Everything Sad Is Untrue

by Daniel Nayeri

  Mazloom is a word I can never tell you what it is in English.

  It is someone who is cute and pitiful.

  Mazloom is a puppy. But not a happy puppy, a kicked puppy.

  Mazloom is something you just want to hold and say sorry to. A victim.

  When I was four and wanted to cry, I knew they would laugh at me—what grief could a chubby toddler feel?—and I knew I could not run, so I would clench my fists and roll my eyes up to look at the ceiling as if maybe the tears would go back down into my eyes. I would stand in one place and tremble and wish the welling tears would just dry up. But tears are like genies. They will never go back into the bottle.

  My sister would say, “Akh, he’s so mazloom! His cheeks, and those little fists.”

  In the story they would say, Khosrou was always so mazloom that he had no idea when his sister would trick him. When Masoud would bring home a box of Orich candy bars, he would run and put his portion into the pockets of his clown. She would say, “Khosrou, let’s have a race to see who can eat their candy bar first.”

  At this time, Khosrou loved his sister and would agree to anything she proposed.

  He would shove the entire candy bar into his mouth. She would say, “You’re so fast. I can’t keep up.”

  As soon as he had swallowed the Orich bar, she would reveal hers and nibble it slowly while his mouth watered. “Mmm. This is so good. I’m just going to enjoy it forever.”

  Khosrou’s fists would clench and his eyes would roll up to the ceiling.

  That’s it.

  She was very clever.

  * * *

  HERE IN OKLAHOMA WE DON’T talk very much.

  She hates Ray and wants our dad back.

  I don’t know. We just don’t talk. What else is there to say? She is the best student the teachers have ever seen. They can see it in her eyes. They are not begging eyes. They are watchful and hungry. They want something that—for now—school can give. If she gets A+ in everything, and starts a club, and builds an after-school program, and scores perfect on all the state tests, they will have to love her. But she doesn’t understand that people are immune to the happiness of others too, not just their pain. They’re numb to everything. They don’t even see her.

  I think she thinks I forgot our dad and accepted Ray or something.

  * * *

  THE HISTORY OF THE CLOWN’S underpants is a secret history and I will never tell it. But if you think people are stupid and mazloom and all you ever do is take from them, then they eventually learn how to survive you.

  They learn to hide away everything they love, where you can’t touch it. And they won’t just hide it someplace easy to find, like a clown’s pockets, or anyplace in this world.

  They’ll create a new world, with its own language, and they’ll hide everything there—all the favorite jokes they won’t say around you, all the best books, the spot on the wall that looks like a keyhole, being safe and free and comfortable—all those things, and you won’t even know they exist.

  And when you’ve gotten your hands on the one Orich, and you’ve laughed at the badly hidden tears, you won’t even know there was a secret zipper in a bus pillow where the rest of the bars were really hidden. Not some obvious clown. You won’t know because you believed the weak can’t do anything.

  But hiding is something to do while you wait to get stronger.

  Deep hiding.

  Hiding so sneaky that it’s hidden below tears that you think are trying to hide themselves—but they’re actually decoy tears. Not real ones.

  Why did I even start talking about desserts?

  I don’t remember.

  I guess the point of all this is to say I don’t like the cream puffs here in Oklahoma, which they call Twinkies.

  * * *

  HERE IS A LIST of foods we discovered in America:

  Peanut butter.

  Marshmallows.

  Barbecue sauce. (You can say, “Can I have BBQ?” to a kid’s mom at potlucks and they’ll know what you mean.)

  Puppy chow. (Chex cereal covered in melted chocolate and peanut butter and tossed in powdered sugar. They only give it if you win a Valentine friend.)

  Corn-chip pie (not a pie). (Chili on top of corn chips with cheese and sour cream (not sour).)

  Some mores. (They say it super fast like s’mores.)

  Banana puddin. (They don’t say the g. Sometimes they don’t even say the b.)

