A Good Country

by Laleh Khadivi

  We have no reason to keep you.

  Great.

  We saw your name, your travel destination, your smart-ass attitude, and thought we’d take a minute to tell you what is at stake. Every day someone with malicious intent for the innocent people of this country walks or flies or drives across our borders.

  Ok.

  The people you come from, your mother, your father, their families, the people you know at your fancy school, the rich Indian and Lebanese and Syrians just like you, are not the pride of this country.

  Ok.

  The man stared straight at Rez.

  We let you in because we couldn’t keep you out and you know that, your parents know it. You feel it every time someone wins the prize instead of you, gets the part in the play, gets into the better college. Gets the promotion. All of this adds up. And your people, who think they are worth a great deal, know that even after making all that money, they are worthless. Their children are worthless, and if this violence continues, their children’s children will be worthless too. The American dream will never play all the way out for you. Do you understand?

  The man was not wrong. And his speech repeated inside Rez, his voice, his clean-shaven face, his long torso, and his narrow head stamped themselves onto Rez’s mind. He sat up in his chair and focused his thoughts on the mosque, the kind glances, and the jolly imam.

  Yeah. I am just trying to do my part. Be a good guy. Go to school. Make my parents proud.

  The man stared at Rez and between them not a single vibration of belief pulsed. The man stood up and walked out.

  By the time Rez got outside, it was dark. He found Matthews sitting on his suitcase smoking bummed cigarettes playing Candy Crush on his phone.

  Dude. What the fuck?

  Exactly.

  You ok?

  Fine. They had me confused with one point three billion other people.

  Matthews didn’t laugh.

  Your folks texted me. I told them we were getting dinner in L.A.

  Cool. I’m beat. Let’s hit it.

  They found a shuttle that would take them to Laguna and loaded their gear and Matthews tried to talk to him on the drive, but Rez finally put a hand up and leaned his head on the window.

  Dude. I gotta take a snooze. Long day.

  24

  … Ok ok ok. It’s not as bad as it was the first week. I mean, I didn’t even leave my house. Did you leave?… No. No one did. It was just the fam, sitting around, Moms, Dad, Haleh and Darian, watching the news on TV. Not that it changed, but we watched anyway. Dozens killed. Six attackers, one of them Hassan Amajalad. My name is Hassan. That burned for a few days. I thought about having it legally changed, Henry or Harold or Hank, something … Go ahead, laugh. I least I am honest about it. You probably thought about it too. Though I don’t know, Rez is such a weird name, like razor or reservation or something, not as easy to fuck with. But Omid, man, with Omid you are fucked. Anyway the first week sucked and now, look, two months later and we are out, sitting at Maryam’s Luxe, smoking apple tobacco and talking shit and welcoming home our friend from his fancy surf trip. What’s there to complain about? Are you scared? I’m not scared. Things will go back to normal. They always do.

  Man, that is bullshit. Who says you are not scared? Your ass drove under the speed limit all the way here. Two months and my sisters still get shit wherever they go. Yesterday Shadi got coffee at Starbucks and some dude yelled at her from his jacked truck, Scarf head go home! She just covers her hair. Nothing else, and this asshole didn’t even get out of his car. My uncle says the mosque he goes to gets tagged every night and that the FBI and CIA are parked out front, not even hiding …

  It’ll die down. This is America, man. Didn’t you listen to anything in civics class? Plurality? Liberty for all? Remember after 9/11, shit was bad, and way more people died and there was a war and still, things got normal again.

  This is different. Something about this is different. I mean three miles from here there was a massacre. Not 9/11 bad, but bad. People died because Muslims freaked out. In our hood. All that America and equality and liberty shit goes out the window! I mean, how many checkpoints do you have to go through to get gas? To go to the mall? How many times do they pull your car aside after they see your license and look you up and then stare at you and treat you like criminal shit? It’s not going to go back to normal for a long time. At least around here. We might not have done the deed, but the police can’t tell us apart and we are going to be suspects as long as this crazy Islam shit keeps going … All that rap music you love, the cops and gangs and injustice, well you in it now …

  Omid the pessimist. Relax, dude. Stop listening to your dad’s conspiracy theories. Smoke more weed. Just look around. A month ago no one was here. Smoking hookahs and Middle Eastern vibes were like a curse. And three months ago you couldn’t get in, the line out the door was so long. People are slow, but they want the normal, the good life, the shit money can buy. It’s gonna be nice again, just wait.

