In the Name of Those Optimist Iranian Fools
Minutes after my feet touched moon dust, your voice creaked in the video message.
“The virus wins,” you chuckled in that half-slanted way you did when nothing was funny. Jaundice yellow laced its way across your cheeks.
“Why does it only attack Iranians?” I asked you, my twin sister. Wasn’t it enough that the virus had stolen our parents from us months ago?
“Maybe it likes to bathe in our saffron, likes our sour Feta. Maybe it has a soft spot for Tehran’s dusk pollution,” you answered, imperturbable as always, even death a funny joke.
I hated this virus, its greed for the scarce quantities of Iranian optimism. Hadn’t we lost enough to failed revolutions? Did it have a grudge against us? Maybe we’d offended its ancestors at some point in the thousands of years of the Persian Empire’s history. Who knows. Our lot has been to be the inheritors of histories’ burdens.
In your next video, you showed me the white blossom umbrella of our gnarly sour apple tree, held up old photos from when we were allowed to stay up for Yalda and fought over who got the last Tah Dig.
“I hope the moon is all you hoped for,” you said. I didn’t know how to tell you, it was, and it wasn’t. I hadn’t anticipated the loneliness of a life without birds. Without you. Other escapists like me, fifty of us total, braided our hours with silence, our tongues stripped of words as if we had forgotten to pack language with us.
Craters rose and fell like pimples on the face of a giant. For hours, leaning against a rock, I stared back at earth’s blue and green marble. I kept thinking about that nightingale that had flown into our window with that awful thud when we were in first grade. Why such hurry? What did it imagine to be waiting for it on the other side of the glass?
I didn’t know how to respond to your message, shame-faced for my cowardly flee from Iran. Our parents, early victims, were fools who chose to stay in Iran as flocks immigrated to Korea, America, China, Germany, Australia. Do you remember Dad telling us “Yek Rooz Iran Azad Mishe,” in between the hissing sips of cardamom tea? His certitude of Iran’s future felt as unshakable as Tehran’s Liberty Tower.
You didn’t ask me to come back, but how could I not? Did you know that at fourteen weeks fetal twins reach across the womb for one another, touching head to head, arm to arm. Thirty-five years on our last birthday. You do the math of the seconds I’ve loved you.
At Imam Khomeini International Airport, you looked like a twisted rug of skin and bone. In my arms, a stack of sticks brittle as the ones we used to construct miniature worlds, a little fire, a fence, a pool.
As you shrunk into yourself over the next three months, my heart shrunk into my chest. I feared the violent tremble of your hands, that husky tone cracking your voice. The virus feasted until you no longer said, “One day, Iran will be free,” asked me what “Azadi” meant. More neighbors died, frowns caked on their faces. Eradication of their smiles was the virus’s final blow.
The remaining neighbors crowded our home, offering barley soup, yellow roses. They said, “Don’t lose your hope.” Your doctor said. “Gray pupils, pouting lips. Not good. Just a few days left.” I missed the moon’s solitude and rewatched footage of my time there, during your lengthening sleep.
One night, you asked me to take you up to the roof, your favorite spot. Indifferent to our troubles, the stars sparkled with coruscant fingers. “I wish you would’ve come with me to the moon,” I told you.
“Will you go back?” you asked through a storm of tiny coughs.
“Leaving is overrated,” I replied, a meteor stuck in my throat. Under us, our parents’ empty room, dust-laden, the white paint peeling. Even the apple tree had gone rogue from years of not being trimmed.
“Did you know large stars live shorter lives compared to smaller ones?” I asked, but you were already asleep. I was relieved you couldn’t hear the protestors shouting on the street, the screams of our neighbor over the dead body of her daughter, our childhood playmate, Soghra. She had been another optimist fool, just like you, just like our parents. What made you all believe in Iran even as it crumbled before your eyes? What made you choose not to abandon Iran at its hour of doom? I longed to understand yet feared that if I did the virus would come for me next.
I carried you down the creaking stairs. Your skin radiated, soft as moondust under my fingertips. Had your bones become porous like that lunar basalt I brought back for you? What if you were not dying but secretly turning into cosmic dust? Had the virus finally made weary of this high-rise infested neighborhood? Did it make you long for our childhood days of overachieving milk thistle bushes, those mustard flowers we chewed on while playing hopscotch?
The next morning, I woke to your body that had gone cold, as if overnight the crushing weights of black holes had filled every cavity in your bones. You were now more bone than flesh, more sorrow than life. Take me instead of her, I had begged God every night. I’d always been the smaller star, the one with tiny reserves of optimism. Why do you think I fled to the moon?
The ambulance light flashed outside our window, turning our home blue, less blue, dark blue. I hissed at the young and frustratingly alive medic who thought stupidly that a stretcher could ever be enough to carry you away. Nothing would ever be enough anymore.
Years have passed, hollow without you. The virus has left only the Iranian cynics alive. I cannot bring myself to leave Iran again, even as it has become a crusted shell of a place I once knew. I can almost hear you say: Someone must stay, no? Someone must try.
Pegah Ouji (@Oujipegah) is an Iranian American writer who writes in Farsi and English. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Joyland, Epiphany, Fugue, Necessary Fiction, Tiny Molecules, Flash Frog, and National Flash Fiction Day, among others. She is currently an Emerging Writer Fellow at Smokelong Quarterly as well as an editorial fellow at Roots, Wounds, Words.