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Authors: Peter Nathaniel Malae

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BOOK: What We Are
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Now I can talk to him on the straight, no condescension, as little ego as possible.

“Having your face bloodied up,” I say, “is the first step to becoming a fashion model. Like the body making broken bones stronger than unbroken bones. I'm gonna come out looking like a young Paul Newman. The body's like the marines. You gotta get beaten down before you can carry a gun.”

“What kinda gun you got?” he asks, still hoping for a compadre.

The cop returns and I'm actually thankful. He's cradling a printing kit in a giant Ziploc bag. The transient sits up, looks around innocently. “Okay,” the cop says, “let us commence.”

I put my hands out. “Commencing.”

The name tag reads
BEHBAHARI
. My first guess is Afghan. I'll give it a run. “What do you think about what's going on right now in Kabul?”

He nods, rolls my thumb into the ink. “Very complex.”

“Do you miss your family?”

He looks up at me and says, “Of course. With the supreme one's favorable eye, most of my family made it here. Our twenty-fifth anniversary was two years back, thank you. I am not Afghan. Your index finger please.”

Iranian then, or Persian. And with language like “the supreme one,” he's not Muslim either. One of the last descendants of Zoroaster,
maybe, or an up-and-coming new-age recruit of Baha'i. He probably got out in '79, or somewhere thereabouts.

I say, “I'm glad y'all made it.”

Officer Behbahari nods. “Thank you very much. Ring finger.”

“I once had a friend who was Persian,” I say. “Name was Cyrus.”

“Very popular name. Pinkie.”

“I want to tell you about him.”

“You be careful with your wounds now.”

“Amazing guy, good old Cyrus.”

“You have been beaten up very badly. You seem not to know this.”

“Worked with him in a house of books. Wanna hear about him?”

“Not today, my friend.” He snaps the fingerprinting kit shut, taps on my hand almost with compassion. “Okay. You are finished.”

7
I Needed to Stay Out of the Pit of Solitude

I
NEEDED TO STAY
out of the pit of solitude after my girl left me in the spring of '04, and so I'd gotten a job at the Santa Clara Public Library shelving books. If you took away the people who ran the place, it was the best job I'd ever had. I loved pushing the carts down the aisles, flipping through book flaps for leads to a great story, alphabetizing the F–Gr fiction section. I loved sharing a favorite book with a patron, guiding some random high school kid to his first encounter with Steinbeck.

All the stuff that mattered in that place mattered most to me. I preferred the dead to the living in the library. The only thing redemptive I felt toward my pedantic, punctilious coworkers was sympathy for some kind of physical deformity they endured—
What's Eating Gilbert Grape?
—obesity, unthinkable acne, physics-defying limp, shocking facial tick, sanguine body odor. But I capped it there. I've never believed that an ailment of the body should necessarily lead to corruption of the soul.

They usually had their noses in some digital monstrosity and would meet on Friday nights at Chili's for amateur-hour karaoke
with watered-down, umbrella-shaded, glistening drinks in big phallic glasses. They'd bring back laminated and framed photographs of their forgettable weekends—which were remarkable to them, of epic proportions, worthy of a novel. But I think they vexed my sensibilities mostly because they never read novels, or any books for that matter. They were ensuring that oddballs like themselves wouldn't have jobs forty years from now in a future where libraries wouldn't exist.

It's just that they were all so skilled in committing energy to events that didn't matter. They got off on tech logic and star gates of Dewey Decimal systems. They equated violations of library protocol with crimes against humanity, which drove them to the brink of frenzy. They were minutiae fiends, petty. The month-late book (“That'll be”—giddy-voiced—“let's see, ninety cents, sir”), the absconded DVD, the indignant patron (“Did you see the veins on his forehead when he said, ‘I don't care what that computer says I returned the goddamned book last week I made a point to I always do!'”), the pair of smooching teenagers in the juvenile fiction section (“What's this world coming to? We were just getting into hopscotch, God!”). It required the tiniest phrenological literacy to read the text of my face: these people were wasting precious oxygen.

