Christopher Joseph Maggio Marjane Nafisi Is a Thirty-Four-Year-Old

ABSTRACT

A DOCTOR’S DAUGHTER

by: Christopher Joseph Maggio

Marjane Nafisi is a thirty-four-year-old Iranian-American. During her last year of graduate school, she leaves campus to help her mother care for her father, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia. As she cares for her family, she is distracted by her unfinished dissertation and her relationship with Joseph Battaglia, a man nine years her junior. Over the next several months, she must decide where to put her energies: on that relationship, on forgiving her father, on finishing her dissertation, or somehow on some combination in between.

A DOCTOR’S DAUGHTER

A Thesis

Submitted to the

Faculty of Miami University

in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

Christopher Joseph Maggio

Miami University

Oxford, Ohio

2016

Advisor: Brian Roley

Reader: Joseph Bates

Reader: Timothy Lockridge

This thesis titled

A DOCTOR’S DAUGHTER

Christopher Joseph Maggio

has been approved for publication by

The College of Arts & Science

and

Department of English

______Brian Roley

______Joseph Bates

______Timothy Lockridge

Table of Contents 1. An Historic Phone Call 1 2. “Is it my birthday?” 10 3. Date Night 15 4. Baggage 19 5. Trivia on Tap 27 6. Hurt 31 7. A Very Nafisi Christmas 39 8. Ameliorations 41 9. A Doctor 50

iii

Dedication To Christine Purtell and Barbara Euskavech

Acknowledgements

Thank you to my family, especially Mom, Dad, and Gina; my friends, especially Brad Powell; my peers at Miami—there’s too many of you to name; my teachers, especially Brian Roley, Joseph Bates, Timothy Lockridge, TaraShea Nesbit, and Kevin Griffith; the Miami University English Department, especially Monica Baxter; the staff at Circle Bar, O Pub, and Oxford Coffee Company; and the authors and musicians who inspired this novella.

1 An Historic Phone Call

Marjane is reminded of the scars, small faded tallies on the pale chalkboard of his upper back, while bathing the father who never once bathed her. A pink soap bubble slides down one of the scars, past his waistline, over his left buttock, and onto his shower seat. She asks him what happened. He trembles partly from nakedness, partly from neurons, and says his name. She’s been crouched beside him but sidesteps to her right, dodging a spasm from his right arm as she moves toward the toilet. Once seated on the lid, she looks him in the eye and asks, “Papa joon, what are those scars on your back?” He repeats his name. She tries one more time, but that’s all she gets—“Hussain Hussain Hussain.”

While Marjane is toweling him off, she hears the garage door open. Mama is returning from a meeting with the realtor. Six months ago, Marjane’s parents “downsized” to a McMansion in Sewickley, a suburb north of Pittsburgh. But a sluggish housing market has kept the old home, the Persian Palace, with its window grillework of steel peacocks, from selling. Still, the Nafisis couldn’t wait until it sold to move. Papa needed a first-floor bedroom with adjacent bathroom. What they don’t need, Marjane thinks as she wrings out the towel, are the three other bathrooms, nor the four chimneys that lead to a surprising dearth of fireplaces. She dresses him into his pajamas, and they walk, arm in arm, to his bed. How tremulous he is for the few minutes he’s on his feet, how much he needs to lean into her. “Steady steady steady,” she says. In a few weeks, she might not be able to support him alone. How did her mother, short like Marjane but frail with age, manage all these months? After Marjane tucks in her father, another ritual he never performed for her, she raises the bed rails into their vertical position, kisses his forehead, dims the lights, and tiptoes to the laundry room, which is also connected to the bedroom but is toward the front of the house. While removing her clothes from the dryer, she smells sautéed garlic. She drops her hamper and follows the aroma into the foyer. From the foyer, a runner leads down the hallway. On the left wall hangs a framed black- and-white photograph from Shiraz or, rather, the Shiraz her parents used to know. The photograph is of a large garden clock, set horizontally into a grassy road median, mopeds and buses streaming by the three and nine. In the kitchen, Mama stands at her butcher-block island, her back to Marjane, chopping onions. Unlike the old home, with its three wings and multiple quarters, the new house lacks partitions. Beyond the island is a white dining room table and then, without any sort of divider, save the edge of another rug, is the living area. Marjane notices the time—9:37—blinking in green on the microwave. Āsh takes three hours to cook. Arms folded, Marjane leans in the doorframe. “What are you doing?” she asks. “Making āsh to welcome you home,” Mama says. “Ri-i-ight.” “What?” Mama continues to chop but cranes her head to Marjane. Mama’s caviar- colored hair lacks the strands of gray that skipped a generation and landed on Marjane’s head.

However, crow’s feet and puppet’s mouth chisel Mama’s face, the result of years spent worrying after patients and now her husband. “You don’t want āsh? I’ll give it to Broca then.” From across the first floor, in the living area, comes the jingle of dog tags. Despite her mother, Marjane smiles. She can’t help but smile at anything involving Broca, her black lab/chow mix. “How did the meeting go?” Marjane asks. “Ok.” Mama continues chopping. “He suggested I hire someone to cut some trees, so the property seems more manageable.” Marjane’s smile fades. As a child, she spent many hours in the backyard playing in those trees. It’s not her house to sell, though. “What are those scars on Papa?” she asks, sidestepping right to the stainless steel refrigerator and leaning against it. Mama stops chopping onions. “What scars?” “On his shoulders and back. I asked him about it, but he just kept saying his name.” “Don’t worry about it. It’s in the past,” Mama says, waving the last word away as she pivots right and shuffles to the stove, cutting board in hand. So goes her patented response to any question pertaining to her biography:

“You used to vacation to Spain when you were a child?” “It’s in the past.”

“You were the first woman to graduate from Pahlavi University’s medical school. What was that like?” “It’s in the past.”

“Um, why did you throw away those pictures of your parents?” “It’s in the past.”

“Mama, no,” Marjane says, pushing herself off of the refrigerator. “You never saw those scars before?” Mama asks. “I have, but it’s important to know for sure if ‘it’s in the past’ or if he hurt himself recently. You have to tell me these things.” “I told you to focus on your studies, but you argued and argued.” “Yeah. Well. I’m here. Get over it.” Mama takes the lid off a boiling pot and adds the onions. Marjane flinches as her mother sips from the stirring spoon. “You know your father’s family was very poor?” Marjane says yes, she knows and thinks if she hadn’t, she might have been content watching her father’s decline from her West Coast vantage point. But over the years, she pieced together not only her father’s upbringing but also the shame this later caused him: shame from his med school colleagues, shame from his father-in-law. Through his shame, she understood partly why her father logged so many hours in the OR as a surgeon and not at home. He wanted to provide the perfect life for his family, but of course their displacement made “the perfect life” impossible. It’s been Mama’s turn to speak, but instead Mama drains half a bottle of olive oil into the boiling pot. “Mama!”

“What?” Mama’s face is innocently inquisitive, like a child caught next to a broken window, the baseball bat peeking from behind her back. “Never mind,” Marjane says. “I’m going to bed.” Mama shrugs and continues stirring the soup. “Ok. Maybe we’ll talk tomorrow.” Marjane storms upstairs, Broca following her. Marjane won’t eat āsh if it’s saturated in oil, and her mother knows this. She slams her bedroom door. Not that it is really for her, anyway. She suspects the real reason for her mother’s nocturnal cooking is to lighten a tomorrow already ladled with an alphabet soup of appointments and procedures: CT, MRI, PCP, each one sure to spill into the next what with waiting times and the many minutes it takes to move Papa in and out of his wheelchair. They also plan to tour Kane Gardens, a nursing home about twenty minutes north on I-79. She flops on her bed, her dog joining her. Aside from the bed, her room is bare, save a dresser and a dozen moving boxes, most unpacked. Never mind she and her family will be passing multiple restaurant chains tomorrow. Or that Papa can no longer differentiate between āsh and chicken noodle soup. Mama, despite a long meeting with her realtor, would rather cook through the night on her bad hip. The next day, Mama will drag Tupperware from waiting room to waiting room, bugging the medical assistants to use their microwave, rather than allowing her husband to deign to anything less than her home cooking. Never mind, too, Marjane returned home to help. In the phone calls made prior to her return, she hadn’t bothered to unpack this infinitive for her mother, although “cooking” seemed like a pretty implicit and sizeable portion of its contents. Ditto on bathing. But Mama had allowed Marjane to bathe Papa only when Mama’s meeting had gone long. A ringing trills from Marjane’s pants pocket. She removes her iPhone. Seeing that the screen reads “Doc,” she emits a sound, something between a groan and a sigh, and then presses ignore. Doc is her dissertation adviser. He thinks his nickname harks to his education (he holds an MD plus a PhD in neuroscience), but ask any neuroscience student, graduate or undergraduate, on UCSF’s campus, and they will tell you it has more to do with his resemblance to an Italian version of Snow White’s dwarf of the same name. Doc will arrive Thursday, two days from today, to attend an annual neuroscience conference held at the University of Pittsburgh. He will be giving a presentation Friday morning and afterwards wants to meet Marjane for lunch to discuss her dissertation. He’s worried. In his last email, he expressed dismay that the conference rejected her abstract. But that’s because she never submitted one, for the same reason she is probably not going to finish her dissertation: her research abandoned her. After undergrad at Pitt, Marjane got a job as a lab assistant at UCSF. After a few years, she entered graduate school thinking she would study autism. Then came her father’s diagnosis her first semester and she, like so many graduate students before her, got the chimerical notion that she could leave her program having changed her field. It took her five years sequestered in an underfunded lab to determine that three alleles contribute to neurological plaque, a deterioration which, later in life, can exasperate Parkinson’s into full-on dementia. As far as treatment, results were inconclusive. She had to settle on a dissertation that emphasized the how and less the why, but every time she sat to write, she couldn’t bear to string together the sentences that would remind her, over and over, what she already knew, the larger abandonment, that of her father, who was not going to be helped by her studies. If she had truly wanted to make up for those hours he spent in the OR, then she should

3 have dropped out of school and moved home five years ago when he was lucid. Instead, she slaved away at the fantasy that she could prolong not only his life but also the quality. She told Doc none of this. When she left San Francisco, she cited collectivism. From years of therapy, she learned to see in her upbringing her parents’ emphasis on doing what was best for the whole. Her father (and her mother, too) worked constantly at the hospital, but both her parents provided her with nourishment, a palace, nannies, private education from preschool through college, a car. Yes, her father occasionally ruled by the hand, but he was trying to make her in his image, that is, successful. “It’s just what you do,” she told Doc when he expressed concern. Better she than her brother, Cyrus, who is thirteen years older and already cemented in his professional life as a marketeer for Eli Lilly in Indianapolis. Besides, her teaching assistantship was up, and she had a fellowship—a final year of funding. Doc deserves to know the truth if, for no other reason, than because he has been so accepting of the lie. When he was in his third year of med school, his father unexpectedly died of a heart attack, he told Marjane in his office. He left school entirely for one year both to mourn and to help his mother downsize and sell his childhood home. “Family first,” he said. “Just keep me and your committee apprised these next couple of months.” A May defense date was set, and with that, she left to finish her dissertation at home. Marjane should call Doc back. Doc, unlike his colleagues, made himself available, often hosting advising sessions at his house, complete with Chianti and homemade cookies. Yet Marjane cannot bear to disappoint the one who has been so encouraging. So instead she flips open her laptop and reads an article on NPR about America’s president calling Iran’s president, the first such diplomatic outreach of its kind in thirty years. She finds a few editorials about the event from other websites and bookmarks them for later. She next checks her Gmail. Spam, plus the emails from Doc she never opened. Then she logs out and Googles “hussain and scars.” She wishes that all her parents’ memories were cached on some server right alongside all the digital minutiae she has but does not want right now. The few search results are for an acne cream manufactured in Saudi Arabia. She shuts her laptop and retreats underneath her covers. During family vacations to Boca Raton, her and her family would go swimming. Marjane had to have seen those scars then. Why hadn’t she asked about them? Or, better, why is she asking about them now? It’s because her father is dying, she knows, and she is realizing the many things he never told her—or she never asked about—that she wants to know. Of course, she has some scars, too, and in the dark, her fingertips trace them, marked on her right thigh in eleventh grade as a way to get back at those who wronged her. She wonders, returning home to an uncooperative, reticent mother, if she’s begun the ritual anew, only now the cuts are internal: When she offered to help, she cut herself. When she moved out of her apartment, she cut herself. When she left San Francisco, she cut herself. When she drove cross-country, she cut herself. When she moved in with her parents, she cut herself.

The next day begins with a walk around the cul-de-sac. It’s late September, the first frost, the dip in temperature conjuring anxiousness, for right around now is when things would get

4 busy for her if she were in school. As Broca squats in a neighbor’s yard, a suburbanite power- walks from a bloated garage. “Excuse me, can you please pick that up, please?” In response, Marjane holds out the green plastic newspaper bag clearly gloving her hand. Farther down the street, Marjane flings the bagged turds into a dumpster. Dumpsters, overflowing with felled wood, litter this end of the cul-de-sac, as bulldozers work to level the remaining land, and carpenters hurry to finish the rest of the new development. Back at the house, Marjane finds her parents, both dressed and ready for the day, seated at the dining room table. Mama sits to Papa’s left, raising spoonfuls of oatmeal to his lips. A bronze tea kettle sits on the table’s center. There is a bowl and teacup, both filled, waiting for Marjane at her mother’s left, and after unleashing Broca, she joins her parents. “Mama, you knew I was gonna be back in a few minutes.” “Don’t worry about it. We managed. Right, Hussain joon?” His lips curl upward even as they wrap around the spoon. While they eat, the house is silent, save the clink of silverware against ceramic, the light tapping of Broca’s nails as he paces the hardwood floor. As Marjane reaches for the sugar bowl, she says, “You never did tell me what those scars are from.” “Oh. Well. Your father got into a fight.” Marjane raises an eyebrow at him as he paws the tablecloth with his right hand. “Years ago,” Mama says. “During the first weeks of med school. One evening after class, we all went out to a French bistro, and one of our peers, who was also named Hussain—” “Ah.” “—got very drunk and started picking on him, saying, you know, ‘You’re a peasant. You don’t belong here.’ He was jealous of your father. “And your father stood his ground. Said something about how, ha, Other Hussain, shouldn’t drink so much, and that’s when he, Other Hussain, pushed your father and—I don’t think Other Hussain meant for this to happen, but—and your father tripped backwards onto some wine bottles stacked at the bar. “Anyway, it worked out because Other Hussain got kicked out of the restaurant while this Hussain—” She put an arm over the backside of his chair. “This Hussain got first aid, and later a first date with me.” Marjane is silent for a second and then says, “That’s … that’s the best How-We-Met Story I ever heard. Why didn’t you tell me?” Mama sips her tea. “Because it’s—” “—in the past. Yeah, we know.” Marjane looks over at her father, who smiles, while Mama gets up to clear the table. Marjane helps. Marjane fumbles her teaspoon while inserting it into the dishwasher. Mama nudges her aside and, with slender, wrinkled hands, plucks the spoon from between the drawn rack and the open door. Soon Mama wheels her husband to the foyer and then through a side door into the garage, their daughter following. Marjane helps Papa into the passenger’s seat of the Mercedes, a process her mother criticizes. Complaints include lowering him into the car too quickly and letting the wheelchair rest against the newly waxed exterior. “Did you remember his duffle bag?” Marjane asks. “It’s by the door, I think. And the āsh? Don’t forget to grab the āsh from the fridge and put it into his duffle bag.”

Mama forgets the āsh. As she will later explain, when she reaches the foyer, her phone rings. She slings the duffle bag over her shoulder and even manages a few steps toward the kitchen before answering. But the conversation idles her, as she and Frida, an old med school colleague, review dinner plans. When Mama ends the call, she turns around, reenters the garage, and drives them to the hospital. She does not realize her mistake until she pulls into a parking space. “Seriously?” Marjane asks from the backseat. The car is in park but running. “Here. I will take your father to his appointment. You run back home and get the āsh.” “Nope. Not happening. Can’t we just eat at the cafeteria?” “But what will he eat?” Marjane unbuckles herself and exits the vehicle. Mama turns off the car and follows suit. Mother and daughter argue as they unload father, guide him into his wheelchair, and span the parking lot. Marjane says, “Mama, your hip. Let me push him,” and this offer fortunately gets them off the subject of forgotten āsh but unfortunately onto the subject of who should push. Still arguing, they reach the sidewalk. As Marjane watches her mother huff and puff Papa up the wheelchair ramp, Marjane considers pushing her aside and grabbing hold of the handles. Marjane instead shakes her head and dashes to the sliding doors. She doesn’t turn around until she hears the soft cry. Mama is bent tying her shoe, misjudging the crest of the ramp, old ears oblivious to her husband’s caterwaul. Mama looks up from her laces as her daughter sprints past. “Hussain! Marjane—” The next word would have been “help,” Marjane knows it, but he hits a retaining wall first, the resulting impact catapulting him out of his seat backwards and headfirst into a rosebush, his legs treading the air above the branches. Marjane discerns Farsi, muffled beneath the leaves, all of it not suitable for work. She plunges her hands into the bush, feeling jaggers slice her arms as her fists close around the starched cotton of his polo. She pulls her father to her heart. She feels a body pressing beside her and thinks it’s her mother, but the hands, helping her to lift Papa, are hairy, too large. “It’s ok, guy, we got you,” the man says as Papa thrashes and continues to curse. Together, the pair lift him back into his wheelchair, which miraculously is still upright. The man is red-haired and sinewy beneath his loose-fitting blue scrubs. He has a briefcase with him and from it retrieves a small light, stethoscope, and blood pressure cuff. Mama appears. “You’ll check his pupils, his blood pressure, yes?” “Of course, ma’am. I’m an EMT.” “I’m a doctor,” she says. He doesn’t hear this as he works. A few cuts to the face, but otherwise, Papa is fine. Marjane says, “Thank you … ” “Carl,” he says. “I was walking toward the ramp when I saw him backslide.” The only Band-Aids Carl has are Dora-the-Explorer themed, and he carefully applies them to Papa’s snapping head. “My wife’s a pediatrician,” he explains. Carl escorts the three to the radiologist, who also inspects Papa and clears him for his MRI and CT scan, “provided, Dr. Nafisi, you want your husband to go through with it.” Mama nods. Papa has calmed down, but his disease means he requires a mild sedative, so the machines can accurately read his brain. A half hour after his scans, when he comes to, the trio head to the cafeteria. Between bites of Mama’s turkey sandwich, which she lauds, she also

6 brings spoonfuls of chicken noodle soup to her husband’s lips. Her daughter scarfs a brown salad of silent rage. When Marjane is done, she announces she will feed Papa now, reaching across him to take the spoon from her mother’s hand. But every time she raises the spoon to his mouth, he turns his head away. She tries the “here-comes-the-airplane” trick and wonders if, like her baths and bedtimes, feeding was something he left to the nannies. The six cafeteria televisions are tuned to Fox, and some talking head is lambasting the president’s phone call. That it was a mistake to reach out to Iranian leaders. That doing so would hurt interests at home. From near the cash registers comes the rattle of dropped silverware. Papa swings his head toward the stimulus, and Marjane, distracted by the televisions plus contemplations of her upbringing, is too slow in pulling away the spoon. His nose knocks broth on her T-shirt and jeans. Mama shakes her head. The rosebush fiasco, the minutes it took to apply first aid, the CT and MRI they frequented the hospital for in the first place, and the final detour to the cafeteria make them miss their tour of Kane Gardens. They will have to reschedule for one week later. Such delays, though small, could prove detrimental to Papa’s comfort and health—even after finding an acceptable nursing facility, there will most likely be a wait list. Mama should have chosen a place and reserved a spot months ago. Papa is declining quickly, quicker than Marjane realized from that West Coast vantage point. As they leave the hospital, she watches the passing Aldis and Rite-Aids. If she had known the extent of his illness, would she have come home? The bags and lines under Mama’s eyes say more about the situation, but Mama is managing, and soon Papa will live elsewhere. Marjane seems not to be needed now; what will her role be once her father has around-the-clock care? Her phone rings. Doc, again. Not that role, she thinks, and presses ignore. “Who was that?” Mama asks. “No one,” Marjane answers.

