With Tanner I ask, “How strong is it?” The battery. He’s got a pile of dead roaches already.
He shrugs.
I wonder if we’ll go to the hospital today and tell them my mom hurt herself. And Ray will buy us dinner at a restaurant.
An idea worms its way into Tanner’s brain. He looks at the two prongs attached to the car battery. Like a bird, he cocks his head sideways.
I say, “Don’t.”
He slowly raises the prongs to his face.
I don’t have anyone to shout for, because all the other kids in my class live in houses across town and the apartment families won’t talk to us because they say they may be poor, but they ain’t dune coons that make foul-smelling food and yell at each other in gobbledygook.
Tanner opens his mouth and looks at me, big-eyed. He stands up to brace himself. But I don’t dare him to do it.
“That’s gonna hurt—”
I don’t finish, because he jabs the two prongs onto his tongue and the zap sound is a juicy water balloon sound. Tanner’s mouth is suddenly full—like he’s blowing out his cheeks.
He drops the cables and falls to his knees.
I hear a scream from an apartment window.
Tanner opens his mouth and a water balloon worth of blood pours out.
More screams.
Tanner’s still coughing, like moms do when they get punched in the stomach. A chunk of his tongue is in the pool of blood.
I run to get help and hear an ambulance coming.
It could be for Tanner or my mom.
Anyway.
Sometimes people get married just so he’ll buy them a house—not one with a bird room—a little one with cockroaches. Maybe it’s love most of the time. But that’s a reason too. And it doesn’t have to be because they want a father figure for their sons. That would be a terrible reason.
You shouldn’t put that kind of blood on a kid’s head. Cause he would have said he didn’t even want a house or a stepdad, if it was all for him like my sister said.
Sisters can be evil like that.
They tell you all the nightmares you ever had were your fault, and you were the reason somebody broke your mother’s jaw.
Anyway, Tanner came back three months later with a forked tongue. He’d stick it out like a snake—two nubs wiggling around.
And anyway maybe Ma and Pa in Charlotte’s Web do love each other.
Maybe I could have just read that and had a father figure to teach me how to treat mothers. Anyway, the only reason I said anything was that sometimes marriages give people houses and sometimes they take them away.
Like for Aziz. She lost hers.
* * *
HERE’S A VERSION OF the rest of the story that is mostly true.
By the time Aziz turned fourteen, she had stopped glancing across the orchard every time she passed by, hoping to see the khan riding up the road.
She had buried him in her heart.
The saffron fields—under her uncles’ control—were just a great big red river of blood. Every day, she would wake the rooster who slept by the fountain in the courtyard. She would lean into the open grate of the reservoir and pull out five stones the size of cantaloupes that stopped it up. The water would flow into the paved channels in the courtyard to feed the apple trees and the grape vines.
The truth is that she was lost after that. She wandered.
One evening her uncles appeared as she sat on a blanket pitting cherries and spreading them out to dry in the sun. Uncle Bird liked to stand when others sat. Uncle Onion sat and began eating the pitted cherries.
Aziz was polite, but she was also a thousand worlds away.
“We have news,” said Bird.
“Mmm,” said Onion, and then, shlorp shlorp shlorp, which was the sound of cherries mushing in his mouth.
“News that will make you happy,” said Bird. “Do you want to hear it?”
“Yes, Uncle. You must both be hungry. We have dinner.”
But Onion was content devouring her day’s work.
“We should tell you now,” said Bird. “It’s a family matter.”
In that moment Aziz dared hope.
Was he alive?
Had he returned?
“You are a married woman now,” said Bird.
“Congratu—shlorp shlorp!” said Onion.
“He lives in Karaj. His name is Hassan.”
Aziz had never been as far as Karaj in her life. It was as far away as Edmond from the Gulf of Mexico. She said, “Dear Uncles, am I not helpful?”
“Of course,” said Onion.
“And as owners of this house, couldn’t you let me stay?”
She referred softly to the fact that her uncles had long ago stolen the deed to the estate. There was no need to send her away. She would never inherit.
“Yes,” said Bird, “but we have reputations to think about. You’re a woman now, Aziz.”
Aziz opened her mouth.
Then closed her mouth.
Then closed her eyes.
* * *
WHEN SHE OPENED THEM AGAIN, she was on a horse cart to Karaj with a small trunk of clothes, and nothing to help her remember her mother or father.
She never returned.
* * *
OF COURSE, SCHEHERAZADE WOULD never let the morning come at the end of a story—or else the king would have no reason to keep her alive.
Reader, you are the king, so let me tell you, when Aziz married Hassan, the two were already in love and one of them was already destined to die.
* * *
IN MRS. MILLER’S CLASS WE make goody bags for American soldiers in the war and it is very important that I help as much as I can to prove whose side I’m on.
“Class,” she says, looking at me, “be sure to sign your name at the top of the card.”
Jared S. draws a bunch of fighter jets shooting arrows at monkeys on camels. Mrs. Miller comes by and makes her lips a straight line but doesn’t say anything.
