ORIENT, by Douglas Light
I’m clapped, Leesa thought, certain the man following her into the Macy’s lingerie section was security. Pausing at a messy pile of sale underwear, she buried the watch she’d stolen then sifted through the panties, hoping he’d pass.
He slowly approached from behind, lightly touched her shoulder. She held a red lace thong, pretending to examine it. “It’s not your color,” he said, then introduced himself, told her she was stunning. “Your face,” he said, “the symmetry. It’s like a perfectly set table.” He was on the board of the Metropolitan Opera, enjoyed eating caviar pizza and drinking peppermint infused vodka at Pravda at two in the morning, and had a place with a view of the Empire State Building through a skylight. “You can see it,” he told her, “from the bed.”
She accepted his invitation to lunch.
Tuscan themed and floored with blue tile, the restaurant was overpriced. The menu noted at the bottom that all the décor was authentic, from Italy, and that the wait staff wore designer uniforms. Long and pale, the man’s fingers were like a boy’s who collects stamps. He asked Leesa what she did. “I come into money,” she absently told him, already having forgotten his name, “spend it, then come into some more.”
“Leesa,” he said, pushing his chair back to go to the restroom, “excuse me a moment.” While not attractive or young, he was interesting. She could have liked him, could have liked him spending money on her.
But he’d taken off his suit jacket, hung it on the back of his chair, exposing sweat stains that circled the armpits of his yellow tailored shirt. Leesa imagined she smelled him, smelled a foul odor of turned yogurt and wet wool.
While he was away from the table, she rifled his suit jacket pockets.
Hailing a taxi uptown, she hoped she’d have some time before he realized the credit card was missing.
Outside, the day was cool for summer. People forced their way down the crowded sidewalk. A drunk sang “I Believe I Can Fly” while urinating into a trashcan.
Inside, the store was quiet, near empty. The sales clerks were in the back arguing about commissions and eating Chinese food.
“That’s nice,” a man said to her, referring to the digital video camera she held. “Just bought the same model myself,” he continued.
“You like it?” Leesa asked, glancing at his shoes, then his face. Soon, she’d turn twenty-one. She worried about getting old, spending her life alone. His eyes met hers. He smiled.
“Yes,” he said. “Top of the line. For the price.”
“And your wife?” she asked, watching his reaction. He had a pleasant smile, one that reminded her of her high school swim coach or a TV weatherman. He wore no rings. “She likes it too?”
He offered his hand. “Marco Finn,” he said.
Ringing her purchase up, the clerk swiped the credit card then studied the name embossed on the front. “Is this your –”
“Husband’s,” Marco said, walking up behind her. He looked at Leesa, then at the clerk. All three were silent. “Is there,” Marco asked, reaching over to scrawl a signature on the credit card slip, “a problem?” He took the card from the clerk.
They walked out of the store together, Marco and Leesa. She held her purchase tight. He handed her the credit card. She dropped it into the storm drain, hailed a taxi.
“Interested in lunch?” Marco asked.
“I’ve eaten,” she told him as a taxi pulled to a stop. He climbed in with her, said to the driver, “The Soho Grand,” then to Leesa, “For a drink.”
It was Tuesday and she had money enough to last her until the end of the week. She turned to look out the window. “For a drink,” she said, and watched the people and buildings pass as Broadway carried them from the west side of Manhattan south and east. She thought of her most recent boyfriend, how he’d lasted only two months and how her rent was due. Turning to Marco, she asked, “What do you sell?”
“Artifacts,” he answered. “Old maps, pottery, sculpture. Art,” he said, then told her of his recent business trip to Greece, of the octopus he killed and grilled there on the beach. “You can tell the gender,” he said, “by the size of the sucker. The female’s,” he said, pulling back his sleeve to reveal a three black marks the size of a dollar coin running up his arm, “are larger. Even when they are dead,” he said, “they won’t let go.”
At the bar, Leesa ordered a Bombay Sapphire martini. The bar snacks were stale. Stirring her drink with her finger, she told him, “People think I’m a model, that I work out all the time or never eat. But I love to eat.” When she spoke, she often wished she hadn’t, wished she had remained silent. She hated the sound of her voice, thought it made her sound plaintive and fat. She licked her finger. “They think that’s all I do, work out and starve.”
