A Good Country

by Laleh Khadivi

  What they did was as much as he’d ever done and it was clear she had done more. She pushed his chair back and slid down in between his legs and took him between her glossy lips and into her warm mouth and Rez felt the world end. His muscles turned to water and his mind evaporated and he was sure it was death, a kind of slow, soft death, and that was all right. He was high and every touch, every lick, opened him up and brought him forth. It had never been like this, not with the porn that jolted and pressured and drew him out in a tense awkward way, not with the few girls in closets and on floors at parties. It may never be like this again, so why live? When she stopped to look up at him with her dark eyes and her open pink mouth, he wanted to push himself in to keep the rhythm going and fuck her mouth the way he had seen it done, but she was in control and she started again and he died again and after a time he let go and came like the happy accidents of his dreams.

  Finished, he had nothing to say and she smiled at him and zipped his pants and put herself in the driver’s seat, where she took little sips from her water bottle and then fixed her hair and added more lip gloss. She started the car and looked at him with a mischievous smile.

  How was that?

  Nice. Thanks.

  Good.

  She drove him to the gates of his neighborhood and he wanted to hop out quick, before his mother or father might see, and she gave him the smile, coy pink lips spread across perfect teeth.

  Maybe we can hang out again? I don’t have class seventh period.

  Yeah. Totally. I’m down.

  He walked home and felt himself get hard as he thought about Sophia Lim, and her body, and that she was a bad student with bad grades and her father was known for gambling in Las Vegas every weekend and gave huge donations to the school every year and they lived in an enormous mansion in Costa Mesa, and even though she was only in tenth grade, she had her own car and it was new. She was a cheerleader. Rez remembered when it was her turn in history, she told Mrs. Heinz her grandparents came to America from Vietnam on a boat with no engine, and Mrs. Heinz said that is impossible and Sophia told her to read her history.

  3

  He was late for dinner. Not just once, but all the time now. Rez opened the door and found them as they always were at this time of day, around the long teak table—mother, father—Meena and Saladin, in a room with three walls of fine art and one sliding glass door that led to a pool, the water still and steel blue to match the California dusk. Food was set, a meal Rez had eaten all his life, fried eggplant in a stew of onions and tomatoes and beef, buttered rice, fresh greens and radishes. There were the glasses of water, the same knives and forks and spoons as yesterday, the flower piece a bit more dead. None touched their food, none moved, and his father sat at the head of the table, typed into his phone, and said nothing when Rez took his seat. After a few minutes his father put the phone down, lifted and dropped his napkin, and sighed.

  Someone has to pay for all this.

  Then his father reached for the rice and piled on the stew and ate without talking or looking up. Without appetite Rez watched his mother take her turn and then he scooped the rice onto his plate and then the stew on top and stared at the mound and thought, I have eaten this food, this same stew, these same grains of rice, my whole life. This is the oldest food in the world, and his parents ate it and his parents’ parents, and since it was a dish from Iran, maybe the first Iranians, thousands of years ago, ate it too. Rez thought about the apostles and wondered if they ate food from the beginning of time, and what was the beginning of their time? Where did the time of their families start? Ireland? Germany? France? Some mix of all those things that gave them no one old food, no long straight line, no place? Rez had heard his father boast of it. Their place, their line of men and warriors that stretched all the way back to an old village in the oldest mountains. Now Rez sat, stoned out of his mind, at the end of that line, at the teak table and listened to his family chew and sip and swallow and he thought, What does it matter? We are all animals anyway. He remembered a picture from psych class, a group of chimpanzees sitting around the table, naked, hairy, crouched over and reaching for the dishes with their long ropy arms.

  Where is your appetite?

  Generally his mother said nothing at dinner. Rez looked at her and she smiled. She knew. How could she know? It was a mistake to smoke so late into the afternoon. He knew it was a bad idea, but when he skipped soccer practice to meet Sophia at Johnson’s pool house, he thought about the sex they would have and nothing else. When Sophia showed up and lit the joint, he was still only thinking about sex, and when he got stoned and fucked her, he wasn’t thinking about anything, just feeling and being felt and doing with his hands and mouth and tongue what was good. After she left, Rez and Johnson took a swim and Johnson teased him.

