by Adib Khorram
“Um.”
I felt so useless.
My palms were sweating on Sohrab’s box, smudging the wrapping paper.
“Can I. Uh. Make some tea? Or something?”
I knew it was stupid as soon as I said it.
Sohrab’s head snapped up.
“Go away, Darioush.”
His voice was as sharp as a knife.
“Sorry. I just . . .”
“Get out!”
My stomach inverted itself.
“Sohrab,” Agha Rezaei said softly. He spoke in Farsi, but Sohrab argued back, his voice rising in pitch and volume until it started cracking.
Sohrab’s uncle shook his head and led me back to the kitchen. His hands shook as he filled the kettle.
“Here.” I set Sohrab’s cleats on the counter and grabbed the Rezaeis’ tea out of the drawer to the right of the stove.
I swallowed and swallowed but I couldn’t get rid of the pulsing lump in my throat.
“What’s wrong?” I whispered.
I couldn’t make my voice work properly.
Ashkan Rezaei opened his lips to speak, but then pressed them back together as they trembled.
He was crying too.
“It’s my dad.” Sohrab hovered in the doorway, radiating fury. His jaw clenched and unclenched. “He’s dead.”
I wished I could time travel.
I wished I could unravel everything and make it not true.
“Amou.” Sohrab said something in Farsi to his uncle, who looked like his knees were about to buckle. He used that same knife-sharp voice he used on me.
Agha Rezaei shook his head and went back into the living room.
“What do you want, Darioush?”
“I’m sorry,” I squeaked. That lump was still there. “What happened?”
Sohrab’s face burned like a brand-new star. I could almost hear him grinding his teeth.
“They say he was stabbed. In prison.”
“Oh my God,” I said. “Oh my God.”
Sohrab’s eyes drilled into me. He jerked his chin at the countertop. “What is that?”
I swallowed and picked up the box.
“This—I got it. For you.”
Sohrab stared at me like I was speaking Klingon.
“What is it?”
“Shoes. Cleats. For football.”
“You came here to give me shoes?”
“Um.” The lump had turned into sand. I was getting squeakier by the second. “Yeah. For our game today.”
Sohrab’s eyes flashed. He smacked the shoebox out of my hands and then shoved me.
He didn’t push me hard, but I stumbled back, because I wasn’t expecting it.
I wasn’t expecting the look in his eyes.
“Get out. Go away. Leave!”
“But—”
Sohrab cut me off.
“You are so selfish. My father is dead and you come over to play football?”
Sohrab kicked the box of cleats across the kitchen.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You’re always sorry. God.”
My heart felt like a warp core about to lose magnetic containment and breach.
“I . . .” The sand in my throat had spread to my eyes.
“Stop crying! You’re always crying! Pedar sag. Nothing bad has ever happened to you. You do nothing but complain. You’ve never had anything to be sad about in your life.”
I couldn’t speak.
I just stood there, blinking and crying.
“Go away, Darioush,” he said.
And then he said, “No one wants you here.”
No one wants you here.
Sohrab turned and left, slamming the living room door behind him.
And then he screamed.
His voice shattered like glass.
Everything he said was true.
No one wants you here.
I knew it was true.
I stumbled out the back door.
No one wants you here.
I ran.
FIRST, BEST DESTINY
My socks crunched over gravel and concrete.
I had left my shoes at Sohrab’s house.
I couldn’t go back for them.
And I couldn’t go back to Mamou’s either.
I just kept running.
I was a coward.
Sohrab had left that off his list.
Clouds had rolled in off the mountains, casting the whole of Yazd in gauzy gray light. Without the sun, the old houses weren’t blindingly khaki anymore. They were brown and dirty and sand-worn.
There was litter everywhere: white plastic lavoshak wrappers, and empty plastic bottles crusted yellow with dried-out doogh; scrunched up sun-faded newspapers and pictures of my new, unfortunate namesake, the real Ayatollah, frowning up at the gray sky.
I didn’t like Iran anymore.
I wanted to go home. To Portland, not to Mamou’s.
I kept thinking about Sohrab. About his father. How he would never see him ever again.
I thought about Stephen Kellner. How sometimes I wished I saw him less.
I thought about how selfish I was.
I really hated myself.
* * *
My foot was bleeding.
I had sliced my heel when I climbed the chain-link fence to our spot in the park. We were supposed to celebrate Sizdeh Bedar there.
I didn’t think that was going to happen anymore.
From the Jameh Mosque, the azan sounded, piercing the quiet afternoon. All across Yazd, people faced the qibla to pray, a titanic multicellular entity focused on the same moment in space-time.
My throat clamped up, a compression wave that traveled down my chest and into my stomach.
Another containment failure.
