Everything Sad Is Untrue

by Daniel Nayeri

  You leave the room and enter a hallway of doors that look just like yours. Nothing else. A fluorescent light above makes faces look green.

  If a door opens while you’re out in the hall, the face in the doorway is unsmiling. It won’t speak what you speak. It’s scared, like you. Down the cement stairs, there is nothing but an entryway. The staff are not your friends. They’re good people, most of them. But other people before you were thieves maybe, or liars, so they’ve become hard. They police you. If they find out you put cinder blocks in your shower so you could sit down while you wash, they will shout at you and take them away. So you stay away from them.

  You don’t have any money. You’re not allowed to get a job. Even if you’re a kid who speaks Italian and looks like the other kids in town and could carry groceries or dig a trench or something, make mug rugs, I dunno—they won’t let you. You can’t travel. You have to wait.

  There are a million papers shuffling across a million desks under a million upturned noses. Eventually, one of them will get stamped and you’ll be told you can go be poor in Canada. But that’s still weeks or months or years away. You have to wait.

  There’s nothing to do. No TV. The radio plays gibberish. No library in the words you read. Obviously no video games. No Game Boy. No comic books. You might have a ball, but if it pops you shouldn’t cry. No art supplies. No yo-yos or whatever.

  So what do you do, you wonder. You wait. You kill time remembering some other place in your life. You count those memories. Maybe you were happy then. You cling to them. If you can—like if your family isn’t dead in Kurdistan—then you write letters. You tell them to write back. You beg for news. Any news. New anything.

  You have to wait.

  Until your mind starts to betray you a little. You count minutes until the Zuppa Guy yells, “Zuppa!” and you can file into the cafeteria for food. You count seconds.

  This sentence took you three seconds to read. This took two. One. One. One.

  Add them together.

  What else are you going to do?

  You have to wait.

  Five.

  Six.

  Seven.

  You go till the number is so big you can’t say it in your head in the space of a second, and so you fall behind.

  Two thousand seven hundred forty-seven.

  Two thousand seven hundred forty-eight.

  But that took you three seconds to say, so you’re really on two thousand seven hundred forty-nine.

  You’re losing time.

  You don’t care.

  Little by little, you stop caring about most things.

  Who cares if they ever let you go anywhere. What sadness you’ve seen. Maybe it never goes away. Maybe it’s the most true thing. Who cares anyway. Who cares if the people of the world don’t want Daniel.

  Daniel doesn’t need the world.

  And he doesn’t need the people.

  But you have to wait.

  It’s dark now and you’ve eaten the begrudged food and counted thousands of seconds and become so angry. Your fists go stiff and you stagger up the cement stairs to your door in the unmarked halls to your cement room and you lie down. And you admit you do need stuff. You whimper that you want love.

  And you wait.

  You wait all night.

  You wait for the Committee to find you.

  You wait for some stamp to give you permission to go somewhere and live.

  And that’s what it looks like. Unless you’re my mom. She doesn’t wait.

  She bangs, she doesn’t whimper. When we got to Hotel Barba and she saw the dead eyes of the people—not even begging to stay alive—she told us, “No. No we won’t do that.”

  Back then I didn’t know what I know now. The people just looked sad to me. So I said, “Do what?”

  “Wait,” she said. “Waste time.”

  She said the Hotel Barba turned sadness into opium. It tricked you into thinking you were waiting to go live somewhere, when you were already living somewhere.

  So that’s how she found that family I mentioned, and saved her money for bus fare, and the rest of her money for two pencils and six erasers.

  We took the bus to Rome where we thought the family attended school. But when we got there, we realized the giant building was their house.

  We rang the bell.

  A woman who could have been an Oklahoma mom opened the door, joyful and alive like she’d just walked out of the ball pit at McDonald’s. “Ciao tutti!” she said. “Or should I say, hello friends!”