That evening, the Farrokhzads visit. They are friends of the Nafisis from med school and, like the Nafisis, came to Pittsburgh around the time of the Revolution. Marjane gates Broca upstairs. As she descends the steps into the living area she realizes, too late, that she is the only one wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Everyone else, including Papa, is dressed as if for a board meeting. At least she changed out of her stained clothing. “Salam!” Gazsi says. He and Frida each kiss Marjane on each cheek. “It’s so good you came home,” Frida says, clutching Marjane’s hands in her own. Frida’s jeweled rings feel cold, and when their hands unclasp, one ring resists, pinching Marjane’s skin. “Yes. You have no idea how stressed your mother was,” Gazsi says, shaking his head. Marjane has waited nearly a month for such vindication. Yet she looks at the floor, thinking of her dissertation. It’s stored on a cloud in Google Drive, she could display it on her phone right now if she wanted to, but it may as well be in her old apartment on Haight Street, alongside the broken printer and thirty-speed Huffy she also left behind. “Oh, just happy to be home,” she finally says. “Ah, I was doing fine without her,” Mama says, striding to the kitchen to get the kettle. They take their tea in the living area. The couch is shaped like a capital “L.” On the stem are the Farrokhzads; on the leg, Mama and then Marjane. Papa sits to Marjane’s right in his wheelchair.

Gazsi asks Papa how he’s feeling. But Papa, perhaps with residual embarrassment from the earlier fall and his Dora-the-Explorer Band-Aids, does not answer. Rather, he scans the living area, his eyes not resting on any one thing. Attempts to include Papa in the conversation eventually falter, and the grown-ups slip into chatter among themselves, save Marjane, who persists. “Come on, Papa,” she says, alternating between English and Farsi. “Tell them where you went today. Tell them how you’re feeling.” He answers by kicking the coffee table, knocking over Frida’s tea. “Marjane, leave your father alone,” Mama says, running to grab a towel. “I’m so sorry, Frida,” she calls from the kitchen. Papa glowers at his daughter. Then, satisfied, he turns his head and clamps his eyes.

Marjane idles at a green light in her red Ford Focus. She’s on McKnight Road, known as “McKnightmare” for its traffic, strip malls, and frequent stop lights. It’s Thursday afternoon, getting close to rush hour, but her father is on his last diaper. She needs to call Doc. But he’s probably just arriving, he needs an hour or two to get situated at his hotel, right? Besides, she’s thrown her purse, which holds her phone, in the backseat after being berated by her brother via text for forgetting the āsh the other day. “Welcome to the Hotel Cali—” She twists the radio knob so fast, she imagines it snapping off the dashboard. Although she has no way of knowing the final tally, she does know they’ll be plenty more drives on this road. Over a thousand, she bets. Over a thousand times not laughing at the grinning cartoon bunny and turtle on the sign for Tortoise and the Hair Salon. Over a thousand times watching the same expressionless, fat women in pink business suits and pumps disembark from the same gray buses. Over a thousand times reading bumper stickers that proclaim their drivers don’t need sex, the government f---s with them everyday, all splattered on the SUVs, which guzzle the oil, which cause the coups, which prop the dictatorships, which expel the diaspora, which birth the fucked-up children of immigrant parents. Her back, already slouched, braces as if a bulldozer is paving the cumulative miles of those ugly journeys over her, like a female Atlas with the weight of suburbia and familial fealty on her shoulders. She thinks of her old bike, and her heart leaps to meet it but comes short, catching in her throat. She remembers clutching the handlebars on her way to and from seminars and classes, going up and down hills, and smirking at stalled motorists in their CO2-spewing vehicles. Now she feels the shame of someone judging her, a parallel Marjane, perhaps piloting the red Ford Focus two cars back, one who chose to visit, but not live with, her parents. She’s home.

“Marjane, go play with your father.” Mama stands in the foyer as if she was waiting the entire time. “He’s falling asleep, but it’s much too early for his bedtime—you remember Janice?” “Yeah, our old housekeeper.” “Right. She’s been helping me with the old home. I need to run out and meet her about those trees.” Before Marjane can respond, Mama breezes past, shutting the door behind her. “You’re welcome!” Marjane says over the start of the engine and the yawn of the garage door.

Marjane sets down the Depends and her purse and takes off her tennis shoes. Broca trots to greet her, and they proceed down the hall to the living area. The flat screen is turned off. It reflects Papa’s bald head and hooked nose. His eyes are closed. A soccer ball rests on his lap. “Hey, Papa,” Marjane says, crouching next to him. Broca lies at his feet. He blinks several times. “Do you need to be changed yet?” He shakes his head. “Want to play catch?” “Call Frank.” Dr. Frank Caldwell, an old colleague. Marjane sighs. Even in dementia, he’s too wired for work to play with his daughter. She knows from past visits it’s quickest to let him act out these fantasies before trying to get him onto another task. She spies the cordless phone on the arm of the sofa and gives it to him. He puts it to his ear with a shaking hand. She stands behind him. Her phone is in her purse, so she makes a fake one with her left thumb and pinky. “Hello?” she says. “Fr fr frank?” “Yes?” She tries to make her voice sound deep. “I need … ” He stares straight ahead. His hand is shaking harder, and she worries he will drop his phone. “Yes, Dr. Nafisi? What can I—” “Two kidneys!” “Will do, Dr. Nafisi. I’ll have them to the OR in a few minutes.” “OK.” He lowers the phone halfway, but from the hallway comes a ringing, and he jerks it back to his ear. “Salam?” he asks. “Hello? Is Marjane there?” She looks around, unsure what to do, no one there to help. Broca starts barking. It’s Doc, has to be, and she knows she should run and answer it. Instead she says into her pinky, “Yes? Yes? Papa?” No answer. His whole arm is vibrating, like at any moment it might combust. “Daddy?” “Thank you for coming. I hope you enjoy your stay.” In the old palace, growing up, Marjane often felt less like a daughter and more like a guest at a hotel, and here is her father, addressing her as such. But she observes, in his frightened, unblinking eyes reflected in the flat screen’s black mirror, a feeling which she thinks he would have trouble articulating had he been well. She notices the Band-Aids are off and in their place are new scars of a different shame. Papa joon is the first person to thank her, to actually use those words—Thank. You.—since she arrived, and she takes this pleasantry for perhaps more than what it means, praying it will not end up another cut on her soul, as she responds, her iPhone going to voicemail, and then hangs up.

2 “Is it my birthday?”

The trio tours Kane Gardens the following Thursday. Mama pulls up to the gate arm, and a moustachioed security guard asks for her driver’s license. “Nafisi. Italian?” he asks. “Iranian,” she says. He frowns. “I don’t see your name on our list.” “We canceled last week. We rescheduled.” He gets on his phone. “Probably calling the Department of Homeland Security,” Marjane says. Her mother shushes her, though Marjane said it in Farsi. He hangs up, the gate arm lifts. They ascend, past a man-made lake. A fountain shaped like an umbrella rests in the lake’s center. The facility sits at the top of the hill. Its portico reminds Marjane of a Holiday Inn, as does its pink stucco walls. The color conflicts with the fall foliage surrounding the building. Mama finds a handicapped spot. Marjane then removes Papa’s wheelchair from the trunk and unfolds it. Mama holds the chair steadily while Marjane helps ease Papa into it. They transverse the short expanse of parking lot, Mama pushing Papa. As the sliding doors open, Marjane braces herself for the familiar nursing home smell but instead detects tomato sauce. The olfactory surprise comes from the doors opening not to the residential quarters but to a carpeted dining area. To the right, a fireplace crackles. It’s past lunchtime, so most of the chairs are unoccupied, the round tables bussed, though a small pumpkin adorns the center of every one. On the walls, at regular intervals, hang portraits of forestscapes. At the sound of the automatic doors, a middle-aged woman looks up from the paperwork spread before her, sees the Nafisis, and walks toward them. She’s as tall as Marjane, which means she’s short. Her hair is cropped close to her skull, a dyed red. Orange, really. Blue eyes blink behind small square spectacles. Marjane expects Terry Gross but gets something more strained, more Diane Rehm. “Mrs. Temperton,” the woman says, shaking hands, though she must lift Papa’s from his lap like a dead fish. “Well. Shall we begin the tour?” Mrs. Temperton leads them through another set of automatic doors deeper into the facility. What Marjane will remember most is not the uric smell of the residential quarters. Not the warm bedrooms, every one furnished with an automatic bed and a flat screen atop a dresser. Not the private bathrooms with built-in shower seats and detachable nozzles. Not the exercise room downstairs nor the empty prayer room adjacent to it. Not the two staff doctors on site Monday through Saturday during business hours and on call for emergencies. Not the therapists—occupational, physical, speech, art. Not the beeps of medical equipment nor the exhalations of breathing machines. Not Papa turning his head to these stimuli. Not the nurses nor the nursing assistants nor their smiles nor the clicking of their keyboards as they chart in their nurses’ station at the end of the hallway. Not the sunflower-patterned wallpaper, the asparagus-colored carpeting. Not the common area nor the dozen old people at a table littered with coloring books, a feather-haired art therapist helping them to stay in the lines. 10

Not how, according to Mrs. Temperton, “This is just one of numerous activities available daily to our residents.” What Marjane will remember most from their tour is a plate of chicken bones. The bones are piled on a Styrofoam plate on a small table. This table is behind the larger one where the old men and women crowd, including Papa at his wife’s insistence. As Marjane sits to his left, she tries to keep her eyes trained on his coloring and on her mother’s hand as it guides her father’s hand, a crayon clutched between his tremulous fingers. He makes shaky, orange strokes over the outline of a Jack-o’-lantern. But her eyes keep returning to the bones. They are black-veined, meatless. Bumpy gray skin hangs from an upper joint, like a tattered, desecrated flag on a sad pole. How old are the bones? How long have they gone unattended? Minutes? Hours? Days? A fly flirts about them. Why has nobody taken care of this mess? Are she and her mother pushing Papa to a similar fate? To decay alone and unnoticed?

The landline rings five days later during Papa’s afternoon nap. Mama mutes Law & Order and moves from the couch to answer. Marjane is at the butcher-block island, making a turkey sandwich, flipping the occasional scrap to Broca. She hears her mother ask, “Can I think about it?” Then, “Sure. Sure. Bye.” “Who was that?” Marjane asks. “Kane Gardens.” Mama places the phone back in its cradle. “A spot opened.” Marjane sets the mayo knife onto her plate. Before Marjane can ask, Mama answers: “Someone died. A stroke. It was unexpected even for there.” Marjane wonders if it was one of the people she saw coloring five days ago. “But they said weeks. That there were people ahead of him.” “Two. But their families chose Hebe Gardens.” Another facility; also luxurious, though much farther away from where the Nafisis lived. “You said, ‘Can I think about it?’” Marjane begins, walking toward her. “Mama, what’s there to think about?” “Thanksgiving. Nowruz.” Marjane touches Mama’s shoulder. But Mama turns back to the couch, surrendering her hazel eyes to the court drama unfolding. Mama unveils a face so affectless that it scares Marjane away, wordlessly, upstairs. Marjane paces her bedroom for a moment before responding to an instinct that is typically third or fourth, never first. She calls her brother. At first, Cyrus is annoyed she bothered him at work, but once Marjane explains the situation, his voice becomes serious—“Did she say how long they’ll wait?”—and she can picture him sitting upright in his office chair. “No,” she says. “Wait, why does she want to wait?” “She’s afraid of him not being home for holidays.” He sighs. Marjane plops onto her bed. She forgets the brother who would threaten to throw away her baby blanket when she was a teenager. Or the one who would criticize boyfriends after meeting them. “It’s not like we can’t sign him out those days,” Marjane says.

“How was it by the way?” Cyrus asks. “Kane?” “Yeah.” She thinks of the fly buzzing around the gristle. “It was fine,” she says. “Great.” A pause. “Dammit,” he says. “You know, they’ll only wait so long until they don’t hear from us.” “I know, I know,” Marjane says, thinking of Doc. He twice called her during the conference and sent her one text message: “Hope everything’s ok. Understand if you have some family stuff going on right now. Give me a call. I’m happy to talk about it if you want.” He hasn’t called, or emailed for that matter, since. “If we don’t put him in now,” Cyrus says, “by the time a spot opens—again—he’ll really be in trouble.” “I know,” Marjane says. “Here. Put her on.” “Now?” “Yes.” She creeps downstairs. A Pizza Hut commercial is on, but Mama hasn’t bothered to mute it as she usually does with commercials. “Cyrus called. He wants to talk to you.” Whatever Cyrus tells Mama is probably no different from what Marjane would have said but because it’s from Cyrus, Mr. 1600 SATs, Mr. Never-Dated-In-High-School, Mr. Top- Marketeer-at-Eli-Lilly, Mama concedes. But now at least, Marjane thinks, she and Cyrus don’t have to worry about broken hips or asphyxiations or home care or Papa’s sometimes hostile reactions to hallucinations, like the time, early in his illness, Papa thought he heard his wife showering with his colleague, Dr. Caldwell. Marjane had moved to San Francisco and Cyrus was long gone to Indiana. Papa rammed his fist through the shower door, and, as blood, bubbles, and shards circled the drain, caught only his wife, cowering in the corner, alone.

Marjane is packing, the second time in less than two months. She sits in her parents’ bedroom with her mother and fills suitcases with clothes and framed photographs: a black-and- white of Papa and Mama on their wedding day, walking arm in arm toward a limousine; a colored one of them, older, yet still young, sitting atop an inactive volcano, leis around their necks, the azure sky meeting lazuli sea behind them; toddler photos of Cyrus and Marjane. Clothes, photographs, and that’s it, really. How little the decayed brain needs, Marjane thinks, tugging the zipper around the suitcase’s perimeter. Then she remembers the carpeted dining area, the therapists, the daily activities. How little we are able to provide for him. Mama insists on packing his Radif and his Eagles CDs. “But what will he listen to them on?” Marjane asks. So the trio stops at Best Buy on the way to Kane. The excursion is preposterous, requiring Papa to get in and out of his wheelchair an extra time today. Mama and Marjane could buy his CD player later, during his nap, but then they would miss remembering the final time he shopped with his family. Mama inspects every device on display. “Are the buttons big enough for him to see? Is the volume knob easy to find?” Mama asks. Marjane feels very, very stupid. Over nine years of post-secondary education, and she never learned to answer such questions.

From behind the wheelchair, Marjane looks down on her father’s bald head, as if the solution is going to float to its surface, like a crystal ball. When Marjane doesn’t respond, Mama shrugs and says, “I guess we or the nurses are the ones that will operate it anyway,” and Mama grabs whatever player is on the shelf’s end. Clothes go into the dresser. Depends, in the closet. CD player, on a nightstand by his bed. Hooks already adorn the walls of his new room, so the women have little say where the pictures hang. “Hussain, do you want our wedding photo to go above the TV?” his wife asks. He watches in the entryway from his wheelchair, cocking his head to the side, confused by this whole process. But he smiles, so his wife leaves it there. When Marjane was a child, she conflated the words “dining” and “dying,” assuming that because there was a living room, its opposite would logically be adjacent to it. The “dying room” scared her, and she always protested when her family ate there, but never said why, exactly, her parents never understanding. When she was five, her paternal grandfather died suddenly in Iran. Her grandfather, whom Marjane never met, was devout, and under Islamic custom, his funeral took place within twenty-four hours, leaving no time for the Nafisis to return to Shiraz and join their family in bereavement. A silence came to their home, a silence which lasted for days. One evening over dinner it became too much for little Marjane, and she absconded with her plate of khoresh from the table to the living room. Her father followed, and she told him how she was worried her parents would be next if they continued to eat there. He corrected the semantic confusion and yelled back to his wife, “See, this is why we need to speak Farsi more around the house.” It was the first time Cyrus or either of her parents smiled in a week. But that’s what this new room is for Papa joon. A dying room. Someone died to make room for him and someday, very soon, he will die to make room for someone else. It’s mid-afternoon, time for Papa’s nap. In a minute, Mama will press the red button on a remote attached to his bed. A nurse will arrive, and the nurse will help him under his covers. Marjane and Mama will sit beside him until he falls asleep. Then they will go to a common room: Mama to work on a crossword puzzle, her daughter to read People, neither able to surrender their attention to their respective distractions. When Papa wakes, they will wheel him to the dining area, and Mama will raise forkfuls of salmon to his mouth. After dinner, they will meet Carol, an occupational therapist. Mama will remark how Carol could be Marjane’s younger sister, so greatly do they resemble each other, and Carol will laugh and say, “I suppose so,” and then Carol will explain that she is not Iranian but rather Bosnian and Dark Irish. Marjane and Mama will watch as Carol engages Papa in some mental and physical exercises: flashcards and beach-ball-throwing, respectively. Then Marjane, Mama, and a nurse will put him to bed, with Mama promising to visit tomorrow, first thing in the morning, as she will do every day over the next year, except in cases of extreme sickness for fear of endangering her husband’s already enervated health. For now, Papa takes in his surroundings: his new CD player, his hotel room. Smiling, he asks, “Is it my birthday?” and leaves Marjane to endure the confused, awkward moment when a mother cries.