Staring across the bar, Marco, lost in thought, said, “On the Mappa Mundi, the oldest surviving medieval map, the Garden of Eden is located dead center in the middle of Asia. China, to be exact. That’s the reason Asia’s called the Orient. It’s where we all began, the place we all started from,” he said. “The point we reference back to for our bearings when we get lost. Our orientation.”
Ordering another drink, one she didn’t need, Leesa loudly said, “I can’t take the subway. It terrifies me. I’ve done it once and have had nightmares since. The thought of traveling under tons of earth, the city, the buildings, overhead – it’s like traveling through a grave, all that darkness and the smell of other people. I need to see where I’m going,” she said. “Need air.” Looking around the room, looking at the people laughing and leaning into each other, a pang of loneliness ran through her. It was her second year in the city and she felt she’d made a terrible mistake, that somehow, she’d agreed to something she shouldn’t have. “There is nothing like this at home, Indiana,” she said softly. “Here, the subway. New York. It all moves so quickly,” she said, then, turning to him, asked, “What are the rooms like here?” Her hand touched his. “Are the rooms here any good?”
Worn and decorated in muted colors, the room smelled of carpet cleaner. It reminded her of the Indianapolis airport lounge. “I can’t believe they charged you three hundred forty-nine dollars for this,” she said, looking through the mini-bar.
Standing at the window staring out onto the street, Marco said, “You can’t tell by looking, but the Parthenon in Athens has no straight lines or flat surfaces. The columns,” he said, “bulge through the middle and lean inward at the top. The floor is convex, arching in the center. The ceiling and roof’s cut on a curve. To look at it, you’d never know. It appears perfectly straight.”
“I don’t do this often,” she told him, taking off her pumps. On the street below, traffic surged then stopped then surged again. She opened a small bottle of vodka from the mini-bar, drank it straight, then anxiously pulled off her blouse. “I want you to know,” she said, “I don’t do this.”
Early evening, they dressed. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she flipped through the channels then turned the TV off. “Where’s your wife?” she asked.
“Israel,” he answered, lying on the bed. “Or Italy. I’m not sure.”
“I’ve never been,” she said, “to either.” They both fell silent and she wanted him to hold her tight, wanted him to wrap his arms around her waist and place his mouth to her belly, wanted him to beg her not to go. “Mark,” she said.
“Marco,” he corrected her.
Smoothing out her skirt, she was embarrassed by the strength of her feelings. “Sunday,” she said, not looking at him, “I’m free.”
“Sunday,” he said, touching his lips. She liked his lips, the way they had lingered on her skin. “Yes, Sunday.” They made plans.
The elevator doors slid open onto a lobby shadowed in dusk. People moved confidently, speaking loudly on cell phones or quietly to one another. Stepping out onto the street, she realized she didn’t have her digital video camera, had left it in the taxi, or the bar, or the room.
She thought of going back upstairs and knocking on the door, asking if they could have dinner together, if she could stay the night. But then she thought no, and crossed against the light.
He hadn’t, she realized, asked her her name. She hadn’t, she realized, told him.
* * *
Friday afternoon, Leesa met Melody at TeaNY on Rivington Street for a tea. They sat outside and didn’t particularly like each other. Both the same age and from the same town in Indiana, they’d never hung out or spoke during high school. But they’d run into each other looking for work at a temping agency six months back and now went out together, more from loneliness than interest.
“Are those new jeans?” Melody asked. Her eyebrows tweezed, she wore a size zero and constantly smoked. Iceberg lettuce, carrot sticks, and canned tuna were all she ate. Occasionally, she’d chew on a beef bouillon cube.
Leesa ordered a black tea, a vegan cookie. Melody, a water.
“I met someone,” Leesa said, wanting to talk, to describe Marco, how she liked him. Their one meeting had consumed her for the past three days.
The tea, cookie, and water came.
“What about the guy with the bad teeth, the one from New Jersey or somewhere?” Melody asked, referring to Leesa’s last boyfriend. She and
Melody had run into him the week prior at a club. Leesa had spent the night with him and in the morning borrowed eighty dollars, knowing she’d never pay it back.
“That’s over,” Leesa said. “Been over for weeks.”
“Really?” she said, pulling out a pack of Gauloise cigarettes. “It didn’t look that way at the club the other night. You were all over him.”
