One
Eight years since I’ve seen my parents’ graves, and if I haven’t visited it’s a safe bet that neither has anyone else. Maybe a few of the curious, assuming that anyone is still curious about such things. Not a week goes by that I don’t think of them there, under their shared granite slab. They died a day apart, my mother the one day and my father the next, so one stone seemed appropriate and more cost-effective. Not that I paid. I just mean that it must have seemed more appropriate and cost-effective to the man who did pay for the pretty pink rock and the engraving and had them buried side by side. They’re within reach, but they never touch. How so like the world of the living.
You don’t entirely appreciate how alone you are until you’ve lost your parents.
In the beginning, we piled stones on graves to stop wild animals from digging up the remains of our loved ones. I suppose those rough mounds served as markers as well, but the principal reason we piled them so high and wide was because we didn’t want to come back to find our parents’ bones strewn around like any other animal’s. Nowadays, with coffins and fancy fenced-off graveyards in the middle of the city, you don’t have to worry about anything eating your dead parents. We’ve almost completely run out of things to worry about. I’m kidding. I wouldn’t even mention it, but down east here, people tend not to know when you’re kidding.
My mother’s father was a baker, and he was not a kind man. That was about all she ever said about him. There was an empty place in my mother that couldn’t be filled up with any amount of love or nastiness, and I was always pretty sure it had something to do with her father, but there was no way of getting at what he might have done to her. It was like she spent her whole life hiding from him, always glancing over her shoulder. One time, when I tried to get more out of her (I was probably seven or eight years old), she told me he was like the giant that Jack meets at the top of the beanstalk. I guess my father was Jack. He met her at a meeting in a Denver basement in 1964. She was seventeen years old and he was over forty. It was the monthly gathering of the Secret Society, an anti-communist cell operating in Denver. She had been hired to dance and take off her clothes for them. (She told me this when I was sixteen, after she’d pulled out my bottom drawer and found a magazine full of young women who had taken off their clothes. She said I could keep the magazine, but I couldn’t stand the thought of her knowing it was there, so I burned it.) The Secret Society didn’t pay her much to take off her clothes. The man who hired her, a friend of her father, said it was for the cause of freedom.
The morning after the last performance of her dancing career, she was heading north in my father’s pickup truck. He was the most exciting man she’d ever met, a war hero from an exotic northern kingdom. Queendom. He’d lost his arm fighting the Nazis, and she was escaping with him from the giant and from Denver and from the United States of America, and she would never be unhappy again.
Nine months later I was born.
I’m only twenty-nine years old. People generally think I’m older. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I’ve suffered more than most in twenty-nine years, and that’s made me act or appear older than I am. Don’t get me wrong: there’s no pride in my claim of suffering. Mostly I suffer from shame, and there’s not much percentage in being proud of your shame. I’m a janitor here at an elementary school in Toronto, Canada, and I’m also a bit of a philosopher. The thing that marks me most is my unusual relationship with God. I’ve killed for Him, and He, in turn, has killed for me. That, I believe, is an unusual relationship.
I like being a janitor because it’s plain and simple, one of those jobs that’s never noticed unless it’s left undone or not done well enough. When somebody compliments me on my work, it’s most often because she wants to feel good about herself for noticing. I’d just as soon not be noticed. The highest compliment is when they forget you exist. If they can’t see right through you, you’re not using the right window cleaner. This afternoon, for instance, I happened to be emptying the trash barrel in the corner of the schoolyard when I heard the voice of this lawyer’s son, a boy I have not gained a good opinion of. I turned to see that he had another kid cornered.
“Give me the ball, you little faggot.”
These kids were both in grade four, the same grade as Caroline. There’s no way he’d have let a teacher hear him say that, but he didn’t take any notice of the janitor. I was of no more consequence than a rat rooting around the garbage. Less, in fact. A rat is far more deserving of attention than a janitor. And if the cornered kid hadn’t been a friend of Caroline’s, I’d never have got myself involved. I watch out for Caroline and her friends. Caroline is my daughter.
“I said, give it here, you faggot. Why don’t you go play with your girlfriends? Maybe they’ve got a Barbie doll for you.”
Caroline’s friend has more backbone in him than little Mussolini expected, and he shook his head and wouldn’t give up the ball. Didn’t say a word, though, and you could see he was pretty scared.
“Give it here, faggot!”
“Watch your mouth,” I said.
The lawyer’s kid spun around to look at me. Caroline’s friend was gaping at me too, but he looked just as scared as before I stuck my nose in, like he thought I was on his case for not watching what he wasn’t saying. For a second there, they were equal: two scared little boys.
“I don’t like to hear that kind of talk,” I said.
By this time the lawyer’s kid had realized I was only the janitor. “Mind your own fucking business, freakoid.” He turned back to Caroline’s friend. “If you don’t give me the fucking ball –”
I picked him up by his shirt collar at the scruff of his neck, as if he were a kitten, and turned him around to face me. “I told you, I don’t like to hear people talking that way.”
He started wriggling, and for a second I thought he was going to take a swing at me, even though I had him by the back of the neck. The laying on of the hands wasn’t what made him drop his fists. It was my eyes. He could see something in my eyes that made him hang still and pee his pants. He could see me wondering whether God wanted him dead. Caroline’s friend saw too, and he ran.
I set the boy down and walked away.
Caroline’s friend went right to the teacher in the playground and told her. I’m not sure which teacher, because I’d gone down to hide under the stairs in my room with the red door. Had a coffee. What could be safer than drinking coffee in a room under the stairs behind a red door? A knock came, and I opened up to see that the principal herself had come for a visit. She looked me over for signs of chaos and depravity.
“How are you, Jonathan?”
“Fine. Just having a coffee. Would you like a coffee?”
“One of the students said you were involved in an altercation in the playground.”
I knew I should not have lifted him off the ground. Less than three months on the job. They could get rid of me for less.
“Just now? Oh. Yeah. A couple of boys arguing and I told them to stop. Hope I didn’t scare them.”
She studied me and I looked at the floor.
“Did you touch him, Jonathan?”
“Touch? No. I don’t think so. No.”
“What happened?”
“The one called the other a name.”
“What name?”
“I don’t remember.”
“It’s better if I know what name.”
I looked around to make sure no one else was listening. “Faggot.”
“You see, Jonathan, that’s important. There’s a strict policy against that kind of thing. But you have to come to me immediately. And you’d better not have touched him. We’ve had to deal with his father before. You’d better tell me the complete truth about what happened so that I know what I’m dealing with here.”
I shrugged and then, because it was obvious she wasn’t buying, I added, “Just dealing with garbage.”
I smiled and she shook her head, not appreciating the humour of a janitor dealing with garbage.
“I need to know, Jonathan,” she said. “I need to know exactly what happened.”
“Never touched him,” I said. “I told him to watch his mouth, and the kid he was tormenting ran away, so I left.”
She looked me in the eye and I forced myself not to look away.
“That’s strange,” she said. “The boy you helped was under the impression there was some kind of physical intervention involved.”
“That is strange,” I said. “Maybe he wished it were so.”
“Maybe,” she said.
