Farhad gave me a bow and pronounced his surname with a faint undertone of whimsy, ASH-kar-yar. He followed with a summary autobiographical statement—an apology, almost, for being amongst us eighteen year-olds. As he fumbled with his lock, balancing a bag of groceries on his hip and squeezing a large textbook between his legs to free a hand, he explained that he was a twenty-two year old transfer to our honours’ students residential program. Afghan by heritage, German by birth and schooling, he was already in possession of his first Bachelor’s degree.

“Who knows why they put me here,” he offered with a shrug. Our elitist fifth floor domicile had tiny, single rooms, each with a sink, a bed, and a desk, and about enough floor space left over to do jumping jacks, though not at a full stretch, and not if you’d left your chair out from under the desk, or a pair of shoes on the floor. We were a far cry from the kids who slouched around in the infamous freshman dorm a block over. We honours students cultivated our ambition in a rare collegiate quarantine, emerging from our residential boxes for intellectual camaraderie, sitting squashed up, cross-legged in our narrow hall.

I met James after Farhad, two weeks later. At five foot eleven, he was just a few inches taller than me, solid and small-featured. He wore Lennon-style glasses and came from upstate New York. I heard a rumour that he grew up in a trailer park, but that might have been an inspiring mythological account of his humble origins, meant to complement the studious, driven young man he appeared to be. I never found out the truth. He admitted that he’d been a kind of prodigy in math, though he never talked much about numbers other than to declare his intended career path in mathematics and philosophy. Mostly, he talked about books. Perhaps that’s why he was the first person to whom I admitted that I was writing a novel.

“What about?” We sat on his floor drinking instant coffee at eight pm, taking a break from homework.

“I’m not sure. A young woman learns about some stone tablets buried somewhere in Australia and goes in search of them. I think they reveal the meaning of life.”

“Hmm.” He studied his Snoopy mug for a second and sniffed.

“Are you wondering how I’ll explain the meaning of life?”

“Well.” He brought his mug to his mouth. “Writers usually write about familiar things.”

He peered at me, bug-eyed, through his round specs.

“James, I grew up in an apartment, with a view of a parking lot. There were the same fast food restaurants on the main road as everywhere else in America. There was a weirdo pervert guy upstairs who kept wanting me to come play his video games, and a public school with all the normal cliques. People read fiction to escape that kind of mediocrity.”

He rebalanced his glasses on the rim of his nose. “Have you read Mrs. Dalloway? Day to day life can be revealing. I’ll loan you my copy.”

“I’ll take it under advisement.” I rolled my eyes at him. I didn’t like the implication that I needed literary advice.

Anna, barely five foot tall and squarish, with a bosom that disappeared into her plumpness, was an art history major with a passion for making ceramics. She wanted to run an art gallery. A famous one. She spoke French and German, owing to her Swiss-American parentage and summers in Lausanne. I think she was from California, though there was nothing West coast about her. Her dark brown hair was a mess of cropped curls framing her sallow skin, as if she rarely emerged from her own thoughts, much less out into the sunlight. Her room smelled like Cheetos and peanut butter. She and James hung out together sometimes after dinner, listening to the Violent Femmes and Portishead. I stopped by one evening, and because her room was too small for three people, we sat outside her door in the hallway.

“Has Caroline told you that she’s writing a novel?” James asked.

“No. Wow. About what?”

“About the meaning of life,” he said.

“In a manner of speaking,” I added, glaring at James.

“Have you ever read, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller?” Anna asked.

“No.”

“It’s such a trip. I’ll lend you mine,” she said.

Just then, Farhad appeared.

“Aha! This is where it all happens, the fifth floor!” He left his door wide open to come sit with us.

“This is Farhad.” I introduced him to the others. Then we all collectively inhaled in a quizzical, slightly panicked manner.

“Is something burning?” Anna asked.

