An Emotion of Great Delight

by Tahereh Mafi

  “Whose is this?” I asked.

  My mom shrugged. “It must be Mehdi’s,” she said in Farsi. “It’s been in the car for a long time.”

  “A long time?” I frowned. “How long is a long time?”

  My mom shrugged again, put on her sunglasses.

  I gave the cotton a suspicious sniff, but it must not have been abandoned in our car for too long, because the sweater still smelled nice. Something like cologne. Something that made my skin hum with awareness.

  My frown deepened.

  I pulled the sweatshirt over my head, watched my mom disappear down the drive. The hoodie was soft and warm and way too big for me in the best way, but this close to my skin that faint, pleasant scent was suddenly overwhelming. My thoughts had begun to race, my mind working too hard to answer a simple question.

  Shayda honked the horn. I nearly had a heart attack.

  “Get in right now,” she shouted, “or I’m running you over.”

  December

  2003

  Three

  When it rained like this people often shot me knowing glances and friendly finger-guns, said things like, “Lucky you, eh? Einstein over here doesn’t even need an umbrella,” finger-gun, finger-gun, eyebrow waggle. I’d always smile when someone said something like this to me, smile one of those polite smiles that held my mouth firmly shut. I never understood this assumption, this idea that my scarf was somehow impervious to water.

  It was discernibly not.

  My scarf was discernibly not neoprene; it did not resemble vinyl. It was silk, an intentional choice, not just for its weight and texture but for the sake of my vanity. Silk caressed my hair during the day, made it smooth and shiny by the time I got home. That anyone thought my hijab capable of withstanding a thunderstorm was baffling to me, and yet it was a logic maintained by a surprisingly large number of people.

  If only they could see me now.

  The rain had drenched my scarf, the skin of which was now plastered to my head. Water ran in rivulets down the sides of my neck, my hair heavy, dripping. A few rebellious strands had come loose, harsh winds whipping them across my eyes, and though I made to tuck them away, to pull myself together, my efforts were more habit than hopeful. I was no fool. I knew I was going to die of pneumonia today, possibly before my next class even started.

  I was a senior in high school but on Monday and Wednesday evenings I took a multivariable calculus class at the local community college. It was the equivalent of taking an AP class. The units were transferrable, helped inflate my GPA.

  My parents were into it. Most parents were into it.

  But my parents, like many Middle Eastern mothers and fathers, expected it. They expected me to take multivariable calculus as a senior in high school the way they expected me to become a doctor. Or a lawyer. A PhD would also be accepted, though with decidedly less enthusiasm.

  I looked up again, at the opposition.

  The rain was falling harder now, faster, but there was no time to take shelter. If I wanted to get to class on time, I had to be walking now. I knew I’d spent too long after school hoping someone would come get me, but I couldn’t help it; my hope was greater on Mondays and Wednesdays. Greater because I hoped for more than a ride home—I wanted to be spared the long walk to the college, two and a half miles away.

  I was tempted to skip.

  The temptation was so palpable I felt a tremble in my spine. I imagined my sodden bones carrying me straight home and my heart stuttered at the thought, happiness threatening. Cars flew past me, spraying me with dirty water, and I wavered further, shivering in soaked jeans and sopping shoes. I was a smudge with a dream, standing at a literal crossroads. I dreamed of going left instead of right. I dreamed of hot tea and dry clothes. I wanted to go home, home, wanted to sit in the shower for an hour, boil my blood.

  I couldn’t.

  I couldn’t miss class because I’d already missed a day last month, and missing two days would drop my grade, which would hurt my GPA, which would hurt my mother, which would break the single most important rule I’d made in my life, which was to become so innocuous a child as to disappear altogether. It was all for my mother, of course. I was ambivalent about my father, but my mother, I didn’t want my mother to cry, not for me. She cried enough for everyone else these days.

  I wondered then whether she’d look out the window, whether she’d be reminded, in a rare moment, of her youngest child, of my pilgrimage to calculus. My father, I knew, would not. He was either asleep or watching reruns of Hawaii Five-0 on a television stapled to a partition. My sister would certainly not be bothered, not with anything. No one else I knew would even know to come for me.

