A Good Country

by Laleh Khadivi

  Rez thought about turning around, going home. He hadn’t been close to Kelly, in a room that wasn’t a classroom, since all the shit happened so he stood on the far side of the pool and looked in. They were hotboxing the pool house, playing on the PlayStation, chillin’. The smell of herb seeped out of the house and Rez thought, Fuck it, and stepped toward the house and all its happy sounds and smells. Matthews hooted.

  Hey, Rez!

  Matthews, happy Matthews, easy, glad, all balloons and smiles Matthews. Rez bumped his fist and took the bong from him and knew his friend was so high he had forgotten that Kelly and Johnson hated Rez and that Kelly could at any moment bring up Paul or the cheating A Rash and no one could argue with him and his loss and Matthews didn’t know it but if Kelly wanted to be an asshole right now and throw a punch or spit on Rez’s shoes, no one could say it was wrong or bad or rude.

  Johnson said, Whatsup, and Kelly gave Rez a cold, focused look and turned back to the game and smiled as he pressed his controls with zeal and shot and slammed heads against stones and moved his avatar, a blond head in a Kevlar jacket behind the bouncing barrel of his gun.

  Rez sat on a stool at the bar and lit the small ball of green and black and ash at the bottom of the bong, sucked at the tube until the water bubbled and the cool gray smoke filled his lungs. He listened to the Kanye and bobbed his head. He listened to the sounds of the game, grunts and screams and bullets and yells. No one talked and Rez closed his eyes and waited for the high to come, to make things lose their edge, to make him feel like it was ok to stay. He felt a punch on his shoulder.

  Dude. Did you hear about Meegan and Fatima?

  Matthews stood in front of Rez with his phone on and the Twitter feed going.

  Yeah. I was there.

  Crazy right? Girl-fight city.

  Yeah.

  The haze cleared and the other two apostles sat on the edge of the couch now and pushed the buttons and moved their bodies in twitches and jolts as if they were in the game, as if their own bodies filled the military garb, their own hearts tucked into the Kevlar, behind the sweating skin. Rez watched the split screen where their two soldiers marched through various alleys and marketplaces, knocking down doors and pushing over stalls of spices and rugs as men in long shirts and turbans protested and women cowered over small children whose eyes peered back through the shawls and robes. A man rushed before Johnson’s character and said something in broken English and took a few bills from the hand of the soldier and disappeared back into the maze where he’d come from.

  Intel!

  Nice, dude.

  Johnson got his man to run and soon the split screen was one and the two forms were joined in a single setting, a small dusty road with dark houses on each side. A dog picked through piles of trash and then ran away as the soldiers approached. Rez wondered at the reality of it all, the street, the garbage with flies, the huffs of the fast walking, the shifting fabric of their uniforms. To what end, all this reality? He was high now and the television was the biggest thing in the room and he wished it were more fake.

  Now? Johnson asked Kelly without looking at him.

  Yeah. This house. Here.

  They both twisted their bodies to the right and their guys turned right and their boots were in the frame, kicking down the door of a house that was otherwise dark and quiet.

  We are soldiers of the defense force. Where is the sheikh?

  The avatars shouted now, one and then the other, into dark rooms with faint rugs and small-framed pictures of men and women smiling in the dimness. Ahead of them light shot into the hallway from a doorway and they moved toward it and inside a girl, the oldest sister maybe, sat in front of a few other children, the girls all in head scarves, the boys all with shaved heads.

  Where is he? Where is the sheikh?

  The girl, almost a woman, attractive and tall, shook her head and said something in Arabic. One of the avatars moved forward and used the butt of his gun to pry the children apart from their pile, to separate them to make sure no one was hiding in the midst of their small bodies. Rez felt his heart beat fast, like he’d just done a line instead of taken a hit, and he took a few deep breaths and cleared his throat and then someone in the television coughed loudly and Johnson and Kelly jumped.

  Dude!

  He’s under the floor! Pull back the rug.

