Why Visit America

by Matthew Baker

  Kaveh turned. She was older than he had expected, seemed about the same age as him, and he was suddenly struck by the thought of her and him growing up in different parts of the country at the same time, newborns swaddled in plastic bassinets in different hospitals, toddlers staggering through sandboxes at different daycares, children chewing on pencils at laminate desks in different classrooms, teenagers smoking cigarettes secretly behind the loading docks of different malls, shaped by the same national triumphs and disasters. The complex routes that he and she had taken over the past thirty years to meet each other there at that present moment. She wore no jewelry, just a loose linen smock and flimsy leather flip-flops, and when she stepped out of the flip-flops he saw that the thongs on the sandals had left pale stripes on her feet, which for a moment he thought were tan lines until he remembered that her feet were never in the sunlight, and then he realized that her feet were dusty and that the stripes were the only places on her feet that were clean. She slumped her shoulders, letting the straps of the smock slip down onto her arms, and then with a shake of her hips the smock fell to the floor in a heap of linen, and she stood naked across from him. She had a narrow waist, average breasts, a slender neck, and a bizarre face. Only the uniqueness of her features made her seem beautiful. Her eyes, dark and beady, were too far apart; her nose looked smushed at the tip, and was too close to her mouth; her cheeks, high and bony, had a haggard look. Her hair was black and long and straight. Neither her fingernails nor her toenails were painted. Aside from eyeliner she wore no makeup. Her skin was almost frighteningly pale. The scars faded just past her wrists.

  Online, some people claimed she was Romanian, other people claimed she was Egyptian, but to him she looked Iranian. The recognition startled him. He was almost sure.

  Kaveh said, “Where do you come—”

  “I will hurt you if you speak,” Zoe said. She had a faint lisp.

  Kaveh said, “You just look like—”

  She jabbed a pair of her fingers into the tender dip of skin at the base of his throat, and he staggered back against the windows, fumbling at curtains, hacking for air.

  “Fuck,” Kaveh coughed, and she reached around his jaw to press her fingers deep into the hollow nooks of skin beneath his ears, sending a burst of pain through him so intense his knees wavered, but this time he bit down on his cheeks instead of shouting. She stared at him as if waiting to see if he would dare to speak again. His cock had gone limp between his legs.

  “You don’t want what you think you do,” Zoe said.

  She took him by the hand, not simply wrapping her palm around his palm but actually interlacing her fingers with his fingers, a gesture so intimate that he felt a rush of blood in his cheeks. Getting reprimanded had embarrassed him, had made him feel insecure, but being back in her favor exhilarated him. He was captivated. She led him over to the bed and laid him down on the sheet spread-eagle with his feet turned out and his arms stretched wide and his forehead resting on a pillow.

  “Happiness was never meant to be pursued,” Zoe murmured.

  She blew out the oil lamps beside the bed.

  “Adventure has always been superior to pleasure,” Zoe murmured.

  He felt the mattress dip as she got onto the bed, and then she straddled him in the darkness, lightly placing her hands on his shoulders with her fingers spread, with the poise of a pianist touching a keyboard before beginning to play. After being hurt by her he was wary of her, but being touched by her like that, gently, was electric, as if the very protons and electrons in the atoms of his skin were excited by her energy. He liked the soft touch of her fingertips on his shoulders, the sensation of her pubic hair on his back, the feel of her ass resting against his buttocks. She began to massage him, splaying her hands across his skull, tenderly running her fingertips over his scalp, then scratching his scalp with her fingernails, sending tingles of pleasure down his spine. She massaged his neck, kneaded the muscles in his back, stroked and kneaded his arms, gently caressed the ligaments in his wrists, rubbed his palms with her thumbs and the heels of her hands, even worked the pads of muscle on his fingers. Pressed between his abdomen and the bed, his cock was getting hard again. He was overcome by a sense of bliss. He felt the mattress shift as she swiveled on the bed, straddling him in the opposite direction. She massaged the pads of muscle on his toes, rubbed his soles with her thumbs and the heels of her hands, gently caressed the joints of his ankles, stroked and kneaded his calves, kneaded the muscles in his thighs, and then moved her hands to his buttocks. She found the tension where his buttocks met his back, the hard knots of muscle where all of the stress from driving had settled, the strain from sitting at a steering wheel from dawn until dusk every day, all the gridlocks and the pileups and the detours and the construction. She clenched her hands into fists, putting all of her weight into his flesh, pressing her lumpy knuckles deep into his skin, forcefully kneading the knots out of his buttocks. The release felt so pleasurable that his toes curled in reflex. She turned around again, and her hands glided across his back, moving across him in elegant strokes, just barely touching the skin. He couldn’t remember ever having felt so calm. Serene. All of his muscles were relaxed. All of his tension was gone. His cock was throbbing.

