Behrooz held out his hand. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “Just observe, quietly, for a while. Soon, you’ll come to know it as your own.” I nodded, took his hand and we walked toward that exit, the doors that opened and shut, opened and shut.
WHEN I ARRIVED at Behrooz’s apartment, his wife and his sons, Javid and Pouya, were there to greet me. My uncle sat me down at the kitchen table and told me that there were nuances to public behavior in Iran that I did not understand, an entire language of social decorum, taboos, restrictions that required experience to learn and navigate. The margin for errors was small. “I want you to stick with either Javid or Pouya when you leave the house. For a little while. They will keep you safe until you learn your way.”
Then, Pouya asked, “Do you want to come with me to a pool party?”
Jet-lagged and disoriented, dressed in a hijab that was ghastly in comparison with the sleek interpretations of hijab I saw on our drive home from the airport, I went with my cousin to a beautiful brick home in a neighborhood of other beautiful, large brick homes and old trees. In a drawing room full of antiques and heavy drapery and fine furniture, girls in bikinis lounged on the couches sipping drinks and eating olives. I took off my hijab and hung it on the coat rack by the door, which was already heavy with manteaus and headscarves. Pouya and I walked into a lush backyard surrounded by high walls, and there, diving into a blue swimming pool surrounded by girls in bikinis and designer sunglasses, was Ali.
He swam the length of the pool and pulled himself out, water streaming from his auburn curls, down his muscled torso. He had a compact, powerful body. Eyes the shade of honey. A fierce hunger in them. A strong chin. He took a quick glance at me, slapped Pouya’s back with his wet hand in greeting, then turned back and asked, “You want to see a crocodile?”
The girls around the pool responded with a unanimous yes. He got down onto the ground at my feet, balancing himself on his hands and his toes as though ready to do push-ups, then he slithered and curved his way back to the pool’s edge, and flopped in sideways, impressively crocodile-esque. The girls squealed with delight. He swam the length of the pool and with perfect fluidity, got out, jumped into the air, flipped, and dove back in.
Ali had been Pouya’s best friend since boyhood. This was his parents’ house, but his father had died six months earlier, and though he was the youngest child of six, last in a line that included five daughters, the house now belonged to him. He also owned a villa in the northern Caspian Sea region of Iran. Ali was the playboy of the Tehran scene. Not a girl poolside he hadn’t discreetly had already.
“So you’re Pouya’s cousin from Los Angeles?” he asked me.
I felt the tension of the other girls, the quiet appraisal of my sexual appeal, the calculations of whether I presented a threat or not in their contest for this man’s attentions. But Ali was Pouya’s best friend, a brother to him. And I knew the codes of this culture well enough to know that if a man had a friend who was like a brother to him, he kept his hands off his friend’s female kin, his sisters, his cousins, any blood relation of his unless the man’s intentions were marriage. And if that was the case, he’d ask permission from his friend before he began the courtship, and he wouldn’t touch the girl until she was given to him for keeps. So when I told Ali my name, and he invited me to swim, and I declined and told him I was there to only watch, he returned to his performance, but this time for my sake, which he knew, and the girls knew, and I understood. But I had just ended an obsessive and all-consuming love affair before arriving in Tehran. I had left Justin behind in Los Angeles. In truth, I had escaped Los Angeles to leave Justin behind. So I ignored Ali.
The girls surrounded me, wanting to know who I was, where I came from, how it was in LA. I wanted them to like me. I was tired from my journey. The sun felt good on my skin. The walls were high enough to keep the music and the sound of our laughter from reaching the street and alerting the police to our illegal gathering. The colors of that afternoon appear hazy in my memory, like a faded Polaroid. Muted sunlight, a faint blue pool, the slowly erased familiarity of a handsome man’s face. On the borders of that image are the partially nude bodies of young women, their gaze hidden behind sunglasses. It could have been a scene in any Los Angeles backyard. And so, in a state of half dream, I forgot where I was, and I allowed myself to be.