“Well, physically . . . yeah,” Leesa answered, quietly stirring her tea. She looked at her cookie and didn’t want it anymore. “But mentally,” she said, thinking of Marco, “you know . . . ”
A fifty-year-old man with tattoos the color of tarnished copper slowly rode past on a custom-built low-rider bike, raccoon tails hanging from the handlebars, Puerto Rican flags flying from the back of the seat, and a stereo tied to the front-wheel fender blaring merengue. “God,” Melody said. Grimacing, she watched him pedal past. “Is that supposed to be attractive?” She broke off a piece of Leesa’s vegan cookie, sniffed it, then dropped it back on the plate. “Well,” she said, staring out at the street. Both sat silent for some minutes, Melody smoking cigarette after cigarette while Leesa picked at her cookie.
“OK,” Melody finally said, “I’m heading over to Barney’s Warehouse Sale.” She pushed her water away and stood. “Coming?”\
“No,” she said, thinking of the money she’d borrowed and how she’d already spent it. She counted out quarters and dimes for the tea and cookie. “I was there yesterday.”
“Are those new jeans?” Melody asked, brushing off her blouse.
“Marc Jacobs,” Leesa told her, standing to model them. “Got them on sale. Sixty-eight dollars.”
“Marc Jacobs?” Melody asked, skeptically. “I didn’t think he made your size.”
* * *
Leesa’s apartment was a fray of empty to-go containers, fashion magazines she’d found on the street, and half-eaten rice cakes. Avenue C and Third Street, the studio was a five-flight walk-up subletted from a woman who went to Oregon to sell phone cards. Leesa’s rent was a week overdue. The studio’s one window looked out onto the building next door. When open, the odor of fried food wafted in.
With no job, she spent her days going from shop to shop or laying on the hard futon, listening to the Dominican couple in the apartment above fight. Their shouts, stomping, and screams carried through the thin floor.
Leesa’s first week in the building, the Dominican woman’s unemployment check was accidentally delivered to her mailbox. It took over a minute of knocking before the woman opened her door, the security chain still on. Late morning, the day was already warm. A fly escaped from the apartment, flew into Leesa face. She fanned it way. “Hello,” Leesa said, peering through the door’s gap.
The woman said nothing. She seemed hot, uncomfortable. Her face, shiny with sweat, was darkly marred by birthmarks, large purple splotches that reminded Leesa of the eggplant her mother use to serve. A flare of sadness filled Leesa’s stomach and her throat tightened. She wanted to ask if they had air conditioning. “This,” she said, holding up the envelope, “was put in my mailbox. The mailman must of gotten confused.”
“No,” the woman answered. She shook her head, her long hair held back by a rubber band. She glared at Leesa like she was from Amway or the INS.
“The mailman,” Leesa explained again, slowly, “delivered this to me. It’s yours. Addressed to you. It was in my mailbox.”
“No,” the woman said again, backing slightly away. Her voice was sharp with anger and confusion. She started to close the door.
Leesa held her hand out, stopping the door, then let go. She looked at the woman, then at the envelope. “I don’t . . . do you understand English?”
“No!” the woman shouted, frightened. She kicked the door shut, turned the deadbolt home.
Stunned, Leesa stood in the hall, the envelope still in hand. She started to drop it at the woman’s door, then decided no. She’d keep it.
In her apartment, she ate a rice cake then washed her face. Stupid bitch, she thought, irritated. Looking at the check, at the woman’s name, she made a decision. It was not yet noon.
By one p.m., she’d obtained a fake ID from a T-shirt shop on St. Marks Place. By three, a library card.
By four-thirty, she’d cashed the check.
* * *
She didn’t have the money for a taxi, so she walked to the Tribeca, studying the crowd as she went. Everyone seemed the same, either laughing or hung over, carrying the Sunday Times or a baby or a bag of bagels. No one is special, she thought, including myself.
“I thought you’d forgotten,” Marco said, rising from his seat to give her a kiss on the cheek. She’d arrived twenty minutes late. The place was small, ten tables set closely together. Brunch was being served. The noise of clanking dishes, shrill talk, and cell phones ringing filled the space.
“Are you having a mimosa?” she asked. “I’d like a mimosa.” They ordered eggs with salmon and hollandaise sauce, home fries. He placed his hand on hers, his skin smooth and cool. He seemed different. She remembered him as being different.