  Indo was nice. Nice all day. Nice all night.

  That’s right, dude, listen to us, we’re here to welcome you back and you haven’t said a thing, how was it? What is the state of the rest of the non-freaked-out world?

  Sweet. Good surf. Cheap beer. Nice people. Very different. Most of the people were Muslim. Muslims walking around going to mosque, everything peaceful.

  —

  Dude, that’s right, Indo’s got more Muslims than anywhere else. Pretty brown girls in head scarves. It’s supposed to be really chill.

  Yeah. Makes this place seem like a pressure cooker.

  I hear that. And the surf was good, right?

  Epic.

  They give you any shit at the airport?

  Nothing I couldn’t handle.

  And the massages in Bali?

  I plead the Fifth.

  25

  Then days and days of nothing to do. A checkup. A trip to the dentist. The occasional session with Matthews, but mostly Rez’s phone stayed silent and he spent the days barefoot in the empty house, reading, watching movies, staring at the surface of the blue pool and then swimming in it, the underwater as quiet as his mind.

  He thought about college, the month left until he could get on the Amtrak at San Juan Capistrano to sit for fourteen hours until he got to Berkeley, where a welcome van would pick him up and take him to his dorm. New streets. New building. New bed. His parents agreed to let him arrive alone and he imagined the handshaking from his proud father and hugs from his mother and then he’d be on his own, free to live as he liked to live, whatever that meant. He looked up the beaches closest to Berkeley and the surf spots and saw the wild brown waters of Ocean Beach and the mellow tubes in Pacifica and the late-winter monsters at Mavericks and thought, That will be enough. He’d find a friend with a car, go early in the morning before class, smoke a bowl, harmonize with himself as only the ocean allowed, and then go back to school and learn it up.

  He spent his days in preparation; went through his clothes, filled garbage bags with T-shirts and old uniforms and pants he didn’t like and left them in the laundry room for his mom to take to Goodwill. He took down the posters of surfers and Champions League soccer stars, the prizes from school and the old anime cutouts, and rolled them up and put them in the garage on the shelf beside his artwork from middle and elementary school, pastels of sharks and paintings of spaceships and a papier-mâché mask of his own, much smaller, face. He did not try it on but pushed it aside to make room for the new old stuff and wondered if these objects, years of things, were the all of him, a person defined by what he had touched.

  Rez looked up to the top shelf: a long row of photo albums, thick spiral-bound books with fake leather covers and gilded edges Rez had seen the million times his mother or father pulled a car into the garage, though not once had he actually looked at them.

  He pulled one down at random. Photos of the trip to the Grand Canyon, his whole family smiling with terror before the sheer expanse of
rock; himself at four years old and crying at the sight of a giant mouse head bending down to embrace him; at the beach, in a hat and thick white sunblock. A few birthdays and a few picnics and his face, round with pale hair and green eyes, unfamiliar to him but for the serious stare. Maybe he had always been that way in the center, the serious boy, and he felt bad for a moment that he’d tried to smoke it away, surf it away, somehow erase the gravity that radiated from deep inside.

  He skipped a few albums back and saw his father’s friend the rug seller, younger, a full head of hair, and a smooth face. There were pictures of his father at a rug store, rolling rugs and writing out receipts and posing with a family, an older woman and three long-haired daughters. Rez’s father stood a head taller than everyone else and his clothes and hair and sunglasses were fashionable and showy and Rez could not even bring himself to laugh, the man in the photo so different from the man who ate and slept and shat in this house. Rez turned the pages to see a series of photos without human subjects. Landscapes of the desert, mountains that looked like Tahoe, the Golden Gate Bridge.

