Darius the Great Is Not Okay Read online

  “Do you understand Farsi?”

  “No. My wife does.”

  The Customs officer turned to Mom and asked her a few questions in Farsi, too fast for me to make out any words other than you (he used the formal shomaa). He nodded and handed back our passports.

  “Welcome to Iran.”

  “Merci,” Dad said.

  Farsi and French use the exact same word for “thank you.” Mom had never been able to adequately explain why.

  I tucked my passport back into my borrowed messenger bag and snapped the clasp shut before following Dad. Behind us, Laleh clung to Mom’s hand, dragging her feet so her shoes squeaked on the tile floor.

  “I’m tired,” she reminded us.

  “I know, sweetie,” Mom said. “You can rest on the way to Yazd.”

  “My feet hurt.”

  “I can carry her,” I said, but then I had to stop, because another Customs officer stepped right in front of me with his hand up.

  “Come with me, please,” he said.

  “Uh.”

  My first instinct was to run.

  Unlike his predecessor, Customs Officer II did not look sleepy at all. He looked keen and alert. His eyebrows contracted into a sharp arrow above his long nose.

  “Um. Okay. Mom?”

  Mom called to Dad, who hadn’t noticed I’d been stopped. She tried to follow me, dragging Laleh, who skidded across the tile floor on her rubber soles, but the officer held up his hand, careful not to touch her.

  “Only him.”

  I wondered what I had done that made him single me out.

  I wondered what made me such a target.

  I wondered what it was he wanted.

  Mom said something in Farsi, and the officer answered, but again, it was too fast for me to make anything out. Not that I could have made out much, unless they were talking about food.

  Customs Officer II shook his head, took me by the elbow, and led me away.

  * * *

  There is an episode in the sixth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “Chain of Command.”

  Actually, it’s a two-part episode, so it’s “Chain of Command, Parts I & II.” In it, Captain Picard gets captured by Cardassians at the end of Part I, and spends most of Part II getting interrogated and tortured. The interrogator, Gul Madred, shines four lights in Captain Picard’s face and keeps asking how many there are.

  Every time, Captain Picard answers “four,” but Gul Madred tries to break him by insisting there are five.

  Customs Officer II led me to a small room.

  There were four fluorescent lights in the ceiling.

  When he sat down behind a large wood-grained desk—the kind where it was obviously not made of wood, but covered with something that looked like it—my heart thundered.

  Unlike Customs Officer I, Customs Officer II did have the full and resplendent beard of a True Persian.

  “Passport?”

  His voice was deep, crisp, and heavy.

  I dug through my Kellner & Newton Messenger Bag, wishing again for my old backpack, my fingers fumbling for the passport I had slid inside only a few minutes before.

  “Why are you in Iran?”

  “Visiting my family,” I said. “My grandfather has a brain tumor.”

  Customs Officer II nodded and wrote something down. He didn’t look particularly sorry about my grandfather’s brain tumor.

  There was a dark window behind his seat—one of those windows that you can see through from only one direction.

  I didn’t get why they were called two-way mirrors when they were really one-way windows.

  “How long are you here for?”

  “Um. Leaving April third.”

  “You have your papers? Airline tickets?”

  I swallowed. “My dad has everything.”

  “Where is your father?”

  “Outside.” I hoped.

  I assumed Mom had stopped him, but it would not be the first time Stephen Kellner had accidentally left me behind.

  Mom still liked to tell the story of my first real trip to the grocery store. Apparently I managed to climb out of the shopping cart on my own and start wandering the aisles, and Dad didn’t realize I wasn’t sitting in the cart until he reached the cash register.

  I scratched my ear. Customs Officer II was still writing. I couldn’t read Farsi at all, not even food words, but it made me nervous.

  There were four lights.

  “What is in your bag?”

  I was so nervous, I dropped it.

  “Sorry. Um. It’s my homework. For school. And a book. And my medicine.”