  Last year, my mother would’ve come.

  Last year, she would’ve known my schedule. She would’ve called, checked in, threatened my sister with violence for abandoning me to the elements. But in the wake of my brother’s death my mother’s soul had been rearranged, her skeleton reconfigured. The crushing waves of grief that once drowned me had begun, slowly, to ebb, but my mother— Over a year later my mother still seemed to me not unlike sentient driftwood, bobbing along in the cool, undiluted waters of agony.

  So I’d become a ghost.

  I’d managed to reduce my entire person to a nonevent so insignificant my mother seldom even asked me questions anymore. Seldom realized I was around. I told myself I was helping, giving her space, becoming one less child to worry about—mantras that helped me ignore the sharp pain that accompanied the success of my disappearing act.

  I only hoped I was right.

  A sudden gust of wind rattled through the streets, pushing me back. I’d no choice but to duck my head against the gust, the motion exposing my open collar to the rain. A tree trembled overhead and a stunning, icy torrent of water shot straight down my shirt.

  I audibly gasped.

  Please, God, I thought, please please don’t let me die of pneumonia.

  My socks were soup, my teeth chattering, my clenched fingers growing slowly numb. I decided to check my cell phone for a sign of life, mentally sorting through the short list of people I might be able to call for a favor—but by the time I fished the metal brick out of the marsh of my pocket it was waterlogged and glitching. Never mind pneumonia, I would likely die of electrocution. My future had never looked so bright.

  I smiled at my own joke, my lips curving toward insanity, when a car sped by so quickly it just about bathed me in runoff. I stopped then, stopped and stared at myself, at my amphibious state. It was unreal how I looked. I couldn’t possibly go to school like this, and yet I would, I would, propelled forward by some greater scruple, some nonsense that gave my life meaning. It all suddenly struck me as ridiculous, my life, so ridiculous I laughed. Laughed and then choked, having aspirated a bit of sewer water. Never mind. Never mind, I was wrong; I would die of neither pneumonia nor electrocution. Asphyxiation would usher the angel of death to my door.

  This time I did not laugh.

  The speeding car had come to a complete and sudden stop. Right there, right in the middle of the slick road. The taillights came on, white and bright, and the car idled for at least fifteen seconds before making a decision. Tires squealing, it reversed in the empty street, skidding to a terrifying halt beside me.

  Wrong again.

  Not pneumonia, not electrocution, not asphyxiation, no—Today, I was going to be murdered.

  I stared up at the sky again.

  Dear God, I thought, this was not what I meant when we last spoke.

  Four

  I stood stock-still and waited, waited for the window to roll down, for my future to be determined. Waited for fate.

  Nothing happened.

  Seconds passed—several and then a dozen—and nothing, nothing. The silver car idled beside me, its heavy, glistening body dripping steadily into dusk. I waited for its driver to do something. Anything.

  Nothing.

  I couldn’t quell my disappointment. In the breathless interlude, my cur
iosity had grown greater than my fear, which now felt perilously close to something like anticipation. This near-denouement was the closest I’d been to excitement since the day I thought my father would die, and bonus: the car looked warm. At least death, I thought, would be warm. Dry. I was ready to ignore everything I’d ever learned about getting into cars with strangers.

  But this was taking too long.

  I squinted into the rain; I couldn’t see much from where I stood, just darkened windows and exhaust fumes. It was a short distance from the sidewalk to the car, and I wanted to clear that distance, wanted to knock on the car’s window, demand an explanation. I was stopped short by the sound of trapped, muted voices.

  Not talking—arguing.

  I frowned.

  The voices grew louder, more agitated. I approached the car like a crescent moon, my back curved against the rain, head bowed toward the passenger door. I had no way of being entirely certain of my fate today, but if I really was going to be murdered I wanted to get it over with. I squelched the three steps across the sidewalk, adjusted my sopping headscarf, and waved at the dark window of the strange car. I might’ve even smiled. My trembling, secret hope was that the driver was not a murderer, but a kind Samaritan. Someone who’d seen me drowning and wanted to help.

