Fault Line (7 page)

He hadn't known it at the time, but family was a fragile thing. Like a house of cards. Some cards, no doubt, could be pulled out without much affecting the overall structure. Others, when they were removed, caused a shudder, and then another card popped out, then two more-and then the whole thing collapsed, just like that. All from a single mistake, from one little lost card.

But none of that mattered anymore. What happened had happened, and now, looking back, it all seemed unavoidable, not a collection of random events at all but rather the insidious and inevitable workings of destiny itself. He wondered sometimes whether that feeling of destiny was a trick, a narcotic the mind offered up to anesthetize remorse and regret. After all, if it didn't just happen, but had to happen, it couldn't have been your fault. Destiny was like a freight train, and who the hell could stop that? Trains just went wherever the tracks led them. So at the time it had looked like a car, sure. But it wasn't. Really, it was a train.

Chapter 8 THE FLAVOR OF THE FOOD

Sarah had gone back to her office so Alex could call the VCs and cancel the meeting. The poor guy looked crushed. Well, who wouldn't? He never said anything about it, but she knew if the Obsidian technology turned out to be as good as it looked, Hilzoy would become a very important client of the firm. For a sixth-year like Alex, coming up for partnership, originating a client like that had to be a big deal.

She spent two hours analyzing some prior art for one of the senior litigation associates. There were no interruptions, and she was glad of it-she still wasn't used to managing her time in six-minute increments, and long periods devoted exclusively to a single matter made it easier to keep track. She made a note of the time and thought about getting some lunch.

She got up and adjusted the blinds. At midday the sun moved into position and made the office too warm. Not that an overabundance of sunlight was anything to complain about.

Outside her window, a soccer game was in progress on a field that had lain barren until recently, when some sort of Superfund cleanup had converted it to its current use. She pulled the blinds open a bit and watched for a moment. Her window was impressively soundproofed and she couldn't hear the game, but she imagined the players were laughing.

No, she really had nothing to complain about. An office with a view in a great location, nice furnishings, a secretary. The work was reasonably interesting and she was good at it. The position conferred a certain degree of status, too, although she wouldn't have wanted to put it that way out loud. And of course she was making an obscene amount of money for a twenty-six-year-old. Still, at times the feeling that somehow she had just stumbled into it all troubled her. Just because you were good at something, and it paid well, was that sufficient reason to do it?

Her parents would have laughed at the question, and indeed they had before she'd learned to keep her doubts to herself. But of course, they were from a different generation. They had met as college students in America, where they had come to study and to perfect their English as was the custom among the sons and daughters of well-off Iranians of the day. Her father, Emaan, was pre-med and planned to become an ophthalmologist. Her mother, Ashraf, was studying nineteenth-century English literature and wanted one day to become a professor herself. They married while still in school. Their parents were pleased with the match, and their future looked bright.

Then came the revolution, and the seizure of the U.S. embassy. Amid talk of war, President Carter froze Iranian assets. Their families lost everything. Forget about tuition-it was all they could do to find a way to eat and pay the rent. Ashraf took a job as a waitress. Emaan sold eyeglasses at an optician's shop. They worked their butts off and saved money by sharing a two-bedroom apartment with another Iranian couple who had been similarly afflicted. Eventually, they had enough put away to buy out the optician. Now they owned five eyeglass stores in the Bay Area and some real estate, too, and were damn proud of it. Once, when Sarah had told her father she wanted a job that paid psychic income, he had laughed and said, Silly child, don't you know that financial income is psychic income?

She understood his point. But she had more opportunities than her parents did, opportunities they had given her. Wouldn't it be wrong not to take advantage? Shouldn't she build on the foundation they had provided?

And besides, she thought she had seen sadness behind her father's laugh.

She tried to ignore it, but she couldn't shake the feeling that there was something more for her, if only she could figure out what.

And that was her problem: all her dreams were inchoate. She didn't know what she wanted. There was a longing inside her, but she couldn't name it. It could be quietly corrosive, feeling so strongly something was there yet unable to express or even identify it. She wondered which was worse: betraying a dream or being too shallow even to have one?

And then she would tell herself she was being silly. She was hoping for too much, that was the problem. She should just be satisfied with all the good things she had.

Sometimes she wished she had a sibling she could confide in. But times had been hard when she was born. Her parents didn't think they could afford another child, and by the time they could, Sarah was already ten. They didn't want to start all over again.

The one thing that really interested her was politics. She read everything, across the political spectrum-newspapers, magazines, books. Blogs especially. There were some great ones out there, and with their diversity and spontaneity she trusted them much more than she did the mainstream media, which was controlled by corporations or driven only by a hunger for access to whoever was in power, or both. The voracious reading was a kind of hobby that had started in high school and intensified as she got older. But what was she supposed to do with it? Look at how Obama's opponents had tried to smear him by falsely suggesting he was Muslim. Or the way they'd destroyed that Iranian-American businessman, Alex Latifi, with textbook malicious prosecution in Alabama. What would people make of an Iranian-American woman who really was Muslim, who in fact found passages of the Koran breathtakingly beautiful? Her given name was Shaghayegh, for God's sake, after the Persian flower-Sarah was just a nickname. Shaghayegh Hosseini, vote for me Really, she had a better chance of being sent to GuantAnamo than of being elected to office.

