by Salar Abdoh
It wasn’t that simple, though. They’d offered him a choice: take the blame yourself or have Elahe take it. But they were bluffing, as usual. They didn’t want him to take the blame. If he did, then there would be an investigation into his job and they might discover the false import documents. No, they wanted Elahe to take the fall, a straightforward case of a scorned and vindictive lover. He’d had plenty of time since then to think these things through. He’d been duped. When she was being readied for the gallows, they’d told him it was no use: they’d kill both of them if he asked the court for clemency. The papers had a field day during that period: Jealous Woman Kills Her Lover’s Spouse . . . Murderer Recants Her Confession . . . Elahe Says She’d Do Anything for Him . . . Five years of living with these newspaper clippings. That’s why he was back. Because nothing mattered anymore.
The flower man was telling him something. “. . . Take a look at this album, son. Maybe you’ll like a few of the designs.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“But it does. Let me tell you, I’ve been in this business over thirty years. Rest assured, years down the road your lucky bride will be reminding you what beautiful flowers you had on the car. These old hands bring luck to young people.”
Behdad winced. “I’m not so young anymore. But all right, whatever you say. Whichever design you think is best is fine with me.”
He scanned the street as the flower man got to work. There were two motorcyclists on the other side of the road next to a juice stand. They both wore black leather jackets without helmets.
The newspapers had asked: Elahe, is there anything else you want to tell us? And she’d replied: Only this: I’ll keep buying flowers, just so the flower man won’t know that my lover has left me for good.
The car slowly became a feast of colors, just as the man had promised. He went about it patiently, fastening flowers and ribbons and leaves in two neat circles across the hood and trunk. Behdad came and stood outside watching the man work. Passersby made comments and offered congratulations. But the two men in leather jackets across the street barely turned his way.
“How do you like it?” The old man ran a hand through his white hair and smiled at Behdad. He seemed pleased with his work.
“You are an artist.” He took out another wad of bills from his pocket and counted. When the flower man protested that he was giving him too much, he put another bundle of cash in the man’s hands. “Pray for me.”
“May this happy occasion bring you a hundred years of happiness.”
Behdad drove.
The execution had taken place on a late-autumn day inside the prison. He was there; they’d ordered him to go. He had to be there as the spouse of the victim insisting on qesas. Elahe’s mother was there too and one of their relatives was holding her up with difficulty. Behdad could hardly look at them. “My daughter made a terrible mistake being with a married man,” she cried, “but I know my daughter; she’s not a killer.” His memory stopped there. He could not recall the stool being pulled from under Elahe. He could not remember if she’d said anything. Elahe was up in the air and he was still down on earth, his eyes glued to the ground. Immediately afterward, his life had been voided—fired from his job for carrying on an illicit affair, thus bringing shame to the bank and his colleagues.
A big stamp of annulment on his life. The road his only option.
Until today.
He drove on, farther and farther south until he was on the freeway that led to the Behesht e Zahra Cemetery. They hadn’t buried his wife at this place, but instead took her to her parents’ graveyard in the town she’d grown up in. The police report had said they’d found the victim naked in bed. They lied; his wife never slept naked.
A white car moved past him and one of the passengers shouted out congratulations to the groom. Behdad rolled his window down and honked back. He wanted the sound of his wedding to echo through the entire city that he’d just left behind. In the meantime, as he’d expected, the two bikers were there in his side mirrors. They stayed on him like a pair of wings, one on each side, keeping pace exactly a car-length behind. He pressed on the gas and saw them speeding up too. The white ribbons hanging off the flower arrangements fluttered in the air. He was a groom who had arrived five years too late. But today he was in a hurry. The biker to his right gradually inched closer until he was almost flush against the rear door. Speeding up again, Behdad reached over, swung the front passenger seat open, and shoved the box out of the car. As he did, he lost control of the wheel and the vehicle made a sharp turn in the direction of the box and the biker. The sound of metal on asphalt. The car was making for the guardrails. He quickly grabbed the wheel and swung it the other way, then reached over and closed the flapping door without slowing down. The other bike had stayed on him, though it hung back a bit now. In the rearview mirror he saw that the crashed bike had slammed into the rails but the rider wasn’t anywhere near it.
