From Afar

Dream One

Last night too I dreamed vividly. I had
taken Suzy to a zoo by the sea. The animal
cages were set up on stilts over the water,
round aluminum scaffolds holding them in
chain links. The sky was blue and
cloudless, the sea calm. We were jumping
from scaffold to scaffold to feed the
animals, laughing, having a good time. A
seal was following us in the water. But
then, around the bend, Suzy was out of
sight when I heard the sound of something
falling into the water. I immediately
jumped, looking for her under a cool and
opaque turquoise.

God! What is happening to me? Like an
alarm clock my body wakes me up every
night with one of these dreams. My heart is
always racing, my stomach in knots.
Overproduction of acid, a valve not closing
properly in the horizontal position, I am a
factory in need of repair. A burst pipe
enough to flood the lower floors. Control
the fear of dying, or simply giving in.

This winter is almost past. One more. Not
always this simple. My little sister in the
cold streets of Toronto. The coldest winter
of Eastern Canada in eighty years. Record
snowfall. Not allowed to remain in the
same shelter for more than three days.
Mom helplessly praying, thousands of
miles away. Barely months after my
father's death.

When it seemed that something could be
done, I went to Toronto to see my sister.
The phone conversations were becoming
surreal. Her boss calling to say she was
fired. Her landlord wanting to get paid.
Babbles about sexual molestations. Coke.

She told me not to come. She said she
wouldn't open the door. I went, staying
with my friend Terry and his daughter
Zuri, hence I brought Suzy.

A Toronto that shatters my memories of me
and Dee, in bliss. Far dirtier and meaner
that I remembered. Hopelessness in the
faces of pedestrians, commuters,
merchants. And then a flight of stairs to
her place. My heart. "Who is it?" "It's me,
Betty." A long pause and the door opens.
She has aged. Her skin is not very good,
her arms seem bruised at the elbows. Her
hair is bright red and she is heavier than I
imagined, but not as bad as I feared. We
hug, she makes us tea and asks Suzy "And
what have we got here?" Immediately she
gets busy making Suzy a ring. The TV is
playing, there is pot on the counter. It
seems she hasn't left the apartment in
weeks. The smell of occupied small
quarters.

I tell her the apartment is not as bad as
Mom made it to be. The location too, not as
bad as Queen Street can be. I listen to her
unending stories, how someone broke into
her place, stole her clock and threw it on
the roof next door, how her music box
plays the music she composed.

She is in the middle of trying to sell my
father's paintings for hundred of thousands
of dollars, if not millions. She has engaged
two crooks, a Mike Tyson look alike and a
middle-aged Englishman with a crew cut
and shifting eyes. I try to bring her back to
earth. But my efforts are half hearted. I
know her well enough to know that she
would never, ever, take my advice on any
matter. The dealers are milking her, eight
hundred dollars for a web site, two
hundred for authentication. The king of
Singapore is interested. And so on.

I am out of my league. I offer her money in
exchange for her to seek psychiatric help. I
have a list in my pocket. She agrees, then
refuses at the last minute. In the mean
time, me and Suzy visit the places me and
Dee lived in.

We travel by train to Montreal, where we
meet my friend Ivan. We take our
customary "every ten year" picture. He
looks at it for a while, unsure of something.
We talk about Betty, while Suzy is making
a dream catcher for them. Ivan too has had
his share of alcohol abuse. He tells us about
the time he was contacted by aliens. Irene,
his young wife shouts from the next room
"Someone put something in your drink." It
doesn't matter to him. "I wouldn't put her
away", he offers. "It doesn't matter where
she is anymore."


