“Oh, Darius.” Suddenly her voice was even smaller than a whisper. “Why did you tell me that?”
He had nothing more to say. Like a big man after his biggest meal, he was done. It was over, he decided.
“Is it true?” she asked.
No, nothing more. Oh, she can figure it out. I’m done, he decided.
“It’s true. Fine, Darius. That’s … awful. But what does this have to do with … what we were talking about?”
But he just had no more to say. Except “Xerxes,” a final two-syllable mumble that came out of him, as she, to her joy, to her relief, saw him slowly descend to a state she hadn’t seen for weeks—sleep!—and she turned off the lights. It was 7 p.m. So what. Her husband was sleeping! She ate dinner by herself, tickled by what music the sound of his usual obnoxious snoring suddenly had become for her. …
That night she delighted in going to bed by herself—the entire queen just for the queen herself!—as his snoring carried on in the next room. But instead of sleep came thoughts of drooling heaving Darius, juxtaposed split screen against young, bird-killing, nightmare-creating Darius. Suddenly she was having trouble sleeping. She kicked Darius out of her thoughts. And when it finally came over to knock her out, the slumber was deep and thick … as evidenced by how much it hurt to wake up at the sound of “Hey! Hey!”—suddenly the sound of her husband, a big dark dumb shadow in the dark of the bedroom. She didn’t even have to look at the alarm clock—but she did: 3:15 a.m.—to know it was a bad hour.
“Hey!” he was saying, over and over, like a dumb overexcited child waking his parents on Christmas morning.
“I know, I know, you slept,” she automatically snapped, trying to hide just how furious the hour made her. He had gotten eight full hours, she thought. Another, say, month of that and he just may be caught up, just may become a normal person. She couldn’t wait. She buried her head in her pillow, wishing he’d vaporize.
“No, no,” he said, and something about his voice—something about the old Darius, just in some small half-shadow way reappearing in that voice, giving a bit of the old growl to the recent shallow whine—made her want to listen. “Listen, I forgot to tell you the end.”
“Of what, Darius? Really, look at the time. Please …”
“Yes, but before it escapes me,” and like that overgrown child, and yet like the old Darius, too, he sat on the edge of the bed and even bounced for her attention and began.
He told her about the Christmas lights in the East Village, then the street with the doves, the blue and white lit doves of peace, and how it had made him snap.
“And you told him about the burning birds,” she finished off for him. “Did that even really happen, Darius? I never heard of such a thing in Iran.”
He didn’t say anything to that, just carried on, like a man finally popping out of a coma, unable to get enough of the speech and thoughts and actions that characterized life, “and then he said he wasn’t asking about that at all and I think I apologized—well, maybe not—but we walked back and it was very cold and we were very silent and I—I was leaving the next day, in exactly a day—I was hoping to sit him down, maybe that next day at least, tell him everything, my past, maybe yours, everything that was our history, the good and the bad, to let him know everything so there wouldn’t be surprises—if you could call the birds story that—so that he could put things in context, take a story like that and know what to do with it, so he could know me. I wanted him to forgive us, to forgive me. That’s all I wanted.”
“Good, good, so what was the problem?” she muttered through the pillow. She was torn between genuine interest and debilitating exhaustion.
“Well, the next day, I couldn’t face him. It was his reaction mostly, the hate I had seen in his eyes, the shock—he looked like he had been shot. Like I had shot him. He looked dead. I couldn’t get that out of my head. So I spent the day out in the city, hating that city, doing things, whatever, to pass the time, meals, whatever, so sickened by that cold busy mean place that he had chosen to bury himself in. At some point I imagined he might die there and how awful that would be. How awful it was that I had taken my son from his homeland, his Iran, to this place where he might live out his days. I was in a state but by the time I got home, I felt ready to speak to him, but of course he was not there. He left a note saying he was out, had things to do. You know, all evening I waited for him and waited and waited. At one point I got worried—what if he had died? How would you know in a city like this? What if I had killed him? What if he was gone?”
“And then he came home. …”
“Well, and then he came home a few hours before my flight. I was amazed he even came then. He came then and then there was no time and it made me so mad to see that he had done that. More than likely, it was I who would die before we’d ever get a chance to be together again. Didn’t he see that? And then, well, I was packing and suddenly he said he had to go downstairs, go out somewhere, and then he was just gone. I could have waited and missed my flight, but my theory was he wasn’t going to be back until he knew I was gone. And I guess I was right. But I left thinking my son was lost—like a father whose son is really lost—and he made me leave like that. He made me leave him.”
She slowly rose up and reluctantly turned on a light, which hurt them both. So what, she thought, let it hurt. It was all hurt anyway—there was no hope for peace that night after all that. She wearily asked—her right mind still caring, still wanting to know—“Darius, what do you think made him act like that?”
For a good five minutes—she was watching the obscenely bright green numbers of the alarm clock—he said nothing. Eventually she gave up, assuming his handicapped zombie self had to be back, switched off the light and lay down again. The minute she did that, of course, as life goes, as Darius goes, his voice—eerie in adopting the full weight of its old tenor completely now—burst loudly into that fresh, new, light-rid black of the night.