  He opened and closed his hand, gesturing for me to hand it over. I picked the messenger bag off the floor and passed it to him. He dug through it, pulling out my school papers and The Lord of the Rings.

  He thumbed through The Lord of the Rings for a minute and then tossed it aside, digging deeper until he pulled out my little orange child-proof medicine bottle.

  “You have prescription?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Um. At home. It’s written on the bottle.”

  “What is this for?”

  “Depression.”

  “That’s all it’s for? What are you depressed about?”

  My ears burned. I glanced up at the four lights and hoped I wasn’t going to be chained to the ceiling and stripped naked.

  I hated that question: What are you depressed about? Because the answer was nothing.

  I had nothing to be depressed about. Nothing really bad had ever happened to me.

  I felt so inadequate.

  Dad told me I couldn’t help my brain chemistry any more than I could help having brown eyes. Dr. Howell always told me not to be ashamed.

  But moments like this made it hard not to be.

  “Nothing,” I said. “My brain just makes the wrong chemicals is all.”

  “Probably your diet,” Customs Officer II said. He looked me up and down. “Too many sweets.”

  I swallowed away the sand in my throat. My ears burned hotter than a matter/antimatter reaction chamber.

  Customs Officer II pointed at the Kellner & Newton logo stitched onto the corner of my messenger bag’s front flap. “What is this?”

  “Um. My dad’s company. He and his partner are architects.”

  Customs Officer II’s eyebrows shot up. “Architects?”

  “Yes.”

  And then he smiled, a smile so big and bright, it was like the room really did have five lights.

  It was the most stunning (and alarming) transformation I had ever witnessed.

  “We have lots of architecture in my country,” he said. “You must see the Azadi Tower.”

  “Um.” I had seen pictures of the Azadi Tower, and it was stunning—gleaming white angles intertwining into a tall edifice, with intricate latticework that made me think of The Lord of the Rings.

  Only Elves could have wrought something so delicate and fantastic.

  “And the Tehran Museum.”

  I didn’t know that one.

  “And the Shah Cheragh in Shiraz.”

  That one I had heard of. It was a mosque covered with mirrors on the inside, and the reflected light turned the whole thing into a shimmering jewel box.

  “Okay.”

  “Here.” He shoved my papers and medicine back into the Kellner & Newton Messenger Bag. I slung it over my shoulder.

  “You can go,” he said. “Welcome to Iran.”

  I wasn’t sure what was happening, but I said thank you and backed out of the room.

  Part of me wanted to shout, “THERE! ARE! FOUR! LIGHTS!” as I left, the way Captain Picard did when he was finally released, but Customs Officer II seemed to have decided he liked me, and I didn’t want to ruin it with a reference he
probably wouldn’t understand.

  Besides.

  I didn’t want to cause an international incident.

  * * *

  Mom kept a Level Seven Death Grip on my arm the rest of the way through the airport.

  I wanted to pull away, to tell Dad about my interrogation and how there really were four lights.

  I wanted to tell him about the Azadi Tower and the other places Customs Officer II mentioned.

  I wanted to tell him how impressed Customs Officer II was that he was an architect.

  But Dad walked ahead of us, fighting a losing battle to keep Laleh upright and walking on a relatively direct heading.

  My sister was on the verge of collapse. “I’ll take her,” I said.

  Mom released me so I could take Laleh piggyback, and we walked through the sliding glass doors into the cool Tehran night.

  THE DANCING FAN

  It was colder than I expected outside. I shivered, even with Laleh warm against my back. I was in a long-sleeved T-shirt and pants—Mom had said that was the best thing to wear through Customs—and I wished I had a hoodie, but they were all in my suitcase.

  Tehran didn’t smell much different from Portland. I guess I had kind of expected everything to smell like rice. (To be fair, most Persian households, even Fractional ones like ours, smell at least a little bit like basmati rice.) But Tehran’s air was regular city air, with a tang of smog to it, and a bit less of Portland’s rain-soaked earth smell.