  “Think of someone you love who has died,” Zoe whispered, and although he didn’t want to think about his father just then, immediately that was who he thought of.

  Her hands moved back to his shoulders, squeezing his flesh so tightly that pain spiked through his tendons, making him wince.

  “Everyone you love is dead,” Zoe whispered.

  Her fingers clawed into his shoulders.

  “Everyone you love is gone,” Zoe whispered.

  His tendons spasmed under her fingers.

  “You couldn’t save anyone,” Zoe whispered.

  He grunted in pain as her fingernails dug into his flesh.

  “The planets are aligning,” Zoe whispered.

  Her hands lifted from his skin.

  And then suddenly she seemed to vanish, any sense of another human presence in the room was gone, and he was alone in the darkness, lying naked on the bed as a sprinkle of raindrops pattered across his back and his legs—was that raindrops or fingertips, a spurting gleek of saliva?—and then another sprinkle of raindrops pattered across his neck and his back, suddenly, like after a rainstorm, when the fat beads of water that had gathered on the tips of the leaves of a cedar tree were shaken loose by a gust of wind, sprinkling the water across the figures resting below the branches, the soldiers in the laced boots and the camouflage fatigues. He grunted in surprise. The raindrops fell on him again, but before he could reach back to feel if his skin was truly wet, a spiderweb brushed against the skin on his neck and his face—was that spiderweb or fingertips, sticky wisps of licked hair?—and then another spiderweb brushed against the skin on his face and his ears, lightly, like the dewy webbing hanging between thick blades of grass, the massive spiraling orbs of almost invisible silk glittering in the bright light of the dawn beyond the distant gorge, brushing against the figures creeping quietly through the savanna, the soldiers in the camouflage fatigues and the chinstrap helmets. He was more curious than aroused now. His cock was getting soft. A spiderweb stuck to him again, and on reflex he reached to wipe the tangle of silk from his skin, but then suddenly he got flipped on the mattress, tossed by a pair of hands with the force of an explosive, and then he began to feel a pinching sensation, as if she was pinching his skin between her fingernails, except that he could feel the pinches all over his body, as if hundreds of hands were pinching him all at once, or as if instead of lying faceup on the hotel bed he was lying facedown on a gravel road, with the sharp jags on the rocks gradually pressing deeper into his flesh as the ringing of the explosion reverberated in his ears. He was afraid now. His cock had gone flaccid. The pain of the pinches became almost agonizing, he wanted to yell for her to stop, but there was no safeword. He flailed at the darkness, but he struck only air, and then he felt a
horrible pressure on his temples, and he gripped the sheet, and he went still again, and then the pressure faded, and he was alone. He felt a growing sense of unease. He could see nothing, he could hear nothing, he could feel nothing, and then a warm breeze touched his face, like breath exhaled from hot lungs, or like the air blowing through the cracked window of a truck rumbling down a coastal highway as sunlight shimmered on the windshield, or like the blustery chinook that had melted the igloo that his father had helped him build in the backyard to mud overnight. Like the humid breeze rustling the uniforms of a group of soldiers getting assigned cots in a barracks, Andre tossing down headphones onto a pillow, Trevor making bets on a blackjack game a couple cots down, Rivkah taking challengers for a battle rap a couple cots over, Dennis neatly arranging a stack of farmer almanacs under the cot nearest the tent flaps, Kaveh sitting there too serious and shy to talk to anybody. The breeze played across his body, rustling the hair on his forearms and his chest and his shins, comforting him. A balloon bobbed across his chest, maybe the stretched skin of an inflated cheek, another balloon bobbed across his chest, and he actually cracked a smile in amusement, a wild cluster of balloons rushed past him, and then he was startled by a sensation like waxy leaves slapping against his body, slick strands of seaweed wrapping around his ankles, soapy wet bubbles popping gently on his face, a sandy beach towel landing in a tangled mound on his