And Peri pokes Zara back in the forehead several times and then laughs. “You need to lighten up. You promised you would shop with me for our jelli eidi, our end of Ramadan dresses.” She pulls open her sweater and pulls down her top, giving a salacious smile. “And you are going to get something that will make men’s tongues drop out this year, yes? You know we are not getting any younger. Two unmarried women in their midthirties. What’s our chance of finding a good man to share the better part of our lives with?”
“None,” Zara affirms as she looks at Peri’s feet, then at hers. Peri now has soft feet with pedicured nails and gloss. Hers? Weathered skin, natural nails. And scars. The worst on the bottom. It took her months to learn to walk again with the littlest of hints of what happened. But it took her years to cover the scars within her.
“Since when did you do that to your feet?” asks a worried Zara. “What happened with you and that giant man?”
“He had me meet Rhonda, who gave me a fashion makeover,” says Peri, pointing to the gloss on her lips. “I can do the same for you when we get our drop-dead gorgeous holiday dresses.”
Zara’s alarm goes off. One p.m. “Time for Dhuhr prayer. Will you join me?”
“You know I am not as devout as you,” Peri states as she looks at the rough rocky ground. “Well, there’s that time you asked the whole unit to pray before the assault on Tell Abyad. We didn’t lose anyone through the whole campaign. Maybe your prayers saved them.”
As she looks for a mat of grass to pad her knees, Zara replies, “I only wanted the more religious members of our unit to understand that when we liberated the women in the Daesh-held villages, when we abolished the parts of the Sharia law that oppressed women, we were not acting against Xwedê or the words of the Prophet.”
“That’s why I followed you and still do. You made tangible, made real for our soldiers the teachings we learned in our Peshmerga training. Were we not told that a country cannot be free unless the women are free? Under Kurdish rule, women have equal say in political rule.”
Watching Zara as she searches for a soft place she can pray, Peri taps her on the head to get her full attention. “Remember our Peshmerga training about Jineology? ‘Without the freedom of women within society and without a real consciousness surrounding women, no society can call itself free.’ You made us recite this each morning. You made that idea come alive in your unit.”
A stretch of arms upwards, a gaze up into the sky, and Zara finally replies. “And the other principle I asked everyone to recite. ‘Woman’s true freedom is only possible if the enslaving emotions, needs and desires of husband, father, lover, brother, friend and son can all be removed. The deepest love constitutes the most dangerous bonds of ownership.’”
She shakes her head and laments, “And what has that done for us? Forty percent of Kurdish women in Anatolia still cannot read. I tell you the solution is not political, not religious, certainly not military technology, but simple economics. History is all about the power of economics. Our people have been suppressed due to economics. The lands we grew up in are rich in resources others want. Economics aside, most of our unit joined to escape the patriarchal traditions of rural Kurdistan.”
Nodding her head in agreement, Peri affirms, “Firya escaped an arraigned marriage, Beri and Sana evaded honor killings. Me, I ran from my abusive husband who was thirty years older than me. Being sold at thirteen for dowry and a box of gold is not an honor.”
She stops, peering deep into her friend’s eyes. “And you, Zara. What were you running from?”
*
Alone higher up the mountain, Zara seeks respite from that question. She is still running.
She misses her mountains in Duhok Province, formerly northern Iraq, now part of the country of New Kurdistan. Who is she fooling? She misses her walks in her mountains with her father. Who is she fooling again? She misses her father. Peace for her was found in those mountains, walking hand in hand with her father.
“Why did he have to kill himself? He had peace with me,” said the little Zara, the girl deep inside the big Zara, a memory she fights so hard to repress.
She cannot fault Peri for asking. As her second-in-command, Peri always asked the right questions, and on her watch, they brought the unit through the war with only a few nonfatal wounds. Including hers.
Atop the mountain, she finds a modicum of solace in the high air, the blue sky, the early moon rising on the horizon. The purest silence. The essence of her inner peace.
Mehhhhh. Mehhhhh.
She looks around for the impolite intruder upon her peace. Scan and scan.
