We needed papers we didn’t have.
So my dad would go back, start his new life, and mail the papers secretly to the clinic. Could he send my toys? I asked. No.
What about Orich bars? Also no.
* * *
WHEN BREAKFAST WAS OVER, I thought, Maybe if he liked us enough, we could get him to stay. I was his champion son, you will remember. His new wife had not had any children yet (I asked), so there was no reason he would pick her over us. Maybe he had forgotten that we were very fun to be friends with, and that we would bring him lots of honor by winning straight As in school, along with prizes.
We weren’t in school at that time, so I decided to show him other champion-like skills. (This is the second story that has more blood than ketchup in it.)
My dad’s hotel in Dubai had a pool surrounded by date trees, under a sun so bright hot and white that it bleached everything. It was in view of the ocean. The pool was fed by waterfalls from other smaller pools. There were islands in the middle of the water, little floating restaurants where grown-ups could order Turkish coffee while their legs were still in the pool. They had a water slide and lily pads in a kids’ pool, but I didn’t go there, because it was out of sight of where my dad was sitting and I had a plan.
My plan was to show him my greatness and fill him with the desire to be our dad until at least I turned eight. He sat under a giant umbrella. Already, he had a favorite waiter who knew if he paid my dad extra attention, if the drinks were always on the way, discreet and cold, the ashtray always clean, then the tip would be prosperous.
He sat and nodded off in the sun, reading the poetry of Hafez, and sighing. My mom was on the phone somewhere, starting the maze of paperwork and office appointments to get us to safety.
My sister had found some other kids, on vacation from Turkey, a girl and a boy. My sister and the girl wanted to be left alone, but also wanted me and the boy to want to play with them, so they spurred us to do tricks that they would judge. The boy could do flips without a diving board, which probably brought a ton of honor to his dad.
For me, the game was to do something great, but also to be seen doing something great by my dad. I would jump and twist in the air, and when I came up from the water, I’d say, “Did you see me?”
My dad would nod, “Yes, yes,” but kept his eyes on his book. He had a plate of French fries. Sometimes he’d spare a look as he dipped one in ketchup. “Good,” he’d say.
But then I found the ultimate super move. We were in the shallow end of the pool. Along one edge, a set of cement stairs descended into the water. If you jumped in on that side, you’d crunch your bones on the stairs that were only a few inches underwater. But if you ran extra fast and dove headfirst at a super shallow angle, then your face would skim across the edge of the stairs and you’d cut into the water like the prince of the ocean.
If you did it wrong, you could probably die. But it also looked super cool. So it seemed like the thing to do.
I did it first, because I came up with it. Then the other kid. The girls had to admit it was amazing, and clapped from the other side of the pool. I did it three more times and became exactly like a dolphin, grazing the sharp reef of pool steps. I could probably take our family name to the Olympics. I ran up to my dad and said, “Baba, you have to see this.”
“Okay,” he said.
“No. Really this time,” I said.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay, put the book down.”
“Akh. Khosrou.”
“You have to see this.”
He put his book down. I imagined I would come up from the water and the entire world would change. Everyone would cheer and salute. My dad would be enthralled by me more than any country, or obligation to his parents, or drugs, or new wives. More than the good or the bad reasons to stay, even more than his love for his son, would be the gravitational pull of someone so very interesting. If I could entertain and entrance, I would be like a drug, compelling him to follow us. Like when cartoon skunks smell a pie on a windowsill and float uncontrollably toward it.
I took off. I could sprint on wet cement in bare feet no problem. I was my own circus show. I sprinted toward the stairs in the shallow end of the pool.
“Khosrou!” said my dad.
I dove.
I flew.
I descended.
Do you know those times when you’ve been practicing something and you’ve got it perfect, like juggling eggs or riding a bike with no hands; you’ve done it right a thousand times, and you say, “Mom! Look what I can do! Look at me!” and that’s when you drop all three eggs on her kitchen floor or hit a rock and eat dirt?
Maybe that’s the universe weaving a Persian flaw into your otherwise perfect plan. I dove at the pool and crunched my head into the corner of the first step. Three inches of water did nothing to slow me down. I hit the step and flipped over into the pool as I blacked out for a second.
I stayed under the water as long as I could, with my eyes closed. I knew when I stood up, the girls would be laughing, and my dad would be back to his reading. I could have cried enough to overflow the pool, but I didn’t. Because there is nothing interesting about a crybaby boy.
I stood up. The sun in Dubai made the water so warm. Nobody was laughing. But everyone was looking at me. Even my dad. He had taken off his sunglasses and he was staring directly at me.
“Khosrou,” he said. “Are you okay?”
I was embarrassed. I didn’t say anything. I wiped the water from my face. My hand came away red. Red like my Baba Haji’s hands. I looked down. The warm water on my chest was a stream of blood, flowing into the pool around me.
That’s when my sister screamed, “Daniel, get out!”
I took a step, but suddenly felt dizzy, and the warm water kept pouring down my face.