When Marjane and Mama arrive home, they trade “good nights” and drift to their respective bedrooms.

Marjane goes to her bed and slides a hand between her mattress and boxspring until her fingers curl around her vibrator. Since her arrival, she has spent whole afternoons locked in her bedroom while her parents and dog nap. Tonight, though, her body refuses to finish, and her mind wanders to Dan, whom she left, like her dissertation, in San Francisco because like her dissertation, he abandoned her. He is also a PhD candidate in neuroscience. They often feuded about work, once debating for hours with regards to how a particular degeneration in Wernicke’s Area would affect those over sixty-five years old. But the arguments were opportunities to come together personally and professionally afterward, plus make-up sex. One day, almost a year ago, while prepping the lab and awaiting Dan’s arrival, the idea of another such debate made her want to vomit. Similarly, his ability to relate any situation to a Seinfeld episode was always pleasantly unexpected until it wasn’t. His laugh a warm triplet of “has” until it become fake. The mole on his upper lip cute until it was distracting. Washing the dishes when he stayed the night—an endearing gesture until she realized the spike in her utilities as he took twice as long as she and still missed spots, so she would have to start all over. His preference of cunnilingus over vaginal sex selfless until it was selfish. Except now, viewed from her East Coast vantage point, everything reverts back to their first year together. The fights chances to grow, the Seinfeld references welcomed, the oral sex fantastic, et cetera. She gives up, stashes her vibrator beneath the mattress. She should let Broca out one more time, anyway. But before that, she takes her phone from her night stand and scrolls through her contacts but doesn’t stop at Dan. He’s in San Francisco, and her father’s now up the highway, and where does that leave her? She closes her contacts and opens her OKCupid profile.

At Kane Gardens the next evening, Marjane and Mama sit on either side of Carol as Carol holds flashcards up to Papa. “…Stomach.” “…Heart.” “…Brain.” It’s a body-part themed deck, and the former surgeon is rocking it. Later, Carol hands the beach ball to Marjane. Daughter stands a few yards from father, who sits in his wheelchair. He makes every catch.

Marjane has one friend left from high school, Madison. A little taller, a little thinner, Madison lives in Philadelphia, where she’s a visiting mathematics instructor at Drexel. Three years ago, she began dating one of her colleagues. This August, she will marry the good professor, he of gray temples, LA Fitness shoulders, and multiple publications. The wedding will be in Pittsburgh, and Madison is home to meet with caterers and tour reception halls. A Panera breakfast with Marjane bookends her trip. During Lunch Number One, Marjane expresses her desire to start dating again. It’s been almost a year since Dan, she’s back in her hometown, and she wants something to look forward to. Madison approves. When Marjane excuses herself to the restroom, she leaves her unlocked phone on the table. Madison remembers how they used to prank each other; well, more so Madison, who would snag Marjane’s towel off the hook while Marjane showered after gym. During Lunch Number Two, Madison confesses to jumbling the algorithms on Marjane’s OKCupid profile, just to fuck with her, why, get some interesting dates?

3 Date Night

Joseph Battaglia breaks Marjane’s heart long before they meet in person. The profile picture does it, him in a backyard, heaving a massive bearded collie in his skinny arms. Marjane has never believed dogs can resemble their masters—she certainly doesn’t resemble Broca— until she lays eyes on Joseph and Tilly and their wispy facial hair, Joseph’s mocha, Tilly’s gray, smiles peaking from behind both their beards. His profile notes he studied religion in college but is not himself religious. Pearl Jam is his favorite band, and, while text messaging, they realize they attended the same concert (Civic Arena, ‘03) nearly ten years ago. He lives in the South Hills but works in the city as a barista at a local café chain. He promises her that, should she visit him at work, he will whip her up a mean caramel macchiato, gratis. JOSEPH: I hate, HATE haunted houses … I think we should go to one. MARJANE: Why do you want to do that if you hate them?? JOSEPH: Because I’m a coward, and it’s important you learn this early on. And that’s why their first date is at Pittsburgh’s Terror Town. Marjane parks her car next to the old fruit warehouses. A warm autumn night, so she leaves her jacket in the trunk. She walks across Smallman Street. Terror Town is affiliated with Costume World, an eclectic sartorial emporium which takes up about a fourth of a city block. She follows a ramp to the shop’s entrance, but it’s closed. Then she hears creaking caskets and rattling chains. She peers down. A door, like that to a beer cellar, gapes open in the sidewalk, and fog billows from it. She hops the handrail onto the cement and descends. Sawdust coats the floor, and antique-style Edison bulbs glow dimly from the ceiling. The whole basement smells of latex. One line is long and tortuous, around velvet ropes and stanchions, as if the youngish crowd were waiting for a bank teller. The other line is a line of one—Joseph, who asks, “Marjane?” He Anglophizes the second syllable, like “Jane Fonda.” “Mar-jzohn,” she says, extending her hand. “Jzohn. Mar. jzohn. Marjane. Got it. Joey,” he says, and they shake. His grip is firm, his height taller than what she intimated from his profile, a little over six feet, she guesses. His eyes the same mocha color of his beard. Joey bought line-jump passes, so they meet face-to-face for the grand total of a minute before a decapitated mechanic motions them into a dark corridor. The actors don’t touch the patrons, but they come close, beginning with a werewoman who howls right in Marjane’s and Joey’s faces, and Joey wasn’t kidding. He screams immediately, in a voice two octaves higher than the one he used to introduce himself, all while recoiling into her body in a shiver that evinces genuine fear and not some sophomoric attempt to run and hide in her panties. The werewoman eventually hunkers down and retreats into the dark. The pair opens a door to a woodshed, where two Jasons come at them with chainsaws. Joey hurries Marjane into the next room—a kitchen, resplendent with bloody table, upon which a man lies beside his entrails. He screams for HELP when they enter only to be hushed by a Dr. Frankenstein type, who leaps from behind the table, nearly colliding into the pair while waving a meat cleaver. Throughout it all, Marjane stays stoic, never once screaming, often smiling. When she and Joey catch up to the teenagers ahead of them, for Joey has all but ran through the maze, her feet go heavy.

“What are you doing?” Joey asks, nearly faceplanting with his own inertia as he stops a half-step ahead of her. She points as a trio of zombies beset the screaming teenagers. “I don’t want those kids spoiling the surprise,” she says. “But but but strength in numbers!” It’s the first time he makes her laugh.

When they finish and ascend the stairs to Smallman, Joey, breathing heavily, says, “Well, the secret’s out.” “What’s that?” Marjane asks. “I’m a coward.” “You weren’t that bad. You took the mad scientist pretty well.” “Until I ducked behind your shoulders.” “Care for a drink?” “Fuck. Yes.” They wander a block and find a bar and grille that’s adorned with paintings of daggers through hearts and snakes slithering out of skulls’ mouths and eye sockets. “This place,” Marjane says. “This place looks like an Ed Hardy shirt exploded and turned into a bar.” “True. But it’s also one of the few spots open in the Strip after five.” “Fine. But if ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ or ‘Werewolves in London’ or that lame Kid Rock song that covers both and manages to sound worse than the sum of its parts comes on, I’m going out for a cigarette,” she says, yanking the fork-shaped door handle. “And I don’t even smoke.” “November Rain” comes on instead. But they manage to claim the last two empty stools, so they stay. Joey flags the bartender. They each order a beer and some grub. “That was great,” he says when the bartender leaves. “Terror Town? You sure?” “Yeah. The amount of detail they put into that stuff, you have to at least appreciate it.” He sips his beer. “I like the way you pronounce your name.” “You mean the way everyone pronounces it?” “I mean, I’m glad it’s pronounced that way, not that I didn’t like it before, but it does sound better, more flavorful, more…” “Iranian.” She’s ready to get it out of the way, ready for the usual round of dumb questions/comments: “Are you a U.S. citizen?” “Or are you a terrorist (ha, ha, ha)?” “Oh. Huh. My last Uber driver was Iranian.”

Rather, he asks if she can speak Farsi (a little), what city her family is from (Shiraz), whether Shiraz is in the south (it is, yes), if she was born there (no, but would like to visit someday), if her family came after The Revolution (no, before, they were doing their medical residencies here but stayed when things got bad), and when and where, exactly, are the, um, “secret meetings” (!)? Ok, one dumb question. But she gets his irony, laughing.

Their entreés come: a chicken salad for her; salmon for him. She explains her former graduate studies and why she is home, and the explanation freezes his fork midway to mouth. “And you’re dating too?” he asks. “I wouldn’t say I’m ‘dating,’” Marjane says. “This is my first date since I moved back home.” “Just over a month ago.” “Yeah.” They each take a bite, and it’s a race as to who can swallow first and break the silence. She wins. “What? I can’t go on one date because my father’s sick?” “No, it’s just, ah, if you’re moving home to help, will you have time for a relationship?” “A relationship? Joey, it’s one date.” “Oh boy. Look, I didn’t want to bring this up now, but I’m looking for something that can build. Slowly. I know it’s probably not very ‘masculine’—” “No, no, that’s a good thing.” “Good. Well.” “Well.” More silence, this time broken when Joey realizes his Manhattan clam chowder never arrived, and any awkwardness gets converted to irritation and directed to their bartender, who apologizes and later strikes it from the bill.

The question of whether she should be in a relationship lingers after they part (a hug at her car; promises to call soon) and then there’s Madison’s revelation the next day. Marjane reviews his profile. Despite Madison’s meddling, Joey is a good match, but Marjane finds one detail she overlooked—his age. He’s twenty-five, nine years younger than her, five years outside the age range she originally set for herself. Perhaps it was his beard, or the low lighting of Terror Town and then the bar, or how they messaged about ‘90s music prior to their date, but she never thought him so young. She calls him and explains the mix-up. He’s sorry, he thought she knew, he certainly did. “Out of curiosity,” she asks, “Who did you see Pearl Jam with?” “My mom.” Marjane shudders, thinking of teenage-Joey and his mom singing along to “Elderly Woman behind the Counter in a Small Town” while college-age-Marjane and her roommate drunkenly belt the lyrics elsewhere in the audience. “Do you still live with her?” Marjane asks. “ … Ah. Yeah. Both my parents, actually,” he says, but before Marjane can respond, he informs her that Yoko Ono was seven years John Lennon’s senior, and nine is only two years more, it’s not that big an age difference, but he respects and understands it’s her decision. She remembers last night. She realizes, too, from Madison’s visit, that she doesn’t really have any friends left in Pittsburgh, so she tentatively asks if, maybe, instead, they can still be friends? There is zero chance of sex, which means they talk at more restaurants, go to another haunted house. At night, via text, they wax books and decide to start a book club, though Marjane notes that two people seem insufficient for a “club.” JOEY: How about unit?

The first selection for their book unit is One Hundred Years of Solitude. Both have wanted to read it but neither ever has. She invites him to her mother’s house for their first meeting, texting that he should arrive at 5 p.m. He arrives at 4:30. “Hiii,” Marjane says through the crack between the doorframe and the door. “I know, I’m early, I’m sorry. I thought there’d be traffic, but there wasn’t, so … ” “Marjane joon, who is it?” (Zipping up of coat.) “Eh,” Marjane says. “Is that your mom?” Joey asks. “Ehhh.” Shoulder first, he squeezes his way into the house. “Dr. Nafisi, yes? I’m Joey.” He extends his hand too early and awkwardly strides to her with an orangutanian arm outstretched. She takes his hand, all the vigor on his end. “Yes … ” Mama says. “Marjane? Aren’t you going with me?” “I—” “Please take off your shoes,” Mama says to Joey. “Yikey.” Joey ceases the handshake and jumps to the edge of the foyer, the only part not covered by an area rug. “I will tomorrow,” Marjane says. “For the Halloween party.” “Oh. Ok. … Nice meeting you.” “You too,” Joey says while prying off a black Vans with his left foot, a hand steadying himself against the wall. Marjane watches her mother leave but then her attention is drawn to Broca, who by now has discovered the new visitor. Her dog takes to Joey immediately, dropping all pretenses and rolling over for belly rubs. Before the unit begins its discussion, Joey mentions the pumpkin on the front stoop—“It’s Halloween tomorrow. Why isn’t it a Jack-o-lantern? Doesn’t your mom have any tools to carve it?” Marjane locates an appropriate knife in the silverware drawer, and García Márquez gets pushed aside by spread newspaper, Marjane cutting, Joey scooping guts and seeds with his bare hands. They get one eye out before a touch leads to another touch, which leads to kissing, which leads to stumbling their way across the living area and upstairs and into her bed. Joey admits that he brought a condom, but it’s her choice if she wants to have sex. She does.

4 Baggage

Autumn really gets away from her. Marjane does not question why she is with a man during this time, at least not consciously. Any guilt manifests itself as an increased predilection to stay in bed. Most days, by the time she is dressed and done with whatever errands Mama needs her to do, it’s already past Papa’s bedtime; that’s including the days Joey is around to accompany her on runs to the grocery store or mall for Mama. The longer that Marjane doesn’t see her father, the greater her guilt. The greater her guilt, the longer she waits to see her father, and round and round goes the vicious circle. Mama also does not question why Marjane is with Joey and not Papa during this time. Mama is in too deep—deep in visits, deep in OT, soon to be deep in debt if the old home never sells—for her to register any irregularities outside her husband’s world. As for Doc, he tries email a few times, but Marjane deletes every epistle unread, gleaming from the subject lines an increased urgency with every missive. (Words and phrases like “checking in,” “updates?,” “hello??” particularly stick out.) The subject line of his last email mentions something about “dissertation committee” and “impatient,” but she shuts her laptop, feeling she is going to vomit on it. On Thanksgiving, Papa has a bad morning. He must have slept terribly the night before because he keeps drifting off and refuses to answer the nurses’ questions. The staff recommends that he stay at Kane for dinner and, with Cyrus unable to come home because of work anyway, Mama concedes. She doesn’t return to the McMansion for her usual nap, which gives Joey an opportunity to swing by before his own family’s Thanksgiving dinner. While Mama scoops cranberries and slices of turkey into her husband’s mouth in Kane’s dining area, Marjane and Joey make love at the house on top of the butcher-block island. Afterwards comes the realization of where Marjane should be. “I have to go,” she tells Joey, gathering the clothes scattered like palms around the linoleum. She misses the big dinner at Kane but arrives in time to play with Papa. Carol has off work, so Mama stands in one of the common areas holding a beach ball. Her husband’s toys are scattered around the carpet as if strewn by an angry toddler. “Marjane, why are you so late?” Mama asks. Marjane answers by wrestling the ball from her mother. “C’mon, Papa, get ready.” She throws, but he brings his hands together too late, and the ball bounces off his torso. She scampers after it. “Ok, try again,” she says. “Marjane … ” her mother says. “I got this, Mama,” Marjane says. This time he brings his hands together too soon. The ball returns off his clasped hands toward Marjane. She scoops it up. “You got this, Papa.” Again. Too late. It ricochets off his forehead. He growls. Mama says, “Enough!” and picks up the ball. For the rest of the evening, Marjane sits on the sidelines. As she watches her father make every catch her mother throws, it dawns on Marjane that perhaps Papa wasn’t clasping his hands too early or too late. Perhaps it was Marjane—throwing the ball too soft or too hard while her mother’s been around long enough to get it right every time.

The closest Marjane comes to seeing her father after Thanksgiving is the Saturday before Christmas. From upstairs, she overhears her mother on the phone. Mama is talking to Janice,

19 whom Mama employs to keep up the old home for potential buyers. Mama is asking Janice to do another sweep of the home, to look for clutter, for Mama wants the home to look as little lived in as possible. Mama’s convinced she can sell it by the new year. Marjane digs through the unpacked boxes in her bedroom and finds her old house key. She sneaks out of the McMansion while Mama is in the bathroom and drives to the Persian Palace. She parks and then enters through the front door and beelines to the basement, wishing to see as little of the house as possible. On a phone call, nine months ago, when Marjane was still in San Francisco, Mama complained about all the basement clutter she threw away before she and Papa moved. “Well, you didn’t throw everything away, did you?” Marjane asked. “Oh, yes. Every box.” “Wait, Mama, I told you some of that stuff was mine.” “ … ” “No, Mama—” “Marjane, there was so much to sort through. And it’s not like your father could help me. It was easier—” “But what about my old dolls? My diaries?” “Marjane joon, it’s in the past.” Marjane hung up. She called Cyrus, but he couldn’t understand why she wanted stuff from her childhood—Marjane, it’s not like you liked growing up there anyway, right? She hung up on him, too. Now here she is—the furnished basement of her home, a home which still hasn’t sold, which would have acted as suitable storage space this whole time. But Mama seemed to be telling Janice that there might still be untouched things, maybe things Mama meant to pitch but forgot. Marjane finds a box and two bags behind the furnace. The box contains a tape player. Her father’s. The few mornings Papa started work late, he would make tea for himself and little Marjane, both of them singing along to The Eagles, his favorite American musicians, or whatever was on the radio. She sees him clearly, again. He’s healthy, humming as he moves between the counter and the stove. Her eyes well. The bags contain old scrapbooks from Marjane’s undergraduate days: photos from the night she turned twenty-one (thank God Facebook wasn’t a thing then), movie stubs, concert tickets, notes from friends and former roommates. She thought these scrapbooks, like her diaries, were lost. She checks the rest of the house, her bedroom and her parents’ bedroom especially, but it’s bare. She will take the found objects to the new house and leave them downstairs as a test—a test to show her mother doesn’t respect her. She bets Mama will move her stuff, and Marjane can confront her with the evidence then.

