Messenger from Mystery

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by Deno Trakas


  I told her the whole story.

  As expected, Nadia’s face registered confusion and disbelief, and she interrupted me often. “No, this not true.”

  “Yes, it is. I couldn’t tell you because the CIA made me promise not to tell anyone. And I’m not supposed to tell you now, but . . .”

  She pounded me on the arm, and I was surprised to find her angry as well as horrified. “This is terrible! Why you not tell me? Why?” I explained that I wanted to tell her before, but Michaels convinced me that I should keep it a secret, that everyone would be in danger if it leaked, that if Azi was still alive it was because the Iranians didn’t know the CIA was involved. “Then how the motherfuckers find her?” she asked, as we all had asked from the beginning, and I told her I didn’t know, nobody knew, but our suspicion was that they, whoever they were, had been watching her, watching everyone around Sadegh, and that her application for permission to travel caused them to follow her.

  “You hurt me, you don’t trust me, Jay.”

  “I trust you with my life, Nadia—if I didn’t I wouldn’t tell you anything now. You’re the only one who knows about this, and I’m so glad you do, I’m so glad, it’s a relief.”

  “What we can do?”

  “I don’t know. For now we wait until I hear from Washington.”

  “When that will be?”

  “Maybe tomorrow.”

  “And the sonofbitch CIA, what they do?”

  “They’re looking for her—that’s all I know.”

  “Poor Azi.”

  “Yes. You understand why. . . . I’m sorry I ruined your party.”

  “I am ashamed.”

  “No, there was no way you could know. I appreciate all you did—you took my mind off it for a little while for the first time.”

  “Okay, if you say so. But now what?”

  “Hell if I know,” I said without thinking, but I was right—it was hell if I knew, also hell if I didn’t.

  Azi was alive! Four days after the abduction, Baizan’s buddy located her in jail in Tehran, so her family might be able to visit her. That was the good news. The bad: Iranian jails were notoriously brutal.

  He didn’t know what she’d been charged with: conspiracy? Meeting with an American? Having sex out of wedlock? Having sex out of wedlock with an American? Or some version of all the above? It was possible that she hadn’t been formally charged at all, or that the charges were completely fabricated and unrelated to her trip to Athens, but in any case he guessed they weren’t charging her with working with the CIA, which probably would’ve resulted in her immediate execution. The agent hadn’t been able to talk to her or see her, so he didn’t know her condition, and he didn’t know if a date had been set for a trial.

  Michaels promised the CIA would continue to monitor Azi’s situation and would look for ways to effect her release, but . . . that was all he could offer. We’d have to depend on her status as Ghotbzadeh’s cousin, which had probably brought her under scrutiny and had gotten her arrested but might now protect her from harsh treatment. Might. You have to be patient, he said, these things take time.

  Time. It stretched and squeezed like a Chinese finger trap that grows tighter the more you pull on it. Every day it stretched like hope and squeezed like helplessness. At my urging, Nadia wrote a friendly letter to Azi, and sent it to Kuwait to be forwarded to Azi’s home in Iran—but no response. I got a weekly call from Michaels—but no news about Azi. Ted Koppel said the hostages this, the hostages that—but there was no movement in the stalemate. Time stretched and squeezed, but it passed without marking the one event that mattered—the freeing of Azi.

  All of September—Iraq’s invasion of Iran threw the country into further turmoil, and the Iranians blamed us, complicating everything. All of October—the pressures of the race for President grew close and intense, with the third-party candidate, John Anderson, siphoning votes from Carter. Michaels reported to me that there were more secret negotiations underway with Algerians as intermediaries, and that even key members of the Iranian Parliament were hoping that the crisis could be solved before the election; rumors swirled about the release of the hostages . . . but nothing changed.

  I went through the motions of my routines as the natural world passed from summer to fall. I studied for comps but couldn’t concentrate for more than an hour at a time; I taught my two classes of first-year students but couldn’t remember their names or grade their papers with any certainty; I put in my twenty hours a week at the restaurant but couldn’t be attentive enough to earn the tips I was accustomed to. I no longer talked to my students about the big picture. Every day was a black frame around a blank space.