  Here is a list of the foods from Iran that they have never heard of here:

  All of it.

  All the food.

  Jared Rhodes didn’t even know what a date was.

  * * *

  I HAVE A NEW FATHER here in America. Did I mention this already? It’s called a “stepdad.” His name is Rahim, but he tells Americans to call him Ray. My sister says the only reason Mom married him was to give me a male role model so I’d know how to grow up into a man, and so we wouldn’t be on welfare.

  Ray is thin and doesn’t have a beard—the opposite of my dad. My dad drinks alcohol, but Ray quit when he quit smoking (my dad is a chimney). My dad quotes the great Persian poets—Rumi, Hafez, Ferdowsi. Ray only reads the Bible.

  Ray cuts his hair kind of like Bruce Lee, because he says Lee is the only martial artist who deserves to be feared. Ray is a third-degree black belt in tae kwon do. I would rather face a villain with a gun than a man with Ray’s 360 back kick. There is no one in Oklahoma as good at fighting as Ray.

  We don’t talk much after what happened the first Christmas we spent in apartment 404. Except for nights when he comes home with an action movie. He wakes me up and we watch all the greats—Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Bolo Yeung, Phillip Rhee, Jean-Claude van Damme.

  Ray covers my eyes when there are naked women. He pauses the fight scenes and quizzes me on the best techniques. “There, did you see that?”

  “He kicked the guy into the spears.”

  “Before that.”

  “It was a side kick.”

  “Look at him chamber his knee.”

  He’ll fiddle with the VCR till it pauses on the exact moment of van Damme holding his knee up to his chest before exploding it out sideways into a guy’s stomach. “The power is here.”

  Ray stands up and moves the table so he can show me properly. He’ll stand in front of the TV on one foot with his knee chambered just like van Damme. He’s the Persian version of the Muscles from Brussels.

  “From here,” he’ll say, “you punch out into a side kick, or you can rotate your hips and swing around into a lead-leg roundhouse.”

  He extends his leg into a perfect side kick, then brings it back and does the roundhouse. He’s standing on one leg the whole time. One fist is at his chin, the other by his ear, the whole time.

  “Or, if he comes in, you chamber, he flinches, you put down the knee, switch feet into a swing kick.”

  He does the maneuver and swings his back foot right up to my temple. He stops a hair away. I don’t flinch.

  It would ruin the movie if I flinch.

  I know all the best kicks from thirty-seven rated-R movies.

  The axe kick in Best of the Best.

  The side kick in Enter the Dragon.

  The 360 back kick in Best of the Best 2.

  The roundhouse in King of the Kickboxers.

  I’ve done each of them a hundred times. Actually, I’ve done the other guy. The one who telegraphs his punch and misses with his other arm down and leaves himself open. Ray whizzes the famous kicks right past my nose, so close it tickles.

  By the time the movie’s over, I have to go back to bed because I have school in the morning. I have no idea where Ray goes. He’s usually not there in the morning.

  Someday, I will be strong enough to break his jaw.

  I don’t hate him, but it will be my job to fight him.

  I will not miss.

  * * *

  THE MYTH ABOUT RAY—the one I heard in a whispered voice from my mom—is that he was one of sixteen kids in a part
of Iran so far north that it bordered the Soviet Union. His mom died when he was five, and his father remarried a woman who had more kids.

  The dad was a giant brown bear, they said. In the mornings he would scrabble out into the woods and return in the evening. No one questioned him. One day when Rahim was ten, he dropped something—a bowl or a cup, doesn’t matter—and broke it.

  They say his dad stood up, grabbed Rahim by the hair, and dragged him across a lawn to the first tree on the forest’s edge.

  He took off his belt.

  He pushed Rahim up against the trunk.

  He wrapped the belt around the trunk and Rahim, and tightened it.

  He tore a long green branch from the boughs of the tree and whipped Rahim until he bled from his neck and arms and cheeks and ears.

  Then he left.

