A Handbook to Luck (7 page)

At the Lord and Savior Hospital downtown, a nun in an old-fashioned habit escorted Enrique to the elevator, past the faded flower shop and the lobby's noisy row of slot machines. His father's room was in the intensive care unit on the second floor. Papi was bandaged from head to toe. A nylon dress sock dangled from one foot. His bald wig was off and his thin, gray wisps looked infinitely more doleful than the thick rubber. An arm and a leg were suspended with pulleys in lopsided flight, and his left eye was copiously padded with gauze.

Papi recognized Enrique at once, even with his other eye nearly swollen shut. “Thank God you came,” he muttered. “I'm surrounded by Catholics.” The words whistled through a missing tooth. He'd been brought unconscious to the emergency room three hours ago.

The police were calling it a hate crime and a local news station was investigating the incident. Nobody seemed to realize that Fernando Florit wasn't actually Chinese. The bartender from the Flamingo had already sent a get well card and a bottle of tequila. How had Jorge de Reyes heard about the attack?

“What the fuck happened to you?” Enrique whispered.

Papi tried to shrug but he winced from the pain. “As you can see,” he said wearily, “my heart continues to beat out of long habit.”

It turned out that he'd been on his way to Armando's Coffee Shop, where he often spent the morning reading, when a gang of teenaged boys mugged him in an empty parking lot. They were in drag, with Heidi braids and dirndls, and clearly on some serious drugs. Papi had only a five-dollar bill on him. They got mad and kicked him, pushed his face into a bed of shattered glass. Then they broke a few bones for good measure.

“The strange thing is, I can hear better now,” Papi said, attempting to lift his head. “Ants walking across the windowsill. Jackrabbits in the desert. My whole body is one giant ear. The doctors say it won't last but I know it will. Think about it,
hijo.
There isn't a magic act like this anywhere.”

Enrique stared at his father in disbelief. He was barely alive and all he could think of was capitalizing on some passing sensory freakishness to see his name in lights again.

“
Por favor,
can you get me a cigarette? They're over there.”

His father looked so vulnerable that Enrique, against his better judgment, opened the nightstand drawer and found the pack of battered Winstons. He tapped out a cigarette and lit it with his father's plastic lighter. He thought of how the slightest mistake could kill a person. A wrong turn here, a misspoken word there, and boom—your luck ran out. Fortune wasn't something you could hold tightly in your hand like a coin. The smoke made Enrique nauseous but he dragged on the cigarette until the flame caught. Then he carefully held it to his father's lips.

“Menos mal,”
Papi said, moaning. His lips trembled as he exhaled. “You're still my sweet boy.”

“Maybe we should open the window?”

“Did you hear that?”

“What?”

“There's a moth on the ceiling fan.”

Enrique followed the slow rotations of the metal blades. At first he saw nothing; then he spotted it—a white moth the size of a postage stamp with brown check marks on its wings. Jesus, nothing stayed ordinary around his father for long.

“How did you do that?”

“I'm telling you, I'm the human ear.” Papi was jubilant. “I can hear the sound of sound. For an audience, the power of sight is relative, but hearing is another matter entirely.
Ay,
you just wait until I'm back on the Strip!”

Enrique held the cigarette to his father's lips for one last puff before flicking the butt out the window. The mountains in the distance looked fake. Everything in Las Vegas did. The names of things meant nothing here. A strong wind stirred up the dust. Enrique thought of the flag in Colón Park, and the storks thrown off course, and the single straw hat with a mourning ribbon that had flown through the air on the day Mamá died. If he could, he would stop the wind from ever blowing again.

A nurse barged in with a tray of compartmentalized food. There was a bowl of lumpy barley soup, chicken in some sort of gravy, unidentifiable side dishes. She turned on the radio without asking, moving the dial to a disco station.

“I see you have a visitor, Mr. Florit,” the nurse said, sniffing the air warily. “How are you feeling?”

“I could use some more painkiller.”

“You're already at your maximum.”

“Just a bit more,” Papi cajoled. “I need to rest.”

The nurse turned one knob and then another, fiddling with the IV to make sure it was working properly. Enrique noticed the bruises in the crook of his father's elbow, where the nurse drew more blood. He was bulging in the middle, too, like a too ripe watermelon. The nurse pumped a hand crank at the foot of his bed that adjusted the angle of his mattress.

“Would you happen to have any maraschino cherries?” Papi asked her.

“Beg your pardon?”

“Cherries. I would be terribly grateful.”

