by Susan Daitch
“How long have you had this?”
“A couple of weeks. I hadn’t seen you, so I held onto it. I could have shoved it under your door, but the envelope is thick, as you can see, and might have torn if I really pushed it, and you never know. What if you got broken into again?”
“What if you knock into one of your candles, a rug catches fire, and you burn the place down?”
Alyssa ignored me. She worked from home, everyone in the building knew this, so it was assumed she would sign for deliveries. I wonder how much mail traffic found a home in her column. Virgo: You will get something important in the post, possibly bad news. Ignore it. She followed me up the stairs chattering about the Chernobyl disaster. In her column she had written: Capricorns: Beware of explosive and poisonous workplace situations. This could be time to consider a new form of employment. It looked like she was going to follow me inside.
“So who’s writing to you from Iran? Are you an arms smuggler? There’s no return address, but I looked at the stamps.”
“Yes, bombs are mailed to me in packages just like this one.”
“It’s too small.”
“These are only bomb-making instructions. I run a Do It Yourself operation. The bigger operators have warehouses out in Queens and live on Park Avenue. I’ll tell you about it later.”
“When later?”
“Maybe tonight. Thanks for signing for the package.” She lingered in the doorway as if she expected me to invite her in, so I would open the package in her presence. I didn’t want to be rude to Alyssa, but was compelled to practically shut the door in her face.
“I’ll bring the vodka this time,” I heard her say in a singsong voice from the stairs. I opened the package. Inside was a long letter in Farsi.
Dear Ariel,
I’m very sorry we weren’t able to meet while I was Ariel Bokser. Your country was generous to me personally and for that and to you, of course, I’m grateful. By giving me your passport, I’m certain you saved my life. However on a snowy Monday evening evidence of your return made the urgency of my repatriation more acute. I learned quite by accident that you had come back to your city of origin. Walking past a storefront gallery on Avenue B I saw a large black-and-white photograph of a creature, a kind of totem made of dead battery innards, wing nuts, bent nails, horns and claws bristling with shreds of steel wool. It had a half human, half canine face, wings and talons, more leonine than bird-like. Was it meant to be a simurgh? At first I didn’t think this obscure symbol displayed in a narrow window could possibly be such a thing, but then I stepped closer to the glass. A small card posted below said the object in the photograph had been made by Ariel Bokser, and then I knew that it was signal, random and coincidental, odds against the indicator reaching its intended target were small, but nonetheless, the sign told me you were back. If I’d taken a different walk, I’d never have known. Why you would make such a cartoonish object, a parody of what you had searched for years ago, I didn’t know. As walnut-size clusters of snow fell to the sidewalk I felt very far from home, and knew it was time for me to return no matter what the consequences. Perhaps there is room enough in the world for more than one Ariel Bokser, but despite all you sacrificed for me, the Bokser suit with its wide lapels and baggy pants was beginning to feel like a style I could no longer inhabit. It was time to turn it in.
But first let me tell you a little bit about my life as Ariel Bokser, to explain something of what I did in the five or so years that I was you. You have a right to know what I did and how I lived under the umbrella of your identity, so I will give you a short account of my travels.
Upon arriving, nearly penniless with no place to live, I fell in with a couple of cab drivers who knew about a squat on Avenue C. A few other drivers, illegal Punjabis, lived in this place. They kindly informed me there was space on the fifth floor, knock on door C, and so I made my way up stairs worn to the point where because of an aggregation of dirt and garbage, the stairs were more of an incline with footholds rather than clear steps that met sharp ninety-degree risers. The hallways on the lower floors will one day be an archaeologist’s dream: layer upon layer of paint seen through banana peels, sprayed names, obscenities strangely absent, a mural of Che Guevara shaking hands with what might have been a local notable whose wing feathers shone silver and white. Boughs of wires that led through cracked windows to streetlights from which electricity was pirated, these festooned the ceilings. When I reached the fifth floor the decoration changed. Here walls were plastered with black and white posters for someone called Eek a Mouse, Durutti Column, Scritti Politi, Cocteau Twins, the Del Byzanteens. (I corrected spelling with marker. Even I know this word in English.) Later I asked the Punjabis if this was some kind of dialect, but they shook their heads. They knew little of what went on in the heights of the upper floors.
