I, Who Did Not Die

by Zahed Haftlang

  I nodded. Right so far.

  “There’s only one solution. I will prepare a document showing that you resigned two months ago. I will also file a police report about our missing inventory. But if anyone questions you, police or others, you tell them you resigned two months before the stuff went missing. I will back up your story. Understand?”

  I knew a huge favor when I saw one. He obviously felt that what I had done was stupid but not grounds for ruining my future with a criminal record and possible deportation. He slid a piece of paper toward me. My resignation letter, dated two months before.

  I thanked him, signed the paper, and walked out the door.

  NINETEEN

  MAN OVERBOARD

  Working as a ship mechanic was the one job that stuck. As I traveled the world over the next five years, I turned the job into my own floating school. I was making up for lost time, studying history and geography textbooks, devouring literature and comparative religion, even reading the Bible, trying to make sense of the Islamic Revolution that had so altered the course of my life. I was discovering that there was a much bigger world than Iran out there, and there were many different interpretations of faith.

  Turns out, I had a way with words. I transformed what I was learning into poems, and by poems I don’t mean the little pert ones that use only a few lines. I wrote seven-thousand-word epic poems about the nature of man, the question of religion, and the corruption of power. My poetry was secular; I wrote about nature and love and freedom as more powerful forces than God. My work provided an alternative view to the religious education that the crew and I grew up with, but this did not sit well with the ship’s command staff, which required we follow Islamic doctrine on the ship and pray several times a day. My bosses also took note that I skipped prayers regularly.

  The ship captain had gone to college and was book smart yet life stupid. He knew absolutely nothing about what it was like to fight for his country but acted like he was the biggest patriot aboard. It irked me that he didn’t even seem to appreciate how lucky he was to have had that fancy education, whereas people like me had sacrificed our chance to go to school. He didn’t take too kindly to me correcting his bold assertions about stuff he was totally ignorant of, like what kind of rifles were popular on the front lines or some such thing. He went on and on about how we should praise the war martyrs, and I gritted my teeth. Those “martyrs” were little boys who had been sacrificed in the minefields for a God that did nothing to save them when their bodies were blown to bits—so many of them that the sand turned pink with their blood.

  My way of blowing off steam was to host little poetry readings in the cafeteria. My poems took the guys from the tedium of the empty ocean to imaginary tours of Masjed Soleyman, my words conjuring the chime of goat bells and the smell of flatbread warming on stone inside Bakhtiari tents. A rumor got back to me that the captain said my writing proved that I was a pagan, which amused me.

  One day in the summer of 2001, while loading the ship with wheat at a huge grain silo at the Port of Vancouver in Canada, the captain interrupted one of my recitals.

  “You’re going to have to put that away now,” he said, reaching for my poem.

  I yanked the paper out of his reach.

  “Is there a rule against art on this ship?”

  “Don’t question me. I am the captain.”

  “Unfortunately, yes. But I am the captain of the soul of this ship,” I said, sweeping my hand toward my audience. “No one on this ship is morally superior to another,” I added.

  If I could sum up everything I had learned in my self-study to that point, it was that man has a right to free will, but too often he gives it away; his free will has been corrupted throughout history by indiscriminate power. Growing up, I followed what I was taught to believe by my culture and so did not protect my physical or mental freedom, and I paid for it dearly. Now that I was a self-appointed academic freedom fighter, I was not about to back down again to some snot-nosed punk who insisted I pray to his chosen god.

  To emphasize my point, I tore a framed photo of Ayatollah Khomeini off the wall and smashed it on the ground, and my poetry fans took this as their cue to vacate the cafeteria /performance space. I felt a rush of adrenaline and took a swing at the captain, landing at least one of my windmilling punches. An officer from the ship’s Islamic ideology department intervened, stopping me with a choke hold as I kicked and spewed hateful words, something about the captain’s mother being a woman of ill repute. When I had quieted enough that he could get a word in edgewise, the officer holding me down told me to expect a one-way ticket to prison once the ship returned to Iran.