“It certainly makes for a better story.”
She studied me some more and waited. She has eyes so blue that even in the basement they make you remember the sky.
“I like this job,” I said. “I wouldn’t do anything that would mean I could lose it.”
Caroline looks like her mother. Like her mother and like my mother. It’s hard to put a finger on the particular resemblances. My mother’s eyes and mouth, for sure. Her mother’s nose and chin and cheekbones. The resemblance goes beyond the face, though, right into her tiny skeleton: the way she stands on her left leg and curls her right foot behind her left ankle. Her mother used to do that too.
Caroline’s mother, Gloria Irvine, was only seven when I first met her in Mrs. Field’s grade two classroom. That was far from Toronto, in Broken Head, Saskatchewan, a place Caroline has no conception of, I’m sure, though that’s where she was conceived. Not so strange really: out of squeamishness, we all tend to avoid a conception of our conception. But my mother wouldn’t allow me the luxury.
“It was Calgary, Eisenhower.” My name was Dwight then, but my mother usually called me Eisenhower or some other silly made-up name. It was a game she liked: she’d call me Eisenhower and she’d ask me how I got a name like Eisenhower and I’d tell her it wasn’t my name. “That dingy little bachelor apartment your father had there. A furnished room, and we slept on the pullout couch. Galley kitchen, with the table tucked into the L of the main room. Bathroom and showers down the hall. There was that couch you were made on and a desk in the corner.”
I was nine, Caroline’s exact age, when my mother told me this story. We were on the farm near Broken Head where I grew up, sitting in the dark kitchen (the west windows had been smashed in a hailstorm and Dad had boarded them over and left them that way) with the bright red walls. Vermilion, she called them. Her favourite colour. She kept pointing to the couch in the living room as if it were the very one she was talking about. I remember her bright red lipstick. Her lips were the same shape as Caroline’s.
“You happened in that apartment on that couch, and I remember the exact moment. I’ll never forget that orgasm. I was seventeen and it was my first and I’ve never had one like that since. He must’ve drunk just the right amount that day: not enough to make him useless; just enough to slow him down. It was like he flicked a switch I never knew was in me. It was like the top of my head come off. It blew me apart, and the sperm that was you had nothing between it and the egg.”
She ran her fingers through my hair. You mustn’t underestimate my mother, even though she dropped out of school to run away with my father. She was smart, and she wanted to make sure I knew things. She’d already long ago explained to me what an orgasm was. I’d asked her where babies came from, and she’d outlined the mechanics and started piling on vocabulary. Penis. Vagina. Copulation. Ejaculation. Reproduction. That was years before, and she was gradually layering on the details.
“That’s what an orgasm’s for in a woman. They’ve got an obvious purpose in a man. In a woman it’s not so obvious, but that doesn’t mean there’s no reason for them. Contrary to popular belief, they’re not purely for pleasure. Scientists have done studies, and they’ve found that a woman is much more likely to have a baby if she has an orgasm. It opens her up so wide. Not surprising. Unfortunately, Eisenhower, nothing’s ever purely for pleasure.”
I’ve spent most of my life imagining the scientists doing those studies. But I never became a scientist.
The principal did stay for coffee, even though she always tells me I make terrible coffee. She sat on an orange plastic chair, legs crossed at the knees, holding her chin in a professional way. Choppy came in smelling of the smoke he’d had in the alley and found her sitting on his chair, and even though he said he was just as happy turning over a pail and sitting on that, all of a sudden she had to go. When she was gone, Choppy sat where she’d been sitting, cleaning his fingernails with a jackknife and flashing me dark smiles.
“She wants you, boy. Why don’t you give it to her right down here in our cozy little room? Just hang a ‘Gone Fishing’ sign on the door and I’ll leave you be.”
“She’s a married woman, Choppy.”
“What difference does that make? She’s bored with the husband. You saw him at Breakfast with Santa: any woman’d be bored. He’s gone a little thick around the middle and a little thin around the top. Gives her a bit of a thrill fantasizing about doing it with the caretaker, I’ll bet.”
“You’re the one fantasizing, Choppy.”
“I’m only thinking of you, boy. Going around day after day with that hangdog expression on your face. You make me want to cry. Anyone can see that all you need’s a little loving. The principal can sure see it, and she’s more than ready to give it to you.”
“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, Choppy. Thou shalt not commit adultery.”
He picked his nose and eyed what he’d discovered. “The Bible’s got its place, maybe, but it’s not much good for getting your dick wet, is it? We’d better be getting back to work.” He stood up on his tiptoes and stretched his arms up to the ceiling.
“You remind me a bit of my father, Choppy.”
“Is that so? Well, Johnny my boy, you are more like a son to me than my own son, that bastard. You are indeed. And I’m sure your old man’s a fine, upstanding specimen of humanity.”
“Was,” I said. “He passed away.”
“Oh,” he said. “Sorry to hear that.”
I shrugged. “We were never that close.”
Caroline and I are closer in age than my father was to my mother. Mom was only eighteen and Jacob Froese was forty-two when I was born. It’s pronounced Froze, which is why I chose that name for myself. I call myself Jonathan Froze: I have all the official identification so that nobody will ever know Dwight Froese and Jonathan Froze ever occupied the same body.
Jacob Froese lost his left arm somewhere in Belgium. My mother told me that, and at first I wondered if we might ever go over there to look for it. I don’t know if it was a grenade or a shell or a very large bullet. He never talked about it. I watched him shred targets to test a new weapon he’d made, and I saw him kill a gopher a hundred yards away with a .22, but he never said much about the war. This once, I must have been eight, in the middle of supper he stopped chewing his steak and looked me in the eye and said, “At boot camp, there was this sign above the barracks door: Kill the Enemy.” Then he looked towards the window as if he’d been interrupted by a magpie shrieking out there and started chewing again.
Another time, they were screaming at each other and Mom’s nose was bleeding, and he grabbed me by the arm as he was marching out the door and shook me hard and said, “She was mine until you come along!”
He should have had a new prosthesis by the time I was a kid, but somebody or something warned him that the government would use monitoring equipment in the newfangled prosthetic to keep track of his movements, so he made do with the old one, making repairs of his own when anything went wrong. He was handy. He made guns in our basement on a metal lathe. I liked to watch him work, liked the smell of hot oil and smoking steel as I peered through the spaces between the basement stairs, the single light bulb dangling down on a wire above him glinting off the narrow ribbon of metal that lifted off as the cutter licked slowly down the length of the shaft. Periodically, to cool the cutter, he would squeeze a drop of oil from the can he held in his good hand. There was a big red button on the lathe that he pushed when he was finished, and when he pushed it, the lathe always stopped. I’d sneak down when his back was to me, but as the shaft slowed he’d turn and take off his safety glasses and stare through the darkness under the stairs straight into my eyes, and he’d say, “Red means stop.”
Unlike my mother, he wasn’t much of a talker, but this one time when he was drunk – more often than not, he was drunk – he told a very strange story.