“That is home cooking! My aunt in Bethesda cooks me meals and sends them over once a week. Today was delivery day. It is my dinner. I have a microwave in my room.”

He strode back and emerged a second later with a steaming bowl of rice topped with what looked like beef skewers, vegetables with walnuts in an orange sauce, and a flat piece of bread. He sat with us and began to eat, explaining, between bites, that he’d already done a degree in German literature in Frankfurt. He was now studying philosophy and doing pre-med. He’d come to America to become a doctor.

No one responded. I was struck as much by the incongruity and ambition of his dual major as by the cheerful enthusiasm of his announcement. Maybe we were all worried a bit, about our chances at success, about our goals, about all the papers and exams and grading ahead of us.

Anna turned to me. “And you, Caroline? I’ve never asked, actually. Literature?”

“No. Poli sci.”

Then James said to Farhad, “Caroline is writing a novel. I guess we thought she was a lit major.” He paused and watched me, as if expecting an explanation.

I looked away. I had no words for the ineffable peace of creative work, nor my reluctance to expel it from the safety of my heart into a world of calibrated achievement.

Farhad, now sitting next to me, clapped me gently on the back. “Wonderful news! To create is to become part of history. I write poetry in German. I recite, also. You will see. I will invite you to my reading one day.”

That night, after the city’s commuters scattered home from work, we spilled into the empty streets with our laughter and loudness and grandiose plans, making straight for the Mall and its floodlit buildings. On that first occasion together the four of us sat on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, laughing at the phallic significance of the Washington Monument. But I wasn’t fooling myself. There was authority in those oversized beacons, and none of us knew where we stood in relation to it yet.

James was the one who decided. “We have to do this regularly, everyone, come down here and sit at night.”

“Your symbols of power work on the soul,” Farhad said, enigmatic.

“James, you’re a mathematician! I’m the one majoring in politics, and I think it’s just spooky.”

“Why spooky, Caroline?” asked Anna. “It’s beautiful here at night.”

But the cold light of the monuments sliced through the warm air with sepulchral solemnity. Only gradually did our camaraderie, our freshman excitement, soften the glare, and then somehow our surroundings seemed to glow with aspirations, even to beckon with their luminescence, and I began to believe I could achieve greatness. The Mall started to work on my soul that first night, as we walked around the Reflecting Pool in the hot evening of early September.

Ahead of us, Anna was walking next to Farhad as we returned to the dorm. She came up to his shoulder. I eavesdropped as she explained why she adored Gustav Klimt, and he declared the eroticism of Klimt was a form of romance that could be traced directly to German Romanticism. She objected, and he recited something in German. After her witty riposte, which I only half-heard, he spontaneously embraced her. She gazed up at him with shining eyes.

Then, as we moved from the Mall’s brightness up the hill into the dark streets, James told me he needed to get something off his chest. His head lowered towards mine, he confessed that his high school girlfriend left him for another girl. He was the only guy she’d ever had sex with, and it looked like he’d always be that guy to her. The one who turned her off men completely.

His voice cracked. “I don’t know why I told you. I had to tell someone. She only dumped me a month before we left for college.”

“You know it’s not about you. What girl wouldn’t want to go out with you?”

He plunged his hands into his jeans pockets. I stroked his back consolingly and told him not to worry.

Later that night Anna informed me that he had a crush on me. I grew nervous. I began to notice his thick fingers. His thin, unsmiling lips. I wondered if he had hair on his abs and chest, if he were commanding and confident during sex. If he ever lost control, if he cried over love. I imagined he’d be grateful for the affections of a straight girl, that he’d go out of his way to prove his manhood, which did give me a moment’s pause. So far, sex had only ever been mechanical, fast. Teenaged. Not considered, not aspiring to skill or effect.

As we began to hang out more, I took to sitting closer to him, just to gauge my interest. I felt self-conscious, plain, with too-small breasts, a soft middle and flat hair. Not pretty, just average.