  The car sped away.

  Without warning—its tired engine revving a little too hard—it sped away, bathing me anew in sewer water. I stood there dripping on the sidewalk, skin burning with unaccountable embarrassment. I couldn’t make sense of it, couldn’t understand how I’d just been appraised and rejected by a murderer. A murdering duo, even.

  It occurred to me, briefly, that the car had seemed familiar, that the driver might’ve been someone I knew. This thought was not comforting to me, and yet it was a clinging thought, one that could not, at this hour, be probed sufficiently for truth. I shook my head, shook the congealing hypothesis from my mind. The sky was going gray, and silver Honda Civics were ubiquitous; I couldn’t be sure of anything.

  I lifted one wet foot, then the other.

  Of all things, I had the Toys R Us jingle stuck in my head, and I hummed it as I walked, as I passed faceless shopping malls and gas stations. I kept humming it until it became a part of me, until it became the disorienting background music for the PowerPoint presentation of disappointments looping behind my eyes.

  I saw that Honda Civic again when I finally got to school.

  It was parked there in the parking lot, and I dripped past it on my way toward the main building. The rain had stopped, but it was nearly dark now, and I was nearly dead. Right now I had only enough functioning brain matter to keep my teeth from chattering, but I couldn’t stop myself from staring at that Honda Civic as I walked onto campus, my neck turned at a comically uncomfortable angle. I was trying to look more closely at the car, but the sky seemed to have sunk down, sat on the ground. Everything and everyone was gray. I moved through clinging mist, couldn’t really see where I was going.

  Metaphors, everywhere.

  I tried not to think about my throbbing head or the blue tint to my skin. I tried to focus, even with the fog. Now, perhaps more than before, I wanted to understand what had happened. I wanted to know who drove that car and whether I really did know the driver. I was trying to understand why the car had pulled over without murdering me. I was trying to suppress the panic in my chest that wondered whether I was being followed.

  And then I fell.

  There were stairs leading up to the school, stairs I’d climbed a thousand times, and yet tonight I didn’t, couldn’t see them. I fell onto them instead, indenting skin and bones and catching myself with slippery hands. My head only just grazed the stone and I was grateful, but I’d slammed my knee pretty hard and could feel it bleeding.

  I rolled over onto my back, my backpack; closed my eyes. Cold wind skated over the planes of my face, chilled my damp clothes. I couldn’t stop laughing. Mine was the mute variety, the kind betrayed only by the curve of my smile, the shaking of my shoulders. Pain was fracturing up my leg; I felt it in my neck. I didn’t want to get up. I wanted to lie here until someone carried me out, carried me away.

  I wanted my mother.

  Dear God, I thought. Why? Why why why?

  I sighed, opened my eyes to the sky. And with a single, herculean effort, I pushed myself upright. I wasn’t going to class tonight. But I wasn’t going home, either.

  I decided to stay awhile, steep in my failures. Today had been disappointing on so many levels; I figured I might as well go all in, toss all twenty-four hours in the trash, start over tomorrow. I should take advantage of the rain, I thought, take advantage of my destroyed clothes, I thought, take advantage of the quiet, the silence, and the opportunity to sin in peace.

  Five

  The school was fairly well lit at night, well enough to see without being seen. I found my familiar spot, planted my wet bag on the wet concrete, and rooted around in my things with shaking hands.

  I was ruthless with my hands.

  I scraped my knuckles against stone, drew blood, cut my palms on cardboard, drew blood. I shoved those same hands in pockets and held my breath as they throbbed. I didn’t bandage cuts. I ignored burns. When I looked at my hands I was presented with the evidence of my station: bruises untended, scrapes unhealed.

  I was unnoticed except in the worst ways.