One woman named Robin, an aspiring third-grade teacher, made a point to follow me around. She had a designated
Sesame Street
sweater for Dress Down Day. That wasn't so significant in itself except that she was actually proud of it, proud of the sweater. As one would be of a child, one's own child. I think she ironed it.

Once she said, “Why don't you wait for us after work? You run out of here like you can't stand the place.”

I was surprised by her perceptiveness. “I have to get back to the studio and check on the dog.”

“You have a dog?” she asked.

“No.”

“You should walk us ladies out of the building,” she said, smiling.

I looked into her plain and pleading eyes, then down into the insane cross-eyed dots of Cookie Monster. “I think you'll be safe.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean what I say, that's what.”

There was one coworker who kept me curious about the living people in the library, an old Persian man named Cyrus Rohan who patrolled the nonfiction section. Though he was always polite and overtly humble, you could see from a distance that he was immensely proud. He had the upright posture of a high school football coach, an old-school disciplinarian in some agrarian midwest borough, and his dress, while simple, was orderly, refined. If he wore a sweater, he pulled it down just above his belt; if he wore a collared shirt, it was tucked; every thread of clothing was ironed, and his shoes, a pair of Mervyn's penny loafers, were spit-shined. And his eyes: always watery, often leaking, the moon-gray iris afloat in a dead yellow pond, the top of the cheekbones marked by two deeply ridged frown lines.

I knew he had a story, a big one, and I tend to leave people like that alone. Though that's not totally true; I'll talk to a paraplegic as if I've known him all my life. As if we'd just finished elbowing each other in a pickup hoop game at the YMCA. All to swing against those good-hearted but ultimately lame people who use conversational tongs with the ambulatory challenged. They pull the same deal with the paisa at a Burger King drive-in, talking superslow, like, “That's ... right. One... Whopper...and...one ...onion...ring,
por... fa ... vor
.”

So it took me three months before I introduced myself. He was the only employee quieter than me, and I finally couldn't take it anymore. My opportunity came when I saw the old man stretching dangerously for a top shelf. I myself had slipped once, so I rushed over. He said no, he didn't need my help, thank you very much, walked past me and down the aisle of fat dripping fictive memoirs
and other items of high-art bellybutton-gazing. He reshelved a coffee-table history book that was practically blocking the aisle and came back with a steel footstool. Passing me, he said, “Excuse me, thank you very much,” and climbed upon it.

I said, “My name's Paul.”

He fingered each poetry book—Lowell, Maio, Mehigan, his face inches from the texts—until he found the book, Millay's
Collected Sonnets
, its proper place. Then he stepped down, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket with his left hand, snapped it like a football player with a wet towel on a teammate's ass, dabbed his dripping eye and nose, repocketed the handkerchief, and shook my hand surprisingly firmly with his right unsoiled hand. He swallowed to liquidate his mouth with saliva, the right eye flickered like a dying lightbulb and the whole right side of his face winced in pain. He bowed in that kind of Middle Eastern consummate affirmation where the shoulders dip with the head.

“I am Cyrus. Thank you very much.”

In the next twenty minutes, Cyrus went on to explain that he had been in the United States for over twenty years. He spoke a poor version of broken English and so I didn't say a word until I was sure I had his story right. I listened, made easily interpreted gestures. It pained him to speak, not figuratively but literally: he had to fight some kind of facial paralysis to talk, palsy maybe, I don't know. I sure as hell wasn't going to ask.

I decided to offer up a yes or no question so he could at least know I was interested in his life while not forcing him to articulate a response. I asked him if he'd read
The House of Sand and Fog
, and when he shook his head no, I said wait right here, please, ran down the center aisle, cut across the self-help 600s under the rainbow-lettered sign (
BE LUMINOUS: FIND BLISS AND AWARENESS IN YOUR LIFE
), out to the vacant fiction section, snagged one of the fifteen copies with the O on the cover, ran back, and urgently handed it over.

He nodded thank you very much and said excuse me, thank you very much, and plodded step by step to the expansive foreign language section and found an English to Farsi translation book, slid that and Dubus and the code of his card under the visible laser of the self-checkout station, a mandatory procedure which no employee ever abided, and came back to where I was standing, said thank you very much one last time, and then finished shelving the books on the cart.

