“Now we have been somewhere together,” his father had grinned, reaching over to pat his chest.
Kaveh had been haunted by nightmares the week after the avalanche, but each night after the nightmares had woken him his father had made him a packet of cocoa, sitting with him at the turquoise table in the kitchen, talking about baseball until he was ready to sleep again, and after that week the nightmares had ended. But by the time he had returned from war, his father had been dead, and there had been nobody to keep him company after the nightmares. He kept his hair in a buzz cut, exposing the slanted line of bare scalp where the shrapnel had cut him to the bone, and bought a truck with the money he had saved to travel the country with his father. Instead he traveled the country alone.
The dim pink light of daybreak was glowing out the windows beyond the bed. The curtains were parted. He could sense her nearby. He could hear her breathing. In the darkness he had come to think of her as a supernatural creature, a shapeshifter who could become rain, wind, sand, a swaying grove of bamboo, take any form she desired. But she had a body again. She was lying on the bed. In the faint light he could see her silhouette, the curve of her hip, the dip of her waist, the peak of her shoulder. She wasn’t touching him.
“There is no hell, there is no heaven, in this universe there are only molecules and stars,” Zoe whispered.
The bedposts were silhouettes.
“You have no purpose, you have no creator, the life of a human is as meaningless as the life of a moth,” Zoe whispered.
The nightstands were silhouettes.
“Life is meaningless,” Zoe sang softly. “Death is meaningless,” Zoe sang softly. “Everything you’ve ever done, everything you’ve fought for, meaningless, meaningless.”
The faint light gleamed on the glass shades of the oil lamps.
“Everything you’ve felt was real,” Zoe said in a whisper.
He could finally make out her face again. He had missed her face in the darkness. Staring at her bizarre features, the disproportionate space between her eyes, the smushed tip of her nose, the haggard look of her cheeks, he felt a strange sense of reverence.
“Here you are,” Zoe breathed with a sudden tone of recognition, of excitement, rising up off the mattress to gaze at him with a look of desire. Kaveh had lost any interest in sex, but because he was terrified and enchanted by her, being looked at by her in that way gave him a rush of adrenaline. Her face was flushed with sweat. Leaning over him, she kissed him gently on the mouth, lightly brushing his lips with her lips, and then she kissed him again, harder, pressing her lips to his lips with a sense of hunger, touching his face with her hand as she kissed him on the mouth again and again and again. She kissed his chin, she kissed his jaw, she kissed his throat, and then he felt her mouth sucking on his neck as her fingers roamed his skin, grazing his abdomen, circling his hipbones, fondling the buzzed bristles of his pubic hair, caressing his groin, squeezing his thighs, rubbing the grooves of skin between his thighs and his balls, fingering the sensitive patch of skin just under his balls, and then cupping his balls, gently stroking the skin of his scrotum. He was already hard again when she took ahold of his cock, not stroking him, just gripping him, tightly, sending intense ripples of pleasure through his body. Straddling his hips, she rubbed the head of his cock against her vulva, grunting quietly with satisfaction, and then she took his cock into her cunt, sinking onto his pelvis. She was so wet that he inhaled on reflex, gripped fistfuls of the sheet. She experimented until she found an angle that she liked, leaning forward to hold his waist in her hands, leaning closer to press her hands into his chest, and then finally sitting back with her hands on her thighs, rocking her hips on his body. She looked almost mystical in the strange light of daybreak streaming through the windows, but she felt profoundly real, the rough scratch of her pubic hair, the warm wet grip of her cunt, the solid weight of her thick ass. Her breasts swayed slightly with each rock of her hips. He was almost afraid to touch her, but after hesitating he cupped her ass in his hands, and she sank down onto him with her elbows on his chest, offering her neck to him as she moved on his hips, lifting and dropping her ass in the air, taking the tip of his cock to the rim of her cunt before plunging his cock deep into her cunt again, breathing quickly with each slap of pussy against pelvis. He sucked on her neck, her skin tasted pleasantly salty, and he kissed her collarbone, and he kissed her shoulder, and then he took her breast in his mouth, licking her tit until he felt her nipple harden under the tip of his tongue. She gripped his shoulders and pushed her body into the air to lock eyes with him, and a bead of sweat streaked from her temple down her cheek and dripped from her chin onto his breastbone, and he became aware that he could smell her, the potent vegetal odor of her armpits, the faint fungal odor of her feet. He could smell her breath, a bitter odor with hints of milk and coffee, and he realized that other lovers always smelled of mouthwash or mints, that he had never smelled the actual breath of a lover before, or the unwashed feet, or the undeodorized armpits, and gazing into her eyes as she rocked on his hips he was suddenly overcome by a powerful sense of intimacy. She had hidden nothing from him. This was who she truly was. She looked intensely vulnerable.