Calm, but not

A Sunday at home. I am lying in bed with
a kink in my neck. I worked in the
workshop from the time I woke up until
night time. The resulting pine table is
standing in a corner. It gives me enough
pleasure to counter the pain. I can hear
Kim practicing his fiddle songs in the next
room. He is a beautiful boy, but with an
Italian temper. Suzy has lost her blue
pouch with all her money in it, some sixty
dollars. Dee and Kim are now looking
everywhere for it. Big commotion. "Do
you see it outside Suzy?" She's telling
Suzy this happens every time she carries
money. Suzy is carefree, as happy as can
be. Her face has changed recently. She
goes in and out of the figures of our family,
sometime to look like Betty (to my horror, I
often shiver that her character might form
along the same lines, she too, has an older
brother, getting her cues from him to start
acting up, more in line then with her peers,
and less with authority), sometimes as
plump as Dee's Mom.

This is a good period too, in its way. A
time of waiting for change, that must come,
I know. I hope for the health of my family,
for this harmonious day, for me to be less
selfish, less distant. For a while now
everything has come our way. Enough
money for our house with its wrap-around
porch overlooking the green valley below.
The pines, with their fuzzy silhouettes
against the sunsets, bright red these days
from the pollution of Sacramento.

How little it takes for the shadows to fall.
The wrong man in charge, the wrong cell
multiplies, the wrong phone call. Oh here I
go again, just as Suzy finds her purse.
Trust is our savior. Dee, she trusts. She
creates it through work and a complete
healthy attitude towards life, her life in her
hands. Me, anything can happen to me. A
wine cork at the beach.

When we were alone, me and Betty, in
Montreal, I was the same. Nothing can be
as bad as that, in that crumbling high-rise
on C™te-des-Neiges, in front of the vast
Mont-Royal cemetery, looking with awe at
my friends with their girlfriends and close-
knit families. Things must have been that
much harder with Betty. She too managed
to attach herself to a local family, polish I
think. She and Sonia were school mates. I
still get emails from Sonia inquiring about
her. No one can understand why I cannot
help.

I was mostly alone in Montreal. I cannot
remember a single meal I had with her.
Survival took all of my attention. And girls.
The social club at Sainte Rose with Pierre
Paquet. How wonderful to be that free, the
first Men Without Hats concert at Hotel
Nelson in Old Montreal. The unending
festivals. Mareesje.

Montreal is a kind of hell. All the pleasures
you can imagine, then its cold, ruthless,
racist reality. And Toronto is even worse. I
do realize that the image I present changes
all the time. The stories get tailored to the
listener. And that is you, not that I am
really aware. Every time I try to follow my
father's words, for he was better than me,
in his own decadent way, well at least
without fear, every time I pick up his old
books to read, I fall upon an angry
paragraph. Is the wrath only reserved for
me, lost in my selfish acts, or there truly is
an angry hand at work? As I see the world
of animals, I see no pity, no malice, no
grand scheme, and certainly no
punishment. And I see no difference in my
life. I see a system that has honed its
survival instincts for a long time now.
Esthetics and dignity and respect for life are
sufficient guides. Mistakes soon become
obvious, then there is no choice but to
change.


Close calls

Bruce, my friend from work, and I, usually
go for long walks after lunch. When he is
in a good mood he gestures wildly with his
hands as he talks. He mentions, in passing,
that Sigrid, his wife, is at the hospital. She
bent down to pick something up, and
rising, she hit her head hard on the door
knob. She had a headache for a couple of
days and it wasn't going away.

I was worried for her. She is a small
Argentinean girl of Icelandic descent.
Bruce himself is all American with long
thinning blond hair and beard. He is the
most easy-going and cheerful person I've
known, and he's read every book that I've
ever mentioned to him, including obscure
British science-fiction titles of my youth.

When I called to inquire about Sigrid, he
said that she is on strong medication, but
also that his Mom, who lives by herself in
San Jose, just had an accident. She's fine,
but due to her age, they are keeping her
under observation. To top it off, at work,
they've announced a new round of layoffs
and we might be affected. Some days are
full of evil. Most days are boring, but every
now and then, reality slips away, or our
delusion falls to the floor, and we get a
glimpse of the unending void that stretches
in all directions, just a few miles up from
solid ground.

