Everything Sad Is Untrue
Page 18
If my family wanted to smuggle anything, we’d just make custom linings for a luggage set. If they cut Mr. Sheep Sheep, like the bull, there would be no river of blood except for the one pouring from a small exploded heart in my chest. If you can believe a little kid like me could just fall over dead, then believe it here.
So we can’t go into the airport. And we can’t stay outside, because the Committee men would be following us. Any second they might peek through the window of our house, see nobody home, and realize what happened.
We stand in the tall grass and I clutch my stuffed friend.
My dad eyes a van driving slowly across the lot and says, “We have to go.”
The Committee men would have killed us in the field if they found us.
I look at my sister. She smiles at me the reassuring smile of an older sibling. Then she drags her thumb across her throat and points at Mr. Sheep Sheep, the same smile stitched on her face.
I wrench my eyes upward, without tilting my head—my strategy for holding back tears. My pupils roll back. My mom’s shaking her head, saying absolutely not. “It will break his heart,” my mom says.
I don’t know what she’s talking about, only that after being friends with him my whole life, I am supposed to leave Mr. Sheep Sheep to die.
My mom has the one suitcase. There are no toys in it.
Maybe we could hide him somehow?
I am crying at this point and have no idea why the world has to be like this.
And then I realize something. Something I hadn’t noticed.
My dad doesn’t have a bag with him.
He’s leaving me at the airport.
I’m his Mr. Sheep Sheep and he’s going to send me somewhere I don’t even know, without him.
I put down Mr. Sheep Sheep. He props up on the dirt on a flat-panel bottom. His stubby round legs poke out in front of him. His arms reach out for a hug.
I look in his black button eyes.
They beg.
I turn my back and my mom sweeps me up in her arms.
My chin bounces on her shoulder as she begins to run. I wave good-bye to my friend.
He won’t live past sundown, I think.
That was the third creature I ever killed.
* * *
THE OTHER TWO MIRACLES were later at the airport, but I don’t remember them firsthand, so here’s what my dad said when I asked him one Sunday from Oklahoma.
“Is that what she told you?”
“Yeah.”
“They weren’t miracles,” he said.
“Tell me anyway.”
“There’s no such thing as miracles, Khosrou.”
“Okay, whatever.”
“Only science. Only poetry. Only the mind.”
“So, at the airport …”
“And the mind can do anything. It can create anything. It is God, Khosrou. The mind is God.”
“That’s blasphemy, Dad.”
“So what? So I’m blasphemous. What more can happen?”
“People could be listening.” You can hear them sometimes, the American secret police, the CIA, tapping into our calls to listen. Sometimes we hear them cough.
“Let them listen,” he says. “Let them hear how all this talk of God ruined my life and took my family.”
He’s crying now. I think it’s probably midnight in Isfahan. He’s sitting in the dark empty house. The birds in the walls are probably asleep. Or maybe he opened the windows and let them free a long time ago. I don’t know.
I wait for him to finish.
Here in Oklahoma, the sun is up. We’re not even looking at the same sky or anything cheesy like that. We’re in different worlds. He’s calling from the land of stories and genies. I’m in the land of concrete and weathermen. Or maybe I’m in the new world, free and full of adventure. And he is in the dying city, crumbling into dust like an elemental fiend. It doesn’t matter. They’re far apart.
“How did we get past security?” I ask. “Why didn’t the Committee put big red flags on our passports?”
“Accident,” he says.
“Accident,” I say.
“Complete accident. We would have set off all the alarms. Big red lights the second he scanned the passports. Your mom was praying the whole time.”
“What were you doing?”
“Slipping money in between the papers.”
“How much.”
“Enough to buy an Orich factory.”
“So you just paid off the guard.”
“No. That wouldn’t be an accident. That’s how the world works every day. We got to the front of the line. Your mother was mumbling. The guard had a mullah’s beard.”
“So?”
“So he was religious. Everybody was insane but me. He wouldn’t take any amount of money.”
“Did you take out the cash, so he wouldn’t be insulted?”
“I tried. If he saw it, he’d be furious.”
“And then what?”
“I nudged your mother forward so I could sneak it out. She was so scared. It was a terrible week for her. She just said, ‘Please—’”
“Then what?” I said.
“Akh. Wait a minute. I’m telling you. She said, ‘Please—’ and then your grandfather, Arman, came running, holding your sister. He said, ‘Sima. Sima! Your son is missing.’”
“Me?”
“You, you son of a dog. Arman told us he took you into the duty-free shop. The toys were over on the other side of the security gate, and so you must have wandered over there.”
“I was probably looking for Mr. Sheep Sheep.”
“Yeah,” said my dad. He thought the story was cute, I should say. He liked to tell stories about how difficult I was, peeing in luggage stores and running off in airports, because that’s what dads who get to be with their sons every day do. They complain about it, instead of begging God to bring them back and pretending they were little angels.
“You were off being a little goat pellet. But your mother heard this and started sobbing. She almost fell, but we caught her. And the guard said, ‘Go, go find your son.’ And so he waved us through. If he hadn’t, we’d all be dead.”
