It was his idea to meet at the old communist fountain. You don’t know if this is where he meets all girls, but you don’t care. Today you will happily pretend you are the most central woman to his life, and maybe today you truly are. You wish fervently that he will qualify to kick your worries to the margins of your mind and will be good enough to remind your body that it’s wired for pleasure.

He thinks you are late, but actually you arrived 15 minutes before him. You are reading ‘A genocide foretold’, by Chris Hedges. You are on a bench 100 yards away from a huge fountain with some sort of inner courtyard where people can sit surrounded by water and little waterfalls. That’s where he is sitting. Scrolling on his phone, sending you teasing messages about your being late.

A little boy, perhaps 3 years old, is lowered into the fountain by a half naked father. The father has a cigarette dangling from his lower lip. The boy is naked. It’s 35 degrees Celcius today, but it’s still unusual in this town to put an entirely naked toddler in a fountain. The boy is excited. He locks on target. He creeps up on your date from behind and violently splashes him with water. Your date, Aidan, seems unperturbed and just moves to the other side of the circle. The boy instantly slides towards him like a crocodile on the hunt. He splashes poor Aidan again. You are surprised that a little boy can create such salvos of water just by smacking the surface of the water with both hands. You hear the father yell and laugh: ‘He won’t stop until you leave. He does it to everyone.’

Aidan moves again, but the boy follows. He wants his father to lift him over a little wall separating the water of the fountain from the fountain’s island in the middle. This time the boy runs straight to Aidan and starts kicking him. Aidan only defends himself. The father laughs, but puts his son back in the water. From there the boy throws a large wooden stick towards Aidan. The stick hits his hands and Aidan drops his food. He shakes his head. The first visible sign that this is bothering him.

You text that you will arrive in 5 minutes max. You are walking from the tram stop Tomasikova over to the old communist fountain.

Aidan writes: ‘I know your feet must be tired. You have been walking around in my mind all day long, but hurry.’

It sounds like a line he picked up from a sitcom, but it makes you smile anyway.

He goes to sit as far away as possible for the boy, but the boy is relentless. He circles through the water towards the back of Aidan. This time the boy offers Aidan a little toy car. Aidan takes it and you can see he is trying to interact with the boy. But then the boy repeats his signature move and smacks the water with both hands, as hard as he can.

Aidan finally gets up and leaves. He tells the father: ‘I don’t understand why you let him do this.’

He doesn’t sound angry, but surprised.

The father says: ‘It’s useless. His mother and I have tried, but he doesn’t stop till he has driven everyone away. He does it everywhere.’

‘That is going to be a problem’

The father laughs. ‘That is indeed going to be a problem.’

Aidan finds a bench on the other side of the fountain, for a second you were afraid he might spot you observing him.

You yourself can’t be mad at the boy, though you are a bit angry at the nonchalant father. You would give the world to have all the dead kids in Gaza back right here to splash you with water mercilessly.

Naughty kids, even as outrageously naughty as this one, are always to be preferred over kids who no longer have hands to splash anyone with.

It’s in that moment that Aidan still tried to interact with the boy, when he got offered a toy car, that Aidan was sure to lodge himself inside you this afternoon. He’s surely hoping for that, but he doesn’t know what small act has made his wish come true.

Later in your dormitory, in your bed, after fluids have been swapped and dark, racing thoughts have been rammed out of your head and body for some twenty to thirty minutes Aidan proves to be a little smarter than his Tinder bio going ‘I sell sparkling water, flat water and water mixed with sugar. It’s not glamorous, but it pays the bills and let’s me travel.’

He’s in marketing, upper middle management at some Italian company that sells magnesium rich mineral water. Not the kind of job you’d kill for, more the kind of job that would suck the life right out of you.
As a student of International Relationships you are shooting for some job in politics or diplomacy. Somewhere you can make a difference and not be bored to death.

With his nose diving deep into your black curls he goes:
 
‘I’d say that popular politicians right now are committed to what I call the politics of pain.  They wage war on refugees, on you Palestinians, the homeless, trauma driven drug addicts, the unemployed. Basically, anything and anyone who wishes for a kinder society. And it works. Voters want to feel like someone is being punished for their quiet despair, their lack of power, their invisibility.’

You hook his legs with your left leg. Your thigh presses against his thighs. It feels better than you expected. Even in this insane summer heat.

You say: ‘Yes, as long as someone else hurts more they are ok with being nobodies. Essentially.’

‘That’s it. That’s it, yes. Don’t say any of this out land if you really want to work in diplomacy one day.’

He has dark blue eyes. They remind you of the sea of Gaza, the last time you were there was in 2014, you were a small child, but you drank in the sight of the sea so deeply, it will never leave you. It was that time when your parents used their connections abroad to get out. They’d had had enough of the ‘mowing the lawn’ tactics of their neighbours. That decision has probably saved your life. Yet you are convinced it killed your father. He died of Covid in 2020. You and your mother are sure his immunity system was destroyed by the heartache of not being home, of being separated from his native language and culture, of being reduced to a cleaner of operation rooms. The closest he could get to his previous job back home. Head nurse.

You are crying, but Aidan doesn’t see it and you don’t want him to see it. When he went down on you he got you to orgasm three times in a row and you forgot how enternities have gone by since the last time a guy managed to do that. It’s reminded you that life doesn’t have to be stress and anguish at all times.

You have family members in Gaza and you haven’t heard from them in 16 months. Every time you eat you do so with guilt, because if they are alive, you know they are going hungry.

You distract yourself from your tears and the return of miserable thoughts by continuing your game with Aidan.

You ask:

‘Why were your pants and the back of your shirt soaked when you arrived?’

‘Oh that? I went very close to the waterfalls at the fountain to cool down. Too close perhaps.’

You suspect he feels shame over not being able to stop a little three year old from splashing him.

You grab his hand and tightly wrap your fingers around his. You draw his hand right in front of his eyes and ask why his knuckles look so red.

‘Oh, I didn’t notice that.’

‘Were you in a fight?’, you joke.

‘Not that I recall! Though my boss deserves to be punched in his arrogant face every day of his life.’

You have given him a chance to tell you about the boy who terrorized him, but you respect that he wants to keep the little anecdote for himself.’

You don’t want to tell him that he got to slide between your legs today and melt into acceptance of his manhood, because he was kind to a boy that was driving him mad.

You don’t want to curse him with your approval.

If you praise him he might start being kind to the defenseless, not out of genuine concern for their well-being, but because he ties rewards to being human.

Instead you ask him to go down on you again and he happily dives south, to get splashed by a more sacred fountain.