“Did you get your hair cut?” she asked, thinking he seemed older. At the next table, two tan, muscular gay men dressed in matching attire quietly chatted about their dog’s bowel movements. They looked identical. When they kissed, it was like they were kissing a mirror.
“Tell me about yourself,” Marco said, “your home, your family.”
“My family,” she said, thinking of her father’s temper and her mother’s recent death, “is elsewhere, in Indiana.” She hadn’t been back since the funeral, hadn’t spoken with her father since then. It was all a wet memory, her time there, growing up, her awkward friendships, her learning to play clarinet, her losing her virginity to the high school band instructor. Indiana was a memory she preferred to forget. Quickly finishing her mimosa, she ordered another. “Tell me more about that map,” she said, fingering a sugar packet, “the one with Eden and how you can always find your way home with it.”
He gently touched her knee under the table. “First,” he said, “tell me your name.”
“Leesa.”
“Leesa.” Smiling, he said it again.
They enjoyed a leisurely brunch then spent the afternoon at an apartment Marco borrowed from a friend, tearing the bedding apart.
The sky clouded near evening. She lay naked in Marco’s arms. “In every room of my parents’ home,” she said, “there was at least one picture hung askew. It was like the place was leaning, ready to crumble, the walls folding in on themselves. I was afraid to touch anything for fear it would collapse on me.”
“Leesa,” he said, pulling away from her and standing from the bed. He put on his underwear. His voice was soft and distant, coming from elsewhere. “Did you know your name is similar to the Greek word meaning ‘rabid’?”
“Is that how I make you feel?”
He moved to the window, his profile dark against the gaining dusk. He said nothing. It started to rain, wetness striking and running down the windowpane.
Leesa laid her hand to her breast, felt her heartbeat under her skin, a feeling that startled her. “Is this ending, you and I?”
He watched the approaching storm. “People want to believe. They beg to believe,” he said after a minute. “With twelve hours, a dozen damp tea bags, and a sunlamp, any document can look fifty, a hundred years old. It’s amazing what a credible-looking provenance can do for an artifact.”
Getting dressed, she asked for cab fare and a hundred dollars. He gave it to her. She asked for his cell phone number. He gave her his office.
It was pouring rain by the time the taxi stopped in front of her building. She made a dash for the door but it was futile. She was soaked by the time she got in.
* * *
After she’d cashed the unemployment check, Leesa had quietly experimented with different objects until she found that a small, dull paring knife, finessed the right way, opened the Dominicans’ mailbox lock.
When the monthly checks stopped arriving, the arguing upstairs grew exceptionally violent.
* * *
The party was in the basement of an old matzo factory south of Delancy Street. It didn’t start until one a.m. “The DJ thinks he’s so butter,” Melody said, finishing one cigarette and lighting another off the butt. She tried to act more New York than New Yorkers. “He’s a fake,” she said, touching her hair. She was in a foul mood, had lost her temping job after one day and been stood up by the same guy twice in one week. “I know for a fact that he holds a day job, works in the media department for an advertising agency.”
The place gradually filled. The music throbbed, looping the rhythm. A blond-haired man, sweaty from dancing and drugs, placed his hand to Melody’s neck. Leaning in, he whispered something, his lips lightly brushing her ear. Pulling back, Melody frowned. He smiled, his teeth even and well cared for. “Fuck off,” Melody said, blowing smoke in his face. He lifted his chin, clicked his tongue, and loped off, joining the crowd on the dance floor.
“What a creep,” Melody said. “I can’t believe I actually used to sleep with the guy.”
Spellbound by the scene, the mesmerizing music, Leesa felt excited, safe, good. “You’d never guess this was going on here,” she said, unguarded. She was enjoying herself, the open feeling and sweeping sound. The doorman had let her in for free on the condition she went for a drink with him when he got off at five a.m. “The neighborhood, with all the shops and stores being Jewish or Hispanic or out-of-business, it’s all so . . . ” she said, searching for the right word, “Bohemian.”
Melody snorted. “Bohemian,” she said with disgust. “Right. Maybe to you. But then to you Bohemian means eating day old bagels and urinating while you shower. Or it means using someone else’s lipstick, or leaving your apartment without an umbrella on an overcast day. You think you’re Bohemian when your panties don’t match your bra.”