“We were living in this fleabag apartment in Calgary, and I got this letter from a lawyer,” he said. My ears perked up because I knew he was talking about the apartment with the pullout couch my mother had told me about. He was telling the story to a friend of his named Chandler who was a gun dealer and bought the guns he made. I was hiding in the pots cupboard beside the fridge. Listening. There wasn’t any good reason to hide. I hadn’t done anything to piss him off that day, but if he’d found me he would’ve been mad enough to take his belt to me. I was only hiding because I knew he’d make me go out to the shop and sort bolts if he saw me. I guess I was also keen on hearing what he and Chandler talked about when they talked.
“Letter from this lawyer said my dad dropped dead of a heart attack and left me half a section of land. Didn’t know what to think: leaving me land when I had every reason to believe I’d been decently disowned. I was a bit suspicious. Greeks bearing gifts and all that.”
Chandler laughed. “Your dad weren’t no Greek: he was a damn Mennonite.”
“Mennonite preacher. So I couldn’t figure why he’d leave land to the boy he’d shunned. Hadn’t said more than two sentences to anyone in the family since the day I stole the horse and rode to Broken Head to join the army.”
“Oh, right. You Mennonites didn’t believe in going over there to kill other Krauts, did you?”
“Nothing to do with Krauts. Didn’t believe in killing the man who was holding the gun to their heads. Pacifists. Turn the other cheek and let him blow your brains to the far side of never mind.”
“But you were cut from a different cloth. Right, Jake? So you joined up. You want another splash?”
Chandler’d brought the whiskey they were sharing, and Dad must have nodded, because I heard him push back his chair and go to the fridge for more ice.
“So they shunned me. Not that I gave a damn. But I was sure thrown for a loop when I got that letter from the lawyer. Jumped in the truck and drove the six hours here to have a look at the place before I sold. Had no intention of keeping it. No desire to live here.”
“What changed your mind?”
Dad’s chair scraped back into place at the table, and I heard him strike a match to light a smoke. “Well, I came and took a look around. Walked through the pasture. Went for a swim in the creek. Skinny-dipping, like I remembered doing when I was a kid. Left my arm lying there on the bank. When I got out, I lay down on the ground stark naked and closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, my dad was standing over me, looking down into my eyes. He asked if I liked it.”
“What? Liked it? What are you saying? Who asked?”
“My dad.”
“I thought you said he was dead.”
“Yeah. But there he was, looking down at me, and he asked me if I liked the place, and I said I thought he was dead. ‘I’m not your father,’ he said to me. ‘I come to you in his form because my real form would strike you stone blind.’”
“Uh- huh?” Chandler said.
“‘Is that so?’ I said to him. ‘Who are you, then? Elvis Presley?’”
Chandler thought that was funny.
“He spat on the ground right beside my head where I’m lying there, just the way my dad would have done. Then you know what he said?”
“What did he say, Jake?”
“He said, ‘I am Yahweh.’”
“He’s who?”
“Yahweh. God. That’s God’s original name. He’s had a few, you know?”
“Really?” Chandler said. “Why does He keep changing it?”
“Dunno. Too many bad cheques. So I’m looking at his spit dripping down from a blade of the prairie wool, and I’m thinking, Is that really God’s spit? And so you know what I said to him?”
“What did you say to him?”
“Prove it.”
“Prove what?”
“I told him to prove he was God.”
Chandler coughed before he spoke. “You did? And what’d he do?”
“Well, he stepped on his own spit, right beside my head, so the toe of his boot was practically in my eye, and I’m staring at this scuff on the toe of his boot that’s shaped like a butterfly and I’m wondering if it’s going to turn into a real butterfly and flutter away, and then he said, ‘I’m not here to make miracles for you, Jacob Froese. I’m here to warn you that the son who’ll be born to you in three months will one day kill you.’”
I sat up straight and bumped my head against the top of the cupboard. Neither Dad nor Chandler spoke for a long time. I held my breath.
“Did you hear that?” Dad finally asked.
“Yeah, I heard. Eva was pregnant,” Chandler said. “That was Dwight he meant would kill ya?”
My name back then was Dwight. Not Jonathan. Not Eisenhower.
“That must have been who he meant,” Dad said. “That’s who was born three months later. ‘Your son who’s growing in that young prostitute,’ is what he said.”
“Dwight? He told you Dwight was going to kill you?”
“Yeah. And I stood up and asked him if that was his proof he was God. ‘That’s your proof you’re Yahweh?’ I said. But as I was standing, he was growing, so he was still looking down at me from way up above. He was smiling. I don’t remember my father ever smiling. His yellow teeth were showing. ‘If you want to take my warning as a miracle you can, but that’s the only miracle I’m giving you,’ he said.”
“Dwight?” Chandler said again.
“And I said to him, ‘You were always clucking on about God, but you were never before honest enough to admit you thought you were him.’”
“He said that Dwight was going to kill you?”
“And he said, ‘I’ve given you my warning, but you’re such a faithless fool, you won’t know it’s true until you’re dead.’ And he turned and walked away. I watched him for five whole minutes until he’d climbed out of the valley and disappeared over the horizon.”
Inside the dark of that cupboard, I saw God disappearing.
“Jesus, that’s one hell of a bad dream,” Chandler said. “But how did that dream make you decide to stay here?”
“Who says it was a dream? I was awake. It wasn’t a dream.” Chandler started coughing again, and then he started to laugh.
“Come on, Jake. You think it was real? You don’t really think it was real.”
“I don’t think. I know it was real. I was awake.”
Chandler’s laugh got a little more nervous. “So you moved here with Eva and had the kid and raised him? I don’t get it, Jake. Why would you do that if you thought it was real? If God told you the kid was going to kill you, why didn’t you flush him down the toilet the first chance you got? And why would knowing that make you move here? You said you didn’t even want to live here in the first place.”
I could hear Dad drumming the fingers of his good hand on the table.
“I’m not scared of God. I don’t even believe in God. That’s why I moved us here. How else was I gonna prove to him that I don’t believe in him?”
There was this long moment of silence where you could hear the birds singing outside, and then Chandler laughed so hard that after a while he started coughing again and it took him a long time to stop.
“Whatever you say, Jake. Whatever you say.”
I talked to Caroline’s nanny with the pierced nose out by the garbage bin after school today. Pretty young to be looking after her, but she seems nice enough. Not sure what Caroline’s mother’s thinking, putting her life in the hands of someone so young. Black hair, dark complexion. I thought she was Mexican, but apparently not. She told me Caroline had lost her red toque and wondered if she’d left it in the playground and if Choppy or I or one of the teachers might have picked it up and put it somewhere. I went into the school and looked through all the lost and found boxes, sifting mounds of smelly boots and shoes and coats and hats and dirty lunch kits. Couldn’t find it. What I did find was a sunhat I remembered her wearing the day I first saw her in September and a few days after that. I thought about taking that out to the nanny, but realized it wouldn’t be wise. I went and hung the sunhat on her hook in her empty classroom and went out and told her nanny I couldn’t find a red toque.
“Oh, fuck,” she said. She saw me flinch. “Excuse my French. Her mother always gets on my case when she loses something. She’s constantly losing her hats, and I’m constantly getting blamed. As if there was anything I could do about it. She doesn’t like wearing them, but her mother insists on jamming them on her head every morning as she’s going out the door. And then she tosses them off anywhere and I’m supposed to keep track of them and I’m the one who gets blamed when she loses them.”