  I stayed in my cabin for two days, subsisting on canned food and nuts, and staring out the porthole thinking about how many months it had been since I’d seen my family. Seven. Every time I came home on leave, Setayesh pattered after me everywhere, not even letting me go to the bathroom in private. I don’t know how Maryam explained to her where I went or why. But it was getting harder to leave them both each time. I was so tired of waiting for my real life to start. How much sacrifice is enough for one man before life starts getting a little easier? That’s all I wanted, just to be with my family. But when I wished for something, why was the answer always no? I refused to return home to my wife and baby girl as a criminal. I was tired of the job, of my homeland, of always butting heads over politics and religion. With the exception of Maryam and Setayesh, I could truly say there was nobody worth a damn in the whole world. I hated everybody, and just about everything. And I refused ever to be locked up again.

  So while the ship was still docked in Vancouver, I left during a permitted leave and hid my ID and all the Canadian money I had, $150, in a small bag and stashed it underneath the bottom step of a staircase attached to one of the grain silos. My plan, if you can call it that, was to wait until the next week, when they did the final head count before departure, and then sneak off the ship and make a run for it. My options had whittled down to two: prisoner or fugitive.

  Only we pulled away from the dock a day early. I was caught off guard, and the gangplanks had already been removed by the time I realized there had been a change to the schedule. I ran to the bow and watched as we pulled away, away from the silos, and away from my freedom. Stunned, I grabbed the railing to steady myself. Was this God punishing me for my pagan poems? I saw myself walking off the ship in Iran in handcuffs, and Setayesh running up to meet me and raising her pudgy arms to be picked up, and me unable to grant her wish. I would have to call Maryam and tell her what had happened, that I’d failed to heed all her warnings to keep my temper in check and now I wouldn’t be coming home. The Iranian government could lock me away for the rest of time if they wanted to. I was queasy with fear and self-loathing.

  A shadow crossed over my face and I looked up at the underside of Lions Gate Bridge as we entered the open expanse of English Bay. From my vantage point, I could look down at people sunning on yachts and see sailboats racing one another in the wind. There were kayakers bobbing in their bright boats, and fast things like water motorcycles bouncing over the chop; everyone playing and having fun in this natural water park nestled between islands studded with forests of fir and cedar. I wanted freedom like that. I wanted to have a whole day in front of me with nothing more to worry about than which direction to point a boat and whether I remembered to put on sunscreen. All these adults were out having a day of leisure, oblivious to the doomed man gliding right by them. I begged for some miracle to switch places with these carefree Canadian boaters. And when it didn’t come, I swung one leg over the railing. Then the other.

  Then I jumped.

  A million microscopic icicles stabbed every surface of my skin and I instinctively opened my mouth underwater to scream, then surfaced choking on salty, oily brine as my lungs tried to remember how to exhale. The water in Iran is cold, but I’d never felt a flash-freeze like this. My jeans and running shoes were like heavy chains on my legs, pulling me down as I fought to st
ay above the whitecaps, floundering against a strong current. I scanned the shoreline and saw a cluster of buildings and tried to swim a clumsy freestyle in their direction, stopping every three or four strokes to tread water and catch my breath. But each time I stopped swimming, the surge carried me back a few more feet, so that I was essentially being carried out to sea. The last of my energy was draining away, and I could feel the water winning. The only way I’d make it before exhaustion and hypothermia set in was if I made a major push to get within shouting distance of the boaters. I put my head down and cranked my arms through the waves and gave it everything I had. When I looked up again, I was maybe fifty feet closer at best.

  “Komak!” I screamed into the wind, then realized that nobody knew what that meant. My teeth were chattering uncontrollably.

  “Help!” I tried again, waving one arm. “Help me!”

  Nobody heard me. My chin sank below the waterline, and I tilted my head back to keep my mouth and nose out of the water. I kept my eyes on the tiny dots of neon color in the distance, willing one of those kayaks to come my way. Then I felt something grab the back of my T-shirt. I sputtered and looked up at a kayaker who had a white triangle of cream on his nose.

