American Estrangement

by Said Sayrafiezadeh

  “Perhaps he survived,” I said.

  He was a nice enough man, this therapist, full of patience and understanding, though I often wondered how long the understanding would last if he’d known what was really running through my troubled mind. But the price was two hundred dollars a session, and my insurance only covered forty percent, not counting a deductible, and after four months I cut off the treatment by way of a phone call.

  I hoped that after some time passed I would simply forget everything and go back to being who I had been: a young man driving a dairy truck for a living. How quaint that life now seemed. And it was true that the girl’s face faded from memory, but it was immediately replaced by the faces of other little girls. Little girls in Times Square, for instance. Or in the playground. Eventually, I forgot if Sabrina had been blond or brunette. Eventually, I forgot her name. I began to stop by the elementary school after my morning shift and watch the girls screaming with glee in their last moments of freedom. Then the bell would ring and they would disappear inside and I would drive home.

  I’m just going through a phase, I told myself. But the phase continued into winter. I began to park my truck on side streets, where girls walked alone on their way to school. They would pass by, oblivious to me sitting in the front seat, their books and bags occasionally brushing against the side of the truck. Sometimes I’d roll down my window and rest my baby-blue coverall arm on the door. If a girl approached I would smile at her. It seemed like it would be quite easy to start up a conversation. “What’s your favorite class?” for instance. The prospect of such ease enticed me. Then it terrified me. I promised I would never park there again. I broke the promise. So I promised again. Then I broke it again.

  Then one morning I went through the windshield at five o’clock in the morning and suddenly I had other things to occupy my mind.

  I had other things to occupy my mind now, too. Namely, Sylvester Y. calling me, and not a moment too soon, with good news: the third party was back in. He was back in and ready to go.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” Sylvester said. He was shouting and laughing.

  The old feelings of possibility returned. “Yes,” I said, “yes, you did tell me!” My voice quavered with gratitude. How could I have ever doubted? I feared for a moment that I might weep.

  We met at his house two nights later, deep in Queens. Our plan was to meet to talk about our plan. That was the first step. After the first step came action. After action came new beginnings.

  “Come on in, Wally,” Sylvester said. He shook my hand like a businessman. I liked that. He lived in one of those small houses, once new, now poor. “I’m glad you could make it,” he said. He made it seem as if I’d been the one holding everything up. He was dressed in a sports coat that was too tight for him because he was a big man. He smelled like cologne. He hobbled with affliction.

  I was surprised to find his wife waiting in the living room. Was she the third party? She was dressed like she might be on her way out to a show, heels and lipstick.

  “This is the one I told you about,” Sylvester said to her. She took both my hands in hers. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she said. She held my gaze too long.

  The television was on, tuned to the Yankees game, turned up loud. Above the television was the mantel. On the mantel was a portrait of a young man I assumed was their deceased son, captured around the age of ten. Sylvester was right, the boy could have been my younger brother. I wanted to tell them that I was sorry for their loss, but too much time seemed to have passed.

  The wife set a plastic bowl of potato chips on the coffee table. “Help yourself,” she said. I took a handful and sat down on the couch in the corner. Sylvester switched off the TV, and the little living room went silent and calm, and then he said, “First things first, I want to thank you for coming today.”

  I told him, “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  This delighted him and his wife, they smiled and laughed, and the laughter went on for a while. I kept hoping his wife would leave us to it, to get down to business, but instead she sat beside me.

  Next to Sylvester was an easel with a giant pad of paper propped on it. He pulled out a blue marker from his pocket and uncorked it with a flourish.

  “Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule,” he announced, which made no sense.

  “I don’t have a schedule,” I said.

  He ignored this. “I know what it’s like to be a workingman.” He spoke with a false familiarity, a salesman’s tone, as if he were meeting me for the first time. He started sketching a map on the pad. At the top of the map was the credit union I presumed, at the bottom was us, in the middle was the third party. It was a simple pyramid and it made sense. What didn’t make sense was that he was talking to me about toilet paper and facial tissue, about how doesn’t everyone need these things. He would sell to me, he explained, and I’d sell to others. “Everyone makes money from money,” he said.