“Maybe it’ll turn up. Her mother must be . . .” I didn’t know where to go with that, and she was standing there looking at me. “I guess I’ll have to make allowances for your French, considering you’re not even French,” I said.
“I am,” she said, without so much as a blink. “Nez Perce.” She gave a little tug to the ring in her nose.
I shrugged and scratched at a sudden itch on my own nose before I got embarrassed and dropped my hand.
“I have no idea what I am, really,” she said. “I was raised by foster parents. My mother was some variety of Indian, but she gave me up. After I read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, I always wanted to be Nez Perce. You heard of them?”
“Don’t believe I have,” I lied.
“They were this tribe from the west coast of the U.S. who had their land taken away and fought the cavalry halfway across the continent trying to join up with Sitting Bull in Canada to help overthrow the white invaders. But eventually the cavalry slaughtered most of them and they had to surrender. So I always wanted to be Nez Perce, even though my white foster parents were very good to me. Actually, Caroline’s parents are good to me too. I get paid better than any of these other nannies. But I still complain. I’m such an ungrateful little dirtbag.”
I shrugged and scratched my nose again. “I thought you were Mexican,” I said.
She looked at me like I was a bit of an idiot. “Shows what you know.”
She smiled a smile that showed me her crooked white teeth and walked away.
I took the Queen streetcar home after work, as usual. Home is a room above a barbershop on Queen East that I imagine isn’t much different from the apartment where I was conceived. I sleep on a pullout couch. The bathroom’s not in the hallway, though. There’s this desk I’m writing at in the corner by the kitchen. I have a computer they were throwing out at the school.
Caroline’s my daughter, and I wish I could be a real father to her. But I can’t even tell her who I am or how I feel about her because if I did they’d fire me and I couldn’t be close to her anymore. I’ve already missed too many years to allow that to happen again. I want to leave this account of myself so that she can read it someday when she’s old enough. I want her to know the truth about where and whom she comes from. There’s too much that her mother and her family wouldn’t want her to know. I’m afraid that otherwise she’ll never even know I existed.
I guess I’ll begin by telling about the day I killed her grandfather.
After I’d done it, I drove straight to Broken Head to tell the police. Past stubble fields bleached white by herbicide. No tillage. Poison and fertilizer instead of leaving the land fallow, the higher purpose supposedly to avoid disturbing the earth so it wouldn’t blow away, the real goal to squeeze a crop out of the soil every single year.
At the rural detachment of the RCMP, I pulled into the parking lot, walked inside and told the man behind the window that I had another death to report. Two officers came to question me, but all I’d tell them was that my father was dead. After taking me to the hospital, where a doctor looked at my ear and a nurse bandaged it, the police asked me to direct them back to where they’d find his body, and I did that well enough, though I had a feeling he’d be gone when we got there. He wasn’t. The flies were already at the blood and mess. I was glad that the day before I’d taken my mother straight to the hospital.
Even though I believed he’d killed her, I no longer felt the least bit of pleasure in his look of surprise.
Instead of arresting me, they asked me if I’d be willing to see a psychiatrist, and I said that I would. The psychiatrist asked me many questions about my mother and father and how they’d both died, and I told him everything I knew. He had me admitted to the psychiatric wing of the Broken Head Union Hospital. The police did not charge me immediately, as they said they needed to complete their investigation. These men were friendlier than they’d ever been before. It was because I’d killed my father. They didn’t like my father. I didn’t tell them anything about the duel because, when one of them asked me about the duelling pistols, another told me it might be better for me to talk to my lawyer before I answered, as if they didn’t want to hear what I might have to say. It was as though in the killing I had become my father, telling the story he’d told me just before I killed him, the story about how he’d been trained to kill over there in Europe – trained to seek out the movement of a man from a great distance and draw his crosshairs on that stranger’s chest or head and pull the trigger. And the policemen looked at my father’s body, with the bullet hole through the forehead and out the back of the head, and they nodded and said they understood. They showed more mercy to me than I had shown to him, my own father.
In the hospital, I had my own soap-green-walled room with a barred window. There were fluorescent lights and a single metal chair for visitors and a washroom by the door and my own personal officer outside to make sure I did not try to escape. It was very hot, and a pretty nurse put a fan in the room that blew a breeze at me. There was a woman next door who talked constantly, and so loudly, even when she was alone, that sometimes I wondered if she was speaking to me.
“Time to be a-goin’ home now. Frank’s waiting for me. Get his supper ready. Better be goin’. You’ve ben so nice. I like the soup. Good soup. Very good soup. Wonderful soup. I like the carrots too. Frank doesn’t like carrots, but I’ve always liked ’em, ever since I was little. Used to steal the carrots from Mom’s garden. And the peas. Nothing better than fresh peas right out of the pod. Oh, Mom was mad when she caught me. She paddled my bottom, she did. I really should get home. She’ll be very mad. Or, I mean, Frank will. Mom’s dead now. I know she’s dead now. I know that. I know my mother’s dead. I know that for sure.”
My ears rang. My father’s bullet had taken a large piece of the left one. The remains were bandaged so that when I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror I saw a veteran of some simple, perfect war. I believed Dad had killed my mother, and I had avenged her death and discovered that vengeance would not return her. She was gone and everything about her was gone, and no matter how much I expected her to walk through the door and take me in her arms, she would not be coming back. Sometimes the nurses came and gave me pills, which I took, and asked me questions nurses ask, like “Have you had a bowel movement today?”
The pills didn’t help the ringing in my ears, which was beginning to drive me insane. It wasn’t a long drive. I wished that, instead of going to the police, I’d got another of my father’s guns and put it in my mouth and pulled the trigger. How stupid to have given up that chance. Sometimes I imagined getting up and getting dressed and walking out of the room and past the guard and all the way to the farm and finding a suitable tool and finishing the job properly. I didn’t want to be locked up and forced to live out the rest of my miserable life.
Other times I wondered if it might not be so bad in jail. This hospital room with the barred window was not so good, but maybe I could learn to be happy in a cage, like those animals you see in the zoo that are watered and fed and care for nothing. I’d have plenty of time for reading Dostoevsky. The thought of the other prisoners worried me, but could it be any worse than high school?
Please try to understand. I believed my father was evil. I believed he’d killed my mother. I wouldn’t have killed him otherwise. I wouldn’t have left him lying there for the flies. Though flies are beautiful in their way: the iridescence of their wings. Like feathers and silk. And oil and gasoline. As a janitor, I’m not supposed to have any place in my heart for flies, but I can’t deny their beauty.
A man not all that much older than me who called himself my lawyer came to my room, shook my hand and sat down in the metal chair, with his briefcase resting on his knees. He said it was good to see me again. I didn’t admit that I had no recollection of ever having seen him before. He started asking me strange questions: “Are you sure that five minutes passed between when he shot you and when you shot him? Couldn’t you have been mistaken? Maybe it just seemed that long. Time seems to slow down at times like that.”