  Rahim was tied to the tree for two days. He stood there, unable to sleep or sit down. He cried out for a while but was afraid only the bear would answer. Only his new mother dared to help him. At night, she snuck out of the house with rags to wash his cuts, and gave him food and water.

  That was how he knew she had accepted him, even though she wasn’t his mother. And that was how he knew his siblings weren’t ever going to help him.

  After the two days, Ray knew he was alone. When he turned seventeen, his dad sent him to America to earn money.

  When he arrived, he had no English, no place to stay, and less than twenty bucks.

  But more than language, and more than money, and more than a house—he knew he needed an axe kick strong enough to cut down a bear.

  He walked into a dojo in Oklahoma City run by an old Korean man named Master Moon. Years later, when I signed up at a school, Ray called it a toy gym, cause it was run by a guy named Kerry, and it was full of rich kids with brand-new head protectors on sale in the back.

  Moon’s Gym was just a room off the highway with exposed cement beams and heavy bags held together with duct tape.

  Ray said they would do so many roundhouse drills that all the skin on the ball of his pivot foot would rip off and the blood would start pooling on the carpet—at first the size of a quarter, then a plate.

  They would stand in line, holding one knee up and Master Moon would attack their shins with bamboo rods until they passed out. Everybody in Moon’s Gym was a super stud. They weren’t afraid of anyone.

  Master Moon was a sixth-degree black belt.

  I know now that this part isn’t true, but I used to think Master Moon had the Death Touch—where he’d hit your chest with an open palm and the impact would burst your heart like a Gusher.

  He was a knotted-up old Korean guy, and since Ray couldn’t pay any money, he made Ray a deal. Ray went to live at Master Moon’s house. In exchange for a room and tae kwon do training, Ray would clean the Moon family house and make their meals.

  Mrs. Moon had a condition where she couldn’t work anymore, but she would rather die than eat some Iranian kid’s teenage cooking. So she would sit in the corner of their tiny kitchen and yell at him in Korean. Neither spoke English, so she’d say, “Cut the radishes,” in Korean and he’d say, “Pick up the knife?” in Farsi.

  “Now cut the radishes,” in Korean.

  “What should I do with the knife?” in Farsi.

  “The radishes. Radishes.”

  “Cut these?”

  “No, long ways.”

  “Like this?”

  “No!”

  Then she’d scream, and screaming is the same in Korean, Farsi, and English.

  Until years passed and Ray finally knew how to make bulgogi, kimchi, bibimbop, mumallaengi—all the super serious Korean foods.

  That’s how Ray became a third-degree black belt.

  And how he got that bear-slaying uppercut that he only ever used on single moms.

  * * *

  IF YOU REALLY WANT to know the truth, it’s the forgetting that hurts most. Not the secret police trying to murder us. Not Brandon Goff shooting paper clips at my neck. Not Ray. Not everyone thinking I’m gross.

  Those pains are pains that make me strong.

  I imagine the more they bleed me, the more I become like jerked meat—a dried bull, a hard leather.

  But no matter how hard I clench my fist, the memories pour out of it and disappear. When you kill a monster in Final Fantasy, it makes a sound like a groan and disintegrates into sand. None of them are strong enough to keep two grains together once they die.

  You could imagine the Elemental Fiends clenching their toothy jaws—but even they just crumble.

  That’s what forgetting your grandpa’s face feels like. There’s no good in it. Nothing to gain but nothing. A piece of your heart makes a sound like a groan and disappears. Then you poke at it sometimes, trying to remember what was there by the shape of the hole. That’s it. You are less.

  The truth is that’s why I’m writing all this. Behind me is the elemental fiend of my memories crumbling into powder. I watch an arm disintegrate and instantly forget what was there.

  Did I ever hug Baba Haji? What was that like?

  Did he smell like a farmer or a shepherd? He was both.

  Did his arms feel strong?

  You don’t get to choose what you remember.

  A patchwork memory is the shame of a refugee.

