What We Are (9 page)

“We had to burn the other photos,” said Qavi. “This is the only one that survived. Mother smuggled it in her bag.”

“Very stupid,” said Cyrus.

“And luckily nothing happened. I actually bought that frame for Mom when I got my first paper route.”

“Did you?” said Sefidi. “Does she remember that?”

“I don't know. Ask her later tonight.”

I looked at the brothers.

“Oh,” said Sefidi. “You didn't know she lived in Fremont?”

I didn't respond, hoping he wouldn't answer any further.

“Yeah,” he said. “Ma's had her own little apartment for about ten years now.”

“Eleven.”

“You sure about that?”

Cyrus stood up, left the room. Welcome to the season of divorce, the land of it. Sefidi winked at me again and Qavi started cleaning up the dishes. I offered to help and as Sefidi said, “No, no, of course not, it's cool, bro,” Cyrus came back with a flea-market ghetto blaster balanced on his frail pointy shoulder and motioned me over to the living room. I went at once to show loyalty to him and not to his Americanized but very nice and polite sons, walking across the clean soft rug in my socks, feeling sad for Cyrus and yet good, full of fine, exotic food and clean tea.

I sat down at the base of the couch, the brothers talked and whispered and clacked plates in the kitchen, Cyrus plugged the contraption in and hit the dice-sized
PLAY
button. This woman's beautiful operatic moan came out of the box and I stood up and lay back on the cool white cushions like Daisy fanning herself in
The Great Gatsby
and followed the rhythm with an instinct I thought I'd lost. Or had killed. Floating in timelessness, mining the soul. I was humming a tune I'd never before heard and I could hear my heartbeat behind the moaning, and the minute I proceeded to measure the
thump thump thump
my treacherous mind snuck into the game and rendered a puny list of tangents loaded with sarcasm: could be an early Verdi, this middle-eastern Aretha, a Farsi version of Streisand, Ottoman queen of the song.

“
Gol-e baran. Gol-e baran
.”

Cyrus was sipping on his tea, nodding. I wished to God—even his God—that I could speak Farsi and give the old man a moment he'd remember. I was his half solution, interested enough in his story to visit respectfully and more or less keep my mouth shut, but with no capacity to talk history or politics or genealogy. I was the surrogate
society, a trigger for nostalgia. I was, for the moment, just barely good enough.

“This sounds very nice, Cyrus.”

“Sima Bina. A lady very much older than you.”

“What is she singing about?”

“She is crying about love. Lost. You sang like a bird and go away. You fluttered my heart and leave it behind.”

Both sons emerged from the kitchen. Sefidi put his hand out and I hesitated; I didn't want to leave. “Well, thanks for coming, bro. It's good of you to keep an eye out for Pops at work.”

“Yeah. Thank you, Paul.”

I stood and said, “Yes. Of course. I'll get my shoes.” I turned to Cyrus and said, bowing, “Thank you very much, Cyrus, for the excellent dinner. Good-bye.”

He said, “Thank you very much, good-bye,” pressed the
STOP
button, unplugged the radio, hoisted it to a shoulder and walked back to his room, the cord dragging lifelessly behind.

Later that week Robin asked why I talked with Cyrus at lunch break and no one else. I told her a few talking points about his life and she yawned right through them. Didn't ask a single question. My coworkers forgave or ignored Cyrus his silences because of his age and immigrant status, but they didn't see anything worth investigation about someone who reported quietly to work, always on time despite catching the impunctual county bus each morning, who never took breaks or lunches beyond the allotted thirty minutes, was curt but polite with greetings and, at seventy-eight years of age, outshelved the lot of them every day with ease.

Robin knew how much I detested all of them, because the feeling was mutual. They cleared out of the way and fell silent when I'd round a corner with my cart. Unlike Cyrus, my tight-lipped approach to the job was offensive, arrogant. I was a native son of the Silicon Valley, however much I disavowed it in gesture and attitude, and I
should have shown some silly categorical reverence to the other native children.

