Darius the Great Is Not Okay Read online

  “Four scoops,” Babou said. “And we crush the hel. You know hel?”

  “Cardamom.”

  “Yes.” He shook out five green pods from a smaller frosted glass jar. “We crush it like this.” He rolled the bottom of the teapot around on the cardamom pods to pop them open, then scooped them up and dropped them in with the tea leaves. “Cover it with water.”

  Babou grabbed the kettle. The lid was still off, from where the teapot had been sitting. Steam billowed around his hand like the scalding breath of Smaug the Ever-Boiling, but Ardeshir Bahrami’s skin was part dragon hide. He filled the teapot, flipped the lid closed, then put it and the kettle back on the burner.

  “Now we let it sit.”

  “Dam it.”

  “Yes. Ten minutes.”

  “Okay.”

  “Not before. It will be too light.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now you know. Next time you can make it.”

  “Okay.”

  Babou made me stand with him in a Level Five Awkward Silence while the tea dammed.

  It was upgraded to a Level Six Awkward Silence when Dad came in to take his medicine. He glanced back and forth between me and Babou for a second.

  “You okay, Darius?” he asked, which broke the silence, but not the awkwardness.

  I nodded.

  Dad shook out his pills and filled a glass of water.

  Babou’s mustache twitched. “Stephen,” he said, “you take these pills too?”

  Dad dry-swallowed and then drank his water—the entire glass—in one long gulp. He almost blushed.

  Almost.

  “Yes,” he said.

  And then he said, “Hey. Is that tea ready?”

  I glanced at the timer on my phone.

  “Another two minutes.”

  “Mind pouring me one? I’ll get Star Trek set up in the living room.”

  “What about the censors?”

  “I’ve got the whole season on my iPad.”

  It shouldn’t have surprised me. Übermensches were known for their foresight.

  But I honestly had not expected Stephen Kellner to bring it up on his own.

  “Oh. Okay. Cool.”

  “Thanks.” Dad nodded at Babou and went back into the living room.

  I played with the hem of my shirt and waited for the tea to finish.

  * * *

  When I got to the living room, Captain Picard had already started the opening narration.

  And Dad was sitting on the couch with his arm around Laleh.

  “Uh.”

  “Sorry, Darius,” Dad said. “But you’ve seen it before. And your sister was so excited to watch.”

  I blinked. It didn’t make any sense.

  Star Trek was supposed to be me and Dad’s special thing.

  What was he doing, watching it with Laleh?

  I mean, it was inevitable that Laleh would acquire a taste for Star Trek—eventually. She was my sister, after all. And Stephen Kellner’s daughter. It was in her genetic makeup.

  But I thought I would get to keep that bit of Dad to myself for a little while longer.

  It was the only time I ever got to be his son.

  The credits faded out, and the episode title came up. “Sins of the Father,” which was about Worf going back home to face accusations that his father had committed treason.

  It seemed weirdly appropriate.

  “Come sit,” Dad said.

  He patted the couch beside him.

  “Um.”

  We were supposed to get along in Iran.

  But did that mean we had to cancel the only time we actually spent together?

  Maybe it did.

  I sat against the edge of the couch and balanced my tea on my kneecap, but Dad reached out and pulled me closer. He left his arm across my back for a second.

  “Your shoulders are getting broad,” he said.

  Then he let go of me and leaned over to kiss Laleh on the forehead.

  And I sat with Stephen and Laleh Kellner as they watched Star Trek.

  THE KOLINAHR DISCIPLINE

  It wasn’t even dawn when a voice began chanting.

  It was far away, tinny, like the speakers in a drive-thru.

  But it was beautiful, even if I couldn’t tell what it was saying.

  When it faded away, I didn’t go back to sleep, because Mom knocked on my door.

  I pulled the covers closer around my neck. I had on my boxers, but still.

  “Yeah?”

  “Oh. You’re up.”