Brianna is the best at bubble letters, so she writes, “We support the troops,” and Kelly J. helps her color the American flag with hearts where the stars should go.
The soldiers are in Iraq to kill Saddam Hussein, who’s evil.
I raise my hand and Mrs. Miller calls on me from her desk.
“Saddam Hussein is evil,” I say.
“Don’t write that, please,” she says.
“Okay, but I hope we win,” I say.
Some of the kids have uncles in Iraq and lots have family who work at Tinker Air Force Base in Midwest City, Oklahoma. A lot of them think my family is Mexican, which is what “wetback” means, but if they see Ray’s beard or hear my mom talking to us in a grocery store, they come up and tell us, “My brother-in-law works every day at Tinker to protect us.”
At this moment we will be trying to pick out juicy oranges, so my mom will say something like, “Yes. Good.”
Then they’ll say, “We support the troops around here,” and walk off. Some say, “Eff Saddam!”
I want to tell them that when I was three, Saddam was at war with Iran. He bombed Isfahan every night trying to kill people and my uncles fought him. One of them has a twitchy face from the chemical attacks. One night, when I was a baby, the building next to ours was hit and the whole thing collapsed.
My mom says she ran into my room and I was still asleep.
I was a super fat and sleepy baby—which is the best kind of baby. And I even slept through bombs.
So the point is that Iran is not the same country as Iraq. This should be obvious because they have different names. But then Doug C. leans over and says, “Hey, you from Iraq?”
“No.”
“If I ever see a dune coon, you know what I’d do?”
“What’s a dune coon?”
“Arabs.”
“I’m not Arab.”
“Okay, but you know what I’d do?”
“What?”
“Iraq, Iran,” he says. “I-rack,” he says again,
“I-ran … I’d kick ’em in the balls.”
He laughs. I kinda laugh, because it’s joking and joking is a shared thing. Mocking is a joke that is not shared. I laugh a little to acknowledge that he has shared his joke with me.
Then I tell him, “I signed my name ‘Daniel.’”
“Good for you,” he says.
That way the soldiers won’t think I’m trying to poison them with my tin of cookies.
Also, I don’t have a problem with Arabs. I’m just not one.
Also, kicking someone in the nuts and then running is a coward thing to do, but I guess there isn’t a country for I-rack, I-gloat.
* * *
I AM IN LOVE WITH KELLY J., who thinks I am disgusting even though I finish worksheets faster than all the other boys. She seems to value Tyler L. for his shirts with surfing lizards on them.
There is no helping this.
I do not have the T-shirts that she likes, because they are from a store called Gadzooks, which is in the mall of new clothes. I only have my love, and used clothing.
I used to believe that you could not choose who you love any more than you could choose the picture on a used shirt.
But the truth is that no one is innocent in love, and nobody forced me to love Kelly J. I don’t want to stop just because she laughs at me. I want to stay in love with her until she realizes I am a person. It is a complicated thing that a little kid, or even a fifth grader, can’t understand, that we are always choosing situations that hurt us.
We choose them so deeply that we don’t know we chose them. We think we had to. We think the world did it to us.
And then we think, what a horrible world that makes a weapon out of love. That stabs you with it, even when you can’t defend yourself and the other person hates you and wants to see you cry.
It’s a miracle that anyone would ever fall in love with someone else and—of all the people in the world—that person loves them back. Like if you fell off a building and landed in a pillow truck, somehow.
It doesn’t happen, basically.
Which means we end up with someone and there’s lots of choosing to do. Choosing to forgive strange smells or choosing that Gadzooks is not the only place that boyfriends can shop.
This is the work of love.
I never had a grandpa to tell me this stuff, so I could be completely wrong.
I mean, I only have the memories of people quitting love. So I’ve seen it. I’ve seen love take hard work that they don’t want to do anymore. They just decide their own kids aren’t worth it (my dad). They tell themselves it’s okay to give up, because love should be like the shows on TV, where you float uncontrollably on the smell of the other’s perfume. They lie to themselves with stories of Aziz and Hassan, whose love—they say—was like Khosrou and Shirin, a legendary love, a love so big that if it was a mountain it would sink the earth to the bottom of the well of the universe.
* * *
HERE IS AN INTERESTING question that I heard once in church. Can God create a mountain so big that He himself couldn’t lift it?
It’s trying to put God in a corner, because if He can or if He can’t, He’s not all-powerful.
But the question is silly, because it assumes God is as stupid as we are. If you’re as big as God, there’s no such thing as “lifting.” It’s all just floating in a million universes you made. If you made an object of some insane, unusual size, then it’d still be a thing.
And God is as big as everything at once. And as small.
Physical stuff is too simple.
The better question is, Can God create a law so big that He himself has to obey it?
Is there an idea so big that God doesn’t remember anything before it?
That answer is love.
Love is the object of unusual size.