A week later I went to see if the book had been returned and of course couldn't tell with all the other copies there, hogging the shelf. I risked encountering those evasively vague enthusiasms of someone who clearly hadn't read a page of a recommendation and asked Cyrus straight up if he liked the story.

In good faith, his dead eyes came to life. He swallowed for saliva and nodded even before he'd said a word. “This is my life.”

I was so excited that my mind started to pedal its predictable little tricycle of imagination. I brought forth romantic images of the old man in his indigenous inaccessible land, a sun-browned youth with a scythe at his side, mounted on some ageless slump of a camel, gown flowing in the sandswept wind, an extra on
Lawrence of Arabia
. Then he was squatting on the floor in one of those mud-dried hovels, a minuscule pile of food between his humble feet, tea in hand, blessing something, maybe the food, the hovel, maybe someone, his wife.

My head returned to the book, which took place here on the Peninsula. Thinking on its cursed, displaced Persian protagonist, Colonel Behrani, I realized that Cyrus reminded me of this figment of Dubus's imagination. More than its kindred cultural element, it's why I'd chased the book down in the first place.

I asked, “You were in the army then?”

He nodded, shoulder, eyebrow, wincing.

“And you were a colonel like Behrani?”

“General,” he said, with a trace of pride.

“General?”

He did not like that I repeated the word. “I am in charge of operations and field strategics,” he said firmly. “Thank you very much.”

That week he invited me to his apartment for dinner to meet his two sons. They visited Cyrus every Thursday night. Before knocking I kicked off my shoes in a respectful nod to their culture, one that my Samoan cousins halfway across the world also practiced, and when the door opened they smiled at my anticipation and I, in thick camping socks, smiled back. They both called me
bro
and had white wives with sun-whitened waist-length hair, both in teetering heels. The brothers were playful with their father, who, without any help from them, had prepared a five-course five-star (in my novice culinary book) meal.

We had
zereshk polo
, a kind of brown rice with dried cranberries, a dry flat bread akin to naan called
lavash
, roast chicken, a Persian cheese called
panir
that tasted like a wet feta, and my favorite,
tarig koresch
, potatoes crisped beneath the buttery drippings of the
zereshk polo
. I loved it all and paid tribute to Cyrus's generosity as host, his skill as chef, by eating everything on my plate the first time through and, sipping on tea in between, the second time through as well.

After dinner the wives left for home and the brothers cracked open domestic beers from microbreweries in Portland, Oregon, and I listened to their stories about showing up in St. Paul, Minnesota, one day before the American embassy fell in their birth town of Tehran. The boys had been whistled and honked at here, threatened at school, marginalized by teachers. This was 1979, hula-hooping kids were rotating their waists in T-shirts imprinted with Mickey Mouse giving the ayatollah the bird, folks pasted a
WE PLAY COWBOYS AND IRANIANS
stickers on the bumpers of their station wagons.

I mimicked Cyrus: polite, curt in conversation. “Were you worried then?”

“Hell no,” the older, Sefidi, said. “We all knew there was nothing going down here that could compare to where we just came from. America's a cakewalk, bro.”

“We were worried about our father,” Qavi said.

Cyrus was sipping his tea, looking down at his plate.

“So he wasn't here then? You didn't come out with them, Cyrus?”

“No.”

The brothers looked at each other and the oldest spurted, “He came out in 'eighty-one. All the brass except my father were executed.”

“How did he survive?” I hated myself the moment it came out of my mouth, stupid prying American intrusion.

“I never mistreating my men,” said Cyrus, face scrunched up, eyes aflame.

Sefidi refilled my cup, winking at me as if to say, We know this is uncomfortable for your hypersensitive infrastructure, but just indulge the old man, won't you, bro?

As I nodded back, accepting a sugar cube for my tea, the other brother came out with a framed black-and-white photo of Cyrus at twenty-eight, an officer in the Iranian army learning the latest avant-garde strategies at Fort Benning, Georgia. He had the photographer right there in his sights and the calm, confident, unblinking portraiture of a young president.

BOOK: What We Are
12.7Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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