But how could I be expected to worship with a group of people who started a deal called the Sunshine Fund, a “strictly voluntary donation to ensure that every retiring employee gets a tiny yet dainty sendoff party”? This meant chips and dip and little pointy hats with rubber bands hooked under your chin that said,
GOODBYE AND GOOD LUCK
. And a few plastic kazoos. Oh, and it was voluntary, all right, but that doesn't mean it was private. In the break room, there was a plastic chart the size of a chalkboard divvied up into months with the names of every employee on it. Only the ones who gave to the collection were given a smiley-face sticker, and those who gave more than a dollar were given a star sticker to match. Two of the thirty-six employees were starred. I was the only employee of the library who had neither smile nor star sticker to his name, and when I looked for Cyrus on the chart I saw he wasn't up there at all. Either it was compassion on their part or just plain oversight. Either you're someone we just won't take money from or you're not someone.

When Robin pointed out my altruistic shortcomings, I said, “I'll give cash when you change the name to the Moonlite Fund.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means y'all bring me down.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean: way down.”

“You heard about the new building plans?”

I shook my head no.

“They're gonna double the size of this place, make everything state of the art. Air-conditioning and skylight windows in two years.”

“How much you wanna bet the library collection doesn't grow one book?”

“You know, you have the worst attitude of anybody I've ever known.”

“Yeah?” I said. “Well, I'm gonna make it worse.”

“Impossible.”

“How many times do I have to kick you before you stop chewing on my leg?”

“Jerk!”

But even without the flak—even on the best of days, when I wouldn't talk to a soul in that house of books and, ordered to shelf-read in the Poetry section, would just float amongst the best of our species and browse their eternal lines—I couldn't remove my peers from the shadow of the old man. I watched Cyrus work harder than the lot of them; I watched them let him work harder; I watched them recognize his steady diligence, his timeliness, his discipline as nothing more than mere factors mitigating their own need to be diligent, timely, disciplined. As young and fresh as twenty-one, they'd leave loaded carts in the aisle, knowing Cyrus would unbegrudgingly pick up their slack, as if they were doing him a favor, giving him something to do, keeping him alive. We had a two-star general with us, a man of importance, and no one knew.

Finally I went to the top and told the head librarian, a crater-faced woman named Benilia Blight, about Cyrus's story. As she was in charge of the place, Ms. Blight was doubly afflicted. She had red hair that stuck close to her skull in the cranial area of the head but was patchy and wiry and actually of a lighter color near the nape of the freckled neck. The texture was like a bad mix of sod, weeds and crabgrass. And there was a lazy eye over which she sometimes wore a pirate's patch, depending on the intensity of the sun's brightness. She'd married an Iranian accountant whom she'd divorced within a year after he'd spent half her life savings watching women a third his age strip at the Blue Noodle Cabaret Club. According to Ms. Blight herself, she was able to capably greet an Iranian in the native Farsi. But before she'd even finished saying “
Salam
,” she was explaining to anyone in listening range the etymology of the word and its theological significance and why you, too, should pick up another language.

I thought she'd been unimpressed by the tale I'd shared until she made a rare appearance behind the scenes. I was checking in books with Cyrus, sorting them by genre. All of my fearless peers immediately stopped their conversations about nothing and put silent kisses on their obvious faces, saying, “Hi, Ms. Blight,” in obsequious unison. She befittingly acknowledged none of them and, as she marched directly toward us, I began to feel a tangible guilt about shooting my mouth off. She'd come to address something: her lazy eye was nearly centered in the socket of her rage.

“
Salam
,” she said to Cyrus.

“
Salam
.”

Nearly all of my coworkers watched in amazement. How did this impotent old man rate the head librarian's tongue? And then: her tongue in a foreign tongue?

“Did you read the papers today?” she said to me.

I had, but said no for safety reasons. I didn't like the tone of her voice: it implied I was a sheet in a windstorm.

“Can you believe what happened at Abu Ghraib?”

I shrugged for the same reason.

She rolled her good eye and said to Cyrus, “They tortured those Iraqis. And one of the torturers was a woman. I'm ashamed of my gender.”

I coughed into my hand.

“And I'm ashamed of my country.” She was talking to her Iranian compadre now, not me. “Of my president.”