“Did it take long to find me?”
“You? No. You were right in front of the candy shop. The woman gave you a chocolate and you followed her around like a piglet. We scooped you up and ran to the terminals.”
It’s weird. I even asked my mom if her dad had made it all up, but she said no. He would never embarrass himself like that. It was as if I disappeared for ten minutes.
“What was the third miracle,” I asked my dad.
“There weren’t any planes. We didn’t have any tickets.”
“Did you find tickets on the floor or something?”
“One flight going to Dubai had some kind of leak, so they landed in Iran first for repairs. Totally unscheduled.”
“How did we get in?”
“Money.”
“But it was totally random that the plane was there?”
“Yep.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah,” he said, kinda dumbfounded about it.
“It’s really nuts,” I said.
“Your mom’s had more miracles than I’ve had hot food.”
Then we didn’t say anything for a while.
I mean, you don’t have to believe any of it and I wouldn’t blame you. But if they were accidents, then it was like putting a jigsaw puzzle into a tumble dryer and having it come out with all the pieces in the right place.
* * *
YOU KNOW WHY I told you all those poop stories. Because food and poop are the truest things about you. I walked past the bathroom once when Kelly J. was walking out and the smell was so foul and sour it was like she could never hide her rotten insides, no matter how pretty she is.
Jared S. is rich, but his mom feeds him bread I wouldn’t give to the ducks and meat they color pink with chemicals, like he isn’t even welcome in his own house—so I feel bad for him. We all have our own pain.
If you give them sugar, they get excited and then crash. Their bodies expose the lie. There are no myths or legends that can trick you by the time you’ve put something in your mouth and you’re digesting it.
Even though people tell me I’m poor, my mom makes the best food in the world. And they tell me I smell, but I saw after gym class that they have “skid marks” on their underwear, which is poop that didn’t wipe away with the dry paper. They soil themselves every day instead of washing.
Anyway, I also told you all that because I don’t want you to think I’m some dingleberry weakstick whose mama is so gross that people don’t even want to eat next to me.
And I have a food and poop story about Ray. First the food story.
One night really late—so late it was early—I was reading the part where Sam the hobbit sees Gandalf come back and it’s like seeing his grandpa return from the land of death and memories. And his grandpa laughed, and it says it sounded like “water in a parched land.” I could imagine exactly what the feeling must have been like, but not what it was. Does that make sense?
And Sam thinks maybe all the sad parts of the adventure will come untrue, now that this one has. And the beautiful part is that they do.
Outside my room, the rain and hail were smashing into our windows. In Oklahoma rain can sound like the gallop of horses come to your rescue, or the laughter of darkness. It was late summer, when tornadoes ride up and down the state every night like wraiths, and sometimes attack the towns looking for hobbits, who are really just kids.
I had a koloocheh—which is a bready cookie stuffed with cinnamon and walnut, which is exactly like the lembas bread that the Elves make, which means maybe J.R.R. Tolkien had Persian friends.
If you ever read the books, that really is the best part.
Ray opened the door without knocking.
“Daniel, get up,” he said.
“Why are you wearing a trash bag?” I said.
“Your mom thinks it’s safer. Why are you crying?”
“I’m not.” I wiped my eyes anyway. “I was reading. My eyes are red.”
“It’s two in the morning.”
I didn’t tell him I was at the best part. Do you know how much I would have had to explain about hobbits and lembas bread and wizards who hold your cheeks in their hands and pour love into you?
A lot. And what would he care? The only dad he ever had tied him to a tree. He threw a black trash bag at me and said, “Come on. Put on your shoes.”
I followed him through the dark house. My mom was waiting by the door. She helped me pull the trash bag over my head after I tore holes in it so I could wear it like a poncho. “Be careful,” she said. Ray sucked his teeth, like she was babying me.
I put on my shoes. Outside, the hail sounded like clacking teeth. Before he opened the door, Ray turned around and handed me a box of three-inch nails.
“Don’t drop these.”
There’s a sarcastic phrase in Farsi that goes, “Good thing you told me, cause I would have done it otherwise.”
I didn’t say it, but it would have been the moment to say it. Why would I choose to drop them?
Stepping outside during a tornado, or even a storm on the outskirts of a tornado, is a pig idiot thing to do that no real Oklahoman would do. Tornadoes are tunnels of wind half a mile wide that pick up cars and fling them three towns over. If you have a barn, and it’s still standing in the morning, it’ll have rocks and keys and bolts embedded in the wood like they were shot from cannon.
Every kid knows you run inside when a tornado comes, find the thickest pipe that goes the deepest underground—like the one in your bathtub—get in, put a blanket over you, and pray to a god that listens.
We know this because Oklahoma has more tornadoes than anywhere on Earth. If you’re keeping up, that means they don’t just have a god who listens or a god who speaks, but a god who puts his finger in the dirt and swirls it.