  I leaned forward on the couch. “What exactly are you talking about?” I asked.

  Sylvester paused and put the cap on his marker. He affected a sad face. “I knew you’d be skeptical,” he said. Then he smiled an overly warm smile. “I was skeptical once, too.”

  “Skeptical about what?” I asked.

  “I’m not skeptical,” his wife said.

  “What happened to our plan?” I said.

  “We’ve changed our plan,” he said.

  “This is a good plan,” his wife said.

  “This is a better plan!”

  “This is an opportunity!”

  “An opportunity for what?” I was standing now.

  “Tell him about the opportunities,” his wife said.

  “I’d be most happy to.” He cleared his throat and began: “I buy bulk from my contact and you buy bulk from your contact—which is me.”

  “This only comes around once-in-a-lifetime,” the wife said.

  “The gentleman above me,” Sylvester continued, “made a hundred and fifty thousand dollars last year.” His wife whistled low.

  “The gentleman above him made three hundred and thirty-five thousand.” He wrote the number on the pad as if writing it would make it so.

  “Laundry detergent,” the wife said. “Everyone needs laundry detergent.”

  Sylvester handed me a brochure. “Promise me you’ll at least consider it.” On the cover was a montage of household products along with a couple reclining on a beach.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “I sure hope so,” Sylvester said.

  “I think he will,” the wife said.

  A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO ESTRANGEMENT

  I’ve got a thirty-day visa, but I’m only going to be using six of them, and the clock’s ticking. It’s already taken me fourteen hours to get here to see my dad, starting from JFK, and that’s not including the three hours I spent sitting in the Istanbul Airport at five-thirty in the morning or the extended turbulence over the Caspian Sea that made me rest my face on my tray table. Nor does it include the nine months for me to be approved for the visa, because that’s a separate journey traversed by way of global bureaucracy. When I do finally land, the airsickness is replaced by the jet lag, which kicks in hard and fast, a toxic combination of depletion, dejection, and befuddlement. The light in the airport is bright like dawn, but the airport’s empty like night, and I can’t remember if it’s technically yesterday or tomorrow or today. I suppose I’d been expecting to arrive into some gray, grim terminal, something sepulchral and seventies, something Argo, given the extent of my ignorance and preconceived notions. Instead, the place is tubular and shiny and twenty-first century, and hanging above me is a giant sign that announces, with surprising warmth and conviviality, WELCOME TO IMAM KHOMEINI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT.

  This welcome sign is the lone thing written in English, and this is going to be Impediment #1 toward a more nuanced understanding. Surrounding me on all sides is a language comprised of swishes and dots, more art than alphabet, draw
n in cursive with a calligraphic flourish and reading right to left. Lodged somewhere at the bottom of my suitcase is the Lonely Planet Persian phrase book, which I’d purchased next-day delivery from Amazon, back when I was all-in on puncturing the bubble, and which I’d begun studying in earnest in the comfort of my American home until I realized the amount of effort that was required for even minimal proficiency. Now I’m standing underneath the big good-natured sign, trying my best, with jet-lagged fingers, to pop a prepaid SIM card into my iPhone, because my dad told me the first thing I needed to do was let him know when I’d arrived. “Put my mind at ease,” he’d said; he was speaking for both of us. I can hear a beeping on the other end of the phone line, ever so faintly, as if a truck is backing down a city street, but whether this beeping is an indication of my dad’s phone ringing or a busy signal I have no idea. I keep anticipating that he’s going to pick up at any moment and utter the Persian equivalent of “Good morning” or “Good evening,” something from chapter one of the Lonely Planet Persian phrase book, followed by a mostly convoluted conversation that will be made worse by his accent, my jet lag, his elderliness, and the uncomfortable truth that we don’t really know each other.