chest, the slippery polyester of a fluffy sleeping bag dragging lightly across his skin, twigs cracking under the soles of his feet, moss sinking under the soles of his feet, prickly burs poking his thighs and his shins, the metallic rings of a chain-link fence pressing into his flesh, and then a breeze blew again, cooler now, getting cold, and a wet spatter of sleet, or maybe slimy strands of drool, struck him in the face, and though he hadn’t thought of the morning in years, he suddenly thought of the patrol to the village in the valley with Andre, how sleet had been falling that morning, and Kaveh had wiped the sleet from his face, and Andre had wiped the sleet from his face, standing under the weathered prayer flags snapping in the wind as an elderly widow had fed Kaveh and Andre challow, insisting on feeding the soldiers with her own hands, pinching clumps of the rice with her withered fingers, gazing up at the soldiers with a look of profound emotion, murmuring in a dialect so obscure even the translator couldn’t understand, and how after being fed by the widow in the valley Kaveh and Andre had had this strange bond, had trusted each other, had become tight friends, and Andre had watched out for him around the base. He felt moist lumps clinging to his chest and his abdomen and his legs, like squishing tongues, or leeches, like the shiny dark leeches that he’d discovered clinging to his legs after wading through a murky pond behind a gold mine with Trevor, taking a shortcut to investigate the cloud of smoke rising beyond the ridgeline above the pond, and he remembered how Trevor had yelped when he had realized that leeches were clinging to him too, and how he and Trevor had stood bare-assed together in the wind on the ridgeline, burning the leeches off of each other with a fluorescent lighter and whooping in triumph every time that another leech dropped to the dirt, grinning at each other, and how later that week back at the base Trevor had come to Kaveh with a look of shame for advice about a corporal who kept harassing him, giving him creepy shoulder rubs, giving his butt gross pats, and how Kaveh and Trevor had stayed awake until dawn that night in the empty mess hall, hashing out the delicacies of his situation, and after that Trevor had always insisted on picking Kaveh as a partner for euchre despite how terrible that he was at playing cards. He felt soft fluff land on his chest and his throat and his head, like split ends, or feathers, like the downy white feathers that had erupted over his head as he’d scouted out an abandoned railroad station in the desert with Rivkah, startling a stork that had been nesting on the eaves of the station, and he remembered how he and Rivkah had stepped back from the eaves in terror, hearts pounding as the stork had flapped off down the train tracks, and how later that week back at the base Kaveh had accidentally walked in on Rivkah masturbating with a vibrator in a portable toilet, and how Rivkah had hunted him down afterward with a look of resolve, insisting no matter how much he protested that nothing could ever be okay again between him and her until she had seen him masturbate too, and so that night Kaveh had jerked off into a handful of crumpled tissues while Rivkah had watched from a stool with a bag of microwave popcorn, heckling him with sarcastic pointers, applauding ironically when he climaxed, and how after that Rivkah had come to Kaveh whenever she was upset about drama back home, even with the secret about her sister. He felt a sensation like the clammy feet of a tree frog hopping across his chest, the bristly fuzz on a honeybee drifting across his body, the delicate wings of a butterfly flapping against his skin, and then a sensation like blown dandelion seeds scattering across his face, or maybe fluttering eyelashes, and he remembered the dandelion he’d found growing in the scorched soil of an oil field he’d been patrolling with Dennis, the only living plant visible in any direction, and how Dennis had taught a couple of oil workers how to blow the seeds to make a wish, and then Dennis had asked the oil workers a series of cringingly earnest questions about local traditions involving flowers, which had irritated Kaveh, that Dennis was always treating the army like a cultural exchange program, and how back at the base later that afternoon Kaveh had seen Dennis rereading letters from his parents with a homesick