Everything Sad Is Untrue

by Daniel Nayeri

  The next morning was a Saturday, and it was our first summer in Oklahoma, so we didn’t know that kids went to camps, and soccer leagues, and vacations, and stuff. Everybody just disappeared and we were left.

  My sister had a system where we each picked what to watch on TV every thirty minutes, but she timed it so I got all the slots where we agreed on shows, and she got the ones where we didn’t.

  So we were watching a show about high school kids on a volleyball team, instead of a cartoon about a duck detective. But then she turned it to a court show about people who steal air conditioners from their grandparents.

  I made a grunty noise, cause I had cereal in my mouth.

  “What? This is what I wanna watch,” she said. Her smile was a warning.

  “Change it back,” I said.

  “No. I want to see what the judge says.”

  The judge screamed at them and gave them a fine. Up next, a girlfriend who stole radios.

  “You know,” said my sister, “I’d give you all my time slots if you helped make mug rugs.”

  “All summer?”

  “Only while you’re making mug rugs.”

  “Do I get paid?”

  “I’ll give you fifty cents a rug.”

  “You make five bucks.”

  “Four-fifty,” she said, “after your cut, and I only make about the same after all the costs,” which I found out later was completely untrue. But I didn’t know then. I still believed the things she told me. So I agreed, and she put me to work.

  Every day, we would wake up and our mom would already be gone. Cereal has to be eaten in a specific way, so we did that first. Then we each took a plastic grid and started weaving. She was afraid Mr. Abbas would go back on the deal, so she said, “Make them all perfect.” But I would hide a Persian flaw in each one, which was hard because mug rugs aren’t very big and have about seven knots per inch. I would move them around, because if you put a little hole in the same spot of every rug, then it’s not a flaw anymore, it’s the design.

  Sometimes, I would go outside, but I didn’t have a bike and the closest park to our apartment was past a creek where a couple of kids had died once. Kyle had gone to his mom’s house in California, so I didn’t really have anything to do outside.

  I am now an expert weaver of mug rugs.

  My sister and I never talked much, because I only picked riveting shows about duck detectives and mouse detectives so we were riveted. But once, during the afternoon shows about grownies kissing, I said, “Remember that huge rug in the castle of the Prince of Dubai?”

  And she said, “He wasn’t the Prince of Dubai.”

  “Yes he was.”

  “No, you’re dumb.”

  “You told me he was the Prince. You’re dumb.”

  “I said he was a prince.”

  She was right. Or, I didn’t remember if she was, but it was how every conversation ended. I didn’t say anything, because there’s no reason to talk to people who are just waiting to pounce on your flaws and put their fingers in the holes.

  She said, “Oh come on. I remember the rug. What about it?”

  Nothing about the rug. I was just counting the memories. Sometimes you just want somebody to look at a thing with you and say, “Yes. That is a thing you’re looking at. You haven’t lied to yourself.”

  But anyway, I just wove another mug rug until she said, “He wanted to marry me, you know.”

  “Who?”

  “The rich guy in Dubai.”

  “No.”

  “He did. That’s what they were talking about.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I heard Mom tell Ray. The prince said we could stay at his palace and we’d be safe. But it would be weird if we weren’t family, so he’d marry me.”

  This was just about the grossest thing you could possibly imagine—to think of your sister as a finigonzon. I didn’t want to know any more. I always wondered about that moment, though, about the dinner in the palace and then a year of being homeless again, living in the back of a free clinic for poor people, which was a nice place with a nice family. But I’ll get to that.

  In all our lives, my sister only told me her stories twice. We never compared our memories, ever. I think because where they were the same, they were painful and obvious. And where they were different—even just a little—they were so important to each of us, that we hated each other for not remembering them as we did. For years, we couldn’t forgive each other for misremembering even the color of our grandmother’s scarf.

  I said, “So why did he let us go?”

  “Because we refused, duh. He had thirty wives already. Didn’t you know those women were his wives?”