She had been a freshman at Caltech when the planes struck the Pentagon and Twin Towers. After, she had been approached by recruiters from all over the federal government: FBI, NSA, CIA, the newly formed Department of Homeland Security. They were all desperate for people who could speak the languages of the Muslim world, and Sarah, whose Farsi was fluent, seemed to be popping up on all their computer lists. She was intrigued by the notion of a top-secret security clearance, by the chance to fight the fanaticism that was poisoning the culture she came from. But her parents had been against it. Having endured the revolution and everything that came after, they had been badly afraid of another backlash. The Hosseinis were American now, and didn't want to do anything to draw attention to their origins. Education was the key to success in America, her parents assured her. They had long since accepted that she had no interest in becoming a doctor, but she had a strong aptitude for science-advanced placement courses in high school, early acceptance to the information security program at Caltech. Why not go on to a law degree? With a combination like that, she could do anything. And so a kind of compromise had been born.

She loved her parents and wanted to make them happy, but there was a part of her too that resented their obsession with education and status, with the way they used her as a vehicle to pursue their own truncated dreams. That kernel of resentment led to her first real act of rebellion- an American-as-apple-pie boyfriend named Josh Marshall, whom she started dating as a sophomore when he was a junior, and to whom she lost her virginity that same year. Josh was a nice guy, from a nice family, and with good prospects, but he wasn't Iranian, and although there wasn't much her parents could do to stop her, she knew they were quietly appalled. And that was good. She was finally going after something she wanted.

The romance lasted until Josh graduated, when he left for Tucson and a job designing missile systems with Raytheon. They saw each other a few times that summer, but when the senior-year fall semester began, Sarah told him she was just too busy to keep it up. She pretended to be full of regret, but the truth was, she'd gotten bored. Although he was generally a confident guy, Josh had always been intimidated by her, and uncertain of himself as a result. It was as though he didn't quite believe he deserved her, that she was doing him some kind of favor by seeing him. She'd always felt the relationship was on her terms, that she was the one ultimately in control, and in the end she'd been proven right.

The pattern had continued at Berkeley's Boalt Hall. She'd been at the law school less than a month when she got involved with a second-year, another Anglo-American, this one named John Cole. And later, when John graduated and left for a job with the Justice Department in D.C., Sarah, who had grown bored with her new relationship in much the same way she had grown bored with the previous, again used the occasion as an excuse to end it. After, she wondered about her motivations. Both had been good boyfriends, at least in an all-appropriate-boxes-checked kind of way. But both had been guaranteed to be unacceptable to her parents, and both had come with a kind of built-in expiration date. Was she stacking the odds against herself? And why would she do that?

Had she loved them? She told them she did, after they breathlessly declared the same to her. But although she felt a deep affection, especially for Josh, who after all had been her first, she didn't know if she could really call it love. She wondered if it was not only the expiration date that drew her, but also a certain blandness to the flavor of the food. Maybe she was afraid to taste something that might ignite some latent appetite, an appetite she sensed inside herself but for some reason sought to deny.

The sex had been good, though. Or good enough, anyway. True, she couldn't seem to come with either of them, but it didn't really matter. Just the contact was nice, and she liked having someone to sleep with. And when she needed to really get off, she could always lock the bathroom door, take a hot bath, close her eyes, and touch herself the way she needed to. In her fantasies, she would be at the back of a lecture hall, or surrounded by a crowd at a bar or a party, or in the library stacks late at night. There was always a man whose face was indistinct, but who she knew was watching her, and there was something simultaneously appreciative and arrogant in his gaze. She would challenge him, demand to know who he was, what he thought he was looking at. He would smile and say, I know what you want. She would laugh at his presumptuousness and say something like, Oh, really? The laugh was supposed to make him wilt, but it didn't, and his smile would grow broader, and she would feel he was silently mocking her. You don't know the first thing about me, she would say. He would come closer then, and in a low voice say that of course he knew things about her, and he could prove it if he wanted to. His insolence would enrage her, and she would demand, Prove it how? He would come very close then, and she would try to move back, but there was always something blocking her, and then his body would be against hers and his mouth would be at her ear and he would whisper, I know how you like to be touched like this, and like this, and like this

She shook her head and let the blinds fall shut. She needed lunch. Maybe she'd ask Alex. She was curious if he'd heard anything else about Hilzoy. And he looked like he could use a little company.

He was an attractive guy, and she wondered about him sometimes. But he'd probably make partner soon, and if she were involved with him at that point they'd have to break it off. She chuckled. Yeah, he was right up her alley. Another good-looking, all-American guy with the right kind of rEsumE and an automatic expiration date. Perfect.

Anyway, he didn't seem interested, although she had to admit that was part of the attraction. She was used to men wanting her. They weren't very good at concealing it, and most didn't even try. It was funny, too, because she'd been a strange-looking kid, with widely set eyes and lips way too full for her face, and her features hadn't come together until late in high school. She was grateful for that. If she'd been born beautiful, it would be like being born rich. Everything would have been too easy. As it was, her looks always felt like an improbable, unexpected gift, something she'd happened across by accident, not something she'd been granted by right.

It was ridiculous, really, that she would be interested in the one guy in the firm who seemed not to be interested in her. But he had qualities she liked. He was good to work with, for one. He always explained things clearly, and he wasn't intimidated by her technical knowledge, unlike various other associates she'd worked with. And he was certainly serious. Even too serious-she saw him in his office whenever she came in early or left late, and he didn't seem to have much of a life outside the firm. She thought she detected an odd sort of sadness behind the seriousness, and it intrigued her. She imagined how she might respond if he made a move, then laughed at the thought. He wasn't interested, and that was probably for the best.

But no harm in just asking him about lunch. She was going out anyway, she would just check in about Hilzoy and then mention that she was going to grab a bite, maybe at Straits CafE, the Singaporean place, and if he was hungry