AT LAX, MY mother had held me in her embrace for a long time. I finally pulled away from her, assured her that I’d be fine and turned to walk to my gate. I had on my Das Meindl boots, my trekking backpack on my back, my cash and American passport hidden in its lining, my suitcase checked. A couple weeks ago, I had quit my job at a subtitling firm in Hollywood. That same night, Justin and I sat in my parked car on Cahuenga and Hollywood Boulevard. Outside, the steady current of people walked by, weirdos and junkies and club goers and tourists dazzled by the grime-covered stars beneath their feet.
“I don’t know when I’ll return,” I told him.
Justin looked straight ahead. He didn’t show any emotion, but I could see his fury in the tightness of his jaw. His hurt in the straight line of his lips. A helicopter with search lights passed overhead. In the distance, sirens wailed endlessly. I imagined whomever they were hunting and what it might feel like to be hunted. Running through the crowded streets. Cold. Afraid. Dodging the lights of the marquees. The flashing advertisements. The costumed characters, Mickey Mouse and Marilyn Monroe, the man painted silver, the handful of Michael Jacksons moonwalking, the guy holding the sign about the Second Coming, screaming above the noise and the traffic, “Repent! Repent!”
It had been four years since my father’s death, and I felt like I was suffocating. I waited in that car, carefully reading the man who sat silently beside me. “You never loved me,” Justin said, finally. He got out of my car, slammed the door. I called him, again and again, but he didn’t pick up his phone. I left messages apologizing, explaining, pleading for forgiveness.
I had met Justin five years earlier in the parking lot of a strip mall in the San Fernando Valley, at the beginning of the summer, so that the heat was already the intolerable hell-furnace the Valley is known for, and the air heavy with that brown death that lingers just above your head, and the seagulls suspended in the sky as that strange haze rose from the asphalt and made everything seem like a desert mirage. He walked toward me from that warped light rising from the parking lot, shirtless, long hair loose about him, green eyes, smooth skin, an apparition of beauty. He stood before me, then said hello in a baritone I felt in a part of me strangers don’t often touch.
At home, my father was dying, slowly. From Lou Gehrig’s disease. A darkness entered our house. I used to punch the walls in my bedroom with my bare fists after spoon-feeding pureed baby food to my father, while my mother used a machine to suction out what he couldn’t swallow. I needed desperately to pull my life apart from that death. Justin’s arms, the weight of him, the urgency of his desire in contrast to that other urgency, offered me an escape. When I was with Justin, it felt like the gulps of air a drowning man takes each time he struggles to the surface to breathe.
And it wasn’t just that, either, the escape of death through desire. I grew up choked by restrictions. My parents had left behind a whole world they understood in Tehran, and settled in the staggering isolation of a Los Angeles suburb. They barely spoke the language. They couldn’t grasp the culture. Everything felt foreign and dangerous. They learned about the America outside our door from the TV in our living room, through the nightly news and sitcoms. The news promised kidnappings and rape and gang violence. The sitcoms showed broken families, unruly teenagers, dysfunction. The world outside the home was hostile to our ways. Violent. Unwelcoming. My parents needed to protect me from the lawlessness, the waywardness of America. I was to walk straight home after school. I was to keep my mind on my studies. If I met friends at the movies, I was dropped off right before the film began and picked up immediately after. I wasn’t allowed to sleepover at anyone’s hous
e, and school dances were a leniency only because teachers were in attendance. Parties were out of the question.
Everything with Justin was a trespass. I used to go hiking with him in the coastal mountains where we wandered off the trails to hidden crevices in the valleys of those mountains. We spent the afternoons lying on warm slabs of granite by the creek. We climbed the side of those mountains to overlooks. Once, we walked into a den of rattlesnakes. Once, a cloud of bees swarmed over our heads. We used to crawl through the hole in the chain-link fence to cross the ledge of the dam, past the “No Trespassing” signs, to swim in the lake. At night, we drove to secret parties in old, abandoned factories where DJs played electronic music until the sun came up. Then, we’d stumble out, drive to the drum circle at Venice Beach, or go to Lenny’s house. Lenny was an old black man, a friend of Justin’s father. He had known Justin since Justin was an infant. Lenny lived in an apartment full of old records and so many potted plants, the air inside his home felt tropical. He would pour a glass of wine, roll a joint, and put on a record, blues, jazz, funk, and talk about the music. I spent whole mornings with him in the study of Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain” or War’s “Get Down.”