Enrique wished he could order up some real Cuban food for his father: roast pork and black beans, fried plantains, yuca in garlic sauce, pineapple flan. Each time Enrique's parents had returned from one of their tours of the Caribbean, his grandparents had thrown them a party and invited all their neighbors. The festivities always lasted well into the morning.

Mamá, though, preferred quiet times. She buried herself in novels, rereading her favorites. Enrique knew by heart the opening to
A Passage to India
: “Except for the Marabar Caves—and they are twenty miles off—the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary.” Mamá liked to reminisce about her honeymoon, too, embroidering the events differently each time. But the facts remained: after a daylong courtship and a hasty civil wedding, she and Papi left Panama City on a little tramp steamer four days after they met. What had she seen in him that made her leave everything she knew?

Mamá's parents questioned the boat's seaworthiness, as well as their daughter's sanity. The little steamer had one battered smokestack and a Honduran flag at its stern. In exchange for a free berth, Papi provided the sailors with nightly entertainment and once made orange blossoms flutter down from a cloudy sky. For three months the boat sailed from port to port, carrying bananas and machine parts counterclockwise through the Caribbean, until it reached Havana.

“Turn that thing off!” Papi roared the minute the nurse left the room. “Not one of those ABBA-dabba Swedish nobodies—none of them,
¿me entiendes?
—compares to even the lowliest bongo player in Cuba.”

Enrique switched off the radio and picked a small book off the nightstand,
Miracle Mongers and Their Methods
by Harry Houdini. It had been in his father's pocket when the teenagers attacked. He opened it to a dog-eared page and read aloud:

“Norton could swallow a number of half-grown frogs and bring them up alive. I remember his anxiety on one occasion when returning to his dressing room; it seemed he had lost a frog—at least he could not account for the entire flock—and he looked very much scared, probably at the uncertainty as to whether or not he had to digest a live frog—

“Getting ideas for your act?” Enrique joked.

“I'm translating it into Spanish.”

“Houdini in Spanish?”

“Why not?” Papi said, his leg swaying in midair. “His glory should burn in all corners of the world!”

Unlike his father, Enrique wasn't theatrically inclined. He'd performed with his parents only a few times. Papi kept a photograph of him as a toddler in blackface and diapers but Enrique couldn't remember what he'd done in that trick. He wondered sometimes if Mamá had performed just to keep Papi company on his travels. At home they were often inseparable, cooing to each other in a private language that Enrique didn't understand.

“I need to ask you something,” Papi said. “But first, bring me the mirror from the bathroom.”

Enrique dutifully tried to remove it from the wall but it was securely screwed in place. “Sorry, it won't budge.”

“Tell me the truth,
hijo,
” Papi said, attempting a smile. “How bad is it?”

Enrique didn't want to discourage his father but he refused to lie to him. “You've looked better.”

“Am I still pretty?” Papi batted his one working eyelid.

“I don't think I would've ever called you pretty,” Enrique laughed. “But let's just say I'm sure you'll be back to your old self in no time.”

His father seemed greatly mollified. Then he cleared his throat and launched into a monologue about the beauty of working outside the system, unanswerable to any boss; how his life would've been impossible in Cuba; how sometimes good things were born from bad, from tumult and revolution, grief and ruination. He began to recite his all-occasion Martí poem: “I am an honest man from where the palm tree grows, and I want, before I die, to cast these verses from my soul. I come from all places—”

“How much do you need?” Enrique interrupted him.

“Forty.”

“Forty thousand dollars?” Enrique was incredulous.

“I got myself in a little trouble down at the Diamond Pin,” he said. “And this hospital won't be cheap. We don't have insurance, you know.”

“Jesus Christ.” Enrique sat on the edge of the hospital bed. He was sick of taking care of his father, of bailing him out of one scrape after another. But this was another order of fuckup altogether. Why couldn't he be like other parents? Why couldn't Papi take care of
him
for a change? Enrique looked at his father, helpless and mummified, and felt terribly guilty.

Last year, Johnny Langston had been down to his last hundred bucks. In thirty-six hours he'd built that up to fifty thousand dollars by betting all his money on every wager—blackjack, poker, professional football—calculating the odds, shrewdly, unsentimentally. He'd refused to touch anything as stupidly passive as roulette or the slots. If push came to shove, he would go down a lion. It was a matter of pride.

“The World Series of Poker begins in a week,” Papi said, cautiously enthusiastic again. His unbandaged eye followed Enrique around the room. “It takes ten grand to get in, but that won't be a problem if you decide to play. I know plenty of people who'll stake you.” His breathing was labored, as if the air itself were straining his lungs.