The next day, Marjane dreams she is back at school, but in the wrong department, and no matter what hallway she takes, she can’t escape. She awakens, wants to get out of bed, but she finds herself unable to do so. In her head is a professor from a philosophy elective that she took as an undergraduate. The professor was a droning bore of a man, whose only moment of life came when he spent an hour lecturing on Zeno’s paradoxes, like how infinity exists between any two points, just halve the space between them and keep dividing by two, you’ll never reach the other side.

Marjane contemplates the distance between her and her father. The trudge from bed to closet; the clothing to sort through; the descent down all seventeen steps; the trips from fridge to table to assemble whatever nourishment will work to kill her anyway—digestion being a huge factor in aging, or so she once read online; interrogations with Cyrus and Mama about when Marjane and Joey will visit Papa; the luring of Broca around the cul-de-sac with treats; the twenty-minute drive to the AMC with Joey; the two-and-a-half-hour bloated action thriller; and, finally, the slog through snowy miles of highway and stoplights to the facility that houses her father, a single dot at the end of this line, demented and diminishing each day. Her door opens. Her mattress creaks, and she lists into Joey’s tall, skinny body, getting a noseful of Colombian Supremo, the house blend where he works, its scent embedded in his blue hoodie. As he moves in to kiss the slight hook in her nose, she flinches in anticipation of his beard, forgetting he shaved yesterday. He brushes a strand of her hair from her ear and softly sings, “‘Dear Marjane, won’t you come out to play?’” She smiles but says, “Nope.” He goes on: “‘Dear Marjane, greet the brand new day. The sun is up, the sky is blue, it’s beautiful, and so are—’” “Ok, I get it, you’re cute.” He sighs, and, in a voice devoid of Liverpudlian lilt, asks if she’s ready to go to the movies, it’s past one, and the next showing is in less than an hour. “Ten more minutes,” she says, squeezing his crotch. “Your mom and brother are downstairs,” he says, gently lifting her hand. “Awake.” She turns from him. “You’re no fun.” “I feel weird about last night with your brother across the hall.” “We waited until he was asleep. We’ve done it with Mama downstairs asleep.” Joey rises. She can sense him standing over her before he walks away, the door clicking shut behind him. Joey doesn’t work at the café on Sundays, so Saturday nights he sleeps over. Last night, he and Marjane were about to go to her bedroom when Cyrus arrived, home for the holidays two days earlier than expected. Marjane introduced Joey to Cyrus and then the three of them, plus Mama, stayed in the living area for over an hour chatting. Finally, Marjane said she and Joey were retiring to bed, but before they could escape, Mama asked if Marjane and Joey could visit Papa Sunday evening. Mama wanted to cook supper with her son, but she didn’t want to leave her husband with Carol and the nurses. Marjane consented. As for that supper, Marjane already knows the questions her brother will serve alongside the evening’s khoresh: “Why aren’t you helping Mama more?” and “Why aren’t you waking up earlier?” and, worst, “Why aren’t you visiting Papa?” Marjane sinks deeper under the covers. She will want to say, “Maybe you should turn down a promotion for once, be the one to help Mama, visit both of them a little more often.” She also doesn’t want to face how Papa might be less able to play his games. He’ll have trouble catching the beach ball, like on Thanksgiving, or reading his flashcards. That’s how it goes with Parkinson’s and its partner, Lewy body dementia: for months the patient is ok. Not great, but ok. Is ok, is ok, is ok, is ok, is ok, then WHAM, not ok. She pushes off the covers, as heavy as lead aprons, and limps to her closet. Three walls of clothes, hung in rows from floor to ceiling, surround her.

Ninth grade. Algebra II. Mr. Fenton, with his paunch and Luigi-like mustache: “And how do we say this?” He points to a chalked number five followed by an exclamation point. “Marjane?” “FIVE!” she answers. Her friend Madison, seated beside her, cackles as Mr. Fenton shakes his head, silently counting down the days until his retirement. That operation’s name escapes Marjane now, but she remembers its function—to give the number of ways to arrange n different objects into a sequence, by multiplying n by all the integers less than or equal to n. So if she has three different objects (3!), there will be six ways to organize them in a row (3 x 2 x 1= 6). The sequences grow rapidly. Nine objects gives 362,880 combinations. Ten objects, 3,628,800 combinations. She tries on seven different outfits with no luck. Nothing seems to fit or match or feel comfortable. She begins pulling random clothing off the racks: a blouse with sweatpants, a thermal V-neck with skirt and stockings, jeans plus an old pink prom dress, SHIRTS!, PANTS!, DRESSES!SKIRTS!STOCKINGS!… There’s a knock. Joey. “Come on, Marjane! Let’s go!” She meant to lie on the floor for only a minute. Lunch first and then she’ll change out of her pajamas. She pulls herself up.

As she goes downstairs, the smell of lemon Pledge assaults her nose. Janice—who is here this Sunday for some reason. Probably Mama wanted some extra help cleaning the house for Cyrus. The stairs run down the left side of the house and end across from the entrance to the back patio. To the left of where they end is Mama’s bedroom. To their right is the living area. From the television, a whistle shrills. Marjane sees Cyrus’s bald spot, and she remembers to ask him and Mama about her father's tape player, which she found in the trash late last night after her family fell asleep. Cyrus sits on the couch, his left arm outstretched over the back pillows, an NFL commercial glinting off his Rolex. His ring finger is bare, always has been, a result of working fourteen-hour days at Eli Lilly, where he markets the same antidepressants that she takes. Do his co-workers work as hard as him at making their siblings miserable and, if so, is this part of a conspiracy to hook the nation on Prozac? From halfway down the steps, she spies Joey at the dining room table reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. After they had sex last night, she balled up the condom in tissues and then threw the ball into her wastebasket. She took the wastebasket to the trash barrel in the garage, opened the barrel’s lid, and found the tape player resting on a pile of filled trash bags. She took the tape player to the downstairs bathroom and disinfected it with Clorox wipes. “What took you so long?” Joey said when she returned to bed. “Wait, what are you holding?” She explained, and he read to her afterward to calm her down. Now he better not be reading ahead. With Cyrus home, Marjane finds herself distracted by Joey and not in the usual ways. Unlike Cyrus, Joey has a full head of hair, cut in a brown mop. Joey’s hoodie and jeans look especially frayed when juxtaposed next to Cyrus’s polo wear. Cyrus is forty-seven years old. Joey—twenty-five, a number which flashes across her mind in inflated, silver digits, like birthday balloons, before deflating into the pit of her thirty-four-year-old abdomen. She wishes Joey didn’t live with his parents. It usually isn’t a problem, what with Mama spending most of each day keeping Papa company, leaving Marjane and Joey with at least one empty house. And when Mama is home, she sleeps.

Cyrus wants to spend more time with our parents; his sojourn has nothing to do with torturing me. She mantras these thoughts as she lights upon the first floor. Her mother is in the kitchen making a sandwich. Before Marjane can ask about the discarded tape player, she realizes her bags of old college scrapbooks are also gone. She walks across the wooden floor and checks the basement stairs, which run under and parallel to the main stairs. The bags sit by the basement entrance. Although they aren’t in the trash, to bring them to her bedroom will now require extra work, extra steps, her infinity made more infinite. “Who touched my things?” she asks. The center snaps the ball. Roethlisberger manages two steps before a Baltimore Raven sacks him. Cyrus shakes his head and then answers, “I did.” “Hey, Marjane?” Joey asks, standing. “Maybe we should get—” She holds up a hand. To Cyrus, she says, “You know how I feel about people touching my things.” Cyrus raises the volume on the broadcasters. “Cyrus.” Something brushes behind her. Her dog? No—Joey, sneaking to the basement. Her adrenal glands drip, her heart quickens, muscles tense. She’s awake. By the time she gets halfway down, he’s about to head back up, bags in hand. “Don’t you dare,” she says. He drops the bags. “But the movie starts at two!” he calls after her. As Marjane ascends, the friction of a sponge against wood reminds her that there’s an audience—Janice, built like a mini-fridge, with cropped red hair. She’s going at a baseboard in the foyer. Oh, well. She’s done housework for the Nafisis on and off for two decades. This isn’t her first Iranian soap opera. Nor her last, most likely. Back in the living area, Marjane notices Broca is also in the foyer, lying by the front door, his tail wagging. Cyrus is in the dining area now, at the liquor cabinet. She once more asks him about her things. “Marjane joon,” Mama says. Behind the butcher-block island, Mama stops chopping baby tomatoes and points her knife at her daughter. “Let your brother watch TV.” The command follows a list of imperative statements that Marjane has kept track of since childhood: “Marjane, fetch your brother his shoes.” “Marjane, go make your brother a sandwich.” “Marjane, don’t talk to your brother that way.”

As Cyrus returns to the couch, an arak on ice in hand, he says to the flat screen, “I was on autopilot. I wanted to make room, so we could add the leaves to the table. You weren’t awake.” “That doesn’t matter, it’s not your stuff to move,” Marjane says. “You weren’t awake,” Cyrus says. Joey, who’s since returned and has been milling in the background, says, “I guess Marjane feels, in the past, her stuff wasn’t treated with, um, well. Wasn’t treated well. And, ah, there was a radio thrown away?” “That’s right!” Marjane says. “And Mama, you threw away my dolls and diaries back when I was at grad school. But you didn’t—”

“You would never have survived the Revolution. We lost everything,” her mother says. “Marjane, think. Your father was ill. I was tired. We needed a smaller place. We had. To get on. With our lives,” each clause emphasized with a whack of the knife to the cutting board. Marjane trembles. “Your lives! Your lives!” She runs to her mother’s bedroom, glancing back once before opening the door. At Mama shaking her head. At Joey standing there like an idiot. At Cyrus returning to his football, forever failing to stand up for his little sister. At the Terrible Towels twirling in the stands, waving Marjane on. She tries not to look at her father’s bed. The sheets, untouched since they moved him. The bed rails, reflecting the afternoon sunlight. She hurries to her mother’s bed and strips the white comforter. With it, she makes a bindle and into this bindle, she gathers some things: Blouses from her mother’s closet. Rosewater and golden vials of French perfume from her mother’s bureau. A framed photograph of a young Cyrus. Years of therapy, which convinced her to observe in her upbringing the Iranian emphasis on doing what was best for the whole. Sure, her parents, both doctors, worked constantly, were rarely around, and let nannies raise her. But she got a palace and private schooling! She gathers the little love her parents showed her as a child: those mornings with her father, the occasional jaunt to the Cultural District for a musical with her mother. Her parents loved her just enough so that when Papa took a turn for the worse, and with Cyrus entrenched in his respective life, Marjane proposed moving back home. Mama refused but acquiesced within a phone conversation, as quickly as if her daughter had offered to treat her to coffee. Was this brief refusal also calculated? Mama possesses her daughter’s help without guilt, as she never made Marjane come home. “I told you to focus on your studies, but you argued and argued” goes Mama’s refrain anytime Marjane complains about her changed life. There was never Iranian collectivism, Marjane realizes as she ties her bindle tightly. Only American opportunism. She races through the connected laundry room. She imagines running away from home, her bindle hung from a pole over her back. Frostbite would amputate her hands and feet somewhere around Ohio. But, pole clenched between teeth, she would Monty-Python it back to the Golden Gate, back to her dissertation, back to Doc, back to her apartment on Haight. She almost drops her bindle, she’s laughing so hard. The laundry room opens to the foyer. No Janice. Just Broca witnessing his mom lose her mind. She opens the door next to the laundry room and enters the garage. The passenger side of the car distorts her sneer, her tangled hair. To her left is the garbage barrel. She lifts the lid, gags. “Wait, Marjane—” Joey says, running to the door, but she yells over his slumped shoulders: “THIS!” She hikes her bindle back. “THIS IS WHAT I THINK OF YOUR LIVES!” And snaps it into the can. Marjane struts past Joey, who is frozen to the cement floor. She sidesteps Broca and continues through the downstairs. Mama leans against the island, staring at the TV as she chews her sandwich. Like an evil eye, Cyrus’s bald spot glowers over the couch. Yellow penalty flags litter Heinz Field. Didn’t her family notice? Depending on the angle, they might not have been able to peer into the garage. She didn’t see them, but even Joey’s skinny body could have eclipsed her line of

24 sight. But they must have heard her. What does she have to do? Sit her family on the couch, tape their eyelids open, and empty the garbage in front of them? The tread of feet on wood signals that Joey’s unstuck himself. She ascends the stairs. Joey is murmuring something to Cyrus. She wishes Broca would follow her, but he’s learned to keep his distance when his mom is in a mood. Upstairs, Janice is setting down the bags from the basement. “Oh!” Janice says. “I—I figured you’d want these here.” “Thanks,” Marjane says. Janice, eyes cast downward, dashes past. What does Janice think of the Nafisis? Marjane shakes her head and enters the guestroom. Cyrus will ignore her? Fine. She’ll find something of his to toss. She doesn’t hear Joey approach. “What was that?” he asks. He’s leaning inside the doorframe, arms crossed. She eyes the room, empty save a dresser, a queen-sized bed, and her brother’s suitcase on the floor. “Well?” Joey asks. She looks past Joey. Soon enough, he gets that he should turn around. His back flattens against the doorframe, and Cyrus lumbers by, arak in hand. “My door opened?” he asks. “Ready to talk?” Marjane asks. He sips his drink. “What are you doing in my room?” Allah. God. Yahweh, too. She believes in none yet searches for all three as she folds her arms and flips back her head. It’s not his room. It’s a guestroom, and he’s a guest. Her stuff is not his to touch, and she tells him this. “Marjane joon,” he says. “I had to add the leaves to the table. You weren’t awake. So I added the leaves.” “What about Papa’s tape player?” she asks. She explains how she found it in the trash last night. He takes another sip. “Marjane joon, I would never, ever purposefully throw away a piece of electronics. Talk to Mama.” Marjane will, later that evening. “I never thought anyone would want technology over twenty years old,” Mama will say. “I didn’t know you had some sort of connection to it. I thought you meant to throw it away but forgot.” Marjane will be too exhausted to argue by then. As for now, she sizes her brother up, both siblings silent. Then Joey says, “See, Marjane, aren’t you … making too much of this?” She whirls on her boyfriend, contorting her mouth into the beginnings of a word, a sound, an exclamation, but then stops herself. She marches to her bedroom, back to the starting point. Joey follows. “Do you see what you did?” Marjane asks Joey after he closes the door. She wonders what he said to Cyrus earlier. Joey holds his palms out, raising one slightly, weighing his responses. “Why would you take his side?” she asks. Then, imitating her mother’s accent, “‘Marjane joon, ve vere talking, and your brother says even your boyfriend thinks you vere vrong.’” “That’s not what I meant,” he says.

Marjane looks around, takes a step toward her bed, but then sits on the carpet. He sits, too, bringing his knees to his chin, like a kindergartener at story time. How different he looks from when they first met. She convinced him to shave, yes, but now she can discern his dearth of wrinkles, his cherub face. There’s that frayed hoodie, too, and his holed jeans, an inattention to dress at home with not yet having to contemplate biological clocks or a friend’s recent engagement. Daily, his greatest worry is whether he forgot to add enough ice to someone’s frappé. Last week, she visited the café where he works. From the back of the line, she surveyed the Point Park University dance majors ahead of her: bodies lithe, stomachs flat, hair sporting asymmetrical cuts dyed pink, blue, green. They complimented whatever hipster yodeling he played on the sound system, chuckled when he told them, “Thanks a latté.” He could date one, and so what if he wasted a few months on the old woman? He’s in his infinite twenties. He’s waiting for her to say something, but all she can manage is a flushed face and watery eyes. He says, “Look, I’m sorry, I fucked up,” and waits for a response. Now there’s wrinkles, frown lines, a furrowed brow. The boneheaded line that he said to Cyrus, the fact he was clearly flirting with those girls, his age—they shouldn’t be dating. And he shouldn’t have to whittle his weekend in the suburbs helping her to get out of bed, to cope with her family, her baggage. Go, go, hook-up with a dancer. Go hang out in cafés, crawl galleries, fuck in lofts. This isn’t the first time she’s thought this. But to voice it means acknowledging yet another imperfect thing in her highly imperfect world, and the only people in Pittsburgh she knows besides him are family, and who else will help her with her mother’s demands, will listen to her while she vents about her life, will come only if she has, will read to her, will wake her with Beatles songs, and she’s lunging now, across the carpet, embracing, her body tackling him to the ground.

5 Trivia on Tap

Marjane doesn’t break up with Joey then. She cries in his arms, and he spends the afternoon cuddled with her and Broca on her bed. He applies caresses in equal measure to verbal balms: your mother is passive-aggressive; your mother doesn’t appreciate your help; your mother doesn’t recognize the sacrifice you made leaving San Francisco, moving back home, and helping her to take care of your dad. “‘Vou vould never have survived the Revolution. Ve lost everything,’” Marjane says, sniffling. “She’s used that one before. I never know what to say.” He pets her hair and kisses her nose.

They miss the movie, but Joey proves to be great with Papa, who, to Marjane’s relief, is having a good day. The couple meets Papa in a common area. Papa extends his hand when Marjane introduces him to her boyfriend. As they shake, Joey says, “You have a wonderful daughter.” “Thank you very much!” Papa says. Joey and Marjane laugh. “What? It’s truth!” Papa adds, and Marjane can feel herself beaming. Carol soon arrives. The couple watches Carol walk Papa through some speech exercises. Soon after Carol begins, though, Joey says, “Wait.” And then he walks over, crouches by Papa, gently lifts Papa’s dangling feet, and straps them into the footrests of the wheelchair. One of the nurses must have forgotten to strap Papa in. When Joey returns to Marjane’s side, she kisses him on the cheek, and they hold hands through the rest of Carol and Papa’s appointment. Marjane later texts Mama that it took longer to put Papa to bed (a lie) and that Joey is super hungry (also a lie), so they’re just gonna eat at Eat ‘n’ Park, which they do.

The next day, Marjane and Joey try again. Not a movie, though. Monday nights, Joey hosts a trivia night at Gene’s Place, the dive bar he used to frequent when he was an undergrad at Pitt. He’s been trying to get her to go for weeks, but she’s resisted. She tells him she’s busy with Papa those nights. Really, she cringes at the idea of being the only thirtysomething in a smokey bar full of Millennials. She agrees to go this time if he will pick her up. The doorbell rings, and Broca starts to bark. “Quiet!” Marjane yells back as she opens the door. A few snowflakes swirl inside the house. “Hey, did you get my text?” she asks Joey. He steps in, careful to take his shoes off immediately. “No. I was driving.” “I have to go to Kane.” “What? Why?” “Mama threw up. She thinks it’s just something she ate, but she doesn’t want to chance giving Papa a stomach bug.” “What about Carol?” “She started her vacation.” “And your brother?” “Grabbing drinks with old MBA friends.” Joey sighs and leans against the wall by the door, head tilted up toward the ceiling. “Why do you have to go?”

