RICHARD POWERS (36 page)

She crumbled at the prospect of losing the greatest Etch-A-Sketch a girl had ever been given. She hid her face in her hands, up to her ears.

No,
his look said, too soft to hear. Not to fix you up. Not you per se. Zimmerman. To fix Ted. The one who really needed him. The one Spiegel loved, first of anyone.

2
7

The Therapy Room is a work in progress.

Its idea is as old as ideas themselves: to break the terror of existence by depicting it. Heights brought down to ground level, dried floods, cardboard invaders: a story of hurtful things that cannot hurt you any more than any story can.

Outside the Therapy Room, a white thirty-four-year-old neurasthenic female, Miss Muffet (not her real name), presents with acute, debilitating arachnophobia. After administering a history and physical, her doctors place Miss Muffet inside the palpable re-creation of a kitchen much like her own: a clean, well-lit Kenmore ensemble with lots of counter space. Just as M.M. grows comfortable in the surroundings, technicians bury her up to her midriff in spiders.

The patient's vitals spike off the charts. She screams and runs out of the representation, as if from the real evil. For the next two hours M.M. is a panting wreck, unable to go anywhere near the imaginary kitchen. This is a good sign. In order for the Therapy Room to work, the patient must credit it enough to dread it. Miss Muffet's gullibility makes her the ideal subject. She knows the nightmare of spiders is a fabrication. And still she believes.

As soon as the patient can calm down, they send her back in. This time, primed for the assault, telling herself that it's only an invention, she lasts a full thirty seconds. Miss Muffet laughs in cold terror after she reaches the exit. Her pulse returns to normal in half the time of her first exposure. She now knows she can escape the spiders anytime she wants. She can enter the kitchen, however horrible, and survive.

Real exposure can't teach her this, for real fear overwhelms all second tries. But the Therapy Room works at the limits of seeming. Belief gives way to evidence, spiders to spiderlike objects. Twelve exposures later, Miss Muffet takes to batting at her nemeses, frying them with the click of a joystick, racking up the kills like so many toy targets.

Out in the larger world, M.M. makes a miraculous parallel leap. For if the things she so lately took for threats turned out to be mere representations, how much more of a threat can the originals represent? Models reveal to her the model she has lived in. Symbols cure her of the fears those symbols stood for. Terror flattens into its empty sign.

The same cure promises help for all those disabled by the real. Burn victims will forget their pain, wrapped in a more vibrant light. Those paralyzed by fear of flying will make their connections. Post-traumatic stress sufferers, for whom no other therapy has worked, will skim the virtual canopies above firefights powerless to reach them.

When next M.M. sees a living spider, she rubs it out happily with her bare hands. The case history writes her final happy chapter:
Miss Muffet successfully desensitized.

2
7

Every ten-minute chunk of May makes an eternity. But once the weeks are finally dead, you feel the month pass in memory in half a heartbeat. Time uses you; it lays you out. It advances glacially, gouging by inches your scarred inner continents. Then it vanishes, leaving behind no single landmark but white.

You kill the quarter-hours dune-ranging through the blankest Saharas, each kilometer of hard-won track wiped out by the wind as soon as you turn to look back. At huge intervals, oases punctuate the evacuated tracts. You head for whatever infrequent way stations you can scrape together.

Mother's Day, never marked by more than a week of low-level anxiety capped by an emergency call to FTD, swells to an international
conference of sacred distraction. All day, the woman's face struggles to take shape. You fight for detail, work to recover the first sight your eyes ever recognized, the most familiar, most assumed, most beatific, nauseating, neglected, adored, abused. Hours pass trying to fix her features, to see past their gross lines, to zoom in beyond your usual myopia down to the local intricacies of cartilage, her smallest fleshy finials.

Her full-tipped nose swims into focus, your nose before its Anglo contamination. The pained laugh lines on the outskirts of her eyes deeping to plow cuts. Her chin's drumlins assume a detail that only enforced isolation could have given you. A haunted face, a hunted one. Framed in that copper coif of composure that it took you until the age of twelve to realize was not her natural color. Pahlevi copper. Before that, in pictures, Pahlevi blond. Westoxification at its finest. Hair color that would be hard to hide, even now, under the required head scarf. A face no longer welcome in the country of her birth, the same country that now bankrolls Sacred Conflict and their army of God's Partisans, the ones who have seized you, her baby, the flesh of her flesh.

All day long her muscles materialize, cling to the noble cheekbones, a grimace of pleasure peeking through the interdicting fear. Every brave smile apprises you of its bewilderment, the wild route of its arrival here. You make out the tuft of peach fur on her upper lip, there already in '51, the year that old Tavakoli and his family migrated to England in the wake of Mussadegh's nationalization of Anglo-Iranian Oil.

