Home Is a Stranger

by Parnaz Foroutan

  “There is something wrong with your heart,” he said, pushing himself onto me. “You don’t know how to love.”

  I didn’t scream.

  I said, instead, “I don’t want to. Stop, please. Please?”

  “You’re mine,” he said. “Right? Right?”

  After a while, I stopped struggling, and then, I stopped pleading. He wouldn’t look at me. He finished. He pulled away from me. When I breathed, my breath fogged up the glass and wiped out the neighborhood, the sidewalk, the homes, the trees. I focused on just that, my breath on the glass, and the world, disappearing.

  THE NEXT MORNING, I awoke to the sound of my mother in the kitchen cooking with the television on in the background. From outside came the racket and din of lawnmowers and leaf blowers. From a nearby schoolyard came the voices of children playing. The newscaster announced that we were on orange alert for that day. I pulled back the curtain and looked out my bedroom window at the rows of quiet houses beneath a cloudless, blue sky. The night before, I had walked into my mother’s house, walked straight to my room.

  “You’re back?” my mother asked from the living room.

  “I’m tired,” I said. “I’m going to sleep.” Quietly, I closed my bedroom door and sat on the edge of the bed for a long time. Then, Amir called me. He had called, without fail, every night since my return.

  “Did you meet with Justin tonight?” he asked me. I couldn’t find my voice. I didn’t want to speak. “Did something happen?” he asked. “You can tell me. Did something happen to you? Did he hurt you? I knew he would, when you told me he wanted to see you, I knew he would harm you. Did he yell at you, threaten you? Did he hurt you?”

  “. . .”

  “You can tell me. You must tell me. Please?”

  “He raped me.”

  “. . .”

  After breakfast that morning, we drove to the UCLA Medical Center. On the corner of Westwood Boulevard and Wilshire, there stood a high-rise building with a mural painted on its side of a female soldier, fatigues buttoned tight over her ample breasts, dark-skinned, lips plump and glistening. In the painted background, a desert, flames, helicopters, explosions, a soaring eagle, talons spread.

  “You can wait for her out here,” the nurse told my mother when she rose to follow me into a dim room full of medical equipment and computers and screens. A crowd of busy people jostled around, preparing. The nurse asked me to swallow something, then to lie on a table. A doctor stood beside her, clipboard in hand, with a group of students behind him, clipboards in hand, a technician waiting.

  The doctor introduced himself to me as the head of the congenital heart disease center. The bright-eyed students waited. “We need to determine the exact positioning of the holes in your heart, and to measure their size,” the doctor told me. The students scrawled frantic notes. “This test is more precise than the echocardiogram. We insert a tube through your mouth, it travels down your throat, and allows us a clearer view of your heart. That way, when you go in for surgery in a few weeks, the surgeon will know the precise nature of what we are dealing with.” He didn’t even look at me directly when he spoke. I was an exhibit. He delivered his presentation and the students took notes, eagerly. “It will only take a few minutes. You will be awake through the procedure, but we have given you sedatives to both relax you and keep you from moving your arms and legs.”

  The room became hazy. I felt a heaviness in my body. Suddenly, a number of hands were touching me. Men and women in blue scrubs surrounded me, masks over their faces, their eyes averted. They lifted my arms, my legs, turned me to my side, plunged needles into my veins, dripped liquids into me, taped wires to my skin, ignored me when I flinched, ignored me when I moaned.

  “It will be uncomfortable,” the doctor said from a far, far distance.

  “Just for a minute.”

  He never looked at me. He never looked me in the eyes. The whole time. Not during. Or after. He kept his eyes from me.

  “Okay, we’re ready to begin.”

  I wouldn’t have screamed.

  But it wouldn’t have mattered, even if I had.

  They waited, took notes, watched the machines attached to my body, read numbers and lines on the screens. They touched my body with gloved hands. Then, the technician inserted something into my mouth. I didn’t see the instrument, but immediately, I wanted him to stop. He didn’t. He ignored me when I moaned, when I gagged, when tears streamed down my face in protest. He never looked in my eyes to see. He heard my protests. But he didn’t listen. He kept pushing it in. I was drowning. Frantic. Animal. Paralyzed. I couldn’t raise my hand to push him away. I couldn’t raise my foot to kick. I could not make a fist. He kept his eyes from me and pushed it deeper, until he reached my heart and saw the holes.