I gave him a long, steady look that made him squirm. “How would you have any idea what time does at times like that? It was five minutes. But how did you know it was five minutes?” I asked, and he looked at me through his Coke-bottle lenses.
“You told me,” he said. “You told me the whole story. I hope you didn’t say that to the police. Are you sure you didn’t tell the police?”
He had painfully combed hair and a smattering of acne on his forehead. When I didn’t answer, he looked even more worried. He wasn’t quite able to look me in the eye.
“The thing is, I have unfortunate news,” he continued. “Your mother’s death has been ruled an accident.” He looked out the window at the elm tree growing across the street before switching his gaze to the floor. There were bars on the window to make sure I didn’t jump out. Not just me: every person who’d ever been in that room had wanted to jump out that window. Even my lawyer wanted to jump out that window. “According to the autopsy report, she must have been standing on the bank of the river and fallen backwards and hit her head on a rock and drowned.”
“Creek,” I corrected him.
My lawyer cranked his eyebrows a notch higher.
“Fell into the creek,” I said.
He nodded. “Fell into the creek and hit her head and drowned.”
“What report?”
My lawyer opened his briefcase, as if to check his notes for the answer. “The autopsy report.”
“And how would they know what happened? Were they there?”
He handed me a few sheets of paper clipped together. “Here’s the report. You can read it over yourself, and you’ll see how they reached their conclusions. It’ll complicate things. But in the end, it doesn’t change the fact that you had good reason to believe your father had murdered your mother. That’s very important. And your injury is also very important. He tried to kill you.” My lawyer pointed to the bandage on my ear to show me what he meant.
I looked at the cover of the report. It was written by Dr. Andrew Irvine. I knew who he was. Everyone in Broken Head knew who he was. The father of a girl I had been in love with for many years and who mostly did not know I existed. The father of Caroline’s mother, Gloria Irvine.
“I want to talk to him,” I said. “I want to talk to Dr. Andrew Irvine.”
My lawyer looked puzzled. He smiled and nodded and stammered that he didn’t think that was possible.
“Of course it’s possible. Why wouldn’t it be possible?”
He shrugged his shoulders in a way that made me want to crush him into the floor and sweep him away. My lawyer had an unfortunate talent for making people want to crush him.
“Go and tell him I want to talk to him,” I said.
“He’s likely to be a witness for the prosecution. Professionally, he can’t . . .”
“Go and tell him. He must work here somewhere. Wherever they keep the bodies. In the basement?”
My lawyer said he’d speak to him. He closed his briefcase and shook my hand again, all the time looking at the food tray beside my table in a way that made me wonder if he was hungry. To be hungry for that congealed mess, he’d have to be a very hungry man. I suspect he was only trying to avoid my eyes. He said he’d see me again soon and hurried away.
That evening the door opened and Dr. Andrew Irvine walked in and sat down in the chair where my lawyer had sat. He didn’t speak. I was lying on my side, facing the door, but the light was out, so he might have thought I was sleeping. He wore a sleek black suit and a very sad expression. I even wondered if he might begin to cry. He sat looking at the fan in the corner panning slowly back and forth. From the next room, we could hear the woman talking, and Irvine tilted his head to listen.
“Emily, you’re a fool. Don’t know what to say to ya. I’d just as soon you was dead. We go on and on like this and nothing changes. Remember that dog? Daddy gave him to me for Christmas and he disappeared. Never knew what happened. Fell through the ice, maybe. That’s what Daddy thought, ’cause the last time he saw him he was chopping a hole in the ice for the cows to drink from. But it could have been coyotes too. They like eating dogs. They’ll eat anything. They’re hungry beasts.”
While we were listening, I raised myself on my elbow and looked Irvine in the eye.
“Hello, Dwight,” he said. “Andrew Irvine.”
He stood and offered his hand, and I pulled myself to a sitting position. It was a hand made for holding scalpels, with long fingers and soft skin. Nothing like Dad’s hand.
“My father killed her,” I said.
“Pardon?”
“You’ve made a mistake,” I said. “My father killed my mother.”
Irvine sighed and nodded as though considering what I’d said. “You don’t need to worry about the arrangements. I’ve handled things for both your mother and father. There’s a plot for them in Memorial Park, and they’ll share the same headstone. It’s not a large stone, but it’s very tasteful. I hope it’s okay I did that?”
Dr. Andrew Irvine was well known in Broken Head for his causes and general philanthropy. His donations and acts of grace and brotherhood. What I mean is, he was a churchgoing man and famous for his Christian charity. I was flooded with a terrible shame that I had not even considered my parents’ final arrangements.
“My father wanted to be burned,” I said. “He told me that. He didn’t tell me much, but he once asked to be burned. They shouldn’t be buried together. He killed her.”
The woman next door interrupted. “A pretty little dog. Black and white.”
Irvine looked away from me, listening to her voice.
“She’s talking to herself,” I told him. “She’s all alone.”
“Yes,” Irvine nodded. He lowered himself once more into the metal chair. “I understand how you feel right now, but I think that in time you’ll be glad they’re together. Your father didn’t kill your mother. It was an accident. I hope you’ll forgive me for making the arrangements without consulting you first. Of course, if your father expressed other wishes – if you want it done differently, there’s still time. The funeral, as they’ve told you, will be tomorrow. You’ll want to be there.”
No one had told me, or if they had I didn’t remember.
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to be there. My mother’s gone. It doesn’t matter where she’s buried. Even with him. But you’re wrong. He killed her. That’s the important thing. I want that straightened out.”
“That’s not what you told the police when you brought her body here. That’s not how it appears.”
“I didn’t want the police to arrest him. I wanted him for myself. I’m telling you, my father killed her.”
He put his hand over his mouth before he let it drop to his lap. “I understand your insistence, but I also think you need to know it isn’t true.”
“What makes you so sure it was an accident?”
He studied me through the gloom of the room, the fan ruffling his hair as it pivoted in his direction.
“I shouldn’t tell you this. I’m not supposed to be talking to you at all. Do you understand that?” I nodded, though I didn’t understand. He looked towards the door and leaned forward and whispered, “The contusion was caused by a stationary blow: her head hit the object and not the other way around. She wasn’t struck. There’s no sign of a struggle. There was only one other sign of trauma, which was to her right leg. It indicates that she stepped into a hole, fell backwards into the creek and struck her head on a stone. A badger hole. I went out with the police, and we searched upstream from where you found her, and we found the hole and the stone with traces of her blood on it. The stone was below a steep embankment, and it was just big enough that the tip was above the surface of the water, and there were traces of her blood. I took samples. And her lungs indicate that she was unconscious when she drowned.” He looked away. “She fell and hit her head and drowned. Your father had nothing to do with it. I’m sorry.”
I stared at him until he crossed his legs.
“Did you see something?” he asked.
“How do you know my father didn’t push her?”
He gave me a long look and cleared his throat before speaking. “You saw your father do this?”
“I heard him threaten her many times. I know he did it.”
“Did your father tell you he killed her?”
“No. He didn’t tell me anything. He never told me anything.”
He sighed and nodded. “Your mother fell. Her death was an accident. You should be at their funerals tomorrow.”