Three years later, in the returning Shah's wake, the freshly rechris-tened British Petroleum sought out her faithful father and reinstated him to his middle-management post. But by then your mother Shah-naz's lovely, peach-furred lip had captivated a handsome American serviceman loitering around London prior to his inevitable return to Iowa and a lifetime of agricultural extension lecturing. Veiled in white, in an incoherent Anglican ceremony where her whole displaced family did their best
ferangi
impersonations, your mother swore through that fleshy mouth to love, honor, and obey this American, to follow him into lifelong exile deep in a land that couldn't tell Iranian from Indonesian.

These features, this face: what could the domesticated prairie have looked like, through eyes so black and baffled? Not a question you've ever entertained, before Mother's Day inflicts you with time enough to entertain all questions.
Isfahan,
your mother's singsong once sang to you, is
half the world.
Growing up in Basra, Kuwait, and Doha could not have left too much room in her remaining half a world for a town like Des Moines.

And yet,
the laughing, skittish voice tries again to tell you,
I never felt at home until I came to the United States.
The black eyes whose gaze you could never bear to meet dart away, caught in the compromise of something like truth.
People in the Midwest are so friendly. So ready to take you in.
By which she must have meant that Iowans, in their bounty, could not imagine how anyone would not want to be like them, given half a chance.

But she did, your hair-dyed mother. Did want to become that local and featureless thing. Did take on a rolling, open, Midwestern look, that history of no history. Did adopt the life that her cosmopolitan father, the emissary of empire, unwittingly trained her for, through her childhood spent shuttling among Oil's tap points. Did learn to sing, We
are from l-oway, I-oway!
Never at home until here.

The face that solidifies before you at morning grows old by nightfall. All those years, Shahnaz among the alien corn. Her ancient words, ways, and beliefs, hidden under a bushel. Her occasional Franco-Farsi, a mumbled
merzi
to checkout clerks or an accidental
khoda hafez
when leaving the rare party where she fully relaxed. Her annual covert Norooz celebrations, the third week of March, the flowers all hothouse imitations and the nougat candies all made with Jewel Tea Company bleached imperial equivalents.

Except for these lapses, she steeped her life in protective coloration, her olive skin aging, growing pale, each year refining its successive approximation of hearty farm stock until, by Mother's Day midnight, you can mistake her for white, the white of your father, your state, your upbringing. The apparition gazes on you, neither scolding nor imploring. With a simple look, she works her daily vigilance. This May exercise recalls you to the basic fact of her existence. Her life needed no further justification, so long as you and your brother still needed her to survive the world in which chance set you down.

Her two boys: all the light those eyes ever needed. Hers was the countenance of love, too circumspect for any photo to have captured. This is the mask of happy sacrifice. The face of the most maternal being that a child could conceive. Your icon for safety, for every comfort and care ever taken for granted. Your weight, your shame, your memory, your mother.

After sunset, her features dim. She disappears into the black of your enclosure. Nothing remains of her dislocated solicitude but that brow's accommodation, her motherly wiliness, the will to improvise. You cannot conjure her back. She morphs into the woman you never witnessed, the one who came into her own after you fled her faultless nest.

Your desertion must have changed those features, for eyes always betray the thing they look for. With you up in Chicago, teaching the global economy's privileged elites how to maximize their verbal throw weight, Kamran off building Peace Corps housing in Mali, and her hapless husband shrinking to nothing with each successive day of retirement, spinning down the tube into prime-time dramas of Texan millionaires, what could the daughter of Anglo-Iranian wandering, the born mother, still find, in the corn-rowed wastes of I-oway, to nurture? For whom could she go on living? What could absorb her surplus care?

She found a replacement, so fast it made you jealous. Force of habit, maternal instinct's inertia left her continuing to cook, cranking out sustenance as if there were still fledglings to eat it. Great, heaped mountain ranges of her family's favorites began to pile up in a home that no longer housed enough mouths to consume it all. At last a woman friend, a fellow volunteer at the 4-H, suggested a joint catering service, Shahnaz on the stove and native Rosemary handling the front office.

For two years, the women's experiment in grassroots capitalism coasted along on word of mouth. They served pork chops and mashed potatoes to confirmation parties and fried chicken and apple dumplings to golden anniversary reunions. All the while, your mother hid in her heart of hearts the conviction that people wouldn't really cat
that
way except out of ignorance. Once she'd secured a loyal clientele, the woman launched her calculated gamble. She introduced her offerings sparingly, slipping in a little
mast o esfinaj
or
khiar
alongside the glazed hams, and no one was any the wiser.

Emboldened, she graduated to saffron-flecked rice with bottom-of-the-pot and
zereshk pulow
at one party, an eggplant "Mullah-has-fainted" at another. Piecemeal, she deployed the full menu of raptures and revelations:
kabab koobideh, fesenjan, qormeh sabzi.
To these Persian mainstays she added a panoply of recipes reverse-engineered from a youth spent bouncing around all the capitals of the Middle East.

In that corn-fed desert, she built an oasis. Native xenophobia counted for nothing against a good rosewater rice pudding. Once the Iowans supped from her font, even lifelong steak-and-potato men came back for more. Culture had impaired no palate so severely that it could not recover on a few tastes of heaven.