Mehhhhh. Mehhhhh.
And she finally sees them. Two newborn lambs, near a crushed crate down near a ravine. A few minutes down a treacherous rocky precipice, she sees their problem. Their mother recently died in the crate. Their sibling also died, likely shortly after birth. She sits down near the precious babies. A black one, a white one. They come to her, and she takes them into her lap, warming them with her body heat. It does not take much more than a minute before they have decisively adopted her. Maryam, Zara’s mother, will be very pleased. For Zara is now a mother.
Licks to her face, nature’s biology, genetic destiny come forth as her warrior façade, brought forth by her meeting with Peri, subsides, leaving but a warmth and a glow. And their eyes. Those of utter innocence. Simply heartwarming. After what seems to go on for hours, the mountain girl in her recognizes she needs to head home before nightfall enwraps the high terrain. Looking at the climb needed to get out of the ravine, she sees that her two little ones cannot make it out without her help. What can she do? She needs both hands to climb. And there are two. She removes her scarf, which forms a makeshift baby carrier on her back. Lucky lambs are not only adorable, but little enough to fit.
Atop the mountain again under blue skies, she looks at them more closely. Two little girls. If they were older, she would make them walk all the way home, like her father did to her. But getting home by Asr prayer takes priority. And she double-times it down the mountain as only a girl who grew up in the Kurdish alpines could.
As she gets to the edge of her great-grandmother’s home village, she puts her new baby girls on the ground so they can learn to walk with her. She gives them their first motherly lesson. “Don’t go chasing after the first boy lamb that wags his you-know-what at you. He’ll make promises that fill your heart and soul. But they’re only promises. And promises are only there to be broken. Like your heart. And if you are lucky, only your heart.”
On the way back through the village, they come upon a house with a woman crying hysterically outside the entry steps. A little older than Zara, Kilda, once a girl who Zara’s grandmother babysat, points into the house, screaming away in machine-gun Kurdish. Kilda’s daughter, Waja, thirteen years old, had been betrothed to a man twenty-five years older. Kilda explains, “Waja escaped from her tormentor, the man who paid her father for her body as his third wife. And this man wanted his property back.”
Zara reflects. Waja is about the same age as her aunt Leyla and Peri when they were essentially sold off by their families. None of these marriages worked, and the poor girls were left suffering and traumatized by their supposed husbands.
Screams of a young woman come from within the house. The kinds of screams Zara knows all too well.
Zara’s eyes darken. Piercing black. She turns to Kilda and hands her her new furry daughters. Now with two lambs in her care, Kilda quivers at the sight of Zara’s burning eyes. Even fiercer than those of the incensed brute inside, who is physically beating a lesson into her daughter for fleeing their lawful marriage.
Before the crying woman can stop her, Zara rushes into the house. Crashes and thuds precede a bloodcurdling scream, and running out of the house comes a naked man in his forties, with a purple eye and a bloodied nose, holding his hands over his even more blued genitals. He turns and yells Kurdish obscenities back into the house, which results in Zara throwing his pants onto his head. As
Zara comes out of the house, he goes running, trying to get his legs into his pants.
Zara comes back out and sits on the doorstep with Kilda. Her knuckles bloodied, she winces as she holds her right pinky, which hurts like it might be broken. She says to a bewildered Kilda, “You should tend to Waja. She needs her mother at this moment.”
She holds her little lambs to her rapidly pulsing chest, careful not to get her blood on them. “You are fortunate. You are born with innocence and submission to Xwedê. Do not stray. I know. Do not stray.”
Chapter 4
Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.
—Saint John Paul the Great
Parkside, San Francisco, California
7:10 a.m. GMT−8, May 12, 2021
The fog blankets the house where Peter oversleeps his 6 a.m. alarm. Cold, damp, opaque, and yet ethereal in how in its mists mingle the real and the imagined. But for Peter, his fog, real or imagined, is not one of love, but that of the cursed.
In his darkness, in the silence, in the emptiness within his soul, he cries out, “Please help me. What do I do? What do I do?”