  The doctor said, “Here. Here it is. The malformity.”

  I couldn’t scream. And then it was over.

  I lay on that table, weeping.

  SOME DAYS WERE yellow. Other days, orange. Some days, red. They announced which color the day was destined to be with great trepidation and foreboding on the radio and the TV. I stayed in my room. “I’m tired,” I told my mother.

  I sat on my bed and watched the shadows creep along the wall. It was so quick, the change in me. It was so sudden. All of it. Mehrabad, Heathrow, LAX. The parked car. The gloved hands. The intrusions upon my body. And now I sat bereft and broken, through the length of the day. Who was that girl, the outspoken one among the men in that old hotel, the revolutionary on board that train? The one who braved the desires of her body and swam in the open, blue sea? How had she felt so happy? So unafraid? So certain and so whole? And now . . . now I sat in my room on a Tuesday or a Monday afternoon. I didn’t want to answer the phone. I didn’t want to leave the house. The world outside was on alert for disaster, apprehension and fear and mistrust thick as the morning smog that hung over the city. Even my own body felt alien to me. What was this thing that had betrayed me? That had allowed such terror to be acted upon it, that had invited such intrusions, and now held me hostage to the fear of pain and death?

  My mother returned at night to find me sitting in the dark. Every two weeks, she drove me back to the UCLA Medical Center, where I would sit in a chair while a needle plunged into my vein took blood from me and collected whole pints of it in a large plastic bag to save for my transfusion post-surgery. On the way home, I sat pale, exhausted, dizzy beside her as she drove. “It’s no use trying to find a job right now,” she told me. “With all the medical appointments, then the surgery. It can wait. Why don’t you call up some of your old friends so you’re not so lonely? Justin, maybe?”

  I sat in my room, waiting.

  Amir called every evening. Ramin the photographer called, too, every few days. Other than that, entire days passed without anyone speaking to me. One day, on our way home after the bloodletting, I noticed that the city of Beverly Hills was already decorated with tinsel for the holidays. We drove past Bloomingdale’s. In the storefront window, there was a group of female mannequins arranged in what appeared to be a harem, within a domed tent of richly colored silk. Dark haired. Veiled faces. Fashionably wide pants paired with midriff tops. The mannequins reposed with their stiff limbs, splayed out on ottoman cushions and thick Persian rugs, waiting, as the radio announced the updates on the Taliban, Bin Laden, the bloodthirst of the Middle East.

  On TV, the war looked like a show of lights. The reporter stood, mic in hand, and behind him streaks of neon-green light flashed across the dead skies. Then, a sudden light among distant buildings. No close-up of the rubble and the bones in the wake of that shooting star. No wailing mother over the broken body of her child. Just that silent light falling from heaven. Watching it, you would think it didn’t even disturb the sleep or the dreams of the inhabitants of that darkened city.

  The heart surgeon explained to my mother and me how all the functions of my body would be transferred to a machine during the eight to ten hours of my surger
y. I couldn’t stop crying. “But where will I be during those hours?” I asked the surgeon. “Once you take my body, where will I be?”

  Behrooz, his wife, and Pouya visited us in Los Angeles. The authorities wouldn’t allow Javid to leave Iran. When Behrooz pulled into our driveway and stepped out of the car, I threw myself into his arms. He held me for a long while in his embrace, kissed the top of my head. “Don’t worry,” he told me. “This is just another part of your journey.”

  Pouya had brought me a VHS tape from Ramin the photographer. That night, alone at home, I put it in the VCR and watched. The film began with the static of analog, the noise, the black-and-white snowstorm, before it cut to still photos of me. I sat in a café we used to go to. The lighting was soft. A photo of me looking out of the window. Another smiling at the camera. Looking pensive. Laughing. Holding my head. Readjusting my hijab. There was a montage of close-up photographs of my lips, several of the freckles on my face, of my hands, my fingers. Abruptly, the film cut from the still photos in that café to the footage of that day Ramin and I spent in a village among the apple trees, when he asked me to marry him. The camera focused on a herd of sheep walking down a distant path. A shepherd stood afar, watching over them. It was dusk, autumn, and the leaves spectacular. The camera turned to me. I was talking to a handsome, young village man who sat on top of a white mule. The camera zoomed in on my face, until it faded. The film cut to black.