  “I knew that,” I said.

  “And I was eight,” she said. “That’s disgusting.”

  “I know,” I said. “I meant how did we leave without insulting him.”

  “Oh. Mom said we were Christians.”

  “He was okay with that?”

  “He wouldn’t want one anyway.”

  “He seemed nice,” I said.

  “He was on opium,” she said.

  In my head we were back on the street, wandering. We found an outdoor bazaar with lights on and walked around. If you want to know the truth, the only other part I remember is that I couldn’t hold it anymore and went in my pants. It was all the kebab from the palace. I had begun holding it days at a time, and couldn’t, with all the walking that night. When my sister smelled it, she said, “Mom! He pooped himself.”

  I said, “Shh,” cause people would look.

  I remember my mom asking people for a bathroom for what must have been an hour. And finally getting into a water closet that smelled. And my mom trying to open our suitcase on her knee, and stuff falling out. And my sister complaining, because we didn’t know anybody and it wouldn’t be safe for her to wait outside. And when we peeled off my clothes, it had gotten onto the pants and everywhere. My mom finally exploded and cried when she realized we didn’t even have a plastic bag and couldn’t afford to throw away the pants. She cried and said, “I can’t. I can’t.” And she hit her forehead on the bathroom mirror as she washed the soiled pants in the sink without soap, because there wasn’t any.

  I stood in the corner with my bare feet on top of my shoes and no pants and wondered if the glass would break. We were both scared that she’d never stop crying. But when she did, she gave me my sweatpants from the suitcase, and we just carried the wet pants for the rest of the night.

  It’s actually kind of funny that years later, I would have to dig poop trenches in Oklahoma. Like I had been practicing for wallowing in it my whole life. Maybe we get the endings we deserve. Or maybe the endings we practice.

  At the end of the summer, my sister presented two hundred mug rugs to Mr. Abbas with a bill she wrote up for one thousand dollars. And that was when he saw the flaw in his plan, which was that we’d forget or let go of a chance to be less poor. But Mr. Abbas wasn’t a refugee. And he was in front of everyone, so he wrote her a check, which she deposited into her college fund. She never mentioned it, and I never asked for my money, which if you do the math is a lot.

  But that’s okay. That summer was the most time we ever spent together voluntarily. She taught me how to play rummy, which is a card game Americans play at summer camps. And we watched mostly cartoons. And besides, nobody should have to sit there with grown-ups deciding whether to sell her into slave marriage.

  That’s what I did all summer.

  Plus we tasted root-beer floats.

  * * *

  THE TRUTH IS, IN THE real world there’s no such thing as a Persian flaw, because that assumes you could have a thing that has only one thing wrong with it.

  One disaster always begets another, and another. Your dad disappears in Azerbaijan, and your uncles sell you off, and your daughter gets set up with a mean man, and their daughter gets a warrant on her head, and a million other tragedies play out on every side. The story goes on, and you can’t
pretend that dropping one knot in a rug is the only mistake keeping it from perfection. The truth is that everything has a hundred thousand flaws.

  But it’s pretty to think that we can make perfect things and scratch them a little to keep from being gods. It’s comforting, the way in myths the heroes are all one personality flaw from perfection. If only Rostam was more humble. If only Zal’s dad listened.

  The closer you get to history, it’s like the closer you get to the weave of a rug. You see a thousand thousand complications. Like this part of the story, which I remember too well. There is no counting the memories anymore.

  Before, when you were in the parlor of my mind, I only had one or two things to offer. My Baba Haji’s craggy smile, my uncle on the motorcycle. It was like I only had one kind of treat in the pantry, and I offered it up.

  But now, in Dubai and after that, we sit together and my pantry is full of memories about every boring detail. It’s like an Oklahoma grocery store. There is a whole aisle for snack cakes, and I could offer all of them. But maybe back when I only had one snack, maybe that was cream puffs from Akh Tamar, and maybe now all I’ve got is a dozen flavors of junk cookie.

