Behrooz had succeeded at being an Iranian for much of his youth, but the ghosts of the occupation were rising within him. Something had released them, and now he could feel them surfacing, plotting to occupy him. If only he had never heard the stories. He lifted the bourbon to his lips.
Zal waved the swatter around the house. Seemo followed and growled eagerly at the invisible foe. The fly suddenly appeared and Zal twirled around to swat it, but he only managed to knock his earphone out. Zal’s mother Deena stopped wiping down the kitchen counter to sigh, and grabbed the counter’s edge as if she expected it to jump.
Behrooz set his cigarette in his ashtray, leapt up, and took the swatter from Zal to finish the job.
Zal put the earphone back in place. Vin Scully resumed his play-by-play in Zal’s head as the boy stole back to his bed.
Anyone could see Behrooz in the features of his son’s face. He and little Zal shared chins, cheekbones, and their eyes were just the same shape. But Behrooz was vexed by the boy’s fair complexion. He never doubted Deena’s faithfulness—it was worse than that. Behrooz feared that the boy was too much his own; his genuine progeny, born of the pale seed of sin that lay within himself. The blonde child, Behrooz feared, was an offspring of the occupation.
The seed had sprouted, and now it was beginning to flower. Behrooz smoked more, and he drank more. Finally, he drank himself out of his job. He had to move his family into a mobile home until he could pull himself together. This meant his brother Firooz had to move out. Behrooz could not turn to his family for help. It wasn’t a large or prosperous family, unlike some other Iranian immigrant families around at the time, before the Revolution; and he was too burdened by those secrets. He feared that they might burst out of him were he to tempt them any further. He could no more return to Tehrangeles than Tehran. He remained in exile on the desert.
Zal lay on his bed, which fit snugly into the converted utility closet. He reached down over the edge to scratch Seemo’s ears, then he rolled over and flipped through a tattered deck of baseball cards. He heard his mother call him to dinner. When he came out, she was on the phone. She was talking to her sister in Bakersfield. “Yes,” she replied. “No … Merci. Okay. Khoda’fez.” She hung up the phone.
Zal sat down to eat the rice dish that his mother had prepared for dinner. It was one of the Iranian recipes that Deena could obtain the ingredients for out on the pre-Revolution frontier, though there were occasions when she was forced to make do without Basmati rice.
“Azíz?” Deena cautiously approached Behrooz. She mentioned a refinery job that her brother-in-law had invited Behrooz to apply for.
Behrooz held the smoke in his lungs as though he had dropped underwater and couldn’t hear what Deena was saying above the surface.
She continued in Farsi. “Sweetheart? I know it’s not easy to put up with Fareed sometimes. I’m only asking that you try it. Maybe we could drive over for a visit.”
Behrooz walked through the door; out onto the desert. He hadn’t yet returned home when his son fell asleep that night.
Out on the dark desert, a tumbleweed bounced over the cracked desert pavement like a stray ball. A sheet of newsprint soon followed, more bird-like. They travelled northward together as if pushed by a southerly monsoon breeze, but no breeze could be felt or heard.
Another tumbleweed rolled by, and then another. The soft whisper of a warm breeze could now be heard. A glow rose rapidly above the San Gabriel Mountains in the south, and then a wave of bright light crested over the peaks and ridges.
The light flooded into the basin and consumed everything in its path, a tsunami of fire. Zal stood helpless before it. It closed in upon him like the light of a locomotive in a tunnel. There was no escape.
Zal scrambled back against his bedroom wall as he woke in a sweat. He sat on his pillow, catatonic, as a light outside approached his bedroom window blinds. He tried to breathe evenly, but each breath was cracked by his mounting panic.
“Subh-e-noor, Zal,” he heard his mother’s voice travel unimpeded through and around the thin paneling of his door. The greeting translated to “morning of light.” Alas, it was only the sun after all. He picked himself up slowly, and cautiously approached the window. “Only the sun,” he reminded himself.
Later that morning, he waited out front of the mobile home park, sitting on the abandoned planter that sat before the words, “Golden Sands.” A textbook rested upon his lap, and upon the book he held a sheet of paper.
Zal sketched a picture that seemed to depict Jesus fishes falling down from the sky. The fishes were longer and narrower than the typical Jesus fish. Some fired streams like laser beams at installations on the ground. Some simply struck targets and exploded as missiles. Zal penciled graphite flames rising from the ground installations. He mumbled to himself, “Our shields are no match for the peace ships, sir. There are just too many. We have no choice but to surrender.”
A yellow school bus appeared in the distance down Avenue I. Zal folded the sheet of paper and slipped it into the book. He stood up and approached the road.