  Her name was Karen and Karen was kind in the way that people can be, when kindness doesn’t cost them anything. “Come in! Come in! You must be thirsty. Where did you come from again? It must have taken ages. Can she get you anything?”

  “No, thank you so much,” said my mom.

  Karen waved to her housekeeper that she didn’t need anything and the housekeeper ran away.

  Back then we didn’t know that if you wanted water in American homes, you had to ask for it.

  Have I described Karen? Do you know what Barbie looks like? Can you imagine her twenty years later? She had an accent that I thought was Australian, but I know now was Texan. She said, “Well, I’m just delighted that they found y’all.”

  Let me cut to the chase. Because otherwise, this will take a while. It was a charity group that answered my mom’s letters and found Karen’s family—who had the kids our age, who were being home-schooled.

  The program had six subjects and eleven workbooks in each subject. I was in first grade and could tell you that that was sixty-six books to complete over the year. Every book had about two hundred pages. So that’s 13,200 pages. And there were two of us, so that’s 26,400 pages. This becomes important later.

  The house had marble floors so we didn’t take off our shoes. As we entered, a giant man with shaved blond hair, a business suit, and a holster with a gun in it walked in. He looked like the security guards at the UN offices. He was getting his coat from a closet by the door, but when he saw us, he stopped. He didn’t speak.

  We didn’t speak, because we were guests.

  Karen laughed uncomfortably and said, “This is my husband, John.”

  John glared at Karen.

  “Hello,” said my mom.

  John turned around and left without his coat. Karen laughed again, then swallowed it. “He’s just very busy is all.”

  In the back of the house was a sunroom where we met Janet and JR. If this was a book in Mrs. Miller’s class, she would point out that they were both named after John, which says something. And she’d point out that Janet being a finigonzon version of her mom, and JR being an angry kid who threw tantrums by tossing his super expensive glasses into bushes and making his mom look for them—that was all meaningful. But this isn’t one of those books.

  I sat next to JR. He had a buzzcut like his dad, and was using a paper clip to scratch into his desk.

  “My dad is a spy,” he said.

  “My dad is a sayyed,” I said.

  “That’s not a thing,” he said.

  “Then neither’s a spy,” I said.

  “He can’t talk to you.”

  “But I’m fun to talk to.”

  “They give him a lie detector test every day. He can’t be around you.”

  This part was true. For the rest of the time we knew them, we came in through the back door, and if I needed to go pee or something, I’d check to see if anybody was in the hall first. I imagined the secret police of America would strap him to a lie detector and say, “Have you now, or ever before, played tag, freeze tag, blob tag, or oonch neech with Iranians?”

  And he’d say, “Never.”

  “Have you even smiled at one?”

  “Never.”

  “Even the little ones?”

  “Never.”

  And they’d breathe a sigh of relief and let him into work for the day.

  Other than that, it was normal.

  Remember the 26,400 pages?

/>   Karen was kind enough to sit us next to Janet and JR—and later, after JR complained—kind enough to let us sit in a back room.

  Looking back, I didn’t even need that soccer ball that Ali Shekari popped, because JR wouldn’t have played with me anyway.

  We would sit in a row in the back room—my mom, my sister, and me. My mom would take a workbook that Janet or JR had filled out already and go page-by-page, erasing every mark. Janet’s were hard because sometimes she had essay questions, but JR’s were harder because he liked to press his pencil into the paper so hard that it made mountains and rivers on the pages. She would erase as fast as she could and pass the book down. Then we would try to fill them out again.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I could still kinda tell where JR had marked his answers. I told my sister and she said, “So? He probably got them wrong.”

  We only had two months before the school year was over and Karen’s family would want to go skiing, so we had to finish the sixty-six books in sixty days. But really forty days, because those were the school days and we had to travel to Karen’s house to use the books. I’m not going to try to make you cry by describing how it felt, or how they looked at us, or what they said in between all their kindness. Sometimes when you’re a refugee, you have to give up the dignity you’d have if you said, “You know what, thank you, but no thank you. Your son treats my son like a dog, and your daughter says, ‘Ew,’ if we get near her, and we appreciate how smiley you are, but we’ll figure out some other way to attend school.”

