Darius the Great Is Not Okay Read online

  Sohrab squinted at me. “Of course not. Come on. Let’s go.” He opened the door again and then turned to holler back at the kitchen. “Khodahafes, Agha Bahrami.”

  “Khodahafes, Babou,” I said.

  * * *

  Sohrab led me to a park down the street from Mamou’s house. A chain-link fence ran all the way around, and it was bordered on three sides by squat stone houses and on the fourth by another of Yazd’s boulevards.

  The field was full-sized, or pretty close at least, and the sort of vibrant green that only came from constant watering. Nothing else I had seen in Yazd so far was that green—not even Babou’s garden, though I would never tell him that.

  Sohrab led me to the small, sad-looking public bathroom at the edge of the field. It was clean inside, even if it did have the feta-cheese-and-baby-powder smell of a boys’ locker room.

  There were no urinals, only a few stalls with sitting toilets—none of the squatting ones, like my bathroom at Mamou’s—and I wondered if that was a Social Cue I had missed. What if I was not supposed to pee standing up in Iran?

  It wasn’t the sort of thing I could ask Sohrab.

  How do you ask a guy if it’s okay to pee standing up?

  “Lots of people play football here.” Sohrab started pulling clothes out of his backpack. He tossed me a green T-shirt and a pair of shorts so white, they were blinding in the alien glow of the bathroom’s fluorescent lights.

  “Darioush, what size shoe do you wear?”

  “Twelve,” I said.

  Sohrab bit the inside of his cheek. “Here,” he said, and stepped next to me. “Take off your shoes.”

  I toed off my Vans, and Sohrab stepped out of his sandals. He wrapped his arm around my side and lined up his foot with mine.

  My feet were a bit longer but a lot wider.

  I had Hobbit feet.

  At least they weren’t furry on top.

  My stomach tickled where Sohrab had grabbed me. I blushed.

  No one ever stood right next to me like Sohrab did.

  I wasn’t used to guys doing that.

  “I wear forty-four,” Sohrab said. “I think they will fit you. They will be tight, though.”

  “Oh.” I didn’t even realize Iran used a different shoe sizing system. “That’s okay. Thanks.”

  Sohrab dug in his bag and handed me a pair of faded black Adidas.

  He avoided my eyes as he passed me the cleats, rummaged through his bag, and pulled out another pair of cleats for himself. They were white (well, they had been, once), and were in imminent danger of experiencing a non-passive failure.

  “Uh. Wouldn’t you rather use these?” I tried to give back the black Adidas. “I can play in my Vans.”

  “No. You use them. They are newer.”

  They were so worn, I wasn’t sure they had ever been new, but they were in better shape than Sohrab’s white cleats.

  “They’re yours,” I said. “You should use them.”

  “But you are my guest.”

  This was another taarof: Sohrab giving me his nicer cleats. And invoking my being a guest was one of the strongest strategies you could employ in taarof.

  I felt terrible for using his nice cleats, but I couldn’t see any way out of it.

  “Thank you.”

  I took my new kit into a stall to change, which was awkward because I kept banging my elbows into the walls and my knees into the toilet. My boxers were not suited for providing structural integrity while I was running around, and I wished I had thought to bring some compression shorts or something.

  I would not have borrowed any of Sohrab’s, even if he had offered.

  There are some garments you should never share.

  I hopped my way into the borrowed Adidas. They fit okay—a little tight, but okay. And they felt light and agile compared to my gray Vans.

  Even though the shirt was stretched across my chest, and the shorts kept riding up my butt, I felt very Iranian when I emerged from the stall in my borrowed kit and cleats.

  But then I saw Sohrab in his red shirt and shorts, and his white cleats. He looked fit and ready for a real game.

  It made me feel very inadequate.

  I was only a Fractional Persian, after all.

  “Ready?”

  “Um.”

  I wasn’t so sure I wanted to play anymore.

  But Sohrab squinted at me, and the knot of nerves in my chest melted a little bit.