I've experienced these many times, sinking
to the depth of the pool, held up in New
York City, or bringing newborn Suzy to the
hospital, when possibilities of the future are
so condensed that every word, every
gesture is of primordial importance. As if I
am on trial and the outcome depends
entirely upon me. As if an all powerful
attention is focused on me, only to move to
the next victim, or chosen one. In the same
vein, but larger in scope, huge waves carry
entire populations. War, plague,
earthquake come with without malice.
Angels, only here to teach and test, the
same way a mother's hand hits the child
who gets too close to the oven.

Ten at night. Dee is sound asleep next to
me. She always wraps herself up like a
mummy, while I'm up late, not looking
forward to the torture of the night, or the
chores of the next day. I read from this
book to the kids, they wouldn't relent
without satisfying their curiosity. "Suzy,
always Suzy!" Kim complains. "Why
don't you ever dream of me?"

I remember my father writing his poetry
down, his graceful movements of the pen,
slowing down during the curves, speeding
up while dotting the ch and t. He had such
a beautiful style, so unlike everyone else's.
Persian calligraphy, unlike Latin, is not a
lost art yet, being used everyday by most.
He wrote in the Shikaste style, or "broken".
I could never read any of it. I never quite
mastered Farsi. It has so much depth. The
difference between every day writings and
intellectual treatise requires a life-long
undertaking. Various cultures mixed in,
each littering and complicating an already
ornate language.

My Mom was always growling at my Dad
for reading books of no relevance, dusty
thick affairs that came wrapped in
newspapers. His reply was that, in this
time interval, nothing new has been said.
He was particularly fond of Mowlavi. He
devoured everything by him, ironic, for a
man who visually liked only modernism, to
read only obscure dissertations of the 17th
and 18th century. We always lived in
minimalist decors, of 50's and 60's variety.

I miss my first family, my Mom, bored and
disappointed, toiling away in the garden or
kitchen, my father locked up in his
basement studio, my sister playing in her
room, and I reading in mine.

Mostly worried about the Suzy-Betty angle,
I see the same attitudes in my family.
Maybe if it weren't for the nomadic
yearning of my father, the revolution that
forced us out, if it weren't for the fact that
Montreal was such a shock to our system,
perhaps she would be fine.

I see from the corner of my eyes, on the
screen, hyenas attacking a female zebra and
her fawn. Desperate, she attempts to
sacrifice herself, but the adorable little thing
is being eaten alive. Her head watches her
stomach being ripped apart. I know, I
know, locked in a survival dance, helping
each other getting faster, smarter. But is
this not a place for individuals too? If we
were absolutely the same as animals, for are
we not? Does intelligence matter at all? A
mother's sacrifice, a home, playing with
siblings, kicking feet while dreaming. If the
same, does it make less sense? Can we deal
with the fact that it doesn't matter at all?

The tunnel I see before dying is simply the
loss of electrical properties of the optic
nerve. Soon nothing but bones, not even
hungry hyenas to satisfy with food. Worms
at least.

I was telling my Dad that atoms that make
us are old. Hydrogen and Helium are
made in stars, but the heavier stuff is only
made in much more dramatic collisions,
super novae. Earlier than that, all matter in
a single ball. He nods; he didn't have to
read scientific papers to know. I miss his
conviction, his lack of fear. He was as
much of a hedonist as I, but he could leave
it all behind without looking back.

Does the scale matter at all, if we share our
substance? This world is a dream, he
would surely say, a dream about beauty
and nothing less. Easy for a painter to say.


Our Game

Just finished "Our Game". The back of my
neck prickling as it does on what affects me.
Didn't I say just yesterday how to stop
consuming? But I know me. At school,
with my best friend Behzad, we were
judged on academics alone, allowing me to
skip a year or so, I was young for my class.
I used to play with him earlier too, since my
father knew his from Hamadan. I
remember the inedible cooking of his Mom,
the nature magazines labeled "Nature and
Hunting" next to the 1000 piece jigsaw
puzzle on their dining room table. I
remember us talking and talking, me:
"Look at this paved road, our
neighborhood has become so pretty lately"
Just coming out of our white house. He
from his dark depressing place just a couple
of blocks north. He's looking at me with
shock. "I can't believe you can be so
stupid", he's eying me, as if for the first
time. "Do you have any idea of the poverty
that surrounds you?" At school he's
talking to Massoud, a cunning boy that I
instinctively loath. They are already
political at, I don't know, ten or eleven,
and I, admiring the landscape.