“Do you believe somebody can fall in love in a single night?” Zoe whispered.
He stared up at her as she moved on him.
“I love you,” Zoe whispered.
He wondered if maybe that was something she said to every patron, but even if she did, the earnest desperate look on her face made him believe her, that she truly had come to love him over the course of the past night together, that she was the type of person who could be overwhelmed with love for a stranger, that the past night had been as much for her as for him, and in that moment he felt that he understood her, that he knew what it was to be lonely, that he knew what it was to be traumatized, and that he could understand the need to keep moving afterward, forever, to live on the road.
“I love you, I love you, I love you,” Zoe said, each utterance somewhere between a cry and a gasp, spoken in rhythm with the movement of her body, and then he felt her thighs clamp hard around his hips as her cunt clenched down on his cock, and her eyes glazed over, and her mouth parted slightly, and her back suddenly arched, and she pounded him with a sudden urgency until the pleasure and the intimacy and the excitement overwhelmed him and he came, twisting his head back to groan into the pillow, and then she sank down onto him in exhaustion, panting for air, her bangs matted with sweat, her legs trembling from exertion, her heart beating in a frenzy against his chest, as between breaths in an exhausted voice she continued to murmur she loved him. He had come so hard that he had drooled onto the pillow. The orgasm had sent aftershocks of euphoria pulsing through his body. His cock was still throbbing. At first hearing her say that she loved him had made him pity her, but after everything he had lived through during the night, all of the sorrow and terror and grief and despair, he was overcome by a profound sense of comfort as she murmured the words. The intensity of the feeling amazed him. His eyes watered, his mouth tightened, and he began to weep, and she pressed her face to his cheek and held his head in her hands, whispering the words to him over and over and over, in a mantra.
The gold light of dawn was glowing above the hills. Dusty clusters of stars were still shimmering in the sky. His throat raw from all the crying, his lungs weary from the heaving sobs, the skin around his eyes crusted with salt from dried tears, he stumbled through the door of the hotel with his boots untied and his shirt unbuttoned, back out into the town. A flock of starlings rose in a mass into the air, twisting and swirling into different shapes above the rooftops. He felt like he had been gone for years. Somebody was dragging a whimpering dog across the intersection by a stretched leash, somebody in a sedan was holding down the horn outside of the bar, somebody in cowboy boots was firing a revolver into the air on the steps of the museum, somebody had vomited on the sidewalk and somebody had dumped a mattress in the middle of the street and a couple of people in ballca
ps were grappling in the parking lot of the convenience store, but the country he had left was not the country he returned to. Looking around at the town, he felt only peace.
Why Visit America
THE ORIGINS OF THIS GREAT NATION
There wasn’t anything special about us. We were just an average town. Porch swings, wading pools, split-rail fences, pumpjacks bobbing for oil on the horizon. Meetings at town hall were well attended, sure, but we weren’t some hotbed of insurgents. We didn’t subscribe to any one brand of politics. We couldn’t even be plotted onto your basic left-right binary. Our town had everything: pro-lifers who supported gay marriage, pro-choicers who opposed gay marriage, climate-change deniers who owned solar panels, universal-healthcare campaigners who preferred private insurance, creationists with degrees in biology and geology, internet pirates whose views were unique to say the least, loyal conservatives, staunch liberals, moderates, radicals, and ornery retirees whose only real issue was guns. And yet that winter we found ourselves united by a common sentiment. We were fed up with our country. The executives were busy making donations that funded the campaigns of the politicians, the politicians were busy passing laws that protected the interests of the executives, and pretty much nothing else seemed to be getting done. We were anti-government, we were anti-corporate, but mostly we were normal people who couldn’t afford to buy an election and had come to understand that our votes didn’t mean shit. Hell, the executives were stepping down to take government appointments and the politicians were stepping down to take corporate positions so fast that we couldn’t even keep track of who was which anymore, if there was any difference. There were libertarians among us who had been pushing for our town to secede for years now, but not until that winter, watching legal forms of graft being flaunted across the country like never before, did our town seriously begin to consider the proposition. The matter soon came to dominate our meetings. We knew that from a certain perspective seceding could be viewed as an act of treason, might mean arrest, might mean imprisonment, might even mean execution. And the debate at that final town hall meeting was appropriately heated. Most of us wavered back and forth, unsure which way we would vote until the very second that those slips of paper got passed around. Several of us were so nervous that we felt faint. Ultimately, however, the decision was unanimous. We would rather face handcuffs, jail, even a hanging, than spend another goddamned second living in that broke-down country. We’d voted to secede.
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