The truth was, I was lonely and no one asked me out. I could have let myself burn up for him, but I quashed it. I didn’t want to lose him to a fling gone wrong, because I prized our companionship; we were so much the same. Smart and ambitious and unwise.

We walked a lot at night, the four of us, as summer turned to fall, and tourists disappeared, and the Clinton campaign poured its cheerfulness and hope deep into our pockets. I began to volunteer at the campaign headquarters on campus. Answering phone calls, handing out fliers, stickers, soaking up the excitement, the politics of transformation. I was ready to take on the world.

Still, I worked on my novel in private, late into the night, even after hours of homework. I struggled to find a meaning that would be inscribed in stone, and toyed with metaphysics, studying books I’d checked out from the library on ancient religions. It soothed me, the writing and the search for meaning. There were no deadlines, no rules, infinite possibility, and quiet, and dreaming.

Farhad asked me how it was going with my novel one day. I’d rather hoped everyone had forgotten about it. I shuffled my feet and admitted I was kind of stuck, but enjoying it nonetheless. He told me that love was the meaning of being alive, that I must read The Sorrows of Young Werther. Then he pressed a pamphlet of Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet into my hand, and told me that its passages on love were revelatory.

On a sultry evening, we again walked through the Vietnam Memorial towards the steps in front of Lincoln’s seated form. It was an unexpected Indian Summer, the leaves already blazing in shades of red and orange. That’s when James told me that Farhad and Anna had slept together. Once, maybe twice. There was no sign of it. They were still friends—we all were. I detected no awkwardness between them, no lingering touches, or desire or resentment. Had it merely been recreation? Had Farhad gathered her in his lanky arms, buried his long face in her soft breasts and glided across her squat form, a bow drawn across a cello? I imagined that the recumbent Anna had succumbed to Farhad’s noble poetry, and then they were sated; it was over.

“Did you hear me?” James asked. He removed his glasses.

“Yes, yes,” I replied. His slightly unshaven chin was at the height of my nose; he looked down at me, lips parted, eyes lowered. His hand brushed up against mine and I startled. A shiver ran through me and straight into my loins. Why not? I asked myself. I imagined pushing him up against one of the shiny black walls, the engraved names of Vietnam’s dead Americans spiking out all around his outline as our groins met, our mouths colliding with lascivious fury. But I told him instead about young Werther, fashioning a barrier between us with Farhad’s Romanticism, unable to reach across to him.

Farhad invited us all to hear him recite the lyrical poetry of Heinrich Heine at a café on L Street. Anna, James and I all met in our dorm lobby at seven, and began walking. There were revellers buzzing with the democratic victory the previous Tuesday, their Clinton-for-president buttons pinned to their coats. The Friday night crowd stirred with nervous energy; the temperature hovered at a faint chill but no one seemed to care. Coats were unbuttoned, heads bare, and glittering rows of bars and restaurants poured out their warmth to passersby.

We huddled together under a streetlamp to search for the quirky café Farhad had described. It was up ahead, to our left. There was a narrow alley to our right. I saw the homeless man first, and poked James on the arm.

“Do you see—?”

Anna squinted.

The man moaned. He rocked and clutched his chest. There was a knife stuck at an odd angle in his collarbone. I’m sure I saw blood on his face, but it was dark and I couldn’t be sure.

Anna said, “Who knows. Let’s go. C’mon!”

James didn’t move at my side, craning his neck to peer into the alley.

“He’s been stabbed,” I said.

“We should help,” said James.

Anna grabbed James’ arm and said, “Let’s go! We’re going to be late.”

“But he might be really hurt. If we don’t help him, what happens?” asked James.

“Listen, we don’t need to put ourselves in danger to help a homeless guy.”

I froze, mute, queasy. Was there a payphone nearby? Could I take out the knife? He would die, I knew he had to die, no one could survive such wounding. A leaden awareness of life’s inevitability and our powerlessness spread throughout my body. Life in the grip of death. My place on that spectrum gained a terrifying clarity. I could see that he’d stopped moving. Maybe it was too late. I choked back the words clawing at my throat: Fast, go, help him!