Anyway, if the tornadoes don’t suck the air out of your lungs and toss you like a rag doll, and if the swarm of nails doesn’t go through you like shotgun pellets, there’s still the sheet lightning.
As I followed Ray outside, a giant web of lightning appeared in the sky like a crack in a glass, and lit up the neighborhood as bright as daytime for half a second. I didn’t even have time to start counting before the thunder exploded over our heads.
Another bad move is to go climbing a tall metal ladder in the middle of a thunderstorm when lightning is looking for just two kinds of things to strike: tall things and metal things.
I don’t know if Ray had to shout because of the hail, or because he didn’t think I was listening. “Take this!” He shoved a hammer into my chest. “And hit the corners. Watch what I do.”
I still didn’t know what he was talking about. I had been in a hobbit glade like three minutes ago. So he probably thought I was scared. “Don’t be weak,” he said.
Then he ran out from under the front door, into the storm.
I followed.
Immediately, everything about me was soaked. The poncho was useless.
Ray ran to a ladder propped against the house and started climbing.
I stuffed the hammer in my sweatpants pocket and followed him up. The wind was waiting for me to clear the roof line. When I did, it smashed into me and almost sent me sailing backward.
Ray grabbed me by the poncho and shirt and chest skin, and pulled me down so I wasn’t such a big target. It’s hard to look around in rain and hail that punches at you sideways when you’re on your hands and knees. It’s not weak to squint your eyes.
The storm was ripping the roof tiles clean off the house. There was nothing to hold on to. I played a sumo game with the wind. The only light was lightning.
“Go!” said Ray. “If it gets under the shingles, it’ll flood the house.”
He grabbed some nails from the box I was holding and started pounding them into the corners of the tiles. I put the box beside me and took a nail. You have to do a bunch of things with your hands if you’re trying to nail shingles down in the middle of a tornado:
1. Hold down the flapping corner of the shingle.
2. Hold the nail on the right part.
3. Hit the nail with the hammer.
That’s already three and you only have two hands. And don’t forget you have to hang on to the roof for dear life.
So I pounded the nail in (in four hits, which isn’t great, but not bad), and went to get another nail. At the same time, Ray reached out for more nails. I told you already, I put the box beside me. In case you ever do something like this, don’t put anything down beside you.
The box had slid off.
Ray said, “Good thing I told you not to drop them,” in Farsi, which is when I remembered the phrase is for when you warn someone about something and they do it anyway. That was when I realized I had to write down the memories and myths and the legends—and even the phrases and jokes. Or I’d lose everything. Maybe even the recipes.
But first I had to climb back down the ladder.
My mom stuck her head out the window and said, “Be careful!”
I dug the nails out of the bushes and went back up. Ray had another box of nails anyway. He just wanted to keep it closed so he could return it to the store if we didn’t use it.
I pounded nails into flappy shingles for another half hour and didn’t talk to Ray.
I thought, My grandfather’s house is six hundred years old and made of stone.
I cried.
Dear reader, you have to understand the point of all these stories. What they add up to. Scheherazade was trying to make the king human again. She made him love life by showing him all of it, the funny parts about poop, the dangerous parts with demons, even the boring parts about what m
akes marriages last.
Little by little, he began to feel the joy and sadness of others.
He became less immune, less numb, because of the stories.
And what about you?
You might feel what I felt on the roof that night. I was ashamed of being so weak, angry at Ray for everything he’d done, tired of being poor, and afraid of the thunder and lightning crashing all around me. I thought of my Baba Haji as I braced against the roof of the house.
I prayed to God I would see him again.
It won’t be in this life, so it has to be wherever God puts us.
I prayed that even though I was Christian and he was whatever he was, I prayed that God would still let him hold me once we’re both dead.
Reader, I think He heard me.
I think He’s a God who listens as if we are his most important children, and I think He speaks to tell us so.
I looked up.
The hail felt like nails.
It didn’t matter.
I opened my mouth.
Ray said something I don’t know what.
I was busy eating the tornado.
* * *
THE NEXT DAY IN CLASS, Mrs. Miller didn’t even ask us what we did during the storm, because Oklahoma people know that you shouldn’t do anything. Instead she said, “Today I want you to write about the strongest smell you ever experienced.”
But I already told the class about the wall of jasmine flowers in the garden of the house with the birds in the walls. So when it was my turn, I read aloud, “The strongest smell I ever smelled was last summer when I dug out a poop trench.”
She sighed.
“What’s a poop trench?” said Jared S.
“That is so gross,” said Kelly J. “I can’t—I can’t be here.”
I said, “Our toilet was broken so my stepdad made me dig trenches in the backyard to find where the pipes had split open.”
“Sit down, Kelly,” said Mrs. Miller.
“I have to go,” said Kelly. “Can I be excused?”
“How much did he pay you?” said Jared.
“He didn’t.”
“I would’ve told him no,” said Jared.
I doubt it, Jared.
One day, Ray told me to come outside and I thought he was going to yell at me for mowing too close to the house and cutting the tulips. But he gave me the shovel and said, “Dig.”