And the man who can pull together others’ words so they sing out cannot even find the words to cry out his angst as he rolls through the twists and turns of sheets and blankets.
Thud. His body, rigid and cold as Death’s scythe, ripping with contracted muscles yelling for the mercy of the heavens to end it all, hits the floor.
“Oh my God. My little sister. She’s in trouble,” Peter screams out as he bolts to his rickety thirdhand desk to find his MoxWrap, tapping away in panic on the call icon of a young woman wearing long golden metallic swirls in her blond hair, accented by similar earrings. “Pick up. Pick up. Please.”
And then he sees the time in Shanghai: 12:04 a.m. tomorrow morning. Sheepishly, he shuts down the call, hoping he didn’t wake up Michaela.
The fog from the night clearing, both outside and inside, and with microwaved instant coffee finally in hand, he scans his MoxMail. Nothing from MoxMedia yet. Ouch. But then there is his landlord’s gentle reminder that his rent is due, and one from his boss, Jerrod Olson. He opens the last one, hoping Jerrod has mercy in mind and is going to give him a surprise bonus for his exceptional work for nearly two years as a contract copyeditor for the Journal of International Geo-Archeology.
Oh, the trauma. Oh, the inhumanity. I’m fired again. I was right in what I edited. Why doesn’t Jerrod see that? Why is the author always right? Even when they’re wrong?
The irony of it all. I finally had a job that would have made my father proud of me. The son he always wanted me to be. Another few months, and I would have gotten my year-end bonus and maybe a perm position, in which I would have had full access to the resources and people I need to complete his and Pappy’s search. A full-time employee.
And so, he puts his head to the desk with arms around his aching brain. He finds relief from his dream-impaired thoughts as he goes for his run along the Pacific, up to the Golden Gate Bridge. Better than Pappy’s smoking, but certainly not as good as passionate bonding. But he makes due as he warms his heart with the image of little Peter sitting in the lap of his pa while he reads the newest findings in archeology. They shared the love of discovering the new in the old of the past. And his brain energizes with the memory of Pa’s words explaining the nuances of the Star Trek franchise. It’s a large object that defies even our sensors, says Spock.
His chest fills with pride at the memory of winning a summer internship in the newly created Near East department of the Asian Art Museum after his junior year in high school. But with that thought, the darkness always returns. He ran into the house to tell his pa the great news. But the darkness began. The gun. In his mouth. The blood. His eyes open in despair. And Peter sank to the ground and cried. His mother’s God left him that day, and so he left God.
Blond. It was blond that shone through the darkness. He could see his mother’s hair glistening as her fingers wiped his tears away at his father’s funeral. Only her touch could breathe warmth into his beleaguered soul as his clammy hands clasped hers and they watched his father’s casket lowered into the ground.
Blond. It was blond that caught his eye as Sarah asked him to coffee that night at the Aliens R Us Society meeting.
How am I going to pay the rent if I don’t ask Ma again? What am I going to tell her? Should I pretend nothing happened?
Back at his little studio, he peers out his window with that precious itty-bitty view of the Pacific and sees sunlight peeking its way through the fog. Maybe there’s hope after all. He picks up Sarah’s photo, puts it in the trash bin, but then pauses, taking it out and placing it facedown on his table. His mother still holds out hope they will get back together, but Peter knows better, for he edited Sarah’s first book.
A long shower. Cold one at that, given what he thinks he dreamt only minutes ago. A close shave this morning because he will be meeting his mother for brunch, hand held out, begging for more rent money. Those “adorable eyes of innocence” stare back at him in the mirror. What was Dr. Fontaine talking about? All those eyes got him in Manhattan was mugged at gunpoint late one night coming out of the subway. Naivety, not innocence, beaconed his eyes to all would-be thieves. He puts on his John Lennon round-rimmed glasses. Maybe he should get Terminator glasses so he won’t look so “innocent.”
He looks in his closet. A collection of banana slug shirts. He takes out a navy one with Sammy the Slug in his blazing yellow glory holding his anthropomorphic hands out with boxing gloves on.