  Kelly moved his avatar to do it, and as the floor door opened, the girl yelled and threw herself down at the avatar’s feet and then the shooting started and Rez closed his eyes and the shooting was loud and the screams pierced louder but loudest was Kelly yelling.

  Sheikh and bake, motherfucker! Sheikh and bake!

  When Rez opened his eyes, he looked at the TV and saw the girl outside her house, a boy’s head in her lap, his body covered with blood. With his own eyes closed, Rez’s mind jumped to the TV at Javad’s house and he shook his head to get the memory out, to make it change, but it didn’t, the image stayed the same. A Muslim girl in a head scarf, crying. Blood in her lap. The imam’s words from Javad’s TV slammed Rez’s consciousness … the Muslim is the persecuted of the world …

  Rez let himself out. No one noticed. Matthews was on the phone and Johnson and Kelly were shouting Yeah, man and Nice and So much for the sheikh and other shit that Rez couldn’t hear because he was out the door and across the yard and around the pool, sweat coming off his palms. He loped down Matthews’s driveway and heard the voice of Matthews’s mom behind him. She stood in the front door with a glass of wine in her hand.

  Hey, Rez! How’s it going? You ok?

  I’m good, he shouted back with a high wave. And she held her glass of wine in one hand and waved with the other.

  Say hi to your mom and dad for me!

  Will do!

  Then he ran. Down through the neighborhood streets toward the highway and then down the crumbling shoulder. When he got tired, he’d jog but the images came back to him and he had to sprint again. First he thought, The game is not real, just a game, a stupid video game. Then he thought: the imam’s pictures were not real, the imam was a known and crazy manipulator. Then he thought that Kelly and Johnson were not real but video-game avatars or that Fatima and Arash were not real but simply brainwashed puppets. After a mile or so he could not run any longer and then he didn’t know what to know, he did not, in his high head, know what was and what was not.

  When he got to the quiet streets of his neighborhood, confusion and exhaustion churned violently in his gut and he stood in the empty kitchen and threw up into it once and then again. When his mom came through the door, she looked at him and rubbed his back and ran the water from the faucet.

  Joonam. I’m sorry. They called from school and said you left early. They didn’t say you were sick. Some tea …

  She put her hand on his forehead to take his temperature, just as she had his whole life.

  Let’s pray this is just a twenty-four-hour bug.

  PART III

  To a Good Country

  21

  The morning of graduation the fog was so thick Rez stared into the blank white and tried to imagine the house across the street. Home of Mr. and Mrs. Haas. Retirees. Proud keepers of bonsai trees and Japanese moss gardens. A matched pair, same white hair, same white teeth, same white sneakers. Parents of a famous movie star, a comedian who took only serious roles now and spent most of his time in a bluegrass band. Once or twice a year the son came to visit, always in a new-model European sedan, always in sunglasses, always alone and in a rush. When Rez was younger, smaller, cuter, the couple would see them in their driveway and call, Come over! Mrs. Haas always had lemonade and Mr. Haas once put his enormous bony hand on Rez’s shoulder and asked if he wanted to see his sports car. Rez was four maybe five, and followed the old man into his tidy garage, where a dusty green piece of metal sat without a hood, the trunk where the engine would be. It looked like a piece of junk. It’s nice, Rez told Mr. Haas, and Mr. Haas agreed, Yes. Yes, she is. I thought you might like to see it. All young
boys dream about the same things. After 9/11 the Haases stopped waving. Mrs. Haas would look up at him from under her gardening hat, then turn her eyes back at the ground. Rez mentioned it to his mother. They’re mean now. Rez’s mother just shook her head. They are old. Sometimes when people get older, they become quieter.

  But this morning they were gone, disappeared. Between his house and theirs a mist so thick Rez let himself pretend there was no house, no Mr. and Mrs. Haas in their old worn beds, backs to each other, their saggy white bodies silent and still. The sound of Matthews’s truck rumbled through the fog and Rez picked up his backpack and his board and wished for a clearing, for some visibility and blue sky to calm his nerves, but knew there was no hope, not until one or two o’clock, until after the ceremony with the gowns and the photos and the dumb hats, all of it pressed down and dreary under this dark low ceiling of wet.