  “I got you, man!” he said.

  I lunged for his arm and nearly flipped him upside down on top of me. He pulled out of my grasp and maneuvered the kayak so the back of his boat was pointed at my head.

  “Grab here!” he said, pointing at black ropes that formed X’s on the back deck behind his seat. I reached with both arms and clutched the ropes. My head and shoulders were safely above water, and I rested one cheek on the hard plastic of the kayak and went limp.

  “Up, up!” he said. He wanted me to hoist myself out of the water so that my belly would be on the back on his kayak. I tried, but I was too exhausted. The man took a loose piece of rope and looped it under my armpits, and then tied the ends to a handle on his kayak, securing me to it with my stomach and legs trailing behind in the water.

  “Stay still,” he said.

  He hauled me that way, like a big game fish tied to the stern, all the way to a small West Vancouver beach next to a marina filled with dozens of small, white one-person sailboats. Once on shore, he helped me walk to a spot in the sun where I could sit down and try to stop shivering.

  “You OK?” he asked, handing me a bottle of water from his pack.

  “OK,” I said, gulping it down. “Thank you.”

  He said something in English that I didn’t understand.

  “No English,” I said.

  He tried again, with fewer words.

  “Stay,” he said, extending his arm in front of his body and holding his fingers out like the number five. “Telephone.”

  This nice man was trying so hard to be helpful, but he couldn’t go call someone. I wanted to escape, not to be found. I needed to hide until my ship was safely out of Canadian waters, at least five thousand miles away, before I could go to the refugee office. Otherwise, the government could return me to my ship by helicopter, and stick me with the bill.

  “No. No.”

  He looked confused. I searched my brain for the English word for “escape.”

  “Run away,” I said.

  “Wait here,” he said, jogging off toward his cell phone, probably.

  Not an option. As fatigued as I was I got up and I shuffled in my waterlogged jeans along the shoreline for a good thirty minutes until I reached the grain silos and retrieved my ID and small roll of cash. Now what? It was late evening, and there were only a handful of workers left at the dock. One of them, a tall Latino man, was standing next to a red-and-white GMC truck that was sputtering exhaust. As I neared, I could see the tread on his tires was wearing unevenly; truck probably had a bad suspension. I approached him because he had a kind face, and maybe I could help him with his truck, and then maybe he could tell me where the hell I was and where I could sleep for the night. The run had warmed me, and my clothes were more or less dry, save for my underwear, when I approached.

  “Help me, please?”

  He said something fast in English, and I took a step closer. I put my hand to my chest. I chose him because he looked like a regular working guy with dirt under his fingernails, like me. Not like some pansy rules follower who would report me to the police.

  “Refugee. Persian. Help. Please.”

  The man quickly did a 360 scan of the corporate yard to make sure we weren’t attracting attention and then placed a call on his cell phone. He talked for a few minutes and then handed the phone to me. It was his Iranian coworker, who asked me to explain who I was and what I wanted. A faucet turned on in my mouth and I poured out Farsi words, then handed the phone back to the truck owner. I saw him nod yes a few times, then he handed the phone back to me.

  “Don’t worry, this man’s name is Jack and he will help you,” the voice said. “There is a motel down the street and he will take you there and give you eighty dollars for a room.”

  I showed Jack that I knew how to say “Thank you” in English. Over and over and over, all the way to the motel. I cried more than I slept that night, soaking my pillow with tears of relief, fear, and exhaustion. I must have dozed eventually, because at noon someone woke me with their urgent banging on the door. I recognized the woman from the front desk, and by the shaking of her head and the tone of her voice, I learned that eighty dollars only bought me one night.