  “Yeah. The chanting woke me. The call to prayer. Right?”

  Mom smiled. “The azan.”

  “It’s beautiful.” I’d heard it the last couple of days, but I never got a chance to ask about it. And it felt different, waking up to it instead of hearing it while I was making tea or eating lunch.

  “I forgot how much I missed hearing it.”

  “Yeah?”

  Mom turned on the light. The Dancing Fan chose that moment to fall over.

  We both stared at it for a second.

  Mom shook her head. “I can’t believe Babou still has that old thing.”

  “You always say Yazdis don’t throw anything away.”

  Mom snorted. “Come on. You’d better get dressed. Your grandfather wants to hit the road in half an hour.”

  “Okay.”

  * * *

  The sun was still kissing the horizon when I stepped out of the house. I pulled the hood of my jacket up to warm my ears.

  Everything was quiet.

  Everything, that is, except the house behind me, where Mom was shouting at Laleh to get her shoes on, and Mamou was shouting at Mom to remember the water bottles and snacks.

  Dad bumped his elbow against me, his hands deep in the pockets of his gray Keller & Newton jacket.

  “Um.”

  The shouting inside was drowned out by the sound of a thousand furious wasps as Babou drove the Bahrami family vehicle up to the curb.

  Ardeshir Bahrami drove a dull blue minivan that looked like it had come from a different age of this world. It was boxy and angular, and it poured so much smoke out of its exhaust pipe, I was certain the Forges of some Dark Lord were firing deep within its catalytic converter.

  I wondered if they had emissions tests in Iran. It seemed impossible the Bahrami family vehicle could pass any sort of inspection.

  Babou stopped in front of the house, but the cloud of smoke kept going, enveloping the minivan in a black shroud before dissipating into a thin trail of intermittent puffs.

  I decided to call it the Smokemobile.

  I would have christened it, but the sale of alcohol was illegal in Iran, so there was no bottle of champagne to smash upon its blue hull. I could have used a bottle of doogh—the carbonated yogurt beverage that True, Non-Fractional Persians enjoyed—but (a) it usually came in plastic bottles, which would not shatter, and (b) it would have made a terrible mess.

  Babou stepped out and leaned over the hood. “Fariba-khanum!”

  Mamou dragged a half-asleep Laleh out of the house and deposited her in the Smokemobile. Dad buckled her in, while Mamou ran back inside.

  “Fariba-khanum!” Babou shouted again.

  Mom came out next, hoisting a bag of snacks.

  “I can take that.”

  “Thank you, sweetie.”

  I stuck the snacks in the trunk and contorted my way into the backseat next to Laleh, but then Mom turned around and ran back inside too.

  “Shirin!”

  And then Babou followed Mom inside.

  Dad met my eyes, the tiniest of smiles curling his lips. “Now we see where your mom gets it from.” He pulled himself into the van and took the middle seat.

  I wondered if it w
as all that safe for Babou to drive in his condition, especially such a long distance—supposedly it was almost six hours to Persepolis—but when I asked Dad, he shushed me.

  “Not now,” he said.

  I wondered if maybe someone had already brought it up.

  I wondered if maybe that’s why everyone was in such a bad mood.

  Laleh stretched and yawned and leaned against me, burying her face in my side.

  Normally, I enjoyed when Laleh did that. Being a pillow felt like the kind of thing a big brother was supposed to do.

  I did not feel like a very good big brother that morning.

  I shifted and twisted until Laleh got annoyed and leaned against the window instead.

  Finally, Mamou and Mom came out. Mom took her seat next to Dad, while Mamou took the passenger seat.

  “Where’s Babou?” Dad asked.

  “He forgot his tokhmeh for the trip,” Mamou answered.

  Mom said something to Mamou in Farsi.

  “Yes. Every time!”

  Babou hurried back out with a huge bag of tokhmeh and buckled himself in.

  “Okay,” he said. “Bereem.”