  Then he was high, floating in the salt water at Old Man’s, not giving a fuck. The surface was glassy and almost no one was out, and if they were, Rez couldn’t see them. A pod of dolphins glided nearby, their fins up and out of the mist, then down and gone again. The idea of a sea, an infinity of width and depth, filled with life he would never know, dropped his shoulders and opened his breath and he paddled out farther and saw the set as it was coming in and got caught under a huge wave just as it crested and crashed and the big weight of the water pushed down and pressed his body to the seafloor so completely that all the nerves of the day pushed out of him. He caught the next one he saw and rode it almost to shore and then went back for another and another until his body and mind were as numb and loose as any ocean fish.

  Matthews drove him home. They wore the hoods of their hoodies up and ate breakfast burritos from Santo’s and listened to the morning show on the rock station. When they got to Rez’s house, he put a fist up and Matthews bumped it.

  See you on the other side.

  Not if I see you first.

  Matthews cleared his throat and then smiled wide.

  So. Uh. Not to get sentimental, but I have really loved sharing these past four years of high school with you … It’s been really … special.

  Very funny, jackass.

  No. Really. You’ve been like a brother to me, a brother from another mother, but you know, still … Matthews was trying not to laugh, was trying to keep a serious emotional face, and Rez felt his own face try to do the same and soon they were both cracking up.

  No. Seriously. I got you a gift.

  Matthews put his hands into his hoodie pocket and tossed out a baggie that landed in Rez’s lap. Caps and stems. Hard to get. Harder to share.

  Dude! Score.

  I thought we could take a few right before the ceremony, get loopy during all the clapping and speeches and shit and then be nice and trippy for the family stuff after. Say eleven o’clock launch?

  Perfect.

  Sweet.

  Rez jumped out of the truck and grabbed his board and wanted to wave and shout See ya to Matthews, but the fog swallowed the truck and it was just Rez, next to the sidewalk, up the steps, into his house.

  An alphabetical-order event. Just like the SATs, class photos, roll call. Rez took his seat between Melizza Cales and Emily Custer, girls he only knew from these ordered arrangements. Melizza had changed the spelling of her first name in tenth grade and then changed her hair color and kept an anarchist A in her locker and didn’t talk to anyone at the school. Emily. Plump Emily. Emily of Christ and church and the cross that rested just above her cleavage. Mousy until junior year and then born-again and part of a young Christ group with its own music and movies and dates and still chunky, but confident now, looked pretty good, called herself a good daughter of God. Goth and born-again, with him in the middle. What would he be called? He thought of a few names, some types, but nothing went together, none of them fit, and he had to stop thinking because the queasy feeling started and he had to concentrate on unwrapping the ginger candy he’d jammed in his pocket so he could focus on the words of the headmaster, who was up at the podium now, talking and gesturing and smiling, a man so clean shaven and pleased he looked like a baby. Rez tried to turn the blah-blah-blah sound into words.

  The meaning of ceremony, through time, has been to mark, to denote a moment of significance. To bring together family and friends and teachers and support networks and take a moment to mark an achievement, recognize a transformation. You have seen these fine young adults as babies, as eager elementary school students, as moody middle schoolers, and now as men and woman on the verge of their own lives. Such tremendous changes and more changes to come. Every student before you has read the works of the great Roman poet Ovid. In his timeless collection, Metamorphoses, he says … everything changes, nothing is extinguished. Try and remember this when they come to you as college seniors with impressive internships in foreign countries, or as doctors or as parents, and you can remember that they were once on this stage, once in your lap, once a thought in your heart: Everything changes, but nothing is extinguished.