Cyrus dabbed on his eye with the old handkerchief, swallowed, winced, and said, “Well. That is war.”

“Yes. Well. You're doing a fine job, Cyrus, keep it up,” she said, and walked out.

She didn't know what the hell he was talking about, but I like to think I did. His statement wasn't a contradiction. It almost wasn't even a statement. It didn't have anything to do with local or national
or even international politics. Those were all sad things, too, terribly sad and beyond resolution, but somehow whatever he said went deeper and longer and probably hurt worse when it hit. It probably hit over a long period of time. It was closer in concept to the liquid constantly leaking out of this wise old battered man's nose and eye than some theory or punditry or flag-waving/burning. At the end of the night, Rush Limbaugh, her Antichrist, and Janeane Garofalo, her savior, washed each other out. They wouldn't say one kind word about the other side and that nearly invalidated anything they stood for. But this thing sat forever in your heart and guts, hooked like a thorn of barbed wire—
the horror, the horror
—and no position on any issue could ever dislodge it.

Beyond solution, beyond sense, beyond this place.

Cyrus and I were friends, but I selfishly wanted more. I yearned for him to see that despite my superficial inheritance as an American, I, unlike the others, understood him. I didn't care how he got out of Iran—bribing some hooded black-eyed merchant a million rials, whatever—I was just happy he was here and alive. I had some inner degree of peace in the goal that one day I'd prove my friendship to him, not through words but through action. Driving him to work listening to Sima Bina, leaving bags of pomegranates on his porch: whenever I could get enough money for a car or some extra food, I'd do it. I knew no one else would help the old man, just like they wouldn't help me, or even, if it meant their asses anyway, help each other.

One day, a cool and wet Tuesday, I was shelving photography books in paranoia. Everyone in the library had just attended a seminar on sexual harassment in the workplace, and as I either casually or ardently held many of the forbidden attitudes covered by the outsourced sexual specialist, a woman with a flattop named Jo, I knew it was only a matter of time before attitude birthed behavior and I'd be warned, probated, fired. So in order to keep my job, I'd have to
be either criminally dishonest or so internalized that no one could read the blasphemy on my face or in my posture.

But I had a bigger worry, one of the spirit. I was surrounded by conversations that did not fundamentally matter, and if I, too, participated in that sordid practice, the weakness of climate would infect me through a kind of osmosis, sneak in under the radar of the consciousness, and I would, through simple science, thus mean nothing.

Like you are what you say.

I was walking down the makeshift handicap ramp of the employee entrance with that very conflict in my head and the doting Robin on my heel like a lost dog when I noticed a kid in a red bandanna spot Cyrus at the darkest end of the lot. He came up on him fast and I was already over the steel rail of the ramp in one of those feet-first cop-show bounds and as I shouted, “Cyrus!” he took a lump to the ear with a roll of quarters, fell to a knee, tried to get up, slipped on the silver pieces.

I landed like a stray cat in the alley, running the moment my feet hit ground. The kid maneuvered behind Cyrus and fondled his ass with vigor and at thirty yards from the scene I mumbled,
Fucking perv
, just as he ripped Cyrus's wallet from his back pocket and took flight.

I sprinted past Cyrus, who was mounting an attack on the air with his crooked and probably broken index finger—“
Mo-ney! Wal-let!
”—leapt the island splitting the rows of parallel spaces, and maybe fifty yards later, caught the mugger at the end of the parking lot. I came down on him from behind, clotheslining him in the neck. I shoved the jacker's goatee into the asphalt and then, in the slow time, had my first thought since the attempted heist, a purely American thought:
I want the old man to see this
.

I swiveled my body so Cyrus had an unimpeded view of me, and when the bully rolled over between my feet and was supine to the dark sky above us, I bent down at the waist, ripped the rag off his
head, and went to town. I hit him once in the mouth, busted the nose like a ripe grape, slapped him across the eye, spit out, “You like jacking old men, mutherfucker, I'll fucking kill you,” and slapped him again. I shoved my hand up under the scruff of the chin and drove the rear of his skull into the pavement, and that's when the second thought occurred to me, the more important of the two and tougher to abide:
Better quit it, champ. Best quit
.