Tiny Dancer

by Anthony Flacco

  For any human being, the best thing about freedom is the power that it bestows to be able to walk away from something that is poking you, so that you don’t have to wait until it causes you to explode and beat it to death.

  Then you get to live in peace.

  Zubaida knew that her lack of freedom was only the product of the massive efforts to help her recover from the damage left by the teeth of the orange monster, but understanding her lack of freedom didn’t help her tolerate the inability to get away from the poking and prodding. It went much farther than medical examinations; she was continually poked and prodded from the inside by invisible hands holding unseen needles, and the needles jabbed her over and over.

  Her culture is built upon the life of the extended family and one’s place in it. In this country, she felt strangely naked a lot of the time. The pangs of separation prodded beneath her stomach and her feelings of guilt poked her with reminders of how much she had cost her family by carelessly dancing into the teeth of the orange monster.

  In this country, the constant strangeness of the language jabbed at her ears, whether it was the flat-sounding American English or the accented Dari spoken by her hosts. In both cases, the odd sounds of the words scraped over her sense of hearing like dull blades. Everything about America was impossibly foreign, and even though she had spent most of her time indoors, the weekend trips with the Grossmans helped impress upon her that nothing about this place resembled her homeland or her people’s way of living. Here she was amidst abundance such as she could never imagine, while her family remained behind in Farah in circumstances more destitute than before she fell into the fire. And of course they were also less able to keep up their home life because of the lack of Zubaida’s constant help with the unending chores of group family living.

  The harsh realities of all that made for too much poking and prodding to endure. She felt like she had been enveloped by a cloud of invisible bees. The needling stings came at her from every direction, intent upon revenge. They didn’t just come at her from outer sources, with the constant orders, orders, orders from strangers—the needling jabs tormented her inside with hot stabs of guilt.

  She needed to release little bits of that pressure by exploding in frustration and rage, and that need was becoming just as compelling as the need to scream away the pain of the burns had once been. She knew all about the civilized reactions that were expected from one who receives help and hospitality, but the need to either flee or to strike out was stronger, stamped into the cells of her bones and her blood. And since there was nowhere to run, somebody close by was sure to encounter a girl who was being driven half mad by swarms of unseen bees.

  That wasn’t the way Peter Grossman heard it, when he got the doomsday call from the NGO. What he heard was that the experiment was over; it had failed.

  Zubaida was going back to Afghanistan.

  The host family was now demanding that Zubaida be immediately removed from their home. They were no longer listening to entreaties.

  “What?” he barked into the phone. “She’s not finished! You’re telling me about what her hosts want, but what about the patient? Are we just going to throw her away?”

  Maybe, they gamely tried to assure him, she can eventually make her way up to Turkey with her father. Some of the hospitals there were known to be pretty good. Maybe the Turks would offer up the facilities, the expertise, the desire to show deep charity to a foreign patient who cannot pay.

  Oh yeah, Peter thought. And maybe she’ll find a magic lamp and wish it all away.

  It is helpful at this point to get a clearer picture of who was receiving that news. Peter was born in 1963, just a year before his father finished his surgical training. He was still only a year and a half old when the family moved to Los Angeles. His father, Richard Grossman, went to work for a Beverly Hills medical firm for a few years, then opened the first incarnation of the Grossman Burn Center. Peter’s parents were divorced when he was thirteen, and he lived from age 14 through age 16 with his father, whom he idolized.

  From the time Peter was seven years old, Richard Grossman had been taking him to the hospital with him from time to time, to follow him on medical rounds. The good life and the solid private school education that Richard Grossman’s work had provided to his son were alluring, but Peter’s sense of his father’s expertise was always the thing that he admired most.

  It was that admiration that propelled him through Chicago Medical School and a four year residency at Cedar-Sinai Medical Center in Beverly Hills. When he joined his father’s practice and began his own career down the same road, he felt a mixture of privilege at the opportunity and challenge to not allow his own identity to be swallowed by the many years of considerable achievement his father had already accumulated. And this case of the burned girl from Afghanistan was, more than anything else had even been, something that was his alone. Better yet, it was Peter’s case all right, but it was now fully supported by his father even though he had once opposed their involvement.

  This was the man, not yet forty, who sat on the other end of the connection with the NGO and listened to them tell him that it had all been a very nice try, but that it was now time to cut their losses and pack it all in. Zubaida was going back to Afghanistan.

  By the time Peter got home from his office that evening, his mood was so low that Rebecca saw the change in him as soon as he walked in. He sat her down to break the news.

  “They’re sending her back,” her told her in dismay. “They’re going to pull the plug on everything, all because they never arranged for a back-up family like they promised to do in the first place. Now they’re afraid to even look for one.”

  He shook his head. “We were so close.”