  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a half-Vietnamese, half-Persian baby before. Have you?

  Whatever, dude. It’s casual.

  Yeah, casual until her father hears about you.

  Rez thought about her father and then thought about his own father and then remembered he was late for dinner. He dried and dressed quickly and let Johnson put the Visine drops in because it freaked Rez out to do it and skated home and told himself he was fine, it was wearing off and no one could tell and it was just dinner and then he could say he had a lot of homework and go to his room. He walked into the house and walked straight to the table and sat down and tried not make a big deal but he had never been stoned in his own home and this was not going to be a happy high.

  His father looked at Rez and Rez watched as he took a long time to finish his bite, his glasses moving up and down on the bridge of his nose as he chewed, his beard working like a separate animal beneath them. Rez wanted to laugh and tried not to think about the chimpanzees, their jaws chewing in circles, their bony fingers and yellow teeth.

  How was soccer practice today?

  That was the life his father and mother thought he lived. Chess club from seven thirty to eight fifteen. School. Varsity soccer at three thirty and then home by six. A healthy well-rounded day, nothing of the distractions that led to the embarrassment of his grade in history a few months ago, nothing of friends or girls. Rez kept his grades high, and when he went to wake and bake with Matthews, Rez finished the chess sets on his phone and sent them in to the teacher in an e-mail. He went to every other soccer practice, showing the coach a forged note about extra hours in chemistry lab. The schedule was, for the first time, his own and everyone left him alone.

  Soccer was fine.

  And you are not hungry after that running? Are you sick?

  The apostles were always talking about hunger, the way weed made them go in search of nachos and ice cream and how they would walk three miles just to eat at Jack in the Box, but Rez never felt it. He smoked and it settled him and the sensation of food, its temperature and textures and smell was too much, disgusting.

  No. I ate before. I skipped lunch to study for my math midterm and then ate after school.

  He was surprised at the lie, how cleanly it came from him and how much sense it made. His father nodded in approval and dropped his focus back to his plate.

  Let’s try to get back on schedule tomorrow. It is not good to waste your mother’s food. Meena, leave a plate for him in the oven in case he gets hungry later.

  He’ll be hungry later.

  He picked up his spoon and began to eat and wished for his father to ignore him so he could leave the table and sit in his room. The sounds of the knives and forks against the plates went on around him and the time of the dinner passed slowly and Rez did his best to eat and listen to the little talk between his mother and father but could not concentrate because his mind returned to the afternoon and how he had just fucked and smoked and his family, who had known everything about him all his life, knew nothing of him in this moment. They must be full of secrets too. He was sure of it. His powerful father and his silent, dutiful mother. He was certain they left behind empires of lies to come and sit
at this dinner table every night and say nothing. Now he had joined them and he let his mouth fill with rice and his mind fill with Sophia Lim and fucking a few hours ago, three times in a pool house, her thin white body under his and over his and in front of his, and that he had put a finger in her for the first time and that felt like nothing he had ever felt before and how is it that people aren’t always fucking? He tried not to look at his mother and father, who had fucked to make him, tried not to think of that, but with all the not and the don’t and the looks away, the images only came at him more sharply, razors on his mind until there was nothing left to do. He took the napkin off his lap and stood up.

  Thanks, Mom. But I don’t feel great. I think I am going to go lie down.

  He pushed the chair back from the table. His father caught his arm.

  Reza, your face is flush. Meena, go take his temperature, see if we need to call the doctor.

  I am ok. Just tired.

  They all looked back at him and Rez looked at his reflection in the glass doors that led out to the pool, dark now, and saw an image he had not seen before, his own face, a boy, almost a man, tired, conniving.