A very tall man dressed in a gorilla suit opened the door to 5C, and yes, they had room. He introduced himself as Phoenix, and told me the only other person living there at the moment, was his girlfriend, Daisy. His accent was hard to place. South Effrica? I asked. He sounded like an engineer I’d met from Johannesburg while working in the west of my country. (The Shah imported experts from all over the world.) No, he answered, he and Daisy were from Australia. They had an extra mattress on a floor in one of the rooms, and this I was welcome to as long as I needed it. Phoenix had a job that required him to wear this suit for one day only. He had to stand on a corner and pass out small pieces of paper, notices of a sale on something called deluxe sound systems; discounts, the paper stated, that would make you go ape, though why you would want to enact this evolutionary regression to sell objects, I never discovered. I didn’t understand, and he had neither the time nor the patience to explain, he simply told me, “Samir, buddy, it’s National Gorilla Suit Day.” Where he got the idea my name was Samir, I don’t know. I had introduced myself as Ariel. Phoenix left for work, but his girlfriend, Daisy, was just getting up. The apartment had many rooms, wires everywhere, as I mentioned, to convey stolen electricity; water came like magic from who knows where, since no one was supposed to be living in the crumbling warren of flats. I didn’t know Americans domiciled in piles of old bricks and cardboard, more or less.
I sat on the floor until Daisy came out of the bathroom wearing almost nothing. Before he left, Phoenix had yelled through the door that Samir was here from India. She was of the conviction that in India people are more open, she later explained to me, so it was okay to walk around this way. I tried to think of nakedness the way Ariel Bokser, a man who grew up with bikinis and short skirts, would think of it. No big deal, right? But this was blonde nakedness. Maybe it was nice that she could walk around like that, feel the breeze all over her skin. I tried not to think of nakedness in terms of my reaction to it, but rather as a matter-of-fact thing for her. Well, I tried. Obliviousness, was one of Daisy’s great talents, but may also be her downfall. She was the kind of girl with the heart of a rabbit who might enjoy the midnight party scene in Tehran, but wouldn’t ever notice the police tailing her. In fairness, not everyone did, but you know what I mean. It turned out that Daisy had the day off and did not need to put on a costume of any kind. She made fried eggs with chili peppers and curry, hoping it would remind me of home, and that home was something I would want to be reminded of. This was a charming, if misguided, act of kindness.
I insisted my name was Ariel. Okay, whatever you say. That was the end of it. Clearly Daisy and Phoenix didn’t believe me but were going to accept whatever I told them.
Phoenix and Daisy were acquainted with a few things about Iran. Savak, agency of torture, they knew, just as they knew about the Ton Ton Macoute in Haiti, the Somocistas in Nicaragua, death squads in a variety of countries I was ignorant of. They complained of the short memories of their compatriots regarding the hostage crisis at the American embassy in Tehran. What did one expect, they said, when, via the CIA, the United States supported the Shah? At night Phoenix worked at a place called the Pyramid Club setti
ng up musical equipment or something to that effect, and Daisy wrote a zine that she photocopied at her temp job. Life for Phoenix and Daisy was always summer, at least that was the impression they gave.
They were fanatic about something called health food that they bought from Prana on First Avenue, and though it would have been easy to shoplift there, this was not something they would do. They would steal from power companies, but never small shops. Not a bad credo when you think about it. Here among cardboard cartons of root vegetables and bottles of vitamins worked students of massage and acupuncture, and former Hare Krishnas. The owner has a big heart, Phoenix said, and gives work if you need it. I once asked Daisy what is food that is not health? The talk she gave was illuminating in its far-reaching implications. Corporate chemically manufactured food substances, made mainly of sugar and corn have tentacles in every aspect of American life, apparently. The way these substances were described to me I had images of astronauts on feeding tubes, and yet when I traveled, large supermarkets with bright lights and taped music made on instruments, if they were instruments, I couldn’t identify, were sources of great confusion for me. So even if Daisy was spinning one of her conspiracy theories, maybe she was right — or I was hopelessly depressed when I would later visit these big concrete emporiums where large people pushed carts full of Coke bombs, ground meat sold on plastic containers the size of trash can lids, liquid cheese that would emerge from squeezable bottles similar to the way you package glue. Not knowing how to decide, I would leave without buying anything, not being able to choose between each slick and shiny surface. In Zahedan bread, olives, dates all bore the fingerprints of whoever kneaded, picked, or soaked them in brine. Here food appears as if extruded from a nozzle of some kind.