I wiped my face against my Team Melli jersey, the one Sohrab got me for Nowruz.
No one had ever gotten me a gift like Sohrab had. One that showed he understood me perfectly. One that made me feel like I belonged.
No one had ever invited me to play soccer or hang around on rooftops or stand around a Ping-Pong table eating lettuce.
No one ever made me feel like it was okay to cry. Or bumped shoulders with me and made me smile.
I shook so hard, I thought the bathroom was going to lose molecular cohesion and collapse into a vibrating pile of dust.
I was never going to stop crying.
Sohrab was right about me.
Sohrab was right about everything.
I crossed my elbows over my knees and buried my face in the little hollow I had made.
I wished I had the One Ring, so I could have vanished.
I wished I had a cloaking device so no one would ever find me.
I wished I could just disappear forever.
* * *
“Darius?”
It was impossible.
How had Stephen Kellner located me?
The chain-link fence rattled as he hoisted himself up. “There you are.”
“Hey.” My throat didn’t work right. I sounded like I had swallowed a pineapple with its skin still on.
Dad wiped his palms on his pants and sat down beside me, so close, our elbows bumped.
I scooted away so we weren’t touching.
“We were worried about you.”
“Sorry.”
“Mr. Rezaei said you left Sohrab’s house hours ago. Have you been up here the whole time?”
I shrugged.
Dad rested his hand on the back of my neck, but I shook him off.
“He told us what happened.”
“About Sohrab’s dad?”
“Yeah. And about you and Sohrab.”
I felt another
containment failure coming on.
I couldn’t let Stephen Kellner see me cry.
So I said, “What made you look for me here?”
Dad nodded up at the Jameh Mosque. “This seemed like the kind of place you would like.”
I bit my lip and blinked.
“Don’t cry, Darius.” Dad tried to wrap his arm around me, but I leaned away.
“I can’t help it, okay?”
Dr. Howell likes to say that depression is anger turned inward.
I had so much anger turned inward, I could have powered a warp core.
But without the proper magnetic field strength, it exploded outward instead.
I couldn’t sit down anymore, even though my foot hurt when I put weight on it.
“Sometimes I can’t help crying. Okay? Sometimes bad shit happens. Sometimes people are mean to me and I cry. Sorry for being such a target. Sorry for disappointing you. Again.”
“I’m not disappointed—”
I snorted.
“I just want to make sure you’re healthy. Your illness can run away with you before you even know it.”
“No, you just want me to be like you. You want me to ignore it when people are mean to me. When Trent bullies me. When Sohrab . . .”
I swallowed.
“You don’t want me to feel anything at all. You just want me to be normal. Like you.”
I picked up a jagged piece of roof and hurled it off into the empty park. My chest was about to explode, hurling matter and antimatter out until they annihilated everything nearby.
“You won’t even watch Star Trek with me anymore,” I whispered. “I’ll never be good enough for you.”
All my anger had fled, imploding back into my chest, slipping down the event horizon of the churning supermassive black hole inside me.
Slingshot Maneuver.
Dad’s face had turned red and blotchy. “Darius.” He sighed and uncrossed his long legs to stand up. “You’ve always been good enough for me. I loved you from the first moment I saw your little hands on the ultrasound. And felt your little feet kicking in your mom’s belly. I loved you the first time I got to hold you and look into your beautiful brown eyes and know you felt safe in my arms.”
Dad’s hands twitched like he wished I was still a baby he could hold.
“And I’ve loved you more every day. Watching you grow up. Watching you grow into yourself. Watching you learn to cope with a world I can’t always protect you from. But I wish I could.”
He cleared his throat.
“Being your dad is my first, best destiny.”
It wasn’t true.
How could he say that?
“Remember those stories you used to tell me?”
I sniffled.
“Remember? When I was little?”
“Of course.” He closed his eyes and smiled. “I loved putting you to bed.”
“Then why did you stop, if you loved it so much?”
Dad bit his lip. “You remember that?”
“I remember.”
Dad sighed and folded himself back down to sit on the ledge of the roof. He glanced up at me but didn’t hold my eyes—just patted the spot beside him.
I sat down, but farther away from him.
Dad looked up, like he was going to speak, but then looked at his hands and swallowed. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, up and down.
“You’re wrong. I want you to feel things, Darius. But I’m scared for you. You have no idea how scared. I take my eyes off you one moment and if it’s the wrong moment, you could be drowning in depression, bad enough to . . . to do something. And I can’t protect you from that. No matter how hard I try.”
“I’m not going to hurt myself, Dad.”
“I nearly did.”
All the atmosphere on the rooftop fled, blown away by Dad’s explosive admission.
“You . . . what?”
“When you were seven. My meds weren’t doing their job. And I got to thinking about how you and your mother would be better off without me.”