He closed his mouth and stared at the floor, and I became all too aware of the ringing in my ear.
“An accident,” I said. “Could have happened to anyone.”
He held his silence for another moment, looking at me strangely – looking as if he were a little afraid of me. “Yes. It was an act of God.” He reached up and rubbed one of his temples with his fingertips.
“God? God? And where does that leave me?”
“I’m sorry?”
“I had to kill my father to avenge my mother’s death. If she died by an act of God, where does that leave me?”
“Avenge? I see. I’m sorry. I’m not sure. I can’t answer that. I accept that you did what you did because you believed your father was guilty. But it was not for you to judge or seek vengeance. And I can’t tell a judge or jury that your father was guilty. Maybe he was guilty of other things, but not of your mother’s death. I suppose you mean legally? Where does that leave you legally? I really don’t . . . I can’t say your father was guilty. I know that he wasn’t.”
Abruptly, I swung my legs over the side of the bed. He flinched, and the police officer was immediately on his feet and standing in the doorway.
“You say it was an act of God. So where does that leave me?”
Irvine turned to the police officer and nodded, and the police officer looked me sternly in the eye and disappeared from sight. Irvine stood and closed the door. “As I said, I’m not a lawyer. But I do think perhaps we should find you a better lawyer. I’m already looking into that.”
“What does a lawyer have to do with it? Where does it leave me with God?”
Again his nod, as if he were expecting all along for me to say just this. “You could pray.”
“Pray? You tell me God killed my mother. Why would I want to pray to Him?”
He stopped nodding. “You’re on the wrong path,” he said. “God doesn’t murder. It isn’t for us to understand the acts of God. And certainly it’s not for us to judge them. That’s pride. Not that I don’t understand what you’re feeling. I’m a proud man too, and sometimes it feels to me that God isn’t just. I have the same kind of thoughts myself every single day. Believe me. But you have to accept that there are reasons beyond our understanding for God’s actions. You should be there with your parents tomorrow. If you can’t pray, would you allow me to pray for you?”
“No. He killed my mother. God killed my mother.”
He looked away, and I wanted him to meet my eyes, but he wouldn’t.
“My father’s death was an act of God too. Did you know that? Before I was even born, God came to my father and told him I’d kill him. I had no choice. God set me up to kill my father.”
Irvine coughed and looked up at the ceiling. “You should be at the funeral,” he said.
“No,” I said. “How can I?”
“Just ask the Lord’s forgiveness and go.”
“Not until He asks for my forgiveness.”
“He already has. He died for you and was born again.”
I pulled myself up straight again to look him in the eye. “Good. Then tell God I don’t forgive Him. How could I possibly pray to such a disgusting . . . “”
His eyes shamed me enough that I did not finish the sentence. He shook his head. “I’ll have that lawyer come to see you as soon as possible.”
He pulled himself to his feet, nodded once and walked out the door without looking back. The fan swivelled to watch him go.
On that day, I was forced to consider the possibility that my father had not killed my mother. I didn’t want to believe it, but Dr. Andrew Irvine poured some small drop of faith into my ear. God pointed His finger at me and stuck it through my heart. I thought of my father once telling me I was special in some way, and I saw that this was what he had foreseen. He knew I had been chosen. He’d done his best to refuse to believe in God, but what good had it done him?
I slept all the next day. They didn’t wake me for the funeral. Nobody but Irvine really wanted me there anyway. How could I go and let everyone watch me make a spectacle of myself saying goodbye to the father I’d killed? I told myself that they were parting together and heading in opposite directions: my mother to heaven and my father to hell.
Very likely there wouldn’t have been many to watch me if I had gone. My parents were likely almost alone as they were lowered into the ground. Who would have gone to be there with them? Those whose duty it was to be there: a minister, one or two representatives from the funeral home. And maybe Irvine.
From the Hardcover edition.
Stars. Fractured star-sprays and burning constellations . . . galaxies radiating like spokes on a wheel, their epicentres—the suns—dancing pinpricks of kaleidoscopic brightness.
Then: Black.
The steady trickle of salt water dripping in a sea-cave. Lurking behind it: the hiss of a serpent sidewinding over wet rocks.
“Uh . . . hwwwuuugnnh . . .”
. . . you were born into dread, my son . . .
A fairytale giant has collected my blood in a glass globe he wears strung round his neck. The giant laughs, his paving-stone teeth flashing, as I beg for my blood back . . .
A sudden, buzzing pinworm of pain corkscrews through me. The wire cools. It is someone else’s pain now. I’m only holding onto it. Far off, the giant is still laughing.
Blink.
Snap to with a snort.
I’m suspended upside down, belted into the passenger seat of our car. A Volvo: boxy, brooding, Swedish. Snow is piled against the windshield; cold granules of sunlight petal through the shattered glass. Gravity pulls my knee-caps down; my feet are wedged beneath the glovebox and my wrists bent back against the roof upholstery.
“Dan . . .”
The airframe sparkles with powder from the deployed airbags. The Volvo has an embarrassment of them—a number that struck me as farcical in the austere showroom. Now the interior is draped with deflated alien spore-bags, satiny-white, and my lips are caked with xenomorph eggs. There’s an acid burn in my sinuses—did I throw up? No: that’s antifreeze. I’ve been at enough accident scenes to recognize the smell. It must be trickling through the vents with its greasy, burnt-animal stink.
I try turning my head—a wire buzzes with such intensity that it shocks a strangled scream out of me. In the rearview I catch sight of something inverted in the backseat like a little hangman. A pocket-sized executioner with a white hood over his face. A cold lunar silence weeps from the driver’s side. I can think of no good reason to look directly at that ghastly quiet next to me—Why, when it would be so easy? a sharp-toothed voice urges. Just turn your head a smidge and . . .
When I move my left arm, the pain is mammoth. I reach cross-body with my right hand to unlock the seatbelt. My fingers are senseless pegs riveted to my palm. I thumb the button but nothing happens. The lock’s jammed.
The hangman in the backseat emits a consumptive snuffling like a Pekinese with a sinus problem. He broods back there—in every un-noosed neck he sees an opportunity lost.
The belt is cinched tight across my shoulder. My entire body feels like it’s resting on one fragile joint. There’s a Leatherman in the glovebox. I try to heel off my boot before realizing it’s already gone: both boots must’ve been flung off in the . . . my knee brushes the stereo knob and the cab fills with the insane screech of the Doodlebops, their helium voices turning cat-yowly before cutting out.
With one big toe, I pop the latch. The glovebox jars open, spilling oil-change receipts and the Leatherman, which strikes my incisors and floods my mouth with the taste of rolled nickels. I retrieve it from the roof and fumble the blade open. Blood pools in my skull; the pressure must be turning my face as red as skinned meat.
It’s taxing work cutting through the belt. The wire buzzes hotly until the severed strap hisses through the belt’s eyelet. I complete a graceless backwards somersault and in that frictionless second, my head swivels to force a confrontation with the scene I’ve been avoiding.
Ahhhh, breathes the sharp-toothed one. Isn’t that a treat.