Enrique poured his father a glass of ice water from the plastic pitcher on the nightstand. He poured; his father spilled. Enrique stared out the hospital window at the back lots and railroad tracks of downtown Las Vegas. Feathery clouds lined the horizon. He spotted palm trees and cottonwoods nearby, a flash of bougainvillea against the parched grass.

It was getting dark out. Enrique walked over to his father's bed and picked up the water glass, twisting it until it left a moist pink circle in his palm. It was all he could do not to shout at him, upend the tray of hospital food. Papi's delusions were crushing him, crushing them both. Yet his delusions were so much like faith it seemed cruel to take them away. How long was he supposed to keep his father afloat, anyway? What would happen if he just left Las Vegas? Wouldn't Papi have to figure things out by himself?

Enrique remembered the day he'd helped his father plant daffodils in the soft topsoil of Mamá's grave. She loved daffodils because they bloomed before the other flowers, because they were the first, she said, to imagine spring. Enrique set down the water glass and thought of a song his mother used to sing to him at bedtime, about a boat that tried, against great odds, to make its way across a treacherous current.
Había una vez un barquito chiquitito…
What choice did he really have? He decided, for now, to do whatever it took to keep his father alive.

Leila Rezvani

L
eila strolled down the twisting back streets of the Tehran bazaar, where the lazy winter sun barely shone. The bookbinders occupied an alley to themselves, as did the haberdashers and tobacconists, the saddlers and tinsmiths and knife makers. The peculiar smells of each alley—glue, flint, leather, wool—leached into the skin of its practitioners. In the carpet aisles, the merchants were especially aggressive. One dealer offered Leila a gigantic rug woven in the likeness of President Kennedy. When she looked surprised, the merchant brought forth a rug of the Shah in his youth instead.

It was Christmas Eve and her father was missing. Six days ago, two men in double-breasted suits had shown up at his hospital and forcibly escorted him away before he could start a heart-valve operation. Leila had arrived on the Swissair flight from Geneva that same night. The director of the hospital, Dr. Karimi-Hakkak, was appealing directly to the Shah and had sent petitions to the courts and the central police station, but so far his efforts had yielded nothing. A ring of secrecy seemed to encircle her father's absence.

Maman complained that in recent months Baba had spoken out more publicly against the Shah, losing all prudence. If he didn't hold his tongue, he would put them all in danger. Who hadn't heard the rumors? Prisoners thrown into sacks of starving cats, burned alive on the electric “frying pans.” Few ever returned home, dead or alive. But Baba hadn't been dissuaded by these stories. He'd countered irritably that if everyone succumbed to fear, the fear would win.

In the spices corridor, Leila picked up some cinnamon bark and held it to her nose. She thought of buying saffron and a bit of lapis to ward off the evil eye. How could the familiar seem so exotic to her after just a few seasons? A fortune-teller called Leila to her stall. “Advice for your heart, my beauty, advice for your heart!” she cried, waving a greedy hand. Her lips were thick as a camel's and her wrists clicked with bracelets of colorful gems. The fortune-teller promptly took out an astrolabe and a set of geomancy beads. Before throwing the beads, she held up a round mirror for Leila to gaze in.

“Look at yourself,” she crooned. “See how pretty you are,
azizam.
You look like the very moon today!”

“No, thanks.”

“Bale, bale!”
She forced the mirror into Leila's hands. “Look at this feast! May I go blind if I'm lying.”

For a moment, Leila was shocked to see nothing. Then slowly, her face came into focus: the high-arched brows, the shapely lips, the nose that seemed to belong to someone else—small and straight, with an upturned tip. True to her word, Maman had persuaded Dr. Ghanoonparvar, the best plastic surgeon in Tehran, to operate on her daughter. “I won't have her stigmatized in Europe,” Fatemeh argued. On Leila's thirteenth birthday, her mother gave her a few pills to help her relax. This was the last thing Leila remembered until after her birthday “surprise.”

The next morning, she woke up in the hospital, her nose packed with bandages and catheters in her nostrils to help her breathe. For two days she bled so profusely that she required a transfusion. It took another two months for the swelling to go down. The skin on her nose felt hard and stiff for a year. Her father had warned her that in life ten thousand people would try to tell her what to do, would promise her they could read the fine print on a star. But to know your own heart, he advised, it was enough to sit alone in the dark.

“You wait in vain for what you dread,” the fortune-teller concluded. “For this you are chewing up your heart.”