Anna was pulling James away by the arm. He looked from me to Anna and back. He turned once more towards the homeless man, then lowered his eyes. Anna pulled once more at his arm and he stumbled, took a step, and followed. I went after them.

I have no memory of the poetry reading beyond Farhad’s tanned face aglow in soft lamplight, his mouth moving. German words, then English, the murmur of the crowd, sudden laughter. James and I didn’t speak all evening and Anna was sitting on his other side. I left early on my own. I went back to the alley where the homeless man lay. No one was around, so I took a deep breath and approached. The knife was there still, in deep, just an inch of it between flesh and handle. His collar and neck were dark with congealed blood. There was a faint echo of life as streets away, someone cheered. I kicked his shoulder gently. His face was thick with white bristle, glassy eyes staring out at me in yielding blankness. A sliver of moonlight illuminated an oblong area of faded plaid on his coat. I stared at the brightness, unable to look at the wound anymore, unable to tear myself away as clouds shifted and light poured down into the alley and the man glowed in perfect death. My life bore down on me: an unbearable weight of possibilities unfurling in multiple directions, all emanating from—and leading back to—this moment. I might have let go of fear then, once and for all, in that dark, dead place. But I turned and left. I clung to my desire to conquer life.

I scoured the papers the next few days. All victory, elections, Hillary Clinton and ramblings about hope. Two days later, a small blurb in the back of the Washington Post described the stabbing death of the homeless man known to locals as L Street Bill.

I rebuffed James and Anna. James threw himself into math. One evening Farhad put a tablecloth down in the hallway and filled it with several serving dishes of meats, saffron-red rice, stewed vegetables, flat bread, nuts and dried fruit. His small, delicate teacups were arrayed against the wall alongside a massive teapot steaming with the scent of cardamom and mint.

James emerged from his room behind the Wall Street Journal and announced that he’d decided to learn how to trade.

We hadn’t walked together at night since the poetry reading, but we gathered for one more excursion after a snow storm that left DC frozen. Farhad suggested it, rousing us from isolation and late night study with his enthusiasm. Hardly speaking, we walked in a shuddering group down to the Mall. The Reflecting Pool was frozen solid, and Anna suggested we walk on it. It felt somehow disrespectful, but we were buoyed by a group momentum and so together we navigated a straight line across, slipping and taking tiny steps. I recalled a family trip I’d taken to Massachusetts when I was in high school. How I’d taken my tattered copy of Henry David Thoreau’s On Walden Pond, how overawed I was to visit the sacred site, until I came upon a beach filled with bikini-clad adolescents, ice cream vendors, the detritus of consumerism strewn across the sand. On that Washington, D.C. night I gazed into the Reflecting Pool with the same foolish hope.

At first, I didn’t recognize myself, my too-round face, my paleness like a blank palette, without eyebrows or lashes, like some blanched water creature. I saw something cheap and banal in my reflection and it didn’t impress me. I felt ordinary. Then, looking up and around me, the greatness of history, of Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson across the way in his rotunda, and the Washington Monument declaring its prowess over us—all that became my mantle, then and there. One to grow into and live up to. There was much to do out there in the world, and I was game.

Within a week, my laptop, an early prototype of more advanced machines to come, fatally crashed. My novel died. I kept the notes for a few years before losing them at my parent’s house. I redoubled my studying, and my GPA hovered at a steady 3.9. I took summer internships in a Senator’s office, at a PR firm, and my resume grew longer, more focused, more impressive.

By our sophomore year, James had switched to finance. Anna carried on with art, and Farhad disappeared into a punishing pre-med schedule. The year after that we all moved into different dormitories. It was the end of the four of us. I ran into each of them on campus every once in a while, but conversation was never deep, never furthered, and then we lost touch completely.