  As far as the larger world was concerned, I was about as remarkable as a thumb. My presence was notable only occasionally and only because my face seemed familiar to people—familiar the way fear was familiar, the way dread was familiar. Everywhere I went strangers squinted at me, minds buffering for all of half a second before they placed my entire person in a box, taped it shut.

  Adults were always seeking me out—why? why?—to ask me direct and specific questions about international relations as if I were some kind of proxy for my parents, for their home country, for some larger answer to a desperate question. As if my seventeen-year-old body were old enough to understand the complexities of any of this, as if I were a seasoned politician whose tenuous connection to a Middle Eastern country I rarely visited would suddenly make me an expert in politics. I didn’t know how to tell people that I was just as stupid today as I was yesterday, and that I spent most of my time thinking about how my life was falling apart in ways that had nothing to do with the news cycle. But there was something about my hijab that made people disregard my age, made me seem like fair game.

  We were, after all, at war with people who looked just like me.

  I unearthed my damp newspaper along with my damp cigarettes, tucked a cylinder between my lips, dropped the paper in my lap, and zipped my backpack shut. I stretched out my injured leg, grimacing as I reached for the lighter in my pocket.

  It took a few tries, but when the butane finally caught, I took a moment to stare at the flame. I’d spun the spark wheel enough times that it had abraded the pad of my thumb.

  I took a deep drag, held it in, let it go, sat back, stared up.

  I couldn’t see the stars.

  On the one hand, smoking was not cool. Smoking would kill you. Smoking was a vile, disgusting habit I did not condone.

  On the other hand—

  Dear God, I thought, exhaling the poison. Would you please just kill my father already? I can’t take the suspense.

  I picked up the paper, stared at the melting headline.

  When I read the newspaper I saw myself, my family, and my faith reflected back at me as if in a fun-house mirror. I felt a hopelessness building in my chest every day, this desperation to tell someone, to shake strangers, to stand on a park bench and scream—

  There’s no such thing as an Islamic terrorist.

  It was morally impossible—philosophically impossible—to be Muslim and a terrorist at the same time. There was nothing in Islam that condoned the taking of innocent lives. And yet there it was, every day, every day, the conflation: Muslim terrorist. Islamic terrorist.

  The Middle East, our presid
ent had said, was the axis of evil.

  I saw the latent danger in the storytelling, the caricature we were becoming, two billion Muslims quickly solidifying into a faceless, terrifying mass. We were being stripped of gradation, of complexity. The news was turning us into monsters, which made us so much easier to murder.

  I pinched the cigarette between my thumb and forefinger, held it up against the sky. I hated how much I enjoyed this disgusting pastime. Hated how it seemed to steady me, befriend me in my darkest hours. I could already feel the fist unclench in my chest and I relished it, closing my eyes as I took another drag, this time exhaling the smoke across the wilting article. The piece was about the recklessness of our airstrikes on Afghan villages, about how our military intelligence appeared questionable; hundreds of innocent Afghans were killed in the search for Al Qaeda members who never materialized. I’d read the last paragraph a thousand times.

  “The Americans are all the time making these mistakes,” said Mr. Khan, whose two sons, Faizullah, 8, and Obeidullah, 10, were killed. “What kind of Al Qaeda are they? Look at their little shoes and hats. Are they terrorists?”

  “Wow.”

  The voice came from the fog, from outer space. It was a single word but it startled me with its heft and depth, with its fullness. It had been hours since I’d spoken to anyone but a police officer, and I seemed to have forgotten how sounds sounded.

  Nerves spiked through me.

  Hastily, I put out the cigarette, but I knew it was too late, knew there was no denying any of this. I would be eighteen in six weeks, but right now that didn’t matter. Right now I was seventeen years old, and what I was doing was illegal. Stupid.

  But then the stranger laughed.

  The stranger laughed and my fear froze, my heart unclenched. I experienced relief for all of two seconds before I caught a glimpse of his face. He’d stepped into the severe light of a streetlamp and my eyes focused, unfocused; my soul fled my body. I felt it then—knew, somehow, even then, that I would not survive this night unchanged.