyboard as she opened his application. “Exeter and then Yale”—she turned the screen toward him, revealing a Google search of his photo credits—“plus your portfolio to date, which is quite impressive. You’re here, you want to do good work, and your government wants to help you. Also …” She paused and motioned for Peter to hand her back the terms of the grant. He slid the contract across the desk. She took her pen and indexed it on the payment, “… I think that you need this. I don’t think anyone else is supporting you here and I don’t think you want to go back home. This buys you time. You need time.”
Kristin wasn’t pushy, but she was persuasive. Sitting behind her desk with her government-issue badge on a lanyard around her neck, she possessed an unquestionable authority. She was part of a diplomatic mission and, unlike Peter, had a profession, a real job, and one that didn’t require the pittance of grant money. Nothing about her was freelance. She spoke with the tenderness of an older sister advising a younger brother. But she also spoke with the same type of subtle, yet cruel, diminishment offered up between rival siblings.
This country persisted as a riddle to him, a tangle of conflicting signs. And yet it seemed like the easiest of passages from his life in New York to his life here—a plane ticket, a month-to-month lease, a visa. The entirety of him, at least to her, was what appeared on her screen. She likely wondered what his family thought about his decisions. A decade after he had left university, did they feel as if he had squandered their investment in him? If they still supported his work, would he have found himself sitting at Kristin’s desk, broke and ready to return home? His credentials which so impressed Kristin were far in the past and as useless as everything else in the past. He wondered if she could understand why he had traded that world for this one.
Her pen was still indexed on the grant payment printed across the contract.
Peter took back the sheet of paper and read aloud from the mission statement: “The recipient will collaborate with the consulate to provide artistic programming that advances relations between the United States and the host country and which furthers cross-cultural dialogues.”
“You got it,” said Kristin. “We call it soft power.”
The same cellphone vibrated again on her desk. She ignored it, waiting for him to sign so that they could begin their work together. Then another cellphone went off right next to it. “Are you going to answer either of those?” Peter asked.