“Because otherwise the staff is content just letting my father veg in front of the TV for God knows how long.” She pauses. “Can you come with me?” “What? I just went yesterday.” “I don’t know, can’t you call and say it’s an emergency?” she asks. “Well, I mean, for you, I don’t see why I have—” She inhales sharply. “Plus, I get paid,” he says. “In beer!” “Look, trivia night’s his biggest draw.” “Two days before Christmas? When Pitt is out of session?” “He’s my friend.” “Who?” “Gene. Gene’s Place.” Silence. Then, “Fine,” she says. “You understand, right?” “No. Yes. It’s fine.” “Come on, Marjane, around this time last week, I went grocery shopping with you. And I did go with you to see your dad yesterday.” “Ri-i-ight.” She is silent. He is right, though. In fact, over the past month, the emergency runs to the grocery store, the canceled plans, her sleeping in, all of it is increasing, yet he hasn’t complained. Not yet. “No, no. You’re right. Go, go. Have fun.” “You sure?” he asks. “What did I just say?” He is already putting his shoes back on. They both say nothing until he opens the door. Then he turns to her. “Wait.” “What?” she asks. “I’ll text, no, call you. Between rounds. Well, after scoring.” “Ok.” “So … talk soon?” “Ok.” “Love you.” “OK.” He leans in to kiss her. She obliges. And then he’s gone. When she goes to leave, she finds her car has a flat, some construction debris lodged into the rubber, so she has to borrow her mother’s car.

His name is Hussain. He once could sit and read medical textbooks in English and Farsi for hours, getting up only to urinate. Now things come in snapshots. “Papa, what does the card say?” the girl, his daughter, Marjane, asks him. On the table is a card with a picture of brown hair. Below it are the letters W I G. Opposite him sits his daughter. Lemony disinfectant masks a uric stench. The overall smell reminds him of ... something. The pleather of his wheelchair provides little give, and his thighs ache. “Artificial. Hair,” he says. She smiles. ***

Later, Marjane says, “One, two, three, four, five. What comes after five?” Hussain bounces in his wheelchair but loses track while trying to remember why he is bouncing. He will fail to recall five is the number of lives he saved one Christmas night in the operating room many years ago. His daughter points to the cards on the table between them. Can’t she leave him alone? He starts from the beginning. “One,” he says. “Two ... three ... four ... five ... six ...” “Good!” she says, flipping another card. “What comes next?” Seven—that’s the number of scars he counted on his daughter’s right calf while he wrestled the letter opener from her hand. She was sixteen. His daughter, a cutter, caught in the act. Now his daughter’s face is fuzzy, engulfed in a red, electrical cloud, a cumulus puff emitted by the reptilian portion of his brain. Bad girl! he thinks. His left hand pounds the table. The cards flutter into the red cloud, like a magician’s trick gone wrong. She says “no no no.” How dare she talk back! How dare a doctor’s doctor— She rakes in the failed hand, eyes cast downward. Look me in the eye! And he smacks her on the forehead.

Marjane sits in the car, thinking of Joey on his barstool, microphone to his lips. In this daydream, he wears a dunce cap while asking, “What dementia, characterized by clumps of alpha-synuclein and ubiquitin protein in neurons, is closely associated with Parkinson’s disease?” “Lewy body dementia,” she says to the foggy windshield. Although it will fail to garner her any more points, she could add how Lewy body dementia stops your father from counting to seven. How he used to spend seven hours, and often twice that, performing surgeries. How Lewy body dementia makes your father hit you. How it destroys all your resolve to keep him stimulated until 8 p.m. How it sends him to bed early, cursing in two languages. How it requires you and two nurses to undress him and make sure he pees one last time. How it makes you want to cry in front of these nurses. How you do cry once you are concealed in the car that he used to drive. How you strike your head repeatedly against the steering wheel for stalling your life in order to help a father who used to hit you when he wasn’t insane. Not often, true. But you remember the childhood spankings, the time he grazed a plate by your head when you missed the bus in eighth grade. Soon you became plenty good at hurting yourself on your own. How your emotions feel fucked with more when, amid these hysterics, you find yourself smiling over how he identified the card reading “WIG” as “artificial hair.” How adorable that was. How sad. Marjane will collect herself, and before she leaves the Kane Gardens parking lot, she will call Joey. As expected, he won’t answer (Question two, who can forget about getting his rocks off this week?). She will toss her phone onto the passenger’s seat.

By the time Joey is able to return the missed call—she left no voicemail—she will be in bed, though not exactly asleep. She’ll text her father had a bad night, but it was fine, she and the nurses got him to bed, ok. It’s not fine, she knows, but hours removed from the evening’s events, boxed by circumstances which appear unchangeable, the notion of her unpacking these events will seem hopeless. Trivial, even.

6 Hurt First, though, she must start the car and leave the Kane grounds. The snow has stopped, the highway clear, and her mind wanders from the road, to her right leg, specifically her right thigh. Down the length of her thigh, faded and concealed by jeans, run a tally of victories—none hers. One for the old home, always so grand and empty, like an abandoned hotel. One is for suburban ennui. Her mother and father share another for rarely taking the time to hug her or play with her when she was little. Her brother gets one for his criticisms and disparagements. Mr. Wilson, her physics teacher, for giving her her first B, and three strikes for her triumvirate of mental illnesses: anxiety, depression, OCD. One for America. One for Iran. One for Derek Malor for taking her virginity at fourteen and then breaking up with her a week later. One for Paul McDonnell, her best friend back in elementary school until, taking a cue from his Republican parents, he began calling her “a piece of shit Iranian.” Spencer Ludles—that victory should have been Marjane’s. As she drives, she remembers how Madison, her best friend, came to high school one day with a black eye. At lunch, Madison confided that she and Spencer, Madison’s boyfriend, were at a party. Spencer got mean-drunk, saw Madison playing beer pong with another guy, and hit her. When Madison finished telling her story, Marjane marched wordlessly out of the cafeteria, found Spencer at his locker, and punched him in the dick. The ramifications of the blow commandeered all of Spencer’s neurological functions, causing his right hand to unclasp his Discman. The Discman would have plummeted to its doom had its headphones not acted as a bungee cord, stopping the Discman an inch above the ground, where it swayed. Salvation, however, was not to be this portable CD player’s fate. Marjane delivered a well-placed stomp with her left foot. She followed this stomp with a series of stomps, her right foot joining her left in the revelry. She left the Discman pulverized while sending shards of Limp Bizkit and Korn into shadowed corners of the school hallway. Spencer Ludles should have been Marjane’s victory. She avoided detention, for although a dozen other students were in that hallway, curiously not one of them saw the five-foot, two- inch Iranian-American best the six-foot, seven-inch football player. Yet, after Madison dropped Marjane off, and Marjane walked up the winding driveway to her Persian Palace on its American hill, she felt nauseated. Maybe it was Madison, crying in the car, asking why Marjane did that. Maybe it was the teenage hormones in Marjane’s brain, like her mother kept saying, and like her mother would also say, Marjane should “suck it up like the rest of us.” Maybe it was the C.I.A. Or the Revolutionary Guard. Maybe it was sliding the key into the lock, punching in the security code, and finding no one home, again. No parents. No brother. Definitely no more nannies for however many years it had been. She was sixteen, too old for them, she knew, but she missed them. First was Jane, who played hide-and-seek with Marjane in the woods behind the house. Then came Fran, who taught her how to tie her shoes. Last was Angela, who taught her the rules to baseball and football. Every nanny had been the subject of so many arguments overheard by little Marjane, who would lie in bed clutching her Snoopy comforter as Papa yelled to Mama that Marjane loved Jane (or Fran or Angela) more than him and Mama, choosing to hug the nanny first if the three adults happened to be in a room together. Nearly every night, Marjane wondered if her real parents would fire the hired one, find a replacement, and start the cycle anew. Whatever the cause of Marjane’s nausea, Spencer Ludles was about to be another notch on her thigh. She limped up the spiral staircase to her bedroom, cued her CD player to full blast,

31 and lay supine on the white carpet. She hadn’t bothered to change out of her school uniform. To her left was her bed, and she reached under the mattress for the green leather sheath. Later, in therapy, the feeling she would have the most trouble moving past was her embarrassment. She would feel embarrassed at having a big house, money, autonomy from her parents—so much that other teenagers envied—and being unable to enjoy it. Embarrassed at knowing what her parents went through yet not appreciating that she grew up spared from such trauma. Embarrassed at listening, every time, to Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral. A cliché of a cliché. She waited until halfway through the album before rolling up her pant leg. She then withdrew the emerald-handled letter opener from its sheath, twirling it like a small baton through her fingers, trimming a few leg hairs here and there. The CD spun past “A Warm Place,” “Eraser,” “Reptile,” and finally the title track. It wasn’t until the last cacophonous chord of the last song that she went to make her incision, and her door opened.

As Marjane drives down I-79 and the neurons in her brain connect to reform these memories, Dr. Hussain Nafisi tosses under his wool sheets at Kane, unable to sleep, the neurons in his brain reforming the other side, starting with a single measurement tumbling in his head along with its many conversions, like balls in a lottery machine. That measurement was twenty-two hours worked. As he jogged across the blue-salted hospital parking lot, briefcase in hand, he converted twenty-two hours worked to zero hours slept, six cups of coffee drank, seven surgeries performed, one Xanax secretly swallowed, and, finally, a lot of money made. He imagined each number reflecting some sort of medicinal world record, some signal of not only his superhuman surgical prowess but also his ability to provide for his wife and two children. At the same time, as he reached his car, he felt as if a scalpel were cleaving his corpus callosum. Upon entering the vehicle, he began rooting through the glovebox, past Radif CDs to The Very Best of the Eagles. Soon the pluck of Glenn Frey’s guitar was threading through Dr. Nafisi’s headache, like sutures stitching up the wound. “Vvveeelll-come to the Hotel California!” he sang in his car, his lips puckered into a comedic “O” as he tried, and failed, to usurp his Iranian accent’s /v/ phoneme with the correct /w/ phoneme. Forty-five minutes later, he was ascending the driveway to his palace on a hill, a palace which he had built with his own money. The palace was quite a long way from the poor mining community outside Shiraz where he grew up. A precocious child, he had taught himself English by reading translations of Superman and Batman comics and listening to imported Sinatra records. As a teenager, he worked as a translator in the office of a British engineer. This engineer also ran the mines where Hussain’s father worked. The engineer took a liking to Hussain and sponsored his attendance at the English-speaking medical school in Shiraz. It was at school that Hussain met and soon married the daughter of a construction CEO. The CEO doubted Hussain could provide the same standard of living that the CEO had provided for his family. But Hussain would prove that he, too, knew concrete. Cyrus, his oldest child, might have had an immigrant’s memories, but Hussain and his wife would have a second child who wouldn’t. Not the Swiss-cheese drywall of a city apartment. Not the jail bars of city school windows. By Marjane’s birth, his and his wife’s American medical residencies were long completed as was their home in Sewickley Heights, a home he financed upon his appointment as chief of surgery in a nearby North Hills hospital.

He entered this home through the garage. His wife was working late at that same hospital, and Cyrus was at Penn State getting his MBA. “Marjane!” he said. A noise like a dozen bonesaws drowned out his call. He could feel one, two sutures pop inside his skull. “Ack, that sound,” he said aloud, shaking his head and hanging his coat in a closet. He remembered when his daughter was younger, and they used to sing Eagles songs together while he made tea in the mornings. She would try to correct his pronunciation, and they both would laugh. When she turned thirteen, she began closing things. She closed the gate to the backyard and to the woods where she used to play hide-and-seek. She closed the back door, the front door, the garage door. With a thud, she dropped the piano’s fall board over its keys, ending seven years of lessons. She began quarantining herself from whole rooms, starting with the one he converted into a dance studio for her sixth birthday, ending eleven years of dance lessons. She slammed the door on two other birthday presents: the furnished basement with its big screen TV and surround sound, and the playroom with its ping-pong table. Her parents’ room she kept closed, though he would realize later they were never there much anyway. All her dresser drawers stayed shut except the one containing the black shirts and pants she wore when not in her school uniform. Lastly, she sealed her bedroom door with her inside. From this door, the music decrescendoed, and if it had simply faded out, Hussain and Marjane would have been spared. But then came one final dissonant synth crackle. All of Hussain’s sutures unraveled. He stormed up the staircase, taking two stairs at a time, ready to unplug her CD player. As he went to open the bedroom door, he noticed a slight twitch in his right pinky finger. He diagnosed agitation or sleep-deprivation. For a few seconds, the room was silent upon him entering. Then the CD player skipped back to track one, and “Mr. Self Destruct” began to play.

Marjane takes the exit and merges onto the road that leads to the McMansion. She passes a Starbucks. A part of her could use something sweet—a caramel macchiato to forget—but that part is too distracted by what comes next: The door clicked. Marjane looked up from her thigh. She and Papa began shouting, neither hearing each other over the sawing guitar and clanging drums. Before she could scramble from the carpet, he strode to her and tried to wrestle away the letter-opener. She held on but nicked his left palm. They both lost awareness of each other as they watched a drop of blood leave his hand, fly through the air, and dye the white carpet. She focused before he did. As she scampered out of the room, she heard him trip over her CD player. He picked himself up and then brought his foot repeatedly down onto the CD player until it stopped spinning, until it would never spin again. She felt as if she was watching the destruction of a close friend. Her heart skipped a beat for what she had done to Spencer’s own device. He limped after her, but she was already downstairs. His car keys glimmered from their hook in the foyer. As she closed the door to the garage, she overheard him saying “sorry” in two different languages. She drove through the suburbs for a while, not sure what to do, and then a Sewickley cop, sirens wailing, caught sight of the vehicle as she sped on I-79 south toward the city. She pulled over.

The cop waited with her in her father’s car on the shoulder, the blue lights of his cruiser flashing in the rearview mirror. He introduced himself as Doug and offered her some Milanos from a Ziploc bag. Melted chocolate smeared the plastic. “No, thanks,” she said. “No. Here. Take one. In fact, take the whole bag!” She quietly did so. He didn’t talk the rest of the time except to express his appreciation for Pennsylvania’s hills. He wished the leaves hadn’t already fallen. A few minutes later, another cruiser pulled up behind Doug’s car. Out walked an officer and Papa. Doug got out, and she watched the trio in the mirror as they stood in a circle talking. Soon both officers got in their respective vehicles, cut their lights, and, when an opening in traffic allowed them, cut over the rumble strip and sped away. Seriously? Marjane thought. Not even a ticket. She really was a cliché of a cliché. Just another suburban rich girl causing drama. The police probably saw it all the time and dismissed it as much. Not worth the paperwork. Let her parents deal with it. Her father loitered in the mirror, waiting until the cops were gone before removing his brick of a cell phone from his peacoat. He spoke briefly, ended his call, and then walked toward his car. He opened the door, and she slid over. “Buckle up,” he said. Then they, too, rumbled off the shoulder. Neither commented on the bandage, like a gymnast’s, wrapped around his hand. When they passed the exit and kept going south, she asked where they were going. “To Western Psych.” “Oh, come on,” she said, turning from the windshield to his profile. “I’m not suicidal.” “But weren’t you trying to?” “There are other reasons.” He fumbled for the volume knob. “Take It Easy” began to play. Now she wanted to kill herself. Eight songs later, father and daughter arrived at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, a tall beige building near the top of Heartattack Hill, a hill named either for its steepness or for the hospitals clustered at its plateau, Marjane wasn’t sure. If it weren’t for Doug’s Milanos, she might have tried fleeing the car while they were stuck in traffic, but she had no cash on her and, more so, she was tired of being the lead actor in the day’s events, so, fuck it, she thought and sat back and munched. Before they entered the building, she looked behind her at University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning. A Gothic tower of glowing limestone, the cathedral reminded her that in less than two years she would be in college. Free. A security guard ushered them through metal detectors and into an elevator. As it rose to the eighth floor, her mind wandered to Jacquelin Reeser, who freshman year tried to commit suicide by drinking acrylic paint. The EMTs pumped her stomach, and she awoke in the nuthouse. They took everything from her, she told Marjane and the rest of their lunch table a week later. “My shoes. My clothes. My chapstick.” “WHAT?” Marjane had said, getting it was all preventative, but that they would take her chapstick, that they would take this one comfort from someone who needed comfort … If they tried that on her, she was fighting, she decided.

She expected the doors to open to one-way mirrors surveying gowned patients in rooms that were empty save a floor drain. Instead, a row of wooden office doors tessellated down a hallway. Her father opened one, FLO CAROLANE, PhD/MD stenciled on the glass. “Dr. Nafisi?” said the receptionist, a pixie-cut woman who couldn’t have been much older than Marjane. “Yes.” “Great,” Pixie-Cut said. “She is ready whenever you are.” “Good. Thank you, again, for taking us last minute. Marjane joon,” he sat and pulled a Reader’s Digest from a nearby table, “I will wait here.” Marjane intuited she was supposed to go through the door behind the receptionist. A plump woman with blond hair, flower emblazoned blouse, blue jeans, and cowboy boots turned round in her swivel chair. “Hi. Is it Marjane?” She spoke in a Texan drawl. “Jzohn.” “Sorry. Marjane. I’m Dr. Carolane. But you can call me Flo.” Flo extended a hand, which Marjane shook limply, not hard enough to rattle the many beads around Flo’s wrist. “Have a seat.” Flo motioned to the green leather couch against the wall. Between Flo and Marjane was a vinyl coffee table. On it, the requisite Kleenex box, a white tissue half drawn, ready to wave surrender. A corner desk littered with papers stood behind Flo. A few photographs of eagles and peacocks hung from the light blue walls. Flo leaned forward and propped her chin with her fist. “Your father—did your father tell you we did residency together? Your mother, too.” “Nope,” Marjane said. “Didn’t mention that.” “He called and sounded very worried about you. He was worried you were trying to—.” “I wasn’t.” “Then why did he think—” “How about this?” Marjane leaned on the couch, arms folded. “How about I sit here, don’t answer you, and then in a year and four months, I’ll be eighteen, and we can just forget this whole thing ever happened?” “Ok.” They sat. Marjane heard footsteps echo above them. She ran her tongue over her teeth, first the top row, then the bottom, suddenly wanting nothing more than to brush, floss, Listerine. She could sense the microscopic buildup of plaque from the chocolate. She breathed through her nose, for she imagined each oral exhalation was a green-and-yellow-colored cloud, like in the cartoons when a character eats something rotten. “All right, let’s get this over with,” Marjane said finally. She planted her right foot onto the table, quaking the Kleenex box a few inches across the top. She rolled up her pant leg. Flo inspected. “You didn’t today?” Marjane shook her head. “He came in before.” “How many times? Total.” Marjane pulled in her leg, embracing it. “I don’t know. More than ten? Less than fifteen?” “But you haven’t thought of suicide?” “No, not once.” “Can you tell me why then? Why you do this?”