  With the phone pressed to my ear, I’m aware of a small cluster of government officials about fifty feet away, bearded and dressed in black, sweating despite the twenty-first century air-conditioning, and who are probably wondering what kind of person is in such a rush to make a phone call with a prepaid SIM card. The chance of being suspected makes me feel as if I have something to be suspected of, which I do, of course, but only on an emotional level. They resemble actors straight out of central casting, these half dozen sweaty and dark-haired men, stereotypes to put it another way, but I know that my perspective is the American perspective, and the central casting I’m referring to is Hollywood’s. In other words, the point of view I have is the one I’ve been conditioned to have.

  It’s been fifteen years since I last saw my dad. It’d been another fifteen years before that. Now I’m almost thirty-five and he’s past sixty-five and there’s a good possibility that we don’t have another fifteen-year increment to spare. Six months ago I’d received an email from him, out of the blue and in impeccable English, with the subject line “Catching up,” as if we corresponded regularly, instead of only on my birthday. “Dear Danush,” he began, using my Persian name, which I never use except on official documents, and then without any segue he went into an extended account of how beautiful Iran was in the spring. Mountains, lakes, rivers, mountains. “Perhaps you haven’t ever been made aware of this,” he wrote. Why, I wondered, would I have been made aware? He continued for another paragraph or so, waxing poetic, showing off his ability to turn a phrase in his second language, while probably also allaying the concerns of the censors, who would have been flattered by such a rhapsodic assessment of their country, as would anyone. There was no “catching up” to be had in any real sense in the email, and by the time I’d reached the end of it, I understood intuitively that what my dad was trying to say, without saying it outright, was, “I would like to see you.”

  He’d signed it, “Your father,” a formal closing, to be sure, and a debatable one, considering he’s been my father mostly in biological terms, as opposed to my “real” father, by whom I mean my stepfather, Chip McDade, who’s been my father in empirical terms. Chip McDade, who’d moved me and my mom out of our apartment in outer Queens, directly across from a nail salon, Nails Something Something, and all the way up to Upstate, where we lived in a mid-Atlantic colonial with in-ground pool, among other suburban amenities. Chip McDade, who taught me how to throw a football, how to drive a car, and who’d had the foresight to give me his last name, because 9/11 and the Axis of Evil were coming, and why be Danush Jamshid when you can be Danny McDade? “Let the brake out slowly, son,” he would say, the car moving herky-jerky through the Walmart parking lot, after hours on an Upstate evening. Chip has always called me “son,” and I’ve always called him “Chip.” “Hi, Chip.” “ ’Bye, Chip.” “I love you, Chip.” When I reference my biological dad, which is seldom, I call him “Dad.” This has never failed to cause a flicker of disappointment to appear in Chip’s eyes. But by “Chip,” I mean my “dad,” and by my “dad,” I mean “the person I’ve never really known.”

  And if my dad thinks Iran is beautiful in the spring, the American government doesn’t agree. It thinks the opposite, and it thinks it year-round. Its travel advisory for Iran is, frankly, “do not travel.” Strictly speaking, this is categorized as a Level 4 advisory, as per the State Department website, 4 out of 4 levels, i.e., ascension not possible and, depending on a nation’s foreign policy, a certain kind of accomplishment in its own right. (As a point of comparison, the Level 3 advisory only gently suggests that you “reconsider travel” for a list of countries that somehow includes Lebanon and the Sudan.) I discovered all of this and more one evening, sitting in front of my computer, trying to figure out how to get a visa, snow falling over the mid-Atlantic colonials. Before me lay the unrelenting reality of not only what is, but also what could have been, that alternate reality of Danush Jamshid, persona non grata made flesh, if WASP mom had decided to move to Iran, who knows why, circa 1983, height of the Iran-Iraq War, where she would meet and fall in love with Dad, as opposed to the other way around: Dad immigrating to America from Hormozgan Province to study engineering at Long Island University, where he would meet and fall in love with Mom, who was majoring in English Lit—already incompatible in terms of career trajectory. “He was handsome and charming,” she’d tell me years later, filling in the blanks of my origin story as quickly, and with as many clichés, as she could. As for the other incompatibilities they shared, those would have included religion, culture, politics, and several more blue-chip relationship benchmarks that would have most likely seemed wholly immaterial within the confines of the inaccurate and nonrepresentational world of the college campus. Anyway, that marriage was no longer, sadly, and Danush Jamshid was no longer, thankfully, the last remaining signs of him being the recessive genes of bushy eyebrows and a dark tint to his skin, but the latter only apparent in a certain light. When asked by well-meaning strangers if I’m of Italian or Greek descent, I’ll take the easy way out and say yes, great-grandfather on my mom’s side or something. No one has yet been able to determine what I’m actually concealing behind the forged last name of McDade, which, during another historical time period in the United States, would have been an ethnic liability of even greater magnitude.