Sometimes, Justin’s father showed up, too. Justin was the child of this black man and a white woman, the result of a momentary love. Justin’s father talked about another America, one I didn’t know existed, having grown up sheltered in an upper-middle-class white suburban neighborhood, where I was both poor and the only dark-haired, dark-skinned child at school, where the history textbooks glossed over the Middle Passage and had illustrations that depicted smiling Indians engaged in the tallow industry of the pueblos beneath the loving guidance of the halo-headed padres. Justin’s father’s stories of brutality and corruption, not just historical but current, sounded familiar. He spoke of a system of governance and policing that seemed as menacing as the country my family had escaped decades ago. My parents were too caught up with my father’s illness to know where I was and what I was doing. I told them I was at school or the library. That I was studying. Researching. And I was, indeed, learning.
Then my father died.
In that moment of shattering, I understood the prison I’d made for myself within Justin. Though he had pulled me out of the prohibitions of my parents’ fears, he paroled that freedom. I was his girl. His, only. When we walked together, if another man looked at me, Justin would seethe with jealousy. He would accuse me of walking in a way that attracted attention, of being inviting. After a while, I learned to keep my eyes down in the streets, to keep my mouth in a hard, thin line for fear that Justin might see me smiling and accuse me of looking at another man, then fly into a fit of rage. I felt smaller and smaller. Anxious. Encaged. I couldn’t breathe. I needed to escape.
It took a while for me to realize where to go so that Justin wouldn’t follow me. He had followed me when I left to study at the university in Berkeley. Followed me when I returned to LA to work as an elementary school teacher at a yeshiva in Hollywood. After a year at the yeshiva, I got a job at a subtitling firm in the high-rise next to the CNN building, and I sat, day in and day out, behind a computer screen at a window overlooking the hills and the Hollywood sign, overseeing the subtitling of films distributed to twenty-five European countries. It was drudgery. Meaningless, futile work. And Justin was more and more demanding that I remain a small satellite in the orbit of his needs.
Then, a few years after my father’s death, Uncle Behrooz was granted a visa to visit America. In the evenings, we’d gather at my grandmother’s house and he would tell stories about his adventures in Iran. He went trekking often through the wilderness and had friends among the nomads and the shepherds. He was welcomed in remote, unknown villages as an honored guest. His stories were so vivid, so full of life, of magic. The Iran of Behrooz’s stories was not the Iran of the evening news, or the Iran of my parents’ memories. It did not carry the same threat, or the sad nostalgia. It felt like a place bigger than life, full of possibilities and experiences I thought could only exist in books. I sat and listened to my uncle, captivated. He looked at me, and somehow understood that I was searching for something. “Come to Iran,” he invited me. “I will take you with me on these journeys, to experience them for yourself.”
And I knew, then, what I had to do to be free.
I fought with my mother about going back. She pleaded, threatened, tried to reason me out of it. She and my father had risked their lives to bring me to America. They had sacrificed everything so that their daughter could grow up with freedom, and go to school and go to college and have a career and buy a home in a nice neighborhood. But I felt trapped, by the sorrow of my father’s death, by the crippling memories of his suffering. I’d sit in traffic on the way to work, clutching the steering wheel, and think about my job, my school loans, and credit card debts. I’d think about Justin, and the marquees and the advertisements. I walked on those grime-covered stars on the sidewalk and thought about all the absurdities. Life couldn’t be just this. I argued until my mother saw she couldn’t win. I bought my ticket, packed my trekking stuff into my backpack, and a suitcase of other things, and she dropped me off at LAX, held me tight in her embrace, until I pulled away from her and got on the plane.