The months on Avenue C, however, were relatively easy going, though not happy, how could they possibly be? But it began to feel like a kind of home. The lower floors smelled of Punjabi cooking. Phoenix and Daisy were friendly with the various inhabitants: the Korean war veteran who had what he called a recycling business in the basement, runaways from Seattle who worked off the books as bicycle messengers, an elderly Neapolitan who never migrated to the boroughs or suburbs decades ago, he was the last one left of that generation. He was so old he’d abandoned all his English and had lapsed into a dialect no one understood. The bicycle messengers brought him food from Mulberry Street where some latticini freschi owner still remembered him. A Guatemalan man and his brother spent a few days before a van took them to Vermont to work at a ski lodge at the top of a mountain cleaning the restaurant, running the ski lift, and making hot chocolate and coffee drinks, or so they had been told. They had never seen snow before. Many languages were spoken in the building, but none of them Farsi. I was surrounded by friendliness, but everything was unspeakably foreign, and to be honest, there were moments when daily life was a translation from nonsense into nonsense. I had no ability, as Phoenix would say, to just go with it. My isolation eluded definition in any language.
Eventually, still maintaining I was Ariel Bokser, I did tell them something that revealed my past as a geologist. It was the occasion of the Mexico City quake. Their television had been retrieved from the street, from a tonier neighborhood where on Thursday nights Phoenix and some of his friends would rove from block to block and find amazing trash left out for the Friday morning garbage pickup: perfectly good appliances, clothing, books and records of all kinds, some even quite valuable. I still have a copy of Brave New World gleaned from one of these outings, though I suspect the signature, Love Forever Aldous, was some high school student’s idea of a prank. The Sony Trinitron was a big boxy thing, and we could never get it to work in color, but we did watch its jumpy, grainy pictures once in a while. Daisy had been to Mexico City, and she was both terrified and intrigued by this idea: what if her current city suffered an earthquake of the same magnitude? What mountains of broken buildings and rubble would be formed into what the Punjabis called Himalayan proportions! I allayed her fears, though I didn’t really know what I was talking about entirely, but told her some mishmash about shifting tectonic plates, underwater volcanoes, Ice Age glacial deposits, and that she sat on an unmoving bedrock of gneiss and schist. Okay, Daisy said, I can fix you up. Let me fix you up. I can get you a job related to your field, sort of.
It amazed me in your city how one thing led to the next. This was not, in my limited universe, a system of patronage, bribes, jobs attained or deals made via a spider’s web of social connections, or reliance on family ties. I’m sure this impression is quite false, but that was my experience. It was through Daisy that I began working street fairs selling rocks and semi-precious stones, and from here on Daisy and Phoenix exit my story.
I shared a table with a woman named Cindi, a friend of Daisy’s, though they were very different and rarely spent time together. Such is the nature of friendship when you’re constantly, as Cindi said, on the go. Daisy did not entirely approve of her friend, who took things at face value, a bull in the china shop of more nuanced, subtler ideas, who was blind to the conspiracies around her, but Daisy wanted to help me out. Cindi was an old pro at this business and had been working the fairs for many years. She was a big girl whose jeans split from the strain, and she smelled of the bleach she painted on them. When one pair disintegrated she would cut off the rhinestone patches and sew them on the next pair. You can interpret this as attention to detail, interest in recycling, or parsimoniousness, but it was one of my first images of her, a large woman bent over a wrinkled lump of blue material, needle held high above her head, electric light glinting off those tiny glass chips. She looked up and said, you must be Arielovich. When she smiled I noticed she also had a rhinestone chip embedded in one of her front teeth.
On her own since she left high school, Cindi (i’s dotted with circles) called herself a businesswoman, too busy for romance, but in truth she was always in one’s face, is the American expression. We managed the table together, but she was a harsh piece of work. I kept my distance from her, as did most men, I would guess.