  * * *

  Sohrab was waiting for us in front of his house. It was hard to see much in the dawn light—the sun was rising behind the house—but with the curtained windows glowing, it looked warm and cozy.

  I scooted into the middle spot so Sohrab could sit by me. Laleh huffed and wiggled a bit closer to the window.

  “Hey,” I said, once Sohrab was finished saying hi to Mamou and Babou in a long stream of Farsi that seemed to consist mostly of taarofing.

  “Good morning, Darioush.”

  “Ready to go?”

  He clicked his seat belt.

  “Ready to go.”

  * * *

  Ardeshir Bahrami was a madman behind the wheel.

  There were no handles to hold on to—Dad called them “Oh-Shit-Handles,” even though he was categorically opposed to colorful metaphors—so I gripped the seat cushion and tried not to flatten Sohrab or Laleh whenever Babou executed an unexpected lane change.

  Mom and Mamou, who were no doubt acclimated to Babou’s driving, swayed with the Smokemobile’s inertia. And Stephen Kellner, who loved to drive his German Road Machine at unsafe velocities, was right at home, leaning into each turn like a race car driver.

  The streets were still mostly empty as we merged onto the highway, but Babou drove as if he was dodging enemy fire, pulling off one evasive maneuver after another.

  It must have been a Social Cue.

  * * *

  Like I said, it was supposed to be a six-hour drive to Persepolis.

  Ardeshir Bahrami made it in four and a half.

  When we finally pulled into the parking lot, my body had to adjust to sub-light speeds before I could pour myself out of the Smokemobile’s backseat and follow Sohrab to the ticket office.

  I think ticket offices are some sort of universal constant, whether it’s the ruins of Persepolis—“Takhte Jamsheed,” Sohrab kept calling it, the Throne of Jamsheed—or the International Rose Test Garden back home. One day, when humans colonize Mars, there will be a ticket office to see Olympus Mons.

  The real one. Not the smoldering caldera of my former pimple.

  Babou glowered at the cashier and started arguing about the price of admission. Haggling over prices was another Persian Social Cue, one I had observed when I went with Mom to the Persian Grocery back in Portland.

  Laleh had spent most of the drive asleep against the humming window.

  I guess I did feel kind of bad about that.

  But she had woken up refreshed and anxious to run through the gates and explore. She kept twisting the ends of her soft yellow headscarf around her fingers. It had sunflowers on it.

  “Your headscarf looks nice, Laleh,” I said, taking her hand to stop her fidgeting.

  She squeezed my hand. I loved the way my sister’s hand fit in mine. “Thank you.”

  Babou was still haggling, but Mom stepped up and whispered something in his ear. Babou shook his head, but then Mom thrust a wad of bills under the glass partition before Babou could stop her. The man at the counter seemed alarmed at Mom’s directness, but he handed Babou our tickets and wiped the sweat from his forehead.

  Ardeshir Bahrami was an intense negotiator.

  “Come,” he said. He took Laleh’s other hand, and she let go of me to match his stride.

  My sister wanted to look at every single stall in the bazaar that sprawled between the ticket office and the entrance to the ruins, but Babou managed to maneuver her away from them all. Apparently his evasive driving skills extended to navigating Laleh past potential distractions.

  “Your sister has so much energy,” Sohrab said.

  “Yeah. Too much.”

  “You are a good brother, Darioush.”

  I didn’t know if that was the truth. But I liked that Sohrab thought that about me.

  A row of trees hid the ruins from view. We followed the path—made of sun-bleached wooden beams—up a short hill. Ahead of us, Laleh wiggled out of Babou’s grasp and rabbited through a crumpled stone archway that had stood for thousands of years. Sohrab and I jogged to catch up.

  Even though the trees and manicured lawns were green, Persepolis itself was brown and dry. Pillars of stone reached for the sun, their surfaces smoothed by wind and age. I had to crane my neck to see their tops, but the sky was so bright and the sun was so high I started sneezing.