Rosemary, the managing partner, drew up an exotic, Orientalized business card and christened the reborn business Iranian Delights. Des Moines never knew their likes. Nothing matched them for miles. They were a hit, producing a demand that they could not satisfy. They delivered the full, unknown flavor that life forever promised, for the same price as pork and beans.

After November 1979 they changed the name again, to Persian Delights, just as Anglo-Iranian had once changed discreetly into British Petroleum. But the greater Des Moines area still sounded the call to arms, patriotically renouncing all things spicy and suspect. Culinary multiculturalism surrendered its tenuous beachhead in the tall corn, beaten by geopolitics. Iowa renounced its ideal convert citizen, returned her to immigrant status in her adopted homeland.

Reconstructing her story is good for burning an hour, when you most need it. But the pain of imagining her is worse than the agony of time. Her details do you in. You'd call them vicious irony, if you still believed in so benign a thing. How she marched in the streets as a teen, beating her breasts, reciting slices of a Qur'an that she'd memorized in inscrutable Arabic, to the horror of her Westernized parents. How she
sealed the lifelong pact with her American
serviceman, whose greatest wartime experience had consisted of helping to move Patton's fictitious landing army around England, the thousands of cardboard and balloon tanks replete with recorded mechanical sounds meant to fool the Nazis into imagining that the Allies would land at Calais. How your parents embarked on eternal matrimony in an Anglican church, in a country that belonged to neither, yet held them both by the colonial lapels. How, Westernized, apostate, she all but lost her native Farsi. And now, from the street below, how the Arabic texts she once committed to memory percolate up nightly to serenade her monolingual son's window.

You spend a lifetime, another afternoon, trying to recall what it meant, growing up, to say you were half Persian. Never much more than the usual North American party game of Mongrel's Papers. Quarter Irish. Three-fifths Lapp. Nothing more than your run-of-the-mill experiment in high-school chemistry dilution. But you always felt a little pride at being more than the prevailing flavor, an offbeat breed, at least in this stretch of the prairie. Your sound-bite biography always made for good show-and-tell. It tied you to a country where you'd never been, one that you didn't know from Eden.

On into adulthood, you carried around this membership in a place forever closed to you. The year that you hoped finally to go visit, the door slammed permanently shut. The revolution would as soon jail the sons of the golden-haired Pahlevis as grant them visas. For months on the nightly broadcasts, you saw more of your homeland than you'd seen in the two preceding decades. Your mythic home-away-from-homeland turned, by an unholy alliance of mullahs and American television networks, into a demented parody, a nation of breast-beating crazies run by militant clerics with foot-long beards who captured innocent Americans and held them hostage.

That's not how it really is,
your mother told anyone who would listen. Above all, her boys.
Believe me,
the crushed-olive lips begged. But her eyes studied the assaulting broadcasts, flecked with doubt at the distance between what she remembered and this latest round of electronic proof.
It's an old country,
she insisted, her fleshy face frightened.
Older than all this nonsense.
Persians were masters of the world back when the Greeks were still in preschool. This, too, will pass, and leave behind nothing but the astonished record.

Because you could not come to it, Iran has come to you. It happily exports Islamic revolution into the vacuum of this fractured country. Your kinsmen bankroll Ali, Walter, the Angry Parent. Your unknown half-ancestor strides out to meet you halfway, in the valley between you.

All through the summer, words come back to you. At meals, or during your half-hour sprints along your oval track, or in the middle of the morning bathroom ritual, now trimmed back to a frenzied seven minutes. Forgotten vocabulary, sometimes in your mother's voice, sometimes in the voice of those grandparents, fictional to you except for two short childhood trips Stateside when the Brits still pumped the oil and the Shah still issued the travel visas. Words return. The names of foods. The primary colors. The numbers from one to ten.

More than words: chunks of your mother's favorite stories, in translation. The one about the white-haired baby who grows up to be a mighty king. The one about a flock of birds who set out to find the fabulous
Simurgh.
They cross the seven valleys of Journey, Love, Knowing, Detachment, Unity, Bewilderment, and Annihilation, the thirty straggling survivors hanging on just long enough to discover, or rather to remember, that
Simurgh
means nothing more than "thirty birds."

Your cell is a nave. A ship, a dinghy adrift on the currents of wrecked empire. You lie back in the stern, shackled to your radiator, this room's rudder. Open seas leach you. You drift on the longest day of the year, bobbing near madness, the black overtaking you, infinite time, unfillable, longer even than those childhood nights when your own prison bedroom ran with a dread so palpable that sleep seemed certain death and death far better than this standing terror.

And then that frightened, fleshy face is there, next to yours, laughing in the dark.

What in all the world does a child have to be scared of? The old Persians, your people, called their walls
daeza. Pairi
meant anything that surrounds. See?
Pairi daeza.
You have a wall running all the way around you. That,
my little Tai-Jan, is the source of Paradise.