  Some friends just have that effect on you.

  “Ready.”

  * * *

  Two boys waited on the field for us. Sohrab hollered at them in Farsi and then waved his hand for me to jog after him.

  “This is Darioush. Agha Bahrami’s grandson. From America.”

  I said, “Salaam.”

  “Salaam,” Iranian Boy Number One said. He talked out of the side of his mouth, which made it seem like he was half smiling. He was almost my height, but he was rail thin, and he had his hair spiked up in front, almost like a Soulless Minion of Orthodoxy.

  I held out my hand, and he shook it, though it was loose and fleeting and felt kind of weird.

  “Nice to meet you. Um.”

  “Ali-Reza,” he said.

  Ali and Reza are both popular Iranian names—maybe even more popular than Sohrab—though both are technically Arabic in origin.

  I held out my hand to the other boy, who had lost the genetic lottery and ended up with the dreaded Persian Unibrow. I thought he would be hairy everywhere else too, but his hair was cut shorter than Sohrab’s, and he had pale, hairless arms.

  “Hossein,” he said. His voice was thick and dark like coffee. He was shorter than me too—shorter even than Sohrab—but with his unibrow and the ghost mustache haunting his upper lip, he looked older: ready to get a job interrogating temporally-displaced Fractional Persians as they arrived at Customs in Imam Khomeini International Airport.

  Hossein didn’t smile at all as he glanced from me to Sohrab.

  “Thanks for letting me play with you,” I said.

  Sohrab squinted at me.

  Ali-Reza elbowed Hossein and said something in Farsi. Sohrab’s neck turned red, and his jaw twitched, like he was grinding his teeth a little bit.

  “Um.”

  Sohrab didn’t let me ask. “Come on, Darioush.”

  * * *

  Like I said, I hadn’t been on a soccer team—a real one, not just one in physical education class at Chapel Hill High School (Go Chargers)—since I was twelve. Dad had signed me up for the neighborhood soccer club when I was seven. I was okay at it, but according to our coach I wasn’t aggressive enough.

  And then I got diagnosed with depression, and I started on my first round of medication, and I couldn’t focus on the game at all. I was too slow to track the other players, or the ball, or even the score.

  One week, I left every single practice in tears because Coach Henderson (father of our midfielder, Vance Henderson, who I was destined to smack across the face less than a year later) kept humiliating me in front of the whole team. He didn’t understand why I had gone from being an okay-but-not-very-aggressive center-back to a complete and utter failure. All he could see was that I wasn’t trying hard enough.

  I didn’t know how to talk to people about being medicated back then. And Dad kept saying I just needed more discipline.

  Mom finally put her foot down and insisted it was okay for me to quit, scuttling Stephen Kellner’s dreams of me playing professional soccer before they even made it out of dry dock.

  It was another of Stephen Kellner’s many disappointments in me.

  At least he eventually got used to them.

  * * *

  We only used half the field. For a simple two-on-two, using the entire thing would have been illogical.

  Sohrab was our nomina
l forward, which left me de facto defender, but really, both of us played all over the field.

  Ali-Reza was supposed to be the forward for his and Hossein’s team, but Sohrab played so aggressively, Ali-Reza spent most of his time helping Hossein ward off Sohrab’s relentless assaults on their goal.

  Coach Henderson would have loved Sohrab’s aggressiveness.

  Not that Ali-Reza wasn’t aggressive too. I had to fend off my share of goals, which I mostly did, through some combination of luck, coincidence, and latent memories of my pre-medication training.

  It seemed I had misread the situation between Sohrab and Ali-Reza, who had acted like friends, but were clearly engaged in some sort of personal vendetta that could only be settled through soccer/non-American football.

  They fought much more fiercely than Trent Bolger and Cyprian Cusumano, and I was shifting the balance of their vendetta by preventing Ali-Reza from scoring.