“Remind me,” Leesa said, stung by her words, “why I’m friends with you.”
“Remind yourself,” Melody said, flicking her cigarette at her, “that we’re not.”
A hot, red ash from the cigarette clung to Leesa’s blouse, singed a hole before she could brush it off.
By the time Leesa looked up, Melody had disappeared into the crowd.
Standing to the side of the dance floor, the pounding of the music pressing deep into her, Leesa felt an aching sadness. She wished she were elsewhere, anywhere. She wished she were with Marco.
She’d called him at his office that morning. He’d answered the phone curtly, like he’d just woken or had a mouthful of grapefruit. “It’s a bad day,” he told her. “People who I didn’t want to see came by.” He said they’d cornered him regarding an Egyptian artifact he’d sold them, then he said it was best he didn’t speak about it over the phone, apologizing for even bringing the subject up. “Forget it,” he told her. “Forget it.” They’d set a time to meet the following week.
She wanted to leave, the music, the crowd now irritating her. The place was packed, bodies rubbing against others. She searched for Melody, but couldn’t find her.
The doorman grabbed her as she tried to leave. “You promised,” he said, and pulled her to him.
“A drink,” she said, fending him off, “first. When you get off. Then. . . .” She forced a smile.
Taking her hand, he placed it to his lips and kissed it. “Then,” he said.
Outside, she studied the deserted street. Broken glass reflected the dim, yellow light of the streetlamps. She heard noises that sounded like old men coughing, or plastic bags rustling, distant laughter. No one was around. The street was vacant, empty.
In an hour or so, people would wake, make coffee, and ready themselves for work. In an hour or so, people would begin their day.
Pressing herself firmly to the wall, Leesa thought of home, of Indiana, and started crying.
Soon it would be dawn.
* * *
The walkie-talkies crackled and beeped as the policemen paused to catch their breath in front of Leesa’s door. Lying silent on her futon, she listened to the noise in the hallway. The police rested a moment, then continued up the stairs to the Dominicans’ apartment on the sixth floor.
The check hadn’t arrived. The fighting had been worse than ever, shouts and screams and the crash of furniture being turned over. Someone had called 911.
The police pounded on their door, told them to open up. Their voices carried down the stairwell like stones dropped in a cave. “Did you hit her?” they repeatedly asked the man. “It looks like you hit her.”
Watching through her peephole, Leesa saw the police lead the man handcuffed down the stairs. Sobbing, the woman followed, a dishtowel over her head and her hands to her face.
Putting on some music, Leesa felt nauseous.
She sat on the floor, flipped through a fashion magazine, glanced at an article on ten ways to drive a man crazy in bed, skimmed a piece on the repression of women and female circumcision in North Africa, then read an ad for thigh cream that reduced cellulite.
Tossing the magazine across the room, she shakily rose and hurried to the kitchen sink to vomit. It isn’t my fault, she told herself. She wiped her mouth with a paper napkin. They fought, would always fight. Their shouting, their violence, she told herself, was their way of showing each other love.
She poured herself a glass of flat Diet Pepsi, took a sip, then dumped it out.
On the kitchen counter sat the check.
From upstairs, there wasn’t a sound. She wondered what would happen to them, to the couple, if they’d stay together, if he’d end up killing her. “It isn’t my fault,” she said aloud, thinking of her parents, her dead mother.
* * *
“Hey, daddy,” Leesa said, the phone pressed to her ear. For three days, the Dominicans hadn’t returned. She tried to call Melody but her phone had been disconnected. The woman from Oregon had called twice demanding the rent. Leesa was out of money. “How’s everything, daddy?” she asked, needing money.
He was silent. They hadn’t spoke in months, since the funeral.
Over the line, Leesa heard a cracking noise, like her father was breaking eggs or shelling peanuts. “You coming home?” he asked, after a moment.
“I’m great,” she answered, forcing an upbeat tone. “The city’s great. My job . . . ” she said, trailing off. “Daddy, listen,” she said.
“I told you,” he flatly said. “I told you and I told your mother. I told the both of you,” he said.
“Daddy, really, all’s great,” she said. “It just that, I started this new thing, a new job. It just that I need –”
“Come home,” he told her. “Come home now.”