  Rez wanted to cry. He also wanted to throw up. The desire to expel from himself some pent-up substance came and went and he held it together. Clapped. Stood. Sat down. Stood up again when they called his name. Walked to the edge of the stage. Held the diploma, shook the hand, posed for the picture, and then slid back to his seat in the flowing long black robes that made him feel like an eel. When it was done, he tossed his cap like the rest but didn’t bother to catch it and stayed back, behind a line of tall hedges, for ten, twenty, twenty-five minutes, while the drugs came up in him and he watched life play out before him, suddenly nude and beautiful and tragic.

  As it was in the hallways of high school, it was today, and the families gathered in little clumps, everyone segmented out by color or last name or style. He saw a group of younger brothers and sisters stuff catered cookies in their pockets and then run to hide under the long tablecloths. He saw the old ladies with skinny ankles in saggy hose and men with too-tan faces and guts held back by shiny belt buckles. The fog still covered most things and Rez felt everyone and everything as if it were on the verge of death. A small ray of sun opened a hole through the mist and he concentrated on its glow in a far corner of the quad, knew if there were more, he could do this, he could go into the space of the celebration and celebrate. And then there it was, sun like honey to wash over the scene and make everyone fine looking, make all the eyes glint and the teeth shine. Sun to put gold on the leaves of the trees and warmth on the faces. Rez stepped back from the hedge and took a moment to appreciate the magic of life on earth, just enough water, just enough carbon, just enough oxygen, such a crazy precise formula and yet this one planet had it just right and so there was this: families, trees, soil. He started to cry a little and then a lot, full free sobs of joy, and when that was all done, he took a deep breath and shook himself out from top to bottom and then side to side like a wet dog and walked into the crowd of family and friends and happy teachers. Drugs were so good. The day was so good. All of this was the universe at peace with itself, everything as it should be.

  He let the good feeling guide him and he floated from clump to clump, where he hugged kids he’d never said hello to. Their parents shook his hands and he said Berkeley, Yes, sir, and Yes, they are very happy, and Thank you, same to you. And on and on around the quad until he came to Sophia Lim’s family, the men in designer shoes, the women in impossible heels, the old ladies seated and snacking with the little kids. He grabbed Sophia from behind and she squealed. Her robed body slipped under his grasp and she turned around, saw his face, laughed, and hugged him back.

  Rez! Can you believe it? So cool, right?

  Very cool. Graduation day. Just like Kanye said it would be.

  Watch out for the college dropout!

  She laughed and took a step toward him until they were standing close.

  I can’t believe we made it. I mean, everyone knew you would always make it, Mr. Chess and chemistry whiz and all that. I’m surprised I got through! I st
opped going to class all last term …

  She kept talking and might have said something about next year or tomorrow or remember when, but Rez heard nothing because her lips, a sharp and shiny pink, flashed in front of his eyes and he could only stare at them, think about them, wonder why they winked at him and then grow embarrassed that such a sex organ should be on a woman’s face, right in the front, for everyone to see. Sophia, his first. His virginity and childhood lost to her many holes. Gratitude swallowed him and he reached over and gave her another hug.

  Thank you so much. So much.

  For what?

  She giggled.

  For everything. You’re the best.

  Ooooh k. What parties are you going to tonight?

  Um. I don’t know … all of them?

  She gave him a kiss on the cheek and he squeezed her hand. Fifty-two bones in each hand. Sophomore bio. He let the hand go and walked on looking for the next person, the next warm brother-sister feeling.

  In a far corner of the quad his mother and father sat on white wooden chairs. His people, and he was their person, their only son, and he walked toward them with tears coming up into his face again. They smiled at him and said things people said all day long and he felt their happiness and wrapped his arms around his mother’s small narrow frame and the recognition came to him: I lived inside you once. Once you were my home. But he knew it would be crazy to say it so he said nothing and enjoyed the way mushrooms turned the world into an enormous, pulsing, generous truth. He pulled away and reached for his father, once a monster and now, today, meek, but the strong tall body of straight-up-and-down bones and old skin did not give in to the embrace, and that stiffness, the up-and-down, not-bending body made Rez’s thoughts snap toward the dark, the desert, pain, and a million stars. He took a few steps back and felt goodwill leak away.