  4

  Laguna Beach, Winter 2012

  At first only the kids with dads or uncles that followed the newspapers and weather channels talked about it. They spoke in a secret jargon that made it their news, information for the initiated: code. From the southwest, off the Tahitian shelf, two-minute-long breaks. Double head high! Everyone else just watched it rain and thought: rain. Rain like every winter there was rain, gray and slightly warm and brief. Just enough to wash down a few unsupported slopes and fill the terra-cotta fountain in the backyard. For a few months every year the air became water and the ocean ate up the land. The beaches were covered in sea litter, exoskeletons, long hoses of kelp and faded plastic containers with foreign writing. Rez’s mother refused to drive the low stretches of Highway 1 for fear the ocean would, in an instant, flood the road.

  What kind of people live so close to the sea? she asked, and then shook her head at the madness battering the shore.

  Cool people, Rez muttered as the windshield wipers kept the beat and they waited to cross the rush of sewer water that poured out in front of them.

  Last year the rain came and went and Rez didn’t know anything about a swell. He hadn’t yet surfed and went to the beach like a little kid goes to the beach, with a picnic of chips and grapes, a shovel and a love of jumping in waves. If his little cousins came, he’d build sand castles with them and his aunt would laugh at him. Aren’t you too old for that? He liked the water but never swam out past the break, never in the open ocean away from whitewash, never out past where his toes did not easily reach the sand.

  This year he was different. A junior at Laguna Prep. He smoked and had been with Sophia more times than he could count and the kids at school were different with him. More people talked to him. Not just the apostles or the kids in chess club, but other kids, boys who let their hair grow as long as was allowed, who wore caps as soon as they were outside, the juniors and seniors with orange-brown skin from days and days of salt and sun. They looked like kids from commercials; guys from the billboards up and down Highway 1 that showed life as if lived entirely on waves and mountainsides, with hot girls, half naked and wanting.

  His father saw a group of them greet Rez through the windshield of the car at carpool one morning. Peace signs and nods and their hair still wet from surfing before school.

  Those boys.

  His father shook his head.

  They will wake up twenty years from now, part-time jobs, divorced, living in shitty apartments, alcoholics, or worse. But now, hey, now life is good. What a waste.

  Rez said nothing to his father, but when the guys looked Rez in the eye in the halls and said What’s up? he said S’up? back and pretended it was nothing. He watched them in the courtyard at lunch and during class, where they seemed bored out of their minds, silly with energy that kept them tapping their feet and twitching their pens and laughing at nothing, in some antic state waiting, waiting, waiting for the bell to ring so they could explode onto wheels or water and just be. He saw them in the parking lot too, gathered around their old trucks, hardcore and Beastie Boys playing out just so loud as to keep them from getting a demerit, their blazers tossed onto the ground, their striped school neckties wrapped around their heads like skinny bandannas, shouting back and forth about the swell and what spot they were going to, some girl or two or three, sitting on the hoods or bumper, laughing. He saw them and listened to them and this year he knew that it wasn’t enough to smoke or have sex, but to be like that, to be easy and always happy, he had to surf too and so one afternoon he found Matthews and tried out the new tongue.

  Let’s go to Old Man’s. The swell is right.

  Matthews didn’t say what Rez thought he was going to say, which was Fool, you don’t even know how. Or what are you going to do out there? Swim? No, Matthews looked at him, smiled.

  Dope. Killer swell. My brother told me about it. Let’s roll.

  In an hour they had Kelly and Johnson and without Rez’s asking someone lent him a spring wet suit and someone else a longboard and they didn’t take him to Old Man’s but to a shallow inlet by the Dana Point harbor, a sewage-filled learners’ spot none of them had come to since they were four or five. They gave no instructions, just let him paddle, push up, balance, and try to ride. He fell every time but the apostles did not laugh. They waited for him to paddle back to them and one would say Wait a few extra seconds or Paddle harder or Push up faster and Rez would nod and they’d all just sit there and stare at the sea and wait for the next set, which was a word Rez didn’t know that morning, but understood before he fell asleep that night.