  Will it be alright, reader, if I choose just the good ones? By the way, Mrs. Miller says I’m not allowed to write about poop for class assignments anymore.

  Which is fine, because I only have three or four more of those. But it’s also a little silly, because in the Nights, Scheherazade tells about all kinds of grownie stuff that would make the demons blush.

  I know Mrs. Miller would say, “These are not the Arabian Nights, Mr. Nayeri; they’re writing assignments.”

  And I would say to that, “O wise and merciful Mrs. Miller, every story is nestled somewhere within another story.”

  And she’d say, “Please stick to the prompts or I will have to give you an incomplete grade.”

  Ah. See? Another Persian flaw.

  I’d have a hundred in her class otherwise.

  * * *

  THE TWO MEMORIES OF our time in Dubai that I have chosen are titled, “Blood or Ketchup?”

  * * *

  Because one has a bunch of ketchup, and the other has a bunch of blood. But both have some of both.

  The first is after we spent a few months in Dubai. I mentioned already that we found an Australian doctor couple who were missionaries. They started a clinic for people who couldn’t afford clinics and they lived in a small house in the back. When they met my mom, they said we could share it with them. So we all crammed into the little house. They were kind people with specific features, like a man with a blond beard, or a woman with a band of freckles across her nose and different-colored eyes. But they were Christians so I won’t describe them to you, or I could get them killed.

  We didn’t have toys in Dubai, so we made kites out of sticks and butcher paper. There was not a lot of wind where we lived with buildings in the way. So they never flew. One day, my mom was working in the clinic and Jim, the Australian doctor, said, “Your father’s coming to visit.”

  “Mine?” I said.

  “You weren’t supposed to know,” said my sister to me.

  “Sorry,” said Jim.

  “Why wasn’t I supposed to know?” I said.

  “Cause everyone thinks you’re traumatized, and if it doesn’t happen then you’ll freak out.”

  But I wasn’t traumatized. I just hated Western toilets and never used them till I had accidents. And I would sleep under my bed because I thought the Committee men would find us any minute. I’d cry that they would kill our mom and we’d be orphans. I know that sounds like I was a coward, but—I don’t know, maybe I was a coward.

  It was in those days that my mom noticed that nobody could say my name, Khosrou. The Australians, the Americans at the embassy where she would sit all day to beg them to let us into their country, nobody.

  I was watching a Japanese cartoon about a kid who drives a robot when she decided to solve the problem. She said, “Daniel, it’s time to eat.”

  I look back now and I think this was not the best way to solve the problem. “Daniel,” she said, “Come eat, Daniel.”

  I had never heard the name Daniel before, and there was no one in the room but us. I thought, Maybe she was on the phone. I kept watching. The kid’s robot was turning into a gold superbot.

  “Daniel,” she said.

  I finally looked up. She was looking straight at me. “Come eat, Daniel.”

  It was like my mom had forgotten my name. Or they had had some meeting about me and decided Khosrou was too traumatized to save, so they threw him away, and started over with Daniel.

  I stared at her, hoping she’d recognize me.

  “He doesn’t get it,” said my sister. “Your name is Daniel now.”

  My eyes didn’t even go up to the ceiling that time. I just burst into tears and scrambled under the bed the three of us shared.

  “Can we eat now?” said my sister.

  My mom had to get down and explain everything, that she always liked Daniel cause he was in the Bible, and that people couldn’t say Khosrou. At that moment I remember thinking, Maybe names don’t even matter and this is something like stuffed animals that you just leave in a field and never think about again.

  That was the day I decided Daniel would be ten times tougher than Khosrou—like the superbot version or something—so tough he could take any kind of damage and be unstoppable.

  * * *

  HERE’S A NEW KIND of damage: My dad came to Dubai just a few days later and they told us they were getting a divorce and my dad was already married again.