“It was the last of many crimes! It connected everything! It was the only story of my youth he had and suddenly it took on the burden of everything. Everything that was wrong with me, my history, my past. And I think for sons, they transfer that. It was a nightmare but a real nightmare. And that I told him, like that, out of what he thought was cruelty when really …” She could hear the last syllable break a bit, as if he was teetering on the brink of sobbing again,“… it was all about a different place, a different past, the land where he was supposed to be from, and all he ever knew of that place, all he ever knew were those nightmares, those real nightmares, that we real living humans could confirm for him over and over … and it was the first time I felt, I wanted to, to tell him that I was sorry for how hard we had made it, how much harder I kept making it …” and there the sobs came again with more defeat and yet more power than ever, “but maybe that’s me—him, I really don’t know, I don’t know what’s in his head! All I’ve ever wanted to know since he was a little kid—and unknowable even then—all I ever wanted to know was him, what he was thinking, what did he make of it all, and how did whatever it was make it okay to let it all go that day in New York, how, oh how?”
If his son had been there at that moment, he would have answered it in full—with every year that went by it became more and more answerable for Xerxes. He had collected the sentences, put together the pieces of anger and misery, examined all the most complicated emotions, and double-checked the evidence in his memory. At that moment he would have looked the man who shared his eyes in the eye, in his overflowing red eyes, and used that as an opportunity. Because part of the problem, Xerxes thought, was that they had never had the opportunity to communicate fully when he was a child. But as he got older, Xerxes found the narrative played naturally in his head—it would be the real face-off between him and his father, the opportunity to hold his father hostage and spill it all out like blood in his ears, the opportunity that he missed when his father challenged him in New York that day; it would be Xerxes with the power, his father wi
th the anguish, Xerxes with the booming voice in the light, his father bawling in the dark, for once letting him get through it, through it all, or what he hoped was at least a start: The sparking anecdote is only as big as the sum of its parts, Dad. Take the day you really beat me, that certain day out of a few of those days, but the day when I let the worlds mix and it meant the picture of us that you held so dear breaking in pieces, enraging you so much that you left me with two black eyes for school—I later dreamed all night of shooting stars and how they had blinded me from your blows, and then the day you told me about making stars out of the bloody burning feathers of living helpless beings, I thought of that, how you had made stars out of me, how you could do that, with a brandish of your fist force me into place, a place I didn’t want to be, to a whole past that reverberated with another past, every layer deeper and more painful, from my past to your past to our people’s past—when the hell could the symbolism stop? I was just a kid! You were the agent of ghosts, you’d reek of history and suffocate us with the bad parts. … It was always in you, you taking your family out on a weekend drive, taking your family out on a weekend drive to a protest for your child to see a man burning out of nationalistic passion, a passion that I was supposed to understand, you wanted to tell me, a darkness that I was supposed to own, you were trying to instill in me. You didn’t want me to belong to this country, but yet you wouldn’t let me have the ease and clear conscience to belong to you, and so what happened? I ran away and, fine, the irony, even here the instability and turmoil got me: 2001! The worlds mix again, the horrible foreignness I fought to escape, crashing right into the phony Americanness I failed to pull off, the fear bringing me back full circle to my first fear, the nightmare born in a baby watching supposed enemy planes in the Tehran sky, fine, I got through it, but now I’m trying to break the circle, cut the connections, vaporize the voodoo. … I’m trying to find myself, an identity outside yours, outside nationality, outside ethnicity, outside family, outside history, foreign to them and to you and to everything, wholly my own lone person. The worst that can happen is I find out that the world I want to create cannot exist, that’s all—that I just won’t be able to make it like that—that there are only graves for men who want that. But so what to you, you never wanted to save me from it, now accept that I won’t be the one to save you, why would I when I don’t want to save myself? …
What Xerxes couldn’t imagine was that his vision of what Darius would be reduced to during his rant would actually look an awful lot like what Darius had become.
Darius was destroyed. The deep sobs running powerful currents through his body made him shake like a man at electrocution—he was losing it in ways she had never seen. She thought about turning on the light again, but couldn’t deal with spotlighting his downfall like that, so she just blindly grabbed for his body, his quaking torso, and pulled him close to her. “You two will speak again, I will make sure of it, do you hear me,” she whispered into his wet face over and over, until he partially bought it, enough at least to stop for a bit and let her feel effective, let her go back where she belonged, to being right, then to sleep, until she did, only after buying that he, too, was asleep, when really he was faking it all night, faking it with more conviction than ever, never giving up that ghost, hoping that if you faked a thing enough, especially a thing you had just done genuinely, a thing that had genuinely done you—and he had slept, hadn’t he, just a while ago!—if you faked it long enough, eventually, there was a chance it could go back to just being.
Part Six
The Missing
In spite of it all, New York was given concrete consolations that came like firm orders: Go About Your Normal Lives. Be alert but also be normal, be very very normal so as not to cause unnecessary suspicion because there would be tax dollars and new laws and more hatred if you pressed those buttons. In a time when people were calling 911 on their junk mail, when an entire subway line could be frozen for hours because of a child’s unattended backpack, when every plane looked too low and every man looked as if he knew something, normalcy was the new sanity even if it was hard to remember what normal had ever really meant.
