One night, tired of listening to the old women who congregated above my bed, I excused myself politely from their company and tried to get up. I managed to sit. Then, to stand. I took one step toward the light coming from the open door. Steady. My body screaming with pain, even through morphine. One step more. One more step, and another, and another, until I reached the threshold, held the door frame, and looked into the glaring light of the quiet hallway, where nobody floated around, talking. But then, the ground started to swell, like the waves of a sea, and the walls grew farther and farther and suddenly, black.
The next series of sensations were an onslaught. Sharp smell, water, hands, someone slapping my face, lights shined directly into my eyes. “Do you know your name?” they asked me. “Do you? What’s your name?”
“Tell us your name. Do you remember your name?”
“Do you know where you are?”
“Do you know why you are here?”
“Do you remember? Do you remember who you are?”
I stood in a place bereft of time. They held my body, back in my bed now, and crowded around me with their frantic, unfamiliar faces, measured things and spoke to one another about numbers and shook me and jostled me and touched me and I stood far from it, in that place bereft of time. I heard their question, “Do you remember your name?” And I couldn’t. For a moment, I couldn’t remember who I was. And I thought, if I could just recall my name, from that, I might be able to find the rest of me.
I DON’T REMEMBER much from those early days of my recovery, once I returned to my mother’s home. Just the miracle of blue skies when I awoke each morning. I opened my eyes, pulled back the curtains and saw, once more, blue skies, and thought to myself, How many miracles befall me each minute that passes, a miracle to be alive.
But I was afraid. The world outside was beyond me. I couldn’t even inhabit my own body. It hurt too much. And I was afraid of its treachery, its capacity for pain and suffering. I was afraid of my own heartbeat. I was afraid of that scar beneath my breast. Raw and swollen, with black seams and tape. I worried that if I moved too fast, or coughed too hard, or raised my arm, the seams would come undone, that it would split open to reveal flesh and rib. That dark things would come spilling out of me. It was too delicate, that body, too frail. I became afraid of movement. Of standing. Of walking. Of carrying things in my hand. I lay in bed, drugged, the whole day and watched the shadows creep along the wall.
I spent many nights in the hands of emergency room nurses and doctors those first couple months. They ran back and forth, watched screens, took blood, waited with machines ready to revive me if I flatlined. One night, after I was released, a nurse wheeled me out just as another gurney was being rushed in. A young man in it, unconscious. The people administering to him shouted, ran, yelled numbers and jargons. “Motorcycle accident,” they announced to one another. Despite their urgency, the speed at which they moved, he passed me in the rift between moments, so slow that I saw the peace of his sleep, the beautiful structure of his chin and cheeks, the stubble of a beard, the closed eyes beneath thick lashes, the glitter of shattered glass embedded in his skin. He was so beautiful, that cursed prince in his deep slumber. Bloodstained and broken. Torn jeans and jagged limbs. Beautiful and grotesque in his fragility. He would die. And I would die. And that was the story of the human body.
My mother helped me into the car. I couldn’t hold my head up, so I leaned my cheek against the cold passenger window and looked out into the night as we drove down Westwood Boulevard. At a red light, a maître d’ stood in a tuxedo before a fancy restaurant, the valets rushing, the patrons waiting, dressed up in fine clothes, laughing and talking, dreaming themselves immortal in the golden light of the street lamps and the theater marquees. I looked at them and wanted to roll down my window and scream, “You don’t know how close death stands! Closer than that man who touches your bare shoulder with his hand! Closer than the breath of that woman as she whispers her brazen words into your ear! Death is closer to you than all the longings you feel coursing through your own body!”
AMIR CALLED. EACH and every night. His voice, a hypnotic soliloquy. “You are brave,” he told me. “You are beautiful. Special. You will come back to Iran, soon, and be who you were meant to be.” Then, one night, after I told him I didn’t know who I was meant to be anymore, he said to me, “My wife. Come back to Iran. And marry me.”
I TOLD MY mother I had to return to Iran.