  A scream split the night, like the piercing cry of a Nazgûl, and I almost dropped Laleh. “Eyyyyyyyy!”

  Mamou—my real, flesh-and-blood grandmother—was screaming and charging toward us. She crashed into Mom and grabbed her by the face, kissed her on both cheeks, left-right-left, and then wrapped her in a hug strong enough to buckle a starship’s hull.

  Mom laughed and hugged her mother for the first time in seventeen years.

  It was the happiest I had ever seen her.

  * * *

  Dayi Jamsheed had driven Mamou to Tehran, and we all piled into his silver SUV for the ride to Yazd. Mom sat up front with him, talking in Farsi and sharing a bag of tokhmeh, roasted watermelon seeds, which are the favorite snack of True Persians everywhere. Dad sat in the back with Laleh stretched across his lap—she had finally collapsed, though not before being hugged to within an inch of her life by Mamou and Dayi Jamsheed.

  I shared the middle with Mamou.

  Fariba Bahrami was a short woman—I had only seen her from the shoulders up before—but when she wrapped her arms around me, it was like she had fifteen years’ worth of hugs saved up just for me. She kept her arm draped across my back the whole ride, holding me against her.

  I studied her hands. I had never really seen my grandmother’s hands before.

  Mamou kept her fingernails short and nicely manicured, painted pomegranate red. Her perfume smelled like peaches. And she was so warm. She squeezed and squeezed me, like she was worried I would blow out the window if she didn’t hold on tight enough.

  Maybe she was trying to fit a lifetime of missed hugs into the one car ride.

  Maybe she was.

  “Tell me about your school, maman.”

  “School is okay. I guess.”

  The sociopolitical climate of Chapel Hill High School seemed a little too complicated to get into with Mamou on a car ride, especially since I didn’t want her to know that people called me D-Bag and left bright blue fake testicles on my bicycle.

  I never wanted to talk about testicles with my grandmother.

  “You have lots of friends? A girlfriend?”

  My ears went straight to red alert.

  True Persians are heavily invested in the reproductive opportunities of their descendants.

  “Um. Not really,” I said. The red alert was spreading to my cheeks.

  “Not really” was the safest form of “no” I could come up with.

  I couldn’t stand to disappoint my grandmother.

  “Eh? Why?” Mamou had a funny way of curling the ends of her words to make them into questions. “You are so handsome, maman.”

  I didn’t know how she could say that. I was oily and puffy from thirty-two hours of flying, and I still had the caldera of the solar system’s largest volcano smoldering between my eyebrows.

  Besides. No one ever noticed me. Not the way they noticed Soulless Minions of Orthodoxy like Chip Cusumano, who really was handsome.

  I shrugged, but the shrug turned into a yawn. All the temporal dilations we had gone through were catching up with me.

  “You’re tired, maman.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Why don’t you have a sleep? It’s still a few hours to Yazd.” She pulled me closer still, so I could lean my head on her shoulder, and ran her fingers through the curls of my hair. “I’m so happy you are here.”

  “Me too.” Her hand was warm, but her fingers sent shivers of euphoria through my scalp.

  She kissed the crown of my head, over and over again, until it was wet where her tears had trickled down and run into my hair.

  I didn’t mind, though.

  “I love you, maman.”

  Grandma and Oma, Dad’s moms, didn’t say that very often. It’s not that they didn’t love me and Laleh, but they were full of Teutonic reserve, and didn’t express affection very often.

  Mamou wasn’t like that.

  For Fariba Bahrami, love was an opportunity, not a burden.

  I swallowed away the lump in my throat. “I love you, Mamou.”

  * * *

  I only half slept on the drive to Yazd. I was too tired to fall all the way asleep, and even though Mamou was soft and warm, leaning up against her wasn’t a terribly comfortable position to sleep in. So I dozed and floated on the clouds of Farsi that blew my way from the front seat of Dayi Jamsheed’s SUV.