A tree limb is spiked through the Volvo’s windshield; the safety glass is crumbled around the hole it made entering our world. The branch pierced the driver’s-side airbag—shreds of white ballistic nylon still cling to its bark—before carrying on into Dan’s . . .
Oh, I remember this tree. I’d seen it lurking within a copse of its brethren just off the unplowed corduroy road. A tree waiting on this very chance with one of its branches projecting at a perfect ninety-degree angle: a straight jab of oak encased in transparent ice, its end whittled by sun and wind until only the hardest stuff remained. The heart-wood, it’s called.
That branch is now married to Dan’s face. His head is tilted back, his throat shorn by the wood running on its unbending plane: his neck and the branch form an inverted capital “T.”
Later, maybe I’ll have an opportunity to lie about how coldly I accept my husband’s death. At the funeral home with Dan’s pale-eyed father, both of us standing over his son’s coffin. I doubt I’ll ever come to grips with it, you know? But before the back of my skull even hits the dome-light I am reconciled to the fact, and moving past it.
I land on the stem of my neck, and my left side explodes in white-hot fireworks. I plant my feet on the windshield and push, snapping off the rearview mirror as I worm between the front seats to the little hangman suspended upside-down in his car seat.
“It’s okay, baby. Mommy’s here.”
Charlie is fastened by a meshwork of straps with his head socked between two fabric bananas. When we drove home from the hospital with him two months ago, Charlie’s head hung at a terrifying cockeyed angle on his neck. Yikes, that looks painful, Dan said. That afternoon he fixed the bananas in place.
My son’s bib has flipped down over his face but when I lift it, his face is unbloodied and his eyes bright. He sits jack-knifed at the hips—he has the shocking elasticity exclusive to babies and Balkan contortionists—his bootied feet folding down to touch his forehead. He’s so quiet it’s easy to believe he’s dead, but infants make you believe they’re either dead or just about to die several times a day. The moment I reach for him blood begins to foam out of his nose, as if my fingertips released it. It bubbles up from the cups of his nostrils and falls the wrong way down his face to collect in his eyes. But my son doesn’t make a sound.
Bracing one hand on his seat’s carry-bar, I stretch my foot up to pop the release catch. The seat falls painfully onto my chest. Wheezing, I thumb one of Charlie’s eyelids open: pupil dilated, the whites wormed with broken corpuscles. I probe his fingers through his tiny mittens, then move up each of his arms. Toes, feet, legs. Okay, okay, okay . . . I loosen the straps so he can breathe freely.
As a paramedic with the Niagara General Hospital, I’ve attended accidents like this. The first thing you learn is that you can’t save everyone. You must cradle a brutal stone of expediency in your heart.
I rest with Charlie on my chest. Now that his nose has stopped bleeding, he roots at my breast through my jacket. Snow is piled at the Volvo’s windows. Above the snow lies a slit of paling winter sky. The dashboard is lit, which means the battery’s not dead. Okay. I thumb the window button; the glass rises into its rubber flap with Swedish precision. I inhale pulverizing, cold air. It’s early December and the world is locked in an arctic freeze.
Digging with my elbows, I shove myself though the window. The snow is the dry powdery kind that falls during a cold snap. Unzipping my jacket, I slip a hand under my shirt. The wing-shaped bone running from my neck to outer shoulder is broken. The break-ends shift against one another to create a nausea-inducing buzz.
It’s bearable. Now get moving.
This voice belongs to an ancient village hag who sleeps on the bones of her enemies.
I can chart the Volvo’s path across the snow in the ashy late-afternoon sunlight: where we’d hit a patch of black ice and began to skip across the snow merrily as a stone over a frozen lake. Dan’s face comes back to me as it had been the instant before impact: mashing the brake pedal, darting a queasy glance at me as if to say, Sorry, babe, have this sorted in a flash. The Volvo must have flipped onto its roof before we slammed into the tree, its hood accordioning— “Volvos are designed to crumple in zones of lesser consequence,” the dealer told us.
I stand in the two-hundred-foot wake of the crash. Tufts of brown grass poke through the snow crust. Around us, the landscape unfolds in shades of igneous metal: pewter sky, sun lowering behind banks of steel-edged clouds like a Mylar balloon losing air. We’re thirty miles outside Cataract City, my birthplace.
Trucks rumbled along the gravel road in the dead of the night, vibrating like a line of ants, thick tarpaulins shaking as engines whirred and wheels lifted dust, fogging the cold February air. Behrouz Bakhtiar closed his eyes. A film of dirt coated the skin covering the thin bones of his face. He watched by moonlight as four eight-wheelers filled with young men from the provinces rolled away.
He would not be driving the young men home as usual. This was the first night of his four days off. He would instead place a cigarette in his mouth, light it with the last match he had in his pocket, and walk home down the red mountain, where earth mingled with snow, then stride through the city from north to south. This was his Tehran, and he was its secret guardian, the angel perched on the mountaintop counting buildings, trees, lights, and people who walked about like insects, unaware of being watched.
Strange how people are, Behrouz thought, the cigarette between his thin lips. And he began his walk down and through the city just as he had planned, just as he had been anticipating all day. He slid down the slopes effortlessly, taking a drag from his cigarette every once in a while. He whistled when the mood struck him. He had walked this path many times, since he had first learned to drive up the mountain. How old had he been, seventeen? He was thirty-three now, so that made it sixteen years. With time off multiplied by sixteen, that made about four thousand times he had walked up and down the slopes of Darakeh.
Sometimes, of course, the generals gave him permission to drive down and save himself the three-hour walk. And when Behrouz first got married, the general in command had not only encouraged him to drive, he’d let him off early to encourage husbandly duties—but not without reminding Behrouz how old his new wife was. “Think that wife of yours’ll be able to handle fresh little you?” the general had said.
Behrouz had married Zahra when he was nineteen, upon his father’s urging. “The Prophet was a boy, his wife was forty when he took her,” his father had said. But Zahra was no prophet’s wife. She was thirty-six, had never married, and had a son, Ahmad, who was the same age as Behrouz. Ahmad hadn’t come to the wedding. That night, when Behrouz asked his new wife where her son was, Zahra replied, “Somewhere in the prison halls.” Then she had forced herself on him.
When he’d first started driving trucks in the army, Behrouz had been more talkative. The soldiers liked him. They would reveal themselves, telling him about their lives on the farms or in small towns. If they were Tehrani boys, they talked about their schools and their girlfriends. The only one who had never opened up was a member of the royal family—a cousin of the king. But Behrouz supposed that was different. He had been ordered not to look the boy in the eyes.
Behrouz had begun learning to drive at sixteen because he wasn’t strong enough to fight, or smart enough to read. His father had taught him the basics. He could have sold bread on the streets like his father, or worked the oil mines like his uncles. But the one time he had suggested this, his father slapped him so hard, Behrouz saw stars for days. And that was the end of that.
Now, as he walked, the red dirt beneath his boots remained frozen. Three nights ago there had been a storm. But now the snow had settled and was packed along the path. The walk wasn’t as bad as he’d expected. He swiftly made it down Darakeh, to the northern tip of Pahlavi Street. Here there were cobblestone roads and the houses were old. He’d heard that the king’s father once lived here.