“For what?” she demanded.
“For Amir,” I said. “He wants to marry me.” I had nothing in Los Angeles. No job. No friends. I couldn’t imagine what future America held for me. I wasn’t a poet here or a revolutionary or an intellectual, or anything. I was an odd, reclusive young woman, frail and frightened, in a home among identical homes that stretched out eternally. Maybe, I thought, if I returned to Tehran, maybe I could be, again, who I had been. But I had no reason to explain my need to go back, other than the reason Amir offered me. And I thought to myself, well, if nothing else, if I were wife to him, then I’d at least be something to somebody.
Javid picked me up from Mehrabad International Airport and drove me back to my uncle’s apartment. Sanam was already in the driveway, waiting. “Come in my car for a second,” she said. “Let’s take a drive and talk.”
I had barely closed the door when she backed out screeching and drove past the mosque through the streets to a newly developed highway I had never seen, where she drove in the darkness with fierce resolve in her eyes. I was visibly broken. My shoulders hunched from the constant pain in the muscles of my upper body, the light in my eyes dimmed from the painkillers, the sound of my voice dull. It must have been alarming to see such a sudden shift in someone’s identity, and Sanam drove like she had to get me somewhere fast, to mend whatever she thought needed mending, to bring me back to what I was before I left Tehran.
“Where are we going?” I asked her.
“I just wanted to show you this new highway they’re building, and talk.”
Floodlights everywhere. Naked steel ribs sticking out every which way. The monstrous sleeping machines, cranes, rollers, diggers parked haphazardly on the sides. Scattered cones. No other cars.
“Are you supposed to drive on this highway?” I asked.
“They said it’s open.”
“And where does it lead?”
“A few towns.”
“And which are we going to?”
“Nowhere, really.”
“. . .”
“You’re with Amir now?”
“We’ve been talking on the phone.”
“You came back for him?”
“I came back to be in Iran.”
“He says you two are engaged.”
“. . .”
“Are you engaged to Amir?”
“. . .”
“Why would you choose him? Why him?”
“He called, every night, Sanam. Leading up to my surgery. And after. It was real dark, for a while. He was a voice, the only voice sometimes, that got through in all that darkness.”
“You can’t marry him.”
“Why not?”
“He isn’t for you.”
“Why isn’t he?”
It was pretty late that night by the time Sanam pulled off that desolate highway into a quiet town, a more affluent one judging from the homes. She drove through wide, dark streets until she came to a fine wrought-iron gate. She jumped out of the car and pushed the button on the intercom. The gate slid open. A home. Modern. White concrete. A wall of windows. Warm light. And Ramin the photographer stood there in his wool cardigan with his hands deep in his pockets. “I brought you here to see him,” Sanam said. “You two are meant for each other.”
Ramin stood there, sheepish. The last time we had spoken was the phone conversation where I yelled at him about finding the fisherman, taking his photo, and stealing him from me. “You have to come out, you have to talk to him,” Sanam said.<
br />
I was angry. Still. He was like the rest of them, the ones who had intruded into the depths of me and stolen what was mine. I got out of that car, slammed the door, walked toward Ramin. “Where’s your phone?” I asked him. Without an embrace. Without a hello. Ramin led me into the house, to a room full of expensive postproduction equipment.
“My new boss’s place,” he said. “I’m in the middle of a big project.”
I picked up the receiver and dialed Amir’s number. And Amir picked up, as he always did, with that soothing, hypnotic voice.
“Where are you?” Amir asked.
“I don’t know. Sanam drove me here, to see Ramin.”
“Put her on the phone.”
Twenty minutes later, Amir was in the driveway. He helped me into his car without a word to Sanam or to Ramin the photographer. I watched the both of them standing in the driveway, stark and despondent in the flood of Amir’s headlights. Ramin turned and walked back into the home, but Sanam kept looking as we backed out.
“They don’t understand you,” Amir said. He placed his hand on my hand. It had been a long, long time since anybody had touched my body with ungloved hands. It felt cold, his touch. He squeezed my hand, looked at me, and smiled. “They don’t know you the way I know you.”