Newspapers and clippings scattering and dancing in the air on the freeway of the dead.
He pressed harder. At the Behesht e Zahra exit he slammed on the brakes and threw the car in reverse. The second motorcycle was fast coming on him now, followed in the distance by a semitruck. The whole thing took barely a couple of seconds. The bike smashed hard into the car’s rear. Behdad watched the man fly up like a cartoon character and come crashing down next to his spinning bike. The driver of the semi had in the meantime pulled over in shock and the infernal sound of his horn would not let up.
As Behdad began to drive again, the smashed-up trunk kicked open and up, causing some of the loosened flowers to slide off. He could see nothing now in the rearview mirror. The smell of burning garbage was overpowering out here. He rolled up the window and headed for the cemetery entrance.
He should look his best for her today. He collected himself in the parking lot. The tiny gravestone he had ordered sat in the trunk unharmed. He took it out and held it under his arm like a briefcase. He had to find row 253. The city of the dead had grown these past five years. Back then her plot had been the last in its row. But now the graves hugged the walls of this section from one end to the other. He walked fast, almost running, catching pieces of poetry on the other graves as he passed them. For her, though, he’d ordered a simple stone with just her name on it, Elahe Sattari.
He started running, like someone trying to catch up to a bus that was about to leave him behind. Her plot was easy to find: it was the only one in that area that didn’t have a gravestone yet. He’d fix that right now. He placed the marker over her and took out the small music box he’d bought for her when they first met and started winding it up. He’d never done this part before. It was always Elahe who liked to wind the thing up. At dusk every night she’d sit on the balcony, draw a shawl over her bare shoulders, and let the thing play just once. It was a part of her act. The romantic in her.
The music began to play. Ding-ding-ding . . . He had no idea what the tune was. But its sound brought back the scent of Elahe’s incense and the general smell of her apartment. Our Tehran Afternoons. He held his face closer to her. He could hear her breathing now. She was here, yes. He lay over her and listened and ran a finger over the name Elahe Sattari. He had instructed the mason to make her first name bigger than her last. So cold here! The dead don’t give off any heat? But Elahe was breathing for him and he lay perfectly still and recalled just how much she hated the cold. He wound the music box a second time. Footsteps came toward him. Patient footsteps, footsteps with all the time in the world in this deserted section of the vast cemetery.
Behdad glanced up to see the first biker he’d crashed into standing there watching him. There was blood on the man. Blood and patience. Not anger, but determination. The guy brought his hand up, pointing something at him. Behdad rested his head back down and embraced his lover’s name. A fierce noise rang out across the cemetery, and several bored-looking black crows took off from where they’d been perching nearby.
THE GRAVEDIGGER'S KADDISH
BY GINA
B. NAHAI
Tehrangeles
The first to die were the carp, which became cloudy-eyed and disoriented, circling the lake in slow, awkward patterns and developing ulcers on their gills and in their kidneys till they washed, wasted, ashore. Then the seagulls started to go blind and slam into things, or they fell, midflight, into the water or grass, or stopped eating till they died of anorexia. By June, little kids who stuck their hands out of the paddleboats to feel the water went home with burned skin, and the old Russian and Iranian men who sat in the shade and played backgammon all day complained of headaches and nausea, and the few fishermen who were dumb enough to cook and eat the bluegill and tilapia they had caught and frozen before the blight had to be rushed to hospital.