We sold cheap birthstones, geodes, polished lumps of jasper, turquoise, carnelian, tiger-eye, and moonstones. We also sold some bigger items: malachite bookends that looked like chunks of green swamp, small electric fountains, fake jade Buddhas, lamp bases made of agate soaked in sugar and sulfuric acid to bring out the black rings. 17,000 bands per inch, Cindi would tell a customer, a piece of petrified Jurassic history right in your living room. A certain kind of guy really went for this approach. Crystals were very popular with women. Regardless of what they picked up, Cindi would say, That’s a very special stone you’ve found there — or maybe it found you. This is a piece that radiates positive light. Or, if the customer looked perturbed, uncertain, she would say, With that stone you’ll find the nature of your burdens released: it absorbs negative energy. Don’t ask me how, but it does. Most people seemed to buy this. Once I began to tell a customer that Greeks called quartz krystallos, clear ice. They believed the rocks weren’t rocks at all, but a form of ice, so hard, melting was not one of their features. Cindi became very quiet, but as soon as the girl put the stone back in the bin and left without buying, Cindi, snapped at me: Ariel, Arielof, Arielofsky, Ariel El Habibi, Bin Ariel! In the future let me do all the talking! You say all the wrong things! You blow it all the time! I lose business because of the stupid bits and pieces you think people want to hear! I didn’t tell her that saying the wrong things in some parts of the world isn’t about whether or not someone buys a thirty-five-cent bit of mineral, but can cost you your life.
We would only accept cash payment. Cindi bought the rocks from a supplier in the Bronx whom I never met, and she kept track of where and when the fairs took place. These street fairs are the American souks, stuffed bears and inflatable rabbits replacing the jazvahs and hookahs of my childhood, but if this sounds satiric and unfair, making fun of cheap thrills and toys, that isn’t my intention. Comfort can be found in an inflatable rabbit, and comfort can be a very rare commodity. Fr
om time to time a plane would write the name of the fair in the sky overhead: Meadowslands Circus, Willow Creek Fairgrounds, Mermaid Avenue: Noon to Midnight.
So this Cindi, friend of Daisy, who lived off caramel corn, hot dogs, and Sprite, and listened to something called Gang of Four, which I believed was a group of Chinese officials, but was actually a group of musicians, knew all kinds of places to hide cash, so we wouldn’t get robbed. Robbery, when you have a cash business, was always a problem. She was also expert at catching the sticky-fingered who would pocket stones from our array of bins. Cindi liked to say she knew a dickhead from a dickwad, but I never asked her to explain, please, the niceties of difference. I worked with her for a little over a year, learning to make do with tea that tasted like metal filings and the odd halal shwarma stand. The Pakistani operators gave me food gratis. I insisted they take from me a handful of beryls, citrines, tourmalines, whatever I had from our sorry inventory that was genuine and worth a little something.
I’m sure you can understand I was very homesick. Cindi had no family, a mother killed by a drunk driver many years ago, a sister who had disappeared, no idea where she was and didn’t care. This was something very hard for me to understand, how can you function without a network of aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents? When I heard this story I felt very sorry for her, especially for a woman, this state of unmooredness is dangerous, but she seemed to feel the idea that “there was no reason for existing like the tip of a lone iceberg” to be what she called a sore point. What’s the big deal? I heard this tip of iceberg expression all the time.
While working fairs, Cindi also taught me the art of picking locks. She had learned this on her own by studying locks, taking them apart, examining the internal mechanisms, then putting them together again. It was like a science for her. She carried an assortment of basic keys, lock picks, and other tools either in her pocket or in a plastic bag that said, Thank You Come Again on it. Don’t worry, I was never caught. There is no rap sheet for Ariel Bokser. My main concern was to make enough money to return home. No one gets rich working street fairs. Cindi took the lion’s share anyway, handing me some small percentage that was eaten up by motel rooms, food, and so on. Sometimes I was so desperate to save something, I slept in fields. So I began to do small break-ins, sometimes with Cindi, sometimes solo, though she always knew the fences in whatever town we were in. The riches of America lay before me: stereos, televisions, jewelry, mementos of surprising value. It was dangerous, of course, there were a few times when I heard the key in the lock, someone was home early. Our rule was: always have an exit plan. If possible, more than one. You must understand how desperately I wanted to see my family. Cindi was a fantastic mimic, from Presidents and movie stars to the fences she did business with, men dressed in powder-blue double knits, but her mirth wasn’t a laughter that could cure. Also, my goal in these thefts was to repay you a debt that I fear is too great to repay.