expression, and how later that evening as Dennis was taking a nap Kaveh had seen other soldiers huddling around the cot to tea-bag him, flies already unzipped, which hadn’t been any surprise, considering how many times Kaveh had seen Dennis get towel-snapped and wet-willied, and how even later that night Kaveh had noticed Dennis eating alone in the mess hall, and how Kaveh had suddenly remembered life before the army, that feeling of loneliness, the feeling of rejection, never having even a single friend at school, always too serious and shy to fit in, and so even though Dennis was so nerdy that the geekiness sometimes gave Kaveh literal chills, Kaveh had ignored the soldiers calling out to him and had walked across the mess hall to eat dinner with Dennis, and after that Kaveh had made clear to the others that being friends with him meant being friends with Dennis too. A dragonfly alighted on his chest, he felt the wings gently folding against his skin, and he remembered the emerald dragonfly with the transparent wings that had alighted on his t-shirt while he was playing in the woods behind his house as a kid, and how he had held his breath and held his body as still as possible, gazing down at the dragonfly in awe, feeling profoundly special, as if the dragonfly had chosen him, and then he had heard the station wagon that his father drove puttering into the driveway, and the dragonfly had finally flitted away, vanishing into the evergreens, and he had quick run to the driveway, excited to tell his father what had happened. Craggy tree bark pressed against his cheek and his hands, brittle ears of wheat skimmed against his legs, mud squelched under the soles of his feet, the steps on a rickety fire escape, the rough wooden slats on a dock, the scaly fins of a newborn sea turtle flopped across his chest, the velvety heads of cattails bobbed against his chest with a breeze, suds dripped from a coarse sponge wiping dust from his face, pulpy timber rotted by termites crumbled to powder between his fingers, ferns brushed against his legs, toadstools squished under his feet, grasshoppers landed on his chest and then sprang away, he felt a furry cat nuzzle against his shins, he felt a dog pawing eagerly at his thighs, and then he gasped in shock as a crate of fish was emptied onto his chest, the heads and the tails of the fish beating frantically against his skin as the fish struggled to swim through the air, and then after the fish had floundered off of him a damp fishing net landed on his body, a canvas sail, a nylon parachute, he passed through a doorway hung with linen drapes, a doorway hung with glass beads, a doorway hung with papery streamers, a breathtaking storm of confetti, a burst of steam, a whirl of embers, the tumbling spatter of a waterfall beat down onto his head and his shoulders, a lasso cinched tight around his torso, and then he felt a sudden jolt of gravity, a bouncing bed. The hammock behind the barracks bounc
ing as the uniformed group of soldiers had gathered around him, leaning over his laptop to crowd the screen, cheerily crashing a video chat with his father, begging to hear some embarrassing stories about him. The truck bouncing over potholes on the pass through the mountains as the uniformed group of soldiers in the back had swayed, listening to him explain that he was there because he wanted to help the people who lived there, because he believed in freedom, because he believed in democracy, and because even though his father wasn’t at all religious, even though he’d never been to mosque in his life, he’d always felt a special connection to that part of the world because of his roots, an almost telepathic understanding, as if he could understand the people there intuitively, and the other soldiers in the truck had listened to him solemnly until somebody had brought up the fact that he was the one who’d thought a burkha was a type of animal, like a llama, and then the other soldiers had cracked up laughing at him. The cushions bouncing as the uniformed group of soldiers had dropped cases of beer onto the sofa in the lounge, making fun of him because none of the cases were for him, because he never contributed anything to the kitty, because he literally never spent money on anything, the ascetic, the angel, putting every paycheck straight into the bank, saving for the trip with his father. The other soldiers had huddled around him, making exaggerated faces