* * *
IN THE EDMOND, OKLAHOMA, First Baptist Hospital, where we go if Ray hits my mom, or someone pulls my thumb out of the socket—and where my mom works as a custodian because her medical degrees don’t matter here—they have candy machines in the waiting room.
Stay with me.
There are other things, like kids’ magazines in the lobby, and pictures of kittens hanging from windowsills that let you know that kids will be in the area. And if they’re scared, maybe they can do a word search or get a Snickers and they’ll feel like they can “Hang in there,” like the kitten. I think because in polite American society, they care more if you seem happy than if you’re well.
Or I dunno, but the emergency room in Dubai—the one my dad rushed me to—was the exact opposite. Imagine the room in the Committee safe house. A square made of cement. A row of fluorescent bulbs hanging from the ceiling. A metal table in the middle of the room. A drain in the middle of the floor. That is all I remember.
Honestly, I don’t even know if it was a hospital. My dad was carrying me. It was the only time he has ever done that. I thought, Maybe Khosrou will die here and no one will ever have to say his name wrong. Maybe this was my punishment for leaving Mr. Sheep Sheep. In the stories, the shepherd who abandons his duty is a villain. I knew that.
But I didn’t want to die.
I know I’ve been acting tough-stuff so far, but it won’t make sense if I don’t tell you, I was scared.
A nurse in green long-sleeve pajamas met us at the metal slab. She didn’t smile at me or even look me in the eye. I think she might have been scared too. I don’t know. No one talked to me.
My dad said some medical stuff like, “We gave him eight hundred milligrams of boppity-boop-boop in the car.”
She nodded.
He put me down on the metal slab. It was freezing on the back of my legs. I was still just in swim trunks, but they had blood on them now.
A doctor, an older man half my dad’s size with a bald head and a short, trimmed beard walked in like he was already late for a tennis class.
And then the doctor put his hands on my shoulders and started to push me down on the table. I
made my own noise. My dad said, “It’s okay.”
But the nurse was bringing over a tray of bandages and needles and nobody was saying anything in words I knew. I tried to look the doctor in the eye, to make him see me, like if he knew I was a hurt animal and not a practice dummy or something, he’d be nice to me. But he never looked me in the eye. He took a needle—like a sewing needle—from the metal tray. The nurse walked around him, behind me, and tried to pull my shoulders down so I would lie down. But the metal was so cold and no one would say anything to me, and there was still so much blood.
I jerked away from the nurse’s hands.
She tried to dig her fingers in, but I was still a champion son. Disgraced and injured, but still.
The doctor sighed. He said, “Zeep! Creep!”
And a guy whose name was maybe Zeep Creep came in wearing the same green pajamas as the nurse but twelve sizes bigger.
My dad kept saying panicky stuff in other languages. Then he realized I only spoke Farsi and said, “It’s okay. They’re going to help.”
But Zeep Creep and the nurse were obviously annoyed and planned to pin me to the table. The nurse grabbed the meat on my collarbone and yanked me down. Zeep Creep had huge hairy hands. I looked at him cause I couldn’t see the nurse and said, “Please don’t. No. Don’t,” but he didn’t listen. He grabbed my ankles and the two of them stretched me out on the metal table.
The metal was so cold on my back that it burned. My whole body felt cold. I’d lost so much blood.
I saw the doctor’s face hover over me.
He held up a needle, threaded with stitching line.
I think he thought he was making me feel better by showing me what was about to happen. I was just a kid then. But I thought, Aren’t they going to numb the area? Aren’t they going to give me candy? Aren’t they going to give me a towel?
Reader, have you ever felt the layers of difference between the bone of your skull and the skin stretched over it?
The needle entered the skin and I screamed.
I wrenched my right foot out of Zeep Creep’s grip and kicked him directly in his meaty face. I think he cursed in Arabic. He grabbed my foot again and ground both my ankles together. The nurse put all her weight onto my shoulders.
My dad grabbed my left arm (because I was flailing). I could feel the needle dangling from my head. Zeep Creep shouted for someone else, who came out and held my right arm. I was crying and screaming by then.
I remember the exact moment the doctor pulled the needle through the skin, dragged the line behind it, poked it into the skin on the other side of the wound and pulled again.
The line made a scraping sound somewhere deep in my skull and I felt the skin dragging across the bone to cinch together. When it met, he tugged the line two times to make a tight seal.
I felt every stitch.
Zeep Creep’s grip would leave bruises.
So would the nurse’s.
The thing I remember most is the friction of the thread as it tunneled through my skin. And the feeling that maybe I shouldn’t have made it so difficult. Or cried so much.
It was the last day I would see my dad and he’d remember me as a weakling. And I remember thinking this is what it’s like to be the one begging. My eyes must have looked like the big black eyes of the bull, begging my dad to save me.
That’s what I thought then, but I’m older now.
Even if I had made the dive across the pool stairs and qualified for greatness, he still would have left the next day.