  “Wow,” I said when I regained the power of speech.

  Dad paused beside us. “Wow is right. Look at it.”

  Many of the stone pillars were broken. Some were cracked but still standing, barricaded with Plexiglas to keep people from touching them. Others had already experienced non-passive failures. Huge chunks of brown rubble lay forlorn across the loose rocky ground. Tufts of grass poked out from a few shady spots, but mostly, it was dry and stark.

  I felt like I had stepped onto the surface of the planet Vulcan, and was finally going to master the Kolinahr discipline, embracing logic and purging myself of all emotions.

  Dad pulled his sketchbook out of his Kellner & Newton Messenger Bag—Dad was never far from his sketchbook—and stepped off the wooden planks onto the gravel to sketch the nearest row of broken pillars.

  Laleh and Babou had already wandered off, so Sohrab led me to a giant statue of a lamassu.

  A lamassu is pretty much the Persian version of a sphinx: a mishmash animal, with the head of a man, the body of an ox, and the wings of an eagle. As far as I knew, no riddles were involved in mythological encounters with lamassu, but there was probably some extremely high level taarofing.

  This lamassu was one of a pair. Its mate had been decapitated at some point, but still, the statues towered over us, mute sentinels of a fallen empire.

  “The Gate of All Nations,” Sohrab said. He gestured around to the lamassus and pillars surrounding us. “That’s the name in English.”

  It wasn’t much of a gate anymore, since anyone of any nation could have easily stepped around it instead of walking through. But it was still amazing.

  Behind the lamassu, more columns sprouted from the ground like ancient trees in a petrified forest, forty feet tall, spindly but still miraculously upright. Giant stone slabs formed the remains of what must once have been a breathtaking structure.

  Sohrab held my shoulders and guided me through the Gate of All Nations, then turned me toward another long wood-planked path where Mom and Mamou were waiting for us.

  “This is the palace of Darioush the First,” Sohrab said. “Darioush the Great.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  My vocabulary had failed me.

  “Pretty cool, right?” Mom said. She looked back toward the entrance. “Where’s your dad?

  “Ske
tching the pillars.”

  “Go get him, would you?” She tucked a strand of hair back under her turquoise headscarf, and then did the same for her mother. “We should stay together.”

  “What about Laleh and Babou?”

  Mamou said, “They’ll be fine.”

  I ran back to grab Dad.

  “Mom says we should stick together.”

  “All right.”

  But Dad had to get sketches of the Gate of All Nations too, until Mom finally lost her patience and came to get him herself.

  She waved her arm at the crowds around us. “Everyone is going to think you’re planning a drone strike,” she whispered, her voice sharp as vinegar.

  Shirin Kellner could be formidable when she needed to be.

  “Sorry,” Dad said. He slipped the sketchbook back into his Kellner & Newton Messenger Bag.

  Dad knew better than to argue with Mom when she used her vinegar voice.

  He bumped elbows with me as we followed Mom.

  I didn’t understand why he did that.

  “Huge, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m grateful you’re getting to see this.”

  “Me too.”

  Dad almost smiled.

  Almost.

  Maybe he was doing his best.

  “Darioush!” Sohrab called. He waved me forward.

  “Coming!”

  * * *

  It wasn’t like the Ruins of Persepolis were an entire city.

  At its height, Persepolis had covered a huge area. Not as big as Greater Portland, maybe, but still. The part we were in, the part with the actual ruins—Takhte Jamsheed—was small enough to fit in our neighborhood back home.

  Sohrab led me through the Apadana, the complex’s main palace. There was not much of it left: several enormous pillars, even taller than the Gate of All Nations; and some ornate staircases, though their wide, shallow steps had a bizarre rise-to-run ratio; and a bunch of stone arches whose structural integrity fields had held up impressively well over thousands of years.