Everything Sad Is Untrue

by Daniel Nayeri

  It lay at his feet.

  About a thousand years before Europe discovered toothpaste, Khosrou stepped onto a magic carpet that shined brighter than a meadow in May.

  That’s the legend.

  Khosrou. That name ain’t for your mouth.

  But the hero’s always less than his legend.

  Khosrou’s just a twelve-year-old kid with a big butt.

  You can call him Daniel.

  When you think about it, the king could stand on the jewel-encrusted carpet—the kaleidoscopic radiance of human greatness—and yet, if he stuck his head out a window, it’d still be raining.

  * * *

  YOU MIGHT BE THINKING, “What kind of twelve-year-old talks like that?”

  And I would say, “The kind of twelve-year-old that speaks three languages.”

  All my life, people have told me I speak weird. In Iran, my Farsi was baby Farsi (because I was basically a baby) so I made up my own language.

  My mom said it was brilliant so my sister and cousins tried to prove I was faking. They asked me the word for a bunch of things like “ladder” and “chicken” and they wrote them down. Then two days later, they asked me again, and guess what? I said the same words because my new language wasn’t some punk baby babble.

  Also, maybe because it’s not that hard to remember fifty words somebody asked you two days ago.

  * * *

  The only words I still remember from that language are “finigonzon” (beautiful girl) and “finigonz” (beautiful boy).

  That is not one of my languages anymore.

  In Italy I spoke gibberish Italian because we lived in a refugee camp with Roma and Kurds. The people didn’t want us there, so if you said, “Buena sera,” they’d say, “Good evening,” back because they didn’t want us to stay. They didn’t even want us to learn Italian.

  In Oklahoma I spoke like a kid who learned English from a book. When I pronounced the word toilet “twa-lette,” everybody thought I was slow or something. When I used old words like parlor instead of living room, they thought I was trying to act superior.

  It’s been three years and my English is A+ now.

  It’s easy to tawk lahk one them Okies. Just gotta loosen yer jaw a bit ’n’ never let yer teeth touch. Mostly, it’s slow and comfortable, imaginin’ you own a house and it has a porch and yer sittin’ on it.

  Or you can watch the black people on TV and talkin’ like them ain’t hard. If you’re around ’em, just nod and go, “wut up.” No question mark. (Nobody in America likes grammar Nazis. Not even the neo-Nazis who live in Owasso, Oklahoma.)

  Then be cool.

  And don’t talk too much, and they’ll be “chill.”

  If it comes up, you can tell them a joke about the weather or yo’ mama. I wrote a bunch of these down in my notebook when I heard them at recess. So I could always refer back to that if we’re about to be friends.

  One rule in Oklahoma is that if a grownie talks to you, speak like an Okie. If a finigonzon talks to you, be “chill.”

  So I speak well now. And I’ve memorized tons of words.

  But if you want the kid version of the story, here goes:

  Golly gee, hiya! I’m just a dumb kid who likes ice cream. I was born in Iran—happy face! To a family so wealthy that my grandpa’s grandpa was called a king in the history books. There was murder and intrigue and Ferris wheels in the desert, and a house full of swans, a sapphire blue river, and a chest full of gold doubloons—we’ll get to all that.

  Then my mom got caught helping the underground church and got a fatwa on her head, which means the government wanted her dead—“oh-no” face!

  We had to sneak out of the country, but my daddy stayed behind—disappointed face, maybe not-even-all-that-surprised face.

  We were guests of the prince of Abu Dhabi for three hours, then homeless. There I cut my head open and they sewed it back together. And then we went to a refugee camp in Italy where I became a great thief, until we got asylum in Oklahoma, where we try to act normal—raised-eyebrow face like you don’t believe it.

  I think I skipped the part where my grandmother (mom’s mom this time) tried to assassinate her husband, failed, and was exiled instead. And most of the blood. And the secret police. And the torture.

  Sigh face.