She thought. An hour ago, she had sped to the city. No destination in mind; only the urge to escape Sewickley. She could have easily hopped over the ditch and into oncoming traffic. Or into a guardrail down a hillside. Especially when the cop flashed his lights and wailed his siren. But she hadn’t. Hadn’t thought of it, even. Just pulled over. If she had behaved otherwise, there was no knowing the outcome: disfigurement, coma, death? What would her obituary say? She never liked the idea of someone else writing your life story. She could have emerged from the wreckage a quadriplegic. That would have been her luck. But with the letter opener, she measured the harm. With the letter opener, she was the one causing the pain, not Spencer Ludles nor her teachers nor her parents nor her mind nor American subterfuge nor Iranian spite. She remembered her boyfriend, again, a Mr. Trent Reznor. I’d rather die than give you— “Control,” she said.

Broca is bounding toward Marjane, nails threatening to rip the fibers from the runner, collar jingling with each gallop, awrf, awrf, awrf. “Ok, ok, ok, I’m happy to see you!” she says in the voice she reserves specifically for her dog, a kind of high-pitched coo. “Marjane joon, how was Papa?” her mother says from the living area. “Uh, ok, here, let me walk Broca first, k? How are you feeling?” “Much better. My nausea is gone.” Then Mama unmutes Law & Order as Marjane grabs Broca’s balled up leash from the floor. Marjane clips Broca, and they bound into the cold. He raises a leg by the front shrubs, and then she lets him frolic in the front yard, lets him toss snow in the air with his snout. It’s the first she’s smiled all day. “Come on; let’s go!” and she runs in place, her tennis shoes resounding off the driveway cement. Broca gets the message and hops out of the lawn, and they begin their stroll around the lit cul-de-sac. The development is nearly complete, just a few skeletal houses at the end, plastic tarps flapping in the cool breeze, the carpenters’ progress halted with winter’s onset. As they walk, her mind wanders back to Flo. Marjane, though she had liked the idea of talking to a neutral party, resisted seeing Flo again, for the very reason that Flo wasn’t a neutral party. She was her parents’ friend. An ally of theirs, her office behind enemy lines. Papa insisted, so every Thursday she went. Not to Western Psych, that’s where Flo worked part-time. The other part Flo practiced out of a loft, similarly adorned with avian photography. The loft was above a patisserie in Upper Saint Clair, the South Hills’ reflection of Sewickley. Papa took Marjane to every appointment. At the second and third sessions, Marjane gave only monosyllabic answers. She no longer cut—her father had desecrated the ritual by inspecting her legs every evening. At session four, Marjane complained she wanted to see the Smashing Pumpkins at Three Rivers Stadium, but her parents would never allow her to go. Flo surprised Marjane by calling in Papa. Flo then prescribed the concert as if it were the Prozac she also dispensed. “Your daughter needs at least one experience like this a month to exorcise herself of some of the rage she’s been feeling,” Flo said. He acquiesced. That was the turning point. The first in a series of diplomatic negotiations that awarded to Marjane other parental concessions, like staggered hospital shifts so someone would be home more often, and, two years later, for

36 these appointments went on through college, permission to live on Pitt’s campus as opposed to commuting. True, Marjane awarded her own concessions, like realizing all the good her parents did (or at least thought they were doing) for their daughter. Marjane also conceded they had gone through some truly awful shit back in Iran. Marjane learned to see Flo not as an ally but as a double agent, whose allegiances leaned more toward the doctors’ daughter … When Marjane and Broca reenter the McMansion, Marjane’s thinking of giving Flo a call though it hits her that, like her parents, Flo’s definitely retired, potentially in a place like Kane Gardens if her health has similarly deteriorated. In the foyer, Marjane unleashes Broca, who races upstairs. She advances to the living area, where her mother lies on the couch, tucked under a blanket. The TV is off, and Marjane thinks Mama is sleeping, but Mama’s eyelids spring open as Marjane lights upon the first step to go upstairs and feed Broca. “So Papa was ok?” Mama asks. Marjane lets her fingers linger on the wooden banister as she steps back down, returning to her mother’s level. “Not good.” She sits opposite her mother on the stem of the couch. “He won’t play his games. When I tried encouraging him, he hit me.” “Oh, Marjane joon,” Mama says, sitting up, sliding over to her daughter. “I’m sorry. Here. Let me see.” Maternal acts of affection, rare as a child, random as an adult: a hug at the door when Marjane visited between semesters, an “I love you” whispered over cellular waves across more than 2,000 miles of Earth, and now these hands, fingers gently massaging Marjane’s tensed facial skin. Marjane wraps her own hands around her mother’s wrists and slowly pulls her mother’s hands away. “He didn’t scratch or anything,” Marjane says. “Did he get to bed all right?” “Also not good, no. He was pretty agitated about something, but I couldn’t understand him. He was really thrashing when the nurses and I put him to bed.” Then, out of her mouth before formulated in her mind, “What did he say to you after he found me cutting?” “Cutting?” Marjane plants her right foot onto the coffee table, rattling a tissue box. She manages a single fold of her pant leg before her mother puts a hand over her ankle. “Oh.” Marjane feels guilty, interrogating the suspect while the suspect is enervated, but, still, she presses, “What did he say to you that night after he found out? About me?” Mama inspects a button in the couch cushion. She runs her fingers over the button’s ivory and, addressing it, begins, “I remember what he said when we were in bed that night. He said, ‘I feel like Marjane joon is … rejecting us.’” “What do you, did he, mean?” Marjane asks. “That’s what I said. And he listed all these things. How you didn’t take piano or dance lessons anymore. How you never played in the rooms he had built for you. Remember, Marjane, you used to spend so much time in your room as a teenager?” Marjane nodded. “And then he started saying things, like, ‘rejection of intent,’ you know, repurposing the letter opener we’d bought you. And rejecting the body and mind we had given you. You are so smart.”

Marjane says thank you. She wants to ask more, but she has sorted through enough the past few days, literally. On Sunday, when Joey left for home and her family went to sleep, Marjane sifted through the trash. She then disinfected the perfume bottles and picture frame with isopropyl alcohol and washed her mother’s blouses and comforter. Mama still hasn’t brought up the episode, but she had to have noticed the missing comforter, at least, when she went to bed that night. Marjane now busses her mother on the lips and retreats upstairs. She feeds Broca, showers, and then lies in bed, her dog beside her in the dark. The finality of her father’s illness hits her, again. She and Papa never really talked about what happened that day in her bedroom so many years ago, and now they never would. So what does that leave her? Appreciation, again, everything that her parents did for her even if it was sometimes misguided. It’s like bleeding from a rock, though, she’s been drawing on appreciation for over a decade. How much longer can it sustain her? Her phone rings. Joey. She thinks again of when she visited the café where he works. His coworker, some kid with a red cap, had a name for him. Shoddy. She barely caught it. “Shoddy, man the cash register for a minute, dude.” From the back of the line, she looked around for a third employee but couldn’t find one. She forgot to ask Joey about where his nickname came from. She texts Joey back and checks her bedside clock. 10:37, a little over an hour until Christmas Eve, and her last thought before she falls asleep is not the realization that she has less than twenty-four hours to buy gifts but the larger question of for whom she should purchase them.

7 A Very Nafisi Christmas On the first Christmas after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini took power, many of Pittsburgh’s Iranian diaspora would have found themselves with a day off and nothing to celebrate had not Hussain and Laleh Nafisi invited their friends to their apartment for dinner. A total of four couples gathered that evening in the drafty, cramped quarters. To eat, to forget, to decorate a Charlie Brown Christmas tree that Laleh had salvaged from a clearance sale in a nearby parking lot. By the time Marjane was born, the tradition was going strong, larger even than these families’ Nowruz and Yalda celebrations. The Nafisis’ newly constructed palace provided ample room for the ever-growing party. The holiday was one of two times a year both her parents finagled simultaneous time off work. (The other time was their week-long annual vacation to Boca Raton.) If they had a nanny that year, the nanny got the day off too. While the adults made small talk in the parlor, the children would play ping-pong in the playroom or watch movies in the furnished basement. By the time Marjane was born, most of the children, like Cyrus, were well into their teens, a fact which explains why she saw Die Hard when she was four and why she, from a hiding spot behind a sofa, witnessed Cyrus kiss the Farrokhzads’ daughter in a game of spin the bottle. None of the children ever received gifts during this annual party, though Marjane and Cyrus both remember opening one or two presents from Santa every Christmas morning. Their parents would exchange single gifts, like cufflinks and a necklace. And every Nafisi got a stocking stuffed with goodies. The Christmas tree evolved from that initial patchwork of needles and branches, which Marjane knows through photos, into a wide artificial one, hung with garish white bulbs. Every year, she protested the fake tree in favor of a real one with rainbow bulbs, but to no avail. The food amounted to an American-Iranian fusion. Turkey, saffron rice and raisins, mashed potatoes, āsh. Ditto the music, which alternated between Radif and the Rat Pack belting holiday standards. Christmas was also the one day Papa ever drank. Never a lot. At most, two glasses of arak on the rocks. And at a certain point during the party, closer to midnight, the alcohol would sit just right, the families would apply the necessary level of coaxing—enough to persuade but not to exasperate—and he would sing. Though it happened every year, and the children would be called from wherever they were, Sinatra temporarily muted, each occasion coalesces into one memory: Marjane sitting on the carpet with the other children. The parents forming a kind of circle around her father as he stands on the stairs. Papa raising his glass while singing melodies in Farsi both fragile and bold. A single song, at most two minutes long. Andante. Crescendo, decrescendo, crescendo. Applause. Then the children would return to their board games or movies, and the adults would reform into circles of three and four to chat and eat shirini-e nokhodchi from small white china plates. If asked to recall a line today, Marjane couldn’t sing a word, let alone hum a melody, and she kicks herself that nobody bothering to videotape even once. She remembers that the song had something to do with Mount Derak, which she later learned overlooks Shiraz. She also never found out where he learned to sing like that, though she asked him once as he carried her to bed. “Oh, like I’m even any good,” he said, staring ahead, his feet cautiously feeling their way up the steps. And then she must have fallen asleep.

*** This Christmas is a much smaller affair. All of the Nafisis’ friends have retired to Los Angeles. The Farrokhzads are visiting their daughter in Chapel Hill, where she and her husband are expecting their first child. There’s the same artificial tree and the same Iranian/American-fusion. The family will exchange gifts after dinner this year. Bing Crosby and not the Rat Pack croons “White Christmas.” The Access Van dropped Papa off at four. It will return in three hours to pick him up. Mama will ride with him, and the children will follow in Mama’s car. Then all three will help put him to bed. Marjane tucks her phone under her left ear as she lifts a basket of powdered rolls. “Joey, I’m sorry—” “You promised you would come over. Meet my family like I’ve met yours.” “—but I had to buy gifts yesterday, and Cyrus and I got the new tire for my car, and I was exhausted today—” “So you slept in.” “I don’t know if it’s ‘sleeping in’ when I was up past midnight wrapping—” From the iPod dock: I’m dreaming … of a white Christmas. “Joey, I—” “‘Sleeping is giving in,’” Joey says. From the dining area, Cyrus says, “Hey, hey! Papa’s singing!” “What does that even mean?!” Marjane asks. “I dunno,” Joey says. “It’s from a song. Listen, my parents were expecting you.” “ … with … every Christmas card … I write … ” (Papa now.) “Oh, Hussain,” Mama says. “Marjane joon, come here, quick!” “And maybe if you can’t keep promises,” Joey says. “I mean, you have a lot going on.” “Hey, Marjane, why don’t you film this with your phone?” Cyrus asks. “I can’t. I’m on it. Use yours?” “It’s dead.” “ … May your days be merry … ” Joey’s still going on: “And what? We’re gonna exchange gifts on Boxing Day?” “Come on, Marjane,” Cyrus says. “Tell ‘em you’ll call ‘em back.” “I gotta go,” Marjane says.

8 Ameliorations Marjane could have easily viewed her father’s Christmas performance as another abandonment. His voice leaving him, the words weak. But what if it were bestowal? His final notes before they gave out. If she hadn’t hung up on Joey and pressed “record,” then she would have been the abandoner. She already was. Is. She needs to get out of her relationship. The day after Christmas she texts Joey, apologizing for yesterday. She asks him to meet her at the North Side Library before his noon shift. “Sure,” he texts back, not questioning the setting. The library is up the street from where he works, so perhaps he thinks she’s set up a rendezvous convenient for him when really it is neutral territory—a dusty corner sequestered by shelves becomes a spot that is private enough to express volatile feelings, public enough to dissuade vocal escalation. Before departure, she applies light mascara and a thin coat of ruby lipstick. Later, while checking her rearview mirror before taking the North Side exit, she will realize she is wearing makeup for the first time in months. They meet in the library lobby, and Marjane leads him to the private corner she envisioned. As they walk, she asks about his Christmas, how it was, who was at dinner. He asks how hers was. “Good. Good. Pretty ordinary, though. Just dinner, gifts, and then we took Papa back to Kane, tucked him in good, you know?” They reach the corner, and there’s no chairs, so Marjane sits on the tiled floor, Joey following, though he raises an eyebrow as he sits. Then he insists on giving her his gift first. From the inside of his leather jacket, he removes a one-hundred-dollar gift certificate to Sewickley Spa. “I’m sorry, too, about our tiff over the phone,” he says. “Thanks.” She suspends the golden envelope by applying pressure to diagonal corners with her index fingers, thumbing it with her left thumb so that it will spin, like it’s something foreign that she’s not sure what else to do with. She hears the faint click of an analog clock. “You didn’t get me anything, did you?” Joey asks. She continues to twirl the envelope but also shakes her head. “And you’re breaking up with me, aren’t you? Before I start work.” “Shit, I didn’t think—” “Right, because when was the last time you had a job.” He looks away from her and inspects the musty spines of the books to his right—volumes about risk management and organizational communications. He gazes back at her. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I knew you weren’t ready.” “I know. I’m sorry. Here.” She snaps the envelope into her left hand and holds it out to him, but he pushes it back to her. “Bought you a gift certificate for Christmas … ” Joey says. “That was pretty lame of me.” “What? No. It’s good, but have it back, maybe your mom … ” “No no no. Keep it.” He rises and extends a hand to help her up. “Give Broca a good petting for me, ok,” he says.

“I will.” Their embrace is cut short as a stooped librarian pushes past them, her arms full of hardbacks. Separated now, Marjane looks from the passing librarian back to Joey. “Our book club!” “Unit,” Joey says. “Whatever. But we never finished One Hundred Years of Solitude.” “Eh. A little too long … ” “More like Two Hundred Years of Solitude.” His smile is one of compassion, no teeth, as he roams among the stacks, looking for something new.

Cyrus stays through the old year. He holds a national gym membership to L.A. Fitness, and every morning, he wakes before Marjane and Mama to drive his rent-a-car, a red Chevy Impala, to the nearest franchise. He then drives home, showers, and meets Mama for lunch at Kane before following her home around 2 p.m. While she naps, he works from the guest room on his laptop and then they return to Kane for the evening. Sometimes they prepare dinner together; other times, they eat with Papa. The afternoon after her break-up, Marjane stays in her room, leaving only to walk Broca. She has a private bathroom and isn’t hungry, so her own gastrointestinal needs are taken care of. While lying in bed, she thumbs García Márquez but often wanders from the Buendía family. She reproaches herself for abandoning another day at Kane. Just one more, she tells herself. One day at a time. First the break-up, then … It’ll be fine. Fine fine fine fine fine fine fine finefinefine. In the evening, she passes Cyrus and Mama at the front door as they return from Kane. All three exchange “hellos.” As Marjane later shivers while idling on the salted driveway, under the stars, waiting for her dog to lift his leg, she imagines the interrogative statements that will surely greet her upon reentering: Why didn’t you come out again today? You’re not just going to visit Papa on Christmas, are you? When she does reenter, Cyrus and Mama have retired to bed. The next time Marjane sees her brother is in the basement exercise room at Kane. Two nurses have helped Papa onto a sort of horizontal elliptical, where he can sit back and swing his legs while gripping two alternating handlebars. Cyrus betrays no surprise at seeing Marjane, who rode there that morning with their mother. He merely lifts his palm in a half-wave as he trots across the room and then kneels by his father’s side. Mama and Marjane sit on green exercise balls behind them. Father and son’s juxtaposed heads are like an infomercial’s time-lapse for male-pattern baldness, Cyrus’s hairline thinning from the middle of his scalp in a sort of monk’s tonsure, Papa’s hair completely gone except a fringe around his scalp and over his ears. “You ready?” Cyrus asks. Two sandwiches of son’s hand, father’s hand, handlebar. Then together they get the elliptical swinging while Papa’s tilted head oscillates underneath the fluorescent lighting in a way that makes Marjane think, no, he’s not really here until there’s a two-second power outage. She hears her father say clearly, in English, “Black out?” and when the lights come back on, she exhales because her father at least begins to watch his swinging legs and nod at Cyrus’s whispered encouragements of “That’s it” and “You’ve got it.” Carol took off work December 23, New Year’s, and the days in between to holiday in the Dominican Republic. For the next four days, Cyrus runs exercise and then playtime. His mother either cheers or solves crossword puzzles, and his sister either cheers or fortifies herself, though occasionally a game of catch opens up from a binary to a triad. Little is said by the family during these times except those words of encouragement directed at Papa, and during meals, whether at

42 home or at Kane, the conversation among the family pertains to anything but the family. Mama updates her children on the activities of other Iranian families who either lived or used to live in Pittsburgh. In between visiting time, Marjane does what she can off screen, resuming runs to the grocery store and mall. On New Year’s Eve, Kane holds a little party in the dining area. Residents wear conical hats and sit with their families. Balloons with “Auld Lang Syne” emblazoned on them are tied to every person’s chair. Some folks watch ABC’s Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. The flat screen hangs from the wall opposite the fireplace. There’s the occasional premature toot of a horn or crank of a noisemaker. Burning wood mingles with a lingering sauerkraut smell. It’s eight o’clock now and by nine, nearly all the residents will have been wheeled or walked to bed. Below the flatscreen, the staff has set up a long buffet table of desserts atop a purple tablecloth. While in line, Marjane finds herself alone with her brother for the first time since his visit began. Her right shoulder brushes his left arm. “I’m sorry I acted all crazy last week,” she says, reaching for a slice of glazed pretzel to place onto her paper plate. “Oh. It’s cool,” Cyrus says, scooping some roasted chestnuts. “I’m sorry I moved your things.” They slide toward the champagne. “How come you’re not spending New Year’s Eve with your boyfriend?” Cyrus asks. “We broke up. I broke up with him.” Cyrus pours himself a glass, then, “I’m sorry to hear that.” Her face grows hot. She silently adds chestnuts to her plate. He is about to return to their table on the other side of the dining area when she asks, “Cyrus?” He whirls back around. “Yeah?” “Before you leave, can you tell Mama that she needs to let me help now that you’re leaving? With Papa.” He pops a chestnut into his mouth and begins to chew it, slowly, with the left side of his jaw. “You gonna keep sticking around to help?” “Yeah. Yeah, I will.” “Then sure.” “Thank you.” And she turns back to the buffet table for her beverage. New Year’s Day Mama cooks them eggs and salmon on bagels before she and Marjane see Cyrus off. Hugs in the foyer, plus waves from the ajar front door as Cyrus backs out of the driveway, beeps his horn twice, and then drives down their street toward the airport. After Marjane walks Broca, she and Mama go to Kane. The attendants have already fed him breakfast, and he waits for his family in the common area, watching Animal Planet with some of the other residents. “Happy New Year!” Marjane says, kneeling beside him and kissing him on the cheek. “ … Nowruz?” he asks. “No, Hussain,” Mama laughs. “Not Nowruz. Not for a few more months. Then it’ll be our New Year. How about some exercise?” He watches two dolphins swim through the sapphire deep before nodding. “Ook.” Mother and daughter wheel him to the elevator and then they go downstairs, where they get two attendants to move him onto the horizontal elliptical. The attendants leave, and there’s a moment where neither Marjane or Mama moves. Marjane wonders if Cyrus talked to their mother.