  The best was when I executed a perfect sliding tackle, stealing the ball from Ali-Reza and passing it down to Sohrab.

  I felt very Iranian in that moment, even covered in grass stains.

  Ali-Reza hissed and ran back after Sohrab, who dodged Hossein and scored again.

  “Pedar sag,” Ali-Reza spat as he followed Sohrab back toward center field.

  Sohrab stopped and said something to Ali-Reza, which ended up with them shouting in Farsi so fast I couldn’t make out a single word. Ali-Reza shoved Sohrab, who shoved him back, and I thought things were going to escalate from there until Hossein started shouting too.

  I didn’t catch much of that, either, except I could make out nakon, which means “don’t,” so I figured he was telling them to stop it.

  Sohrab shook his head, ran over to me and slapped my shoulder. “Good job, Darioush.”

  “Um. Thanks,” I said. “Uh.”

  But Sohrab ran off again before I could ask what happened.

  * * *

  We played forever.

  We played until I couldn’t run any more.

  We played until my shirt was soaked and translucent with sweat, and my boxers were causing some Level Eight Chafing.

  I once again wished for more supportive undergarments.

  I hadn’t been keeping count, but Sohrab announced we won, by three goals.

  He collided with me and gave me a sweaty hug and a slap on the back, then threw his arm over my shoulder as we headed back to the locker room.

  “You were great, Darioush.”

  “Not that good,” I said. “Not as good as you.”

  “Yes,” Sohrab said. “You were.”

  I almost believed him.

  Almost.

  “Thanks.”

  I decided to put my arm over Sohrab’s shoulder too, even if I felt kind of weird doing it, and not just because of the sweat running down the back of Sohrab’s neck.

  Sohrab was so comfortable touching me.

  I liked how confident he was about that.

  Hossein and Ali-Reza walked ahead of us, fingers intertwined behind their heads in what Coach Fortes liked to call Surrender Cobra. Huge ovals of sweat seeped through the backs of their shirts. They hadn’t said a thing since we called it quits.

  “Uh.”

  Sohrab squinted at me.

  “You play with them a lot?”

  “Yes.”

  “They seem . . . um . . .”

  “They do not like to lose.”

  “Are you guys friends?”

  Sohrab shrugged. “Ali-Reza is very prejudiced. Against Bahá’ís.”

  I thought about that: How back home, all Persians—even Fractional Persians like me and Laleh—were united in our Persian-ness. We celebrated Nowruz and Chaharshanbeh Suri together in big parties, Bahá’ís and Muslims and Jews and Christians and Zoroastrians and even secular humanists like Stephen Kellner, and it didn’t matter. Not really.

  Not when we were so few in number.

  But here, surrounded by Persians, Sohrab was singled out for being Bahá’í.

  He was a target.

  “What does pedar sag mean?”

  Sohrab’s jaw twitched. “It means ‘your father is a dog.’ It’s very rude.”

  “Oh.”

  I thought about that too: How in America, it was much worse to call someone’s mother a dog, rather than their father.

  “Ali-Reza said that to you?”

  “It’s fine,” Sohrab said. “Ali-Reza is like that. It doesn’t bother me so much.”

  Usually, when I said something like that, I meant the opposite.

  I let everything bother me too much. It was one of the reasons Stephen Kellner was always so disappointed in me.

  “You know what, Sohrab?” I said. “I think Ali-Reza is just mad because you’re so much better than him.”

  Sohrab squinted at me again. He shook me by the shoulder and rubbed my head, sending sweat flying off the ends of my hair. He didn’t seem to care.

  “You know what, Darioush? You are better than him too.”

  THE AYATOLLAH’S TURBAN

  Back home, at Chapel Hill High School, we didn’t shower after physical education. I don’t know why, given how terrible I smelled after running laps or doing mountain climbers, or even playing Net Sports with overly aggressive players like Fatty Bolger and Chip Cusumano. But class ran until five minutes before the bell, which was just enough time to get changed, slather myself with extra deodorant, and run to geometry on the other side of the school.