The mirror cost twice what it should but Leila handed over the money without bargaining. A toy seller ambled by with clay whistles. If only the dull ache between her legs would go away. A week ago she'd lost her virginity, she didn't know to whom. After waiting longer than any of the other girls at her Swiss boarding school, Leila had gotten exceedingly drunk on Finnish vodka the night of the Christmas party. She'd danced with lots of boys, something she hadn't done before, and kissed their bristly lips. Someone—who was it?—had begun stroking her breasts. When Leila woke up in her bed, the sheets were stained with blood and her mouth was sour. Her tongue tasted like someone else's tongue.

Now she prayed for three things: that she wasn't pregnant, that only one boy had done it, and that whoever it was wouldn't remember either. The morning after the party, everyone left for the four corners of the globe. Leila scanned the faces of possible perpetrators—Paul Trémont, Heinrich Ülle, Giovanni Scala—but their expressions betrayed nothing. There was one more thing she hoped: that her parents wouldn't find out. Already, Leila could hear her mother screaming: Worthless whore, why do you push us toward ruin?

Leila made her way to an Armenian café and ordered tea and rice pudding with rose water, hoping to soothe her nervous stomach. She watched as the waiter carelessly wiped the table with a dirty rag. After her brother had died, she'd inherited his sweet tooth. Every afternoon, Leila frequented the pastry shops near her boarding school—Le Petit Lapin, Patisserie Michaud, Café Vienna. All the bakers knew her by name. They saved her slices of Sacher torte and plum tarts, éclairs, mocha petit fours.

Classical Persian music crackled into the café from one ancient speaker. Leila listened to the sounds of the sitar and remembered a line of poetry she'd memorized in grade school: “How did the rose ever open its heart and give to this world all its beauty?” It didn't seem fair to her that a girl's virginity was so prized when a boy's was merely a burden to unload at the first opportunity.

Last night in her father's study, Leila had found a book by a woman poet, Forugh Farrokhzad. Leila read and read and didn't stop until she reached the last page. A note on the back cover said that the author had died in a mysterious accident at the age of thirty-three. This was only nine years ago.
Our old courtyard is lonely. Our garden yawns in anticipation of an unknown rain cloud, and our garden is empty.

It was cold outside and the cypress trees swayed in the wind. The air snapped with electricity, with the possibility of lightning. Days like this were considered inauspicious by the tea-leaf readers and the interpreters of coffee grinds. Dusk would arrive suddenly, pressing from the mountains, crushing the light from all living things. Leila thought of Queen Soraya, the Shah's second wife, whom he'd divorced for not producing an heir. The money she spent shopping was legendary. His third wife, Farah Diba, was no different. Shopping was how most rich women in Tehran occupied their days.

A flock of them would be at Aunt Parvin's house tonight. Preparations were under way for the holidays, despite Baba's disappearance. (In their circles, both Christian and Muslim holidays were celebrated.) How could they throw a party with him missing? Her aunt's trademark silver bowls, filled with sprigs of winter jasmine, would decorate the banquet tables at discreet intervals. The guests would lie to Leila, offer her hope about her father. But the minute she turned her back, they would gossip: What was the use of his empty gestures, eh? Look what suffering he has brought upon his family! Where is the honor in that?

Down the street, Leila flagged a taxicab.

“To the police station,” she said. Leila wasn't sure what she would do once she got there, but she couldn't very well just wander the city while her father was missing.

The central station was imposing and shabby all at once, like most government buildings. She wondered if the brutal decrees issued here had anything to do with the disdain the police felt from their countrymen. Fear was a terrible thing to have to live up to.

“Who's in charge here?” Leila asked the front-desk clerk.

“What is the nature of your complaint?” He barely looked up from a sheaf of musty documents.

“My father is missing.” Leila heard the quaver in her voice and hoped it wasn't too evident.

“Down the hall, to the left.”

Leila didn't have far to go. Filling most of the marble corridor was a long line of people holding photographs of their loved ones. Their silence echoed against the walls worse than any curses they might have hurled. Leila took her place behind a middle-aged woman in a chador cradling a school photo of a teenaged boy. He wore a crisp white shirt and the first wisp of a mustache.

“My eldest,” she whispered and her eyes filled with tears.

“How long have you been waiting?”

“Since Wednesday.”

“Surely not!” Leila exclaimed and everyone turned to look at her. She wanted to ask more questions but the crowd silenced her with their stares. Their positions were precarious and they didn't want some interloper spoiling their chance for a hearing with the Missing Persons Bureau.