  Rez flipped to the back and a thick envelope slipped out from between the last page and the end, covered in Arabic script, airmail stickers, and stamps of another country’s bridges and dams and turbaned men. The only things written in English were his father’s name, Saladin Courdee, and an address in Westwood, the handwriting careful and shaky across the front. Rez opened the envelope and shook out a single sheet of paper no thicker than onionskin, and half a dozen photographs, black-and-white with scalloped edges, fell out. The letter was in Arabic script and Rez stared at it for a few minutes and understood nothing. From the pictures he understood less. He did not recognize a single person, did not understand their poses or the places they gathered. In one, a tall man in a military uniform leaned on an old black car, a cigarette in one hand and a half smile across his lips. In another, the same man, same uniform, was on a blanket in what looked like a desert, surrounded by a few men in turbans and a few men in suits. The man again had the lopsided grin and Rez stared at him, his square jaw and light eyes, and saw something familiar. In another photo a woman stood in front of a lake with a few children at the level of her hip and a few at the level of her knees. The woman’s hair was uncovered but behind her crouched another woman, surrounded by pots and pans, and her hair was covered and her face sour with some old expression. Rez looked at the children, probably old people now, no one he’d ever met, yet every face familiar. He flipped through to the last photos, the man in the military uniform again, young, younger than Rez thought there were cameras for, his uniform still part of an army’s but an older army with tight boots laced up to the knee, stiff wool pants tucked into them. The jacket, the belts, the rifle behind the shoulder, the serious look on his perfect face, and Rez stopped and stared down and saw his own self, the same serious face, neither boy or man, lost to time. The same look, the same concern. He put the photo in his pocket.

  He put the rest of the pictures and the letter back into the envelope and the envelope back inside the album and thought about the line of life, from the man in uniform through his bride through to Rez’s father and into Rez and then what? And how? He sensed the momentum of it, the whole long unfolding line of fucking and fighting that somehow ended here in this garage, at the Santa Claus with a cotton-ball beard and the badly painted clay balls of the solar system he made in fourth grade, all of it the spinning tail end of something started in a time far before the times of these photographs, in the mountains and rivers of a faraway place where Rez’s face already existed in the bones of the faces now long dead, the faces of men and woman who didn’t know Reza Courdee, but knew one day he would be.

  He heard the garage door open and stepped away from the shelf, and his mom’s white SUV pulled in. From inside the sealed car his mom waved. Rez waved back and walked into the house.

  26

  How to become a man?

  Rez held himself and knew the organ in his hands was not it. He was male but that didn’t make him a man. Fatima slept beside him in sheets that tangled around her limbs, black hair flung out around like a dark halo, all woman, no part girl. But how? Because she bled? Because her chest was no longer flat and she didn’t giggle? She hadn’t had a baby, wasn’t married, and yet when the world looked at her, they saw a woman and when it looked at him, they saw a boy.

  Fatima rolled from her side to her back and Rez looked at her, the ribs coming into and out of view as she breathed, freckles spread out on her breastbone and shoulders, the neck a strong thin muscular cord, and the head, eyes closed, totally still. He filled his eyes with her as if this were the last time. He looked and looked.

  Why did his body jump to her and only her? All the girls before, Sophia and everyone else, never made him feel like this. He wanted their bodies when they were in front of him, offered or teasing his eye, but afterward he forgot about them. It was only Fatima he craved in her absence. When she called him, three weeks after he came back from Bali, nearly two and half months after the massacre, he answered the phone on the first ring and said Not much and Yeah, I can hang and Cool. Then he begged his mom for a ride to Fatima’s house. Now the desire had a destination and he focused on that moment with such discipline that when she answered the door in a long loose dress and silk scarf wrapped around her hair, Rez still let out a short sigh of relief, like a man whose plane has landed in a war zone after a turbulent flight. He smiled and said hello and wanted to say thank-you, for asking him over, for letting him back into her, and she took a step away from his attempt at a hug and pulled the door wide, her face a warm open smile.