* * *
MRS. MILLER SAYS WE LIVED in Dubai for a year and I can’t just tell the food, poop, and bloody parts, so I will tell you what life looked like for us.
But I did tell her the thing I said before, that food and poop are the truest parts and she said, “That’s interesting.” And then she leaned down to look at me over her glasses—so our eyes would have nothing between them. And she said, “Then how come when you die, those are the first things you expel?”
This was a good point and I did not know enough about dead bodies to answer.
“And how come when we tell stories of Scheherazade, we talk about all sorts of things besides what she ate and where she pooped?”
She had me on that one too. I shrugged again.
I said, “Fine. I’ll write the emotional parts.”
The bell had already rung, so I got up to leave.
“Last question, Mr. Nayeri,” she said. “At the beginning of the year you said the truest thing about a person was whose blood they had in their heart. Do you remember that?”
I nodded, but honestly, I didn’t remember till she said so.
“What happened?” she said.
* * *
I MEAN, WHAT WAS I going to say? That Ray married my mom a third time—or that she married him because, according to my sister, she thinks I need a dad so badly. And there is no returning, it’ll never happen—there is no returning to the house with the birds in the walls, because the birds are all dead by now, and there is no chance I’ll see my Baba Haji again. The feasting is done. He wouldn’t even recognize me with my new name, and I’ll never belong to either place or even have memories I can count on—that I’m the flaw in the story, the exception in her classroom, and I’m sorry.
* * *
OUR DAYS IN DUBAI were spent in the waiting rooms of the United Nations embassy, hoping they would see us, look through our mountains of paperwork, and help us find somewhere to go.
The chairs were bolted down. The pens were on chains at the desks. We didn’t have any books.
I became an expert at counting.
Also an expert at watching agents behind glass to read their expressions. Sometimes one of them would spend ten minutes looking through a family’s papers. She’d have thick glasses and pursed lips. She’d lick a finger to turn every single page. The family would sit with their hands in their laps and quiet the kids if they started playing a game or something, so it wouldn’t bother her.
Everything would be going smoothly.
Then the agent would come to a page. Her finger would stop at her mouth. She’d flip back to check something, then forward again, then back.
A sigh.
Out of the little hole in the bulletproof glass, the whole waiting room would hear as she shouted at them, “Where is the 533-C form?”
And the dad, who barely spoke English, would say, “The what?”
“The 533-C form, sir.”
“C form?”
“Yes. The 533-C form.”
The kids would start to get agitated. The agent’s glare would go right through bulletproof glass. The dad would rifle through the files in his lap, but the panic was already in his hands.
“If you can’t find it, please go to the back and take a number to see another agent.”
But that meant hours more of waiting, so he’d say, “No, no, please.”
Everybody knew he wouldn’t find it.
“Sir. I won’t ask again.”
The agent could call security and the whole family would be kicked out, so nobody wanted to get them mad. And if the family before you even irritated the agent a little, it would affect you, so people in the waiting area would start to grumble.
Finally, the man would have to admit to himself that his whole family had wasted the day—and for some of them, they had no homes or way to eat, so it was a big deal. He’d look up from the papers and say, “What is 533-C form?”
This would really tick off the agent, because they assumed refugees were liars. But you have to understand, there were hundreds of forms to fill out, and nobody knew English all that well, and the rules changed all the time, and the agents hated talking to us.
She would say, “Sir, please find the form and return when you’ve completed it.”
She wouldn’t even give it to him. The man’s wife would usually put her hand on his arm and say something in their language to calm him down. His whole ribcage would deflate.
They would take the
ir papers and walk off. The man would try to ask the armed guard where he could find the 533-C form, but the guard wouldn’t speak. If they weren’t poor, they could go outside and pay one of the translators who made small businesses out of having copies of all the forms and sitting with the families to translate everything from English. But most people couldn’t afford that, and the translators had reputations for being fast-talkers.
My sister and I would make a game of guessing which agent we would get. And we would watch their temper over the course of the day like farmers in Oklahoma watch rain clouds. When we reached the agent, we would wait for the same moment. It happened every time. Here is a completely made-up example.
“Where is the certificate of important information?”
I didn’t have one.
My mom would say, “He doesn’t have one, but—”
“You need a certificate of important information.”
“Yes, but—”
“You can’t apply for asylum without important information.”
“Okay, yes, but—”
“You can only do that with a certificate of important information.”
“I understand.”
“Please return when you have a certificate of important information.”
“Wait. Just one moment, please, just a moment.”
The agent would sigh. My mom would jump on the opportunity to explain.
“We have his birth certificate.”
“That only proves he was born, ma’am.”
“But I’m his mother and you can see my certificate of important information.”
“Under the law he belongs to his father, ma’am.”
“Yes, that’s why I included the letter from his father.”
“If you have compliance from the father, you can apply for a certificate of important information.”
“No, they’re trying to kill us. They won’t give us documents to escape. We can’t get the documents from the government that has fatwas on our heads.”
“If you don’t have a certificate of important information, you’ll need to fill out an appeal for special circumstance form.”
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