  Did I tell you that already?

  I could still tell you how I left the toys in my room. How many Orich bars I left in that bus cushion. But I couldn’t tell you what it feels like to have a grandpa.

  I also forgot Italian when I learned English.

  I also forgot all the bad things about my dad when I met Ray.

  I also forgot my granddad on my mom’s side, but he’s less important because I think he’s a killer who married a child bride.

  * * *

  THE FARTHEST BACK I can remember on my mother’s side is a meadow outside the house of my great-grandmother—who we called Aziz.

  Cutting straight across the meadow was a secret tiny river no wider than the length of my arm. I could hop back and forth, or straddle it like a giant. The green grass on either side was tall enough to flop over the banks and hide the river—that’s why it was secret.

  If you looked from the house window, you’d see a crazy kid jumping ziggy-zaggy across the field. But the almost underground river wasn’t a brook or creek. The water flowed through it at river speed. If you slipped when you did a straddle jump and a foot went in the water, it would grab your ankle and yank.

  I remember squatting by it and staring at the clear water rushing over the stones. My little hand wasn’t enough to block it. A few yards up the river, my sister put her hand in the river, but her hands were bigger, so every once in a while the water would stop and the stones would glimmer and tiny fish would flop between them. I would shout and she would lift her hand, and the water would come rushing back.

  I believed—as deeply as you can believe anything—that one of those fish would pop its head above the water and speak to me like in the 1,001 Nights stories, because I was the one who told my sister to make the river flow again.

  It would say, “O, happy boy, may the wise and eternal God bless you for saving me.”

  I would reply, “He is wise indeed,” showing I’m a good guy in the story who believes in God, and not one of those djinns who speak against him.

  Then the fish would go on, “But still, I am drowning in sorrow if not in air. I was once the prince of a great green city on the banks of a river one thousand times bigger than this, with skiffs and feluccas, and galleons sailing on it to bring my people silk, spices, and animals as you have never seen from the corners of the world.”

  “What happened, honorable prince?” I would ask, “What brought you low?”

  The fish would say, “I will tell you a tale passing strange and wondrous as a warning, so that what happened to the ox and the baker and my great green city might not happen to you.”

  “Tell me,” I would say, “Tell me, please, Mr. Fish. Tell me the warning.”
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  Even though I would ask three times, the prince fish would dart suddenly back into the water and swim downstream.

  To lose something you never had can be just as painful—because it is the hope of having it that you lose. The hope that in this world, there are magical fish who will give you advice and warning, when really, the future is unknowable and infinitely dangerous.

  The story of the magical fish is just a nice thing I imagined. I never had anything like that. I remember hearing my sister walk across the meadow from upstream. “Hey Khosrou,” she said. “What’re you doing?”

  I shrugged. The magic fish was long gone.

  “Let’s play a game,” she said.

  We played a game where she would stand upstream and drop a combination of wildflowers into the river. I would wait downstream and shout what I saw. “Yellow, red, red, blue.”

  “No, it was red, yellow, red, blue.”

  That was it.

  Not really a game.

  I would scoop the flowers out of the water and arrange them into piles. I could give them to Aziz, I thought. She would forgive that we had emptied her meadow.

  The last set of colors was, “Yellow, blue, brown—”

  When I scooped it out, I screamed, because it was a wet mushy poop. I threw it down. I smelled my hand. There was some left. I shook my hand and wiped it on the grass. I stuck it in the river, but my sister said, “There’s more in there.”

  A new bulb of sewage flowed past. I pulled my hand out and shuddered. “There’s a woman up there washing diapers,” said my sister, nodding upstream.

  My pile of flowers was ruined.

  My magic river was just a drainage gully.

  The game all along was to get my hand in a sewer.

  * * *

  I HEARD THIS ONCE:

  When the immigrants came to America, they thought the streets would be paved with gold. But when they got here, they realized three things:

  1.  The streets were not paved with gold.

  2.  The streets were not paved at all.