  Despite the travel advisory of “do not travel,” the State Department web page for Iran still managed to showcase an optimistic, reverential, and contradictory “holiday letter” to the Iranian people, written several years earlier by then–Secretary of State John Kerry and, by the time of my reading it, dated and irrelevant. That it remained prominently displayed on the website was evidence of continued hope for happier days to come between the two nations—or perhaps it was simply governmental neglect and resignation, like the store that’s gone out of business but still has its sign up. The letter had been composed back when the experts were positive that things had finally taken a turn for the better with Iran, but now no longer, now progress, now new beginnings, now the cover of Time magazine. “This week around the world,” Secretary Kerry had written, “Iranians celebrated the festival of Shab-e-Yalda . . .” Add Shab-e-Yalda to the list of things about which I’d never been made aware. Kerry’s over-the-top tone extolling the inherent majesty of Iran was similar to what my dad’s had been in his email to me, but Kerry was writing primarily with nuclear weapons in mind, not springtime weather, and he had closed by saying that he remained hopeful that both countries would continue to address their differences so that “all our children and grandchildren have the future they deserve.” Herewith, John Kerry’s attempt to forestall the designation of a brand-new level of travel advisory: Level 5, “seek immediate shelter.”

  And suddenly my dad’s answering the phone, bringin
g an abrupt end to the beeping of the truck on the line, and saying whatever the Persian equivalent is of hello, his voice much older than I thought it would be. I realize that I’m unprepared to speak to him, that I’m in fact mute, and that until a few seconds ago everything was theory from thousands of miles away. All the men from central casting are gone now, leaving me to stare into the emptiness of the twenty-four-hour daylight of Imam Khomeini International Airport. Imam Khomeini being one reason, even in death, why our children and grandchildren might not have the future they deserve. The CIA being the other reason.

  “Hey, Dad,” I say. I say it with so much self-assurance and nonchalance that I almost believe it myself. I can hear the easygoing Upstate flowing out of my mouth, American accent times two.

  It’s been a long time since someone has said hey to my dad. It’s been a long time since someone has said Dad to my dad. He’s speaking Persian back, an uninterrupted sequence of dashes and dots, which, spoken aloud in real time, shares none of the hand-drawn lyricism of the signs surrounding me. He’s the one who sounds anxious and awkward. Then there’s a pause, and I’m not sure if this is where I’m supposed to continue trying to make myself known or if the line has gone dead. I fear that this phone call is a good indication that what awaits my dad and me will be a reunion of discomfort, miscommunication, and regret. Lovely seeing you once again, we will say, with woodenness and obligation, shaking hands when we part.

  But my dad is saying, “Danny?” He has flicked the switch into English, groping for understanding. “Danny, is this you?” He’s chosen not to use my Persian name, which is disconcerting for me, because if not here, then where? If not him, then who? In English his voice is soft and solicitous, dare I say paternal, but his accent is extra-thick and he seems to be adding syllables to single-syllable words, he’s going up at the end of sentences when he should be going down. I have to concentrate, I have to press the phone to my ear, and I can’t help but wonder if my dad was indeed the author of that florid email he’d sent about the natural splendors of Iran, or if he’d copied-and-pasted it straight off of a travel blog.