  It is also helpful at this point to get a clearer picture of who was sitting next to Peter and listening to him deliver this grim news. To see her as an attractive and poised woman residing in a beautifully decorated luxury home, it would be easy to underestimate her as some Beverly Hills beauty whose life had been velvet coated. But she was born Rebecca Gray in Odessa, Texas, and grew up in Irving, just outside Dallas, in a household where her parents had also divorced. In her case, they split up before she was even born, so that her mother had raised Rebecca and her brothers Michael and Steven alone, on her salary as an executive at Continental Airlines. Rebecca’s childhood ensured that she and Peter shared a fierce devotion to the idea of drawing a family unit together, as opposed to standing by and allowing it to be split apart.

  She and Peter were born the same year, and while he was in Los Angeles enduring his parents’ divorce at the age of thirteen, Rebecca was in Texas while her mother struggled with bouts of depression and turned to alcohol when faced with the financial burdens and emotional challenges that come with parenting three teenagers alone.

  At thirteen, Rebecca began to pitch in more and more to keep things functioning at home, on top of working outside of school for spending money while participating in a full roster of school activities. She replaced an uncomfortable home life with a happier social life through her combination of beauty, brains and ambition, and rose among her peers as an enthusiastic leader with a refined ability to make friends. She carried those traits into an early career as an airline flight attendant, then went on to become a successful entrepreneur in the medical equipment field, making her way as a single woman in that male-dominated industry.

  She was also no stranger to the world’s misery, since her mother’s airline position gave them the opportunity to fly all over the planet for very low rates. Her mother saw to it that they were exposed to many different cultures in Asia, Africa and Europe.

  And so, by this point in Rebecca’s life, she had become so adept at overcoming emotional adversity that the idea of standing by and allowing Zubaida’s medical recovery to be slashed in half, simply because nobody in Los Angeles was willing to ride the emotional roller coaster, was a notion that fell squarely on her list of things that can never
be permitted to happen.

  She and Peter sat up talking for a long time that night. The upshot was that neither one found the situation tolerable. The way they reasoned it out, they were young and healthy, they wished for a child of their own, and until that happened, they had a place in their hearts and home for temporary custody of Zubaida, and they had the financial wherewithal to make the necessary arrangements and absorb the considerable costs.

  The next day, they contacted the charitable NGO and announced their intention to gain official approval as Zubaida’s new host family, then made sure that the current host family knew that relief was on the way. They also prepared to overcome any potential objections from official corners by asking the court to declare them to be Zubaida’s new legal guardians. The complex process, which could easily consume months of legal maneuvering, was accepted as an emergency hearing and took place in days instead.

  On the first of November, by the time that the presiding judge heard all the arguments and got the full picture about what Rebecca and Peter were agreeing to do, on top of what they had already done to restore Zubaida’s life, he ruled in favor of granting them custody while the rest of her treatment was completed, noting that she would be staying inside of a home where she would be guaranteed dignity and respect in addition to the necessities of survival. He ended the proceedings by smiling at them and saying, “God bless you.”

  Two days later, Zubaida was dropped off at their house carrying a couple of small bags and a burning resentment, in a state of complete turmoil about whatever was happening to her. Somehow, she had arrived at a firm conclusion that the host family did not want her to leave, and that Rebecca and Peter had mysteriously used their influence to “steal” Zubaida away from them and to bring her into their own home—all against the host family’s wishes.

  But it was done. And she was there, and their rocky road as a family was about to begin. Three people now lived in the Grossman household, even though so far, only two of them considered that to be a good thing.

  Chapter Seven

  For Zubaida, the only response that made sense in the middle of this crumbling situation was to cover herself with a thick shell of glum attitude and stay hidden underneath it. She could tell that everything was falling apart around her, but she couldn’t make any sense out of whatever it was that the Others were planning to do with her. It seemed pretty clear that the host family was afraid of her because of her temper, or maybe that they were mad because she didn’t like to listen to them. Or maybe somebody was even punishing her for going out and walking around, finding out a little something about freedom. She knew that under the Taliban, she was now past the age of being allowed to walk long distances by herself. The thing that the American adults did not seem to appreciate was that every step that she took alone out there on the American streets was a dance of freedom. The dance defied the black-turbaned overseers who had somehow managed to travel halfway around the world inside of her brain so that they could generate this torment inside of her.

  So while the adults talked in the living room, she made her way through the huge house and into the kitchen, where she crawled under the dining table and curled up into a space that was like a little cave. Her head was packed with conflicting stories about whether her hosts insisted on getting rid of her or not. Either her host family had decided that the answer to the question as of whether the Afghan girl had lost her mind was “yes,” and they were forcing her out of their home—or else they still wanted her to live with them, but Dr. Peter and Rebecca had done some mysterious things that she didn’t know about. And whatever those things were, the result was that now she had to live with them instead.

  At that moment Zubaida had nothing more to grasp onto than the fact that Dr. Peter had helped her so much—even though the surgeries always scared her and the recoveries still hurt, no matter how much better the American doctors might be—and the fact that Rebecca was so friendly with her on the two weekends that they spent together.