Later on, much later on, I hear my Mom
whispering what they did to his sister, how
he escaped to Paris, how the secret service
arrested his father to serve the rest of his
sentence. Another casualty of the
revolution, he never showed up to save his
father. A communist cell in Paris, or was it
his brother?

I remember leafing through his father's
hunting magazines, mostly dealing with the
Caspian forests, pictures of goats and deer,
ads for Russian riffles.

It is never worth it. As I'm interrogating
my father about the darkness in the old
books, about how we will pay for
everything, except blind acceptance. He
responds in a personal manner, gently: "In
my opinion, it is difficult to do good. You
give money to a beggar, he goes home
drunk, and beats his wife. It is much
preferable not to do evil." I point out he's
always giving money to the beggars. He
shrugs and smiles, going on about letting
go, about purifying your thoughts in order
to become a medium for the World. Like a
radio, dialed in to the right frequency.

So here I am, still writing for my friend
Bruce, what I can't tell him in our short
lunch walks.

I am infected once more. I go from
infection to infection. This time around,
how not to be a turtle, "He always hid in
his clothes" says the ghost of my Dad. "He
didn't want anything to do with the outside
world. He was lonely, but well educated,
and rather striking, in his timid way. His
break came as an accountant to an older,
wealthy trader's widow. He ends up
marrying her, and she knows she is much
older, and sets up to find him another
younger bride, one that she likes herself.
You see, he had it as good as you."

I wonder who he's talking about. Isn't this
almost like his own father? Or was it my
Mom's father? One of them was also tall
and striking, and married for money. He
perished down south, his young wife going
to find him, in the middle of a ship hit by
typhoid.

My lineage, with time to kill, time to read,
and become painters and poets, none of
them a man of action, on the fringe, from
afar.

As much as I hate being a traveler, here I
am, a stranger again to my surroundings,
lost in apathy. What do I know about what
works best for shop keepers, farmers or
academics? I can't even tell what works for
me. What do I know about violence? Wait,
not true, I do know about a victim's
rebellion. But that's my own, not
transferable, of no relevance.


Dream two

Dee wanted me to read her what I've
written. "Are you going to fall asleep? You
always do." "No, I'm wide awake" she
replies as she sinks deeper under the
blanket. Her face is inches away from
mine, with a happy warm smile.

It is raining hard outside. It sounds like pee
on wet ground. The wind rises and falls
just like the waves of the ocean, but with a
much slower rhythm. Our window is left
open.

As I'm reading to her, I can see her eyes
dart in all directions under her eyelids. I
stop and listen to the soothing storm, to her
breathing. She's peaceful.

I switch to "Pig Earth", and can't help but
thinking about our neighbors to the south,
Rudy and his wife Valdy and their
daughter Joanna. They are from Germany,
and their reason for living here is that they
won the immigration lottery one day. They
belong to a fringe religious group, and try
to live the American Frontier Life. I really
like them, even though they preach a little
now and then. Rudy would do anything to
help out. He prays for my sister, after I told
him about her state. We are often invited to
their place to watch strange movies about
patriotism and early settlers. I sometimes
forget how many churches are popping out
everywhere. I told Rudy how, one day,
during Dee's gardening meeting, I found a
freemason ring in the toilet, and how, when
I returned it to their lodge in Placerville,
was allowed into their intricate and
windowless meeting hall. "That's where
they practice their black mass" Rudy says.
He lives in a completely dualistic world.
But this world has treated him well. I am at
ease in the presence of truly religious men.
My school years at Saint Louis, a French
catholic school for boys, was nothing short
of surreal. Rudy hates the Catholics, in
particular the Vatican. He wears a cowboy
hat and drives the biggest truck you can
imagine. He's warm hearted and loyal to
his friends.