  It reminded me of when I was little, and Mom chanted to me in Farsi every night before bedtime. It’s hard to describe Farsi chanting: the way Mom drew her voice out like the notes of a cello as she recited poems by Rumi or Hafez. I didn’t know what they meant, but that didn’t matter. It was quiet and soothing.

  It was Mom’s job to put me to sleep, because Dad got me too excited before bedtime. He would sit on my bed and tuck me in, and then he would start telling me a story, leaving gaps for me to fill in with heroes and monsters.

  We told the story together.

  There’s a lot I don’t remember from back then, the years before my own Great Depression. Dr. Howell says antidepressants can do that sometimes, dull the memory, plus I was pretty little at the time anyway. But I remember Story Time with Dad, because I remember the night it stopped.

  It was about six months before Laleh was born.

  Dad came to tuck me in. He kissed me, said “Love you,” and turned to leave.

  “Dad? Don’t I get a story?” I squeaked.

  My voice was much squeakier back then, like a cheese curd.

  Dad blinked at me. He sighed. “Not tonight, Darius.”

  And then he left. Just walked out of my bedroom.

  I lay there and waited for Mom to come chant to me.

  And we didn’t tell stories anymore after that.

  I didn’t get why Dad had stopped. I didn’t understand what I had done wrong.

  “You didn’t do anything wrong,” Mom explained. “I can tell you a story.”

  But it wasn’t the same.

  Shirin Kellner was an expert chanter but a lackluster storyteller.

  And no matter the story she told, the one I told myself, the one I understood deep down, was this:

  Stephen Kellner didn’t want to tell me stories anymore.

  * * *

  “Wake up, Darioush-jan.” Mamou scratched my scalp, which sent goose bumps down my neck. “We’re here.”

  I blinke
d in the gray morning, sat up, and took my first look at Yazd.

  To be honest, even though I had seen plenty of pictures, I still kind of expected Yazd to look like a scene from Aladdin: dirt streets lined with palm trees, domed palaces made out of sparkling alabaster, laden camels carrying goods to a bazaar of wooden stalls covered in jewel-colored fabric awnings.

  There were no camels anywhere in sight, despite what Fatty Bolger might have claimed. I didn’t even know camel jockey was a legitimate slur until the first time he called me one. Trent Bolger was not particularly creative, but he was thorough, and subtle enough to evade detection by the enforcers of Chapel Hill High School’s Zero Tolerance Policy toward racial and ethnic slurs.

  The streets of Mamou’s neighborhood didn’t look so different from the streets back home: dull gray asphalt.

  The houses didn’t look so different either, except they were made of whitish bricks instead of seamless siding. Some had ornate wooden double doors in front, with elaborate metal knockers. They almost reminded me of Hobbit-hole doors, except they weren’t round.

  Dayi Jamsheed pulled up in front of a white house that looked more or less like all the others. It was a single story, with a thin strip of yard full of sparse, scrubby grass in front.

  There were no cacti anywhere—another oversight on Fatty Bolger’s part, because I looked it up, and cacti are actually native to the Americas.

  Dayi Jamsheed parked the SUV under the shade of a gigantic walnut tree that hung over the street and thrust its roots beneath the cracking sidewalk.

  “Agha Stephen,” Dayi Jamsheed said. He pronounced it esStephen, which is what a lot of True Persians called Dad. In Farsi you couldn’t start a word with two consonants. You had to put a vowel before them (or between them, which is why a few people called Dad “Setephen”).

  “Wake up, Agha Stephen.”

  His voice sounded like the crack of a whip, and he was always smiling, eyebrows arched and mischievous. My uncle had two discrete eyebrows—not a single connecting hair between them—which was deeply reassuring, because I had always worried about growing a Persian Unibrow.