* * *
AT FOURTEEN, AZIZ WAS a beauty.
But this would be difficult for anyone to know because girls at that time stayed home.
So a boy didn’t know who to call on (which meant going to their house and asking the parents if he could court their daughter (which meant sitting in a parlor with her and talking to see if he wanted to get married)).
So moms came up with strategies. At the public baths, they would look for the beautiful girls and tell their sons to go calling at their houses.
Or people would look at the brothers. If the brothers had soft flowy hair and nice cheeks and pretty eyes, people would assume his sister would too, so she’d get a bunch of callers.
But if the brother was a hairy boar, like if he spit a lot and had a giant nose, people would imagine it on a girl’s face and that sister would have lots of time to read.
The word for those guys was “sister ruiner.”
Aziz didn’t have any of that when the horse cart rode into Karaj: the brother to help or hurt her reputation, the mother to watch out for her at the baths, or the father to stand at the door and look strong.
She was beautiful and alone.
I do not know how the story goes exactly.
Only that Persian love stories are all tragedies.
To explain love, I have to tell you three stories:
The first is the myth of Khosrou and Shirin.
The second is the legend of Aziz and her husbands.
The third is the history of how I broke my thumb at my mom’s church.
* * *
THE MYTH OF KHOSROU and Shirin and its relation to my mom, and the Miami Dolphins and church.
When I was a kid (before Oklahoma), my name was Khosrou and everybody could say it, because everybody knows Khosrou was a shah in the year 500. I told you that already, didn’t I? Scheherazade repeats herself all the time, just so you know.
Khosrou—I’ll stop writing it so you can stop skipping it—was the famous king who made the carpet called “The Spring of Khosrou,” where the rubies and emeralds were flowers in a golden field. It was one of the legendary treasures of the Old World. You remember this, yes?
I always imagined the king laid the rug in his audience hall so that anyone who came to petition him would step on the greatest treasure in the kingdom. This would be such a Persian thing to do.
A farmer walks in and doesn’t even realize it until his muddy boot treads on a bouquet of jasmine made of pearls and he says, “Oh.”
And then realizes he’s soiled the magic carpet of the greatest empire in the world and says, “Oh!”
And the Persian king, being super Persian, goes, “Come in. Come in. No matter the carpet.”
“A thousand apologies,” says the farmer, falling to his knees to wipe the pearls with his shirt.
“Don’t trouble yourself,” says the king.
This is how Persians host. There are very important rules to treating guests with honor. The farmer would just keep apologizing. They would go back and forth. Until the farmer wiped the rug clean.
“Forever my deepest apologies, O King.”
“You are more valuable to me,” the king says, “than any rug.” (Even though the rug is more valuable than three countries.)
“I will leave,” says the farmer.
“No, no,” says the king. “But perhaps—”
“I will remove my shoes,” says the farmer, finally catching on.
“That might be good, but only if you’d like to.”
“Of course, of course,” says the farmer, retreating to the entry and pulling off his boots.
“I will have someone bring you my own boots.”
“No, I could never,” says the farmer.
This is called “tarof,” by the way, this politeness that goes on forever.
“Of course. Or perhaps my socks.”
“I am unworthy of the king’s socks. But if the king pleases, so I don’t muddy your sacred hall, may I—”
“Have a basin to wash your feet?”
“Yes. If you please.”
“Of course!” says the king.
And they go on like this for hours, honoring each other. So
you should know when a Persian tarofs you, there are rules. I can’t tell you them now cause I’m in the middle of a story, but you should know those rules because they’re just trying to give you respect. Otherwise you end up making everyone feel like garbage. Like, you already know the American rule that when you walk into someone’s house, you don’t go, “Nice couch,” and then climb all over the couch with your shoes on. It’s that kind of thing.
In Oklahoma, when people from church come to our apartment, they don’t ask if they should take their shoes off. They just walk on the rug. But then our rug isn’t very nice, so maybe they aren’t embarrassed when they get mud all over it. It’s the most expensive thing we have, because our TV is a hand-me-down. But it’s still not that nice. My mom doesn’t say anything because they never start the tarof and they never realize when she’s doing it.
Khosrou had a son named Hormizd IV, who had a son named Khosrou II. It was the grandson who grew up and fell in love with a woman named Shirin.
Like Aziz, Khosrou II had two evil uncles who killed his father, Hormizd, so that they could control him and take everything.
This was when the Persian Empire was so big that uncles and princes each got their own countries to play with. The saddest moment, I think, is that when his brothers grabbed the king in his palace, they blinded him first. I imagine one version of the story where the king falls to his knees before his ungrateful guests and looks at his father’s great gold springtime carpet, maybe focuses on a single poppy flower made of rubies stitched around yellow diamonds with one black pearl at the center—and he watches as the boots of traitor soldiers tread it with the blood of his loyal servants. And that’s the last thing he sees before the hand of eternal darkness covers his eyes—a poppy, red like blood.
Everything Sad Is Untrue Page 6