Leila apologized to the woman, bowing slightly, and backed away. She tried to imagine describing Baba to the so-called investigators. Yes, her father was of ordinary build and height, ordinarily handsome, with ordinary-sized hands and feet, but there was nothing ordinary about him. To start with, Baba had no time for people who hadn't earned their station in life. Of course, that cut out most of their circle, with its who-knows-whos and its mutual back-scratchings. He avoided the royal family like the plague.

Did her father have a prayer against his enemies? If only he would keep his mouth shut or issue an apology, he might be saved. But what were the odds of that? The Shah himself would need to have a heart attack and personally call for Dr. Nader Rezvani to attend to him. Baba would never refuse to save a man's life, even one he despised. Only then would he be granted a pardon.

The glare of the winter afternoon made the trees appear drained of color. Where should she go now? With whom should she speak?

A taxicab pulled up next to Leila and the driver called out, “Where can I take you, miss?” He was elderly and clean-shaven, with a country accent.

“To the cemetery,” she ordered.

The driver wound around the city, seemingly in circles, muttering to himself. Car horns blared along the crowded, too narrow streets. They moved so slowly that she might as well have walked. Leila rolled down her window and took in the late-afternoon smells of Tehran. “Build up your muscles with a liver-and-kidney kebab!” a vendor practically shouted in her ear. Another hawked oranges and sweet lemons from the north.

The city was growing so much that Leila barely recognized it. Construction projects sprawled in every direction—power plants, electronics factories, brand-new hospitals. The Shah was importing countless experts, too: hydraulic engineers from Greece, electricians from Norway, mechanics from Italy, truck drivers from Korea. He paid for everything with oil money, while in the countryside the peasants still burned cow pies for fuel.

When Leila was last home, she'd accompanied her father on a drive to the Alborz Mountains. They'd passed new districts still smelling of paint and fresh cement. The hillsides were dotted with Swiss-style chalets. It took an hour to escape the city and finally breathe some clean air. Baba told her that the rich were boarding the daily Lufthansa jet in the morning, having lunch in Munich, and flying home in time for dinner. Others paid for the staff at Maxim's to cook and deliver their lunch from Paris. And the coast of the Caspian Sea was congested with garish new mansions and country clubs. Baba said that it sickened him to see even his formerly reasonable friends yielding to the frenzy of excess.

On Nejatollahi Street, the driver swerved to avoid a dead dog. Poor families from the countryside had set up tents near the local mosques. A bony gray horse pulled a rickety cart overflowing with junk and twine. The cab passed the Sarkis Cathedral, which the Armenians had built for themselves, its dome black with crows. The parks were empty except for the leafless trees and sparse grass, but the shops and cafés were packed.

Leila didn't realize until now how much she'd missed Tehran, the old city anyway, with its dusty side streets and everyday corruptions. In Swiss cities everything was as neat as a postage stamp. A month ago, a boy at her boarding school had been arrested for urinating against a tulip tree in the center of town. The boy, Ömer Özguc, was the son of the Turkish ambassador. Relations between the two countries were severely strained over the incident.

The cemetery, a confusion of tombstones and nettled paths, seemed larger than Leila remembered. It wasn't easy to find her brother's grave, even with the help of the crippled attendant. She hadn't been back since Hosein's burial six years ago. The wailing had been unbearable and Baba had refused to let go of the coffin's lid. Now there was only silence and a dry carpet of leaves.

Baba had aged visibly after Hosein's death. It was as if the years were waiting patiently in a corner of his body, then pounced on him all at once. At fifty-four, he looked closer to seventy. He began to speak like an old man, too, reliving his past through a magnifying glass. Before he was arrested, Baba had spent his nights reading histories of the Qajar era, retelling the tales as if they were his own. At boarding school, Leila was shocked to discover that Persian history didn't exist.

Thirty years ago, Baba said, peasant families used to bring their sick relatives to his hospital and camp out in the waiting room. The doctors and nurses would have to pick their way among rolled-out carpets, charcoal stoves, an occasional goat. Everybody would be smoking and talking loudly, coming and going as they pleased until all hours of the night. They wanted to see with their own eyes what they stood to lose. What would she give now, Leila thought, to hear Baba telling these stories again?

Maman also had changed. She'd given up on her garden, leaving it untended and wild. The wells went dry and the fountain painted with doves lay crumbling in the sun. These days, Maman lived for the mirror. She devoted herself to preserving her beauty with expensive creams and an occasional face-lift in London—and to finding a suitable husband for Leila. There would be an interesting young man at Aunt Parvin's party tonight, a physics student from the States who was home for the winter break. He was an identical twin, Maman said, a lucky trait.