Everything Sad Is Untrue

by Daniel Nayeri

  Or she was dreaming.

  Or the pain medication for her finger made her brain wibbly.

  Miracles are easy to explain away.

  It doesn’t really matter what you believe.

  Because the point is that Sima (that’s my mom’s name) was forced at that moment to pay attention.

  She came to England unwilling to hear Ellie’s (or Sanaz’s) conversion story. When they arrived in England, they found a church that welcomed them. That made them Christians.

  Sima was a committed Shiite Muslim at that time, which meant—

  * * *

  You know what, you’re not ready for this.

  You kinda have to know the history of Islam—which Sima knew—and compare it to her experience in England as she heard about Christianity. Then you can compare the claims they make about Truth and Reality that we all share but also mostly ignore in different parts. Which is why we can see the same things but come to different conclusions about how to heal all our broken hearts.

  Which we all have.

  Which is such a big part of our lives that we don’t even notice the pain of it.

  We’re completely numb to it, because it’s constant.

  It’s so true it’s boring.

  Which is really our brains, terrified, hoping to ignore the fact that we have giant holes in our chests.

  That’s why everyone is distracted with TV shows and no one likes to talk about it.

  Our broken hearts problem.

  But we’re going to have to talk about it soon, so gird your loins, reader.

  For now, here’s a poop story to make you feel better. Or if not better, then at least distracted.

  * * *

  IF YOU WANNA KNOW how rich somebody is, just look at what they eat and how they poop. Everybody does both, so it’s not like comparing cars.

  Those are two things you can even compare with animals—so for instance, you could see some dude grab up a bunch of taco salad with his hands and shove it in his mouth like a bear and then go off into a porta-potty on a construction site and you know that guy is probably dirtier than the bear.

  Or you see people in Edmond who buy boxed cereal and bottled water, and you don’t even know where they poop. Probably every bedroom in their house has a bathroom with candles and potpourri and stuff. They don’t even have to smell themselves. And if you’re a king, you don’t even have to wipe.

  Poor people don’t get to choose what they eat, and they don’t get to hide where they poop—that’s why we think of them as animals.

  So there’s one aspect of pooping—being rich or not.

  But you can tell a lot about cultures too, by how they handle pooping, cause it’s the other half of their cuisine.

  Korean food is the tastiest but makes the smelliest poops.

  English food is pretty much the same in both directions.

  South Indian food is so spicy it burns on the way out, but it’s worth it.

  Oklahoma BBQ takes its time and sits heavy in your belly for more than a day.

  Oklahoma Tex-Mex is some of the best food in the world, but the poops are soupy.

  Italy has a great taste-to-poop ratio, which is probably why so many people like it best.

  And I don’t want to brag, but Persian food is the perfect balance of tastiness and on-time firm poops.

  That’s because Persians are one of the oldest cultures in the world and we make really nice rugs. So we had to make good strategies, or spills (both kinds) would be bad for the rugs.

  The bathrooms in Iran are so different that when I told Mrs. Miller’s class about them, it was a disaster.

  Here’s what I said: You walk into a room in your house and everything is stone or tile.

  “What about your precious rugs?” said Jared M.

  “No rugs,” I said.

  “What do the rooms look like?” said Kelly J.

  “Normal,” I said. Some people put flowers by the sink, or framed pictures on the walls. Just like Oklahomans so far.

  The difference is we don’t have the chairs.

  “What chairs?” said Jared M.

  “The chairs in American bathrooms.”

  “We don’t have chairs,” he said.

  “The chairs, the chairs,” I said. “The ones you go in.”

  “You mean poop,” said Kelly J.

  “Yeah, the poop chairs,” I said.

  “Toilets,” said Mrs. Miller. And then she spelled it on the chalkboard. I know how to spell it. I’m not a second grader. I just didn’t remember the word. It’s even the same word in Farsi. I just forgot cause everybody was staring at me.

  “Wait,” said Jared. “You don’t have toilets?”

  “Ew,” said Kelly J.

  “We have toilets,” I said. “They’re just not chair shape.”

  We have toilet bowls set into the tile floors.

  “So a hole in the ground.”

  You squat over them. They even have really nice inlay steps for your feet, so you don’t slip.

  “Do they flush?”

  Of course they flush everything away. We’ve had running water longer than the United States has existed. But you don’t sit in the uncomfortable position where it feels like nothing will ever come out because your butt is squeezed together. Squatting is way better for you, with less chance you’ll get hemorrhoids.

  “I’d rather get hemorrhoids than poop on the floor,” said Jared.

  I should repeat, it’s not on the floor. The toilet pan is just set at ground level. Rich people have lots of colorful stonework tiles around it, like you’re pooping into a little babbling river in a field of flowers.

  “Sounds dirty,” said Kelly J.

  “Yeah, gross,” said a different Kelly. “Can we stop talking about this?”

  No one really believed that bathrooms like that could be nice and I couldn’t find any pictures, so I dropped it.

  I didn’t even tell the Kellies that the dirtiest thing I can think of is sitting on a chair that clogs all the time and wiping butts with dry toilet paper. There is zero chance all the poop has come off with that method.