  I didn’t know her. That girl in the tape. I searched and searched the emptiness inside me, and I couldn’t find her. When Ramin called, I was embarrassed to talk to him, afraid he might hear the hollowness in my voice. On those phone calls, my laughter was forced. My bravado flimsy. I dreaded being asked what I was up to. I was up to nothing. I sat all day, waiting. And I didn’t know what I was waiting for. Death, maybe. Something in me was gone. Something, taken from me. Justin called. Once or twice. After that night, I didn’t answer. On New Year’s Day, I left my room, got into the car, and drove to the coastal mountains he and I used to hike. I walked off the trail to a path through the sage, up the mountain, to a boulder overlooking the creek below. I stood on the edge of that boulder for some time, just stood there, looking down at the granite rocks within that gorge, the trickle of water passing in the creek.

  Before Behrooz left Los Angeles, I told him I wanted to show him the northern redwood forests. We drove several hours north, then walked together into that forest, into the ferned gullies, among the thick roots, the tangled growths that pushed through rock and hill, among the salmon, salamanders, slugs, pebbled brooks, cold rivers, rotting logs. It kept raining. “It is okay to be frightened,” Behrooz told me in a cathedral of giant, ancient trees. “I’m frightened, too. The weakness has spread to my left arm. When I return to Tehran, they will run more tests, but I won’t allow fear to stop me from living.”

  Behrooz, his wife, and Pouya returned to Tehran. Amir called, every night. His voice, a hypnotic soliloquy. “You are brave,” he told me. “You are beautiful. Special. You will come back to Iran, soon, and be who you were meant to be.”

  Then, one day, Ramin sent me an email. It read, “Remember that afternoon when you told me the story of your golden fisherman? I went to Feraydoon Kenar. I found him for you. I told him you sent me, to say hello. His real name is Majid. I asked him if I could take a picture of him for you. Attached to this email.”

  I opened the attachment. And there he was. Standing beside his red boat, in front of that blue sea. I don’t know if it was the angle of the lens. Or the lighting. But there was nothing golden about the man in that photograph. He was just a man. Tired looking. Ordinary.

  “How dare you?” I yelled at Ramin on the phone. “What right did you have to intrude yourself into my story, and take it from me?”

  I WENT IN for surgery on February 14, 2002. Valentine’s Day. They let me pick the date. We arrived at the UCLA Medical Center at five in the morning, my mother and I. There was already a crowd of people waiting outside the door. We were all pre-op, or families of people who were pre-op, all of us standing quietly in the subdued gray of the morning.

  Later, hooked up to my IV, I waited. The waiting went on for a long time. At noon, a nurse walked in and apologized. The surgeon had two emergency operations before me. A couple more hours, she told me, and it would be my turn. And I guess it was then, lying there in that room waiting, that I thought of all those days I had sat alone in my bedroom, waiting. Afraid. And now, they would finally take my body. Take me from my body and do things to it. And there was nothing I could do to stop them. There was no use in pleading, or in struggling. My mother stood in the doorway, crying, as they wheeled me out. We entered a room cluttered with things I couldn’t make out. I asked if they had put me in a closet of sorts, for later. They laughed until the ceiling seemed to dissipate into nothing.

  I OPENED MY eyes. The only light in the room was a glaring one, directly above my bed. The rest of it a dark, empty stage. Around my bed droned the machines, with lights that blinked on and off, and things that pumped, and alarms that rang every so often, which brought the man with the angelic face back into view. He hovered above me, around me, adjusted things, looked at me quietly.