I carried a secret with me, on board. A ticking time bomb, strapped to my chest. Since adolescence, I’d had a heart issue. My heart would start racing, 240 beats a minute. I had gone to doctors, and they had wired me up to all sorts of machines, and they never seemed to find the cause. When I told my mother I was going to Iran to live with her brother Behrooz for a while and trek the mountains, she finally gave in with one caveat, that I go and have a full check-up on my heart, to make sure everything was in order. I went to a cardiologist, had an EKG, ran on a treadmill, did an echocardiogram, and while they couldn’t catch the arrhythmia, they discovered two holes in my heart. An atrial septal defect, which had been there, unnoticed, since birth. To keep me alive, my heart had to do a lot more work than a normal, healthy heart. This strain had enlarged my right atrium to the point where I was due for cardiac arrest. I needed open heart surgery, stat.
I didn’t have time for surgery. I wasn’t ready to face my own mortality. My bags were packed. I needed to leave. I decided not to tell anyone about my malformed heart until I returned. Once I came back, I’d deal with the whole heart thing. I got on that airplane with my broken heart, my father gone, and Justin behind me. There would be open skies for a while. Then the layover in Heathrow. Then, finally, Iran. And there, I would find something. To fill the holes. To heal them.
MY SECOND DAY in Tehran, a garden gate burst open in front of me on my solitary walk to the neighborhood produce bazaar. Out ran a dazzling rooster, flashing emerald green and brick red, followed by two children who were, in turn, followed by a white-haired old man in sandals, all of whom were laughing in their chase of the feathered escapee, who ran around and around a tree, then down the street with his captors in fierce pursuit.
This filled a hole in my heart. Just this. The unexpectedness of it. The joy of it. The colors of the rooster, emerald green that turned to purple that shone black in the shift of light, the sound of the children’s laughter, the protests of the rooster, the half-hearted curses of the old man. In that moment, I lost myself. I lost the boundaries between me and the world before me. I became the chase, the laughter, the freedom. When I returned to myself, again, I was on an unfamiliar street, the signs of which were written in an alphabet I could barely read, with cars that ignored the traffic signals and the pedestrians.
The day I buried my father, something changed. It is a difficult thing to write about, even still, because it transcended words. Something broke open, sent my consciousness freewheeling beyond everything I thought I understood. I knew, instantly, that the body was an illusion, that time was an illusion, that suffering was an illusion. That the separation between me and plum and tree and sunlight did not exist. I felt as though I had awoken from a deep sleep. It was the
first of May when he died. All the leaves on the trees were new, and they glistened in the sun, and each time the wind blew through them, they sang. Suddenly, the whole of the universe was singing. Or it had been, all along, but now, I could hear it. I lost myself for hours like that, to the symphony of wind and leaves. People passed me in the streets, and I felt as though they had walked right through me, the impact of their humanity like a punch in the gut. I couldn’t separate myself from the overwhelming, aching beauty of the world that surrounded me. I kept losing the boundary between where I ended and the universe began. Once, sitting in a café, I watched the men and women in gray suits walking to work, briefcases in hand, worried, distracted, a steady stream of them coming and going in and out of buildings, and then I saw an old woman walking slowly among them. She stopped and looked to the pavement. It was autumn. Scattered leaves. She stooped over carefully. The men and women kept going. She bent down and picked up something orange. It was a butterfly. A monarch. She stood illuminated among those gray people and held life cupped in her hands, fluttering, broken. I watched her through the glass and couldn’t stop weeping.
It happened often, after my father’s death, that I’d lose myself to this awe. When I moved out of my parents’ home to study in Berkeley, Justin and I used to drive all over Northern California in his beat-up old car, before all the roads and highways became mapped by satellites, when it was still possible to explore. We packed cheese and bread, he had his camera and I had my poetry notebook, we got into that car and just drove. Nowhere. Searching. One early morning we came to a green pasture. Cows on the dew-soaked field, one laboring, about to birth. Then suddenly, out slipped a calf, wet, encased in a film, into the soft, overgrown grass, and from that grass, in that very instant, flew out a whole cloud of startled blackbirds. We drove for hours seeking these treasures. And when we stood witness to them, they weakened my knees, shortened my breath, and each time, brought me to weep.
Home Is a Stranger Page 5