  I quickly set about the vital tasks of securing food, shelter, and transportation. I made my way on public transportation to downtown, where I spied an unattended bicycle in an alley. I did a quick scan of the area and hopped on, apologizing silently to its owner that I needed it more than he or she did. I cycled all day, trying to figure out where I was. I pedaled through an enormous park called Stanley Park that had neat lawns and flower gardens with blooms placed in perfect rows, like some sort of botanical theme park. It was so large that it had its own lakes, forests, and a beach that tourists could reach by foot, car, or horse-drawn carriage. I took a mental note to sleep in Stanley Park if I couldn’t find anything better.

  When I came upon a huge downtown library with a shopping center on the bottom floor, I stashed the bike outside and, as if by divine intervention, walked into the Holy Grail of food. Inside, clustered at tables under an atrium, were people in business suits eating falafel, sushi, burritos, pho, curries, and fried rice from a dozen different international fast-food restaurants. I studied where people paid and where they sat and where they got their drinks and also where they threw away their plates. I noticed that people often left their food unattended. Sometimes they went back into the store to get a drink. Sometimes they left half-eaten sandwiches for the employee wiping down tables to toss. Or for Zahed to eat.

  I waited until I spied an abandoned sandwich, then walked over and, fast as a switchblade, reached out and swiped it under my jacket. Then I bolted out the door, onto the bike, and gobbled it down while pedaling as if a dozen police cars were chasing me. I didn’t even give myself time to taste what kind of meat was between the bread. Over the next few days, my bicycle became my trusty getaway car. I found produce markets that stacked their fruits and vegetables outside the store, right on the sidewalk, and became expert at whisking an apple or an orange as I flashed by. Sometimes people saw me, but all they could do was shout as I rounded the corner and out of view.

  While I had solved the food and transportation problems rather quickly, housing was trickier. I inspected a homeless shelter on the seedier side of town, but when faced with a choice between sleeping alone in a secluded grove in Stanley Park or on a cot in a large common room with one hundred other men in various states of criminality, addiction, and hygiene, I chose to fly solo. That night, I returned to the park and put my bike in the public bike rack, then hid in plain sight, in a cluster of flowering bushes overlooking one of the park’s shoreline parking lots, tucked under a thick tree canopy, just steps from the groomed walking path and public washroom. I made a bed out of leaves and
listened to the animals scratch around at night until I fell into a deep sleep.

  I woke with red bumps all over my skin that itched like hell. Mosquitoes. With my greasy hair, dirty clothes, and pockmarked skin, I probably looked like an ogre who eats children. I felt my pocket, and the money was still there. At least I hadn’t been pickpocketed overnight. I was going to need a job, and my search for work took me to East Hastings Street. Every city has a street like this, dotted with check-cashing places and soup kitchen lines and bartenders serving drinks called corpse revivers to the previous night’s customers. But it’s also the place where you can get hired off a street corner, no questions asked. Maybe I could find a construction or auto repair job so that I could get a little money to stay more than one night in a motel. The sound of East Hastings Street was like a drunken United Nations conference, so many languages at once, but much of it was slurred or in some type of heated spat. It all blended together like TV static, but when I heard the clear bells of Farsi on one block, I headed straight for the voice and practically knocked over an Iranian man in my excitement to talk to someone who could understand me.

  “Hey, man, easy,” he said. “What are you looking for?”

  I explained that I needed a place to stay and a job. He told me he could get me a job selling drugs, and I declined, but as luck would have it, he said I could stay in his studio for one hundred dollars a month, just down the street. I had barely one hundred left, but thirty days was plenty of time to find a job. I took the short walk with my new friend to a seven-story brick building with a rusting neon sign out front that said Hotel Empress. Sheets were haphazardly tacked over apartment windows in lieu of curtains, and a police car was parked in the alley, with officers inside keeping watch on the back door. I followed the Iranian through a musty bar on the bottom floor, toward the pool tables in back, to a stairwell, and as we made our way to his third-floor apartment, I noted some of the rooms didn’t have front doors but a steady flow of visitors who looked like zombies at rush hour. A few ladies in very small dresses made kissing noises at us as we passed.