  Listen.

  The quick version of this story is useless. Let’s agree to have a complicated conversation. If you give me your attention—I know it’s valuable—I promise I won’t waste it with some “poor me” tale of immigrant woe.

  I don’t want your pity.

  If we can just rise to the challenge of communication—here in the parlor of your mind—we can maybe reach across time and space and every ordinary thing to see so deep into the heart of each other that you might agree that I am like you.

  I am ugly and I speak funny. I am poor. My clothes are used and my food smells bad. I pick my nose. I don’t know the jokes and stories you like, or the rules to the games. I don’t know what anybody wants from me.

  But like you, I was made carefully, by a God who loved what He saw.

  Like you, I want a friend.

  * * *

  MY DAD CALLS ONCE a month, on a Sunday afternoon.

  “Allo?”

  “Yeah, hello?”

  “Allo, Khosrou?”

  “Yeah, Baba, it’s me.”

  “Allo?”

  “Yes. What.”

  “You son of a dog, why didn’t you answer me?”

  “I did.”

  “Don’t speak to your father that way.”

  He speaks in poetry by the great Persian writers. Hafez, Rumi, Ferdowsi. It is two in the morning in Isfahan. I imagine him sitting in the dark house where we all used to live together. The doves in the aviary are asleep.

  My sister tells me he is probably drunk or on a drug. I think he is in the trance of a thousand-year-old verse. I stand in the kitchen of our house in Edmond, Oklahoma, watching our cocker spaniel sleep in a sunny spot by the back door.

  In my ear, my Baba’s deep voice murmurs the refrains. “‘Uncheh shiranrah konad rubbeh mesaj, ezdevaj ast ezdevaj ast ezdevaj.’ Do you understand?” he says.

  It’s an ancient Farsi that I can only sort of catch.

  “No,” I say.

  “You are forgetting already. You’re forgetting your own family. And your history. These are the poets you should be reading in school.”

  “Tell me what it means.”

  “It’s a clever joke. Your Baba Haji made it from a common phrase. It says, ‘The thing that turns a lion into a little fox is need.’ Do you understand that?”

  “No.”

  “Akh. Okay, so lions are strong champion creatures, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “And a fox is a coward, yes?”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. In Persian literature, a fox is a coward.”

  “In America it’s a tricky animal.”

  “Persian literature is ten times older than America!”

  “Okay, okay. Fox is a coward, got it.”

  “So the riddle asks, what makes the champion a coward?”

  “Need?”

  “Yes. The weakness of needing something. Now the lion must beg for it. He is no king if he needs anything.”

  “Okay, how is that a joke?”

  “Because your Baba Haji changed the word ‘need’ to ‘marriage.’ Now it says, ‘What turns a great lion into a needy fox? Marriage.’”

  I pause.

  “Because ‘ehtiaj’ rhymes with ‘ezdevaj,’ so the change is clever.”

  “Okay.”

  If ever there was cleverness in the joke, it has been wrung out like a dish towel.

  “I was a lion,” says my father.

  He wants me to understand so badly. He wants me to know the Persian poets like I know American rappers. I feel desperate to give him the connection, but can’t.

  “I was a lion,” he says, “and I married and now I sit by the phone and beg
to speak to my children. Do you see?”

  His voice crumbles.

  I imagine the telephone wire going from my hand into our wall into the ground under our yard up the telephone pole across the flat prairie to the Gulf of Mexico under the water under the Atlantic past Gibraltar across the Mediterranean under Turkey into Iran over the Zagros Mountains to Isfahan to our street to our house to my Baba’s chair to his ear where he sits crying. I listen to him weep into the phone.

  When he’s finished, he says, “Are you doing well in school?”

  “Straight As.”

  “Good. Good. You’re my champion of champions.”

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “Okay, be good.”

  “Okay.”

  “Send pictures.”

  “Okay.”

  And we say good-bye.