  That didn’t mean that things were all right. She already knew that the doctors and nurses only told her a little piece of the truth about whatever they were doing. They acted like they thought she wouldn’t understand it, but what else weren’t they telling her?

  She knew that the Others were the same as her own people in one sense; they really didn’t like it when she got extremely upset. She had been getting extremely upset a lot, lately, so could they be taking her to Dr. Peter’s house so that he could operate on her even more? Was everybody just not telling her, so she wouldn’t get extremely upset?

  It was as if everyone and everything around her were all individual cogs of some giant and unseen Other machine, grinding away and pulling her through its mechanical innards whether she struggled against it or not. Her sense of danger came more from the idea that no matter how much certain people were trying to help her, she was in danger of being consumed and disappearing inside of the invisible Other machine—never to come out.

  And if so, what would anyone do? What would her father do, back there in their homeland, so remote that they couldn’t even speak on the phone? It struck her, then, that her family couldn’t possibly know whether she was even alive at the moment. So how would they know if things went bad here? How would they find out?

  Her dark musings were cut short when the front door of the house closed. The former host family was gone. That was it, then. On one hand, she felt like a new snake crawling out of an old skin. Now they couldn’t make her do things as if they were her mother and father, anymore. Even though their Dari was rough on Zubaida’s ear, there was still enough common language for conversation, which meant that she had to endure their endless suggestions.

  But now she was alone in the home of her doctor and his wife, and there was no common language between them at all except for a handful of random words she had picked up at the hospital and around the host family’s house. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. Without language, it would be a lot harder to boss her around. People would have to leave her alone. As for Dr. Peter, he would surely be gone at the hospital all day, so he couldn’t boss her around except when she was there for treatment, and as for Rebecca—she was so smiley and pleasant all the time that it seemed pretty certain there would be no trouble from her. Zubaida only wanted to concentrate on getting through this whole experience and making it back home alive. She didn’t need anything else from these people. She still had her attitude shell for protection, thicker than the scars had once been. In fact, she felt pretty sure that she would be able to get Rebecca to leave her alone and to let her do whatever she wanted, just to keep things smiley and pleasant. She had already figured out that Rebecca liked it that way.

  It was a fair assumption to make, since she couldn’t know how different Rebecca’s background was from the way she assumed it to be. She couldn’t have any idea of the fire in Rebecca’s belly, as real as the heat that seared Zubaida’s face. They shared a kinship in more ways than one.

  * * *

  Babble was everywhere, in November of 2002, like an airborne virus made of sound. Stories, more stories, versions, more versions, some of them had to be lies because they couldn’t all be true. Zubaida struggled to figure out the true story behind her new residence at Dr. Peter and Rebecca’s home. At the same time that she was weighing the conflicting stories in her life, the world she that had come from and the world that she now occupied. Each babbled their conflicting ideas across the worldwide media because it is self-evident that each knows what to do about the human condition.

  Fears were voiced throughout the ranks of pundits and power brokers that the lines between friend and enemy could no longer be discerned. The U.S. Senate debated the meaning of a laundry list of “Coincidences” as they were what were ironically called, regarding Saudi connections to anti-American terrorists. The confusion began when the wife of the Saudi Ambassador to the United States was proven to have supplied a steady stream of cash to two of the hijackers who would eve
ntually crash the plane into the Pentagon. The Saudi Embassy dismissed the situation as nothing more than charitable giving on her part to two of her countrymen who, although strangers, had simply written to her and asked for help. Still Senate concerns were unusually strong because the majority of the hijackers were Saudi citizens. It was also noted that there is no fundamental difference in the mission statement of the fundamentalist Muslim terrorists and the Saudi government. That includes the idea of Islamic superiority over the evils of Western culture, the rejection of all Jewish people including their homeland and their faith, and most importantly, both extol the Divine purposes of the Arab world’s oil wealth.

  Senator Joe Lieberman, Democrat from Connecticut, spoke about the Saudis on the CBS show Face The Nation, saying, “for too many generations they have pacified and accommodated themselves to the most extreme, fanatical, violent elements of Islam, and those elements have now turned on us and on the rest of the world.”

  On the opposite side of the political spectrum, the conservative National Review.com printed various articles concluding that: (a) the reason for the hatred of the U.S. in the Middle East was because the first President Bush left Saddam in power after the Desert Storm in 1990; (b) the reason to go back to war against Iraq a second time is because North Korea already has nukes, which is bad enough, and Saddam shouldn’t be allowed to get them himself; and (c) that Canada’s lamentable lack of support for the U.S. war on terror is the result of generations of complacency on the part of the Canadians, living as they do in protected peace atop the United States.

  A solution was presented, perhaps not entirely in jest, which involved setting off a couple of massive “terrorist” bombs on Canadian soil—just to watch how quickly they would manage to arm themselves as a nation, get on board with the USA and go long for the big win.