* * *
She took a taxi to West Forty-ninth Street. She’d told Marco to meet her out front of the restaurant. “Can you get the fare?” she asked him, stepping from the taxi. She had no cash, only the change in her purse.
When they were seated, the waitress handed them menus. Marco ordered a bottle of wine.
“What are lobster knuckles?” Leesa asked, looking at the list of appetizers. “It makes it sound like they have hands, like we’re eating their fingers.”
Studying the menu, Marco seemed tired, the lines under his eyes prominent. “I’ve had the gazpacho before,” he said, not looking at her. It was Sunday, late, and he told her not to order the sea bass. “It’s not fresh,” he said. “Never is on Sundays.”
Pleased to see him, she reached out her hand to his and wanted to tell him she’d missed him, that he’d been all she’d thought about. “I need you to tell me we’re OK,” she wanted to say.
Lightly squeezing her hand, he smiled. The wine came. Tasting it, he nodded to the waitress. She filled both glasses. He held his wine glass for a toast.
“To us,” Leesa said, touching her glass to his.
“The word ‘fiasco,’” he responded, setting his glass down, “originally referred to the straw-covered bottles Chianti comes in. After hundreds died from drinking a tainted batch of wine, the word came to mean what we now know it to mean, a total failure.” He had a day’s growth of beard, the stubble a mixture of black and gray. “It’s strange,” he said, watching the door, “how things change.”
The waitress approached, and glancing at a crib note, described the specials. Leesa ordered something she wouldn’t eat. “Is something wrong?” she asked to Marco once the waitress had left.
Marco lifted his napkin to his mouth, held it there a moment, then placed it back in his lap. “I have to make a trip,” he said. “Have to go to Italy for awhile.”
A sharp pain roiled down her spine, spread to her kidneys. “Is it your wife?” she asked, her voice slightly breaking.
“Some issues with my business,” he quietly answered, nodding to someone he knew at another table. “Best that I’m out of country while they’re being resolved. Should be no more than a couple months.”
A couple of months, Leesa thought, unable to think that far ahead. “I could go with,” Leesa said, running her knife along her palm. Nothing held her to the city, to her current life, she realized. She could leave and she wouldn’t be missed. No one would miss her. Her eyes met his. “Like a vacation,” she said, controlling her voice.
Smiling, he grabbed the corners of the table like he was going to move it aside or turn it over. “Let’s,” he calmly told her, “keep this healthy.”
* * *
Times Square was crowded. Tourists paused on the street corners to photograph the neon lights while teens from the outer boroughs smoked, loitered, and shouted. Leesa stood out front of the Toys R Us, chilled even though the night was warm. She’d left Marco, left the restaurant, abruptly, stood up and walked out as the meals were served. He was leaving. And I’m here, she told herself, her throat and eyes burning.
The traffic light changed and the taxis slowly pushed forward. A group of black boys roamed past, yelling profanities at each other. She wanted to be home, to be away from all this, the lights and sounds and people. She wanted to be alone. Counting out her change, she couldn’t afford a taxi. It was too far to walk.
I can do this, she told herself, and taking a deep breath, she walked a block, entered the Forty-Second Street subway station. She bought a token with her dimes and nickels.
Dropping the token in the turnstile, she pushed her way through.
She stood at the top of the stairs to the platform and was greeted with a blast of hot, stale air. A terrifying screech of metal against metal ripped through the station as a train braked to a stop below. The smell of heat and confinement was overwhelming. It sickened her.
She found a map of the subway system posted on the wall. Tagged with graffiti, it was worn and faded, difficult to read. The names of the stations, the streets were obscured.
Leaning in, Leesa touched the map, placed her fingers in the middle of Manhattan and held them there as she examined the colored subway lines that traverse the city, hidden and rumbling in the bedrock below. She ran her fingers along the colored lines, traveled the entire island, from Washington Heights to the Battery, then traced the tracks over into Brooklyn, then Queens, then the Bronx. She placed her palm flat to Staten Island.
She didn’t know what to do, didn’t know which train to take or what station to get off at. Standing there, she desperately searched all five boroughs, hoping to find something familiar. Hoping to find something that would tell her where she was, where she needed to go.
Douglas Light’s first published story, “Three Days. A Month. More.” appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review and was selected for inclusion in both the 2004 Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003. “Orient” is his second published story.