of pity, dejection, gloom, pouting at him, oh, I have to save money for my vacation, oh, I have to save money for my dad. And then, because the others loved him even more than mocking him, the soldiers each shared a sip of beer with him, from every can whose tab got pulled back that night, and in that way had gotten him just as drunk as everybody. He felt hands suddenly, smooth, callused, clammy, cold, warm, strong, bony, fat, all over his body, lightly touching his ribs, grazing his abdomen, fingering his armpits, stroking the soles of his feet, tickling him, and he burst out laughing, feeling a genuine rush of ecstasy, but the hands kept tickling him, and he continued to laugh, hysterically, even as he begged for the tickling to stop, in discomfort and then distress and growing alarm, twisting, kicking, suffocating, desperate to breathe, out of breath, fighting to push the hands away, and then suddenly the hands vanished, and he panted for air in the darkness, frantically, uneasily, filled with dread now, with a sudden foreboding, and he felt a sensation like a gritty callus or a rusty blade dragging ominously across his throat, and then the quaking vibrations of the bells in a clock tower clanging nearby, and then a lurch of panic as a staircase collapsed under the soles of his feet, a trapdoor snapped, a skylight shattered, a hillside crumbled, a tightrope swayed, a ladder teetered, and he jerked in horror as a rat with greasy hair ran across his face, the leathery wings of a swarm of bats beat against his body, centipedes with wriggling bodies darted across his skin, scorpions with pointed legs scuttled across his flesh, spiny cactus needles pierced straight through his palms out the back of his hands, a swarm of flies bit his thighs and his arms and his chest, a swarm of wasps stung his arms and his thighs and his chest, a heavy snake with dry hard scales squirmed onto his abdomen and coiled up on his chest and then lunged and punctured his neck with a brutal set of fangs, massive vultures with hooked beaks tore strips of flesh from his body, bursts of static electricity shocked his skin, rusted barbed wire and razor wire shredded his shins, corroded nails drove through his earlobes, bent screws twisted into his kneecaps, scalding oil spattered across his body, hands slapped him across the face, hands shoved him in the chest, hands shook him by the shoulders, hands wrapped around his throat and squeezed his throat tight and started to strangle him and he writhed and thrashed and struggled to breathe in utter anguish and despair and desolation as hundreds of mouths bit down on him, sharp canines and snaggleteeth and broken incisors, snapping and gnawing at his skin as the laughter continued to echo hysterically in his ears, like the laughter he heard in nightmares, night after night. Andre cracking a joke about gay cowboys before stepping on an explosive, vanishing into a plume of sand and dust. Trevor laughing so hard at his own story that he cried, then getting shot in his neck the next morning, swatting at the wound with a look of confusion, as if he had felt a mosquito bite, and then stumbling sideways into Kaveh, burbling dark spatters of blood. Rivkah laughing so hard that she snorted juice out her nose, then getting her hands blown off the next afternoon, staring at the stumps in disbelief, as if seeing a magic trick she couldn’t quite figure out, and then staggering helplessly toward Kaveh, hemorrhaging blood from both wrists. Dennis, who had been widely mocked around the base for having a corny sense of humor and had always embraced the ridicule good-naturedly, telling knock-knock jokes while clutching desperately at Kaveh, even managing to laugh, managing to genuinely smile, bleeding out next to a mound of sheep dung, waiting for an evac that came hours too late. Kaveh crouching alone on the dirt floor of a kitchen littered with rice and lentils and broken jars, pinned down, cut off, in terror, ducking potshots from the sniper on the rooftop across the market as the wispy curtains at the window had swelled with a breeze, and the floorboards of the staircase to the roof had creaked with the wind, and the wind had rattled the knob on the door to the street, and every time the curtains had swelled or the floorboards had creaked or the knob had rattled he had flinched or jerked and spun with the rifle, bracing for an enemy at the window or the stairs or the