  I felt either detached and numb or irritable and angry, and those closest to me, Nadia and Richard, mainly Nadia, took the brunt. Of course she understood, but still our relationship changed. We didn’t have sex, for one thing. She reminded me too much of Azi and I felt too guilty. I couldn’t even sleep beside her at night because my thrashing, shouting nightmares terrified her. One night, startled in a dream, I flung out my arm and hit her in the face, almost broke her nose.

  Occasionally on impulse I tried to make amends.

  I was dozing on the couch with the Norton Anthology splayed on my chest when the phone rang. In my half-asleep fog I thought it was Azi, so I scrambled up and answered. Wrong number. I looked around at the books and notebooks that kept spreading over the room like academic kudzu. During the summer, I’d devised a methodical system for studying, but since Athens my efforts had given way to panic and disorder. I checked the time, 6:13 P.M., looked at the date on the calendar I left on the counter, saw that I didn’t have to work at the restaurant, and decided I must be hungry. I called Nadia and said, “She is as in a field a silken tent.”

  “A silken tent? What is this?”

  I explained the quote from Frost.

  “Is this good?”

  “Very good.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Robert Frost says so, and he’s one of the best.”

  “Okay then. If he is best.”

  “Can I treat you to some pizza?”

  “No, I sorry Jay, thank you but I can’t.”

  “Something else? Chinese?”

  “No, I sorry.”

  “Why not?” I asked, surprised.

  She hesitated, then said, “I have date.”

  I managed just enough control to pause a moment, long enough to shove my disappointment, jealousy, and anger into the drawer of miscellaneous junk in my head. “Who’s the lucky guy?”

  “His name is Kirk. I meet him at the church on Sunday. He come to pick me up, and we go for ice cream, that’s all he wrote.”

  “Okay, well”—

  “That’s nothing, Jay. We talk until he come.”

  I sat on one of my two kitchen stools and looked out the window at the oak leaves that seemed jittery and eager to release into the breeze. It hurt and confused me to think of Nadia with another guy, and in defense I thought of Delaine . . . but she’d quit at the restaurant and I rarely saw her, then Azi, but . . . . I didn’t give in to my impulse to hang up, but I didn’t know what to say either. Nadia took over, asking, “What’s the late news?”

  “Well, Michaels called this afternoon to say that things are bleak for the hostages and therefore for the President—he’s going to lose. When the Ayatollah dropped his demand of a formal apology, Ham was sure the hostages would be out before the election, but now that Iraq has declared war on Iran, all bets are off.”

  “This is soooo much bad luck,” she said. “Sunnis and Shias, both are crazy—they fight war over nothing. Hussein is dictator, and Khomeini is ayatollah, but both think he is god.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure you’re right, but I think the main reason Michaels called was to tell me that the radicals are even more pissed than usual at Sadegh. They’re out to get him, they’re watching his every move, hoping he’ll slip up somehow. If he does, and if they kill him, then there’s no reason to k
eep Azi alive.”

  “This is too heavy, Jay. I wish they leave you alone. You have your troubles.”

  “Azi is one of my troubles,” I snapped.

  “Yes, of course—you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah. I’m just pissed because all Michaels and Ham care about is the election.” A car door slammed out on the street and shook Azi out of my head. “Shit,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I just remembered a dream I had last night.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I was taking comps, and I was sitting at a table in a small room. There was only one window, and it was open, and Dr. Sheldon was sitting on the sill, checking his watch, and telling me to hurry. I’d just read the questions and my time was almost up. I started to write but he got up and shut the window, and someone took the paper out of my hand.”

  “It is okay. I know you do good.”

  Everybody said that. They meant to show their faith in me, but I felt pressure from their assurance. Starting late in my study of English had put me at a disadvantage, my ignorance was vast, there was a real possibility that I would fail, and I wanted someone to say, “I’m confident that you’ll pass, but you’re doing something difficult, and if you fail, I’ll understand and help you figure out the next step.” But no one would say it, and I was afraid I’d let everybody down. And because of the bigger picture, I didn’t care enough about comps to study methodically any more. “We’ll see,” I said.