“Oh.”
“I got so bad, I was thinking about it. All the time. Dr. Howell put me on a pretty strong tranquilizer.”
“Um.”
“It made me into a zombie. That’s why I couldn’t tell you stories. I could barely tell the time of day.”
I didn’t know.
“I lost myself for a long time, Darius. I didn’t like who I became on those pills, but they saved my life. They kept me here. For you. And your mom. And by the time I was doing better and Dr. Howell tapered me off, your sister was born and I just . . . things were different. She was a baby, and she needed me. And I didn’t know if you even wanted stories anymore. If you were ever going to forgive me.”
“Dad . . .”
“Suicide isn’t the only way you can lose someone to depression.”
Dad looked up at me again. There were no walls between us.
“And it kills me that I gave it to you, Darius. It kills me.”
There were tears in his eyes.
Actual human tears.
I had never seen my father cry before.
And due to some harmonic resonance, I started crying again too.
Dad scooted closer to me. And when I didn’t scoot away, he wrapped his arms around me and pulled me down to rest his chin on top of my head.
When had I gotten taller than Stephen Kellner?
“I’m so sorry, son. I love you so much.”
I let Dad hold me, like that tiny potato-sack version of myself, sleeping on his chest when I was a baby.
“You’re okay,” he murmured.
“No. I’m not.”
“I know.” He rubbed my back up and down. “It’s okay not to be okay.”
* * *
Dad and I stayed and watched the sun set, gilding the turquoise minarets of the Jameh Mosque for a few breathtaking moments before plunging Yazd into twilight.
Dad let me talk about Sohrab, and what he had said.
He let me be sad.
“You really love Sohrab. Huh?”
“He’s the best friend I ever had.”
Dad looked at me for a long moment. Like he knew there was more.
But he didn’t ask.
Instead, he pushed the hair off my forehead, kissed me there, and rested his chin on top of my head again.
Maybe he knew, without me saying it out loud, that I wasn’t ready to talk about more.
Maybe he did.
THROUGH A WORMHOLE
Sizdeh Bedar was pretty much cancelled.
Everyone was going over to the Rezaeis’ house. They packed the food Mamou had made for the picnic.
“Happy birthday, sweetie. Have fun with your dad,” Mom said, kissing my forehead before she grabbed a platter of dolmeh.
“Thanks.”
Mom rested her palm on my cheek.
I thought about her dealing with Dad’s depression for all these years.
I thought about her dealing with mine too, and how much harder it must be with two of us.
I thought about how painful it must have been, to want to help and not be able to.
Not really.
My mother was strong and enduring as the Towers of Silence.
So was Mamou. She kissed both my cheeks. “You are the sweetest boy I know, maman,” she said.
“Darius?”
Laleh wrapped her arms around my waist.
“I’ll always be your friend.”
I knelt down and kissed Laleh on the cheek.
“I know you will, Laleh.”
“I made you some tea. For your birthday. It’s in the teapot. I didn’t even put sugar in it.”
“Thank you.”
Laleh squeezed me again. She whisp
ered in my ear, “You can add sugar if you want, though.”
That made me smile.
“Okay.”
* * *
It was weird walking down the streets of Yazd with my father instead of Sohrab.
Weird, but not bad.
Dad kept pointing out different doors that he liked, or baad girs he thought were particularly impressive. But he didn’t stop to draw them. He had left his sketchpad at home.
“I want to spend time with you,” he explained.
I didn’t know how to handle all this attention from my father.
It seemed we had increased our intermix ratio by a substantial factor.
But it was nice.
The minarets of the Jameh Mosque were even taller than the baad gir of Dowlatabad Garden. I craned my neck and stared up at them.
“Wow.”
“Wow,” Dad agreed.
We crossed the fountained courtyard, staring up at the minarets and the huge, pointed archway that towered above us. It felt like being swallowed by an enormous celestial beast.
Dad was speechless.
I knew, without him saying it out loud, that he was in love with the place.
The halls and chambers were quiet. Morning prayers were done, so it was mostly empty, except for tourists like us. Our footsteps echoed endlessly. My dress shoes squeaked on the smooth tiles.
I had yet to recover my Vans from Sohrab’s house, but Mom had promised to bring them back with her.
I studied my father as he stared at the tile work on the ceiling: endless geometric patterns that made me think of traveling through a wormhole. Dad’s face was relaxed—no smile, no frown. All his walls had come down.
Dad had never hidden his depression from me. Not really.
But I never knew how close I had come to losing him.
How hard he fought to stay with us, even if it made him into a Borg drone.
I didn’t want to lose him.
And he didn’t want to lose me.
He just didn’t know how to say it out loud.
I think I understood my father better than I ever had before.
* * *