door, until finally a figure had appeared, but when it did it was only a child, a young girl in a brown dress standing barefoot out in the plaza, and when he had shouted at her to get down she hadn’t understood, and he had hid in the house like a coward, paralyzed by fear, for whole minutes, just watching the child stand in the plaza as the gunshots had rung out across the market, until finally he had bolted from the house into the plaza, dodging an abandoned cart, hurdling a toppled moped, tackling the child to the ground and crouching over her to protect her, telling her that everything was going to be okay, and moments afterward the sniper had been killed, and the child had survived, only to get wasted by a drone strike a week later, along with her entire family. The corpse of a local contractor for the army, who’d loved to hula-hoop with the engineers, strung up by his wrists with nylon zip ties, hanging there swollen-tongued from a utility pole, with his throat slit by the rebels. The corpse of a local informant for the army, who’d just gotten married a month earlier, left by the rebels in a ditch with his back flayed to ribbons, raw meat, whipped with the blood-crusted electrical cord lying nearby. The elderly naan vendor with the vibrant green eyes, caught in a sudden crossfire, getting capped in the skull, spraying brain matter across the screaming grandchildren whose kite he’d been fixing just moments before. Those were the faces he saw in the nightmares, the vibrant green eyes of the naan vendor gazing at him with blood dripping from the tear ducts, Andre getting mailed to him in a cardboard box in bloody pieces like something meant to be put back together, Trevor dissolving with a horrifying scream in a vat of bubbling acid, Rivkah collapsing in the flames of a trash incinerator with terrifying shrieks, Dennis trapped under a frozen lake with the family of the girl in the brown dress, pounding desperately against the ice, Kaveh dying from a gunshot wound, Kaveh dying in a plane crash, Kaveh dying in a house fire, Kaveh being the one left alive. He had done a single tour, had spent half a dozen months overseas, and had been a mess of nerves by the time that the tour was done, too jittery to spread a pat of butter evenly across a slice of toast. He had dreamed of the relief that he would feel coming home. But by then the country seemed to have changed. The war seemed to have followed him. He could remember his father singing along with the national anthem at baseball games when he was a child, how much his father had loved the country, how his father had loved the whole country, despite that his father had never traveled beyond the borders of Wyoming. How his father had sworn to him that someday he and his father would travel the country together, from sea to shining sea, even though he had always known that his father was too poor to afford a real vacation. Instead he and his father had taken modest day trips around Sundance. Like the morning that he and his father had gone snowshoeing
on a trail in the mountains, stepping gingerly across the snowpack, wearing bright parkas and snowpants. Sunlight had glittered across the snow. Far ahead of him, his father had just arrived at a gigantic granite outcropping flecked with crystal veins of quartz. Kaveh had fallen behind, distracted by a bird hopping around on the snow, maybe a chickadee, maybe a goldfinch, when he heard a distant rumble, and he turned toward the mountain, saw the snow tumbling down the mountainside, saw the pine trees toppling, heard the pine trees snapping, and then turned toward the outcropping and saw his father reach back toward him with a look of horror, and when his father screamed he realized that his father was safe and that he was not safe and then the bird darted into the sky and the avalanche hit him, burying him alive. He woke in a dark chamber of ice, helpless, limbs frozen in place, panicking when he realized what had happened, hyperventilating, growing dizzy, feeling hopeless, imagining that he would never see his father again. Shouting for his father. Giving in to despair. He remembered squinting into the dazzling sunlight with a sense of overwhelming joy as bright red gloves had broken through the snow above his head, and his father appearing above him, and his father helping him out, and how afterward, lying exhausted on the snow together, he and his father had both laughed ecstatically.