  * * *

  THEY SAY MY FATHER’S family got their land from the king of India, in gratitude for saving his daughter’s life.

  This was generations upon generations ago, before Oklahoma was even a state. No one ever told me exactly when. There was never enough time for details. There were no lazy Sunday afternoons sitting beside the fountain in the courtyard with aunts or uncles, no moment to ask, “Was this ancestor around when they had horse-drawn carriages? Or was he around when the phoenix flew its fiery wings over hillside villages? Did he know the prophet Daniel, when he came to Persia, or did he know the doctor Ibn Sina twelve hundred years later? This greatest of grandfathers, was he from the age of myth, the age of heroes, or the age of history?”

  Dastan. Persia. Iran.

  The boundaries of these three countries are nothing but ten feet of fog.

  In Dastan land, the mythical age, my great-great-great-……………………………………great-grandfather was a doctor.

  Nobody in Mrs. Miller’s class had trouble believing this, because doctors aren’t all that special anyway. It wasn’t like I said he was a beast master.

  Anyway, he was a doctor. Not a rich guy with a stethoscope. Don’t imagine that. More like a young man who spent all his time in the library of the university, or the private archives of the local magistrate. He spent his money on herbs and plant roots and oils to make things like ointments for burns and cuts.

  And he spent the rest of his money on paper and ink so he could take notes on what worked and what didn’t.

  He was poor, they said, but generous.

  He lived in an ancient city.

  “How ancient,” Jared S. said, when I told this part to my class.

  “It’s just a city,” I said.

  “Like from Aladdin.”

  “Yeah, like that.”

  In myths they don’t spend time describing things like cities.

  The herbs aren’t fenugreek, wormwood, and yarrow.

  They’re just herbs.

  He’s not a specific man, with shoulders built strong on his father’s plow. He’s just a guy who left home and became a student.

  A myth is only an explanation, not an exploration.

  This one explains how my father’s family became kings.

  But if this was a story in the heroic age, they would give my great-grandfather a name, Jamshid, and a personality—ever-laughing Jamshid with a limp in the foot his father crushed with a plow. Jamshid who took even a broken finch as his most honored patient.

  He lived in Isfahan, the city of covered bridges. The city that smelled of jasmine.

  The young doctor was soon famous for his willingness to help the poor and the untouchables. He even sat with those who weren’t sick, only sad, broken-hearted, or lost.

  They would sit in his small garden under an apricot tree. He would give them tea and sesame cookies, and he would listen.

  “Doktor, I am going to die.”

  “Come now, sir, don’t say such things.”

  “It is true! I am half-dead already! Three quarters almost.”

  “What can I do, then?”

  “Hemlock.”

  “I can’t.”

  “It must be hemlock.”

  “Hemlock is poisonous.”

  “Then belladonna.”

  “Also poisonous.”

  “I know, Doktor, I know.”

  “This is about that lovely Maryam, isn’t it?”

  “Akh! Doktor, send me now to a world without her. I am the unhappiest of men.”

  “She refused your offer of marriage.”

  “Yes. Well, no. I don’t know.”

  “So you might also be the happiest of men?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Sir, please. Let go of my hand.”

  “…”

  “If you don’t know, don’t you think we could wait a little and find out?”

  “But you see, this is my problem. This is my problem.”

  “Waiting.”

  “No. If she says yes—Maryam, who loves me, and I who love Maryam—we will be richer in joy that the great Xerxes.”

  “It sounds nice.”

  “Except her brothers have sworn to poison me. I will die. She will be widowed and left to those villains.”

  “I see. And if she says no, in order to prevent all this?”

  “That one is obvious, Doktor.”

  “I see.”

  “So, the hemlock if you please, Doktor. A large gunny sack of it.”

  “Right away.”

  “No one will blame you. I’ll tell everyone I got it from a dervish.”

  “You’re too kind. But first, have you heard of Mithridates’ antidote? Could I offer you the story?”