  Now he knew all the words. Swell. Face. Tube. Sucked. Wall. Ripped. Grom. Wash. Turtle. And this year when the rains came, he was as excited as the rest of them. Girls. Books. Movies. Video games. Nothing came close to the feeling before doing it, the lead in the pit of your stomach and the butterflies in your chest and then the feeling of a wave, the wave that had rolled over thousands of miles of ocean to push you fast fast fast toward land, so fast his hair nearly dried once. And then there was the feeling afterward, the salt caked onto his skin; the tired, blessed state. Hunger and exhaustion. His body understood what was right, fast, dangerous, and safe and his boards got shorter and his friends took him to beaches he’d never heard of, beaches without parking lots, beaches you couldn’t even see from the road. He started to care about conditions and the weather because a storm meant a swell and a swell meant epic surf and epic surf meant a hero could grow from your skin.

  5

  Gonna be epic. So epic. El Niño strikes again.

  They were taking rips at Kelly’s house, just the two of them passing the bong back and forth, packing it full of herb and passing it back and forth again. The smoke filled the glass tube in a massive way, and when they exhaled, a proper cloud lingered in the air for longer than anyone would have thought. They sat under a yellow-and-black-striped awning and watched it rain into the pool. Kelly lived with his mom and dad and sisters in a huge ranch house in Laguna Niguel. There were horses in a stable and an actual grove of orange trees. The family used to own most of the county, at least that is what Matthews said, and then they went military. His dad was a colonel at Pendleton and had been to Afghanistan and Iraq. His brother was at MIT, studying engineering, and his sisters looked like Barbie. Rez liked to walk around the immaculate house and pause at the layers of framed photographs on every polished surface: trips to Washington, handshakes with the first Bush, handshakes with the second Bush, their dad skydiving, Paul standing in a river, an enormous fish hooked on his finger, John on a snowboard at the top of a white mountain. Throw pillows were on all the couches, many of them arranged to highlight the colors of the American flag.

  Yeah. My dad says last time it got this big he was in high school, my age. He’s been doing curls in the garage every night just to get ready. />
  Rez let Kelly talk and then he let the silence fall between them, there was no rush. He’d learned when to let a moment go, to wait and let himself fill with certainty and then talk as if he didn’t care if anyone heard. It was a new kind of confidence, this waiting, and he felt it more now, a thousand times more than he’d felt it in tenth grade and a million times more than he’d felt it his whole life before when he was just waiting and thinking and quiet.

  Baja, man. That is where we should be. The swell is going to be epic.

  Kelly stared at him.

  What do you know about Baja? You’ve only really surfed San O’s and the Point. Your dad doesn’t even know what a surfboard is. Rez, please.

  Now he was himself, Rez, and he surfed and fucked and smoked almost as he liked. He no longer cowered before teachers, parents, the world, and when the courage came to him, he didn’t tamp it down but let it go, all the way sometimes, and took all the consequences for what they were: inconsequential. He did like Matthews told him, took care of his business, kept Visine in his bag, and looked his father in the face and lied. He lied whenever he needed to, and when it worked, he relaxed and lied again and one bravery led to another and when Johnson told him to say he was studying at his house, Rez did it and they both went to Palm Springs for a rave and took ecstasy and were back in their own beds, still tripping, by six the next morning. He found courage in his success and the next time he told his mom he was staying at Matthews’s house to help him with his math homework, and when Rez went directly to the cove to smoke and wakeboard and prank call Alyssa Mathiesson, he didn’t even worry about it. Withdraw money he’d won in the debate championship and buy his first eighth instead? Fuck it. Hide the plastic baggie in his sock drawer where his mom could easily find it when she put away his laundry? Fuck it. Tell his dad there were curves on the science quiz, no one scored above an 82, so his 78 was considered an A when it was the same C it had always been? Fuck it. He’d make it up at the end of the semester. The lies came easy, and when he remembered, he tried to be careful, but most of the time he thought fuck it and opened his mouth, closed his mouth, and waited for the moment to pass.