WHATEVER THE AIR was in Los Angeles, that thick foreboding, that heavy darkness, it had followed me. I walked the streets of Tehran in its haze. I saw the beggars, the prostitutes, the old women, the young. I saw the butchers, the police, the mullahs, the merchants. I heard the azaan rise from the minarets. I stood in the midst of it, searching for a glimpse of the beauty, for the tidal wave of love that washed over me when I was witness to the sublime hidden in plain view, and I saw nothing. I felt nothing.
Behrooz was sick. He had grown weaker. Pouya buried himself in work. Sarab invited me to his home, but I didn’t have much poetry in me. Sanam refused to talk to me, and Ramin the photographer retreated completely. One night, Amir sat in my room on the floor beside my bed. I told him I couldn’t see anymore, that I had become blind. Amir leaned in and put his lips on my lips. His mouth a cold, dead thing. His tongue, rude. My body recoiled at his touch. I wanted to turn my face. To push him away. But I stepped away from my body, instead, the way I stepped away from my body that night in the parked car and, later, each time the doctors and nurses handled me. I thought to myself, I don’t feel any desire for this man. And since desire has led me to so much suffering, then its absence is the promise of safety. So I let him kiss me.
Amir invited me to his home. Amir’s mother was a homemaker and his father a bazaari. That’s what that class of merchants were called in Iran. And they were notorious for being traditionalists. He came home each night to his warm dinner, ate his fill in silence, then, over the same bowl of vanilla ice cream, shared small talk with me and his family. They had a daughter, too, a good girl, a good student, pretty, and well liked. Amir was their darling, though. His parents gushed about his talents, his intelligence, his achievements, his lucrative career as an up-and-coming developer. Then, one evening after dinner with his family, Amir told me that he was ready to tell his parents about our plans. “You mean they don’t know yet?” I asked him. “Who do they think I am, coming here so often?”
“My friend from America. I wanted them to know you first, before I tell them that we intend to marry.”
The next afternoon, Amir called me in a panic.
“They found out that you have Jewish blood,” he said. “I told them your father was Muslim, but they won’t hear of it. My father wants to meet with you.”
An hour later, I left my uncle’s apartment to find them waiting in their car, Amir’s dad behind the wheel, Amir beside him, deathly pale and silent. Amir’s father did not invite me back to their home to speak in private. Instead, by chance, by some cosmic irony, he drove to the very neighborhood park my parents used to take me to as a child. The same slides, same swings, same trees. We walked to a bench beneath the sycamores. We sat there in silence for a few moments, Amir’s father between us. The children on the playground laughed and screamed. Then, Amir’s father spoke.
“My son has made a terrible mistake,” he said. “He should have been clear with us about his relationship with you from the beginning. Because we would never have allowed him to continue pulling you along in such a fashion and wasting your time. But we are a traditional Iranian family, and this union is not in line with our traditions. We will not allow it.”
I looked at Amir. He sat beside his father, hands clasped in his lap, looking down. I waited. Amir didn’t say anything. His father watched me in turn. I looked back at Amir’s father and said, “Your son loves me.”
“That’s not how it works here, my girl,” Amir’s father said. “Whether my son loves you or not has very little to do with this making a good marriage.” Then he started to talk about tradition, about our ways, about roots and trees with roots and centuries of trees with roots, the longest extended metaphor of my life, really, as I waited for Amir to speak up to his father, to proclaim his love, to stand up to this man and say something. And Amir said nothing. He wouldn’t even look at me.
“Amir?” I said.
He finally looked up. Lost. Wordless. All those nights, I wanted to yell, you talked so brave, professed your undying love and your devotion and now, you have nothing to say to me? But I didn’t say that. I just looked at him, then I stood up from that park bench, turned to face his father and said, “Well, thank you both very much. I understand. And now, I must get going.”
His father stood up, thrust out his chest, and said, “I will drive you back home.”