  This would be the last time I saw my dad for a long time, so I wanted to remember everything. But for instance I don’t even remember the address of his hotel. I do remember that morning, I lost my tooth. I was eating a piece of flatbread—nothing too hard or chewy. But my tooth just bent back, the one on the bottom row in front, with a sharp stab at the gum. I reached in and pulled it out. There was blood on my hand. I wasn’t supposed to be eating, because we were going to eat with my dad, so I ran out of the kitchen and found my mom in the bathroom.

  “My tooth fell out,” I said.

  She gave me some tissue to bite on so the bleeding would stop. “You can show your dad,” she said. “He’ll be happy.”

  My dad is a dentist, remember, and had more opinions about my teeth than anything else. I put it in my pocket to show him.

  We took a bus to the ocean where all the skyrise hotels stuck out of the sand like a row of white teeth. In his room, we ordered breakfast. I don’t remember what he smelled like, but probably cologne to cover the smoking smell. I think my mom was already mad.

  When parents fight they sometimes pretend the kids don’t understand or they speak in super obvious code and expect the kids to pretend with them.

  “So this is it, then.”

  “Doesn’t have to be.”

  “Yes it does, you married her.”

  And I’d say, “Can we get eggs?” even though I don’t want eggs, just to push back the obviousness of the situation, to make it more normal-sounding.

  “No,” said my mom, and then back at my dad, “We don’t have birth certificates.”

  “I’ll find them.”

  It was like that. My sister and I didn’t look at each other. Half of it was boring, the other half horrible.

  We sat in the hotel room, at the foot of the bed, around a tray of flatbread, cheese, honey, cucumbers, and tea. There was another tray with salt, pepper, and ketchup in case we had ordered the Western breakfast.

  They fought through all of it.

  For every bite.

  If you’re a kid reading this, there isn’t anything you can do about it, but grownies can at least remember—when you fight in front of kids, what you’re really doing.

  To us, parents are like blankets. Or parachutes, in a world that is otherwise full of snakes, and leopards, and Committee men, tornadoes, bullies, and death. And as a kid, you’re looking out and seei
ng all this with a near constant spike of adrenaline—always a second from panic—because you understand you can’t do much. You’re a little ball of soft meat with no shell or escape skills or battle strategies. You’re a milk drinker with milk teeth that fall out and you bleed.

  The only protection is those two distracted grown-ups, fighting and scratching at each other. It’s like looking up and seeing the material of your parachute fray and flutter. And you think, “I’m going to die. They’re going to split apart and I will free-fall into brambles where the demons hide, into their waiting claws. The whole world will tear me open.”

  My mom was shouting something about divorce, when she finally looked over and saw me pouring ketchup on my flatbread and taking a bite.

  “Khosrou! What are you doing?”

  I was trying not to cry. And I wanted them to stop. So I put ketchup on flatbread and ate it until they noticed. It only took three pieces, which isn’t great, but who cares? Ketchup’s fine on anything.

  My dad tried to laugh it off. “Silly boy.”

  “Why are you eating that?” said my mom.

  “Gross,” said my sister. (It isn’t. There are a million grosser things. It’s just weird.)

  I shrugged at all of them. I didn’t have a lot of words back then, except for the ones in the language I had made up, that no one else knew. But now that I’m bigger, I would have just told them that it wasn’t the time to fight.

  Instead I said, “My tooth hurts.”

  It was such a weird thing to do that breakfast ended. We knew after that that my mom and dad would file for a divorce. That my dad had a new wife, and that he would stay in Iran with her, that our house with the birds in the walls was hers now, along with my secret stash of Orich bars.

  We were truly homeless now in the world. The conversion from royal and pure (sayyed) to unclean and outcast (najis) was complete. And the insult was so great that the Committee would stay after us. If they found us anywhere in the world, we would be killed.

  Our only hope was asylum in places like England or America, which meant we were refugees, begging for them to protect us.