  “Doktor, I don’t want to be rude.”

  “You’re pressed for time, I understand. It will be short.”

  “I don’t go to the baker for soap. And I don’t go to the storyteller for cures.”

  “But you’ve come to a doctor for a killing drink.”

  “Of course! A builder can make and unmake a house. Both are his job.”

  “…”

  “…”

  “The price of my poison is to hear my story.”

  “Akh. Very well, Doktor. Only because you have been kind to my mother.”

  “Once upon a time …”

  “Don’t get greedy, Doktor. A quick anecdote, if you please.”

  “The father of the great king Mithridates was assassinated at a banquet. He’d been poisoned, you see.”

  “As I would be if I married my love.”

  “Yes. Now you see the connection. And so Mithridates went into hiding. He wandered the forest, and vowed to become stronger than his enemies. Every day he drank a sublethal dose of poison until his body became accustomed to it. And so when he returned to his kingdom, he imprisoned his mother and brothers, who he suspected had killed his father, and he threw a banquet. ‘They put arsenic in his meat and stared aghast to watch him eat; they poured strychnine in his cup and shook to see him drink it up.’ But Mithridates was immune to such a death. He smiled and drank. Then he offered each of them a sip from his own goblet. They were his friends, after all. They couldn’t refuse. If they did he would know that they knew that it was poisoned. And so each drank, and each died, and the poets say, ‘I tell the tale that I heard told. Mithridates, he died old.’”

  “…”

  “…”

  “So.”

  “So.”

  “So you think I should ambush her brothers with such a ploy?”

  “No. I think whatever grievance you have with your future brothers, you should offer forgiveness, and ask them for theirs.”

  “That is not what the story said, Doktor.”

  “Sure it is.”

  “It said Mithridates foiled the plans of his killers.”

  “It said his friends hated him. It said he killed his mother and brothers.”

  “Yes, but he died old.”

  “Kill everyone at a party, and you are the life of the party, but that doesn’t make you good company.”

  “…”

  “…”
>
  “I think your story needs work, Doktor.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  “To explain that Mithridates was unhappy with his decision. And perhaps add the idea that he did not become strong by drinking poison daily. He only became full of poison himself.”

  “That’s good.”

  “His poisoned heart beat poisoned blood.”

  “I will work on it.”

  “No, no. I think you should stick to physician’s work.”

  “Very well, then.”

  “I’ll ask Maryam’s brothers to sit with me.”

  “That sounds like a good plan.”

  “One of them suffers in his back, when he sleeps.”

  “I will give you an ointment. He’ll sleep like a mountain bear.”

  “Thank you, Doktor. The thing is that I don’t have money.”

  “It’s my wedding gift, then.”

  “I must tell Maryam.”

  “Go.”

  “She’ll make you her honey cake.”

  “I would be honored.”

  “Best in Isfahan. Her hand sweetens the honey itself.”

  “I’m in your debt.”

  When I tell this story to Mrs. Miller’s class, I don’t do the talking parts. There is just too much to explain. I only say, Jamshid was famous for taking his payment in whatever patients could offer. Honey cake. A chicken that laid hard-boiled eggs. Three bottles of jam made from his garden’s apricots.

  “That’s super weird,” says Jennifer S.

  Jennifer S. thinks everything that isn’t in a mall is weird.

  And so the legend goes, that he was a good man, peculiar, and not very good at explaining stories clearly. But see, this is the thing with legends. They are more detailed than myths, but not always more accurate.

  So the telling goes, the young doctor of Isfahan was summoned to the palace of a great pasha. No one knows the details, so let’s imagine them. Maryam’s cousin—a merchant of rare furs—knocks on the doctor’s back gate. He has returned from the court of a Parsi king who worshipped the Hindu gods. In the bazaar, as he haggled, he saw a magistrate climb onto a mountain of rugs (despite the rug merchant’s protests) and shout over the crowd.