  (Go Chargers.)

  So I was a little alarmed when Sohrab pulled soap and shampoo out of his nylon drawstring backpack.

  “Uh,” I said. “It’s okay. I’ll shower when I get back to Mamou’s.”

  “You’re dirty.” He pointed to the grass stains down my legs and across my arms.

  “I don’t have a towel.”

  Sohrab pulled a pair of towels out of his bag.

  I couldn’t figure out how they had fit in there, especially with two kits and two pairs of cleats. Sohrab’s backpack had exceeded the normal laws of space-time.

  Sohrab tossed the towels onto the wooden bench between us and pulled off his shirt, peeling the wet fabric away from his flat chest and stomach. He was still breathing hard, his abdomen expanding and contracting.

  I turned away, to give him privacy and also because I was so embarrassed.

  Sohrab was in really good shape.

  Also, it was weird to get all the way naked. I had never taken my underwear off next to another guy.

  I wasn’t even standing that close to Sohrab. But I felt the heat radiating off his skin, like a warp core about to breach.

  My skin was still flush from our game, which was good. Sohrab couldn’t tell I was blushing all over as I pulled off my own sticky shirt, wrapped the towel around my waist, and pulled my borrowed shorts and not-borrowed boxers out from underneath.

  Sohrab was right: I did need a shower.

  New life-forms were evolving in the primordial swamp festering between my legs.

  “Over here,” Sohrab said, which was unnecessary, since the spray of the showers echoed from around the corner.

  I turned to follow him. He had his towel over his shoulder, like he didn’t have a care in the world.

  My skin prickled, the sensation spreading up to my ears, down my neck and shoulders, all the way to my toes. I nearly tripped over my own feet.

  I couldn’t breathe.

  “Uh.”

  There were no stalls. There were just open shower heads.

  Red Alert.

  Hossein and Ali-Reza were already under the sprays, talking in Farsi and laughing about something. They were both tanned and lean, their stomach muscles highlighted by the reflection on their wet skin.

  I felt like a space-borne leviathan, just standing in the same room
with them.

  Sohrab hung his towel on the wall. I bit my lip, sucked in my stomach, and did the same. I got under the closest spray, turned away from the other guys, and tried to breathe.

  I thought I was having an anxiety attack.

  I had never been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, but Dr. Howell said that anxiety and depression often went hand in hand. Comorbidity, he called it.

  It was an ominous-sounding word.

  It made me anxious.

  Sometimes my heart would pound so fast I thought I was going to die. And then I would start sobbing for no reason.

  I couldn’t let the guys see me do that.

  That wasn’t something True Persians did.

  * * *

  The guys had gone quiet. I could barely make out their voices over the spray.

  I scrubbed my armpits, and scratched at the grass stains on my elbows until my skin was pink and angry. Hossein and Ali-Reza were arguing with Sohrab in whispered Farsi.

  Sohrab cleared his throat behind me.

  “Darioush?”

  “Um. Yes?”

  “What is wrong with your . . . penis?”

  My throat clamped up. “Nothing,” I squeaked.

  Sohrab said something to the other boys, in Farsi again, and they answered, more insistent.

  Sohrab cleared his throat again. “It looks different?”

  “Uh. I’m not circumcised?”

  It was not a question. I just wasn’t sure if circumcised was a word Sohrab knew how to translate to Farsi.

  “Oh!” He started talking to Ali-Reza and Hossein again, no doubt explaining my penis to them.

  I didn’t think my skin could get any redder than it was, but I was pretty sure I had started glowing like a protostar about to undergo its first burst of fusion.

  Ali-Reza laughed, and then he said, in English so I could understand, “It looks like the Ayatollah’s turban.”

  Ayatollah Khamenei was Iran’s Supreme Cleric: the absolute religious and governmental authority. His photograph was all over, on signs and walls and newspapers, with his fluffy white beard and a dark turban wrapped around his head.