  It is nice to see you, Reza.

  You too.

  He put his hands in his pockets and took them out again. She stood back from the open door.

  Come in.

  The house was empty, the whole family gone to a cousin’s wedding in Santa Ana, no one back until late. Normally Rez knew what that meant, but now as he watched her move around the kitchen steeping black tea, he tried, with difficulty, to tame himself of any expectation.

  They sat outside under an overlarge umbrella and drank the hot tea. Rez took tiny sips of the bitter drink and realized she had never before prepared anything for him, never served him more than a soda tossed from a fridge or a perfectly rolled joint. He drank and kept his eyes on the hummingbirds that came and went from the ornate glass feeder hung from the branch of a nearby Japanese maple. It took some time but they started to talk, and when they did, it was not the talk of adults but also not the conversations they had had as high school kids. Rez did not ask when they were going to smoke, said nothing about how good she looked, and Fatima sat up straight and the drank her tea with patience. She smiled each time she asked him a question and behaved as if the thing that had once banged around her bright pale face had come to land. They sat in the empty garden and Rez felt seriousness between them, becoming them.

  How was the trip?

  Rez wanted to answer in a few words but talked for a long time and with much excitement about the world he’d found in Indo, a place where Muslims were everywhere and no one, no single life, even the poorest ones, seemed stressed. He told her about his visit to the mosque and how he’d sat there and the way his whole body felt loose with a kind of love.

  Sounds nice.

  Fatima looked into her teacup. Rez saw the sweat bead around her forehead and lip. He wanted to lick it off. He pushed himself farther back into his seat and adjusted his shorts. He didn’t mention what happened at the airport.

  Your scarf looks hot. I mean, it looks like it is making you hot. I mean warm. You know what I mean.

  She laughed and adjusted the edge of it to cover the stray bits of hair come loose around her face. It wasn’t well tied, like the ones the girls in Bali wore, and he wanted to see her hair.

  It feels nice. Keeps my hair in one place. Doesn’t stick to my neck now.

  He knew better than to ask why she was wearing it, what was going on with the outfit a
nd the tea and the invitation.

  What have you been up to?

  Studying.

  Studying? Rez nearly laughed. School is over, Stanford doesn’t give summer reading, do they?

  No, thank God. I’ve been studying other things. The Koran, politics.

  For what?

  For me.

  Oh.

  Rez tried not to let his mind go back, to the afternoon at Javad’s house, the violence on innocent people, the determined imam, the YouTube clips.

  And what have you learned?

  That there is much much more to learn.

  Rez waited.

  And I’ve learned that so much of what we think is important, isn’t.

  —

  It is important to believe in a power bigger than yourself. To pray. To honor your family. To serve. To have a spiritual center. To love.

  Love. In six months of sex, long stoned afternoons at the beach, and parties, it was a word she’d never said. Whenever he wanted to say it, he resisted, knowing it was not her language, not even in that way that girls always said, I love those shoes. I totally love that show. I love that song. Now here it was, from her lips, love, and Rez wanted more of that word, more of her lips, more of more.

  She drank the tea and sweat.

  I started to cover the day after the attacks. The day after we graduated. My mom wears it and I wanted to do something to show I was with her, with my aunts and cousins and other Muslim women to show that not all Muslims are terrorists. To challenge anyone who came at us. I am young. This country teaches young women not to be afraid, I am not afraid.

  A hummingbird buzzed up to the feeder, extended its beak, buzzed away. Stillness and motion.

  It took only one day. Some guy threw a full jar of peanut butter at me in the parking lot of Albertsons and called me a terrorist whore. The jar just missed my head. I called the police, and when they came, they acted like it was my fault. They asked if maybe he dropped the jar by accident. If there were any witnesses. Maybe I cut him off with my cart. Without witnesses there was nothing they could do. Then they told me to be more careful.