Mama leans on a pink exercise ball. Marjane steps forward and crouches to her father’s left, like Cyrus did. She waits for her mother to say something, but Mama doesn’t and, resisting the urge to turn around, Marjane attempts the same hand-sandwiches her brother also did, but every time she gets her father toward a groove, his hands break free from under hers and flutter in front of him like mad sparrows. Marjane catches his hands in her own and guides them back to the handlebars, but they break free again. “Come on, Papa, I got you.” After a third attempt, Mama comes over and places a hand on Marjane’s shoulder. “Hmmm. We got started late today, with Cyrus leaving. Maybe your father’s hungry.” So the attendants get him off the elliptical and back into his wheelchair, and they go to the dining hall. Mama feeds him a turkey sandwich while Marjane has a bowl of vegetable soup. As Mama is feeding him, Marjane notices his eyes droop. “They shouldn’t have that party,” Marjane says. “Agreed,” says Mama. “They don’t need parties. They need rest.” He has an earlier naptime. The women go home and also nap. They return for dinner and afterwards, Marjane tries some games with him. The trio are in his bedroom now, Mama sitting cross-legged on his bed, solving a crossword. Marjane has grabbed a chair from outside and sits across from her father, flashing card after card. Numbers, again. “Ok, Papa, I’ll start. One. Two … ” Clearly, with feeling, he asks, “Where’s Carol?” The words push Marjane into her seat. It’s the clearest she’s heard her father speak since his choral performance on Christmas. It’s clearer than that, even. “Well. Carol has off today, so we’re gonna play.” She connects and then parts the sides of her hands in a rainbow in front of his face. “So. What comes next?” He stares. She pulls the 3 card but faces it away from him. “What comes next?” He raises his hand. She flinches. “Oooook. How about catch? Want to try that?” She stands and retrieves a green Nerf ball from his closet. But, like on Thanksgiving, the passes ricochet off him and onto the ground. “Marjane, what are you doing, playing dodgeball?” Her mother hops off the bed. “Here, Hussain joon.” Mama scoops the ball off of the floor and underhands it to him. He catches it, and back and forth it goes, Marjane slowly retreating to the spot her mother occupied on the bed. Marjane buries her disappointment in her mother’s crossword puzzle, and after twenty minutes, she gazes at the bedside clock. “Mama, isn’t it time to brush his teeth?” “Oh. Yes. You’re right.” And they stop.

Following New Year’s, Marjane and Mama have less chances to interact with Papa because Carol is back, and Carol is the one trained to put him through speech exercises. Mornings, Marjane pushes aside the invisible lead aprons that still weigh her down upon awakening. She rides with Mama to Kane and starts to get a feel for what Mama’s days are like—boring. It’s boring to watch Carol point to a scaled chart of a cross-section of the human body and wait upward of a minute for Papa to give a response. And it’s also worrying. Organs he once held in his gloved hands he now identifies slowly. One day, when the worry becomes too much, Marjane asks to try.

“Sure!” Carol says. “I need to run to the ladies’ room anyway.” With Marjane, though, it’s worse. Papa loses all affect, and his lips frown. The whole time Marjane points to brain, heart, stomach, he stares past her, eyes searching. That’s when Marjane remembers her mother’s comment the first time the family met Carol, how Carol could be Marjane’s younger sister. Carol isn’t Iranian. Croatian and Dark Irish? Something like that. The mix endows Carol with an olive complexion and hair color, oval face, and prominent nose, all features which Marjane mirrors. “Here. You try again,” Marjane says when Carol returns. “Was he not responsive to you?” “Not in the slightest. Less than when you were here, in fact.” “I’m sorry.” Marjane and Carol stand beside each other, contemplating Papa, Dr. Hussain Nafisi, former chief of surgery. Marjane remembers all of the times she chose the nannies over her parents and wonders for a second if her father’s reticence is him getting back at her. She winces at the selfishness of the thought. Papa, whose life is now governed by routine, has simply become more accustomed to Carol and Mama than he has to anyone else, and Marjane has only herself to blame. Or, worse, he’s declining even faster now. Neither thoughts are reassuring, and she tries to push out of her head the relative ease with which Cyrus was able to interact with their father just a few days ago. “How was your vacation?” Marjane asks. “Oh, wonderful,” Carol says. “My boyfriend proposed to me.” “Congrats.”

After a week of this, it becomes too much, and Marjane tells her mother at breakfast she won’t be coming today. Mama says “ok” in the tone of someone who is not ok, with that skeptical lilt to it, but Mama wraps her scarf around her neck and exits through the garage door. Marjane gets dressed, walks Broca. A mile-long walk in single digit temperatures, which leaves Broca scampering for the couch and Marjane with a face she imagines will crack and splinter like the oak trees bordering their complex. She paces the first floor. Opens the refrigerator, closes it. Begins to walk away, turns back, opens it again, removes a plastic container of strawberries. Eats three of them, leaving the green stems on the butcher-block island. Replaces the container back in the refrigerator. What can she do? She restocked the groceries yesterday. She could clean the house— positive procrastination, hahahah—but Janice swung by after Cyrus left, and the house is still clean. Marjane goes to her bedroom and flicks open her laptop. She’ll clean her inbox. Over sixty unread messages, most of them Groupons. Then she gets to the last email from Doc. Her cursor hovers over it. She clicks. Marjane, Call me whenever you are ready. -“Doc” Marjane exhales and removes her phone. She knows she is only abandoning one anxiety for another, but saved contacts make for less deliberation—no chance to change her mind between the pressing of seven to ten digits. She’s upright now, on the edge of her bed, heels bouncing off the mattress frame.

He answers. He does not question where she has been or why she is calling him at 6:30 a.m. his time. In his salubrious baritone, a voice she almost forgot, he cuts right to how her family is doing and how is she doing, and once these inquiries are out of the way, Marjane asks if it is too late. “No. Of course not. You defend in late May, yes?” “Yes. But the committee—” “Consider it taken care of. Sicilians always take care of things.”

She attempts to make up in a week what she has put off for months. Her bedroom transforms into a grad student’s cave. Empty Monster Energy drink cans litter the floor. She finds a folding table in the basement. Soon, unpacked books, notes, and drafts of her dissertation cover the table’s surface. Three chapters are done, which really means two chapters are done. The third is more what a neuroscience dissertation chapter would look like if it were written by Gertrude Stein. On day seven, while pacing her bedroom, an open textbook to her face, she slips on one of the cans onto the hardwood floor. Cursing, she crawls to her bed and inspects her hip. Already, a bruise is forming, and she divines from its Rorschachian blot of yellow and blue a message—TRY AGAIN. She looks first at her bedside clock—1:22 a.m.—then out her darkened window, snowflakes illuminated by the streetlights like dust from a sunbeam. If she works for another hour tonight, plus another four hours a day for the next two to three days, she might condense that third chapter to a solid twenty pages. Then: Four chapters left. Four months left. A chapter a month. Twenty to thirty pages a chapter. A page a day. OK. Doable. In fact, realistic, considering that each page requires typically the meticulous rereading of two to three outside sources, and— Fuck. She forgot the introduction. Another twenty pages, at least. So, what’s that now? (1.3 pages a day + the 8-10 hours Papa is awake – meals + time for Broca + time to help Mama … ) She moans, pressed upon by the arithmetic of trying to whittle a thirty-two-hour day into the usual twenty-four.

Skimping on sleep. That’s how she’ll do it as she does the next morning, five hours of shut-eye logged, mind racing at the speed of light from the caffeine in the cups of tea she gulps at home—fifteen solid pages, sixteen really, four more to go, her planted body reeling with the inertia of her consciousness’s tug as she waits in her father’s room while her mother pulls a sweater over his squirming torso. “Other hole, Hussain. No. No. There.” The nurses already had him half-dressed and in his wheelchair when Marjane and Mama arrived. His head emerges, and he mumbles something. He’s been losing his English for some weeks now, and Mama often has to translate his discomforts or questions to Carol or the rest of Kane’s staff.

“What, Hussain?” Mama kneels closer to him. “Speak up. I can’t.” She nearly has her ear pressed against his lips, but she shakes her head. “Marjane, see if you can figure out what he wants.” Marjane snaps forward, body pushing aside her mind’s worries. She also kneels beside him and listens, his words soft and garrulous, like a trickling faucet, and, wait, that’s it. “He wants a glass of water,” she says.

Papa is still most comfortable playing games with Carol and Mama, but Marjane stands on guard, ready to translate. Papa’s requests and complaints aren’t getting louder and so mumbled and soft are they that her mother often cannot hear them. It’s a small purpose, yes, but enough to get Marjane out of bed most mornings even though she is averaging six hours of sleep per night. One night, she closes her books, closes Google Docs, closes her research. She is having a “behind week,” as in seven pages behind her target goal for February, yet she begins Googling images. The clock first. A reprint of the one that hangs downstairs. Same numbers painted on big white blocks and arranged horizontally into a road median. Same flowers manicured around them. Same buses and mopeds at the three and nine, forever frozen in black and white midway to their destinations. Second, Pahlavi University’s medical school. Third, Persepolis. Fourth, Mount Derak. And so on. She copies and pastes twenty images into a Word document, one image per page, and clicks print. She finds an unused black binder and a hole puncher in one of her moving boxes and begins working. The task takes time from her dissertation, from sleep, but she doesn’t have a night to waste. Broca snores on her bed.

The next morning, before they depart for Kane, Marjane shows what she made. Mama hates it. “You’ll upset him if you show him those pictures,” Mama says, grabbing her coat and purse from the closet. Marjane stomps her foot. The dog, from the living area, barks. “Sorry, Broca,” Marjane calls back. Then, to her mother, she says, “Why? I’m sick of this ‘in the past.’ Why is it any mention of Iran, you act as if you’re suddenly amnesic? And that tape player, too, I had to dig through the trash … ” “It’s not like it was yours.” “AGH. But it is my father’s. Look, I—don’t you dare leave!” Her mother draws her hand from the doorknob as quickly as if there were flames on the other side of the door. “Mama, I know I just asked why, but I know. I know it’s because the pictures are painful. They remind you of what you lost. But, you don’t know, maybe Papa’s forgotten the bad parts? Maybe all he remembers are the good memories, and to deny him that, to make him forget before he does, wouldn’t that be like abandoning him?” Mama turns to face Marjane. “Besides,” Marjane continues while walking toward the wall, “there has to be a part of you, of you both, that’s forgotten the bad parts already. Why else would you have kept this picture from house to house?”

At the last second, Marjane pivots from Mama and traces a finger on the framed photograph of the clock in Shiraz. “Our first apartment,” Mama finally says. “You can’t see it, but it’s just outside the frame, to your right. We had furniture—an armoire my parents gave me. And vinyl records. And photo albums. As the Revolution was happening, your grandfather called. He said there had been a fire.” You would never have survived the Revolution. We lost everything. Marjane asks, “But you kept it?” “Your father kept it.” Mama opens the door to the garage. “Then maybe he’ll want to see more.” Mama shakes her head and then snatches the photo, dashing into the garage. “Oh, come on,” Marjane says, following her. Mama stands by the opened trash barrel, the overhead light reflecting the teardrops beading onto the frame. “Mama joon,” Marjane says, walking to her mother’s side. “I wanted to throw it away,” Mama says. “Years ago. And, again, when we moved here.” “But you didn’t.” “Now I am.” And she holds the photo aloft, but still doesn’t let go. “Only because I said something,” Marjane says. “Let me be the first to admit that throwing something away, something physical, doesn’t … It doesn’t get rid of your baggage, you know?” Mama nods and swings the photograph into Marjane’s arms. Mama straightens her purse and says, “Fine. Hurry up, and put on your shoes.”

That evening, Carol tries farm animals, but Papa keeps nodding off. Marjane asks if she can try, rising from her chair, tucking the black binder under her arm. Marjane has been drinking from a glass of water. She dips her fingers into the liquid and sprinkles drops onto his bald head. He starts. “Marjane!” Mama says from her seat. “Just … ” but Marjane doesn’t finish. She sits opposite him, like so many times before, and begins to draw the photos back, one at a time. The photos face away from her toward her father. Her mother says nothing about the photos. She said nothing when they lay on Marjane’s lap during the drive to Kane, emitting tension like radiation from a rock of uranium. “What are those?” Carol. Off-screen. For Marjane does not want to look away from Papa. “Something I thought might help,” Marjane says. The first photo is the clock. Papa says its name without missing a beat, though he says it in Farsi. It’s easier in Farsi. But he says it clearly, forcefully. “Good job, Papa joon!” Marjane flips the picture through its three concentric rings. The next photograph is of a building fronted by palm trees. “Come on, Papa, what’s this? Or where is it?” He doesn’t respond. Rather, he looks at the photograph as if he were reading it, his eyes darting back and forth. “Come on, Papa. You got this.” And then he says the name of the place where he began his career some fifty years ago.

In a way, Marjane succeeds in salvaging both her parents. When she shows him Persepolis one evening, Mama remarks how she and Papa visited the ruins the week before they moved stateside. “It’s like we knew we wouldn’t get a chance again,” Mama says. Or when Marjane flips to Shiraz University, Mama tells how an old med school professor held up a test of hers at the front of the lecture hall for everyone to see. “‘Hey, everyone, look at how the woman did,’ he said. Of course, I asked around and found out everyone did poorly on that test. He was just singling me out.” There are wagers, like the picture of Azadi Tower. Her parents never mentioned Tehran outside of politics, but when Papa glimpses this marbled, triangular entryway, he begins bouncing in his seat. “No visits to Tehran this weekend,” Mama says, stroking his hand as he settles down. He continues to smile. Marjane’s favorite is the one she already knew, but whenever she shows the picture of Shiraz’s downtown, she always prods her mother to tell her, again, the story of when her parents met, that bar fight all those years ago that left the scars on Papa’s back. Mama never fails not only to tell it but also to add another layer of nuance, like how their first date after that was to see West Side Story at the one theater in town that played American films. Marjane never does get the whole details of the fight, and she suspects occasionally that the scars might be from something else. (She thinks of the protests that were already happening before her parents moved.) No parent ever tells her or his child everything, however, and if she catches her father shirtless these following weeks, she trains her eyes to notice no deviations in the topography of his back. Marjane also salvages herself. She later adds family photos from both Boca Raton and home to the album. One photo is of Marjane and Papa courtside, tennis rackets over their shoulders. She can’t be older than twelve. A nanny may have taught Marjane the rules to baseball and football, but Marjane remembers Papa teaching her how to play tennis. And there are other victories. Mama deigns to let Marjane feed Papa. The first few attempts result in stained shirts for both of them, but gradually Marjane becomes adroit at navigating the silverware around his spasmodic body. He becomes used to playing with his daughter, again, beyond the packet she created for him. Playing catch is soon a lost cause because of his illness, but one day Marjane gets the idea to unclasp a foot from a footrest. His kicks are wild and keep Marjane on her toes. She’s ready to scamper to any side of the common area to block, but the activity becomes a new way to keep his mind focused, his body exercising.