He walked past the old car parked along the street, searching his pocket in vain for another smoke. A man was walking toward him.
“Could I trouble you for a cigarette?” Behrouz asked. He had learned how to speak politely, like the people did up here. The man pulled out a single smoke from his pack. Behrouz took it and placed it between his lips. The man held out a lighter, its flame flickering in the slight breeze.
“Thank you,” Behrouz said, and began to walk away.
“No money?” the man said.
Behrouz waited.
“No money?” the man asked again.
“You want money for the light?” Behrouz said.
“What do you think?”
Behrouz searched both pockets awkwardly.
“Only kidding. Stupid man.” The man laughed as he walked away.
Behrouz stepped up his pace and cut through alleyways. He knew he was somewhere in Youssef-Abad district, midway through the city. He normally walked the main street, but tonight he felt like a change. Streams of sewer water ran in the gutters, but blossoming mulberry trees flanked the roads. This district was one of his favourites. He liked the corner shops and the cinema and cafés, which were old but patronized by rich people.
He was staring at the letters on the front of the cinema when he heard the cry—like a cat in pain. He walked closer to where he thought the sound was coming from, but water gurgling in the gutter muffled its location. He crossed into another alley—nothing there. He continued to move from alley to alley, jumping over gutters. The more he found nothing, the more urgently he searched. His only help was the moon; there were no lights in the nearby homes; it seemed the rest of the world was asleep.
He finally reached the mulberry tree, which was flanked by rows of garbage. Staring up at him was a pack of wild dogs. He imagined them tearing the tiny creature who had made the sound limb from limb.
He grabbed a stick from the ground and charged. But none of the dogs moved. How long had they been there? As he neared, the dogs sat and watched quietly. At last, Behrouz bent down and lifted the baby into his arms. The dogs sniffed his feet, turned and left.
He sped toward the edge of town, past abandoned buildings in which the poor secretly lived, past stacks of cardboard where the even poorer slept. He wondered how long the child had gone without food. The stores were still closed, but his wife must have bought some milk, he thought frantically.
The baby didn’t look more than three days old. His head hurt. The stars whirled in the sky. At last, not far in the distance, he saw the pale outline of his house.
For three hours, Behrouz sat in his living room, trying to feed the child. He had woken a sleeping neighbour, who had found some milk, though the baby threw up most of it. Now, once again, he dipped the cap of his fountain pen into the bowl of milk beside him on the floor. He held the tiny vessel to the baby’s lips, careful not to tilt it too far. The milk flowed onto her lips, but only a few drops got in. He wiped her face clean with the back of his pinky finger. In a minute, he would try again.
Zahra was sleeping. Her son, Ahmad, out of jail only two days, had left his dirty boots on the kitchen table. He’d landed in prison for cutting someone’s fingers off, and Behrouz knew he would already be back to stealing.
By morning, Behrouz was struggling to keep his eyes open. From the north-facing window, he watched the rising sun. The rays crept toward him, along the floor. In the bedroom, his wife still slept soundly. He got up, walked into her room, and stood at her bedside, the baby to his chest. Zahra lay tightly wrapped in her blankets. She was fair-skinned, with straight, fine hair that turned a shade of light brown in summer. She liked to curl it these days, using little plastic rolls.
He returned to the living room and laid the baby gently on the floor. Then he walked quietly back to the bedroom.
“We have to talk,” Behrouz whispered.
Zahra covered her eyes to block the sun. “You’re home. Figured you’d be killing yourself with opium all night.”
“Come with me.” He pulled her out of bed.
In the living room, the baby’s arms and legs shook and she struggled like an overturned insect.
“I think she’s hungry,” Behrouz said. “I gave her some milk, but she hardly drank. She needs to suck it, I think.”
Zahra backed away from the infant. “Where did you find it? Is this some mess of yours we have to fix?” Her voice was sharp.
Behrouz picked up the baby. “Nothing like that,” he said. “Last night in the alley, there was waste all around her. I found her in Youssef-Abad.”
“That’s the North-City,” Zahra said. “What were you doing with those people? Listen to me: You put that baby where you found it so the trash who are her people can take it back.”
“There were dogs around her. I don’t know what they wanted, but—”
“Get it out of my house. And I know you do your own nasty business. You never touch me—as if I were made of fire and would burn you. But men are men. You must be touching somebody.” Zahra grabbed the baby’s face. “Did you take a look at its eyes? They’re blue. I swear on Imam Hossein you’ve brought a blue-eyed devil into my house.”
“Her eyes are green,” Behrouz said.
“No. There’s blue in them. You’ve brought evil into this house, Mr. Bakhtiar.”
Behrouz listened silently as Zahra walked away and into the bedroom, still shouting at him. Fourteen years with her and the rage had only worsened. He looked at the baby. Zahra was right. There was blue in those eyes. He couldn’t think how to comfort her. It had been so easy when he’d been a little boy and would play pretend. He would rock his baby, feed his baby, just like the neighbourhood girls did. And he’d been careful to never let his father know. But now, here was a real baby. The only thing he could think to do was speak to it, human to human. Not human to doll or master to slave. Yes, he would do what humans had always done, from the first crack of life.
“Want me to tell you a story?” he whispered to the little girl. Her wrinkled eyelids were shut tight, as if she would never want to face the world. “Want me to tell you the story of the Tooba Tree?”
Behrouz said again. And so he began, hoping to drown out Zahra’s shouts. “Past the clouds and the sky, way up in heaven, there is a tree, the Tooba Tree, from whose roots spring milk, and honey, and wine.”
“I curse the day I married a boy,” Zahra yelled from the other room.
Behrouz kept on: “Milk to nourish you, honey to sweeten you, wine to take you to the land of dreams.”
Zahra yelled louder. “Think you were my saviour, Mr. Bakhtiar? You only made hell last longer.”
Behrouz lifted the baby closer to his lips and whispered in her ear. “The Tooba Tree belongs to the orphans of heaven, for there is nothing that matters more, my little one.”
He stopped and listened for Zahra again, but she had finished her rant. The baby had opened her eyes but was falling back asleep. “You sang to me from that alley,” he whispered to her, “and I heard your song. Yet if I hadn’t, and if you had not been saved, the Tooba Tree would have been waiting for you and you would have been all right just the same.” Behrouz paused. He wondered if saving the little girl had been the right thing to do after all. But, since he had saved her and forced her into this thing called life, there was one more thing he needed to do.
“I used to love music, you know, when I was a little boy,” he said, putting his pinky finger in the baby’s mouth so she could suckle. “I used to sing, in secret, so my father wouldn’t know. I used to sing arias. Know what they are? Little tales, cries in the night. If you sing an aria, the world will know all about you. It will know your dreams and secrets. Your pains and your loves.”
Behrouz heard Zahra throw a pillow against the bedroom wall, and paused. After a few moments, hearing nothing more, he kept on. “I’ll name you Aria, after all the world’s pains and all the world’s loves,” he said. “It will be as if you had never been abandoned. And when you open your mouth to speak, all the world will know you.”
