The bitter memory of a homophobic stand-up routine continued to curdle in my mouth as I looked out into the street beside me. A few cars idled at the light, but the night was otherwise silent. Trolley Bus No. 8 was nowhere to be found. In a night already punctuated by poor jokes, this may have been the worst: my phone lay dead in my pocket — willingly discarded in the name of challenge — and my only guide home was a Soviet-era Russian–English dictionary, with pages 28, 31 and 79 dog-eared as an ingenious reminder of which buses I needed to take.
Evidently, in defiance of the blue “9” plastered on the wall of the bus stop and the modest evening hour flashing on my digital watch, Trolley Bus No. 8 was no longer running. I uncreased page 28 and started down the street toward where I thought I might meet my other two likely candidates.
Earlier in the night, when I’d noticed my low phone battery, I decided not to charge it — intentionally provoking this feeling of intense anxiety, of being completely, utterly and literally in the dark. But now the feeling stung, as I realized how dependent I had grown on the ability to know everything, everywhere, all the time. Without that ability, I was without situation — misplaced.
The dark city of Almaty loomed massively before me — no longer some light thing to give way before the rush of my life and the dead device in my pocket. It contained me, and I was very small.
A long while passed, and neither of my remaining pages arrived as I oscillated between two neighboring bus stops. I felt that it was very cruel, what the city was doing to me — holding me so tightly with darkened streets that stretched beyond my view and rearing up to silence me, haughty enough to believe I had mastered such a monstrously large being as a city. The countdown lights at each intersection seemed to taunt me: “5, 4, 3, 2, 1,” and yet no resolution followed — traffic passed, but none carried me home to my pajamas and a warm dinner. The cold bit at my fingers, and I stuffed them deeper into the pockets of my coat as the streetlights splayed out into harsh, unfriendly arcs before my weary eyes.
Two young men sat down beside me at the bus stop, one with a particularly kind face adorned with round glasses and a gray pair of earmuffs. This man — possibly the spirit of Almaty — took an apple from his bag and began slowly eating it. Enticed by his congenial demeanor and his boldness in eating an apple at 11 p.m., I bent over to ask whether the bus was still running this late.
“Of course, the night bus is already coming this way,” he said, taking another bite and breaking into a wide smile. “You can wait with us! Where are you from?”
***
As I delicately picked the thistles from the inside of my jacket, I heard my host dad call over to me. “Look, wild apples! And this one is big and beautiful!”
A bigger or more beautiful apple I had indeed never seen. But it hung tantalizingly high among branches already laden with golden-green leaves, bending its own stem with sheer, impudent weight. As my host dad and I hurled rocks and sticks at it, shook the tree’s base and then climbed up to shake the branches themselves, it would not yield to our frenzied apple-hunting.
“Not our apple,” said my host dad. We wandered farther along the mountain path, picking our way through brambles and pausing to gaze down at the crimson and gold streaks of forest running along the hillsides toward the city of Almaty.
But soon enough, another apple — somehow more perfect than the last — came into view. “This one is ours,” my host dad murmured, already stooping to pick out a likely stick to throw.
After much heaving, shaking and other rituals reminiscent of the first hunter-gatherers, we succeeded in bringing down our apple. It was rotten on one side, which we couldn’t see from our vantage point below. But, as my host dad added, it smelled delicious. Our apple — as is my fervent belief — truly did have the finest scent in Almaty.
