"I went to Israel."
I met Justin when we were freshmen in college, just kids, the both of us. We were into the cinema, The Beatles, and bowling with very little accuracy at Tower Lanes, the smokiest of alleys, where you could scrape a fingernail across your ball and dig a furrow in the tar.
The next year, we moved onto the same floor of the same slummy house kitty-corner from campus. I lived in the big room on the corner, just off the kitchen and just over the entry to the basement apartment, which housed at one time or another:
a pair of twins, squatters, one of whom we called "Downstairs Justin"
a man whose face I never saw but whose boxy leather jacket and gently receding hairline I did, and whose never-ending trip-hop beats earned him the name "Dance Party"
and a 40-year-old washing machine, which didn't have a name, but should have
Justin lived in a closet under the stairs, and for a while he slept from 2 to 4, both a.m. and p.m. Once, he taped a note to the outside of my bedroom window, sprayed the perimeter with Aqua Net, and lit it on fire. (This was before that same aging window got stuck in the open position and I tried to close it by hitting the frame with a hammer, a terrible idea.) Every Wednesday, we hosted a Bridge club, and every Thursday, he made falafel.
We co-owned a pair of black & white, highly stylized, hand-painted portraits of Andrew Jackson and Ulysses S. Grant, perhaps inspired by Franz Kline, or maybe they were studies for Ecce Homo, I'm not sure.
One day, I came home and Justin wasn't there, and he wasn't there the next day, either. A few days later, I got an email with the subject line "I went to Israel." He went there to dig up artifacts. He couldn't tell me or didn't want to tell me when he'd come home. But one day he did, and we ate falafel and he gave me a Coca-Cola bottlecap with the logo written in Hebrew.
When, years later, he disappeared to Japan, he returned with this handmade bowl, just a few aesthetic steps above the bottlecap.
For years, I wore his polyester picture shirt of Venice, Italy, the one I'd mended and rebuttoned, until he stole it back.