Five years later, on a sweaty July evening in suburban New Jersey, I was at a neighbourhood barbeque. Ralph Fein handed me a beer at and asked where I’d gone to college, what year I graduated. When I told him, he exclaimed, “Did you know James Longstratton by any chance?”

I was stunned to hear his name. I hadn’t thought about him for ages. Ralph was a trader, had worked with James once, a few years back, and had only good things to say about him: how he worked on Wall Street, used his mathematical skills to trade futures. James had become really successful.

“By successful, do you mean money? Position?” It was my bugbear, something I was grasping at myself. Ralph and I often bickered amicably about the height of my hedges, his dogs, the use of headlights when returning home at a late hour. Not about work.

“Is there any other definition? Would you rather be a genius writer living in penury, drinking yourself to death? You’re successful, Caroline, aren’t you a PR Princess?”

“That’s annoying, Ralph. I’m no princess.”

“Ah, but you could be the Queen. At the top.”

He tried deflecting my imminent rant with a tantalising tidbit about pregnant Patty, four doors down, but I headed him off.

“Is James happy, do you think?”

Ralph never looked anyone in the eye, not for any length of time. He’d been married for twenty years. His wife got her mail in full makeup with a Botox smile. I never heard a voice raised. Maybe he didn’t know what happy was.

He took a swig of his beer. “He’s happy, sure. Why not? He’s married, has two little girls.”

Then Ralph told me about Patty, how she’d been having an affair with her cleaner, such a cliché, but the kid she was having was his, and her husband fired the guy but agreed to raise the child as his own. “Some people’s lives,” he shook his head. “Be grateful you’ve got ambition.”

I moved to London the next year, headhunted by a PR firm. Four more years passed, and ambition carried me like a wave towards some intangible horizon. Work was headier than sex, lubricated by late nights, adrenalin, my reputation, the way junior staff deferred to me. I got the biggest accounts. I didn’t mind the late hours and I forgot what leisure time was. I kept getting promoted. My husband Richard, an Englishman whom I’d met at a dinner party when I was twenty-eight, was on the up as a solicitor, and we lived in a fashionable semi-detached terrace in Hampstead Heath. We knew important people. Politicians, solicitors, an artist or two. Martin Amis was once at a dinner party we attended. When he handed me a glass of port, one of his fingers brushed against mine, and I suddenly remembered the novel I’d begun at eighteen years of age, about the meaning of life etched in stone tablets.

Then I started thinking about Patty, back in New Jersey. Her illegitimate child would by now be approaching school age.

“Why don’t we have a baby?” I asked Richard at the breakfast table in the sunroom; it was a white London morning like any other.

“Why this, all of a sudden? You have a career.”

“Don’t look at me that way. Women manage.”

“You’re driven, sweetheart. How do we make room?”

“Room in my heart, you mean.”

“I didn’t say that.” He gulped down his coffee and hid behind the Times; all I could see of him was a hairy hand and a glint of his wedding band.

“Don’t make it my choice. You have a choice, too.”

He ruffled the paper and cleared his throat. The sky dulled. I knew he meant room in my heart. Sure, we’d fought a few times over having time for each other, but we managed. Weekends, holidays away. Our hearts contained one another. Could my heart contain more? Another kind of love, the subjugation of my ambitions, the constant care of a child?

I tried to fall pregnant to defy him, to defy my heart, and the world which I had so easily conquered. I could create ad campaigns for multi-million dollar companies, surely I could do this. I was fucking smug. But I couldn’t conceive a child.

In the depression which followed, my tears fell to the past, to the bristly chin of L Street Bill, abandoned in an alley, and to James, whom I should have slept with, and Farhad, whom I should have listened to, and Anna, whom I should have shaken and screamed at, to insist that we do something. That we save L Street Bill and save ourselves.