  But there isn’t another way. This isn’t America. You don’t have options. So you have to bring cold hot dogs you stole from the Zuppa Guy and spend all your money on erasers and sit on a bus for two hours and sneak into some people’s house who don’t like you and beg for their trash, which they only let you borrow, and you sit a safe distance from their kids and you erase. You tell your kids to hurry, no time for breaks. If you do it as hard as you can for forty days, if you don’t stop, then you complete the whole year in two months. But you have to erase 660 pages every day, and get a callus on your finger that won’t go away for the rest of your life.

  You can’t stop for rest.

  You can’t waste time with dignity.

  You have to scoop up every workbook as soon as it hits the ground like you’re starving.

  But also, unless you want to become an ungrateful person, you have to understand that Karen was probably doing her best. Nobody has to give anybody anything.

  For forty days, my mom sat in the chair for eight hours each day and never stopped erasing. If you look at her hands, you can still see the bumps where it bled so much.

  I’m telling you.

  Unstoppable.

  * * *

  MY MOM IS THE UNSTOPPABLE FORCE. The power beam you get when you hit level-99 in Final Fantasy and learn the Ultima spell that goes through the crust of the planet like it’s the crust of a pie.

  My dad is the immovable object.

  In Oklahoma they put two-ton winches on the fronts of their trucks to rip out tree stumps and even then, some of them won’t move.

  But my dad watched his wife and kids leave on a plane, and didn’t budge.

  At this point in the story, my mom, the unstoppable force, had run face first into the fist of Ray, and my dad, the immovable object, had flown to see us for the first and only time.

  They were neither of them, themselves.

  And my sister and I were lost.

  Mrs. Miller, if you get this, you can’t tell anyone what happened.

  * * *

  THE DAY MY DAD ARRIVED, I stood at Will Rogers Airport, wondering what he would look like. It was six years since I’d seen him. He probably wouldn’t even recognize me. I was a crybaby when he last saw me, who couldn’t even dive into a pool. But now I could do a 360 back kick, and had eaten tornadoes, and dug trenches and, little by little, like Mithridates—I had become unhurtable.

  I made sure not to stand too close to Ray, so no one would think I had chosen him to be my new dad.

  My mom was at home, making a giant lunch.

  My sister had gotten into a fight with Ray in the car over the radio, so she was standing much farther off.

  As people walked out of the tunnel, I imagined he was somewhere in the back of the plane, telling the flight attendants stories, making everyone laugh, and us wait.

  In times like this, Ray didn’t say much. He just stood there. If you said anything to him like, “It’s taking forever,” he’d just say, “Gotta learn to wait.”

  And if you said, “He’ll probably have lots of bags,” Ray would say, “Oh yeah?” like, You think so? And suddenly you wouldn’t think so.

  Finally, my real dad walked out of the tunnel from Iran into the middle of Oklahoma.

  * * *

  “KHOSROU! BEYA BEYA,” HE SAID.

  Gigantic smile. Big bushy mustache. Shorter and fatter than I remembered. His red hair had gone beige and white. He laughed and said, “You dog children, come here,” which is hard to explain, but is a nice teasing thing to say.

  “Baba, don’t be so loud,” my sister said.

  He had already scooped us up into a hug. My sister and I never touched each other, so we pulled away.

  Whenever I imagined this moment, Ray wasn’t there, so I never thought of what they would say to each other. Maybe when Ray looked at my dad—who looked so much more like a dad than Ray did—he thought of his own. I don’t know. They shook hands and said hello. We walked past a Cinnabon and my dad said, “Akh oonah khooban?”

  Are those good?

  “Yeah,” I said.

  He said, “Dar New York, messlesh dashtan.”

  Which meant he had eaten some in the New York airport.