  Coming to felt like rising from the bottom of a blue sea and trying to surface too fast. My body screamed its ascent back into consciousness, too much pain, better stay here, in the deep, deep void. But I opened my eyes and saw his face. I was certain I had seen him before. Maybe in a car that had stopped on a long, deserted highway near the Canadian-US border, in the middle of some night of my childhood. My mother was a young woman walking toward that car, holding my hand. The car door opened and a man and woman asked my mother if she needed a ride. When we got in and started driving in the direction of America, a little boy with golden hair popped up from the front seat, from between his parents, and held out a stick of gum to me. Was this man that little boy? Older now, though angelic, still?

  “Where is my mother?” I asked him.

  “She is asleep, in a chair, here, beside your bed.”

  “Is she okay?”

  “She is exhausted. I gave her a pillow and a blanket.”

  “Will you marry me?”

  When I awoke again, he was at the foot of my bed. I could hear his voice, talking to another man. There were other beds in that darkness, other machines pumping, droning, screaming in alarm. “She needs a blood transfusion,” the other man said.

  Thirst.

  The thirst woke me. The light glared above my bed, and my throat burned with thirst. Clenched upon itself, a pain so acute, it quieted all the other pain in my body and all I could think was water.

  “Please. I’m so thirsty,” I said to him when he appeared.

  “The IV will keep you hydrated,” he said.

  “Just some water?”

  “I can’t give you any, not yet. You’ll vomit immediately. You won’t like that too much.”

  “Please? Just a little? Please?”

  He was gone. I closed my eyes. The thirst. It is impossible to describe it with words. A desert blighted my mouth. A wretched storm of sand filled my throat. Broken glass. The constriction of the throat. My whole body ached for water, screamed for it.

  Then.

  Then I stood on what seemed like the edge of somewhere, a cliff, and beyond it, a darkness. Not a sea of darkness, because a sea was a something. It was a nothingness and it had a pull to it. I thought, if I should step off this ledge, here, and fall into these depths, then there will be no more thirst. There will be no more pain. Or fear. And it seemed like the easiest thing in the world to do, to just leave behind my body. Nothing terrible or violent about it. Nothing foreboding or secretive or awesome, even. Just, nothing. Death was that easy. One breath less, and I could just not be. And since being meant so much suffering, since being was an unquenchable thirst, I thought, how easy, and I wasn’t afraid.

  He was standing beside my bed again. “Here,” he said. “I brought you some wa
ter.” He dipped a cotton swab in a glass of water and brought it to my lips. “I’ll wet your mouth with it. It’s all I can give you, for now.”

  I opened my mouth.

  It was a drop.

  A single drop of water. That’s all. And the pleasure of that single drop . . . I felt it on my tongue, and the wave of it broke against every cell in my body and all I could think was more. Just that, a single drop of water, and the hope, the longing to feel that pleasure, again . . . It was the immensity of that desire which pulled me away from the edge of nothingness, of darkness, and brought me back to being.

  AT NIGHT, THE other patients, mostly elderly women, drifted through the walls and into my room. They hovered by my bedside, talking endlessly about their pain, their grievances, their regrets. In the mornings I told the new nurse in attendance that I couldn’t sleep. I begged to be taken off the morphine. “I see ghosts,” I told the nurse. “All night they talk to me.”

  “I’ll mention it to the doctor,” each new nurse promised me.

  The morning after my surgery, a group of doctors came to my bedside, followed by note-taking residents with clipboards in hand and stern smiles plastered on their faces. “We are going to remove this tube in your neck,” one told me. They huddled around me, forgot me, spoke to one another. I was no longer in possession of my own body. It belonged to these strangers, these men and women with their white coats and their gloved hands and stern smiles. Somebody tugged and slid that tube slowly out of the flesh of my neck. The pain made me faint. They revived me and gave me more morphine. The next day, another group of doctors wanted to pull out the tubes that drained the liquid around my surgical site. The ones beneath my breast, under skin and flesh and bone. It was the kind of pain that swallowed screams, the shock of my body’s capacity for suffering so intense, it left me catatonic, mute, wide-eyed with wonder. The next day, they came to pull out wires attached to my heart to measure something that didn’t need measuring anymore. It became so that each time I heard footsteps stop outside my door, I’d start shaking uncontrollably, sweating, unable to breathe.