  Think about it. If you got a bunch of peanut butter and jelly on your hands—like, you squeezed a whole handful and now you’re sticky—do you use a series of disintegrating tissues and pretend all the residue magically wipes away, even though your skin is basically a sponge with a billion pores all packed with peanut butter, or do you just wash them with hot water?

  Cause it seems pretty obvious to me that all the butts in Mrs. Miller’s class are poop-smeared and grosser than gross.

  But I hadn’t said any of this when Jared said, “Wait. So do you wipe with leaves?” And I was so busy thinking about how ridiculous it is to have a basket of leaves in a bathroom that I said, “No.”

  “You don’t wipe?”

  “Class!” said Mrs. Miller, cause everyone turned into howler monkeys. “Class! Quiet down.”

  “We wash,” I said, “with soap.”

  “And your hands?” said Kelly.

  Of course with our hands. How do you shower?

  “Yes,” I said.

  “That is disgusting.” Everybody agreed.

  “It’s like a bidet,” said Mrs. Miller. “It’s just a nozzle that sprays water. It’s very hygienic.”

  I said, “They do it in France.”

  People like France, so that ended the conversation, even though the French kings pooped right in the hallways of their castles.

  * * *

  I READ THIS AT THE library one Saturday.

  Imagine you’re a rich French person. Your dad had an oil company or something. You have a giant house somewhere in fancy France. One day you get a fancy invitation to the palace for a party to celebrate the king’s new jacket or something.

  So you go. You put on your best outfit and make sure you smell great and you pull up in front of the palace looking creamy.

  The party is like a party in the movies.

  Everything is a fairy t
ale.

  All the best food served by servants from other countries.

  Flowers everywhere.

  Then the clock strikes twelve and the king yawns. He summons his minions to carry him to bed. People start to clear out.

  You practically float down the hall to the entryway. You turn a corner and—don’t forget you’ve got your fanciest shoes on—you step into a steaming pile of fudgy French poop.

  Right in the middle of a palace that looks like a museum. A big pile that only a person or a Great Dane could have made.

  It’s all over your shoe.

  When you lift your foot, it makes a shlorpy sound.

  Some other party people walk past, but they don’t even care. It’s just you standing there with the poop. You’re the only one who cares about it.

  Then the smell hits you.

  You’ll never smell flowers, or anything nice, ever again.

  Thanks for coming.

  Hope you had a nice night.

  * * *

  THAT’S HOW SIMA FELT in England as her daughter claimed to be a Christian just days before they went back to Iran.

  Because she knew no one else was going to stop to help. She had to deal with it herself before she went back home. Scrape it off her shoe or just keep going with it hanging on.

  Because if they found out—the Komiteh, if the Komiteh found out—they would cut my mother’s throat.

  She had to deal with it, even in the middle of her sister’s wedding, in the middle of a vacation, when it was the last thing she wanted to do.

  The “it” I’m talking about is Christianity.

  And she was a very serious Muslim at that time, so she knew what I’m about to tell you.

  And she knew it was crap news.

  * * *

  A HISTORY LESSON:

  When the Prophet Muhammad died in the seventh century, after he’d taken over most of the world, it was kind of a surprise to everybody. Suddenly, the messenger of Islam is dead. He’s just dolloped there in his best robes, and everyone’s huddled over his breathless body, hoping he’ll give some sign of what they should do in case he dies.

  And the problem is, Who’s going to take over? The known world is at stake and Muhammad hasn’t left instructions on who will inherit all the goats and the yogurt and the servants and the countries.

  His sons are all dead, so that’s out.

  The other two possibilities are his cousin Ali, and his right-hand man, Abu Bakr.

  You can imagine. It could have gone a thousand different ways.

  They’re eyeing each other over his corpse and fingering their scimitars like it’s high noon in an Oklahoma boomtown, except in the desert. Blood relatives versus the second-in-command.

  A tumbleweed whorls across a dune.

  The rigor mortis of the Prophet whistles a gunslinger tune.

  The fate of the world shivers in a dry saloon.

  The gulf between them was big enough for a whole religion to fit into.

  Burying him was the last thing the two factions would do together.

  The pushing and shoving would start even before the wailing of the wives came down from the almond trees.

  Here’s the issue. Islam was the third kid in the family.

  Judaism was the oldest.

  Christianity was the middle child.

  Then Islam.

  So the two groups were basically fighting over which sibling to act like.

  The Shiites were the ones who wanted Ali—the cousin—to take over, because they said we should be like the Jews. The magic is in the blood. The people. So if the Prophet had blood relatives, they were special.

  The Sunnis said, No, no, the new thing to do is like the Christians. Jesus didn’t appoint cousins. He had the apostles and then later, the popes. Popes were elected. They were the best person for the job.

  So the Sunnis followed Abu Bakr, because he’d been Muhammad’s best advisor.

  It was a fight between siblings. But if you know anything about fights, the ones in a family are way worse than the ones between strangers.