  Then we talked about weightless things for a few minutes until the image of her with another guy popped into my head again. Abruptly I said I had to go and hung up, and I was alone with my books. Since I’d talked about pizza, I had to have one, so I took a Faulkner novel with me and rode my bike to the Pizza Hut in Five Points. Faulkner wasn’t a good companion—I gave up after one of his interminable sentences about the miasmal prisoner soul—I didn’t need him to tell me about that—and, although the pizza was good, there wasn’t enough comfort food in all of South Carolina to meet my needs.

  I also tried to make amends with Richard. On Saturday morning, when I pulled up to his house and parked beside the same pick-up truck he’d borrowed to help me move, his wife Emily, carrying her daughter in a pouch over her stomach like a mother kangaroo, was chasing him out the front door, swatting him hard on the butt with a broom. “And don’t come back inside until you’ve finished that damn garage,” she said. She seemed seriously pissed, but Maria was laughing and he was smiling as he walked toward me. “Hey Jay,” she added as she fingered a wayward strand of hair out of her eyes.

  “Go sweet talk them,” he said to me. “Tell them how honest, brave, clean and reverent I am.”

  “Hey ladies.” I walked up to them, took a step onto the porch, kissed Emily’s cheek and patted Maria on the head as she squirmed in her pouch. “Have I come at a bad time?”

  “No, you’re just in time to save your friend’s lazy butt.”

  “Glad to help.” I loved their marriage: for Emily to chase Richard with a broom while their daughter laughed seemed to me to be the perfect way for a couple to fight. And I loved the casual, demonstrative way they showed affection. They had what I wanted, and I’d thought once, with Wynn, my college girlfriend, that I could have something like it, but I hadn’t believed it since. I bent down and whispered in Maria’s ear, “I hope you like your parents as much as I do.”

  Emily heard me, smiled, and patted me on the back. “How are you, Jay?”

  “Pinned and wriggling on the wall, but I’ll be better when comps are over.”

  “That must be a quote from one of those nice, happy poems y’all teach our teenagers.”

  “Guilty as charged.”

  “Come on,” Richard said, heading toward the side yard, “before she remembers she’s mad at me. I appreciate your help, Nicky. I know you’re busy and have a lot on your mind, and I didn’t expect you to sign on for this.”

  “I need the break, and I need to talk to someone who’s funny, or thinks he is. And you helped me move, so I owe you.”

  “Yeah, whatever, but you know what they say: a friend helps you move, but a good friend helps you move a body. Well, I’m afraid there’re going to be some bodies in this garage. I hope you don’t run when you see it.”

  Behind their house stood a separate ramshackle structure that might’ve sheltered a car back in the twenties or thirties but had been accumulating junk ever since. Richard had swung open the wide double doors to let in the fresh, October air, and we beheld the enormity of the task at hand: boxes of books, papers, magazines, jars, cans, pots, wood scraps . . . and even more junk, too big to fit in boxes, piled and strewn throughout the dark and surely rat-infested garage. “Who lived here, and why didn’t they take this crap with them?” I asked.

  “The last owners were connected to Fort Jackson and were shipped out or something. But I doubt all this was theirs. Some of it looks like it’s been here since the Civil War. Why don’t you start on the boxes, and I’ll start on the bigger stuff.”

  I bent down over the first box I came to—silverfish and old magazines, Saturday Evening Post and Soldier of Fortune. “I guess you’re not interested in keeping old magazines, are you?”

  “In the words of my Mexican father, No.”

  I had just lifted the box and was about to head to the truck when there was an explosion that sounded like a bomb a few hundred yards away. I jerked my head around and said, “What was that?”

  “That was something our real estate agent neglected to tell us about—the practice bombing range at Ft. Jackson. They’re at it off and on all day.”

  “Didn’t you hear it when you were looking at the house?”