9 A Doctor

Papa is crying. “Marjane, what is it?” Mama asks. The splash of the fountain masks his stuttered words, but Marjane gets the gist. “We’re outside Kane, Papa joon,” Marjane says. “We can go back.” Marjane pivots his wheelchair, so he’s facing the opposite direction on the paved path. “Does he not know where he is?” Mama asks. “No,” Marjane says. “No, he doesn’t. He wants us to take him back to his room.” When they do, he settles down. It’s near nap time, so daughter and mother page for a nurse to help him to the bathroom one last time. His penis sprays like an unmanned firehose. “Shit,” Marjane says, arching her body away from him while still holding onto his left arm. “Did he get you?” the nurse at his right arm asks. “Just my shoes. At least they’re … white.” They line up his body onto the toilet seat. What didn’t make it into the bowl pools on the pink bathroom tile. Mama appears at the door. “Everything ok?” “Yeah. He missed the toilet a little is all,” Marjane says. After he is asleep, Marjane, Mama, and the nurse linger, all seated beside him. “I think we should celebrate Nowruz here,” Mama says. Although her family sometimes misses other Iranian holidays, like Yalda, Nowruz is sacred. Marjane wouldn’t let boyfriends join when she was in college; family only. “Here? Kane? Because he peed on the floor?” Marjane asks. “Three times,” Mama says. “This week alone. And it’s not like we haven’t taken him on walks before. For him not to remember where he is … Will he remember our house?” Marjane doesn’t think so but neither does she say so. “What’s Nowruz?” the nurse asks. “The Iranian New Year,” Marjane says. “It falls on the vernal equinox, so lots of rejuvenation, starting anew, that kinda thing. Dyed eggs, like Easter.” “Have it here,” the nurse says. “You should see if you can host an information session about the holiday to the residents. Make it part of the day’s programming.” Mama says, “Oh. I don’t know—” “Come on, Mama,” Marjane says. “Drop some knowledge on these old people besides what Fox News tells them.”

At lunch, the residents gather around Mama and the Haft-Seen table that she prepared in the common room. On the table in individual dishes are apples, garlic, vinegar, sumac, oleaster, pudding, and green wheat. There are painted eggs as well. “Each of the seven items on the table begins with the letter seen, or ‘s,’” Mama says. “The Sabzeh is wheat, symbolizing rebirth. This sweet pudding is samanu, which symbolizes affluence … ” Marjane observes her father. He stares past his wife, his eyes glassy, to the other side of the room, to whatever comes next. “ … the eggs, though not officially part of the Haft-Seen, are often included as well. Any questions? No? Ok, let’s eat!” 50

The residents applaud. Mama and the nurses help dispense the samanu and hardboiled eggs. Cyrus, who is back for one day, the first time since the other New Year, walks a plate to their father, but Papa shakes his head. He doesn’t partake of any of the Nowruz food. When everyone else is done eating, Cyrus walks Papa to Papa’s room for a nap while Mama and Marjane clean up the table. At dinner, Papa does eat a grilled cheese. “Hussain, you are turning into Cyrus,” Mama says. “What?” Cyrus, still holding the sandwich to his father’s mouth, looks away from him to his mother and sister. “When you were a toddler,” Mama says. “On Nowruz, you never wanted to eat from the Haft-Seen. ‘I want a hamburger. I want a hotdog.’” Mama starts laughing. Then Marjane. Then Cyrus. Papa last. Cyrus flies to Los Angeles the next day. Eli Lilly's got a new antidepressant going on the market, and he needs to be on the set of the commercials the company is filming. Like brother, Marjane dives into her work, too. She promised a first draft to her committee in three days, and although she knows this is impossible, she feels if she writes five hours a day, she can reach whatever a first draft minus its conclusion and thirty percent of its footnotes is. It’s the hard part, too, getting close to explaining how three alleles contribute to neurological plaque in Parkinson’s patients. Despite what Doc has reassured her, she worries, too, that her inability to frame “the why” of this will represent a failure not only to salvage her father but also potentially to pass if the committee views “the how” as not enough. She does not visit her father during these three days, but when she does visit, an hour after crossing her fingers and clicking send, the decline is perceptible. He has been eating less, and it shows on his frame. The binder she made, which she touted to her brother as a “magic wand,” is what it really is: a stopgap. He names only Persepolis and the clock.

By April, Marjane often finds herself leaving the binder in the playbin with the rest of his games and toys. His sleep time is eclipsing his activity time, a waxing gibbous against a collapsing star. Games and toys beget irritation and muteness from Papa. With TV forbidden by the Nafisis, not wanting the warm glow of the LED to siphon whatever is left of Papa, Mama and Marjane and Carol decide to read to him instead whenever he is awake. Wife, daughter, and therapist rotate shifts, reading aloud newspapers in Farsi, People, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Kane brochures, pizza menus, his old medical textbooks, neuroscience textbooks, the poetry of Hafez, The Wall Street Journal, anything to keep him awake and tethered to reality. During Marjane’s turns, she does catch him nodding along to her words’ cadence, but she also observes that far-off look in his eye again, the one she saw during Nowruz.

All that reading at Kane, and all the typing and proofreading and emailing committee members, and weighing and deliberating their feedback and suggestions for revision, and the occasional weeping over it all in the solitude of her bedroom leaves Marjane’s eyes heavy and unfocused. She limps into May—but with a final draft of her dissertation completed. After sending it off, she buckles down and books a roundtrip flight from Pittsburgh to San Francisco. She’ll stay one night, defend the next day, and then leave. While her committee reads her dissertation, Marjane spends as much time as she can at Kane. Her father is sleeping even more, so she sits by his bedside. She often finds herself looking up from her magazine, studying his face, trying to preserve it.

*** On the evening before departure, Papa keeps his mouth shut against the broth that Marjane brings to his lips. “Did he eat breakfast?” Marjane asks Mama. Marjane missed breakfast because she was packing. “Just a piece of toast,” Mama says. “Half a piece.” They put Papa to bed shortly afterward. He does not struggle as they strip him out of his clothes and help him to the toilet. On the car ride home, Marjane tries abandonment one last time, saying that she should stay and reschedule her defense. “No, Marjane,” Mama says. “Go to San Francisco, get your PhD. Ack, why are you even making me talk this way? I swear, now you don’t want to finish your studies.” “Mama … ” But that’s all Marjane says. The streetlights pass over their faces as Marjane takes the exit. Then Marjane says, “I’ll drive myself to the airport.” “Good.”

It’s the culmination of the days with her father—the reading, the binder, the games, the walks, the meals—that allows her to ignore her ringtone while she stands outside of a UCSF classroom, breathing deeply. These days keep her from canceling her defense and fleeing to the airport when she glances at the screen to see who called and receives the text messages from Cyrus telling her that Papa is continuing to refuse food and that Cyrus has already left Indiana. These days with her father remind her that Papa can’t abandon her anymore even if he expires during the next hour and a half, not that she could make it back to him in that amount of time anyway. These days push away thoughts of his demise as she enters the classroom. At a long table sits her panel, Doc in the center. To his right is Dr. Kang, a Korean- American man with half-moon spectacles. To Doc’s left is Dr. Hyman, a tall woman with black hair cut into a pageboy. “Morning,” Marjane says. “Morning,” Doc and Dr. Kang say in unison. Dr. Hyman half-smiles. She is brilliant, a professor any neuroscience grad student would want on her or his committee, but she also gave Marjane her lowest ever seminar grade (B-). “So before we delve into your research, Marjane, I like first to ask students why they chose the research they did,” Doc says. “Well … ” Marjane pauses, glances from her committee. To her surprise, she must stifle a yawn, but then it hits her that because of the time change, she’s been awake since 5 a.m. She used the time to review her notes in the hotel, but if she now dwells on her fatigue, she’ll lose her mental footing, so she dives into it. “As you all know, my father was diagnosed with Parkinson's some time ago, and, ah, first, thank you for being understanding with me through it all.” “Of course,” Doc says. “So, yes, my interest goes back to my father, specifically in his Lewy body dementia. I knew about Lewy bodies from my undergraduate days, but to see it in person, it’s devastating, and I wanted my research to illuminate it. It’s not as well known in the general public, I think.” She pivots to her research. The three alleles that she spent years analyzing and how they contribute to neurological plaque; statistics; processes—the info streams from her mouth. She never hesitates and only pauses when one of her committee members asks her a question or for a clarification. When she gets to that dreaded “why” of her dissertation, as in why do the three

52 alleles contribute to the plaque, she winces internally as she shifts to the passive voice—“Results were inconclusive … ”—and at this, Dr. Hyman stops her. “And how, exactly, would you recommend moving forward after this research,” Dr. Hyman asks. “You know, toward a cure.” Marjane swallows. Seconds tick by, student staring at panel, panel staring at student. Marjane did her homework, though, no pressure, so she delineates how she would like to gather control and variable groups as early as their forties and chart their potential neurological deterioration in addition to their family histories, genome, and environmental factors. She says if they can find some common cause, some pattern as to why these alleles mutate, they’ll know better how to treat them. “You know, when I’m later employed at a university myself and have access to more funding,” she says, nearly shaking with confidence. The panel asks that she step out, so they may confer. Marjane does so and then debates calling or texting her brother. But she doesn’t know how long the panel will take to review, and she wants an uninterrupted conversation with Cyrus. So she sits on a bench, playing Candy Crush for what feels like hours. Finally, Doc sticks his head out the door and smiles. “Congratulations.” She rises and reenters the classroom, shaking hands with her committee and thanking them. Only when Marjane and Doc are left alone does she break down. He ushers her to a desk and sits beside her, laying a hand over hers. “Why didn’t you tell us?” he asks. She dabs her bloodshot eyes with his silver handkerchief. “Because I would never have been able to start, let alone finish.”

A celebratory libation with Doc will have to wait. Still on campus, bundled in a windbreaker outside her department’s building, she calls Cyrus. “Marjane?” A blast of guitar is quickly lowered. “Where are you?” Marjane asks. “Somewhere around the second stage of grief and central Ohio. You? Did you pass?” She doesn’t expect to be the subject of inquiry, and she blinks a few times before answering. “Oh. Yeah.” “Hey, Marjane, that’s great. I’m—I’m proud of you. I just wish the circumstances could be all around more celebratory.” “Me, too. But enough about me, what’s going on? What’s happening with Papa?” “With Papa.” He exhales. “He ate his breakfast two days ago, yes?” “I’m asking you what happened.” “Marjane, I’m trying to get a timeline. He ate before you left, yes?” “Yeah, I mean, he’s been eating less, but he had some toast.” “And then the next morning, the morning you left, Mama tried to serve him scrambled eggs, but he wouldn’t open his mouth. She tried to serve him orange juice. Same thing. So they took him back to bed. Lunchtime, he was deadweight. He slashed one of the nurses with his nails when they tried lifting him. And same thing, refused food. Mama called me that evening. We agreed to wait until breakfast today. No change. So I called you.” Papa is paying her back for abandoning him. Again. No. She shakes her head. She remembers his eyes. Papa has been moving toward this. “Marjane, you still there?”

“Yeah, can you hear me?” “You were done with your defense when I called, right? Mama said you defended in the morning, but with the time change … ” “No, no. You were good.” “Good. But I should probably hang up. I saw a state trooper not too far back.” He sighs. “I love you.” “I love you, too.” She fumbles ending the call with tremulous hands.

Marjane takes a bus back to her hotel, packs, checks out, and then grabs a late lunch at a taqueria down the street. She tries calling her mother twice but gets no answer both times. Marjane already booked a redeye for her returning flight. She arrives at the airport early. She makes it through security and while she waits in the terminal, she texts Cyrus and Mama that she’ll be boarding soon. She leans in her chair, closes her eyes, but the ping of her phone jolts her. Cyrus. Hey. Here. Give me a call before you board. “I’m at Kane,” Cyrus says. “He’s still not eating, but he did say ‘hello’ to me, and I gave him some water from a straw.” “Thank you for leaving work,” Marjane says. “I’m happy Mama has you there. Does she want to talk?” “She left to let Broca out.” Marjane forgot about her dog. “Tell her I said thank you.” “I will. Speaking of Broca, I think both of us are spending the night here. He’ll be ok in the house by himself for the night, right?” “Broca? Yeah. He should be fine.” Without much else to comment on, they hang up. She boards. Once the plane is cruising, she orders a Bloody Mary in an attempt to knock herself out. As she brings it to her lips, the airplane hitches and the top inch of the beverage spills over her shirt, like she’s been shot.

After a layover in Charlotte, she arrives early the next morning in Pittsburgh. She goes straight from the airport to Kane, parking over the line and sprinting when she reaches Papa’s room, where she expects gray but finds the same olive skin. Papa’s eyes are closed. A heart monitor extends from his body. Cyrus holds his hand, stroking his knuckles with a thumb. Mama is asleep. Her legs stretch from the chair she sits in to the chair opposite her, a blanket draped over her body—one of two temporary, makeshift beds in the room, another pair of chairs pushed a little farther apart for Cyrus’s height. His blanket, a Steelers one, is balled over an armrest. “Marjane,” Cyrus says, rising. They embrace. “Any change?” she asks. He pinches his eyes with forefinger and thumb while shaking his head no. “Marjane? How was your flight?” Mama now, stretching in her seat, pulling her legs toward her. A cat meowed behind Marjane most of the trip, but what did that matter? “It was fine,” she says. “What about you? What are the doctors saying?” Mama starts crying. Marjane and Cyrus go to either side of her. “Here, you two go home,” Marjane says. “Marjane joon, no,” Cyrus says. “You’ve been traveling all night.”

“And you’ve been here all night. I want to see Papa for a while. Come back around lunchtime. Someone has to let Broca out, too.” So Cyrus and Mama slowly leave, each pausing to kiss Papa and to promise that they will be back soon. After they leave, Papa wakes up and says something, something not even Marjane can hear. “What is it, Papa?” He turns his head to the right, nose pointing … and Marjane notices the glass of water on the bedside table. She brings the straw to his lips, and he slurps. He smiles, smacks his damp lips in satisfaction, and then nods as if to say, “That’s enough now.” What to say? What to say to a father who is semi-conscious? Who raised you secularly, so you believe neither in God nor that your words will be carried into some sort of afterlife. And what words could encapsulate her forgiveness, her thanks for un-abandoning her these last few months? Maybe that’s a good place to start. “Thank you,” she says in Farsi. Then she remembers the good news. “I passed, Papa.” She pauses, their lifetime passing in the span of a single squeezed hand. He made way more corrections than he did mistakes, a ratio that, if she ever has a child, she realizes, she’ll be lucky to exit parenthood with. She kisses his forehead. Her soul, which trailed her like all souls do during travel, finally catches up, entering her back and collapsing her onto his bed beside him.

The day that Marjane returns to Pittsburgh is also the last day Papa speaks. He says, in Farsi, “I love you,” to Marjane when Cyrus and Mama relieve her at lunch time. Then, when Marjane relieves Cyrus and Mama for the evening, Papa says those same words to his son and wife. So go their shifts: Mama and Cyrus throughout the day; Marjane at evening and through the night. Marjane doesn’t mind. She is used to being awake from working on her dissertation. She spends the time beside Papa, holding his hand, talking to him: You let me win those tennis games in Florida, didn’t you? Sometimes she tries reading to herself, but even a magazine is too much. Her brain is fried from the dissertation and from stress. She swipes through photos of her and her father on her phone. Other times, she plays music that he likes, the volume low. His eyes usually stay closed, but she catches him winking at her once or twice, his mouth smiling. Because Marjane got the night shift, she avoids the visitors. She misses the Farrokhzads and Janice. Misses them and the empty phrases people like to throw around death: I’m keeping him in my thoughts. If there’s something, anything I can do at all, don’t hesitate to ask. He’ll be in a better place soon. During one overlap in shifts, Marjane sits with Cyrus and Mama, and they talk. “Hey, Marjane, did Papa ever take you to Wendy’s when you were little?” Cyrus asks. “The drive-thru?” “YES!” “Wait, what?” Mama asks. “When I was little,” Marjane says, “and I guess when Cyrus was little, too, sometimes Papa would take me to Wendy’s if you weren’t home. We would always go through the drive thru—” “Except we were never in any hurry,” Cyrus says.

“Exactly,” Marjane says. “So we would get our food and eat it in the car in the parking lot. Even in the winter time, with a perfectly warm restaurant across from us.” She shakes her head. “I don’t think he ever thought to do otherwise.” “And I guess neither did you,” Mama says. “No,” Marjane says. “It wasn’t until I was in college, and a friend took me to Wendy’s, that I realized you could, you know, eat inside the establishment. My head exploded.” When their laughter dies down, Cyrus asks Marjane, “Do you remember any conversations with Papa during those trips?” She thinks. “No … no, they all blend together. You?” “Same.” He sighs. “I remember laughter.” “Me too.” Papa keeps his eyes shut, but he might not be sleeping exactly. Marjane will later learn that hearing is the last of the five senses to go before death. She will hope this is true.

Three days after Marjane returns, Papa stops accepting his straw. He won’t open his mouth. The nurses and the Nafisis must wet his lips with small sponges attached to plastic stems. The sponges remind Marjane of the tiny paintbrushes her art teacher had Marjane and her peers use in elementary school. That night, Marjane notices that Papa keeps grimacing in his sleep. The grimace is slight, like he’s having a bad dream, but he could also be in pain from starvation. Marjane hears a nurse in the hallway, and she goes outside to see about getting her father started on pain medication. The nurse says she will be there in a few minutes to check. When Marjane returns, she lays her hand back on her father’s hand. A few seconds pass before Marjane realizes her father isn’t breathing. He left her. And she, him. But both of their leavings are a step removed. He spared her his dying breath, and she left only while he was alive. She nods. There’s the call button, but the nurse will be there soon enough with the medicine that he will not need. Days of pain, and managing it, will be spared, too. Marjane lays her head on his chest, waiting, one ear pressed above his heart, the other ear wincing as the monitor flatlines.

Your father removed my appendix when it ruptured while I was eight months pregnant. Your husband set my son’s arm back in its socket. He saved my life. Although they mean well, the former patients are the most exhausting. Old friends and family know just to say, “I’m sorry for your loss,” and then to move on to the casket. But the patients—Marjane is light-headed enough from the scent of all the flowers packed into the viewing room. Finally, brother and sister find themselves alone in a corner. “I think I’m going to take a month off work,” Cyrus says. “Can you do that?” Marjane asks. “Sure. My company likes me, and they’ve already told me to take as much time as I need. Plus, I have a lot of vacation time saved up.” “Mama still needs to sell the house.” “And that’s the thing. I want to help.” He puts his hands in his pants pockets and stares at the mauve carpet. “What about you? What are your plans?”

“I don’t know. I’m able to go on the job market now, I guess, but I don’t know when—” “Excuse me.” It’s Mama. For the first time in days, her eyes are not bloodshot. Behind her is a stooped gentleman with a head of silver hair. “Cyrus, you remember Dr. Caldwell.” “Of course! Papa’s old colleague.” The men shake hands. When they finish, Mama turns to her daughter. “And this … ” Mama pauses. “This is Dr. Nafisi.”