For a smaller segment of the urban population, those who existed well outside the perimeter of society, the security of the homeland was not a factor. The apocalypse just a bridge or tunnel away had never hit home, the news was background white noise, and the voiced concerns of a nation had as much power as proverbs. Their lives would go mostly untouched. The only way it would get them, they imagined, was to kill them and that didn’t matter either because dead men couldn’t question what got them. They were the safest of all that season.
One of these men had become a regular at a Park Slope, Brooklyn, post office—a man of medium height and moderate build, who would have appeared just like any other man if he weren’t wearing sunglasses paired with a baseball cap covered by the black hood of a dingy sweatshirt. The official start of winter was just a few weeks away and yet it was suddenly seventy-six degrees—everyone had pulled out spring and summer outfits except, apparently, this man. He had his reasons for his getup: he did not like to be exposed and he also did not like to wear the Kennedy Mental Health Center T-shirt out in the real world, so he put on one of the few cover-ups he had to face the supposedly “real” world. Still, people were staring and he thought it was because they knew where he had come from, as if they had X-ray vision and the T-shirt’s message was loud and clear. As for the function of the sunglasses, they was a barrier between their eyes and his. Exposure again. Because these days when he would leave the facility, he needed all the protection synthetic materials could afford—and it was consoling to remember, these days, from the little he gathered, the country at large felt a little more naked than before.
It was just about the holiday season, so everyone knew to expect something bad, but just how bad, people had no idea: the line snaked itself into a tight unyielding J-shape inside the old postal building. He took a spot and counted eighteen people before him. Fine. What was not fine was that they were not going anywhere—he had to be back at KMH in a half hour. That was all the time they got before they were labeled missing and who knew what happened then—he didn’t want to find out. But the minutes went by and by and even with five postal clerks operating, the line was just not moving. He wondered if he was imagining it—he counted again. Eighteen. Okay, seventeen, as one person walked out. Seventeen. The line seemed nearly locked. Something was wrong.
The other tip-off to the day’s wrongness was the presence of police. In a post office with eighteen people in line, another dozen or so shuffling around and filling out slips and labeling boxes, and five clerks, was there really a need for four police officers? Four police officers = four guns, he thought. They were the big burly Brooklyn kind of policemen, the cops of 1970s movies. They also wore sunglasses—he assumed to avoid having the civilians follow their eyes.
The line continued to not move, but he had no choice—he needed stamps. There had to be another way, he thought. Suddenly, he had it: stamp machines. They still had stamp machines, didn’t they? he thought. He stepped out of the line and headed to the back of the post office where the big black machines always stood. One was a soda machine; the other two were, indeed, stamp machines. Feeling relieved, he quickly took out his crumpled dollars. Before he could insert them, there was a tap on his shoulder.
It was a police officer. A huge black guy, shaking his head. He was also pointing to a handwritten sign posted above him, right on the stamp machine. “OUT OF ORDER,” it read. Oh, he thought. Oops. He went over to the other machine, but it, too, had the sign: “OUT OF ORDER.”
“The machines are dead,” the police officer said. “You gotta get in line for them.”
He nodded. He got back in line. There were now nineteen people ahead of him. Something was wrong indeed.
There were other tip-offs, too. For one thing, the clerks looked all wrong—sure, they were in the usual uniform but they were covered in other ways t
hat were not normal, he noted. For one thing, two wore the masks surgeons used to cover their noses and mouths. And all five wore gloves, obvious white ones, made of something thicker than the hospital latex sort.
Then he began to notice that there were handwritten signs posted all over the place. “PLEASE HAVE YOUR ID READY,” “ALL USPS MAIL REQUIRES VALID ID,” “NO ID, NO DELIVERY, NO EXCEPTIONS.” ID?! he thought. He couldn’t believe it. Surely it was a mistake, surely it did not apply to him, this was just a post office, after all. …
He tried to remain calm and just observe, not judge. He was sweating profusely, but he did not put the hood down. He just stood there, hot and uncomfortable, wondering if things had just simply changed since he was last there. It had been at least a year, he thought. Maybe this was normal, maybe the future looked like this.
The man was feeling better until he got a tap on the shoulder.
“ID, sir?” It was another police officer, maybe the stockiest one, Italian, young, ready to be pissed.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I don’t understand. ID?”
“Everyone must have ID to mail out!” he said in a too-loud voice, as if to remind everyone else in line as well. The police officer lowered his voice a bit and addressed the man again, “Are you even sending anything out? Just buying stamps or something?”
He shook his head.
“What are you sending?” It seemed like a challenge, not just a question.
The man tried to cool himself down by telling himself he wasn’t actually being challenged, he was just not used to this, and this was how normal people in the outside world spoke, he was in no danger, and everything would be okay. … He slowly removed a thin, slightly crumpled envelope from his back pocket and presented it to the police officer.
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