*
The smell of negative ions, so distinct to the Pacific. He knows, as he spent time in New York. The Atlantic just didn’t smell the same. The run along the Hudson was not the same. As he exits the pastel-pink-and-white-trimmed stucco house hosting his little studio apartment to go on his morning run, Peter is relieved he snuck by his nice landlady’s door without being asked about the rent. In his wallet, he has a ten and six ones. Just enough to get to brunch with his mother and back. Hopefully with a rent check. Being fired could not have come at a worse time.
Down the street, a brown fifteen-year-old minivan in process of moving in or out. An early-forties woman in a tight beige tank top and carmine short shorts waves him down. Mrs. Harrison. Colors and mascara perfectly coordinated with MoxFashion’s guidance for this week. “Peter. Peter. Perfect timing.”
“Why, Mrs. Harrison, are you moving?”
“Yes. Come inside, please,” she says.
Once he’s inside, she elaborates. “The terms of my divorce weren’t so good. My husband—my ex, that is—really took me for everything. Do you believe it? I have to pay him alimony,” she says, brushing her dark blond hair back, exposing her earlobes.
She thumbs through a stack of papers. And shows Peter three. “But enough about my problems, I wanted to show you Melinda’s third-round acceptances into Stanford, Princeton, and Harvard. All came within the last two days. And to think, a year ago, all three schools rejected her. If it hadn’t been for your editorial help, your coaching, your confidence building through your quirky humor, she would have wasted her gap year. You are a godsend, Peter. You are.” And Mrs. Harrison takes Peter by surprise with a big hug.
She pulls back, looking at his UC Santa Cruz t-shirt, and purses her lips. “You’re so brilliant. Why didn’t you go to any of those schools? With your writing, I bet you got first-round letters of acceptance.”
Dimples aglow, feet shuffling, hands in pocket, Peter replies, “That was more than a dozen years ago. How could I have chosen differently? I loved UC Santa Cruz. How could I proudly wear Sammy the Slug if I didn’t accept their offer? Besides, I helped my sister with her Stanford application, just as I did your Melinda.”
“I wish I could pay you for your help, Peter, but this divorce has stretched all my finances. Melinda and I have to move to a smaller place not far from here. But I can offer some home-cooked meals. You look like y
ou might be tired of the microwavable cuisine bachelors subsist on,” says Mrs. Harrison with eyes on a certain location on Peter’s light running shorts as she puts her right foot towards Peter, wriggling it to get his attention
But Peter only sees her large, muscular orange tabby cat, coming by her legs to curl around his. He bends down to pet this descendant of the saber-toothed as Mrs. Harrison says, “Maybe you’d like a little cougar in your life, Peter? It’s very common these days.”
With his eyes, those innocent ones, he looks up at her. “No, no, Mrs. Harrison, I couldn’t take care of your cat. Well, maybe babysit him until you can get settled in your new place.”
And to his surprise, she kneels down with him, making sure her cleavage is right under his nose, and pinches his right cheek while gazing into his eyes. “You are so adorable. With those dimples and those eyes. A woman could lose herself peering into them.”
“That was good, Mrs. Harrison,” Peter retorts. “I read the first chapter of your manuscript. You have a latent talent for being a romance writer, not that I’m an expert on that kind of fiction.”
Placing both her hands around the dimples on both sides of his face, she replies, “Call me Amelie, Peter. Maybe if we partner on all things romance, I could pay you with the royalties for my first book?”
Taking her warm hands off his cheeks, Peter nods, pursing his lips. “I tried editing romance novels. My ex-girlfriend started writing them just after I won a set of MoxWraps. She took a test on hers that said she was a natural for writing that genre. I couldn’t relate to the alpha male heroes. Chiseled faces, big chests, glistening pecs, narrow torsos, and the big bulging shorts. But she could. And we made the fateful move to the Upper West Side in Manhattan to further her writing career. But things changed. I guess that’s why I found her in bed with a man just like that. Ex-Army Ranger sniper, ex-NYPD, and now assistant head of MoxWorld USA security. Everything I’m not.”
The Matriarch Matrix Page 5