“No,” I said. “You will not.”
“Of course I will. I brought you here, and I have an obligation to your family to return you safely them. It would be dishonorable of me to let you to walk home alone.”
“Save your honor for yourself and your boy.”
Then I walked. Away. In the general direction I thought might be my uncle’s home.
Amir came running after me. “Please,” he said. “Please, it’s getting late. Let us drive you back?”
I ignored him and kept walking.
In that space, an indeterminable amount of time passed. I turned around and neither son nor father were anywhere to be seen. No evidence of them ever having been. I wondered for a moment if I had dreamed the whole thing. I stood on a street corner. It was dusk. Early summer. The sound of children playing. The long shadows of trees on the concrete. A young boy sat on his haunches nearby, fanning the coal in a portable barbeque, ears of corn roasting on it. He sang about his roasted, salted corn for sale. I could smell the smoke of the coal, the burning silk of corn. I stood there, listening to him, watching the cars pass on the street, and suddenly I was a young child again, standing on that very corner. My father had brought me here. But where was he? I looked around in panic. How would I ever find my way home without him?
I was terrified. I did not know where I stood. Which way to turn. I had no idea what had happened. Was I a child, lost at a park? Was I a young woman returned to the country of her origin to marry a man she did not love, and who did not have the courage to stand up for her? Were all those years I thought I had lived a moment in a child’s reverie as she wandered away, unseen? Time contracted upon itself, and I was lost, completely. I stood on that street corner, and the only thing I knew for certain was that I didn’t know the direction of home. I walked into a grocery store, and I must have been visibly distraught, because the clerk approached me and asked, “Are you all right?”
I remembered the name of our old street. “Please, can you tell me where to find Gheytarieh?”
He put his hand on my shoulder, gently led me to the door and into the street, to the corner, and said, “There, straight ahead. Would you like me to call you a cab?”
I wiped my tears, shook my head, and started walking. After a few blocks, I came to our old home, the apartment building of my childhood. I sto
od outside the gate that led to the long driveway into the parking garage below the building. I stood outside the gate and wondered why no one came for me. The sun set. The darkness. Then, I recalled a name. Sarab. A boy named Sarab. In that dream that may have been the life I had lived, he was my friend. He lived in a building on this same street, which I had left behind as a child, when my family fled to America. I found that building. I remembered a number, I pressed it on the intercom. Raya, his mother, answered, her voice crackling through.
“It’s me,” I said.
“Why are you here at this late hour?” She asked. “Come up.”
The buzz.
The stairs.
That open door.
Raya mixed some herb concoction in a glass of water with sugar and ice. She called Behrooz and told him I was safe, not to worry. Then she asked me, gently, “What happened? What did you see that’s shaken you up like this? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I had seen a ghost.
I had seen the ghost of myself. I saw her, mute, broken by the touch of a man she had once loved. I saw her torn open, manipulated, fixed, sewn back up by hands of strangers. I saw her sitting in a room, watching the shadows creep along the walls, day after day, afraid to move, afraid to feel. I saw this ghost of me, sitting on a park bench, ready to walk into a life empty of desire, of longing. And I had stood up and walked away from her. Left her behind. With the ghost of those two men, and all the others in the past, all the ones who had been.
ON A HOT day in midsummer, with the passenger window rolled down and the breeze sweeping my scarf off my head, I rested my arm on the ledge of the car window. I leaned away from Amir, focused on my own hand instead, outlined gold by the sun I blocked with my palm. I watched the world pass through my outspread fingers, winding green mountains, deep chasms, gorges lush and teeming with forests, rivers mad with torrents, encampments of picnicking families. We drove by the occasional roadside storefront where inflatable superheroes, bunched together, hung from string over glass bottles of soda baking in the sun. Old men, sitting in plastic chairs next to crates of apples, stared back at me. Children stood beside the road, faces dust-covered, waving. I waved back, my chin resting on my arm, my hair revealed.
Home Is a Stranger Page 17