The daily joggers suspected environmental calamity. They called and e-mailed the parks department, their councilman’s office, city hall. They started a “Save the Lake” social media campaign, sent videos of sloshed birds and moldering fish to websites that covered the goings-on in the Valley and Los Angeles proper. If this were a little fishpond in Beverly Hills, they said, every resource in the city would have been drawn upon by now; if it were a swimming pool in Santa Monica, seven different environmental groups would have filed suit in state and federal courts. But this was Van Nuys—60 percent Latino and the rest are black or Armenian or Asian or Iranian, they got bigger worries than a lake being polluted in the park. They were lucky they had a park at all.
The good news was that some years ago, property owners around the park had strong-armed the city council into renaming part of the area “Lake Balboa”—which, truth to tell, sounded considerably more upscale than plain old Van Nuys—and that quite a few buyers fell for the posturing and paid a premium for the name, even poured good money in by renovating an old house or tearing it down to build a new one, which meant they had a bigger stake in not letting their investment turn into a cancer cluster. Among these residents were a husband-and-husband couple, Donny and Luca Goldberg-Ferraro, who had spent the previous nine months remodeling and redecorating their house. The younger spouse, Luca, was a fairly successful film producer with an even temper who, like anyone even remotely connected to the business in LA, believed he should not be subject to the same limitations as other mortals. For a while, he followed the news about the lake with dispassionate curiosity, trusting, as he told Donny, that “the city will take care of it.” Then he noticed the scent of garbage that sometimes blew in the wind, and confessed to being “slightly irritated.” A few weeks later, when a stray seagull crashed headfirst into their window and left traces of blood and feathers and brain tissue on the glass, he declared in the most docile tone, “I’ve run out of patience with that lake.”
Donny was a writer with a good two decades on his husband and absolutely no interest in the park or the lake or, really, anything that had happened in the world since the O.J. Simpson trial in 1994. He had published two dozen novels and was still writing well into his seventies, but he couldn’t remember the last time he had left the house except to go to a doctor’s appointment or a fancy dinner with Luca. He had bought the house with money he made from selling his first book in 1962. Inside, he hung giant black-and-whites of old movie stars, Garbo and Dietrich and Bette Davis, on all the walls. He had silk flowers in the foyer and synthetic grass for a lawn, and he kept the curtains closed and installed only peach and yellow lightbulbs in the chandelier and the floor lamps. His favorite part of the house was a glass coffee table he called “the cemetery” because it was covered with Lalique and Daum crystal figurines, “à la Tennessee Williams.” The table was situated close to the window where the seagull had met its abrupt end, which was the only piece of the whole matter that interested Donny—“Can you imagine if the window were open?”
That was on Sunday morning, July 21, 2013. On Monday, three more birds met an untimely end outside Donny’s crystal cemetery, prompting Luca to wonder aloud if he should “have my intern look into the matter of the lake.”
Donny let a full minute pass, then announced, “My dear, fuck the lake.”
But the next morning the front lawn was littered with avian remains, and Luca realized he was going to have to help cure the infestation or learn to live with the scents and sights of bird vicsera.
On Wednesday the intern, a Harvard Business School graduate who was “working his way up”—that is, for free—with Luca, reported that the lake, in true LA fashion, was “staged.” Rather than a natural occurence, it was a twenty-seven-acre, ten-foot-deep hole that had been filled, in 1992, with 72 million gallons of reclaimed sewage water from a nearby treatment plant. The park where it was situated had started out as Balboa Park but had more recently been renamed Anthony C. Beilenson Park—after a former congressman from the twenty-fourth district.
To Luca, the natural next step was to call the congressman at home.
* * *
Thursday morning a truck pulled up in front of the lake, and two men in official-looking uniforms started to collect samples. They came back the next day in hazmat gear to gather more samples and install orange glow-in-the-dark Health Hazard! Do Not Touch! signs. On Saturday, the district’s representative on the city council made a personal appearance at the park. He wore a brand-new pair of Ray-Bans, a too-starched safari suit, and sunscreen with too much fragrance. Fashion statement notwithstanding, he looked genuinely absorbed in the report whispered to him by the city’s “pollution complaint investigators” and “water-quality control agents.” He had barely driven away in his black-on-black Subaru with the two college-age assistants forever tapping on their smartphones when the website of LA Daily News erupted with the headline, Gold Discovered in Lake Balboa.