  The Sunnis and the Shiites went to war for hundreds of years.

  Until the Shiites—the ones who thought God wanted a bloodline—lost for good in the tenth century. But they didn’t go away. They stewed about it. They knew they were right. For years they would go underground, rise up for a few fights, then go back into hiding.

  It’s no mystery why minorities have to hide, and harden themselves.

  The smaller the army, the more it has to whip itself up into a frenzy. If there’s only one of you, you have to hole up just to keep the world at bay. So the Shiites hid. They even pretended to be Sunnis if they had to.

  Nowadays the Muslims who live in Iran and Afghanistan are the Shiites, and in Oklahoma, they call them the fundamentalists.

  This is all important, I promise.

  The main thing to remember is the magic. When people believe something, you can ask them, How does the magic happen?

  And what you’re really asking is, What can I do to be happy?

  For the Shiites, there’s magic in the bloodline of the Prophet. You still have to submit to the rules of Islam, but it’s sure nice to be family.

  The word for those people is “sayyed.”

  It means “master,” or “holy one.” And people who are sayyed have these lists that go, “Muhammad begat this dude, who begat another dude, who begat so and so …”

  So they prove they were begotten by the Prophet. They’re closer to God because they pray to their great-great-great-granddad. They’re pure.

  They get invited to all the best parties.

  Technically, sayyedi are entitled to a tenth of your money. But how many Christians do you know who give a tenth to the church?

  And very technically, sayyedi are the only ones allowed to be presidents—you can tell cause they wear the green turbans. But, of course, in the real world, if you’re powerful you can just say you’re sayyed and no one will say anything.

  Like if a big guy says he’s good at video games, even though you know you’d gank him, you just keep your mouth shut.

  People lie, basically.

  But who begat you is a question with an answer only someone else can tell you.

  You’re born, and when you’re old enough to understand, they tell you whose child you are. You get claimed. That’s when you’re born again into something—not the world, but the word, the family name.

  It’s the most important thing about you, whose you are. It’s more important than your race or religion. It’s more important than what shows you like. It’s the part of you that talks to itself so late at night that you’re not even sure you’re awake.

  It’s the concentrated you, collected in a pool of genetic fluids, creative juice, carbonic goo, passions, past mistakes, memories of other people, opinions about sweets, the intense desire to visit Italy, habits, the smell of your fart—all together in a thick maple syrup of your human situation. Your blood. That’s you. The truest thing about you.

  To the Shiite Muslims of Iran, the sayyed were religiously important because the blood in their veins was Muhammad’s, and the blood in his was God’s.

  This is why it’s unthinkable that a sayyed would turn away from Islam.

  My mom, Sima, is a sayyed.

  So is my dad.

  * * *

  I DON’T THINK EITHER OF them was lying.

  My dad has a goat skin with all the family tree on it. He jokes that it goes all the way back to Shem. That’s Noah’s son. He laughs when he says it.

  When I was really little, I remember old people would come to our door to have me touch them, like I could give them a blessing or something. Cause I was a double sayyed. Really, it was one lady this one time. I don’t even know what it was about. I was playing video games when my mom called me to the door.

  The old lady standing there was little, with a crooked back and a black chador framing her face, so you couldn’t even tell if she had hair.
Her face was craggy like my Baba Haji and in my memory she reaches out to cup my face in her hands.

  Just like him, she stared into my eyes and smiled.

  I just remember that one thing. I never knew if either of them got what they wanted from me.

  I realize maybe those aren’t even two different memories. Maybe I gave the memory of the stranger to my grandpa so he’d have a good one. Or just blurred them a little into each other.

  I don’t know.

  I don’t know.

  Knowing about yourself, about your family, knowing the name of a grandpa and saying it out loud so he can hear it. It’s probably the thing kids in Oklahoma treasure most. They hide it, of course, the way you should hide your most valuable thing. But I bet they walk around with a treasure chest full of clear memories. And the chest has their family name engraved on it. And the chest is their chest. The memories are in their heart. Their hearts are full. I bet. Full of something that isn’t dripping away into nothing.

  A patchwork memory is the shame of a refugee.

  I don’t even know if the strange old lady at the door was a relative or something. All I have is her touching my face. The rest is flushed and gone.

  * * *

  ANYWAY, HERE’S ANOTHER POOP STORY.

  I got invited to Kyle’s house!

  First I had him over for my birthday. My mom made a giant feast, but we also got chips for party snacks.

  His dad dropped him off and stood around the parking lot for a while, talking to Ray. Ever since he came to America, Ray has been in Oklahoma, so he knows how to “shoot the breeze.”

  He said, “Is that the new Ford Explorer?”

  That’s the nice car Kyle’s dad had.

  Kyle wanted to go inside, but I stood around to watch. Kyle’s dad said, “Sure is. Will the boys be alright with just the sleeping bags?”

  “They’ll be great,” said Ray.

  “Should I give him some money for anything?”

  I winced, because Ray would be super insulted if Kyle’s dad took out any money.

  “Oh, we’ll be fine. Thanks for bringing him over.”