  “Baba!” said my sister, “Speak English!”

  My dad made a funny embarrassed face like, “Excuse me, princess,” and I laughed. In Farsi, he said, “Forgive me, Madame, but your father prefers the language of Ferdowsi.”

  “Then don’t be so loud,” she said.

  My dad nudged me, like, You’ve been dealing with this?

  It was so quick, becoming a family again. We hadn’t even reached the baggage claim and he had his arm around me, needling my sister with his embarrassing behavior. It was so quick that he became human to me again, in the real world of Oklahoma, where you could buy cinnamon rolls at a stand in the airport.

  Before that, he was a voice from the other side of the world.

  And before that a memory of a face, and a smell.

  And before that a myth, a poem of what his father had been, what fathers could be, what place we took in the story of our people. He was all of Ardestan—all the saffron fields, all the walnut trees, the platter of pomegranates and wedges of cheese. He was the lonely mountain and the snake, the pheasant in the mulberry tree. He was the bull and the boulevard of jasmine. And tea. He was the house with the birds in the wall and the Ferris wheel in the desert. He was the fountains of Isfahan, the steps in the stone, cut by the hand of Farhad. He was the city of kings, and the voice of Scheherazade, the whirling dervishes that leap, the fire worshippers, the nomad Kurds, and the eighteen sheep. He was the sizzling kebab, from the land that once belonged to Cyrus, the late great shah-in-shah. He was the rug and the flaw.

  And now he was so small.

  * * *

  I HAD TO ADMIT THAT Ray could beat him up if they got into a fight, and I had to make sure they didn’t. As we waited for his bags, I watched him as closely as I could without him noticing, and I wondered how come he had gotten like this—his nose swollen, his legs waddly. He wore khaki pants with too much stuff in each pocket. He made jokes to Ray about the trip, the way you might talk about the weather before you’ve decided if you’re friends with somebody or not.

  When the carousel started and the bags from New York started to flow past, like a river of barrels, everyone had those new black suitcases with handles that come up so you can roll them behind you.

  If
I was Scheherazade, I wouldn’t stop here, because it isn’t much of a cliffhanger to tell you, his came out and it wasn’t.

  It didn’t even have wheels.

  It was the size of a van door, maroon, and leather. Maybe it was German, I don’t know. It lumbered out of the entry and seemed to slow down the river just by sitting on it. I could practically hear my sister’s low frequency scream of humiliation as she tensed every muscle. My dad must have felt it too. That every person in the airport was watching the ogreish bag and wondering what third-world goons could possibly own it.

  When it reached us, Ray jumped ahead to be the host and get the bag. Also to show how strong he was, to lift a suitcase that probably weighed more than he did. As he put it down, he said, “Nice.”

  And honestly, I couldn’t tell you if it was a “nice” like you do if you’re admiring how nice the bag is, or a sarcastic “nice” like somebody just wet themselves. I have no idea. I looked at both their faces and couldn’t tell.

  I leaned over to my sister and said, “Is that a nice bag?”

  And she said, “Let’s just get out of here,” which she would have said either way.

  In the car, my dad told stories of his travels, but not of Iran. It cost so much money to come to America, especially to pay everyone for the proper papers. Maybe he didn’t want to mention his new wife, who had answered the phone of our house when I had called for American Father’s Day and she whispered, “Don’t call here again, you dog children.” It’s hard to explain, but when she said it, it was an ugly thing to say. Then she hung up. When my dad called a few weeks later, upset that I hadn’t called on a holiday they don’t even celebrate, I told him and I think she got into trouble. She never spoke to me again. Her name is Mahsa or Morteza, and I guess she’s my stepmom.

  Anyway, he spoke in Farsi, “They have these cakes here—incredible—I bought fifteen in New York.”

  “Chocolate cakes?” I said. We were driving down the highway, past the brown grass part of Oklahoma that squats next to the airport. There wasn’t much to look at.