  “No. The bitch must be sleeping with the general or something. She must climb out of bed with him and say ‘Honey, I’m showing a house today, so could you call off the bombs from four to five?’ We never heard a pop. But this house would cost $10,000 more if it was in the city, so, as Emily repeatedly points out, I shouldn’t complain. I hate it when she does that, when she doesn’t let me complain. It’s my forte.”

  I just shook my head and carried the box to the truck and thought about how much I appreciated his comic relief, his trying to keep me sane while I was freaking out over comps and obsessing with my guilt and fear for Azi. I hadn’t told him about Athens, although I’d wanted to, but he’d heard my fake story about the mugging, so he tried to keep me loose and focused. I put the box in the bed of the truck and slid it forward against the cab, then Richard came up carrying an armful of long pieces of metal and dumped them in.

  We had just about filled it up when I came across a box of bombs, or artillery shells, or something metal, pointed and mean looking. “Rich, you better come look at this.”

  He came over and peered inside. “Jesus. Those aren’t just shells, are they? They haven’t been fired.”

  “You think they’re dangerous?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m not going to move them and find out. Good job, Nicky. This is just the excuse we need to knock off.” He looked around without moving any other boxes and saw something else—it looked like a rusty rifle barrel. He carefully pointed it away from us and pulled it up. “I don’t know what an assault rifle looks like, but my guess is that it looks like this.”

  “Can I have it? Might come in handy if Saad comes back.”

  “No. I don’t want to have to visit you in prison.”

  Prison. Azi. He saw me freeze and said, “I’ll call the general, tell him to come get it. Maybe he’ll take the rest of this shit too. Come on, let’s get a beer and drive this load of silverfish condos to the dump.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Richard had convinced me that as my comps approached I needed to watch TV, at least one funny or mindless show a night to clear my head, and I’d started watching M*A*S*H again. I was sitting in my office on a glorious late October day, trying to study but gazing idly out the window at a maple whose leaves were turning red, and I recalled last night’s episode in w
hich the doctors decided they should answer letters sent to them by an elementary school class in Maine. Charles Winchester scoffed at the idea and had to be blackmailed to join in, which he did with condescension and contempt until he opened a letter from a little girl that contained a pretty leaf and the simple message, “It’s autumn in Maine. Here’s a birch leaf. I hope you like it.” He was moved and wrote an elegant, heart-felt reply. I’d almost cried for the first time since my father’s funeral.

  Then I saw Delaine sit down at one of the picnic tables by the reflecting pool. She looked small rather than distant, and I thought I was big enough to talk to her, and I wanted to. I’d seen her coming and going a few times since she quit at the Peddler when school started, and we’d chatted once briefly and superficially. I went down and took a seat across from her, separated by a textbook, a can of Tab, and an empty wrapper from her vending machine breakfast. She looked up, her eyes a deeper blue than usual because of her blue sweater and the angle of the light on this sharply cut fall morning. She smiled and said, “Hey, Jay.”

  “How are you?” I asked.

  “Great. How bout you?”

  I remembered quoting Eliot to Emily but said, “Doing okay.”

  “How are your Middle East women?”

  I was surprised that she thought of me that way—of course the answer was way too complicated to go into, so I just said, “About the same.” And then I didn’t know what else to say, and I wondered why I’d come down. No, I knew why—I was lonely and confused. “What are you reading?”

  “Econ,” she said, holding her book up so that I could see the title, “and it’s about to put me to sleep. My other classes are good, though. I like my English prof a lot, Dr. Catalan. Do you know her?”

  “I know her well, and I like her too. She oversees the T.A.’s, and she’s cut me a lot of slack this semester because of my exams and all.”

  “Oh yeah . . . have you taken them yet?”

  “In a couple of days.”

  “I’m sure you’ll do well.”

  There it was again. I nodded, said “Thanks,” and looked past her, trying to find some distant point to give me perspective or help me find my center, but we were boxed in by tall, rectangular classroom buildings. I looked into her steady eyes as they read me—I must’ve been easy to read. “Do you miss the Peddler?” I asked.

 

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