* * *
The ensuing flash mob pummeled the grounds of the park and made scraps of the rental bikes, boats, and kayaks. Within the hour, the Japanese cherry blossom trees were stripped naked and the jogging path was pockmarked with ditches, and so many people converged on the lake and waded into the water with their shovels and pans and buckets, the fire department had to call in riot cops to break up the fights. The 101 and 134 freeways were backed up for miles in both directions, and surface streets turned into parking lots and police and news helicopters fought for airspace above the area. Their noise, combined with the sound of cars honking and pedestrians’ voices, awakened Donny from his Ambien-induced, Xanax-aided, total-darkness-in-the-room-plus-black-eye-mask sleep that he likened, fondly, to being dead. Downstairs in the living room, he found Luca at the window, binoculars in hand, listening to his intern dish the details of the story on speakerphone.
The soil and water samples taken from the lake indicated not the existence of pure gold, but an inordinately high concentration of a number of chemical compounds found in gold. According to Wikipedia the compounds were known as “gold salts.” At a reasonable concentration, if refined and mixed with other elements, they are sometimes used in treating illnesses and in certain medications. At higher doses, they can cause gold poisoning.
For the first time in recent memory, Donny became interested in the news. He went up to the window and took the binoculars from Luca, then called their “butler,” Mehdi, from the kitchen to bring coffee.
“He’s late,” Luca reported. “He’s called my cell four times already.”
A middle-age Iranian man with washed-out good looks and a pathological drive to please, Mehdi had “been with” (that’s how they put it, because it sounded more elegant than “worked for”) Donny and Luca for nearly three years. He had started as a temporary chauffeur for Donny in 2010, to drive him to his physical therapy appointments after a knee replacement, and slowly moved to full-time status as housekeeper and cook and personal shopper and that amorphous hireling that is de rigueur for every ardent wannabe or unemployed has-been in LA, “personal assistant.” He was so polite and deferential, so utterly self-effacing and low-maintenance, he could be a nuisance if not kept in check. Obsessively punctual, he synchronized his watch with the clock in Donny and Luca’s dinin
g room and made a point of being neither late nor early by so much as a minute. On the rare occasions when some calamity held him back by any fraction of an hour, he went into a state not unlike an anxiety attack that could only be tamped down with a cocktail of high-potency benzodiazepines.
He called twice more that morning to say he was still stuck in traffic, and he sounded so shaken up and harried, Luca suggested they “call it a day and let you go home and rest.” Only that wasn’t an option because the gridlock stretched in both directions, so Mehdi hacked it as long as he could, then simply turned off the engine, left the key in the ignition, and walked the rest of the way to work.
He showed up with his shirt drenched in sweat and hands visibly shaking, so overwhelmed with apprehension that he stuttered like a pro. The minute he started to apologize for his lateness, Donny raised a hand and signaled for him to shut up.
“My dear man, your abjectness is irritating.”
Donny was still at the window with the binoculars, and he had stationed Luca on the computer and left the TV on CNN so they wouldn’t miss a second of anything.
It took them both a minute or so to understand, from his silence and obvious confusion, that Mehdi did not know about the lake. Astonished, Donny lowered the binoculars and turned to him.
“Come here,” he said, and Mehdi started toward him with jittery legs. His face was glistening with a new sheet of perspiration and his palms left tracks when he wiped them on his pants. He was rounding the corner of the Lalique cemetery when Donny added, “Haven’t you heard? They found gold in Lake Balboa.”
He said this with uncharacteristic enthusiasm, as if the gold had been discovered on their own property, and he expected Mehdi to at least feign excitement, as he did, just to be polite, whenever Donny or Luca shared with him some good news of their own. Instead, Mehdi let out a soft, truncated yelp, sank to his knees, and let the binoculars fall out of his hand.