Anna now lived cushioned by suburbia, busy with PTA meetings and a nuclear family, an online craft business and a successful blog. I found her blog by accident, and emailed her in a rush of enthusiasm. I asked her about L Street Bill, if she remembered what happened. I hit ‘send’ before taking the time to think it over.

She replied within hours. A curt response, congratulating me on my PR successes (she had read my Facebook bio), and a measly few lines: “Did you mean that homeless guy? No. I don’t really think about him. Hey, whatever became of your book, by the way? I always wondered if you ever wrote it. Best of luck, Caroline. Great hearing from you!”

Was she in denial? Did she not remember? I spent a few restless nights trying to figure it out, what psychological defence she was using, and why. Maybe I should have been asking myself why it was I cared about L Street Bill so much. Maybe I was the one who should have moved on by now. Weeks later, after the Twin Towers went down, I rang Ralph Fein on a lark and asked if he knew how James was. There was a choked gasp, a muffled reply, and no words to fill the silence that followed.

Then I started looking for Farhad.

It took me a few years, but I found him, at Georgetown Hospital. An orthopedic surgeon. I was delighted to read about his accomplishments online. I followed him then, virtually, keeping up to date on whatever news seeped out: promotions, awards, marriage. His success, his happiness, they became my vicarious hope. After a year of virtual stalking, I worked up the courage to write him. After Anna, after James, I feared disappointment, feared my own expectations.

It was happening to my peers, all around me. In that liminal space where fresh adulthood turns middle-aged, when ambition begins its collision course with identity, the desire for meaning sends its emissaries out through the soul, reaching into messy back corners, exposing those moments that have been shoved, crushed, covered over: the feeling of riding a bike the first time, the smiling eyes of a first lover, realizing the difference between what one is good at, and what one loves.

James and Anna and Farhad and L Street Bill. Literature and ambition, Richard and motherhood.

Authentic moments, excavated, now haunted me.

Some months later I wrote Farhad a short letter. He replied enthusiastically, insisting I come stay with him and his family when I was next in the U.S., after his six-month stint in Afghanistan where he planned to work as a doctor in his family’s ancestral village. He wrote, “I hope you are writing, Caroline. I still write poetry. Only through literature is life eternal.”

In my next letter I enclosed a short story I’d written about all of us and L Street Bill. I’d never told him about that night—I didn’t think anyone ever had. My letter was returned to me inside a big manila envelope with a note from his colleague.

Only two weeks earlier, Farhad had gone back to Afghanistan and was killed by a US air raid. His colleague said that he died doing what he loved, and wouldn’t have regretted anything in his life.

So I took a trip back to D.C. on my own. With moonlight tearing through the jagged clouds, the icy fingers of an early fall morning slipping down my collar to tickle my neck, I trudged up L Street. It was after the night crowds, and the streets were slick with an empty blackness, sidewalks moulting with clumps of wet leaves. I wondered what dreams L Street Bill had harboured, what ambitions he’d held close before it all went wrong. I wondered if he ever found meaning, a reason for his existence, something to hold onto. Maybe the kindness of a volunteer at a soup kitchen. Or the memory of his mother’s soft gaze.

There was nothing in that alley. No person or thing, just the dark and a whiff of urine. I tried to remember what happened, what exactly I’d seen, how L Street Bill had lain on the ground, but it was all blurry, and I started to crave coffee and a bagel. Still I stood there, wanting something to happen, a revelation, a flash of precise memory, the kernel of a decision about how to proceed in the present. Dawn came like mist smoking down from the sky into the alley, and suddenly I was starving. The ordinary world called to me. Imperfect life, drained of fiery aspirations, all around me, inevitable. It was just another day, with more choices to make.

As for that novel of mine: long vanished, with no successor. Life put a stop to the ambition of youth, of James, Anna, Farhad and myself, one way or another. In public or private, in life or death, we skidded to a standstill after all that youthful sprinting toward success. But I’m still looking for something grand to live by. A swathe of light bathing death; the choice to see it clearly or not.