We are such an unlikely collection of
people, such a luxury to have so much
space between houses. We bought our
house from our closest neighbors to the
East. Their ancestors used to own most of
these hills. The previous owner, their son, a
construction painter who married an
ambitious wife, built his dream home here.
It turned into a nightmare for them,
inspections dragging out, money running
out, fighting often and then a divorce, with
three boys running wild. When we first
met him, he was living is a small trailer
where later on, his parents built their
retirement home. He looked at us with a
smile and said "A family, eh?" We
purchased it literally minutes before the
bank would have foreclosed.

I see him from time to time on his Harley,
always happy to see me.

The rain has slowed down to a trickle, and
I'm as sleepy as Dee. It is a pleasure to
write and difficult to stop. I truly have no
idea if any of this is of interest to anyone.
Who cares who lives next to whom? I, I, I,
everywhere I look. But what else is there to
share? As my time is running out, a petty
but happy life, outside of any community,
useless to all. I imagine Kim or Suzy
having the same thoughts forty years from
now. If the past provides any clues, the
future shall be nothing like we imagine.
Who would have thought, for a second,
that the Iron Curtain would fall? That we
might swing once more from Science to
Religion, and Tribal War?

I dreamed I was at a screening of a movie.
The hall was packed and Dee and I had to
sit separately, me on the floor, and her
further away on a chair. I could see her
chatting away with people. The movie
starts. It is a series of similar takes. Each
from the same starting point: a man and a
woman on a boat, the man falling in the
water. Where he falls and what happens
varies from segment to segment. In one,
after the water, he is descending through a
well. The walls of the well are painted with
colorful hieroglyphs, but instead of the
Egyptian symbols, they are depressions
made by strange objects: a screw that is
wider in the middle than the two ends. I
am the falling man, and as I hit the bottom,
my face falls off, revealing crude
mechanical machinery inside. Brass wheels
and such. The movie, I realize, is a horror
movie, but I don't know why. I am sitting
in the projection room again. The man
sitting on the floor to my right is the
director, and offers me to play in the next
segment. The flesh of the leg of the girl
sitting to my left is burning hot.

When I called Mom, she told me it was my
father's wake, when I was dreaming so
wildly. She said the house was busy with
guests going through Javad stories. She
also told me Shokouh, my aunt, was in the
hospital in San Francisco, and that she had
a close call that night, that I should go for a
visit.

I remembered Shokouh from my
childhood. She was a very athletic girl, so
much so, that she made it into the Iranian
basketball team. They had come to the
states in the 50s when their bus had a bad
accident. A lot of her teammates lost their
lives, and she was confined to the
wheelchair, being paralyzed from the waist
down. She became a personality when,
during the war, there were a lot of invalid
young people, and she was busy coaching
them and lifting their spirits. We went to
visit her before and were amazed at her
energy and good humor.

Since Kim had his violin lesson, Suzy and
I drove down to see Shokouh. She had just
been released from the hospital and looked
years older. Her complexion was ash grey.
"It was your father's wake last night" she
says as she greets us. We talk for a couple
of hours. I brought her one of my father's
small paintings that my Mom had
promised her. Her son Arash joined us a
bit later. He is so sweet. Since he had a
poster of Sadegh Hedayat on his wall, we
talked about him for a while. I felt so
powerless. Her internal organs are not
functioning properly. Her kidney, bladder,
lungs. Every now and then, she can't
breath. Then they have to rush her to the
hospital. She is held by a thin invisible
thread of joy.

We spent some time afterwards in the
bookstores of Haight-Ashbury area. The
talk of War everywhere. On the way back,
with Suzy fast asleep in the back seat, my
mind is drained of its usual chatter. I feel
the change in everyone's life. A turn for the
worse. I truly believe we have failed in
some abstract sense. We have become so
numerous that now, we are the biggest
untapped source of food on the planet. We
take and take, looking no further than the
next month. Weapons everywhere.


Storm

I was watching the most amazing show last
night on giant black holes at the center of
galaxies. It turns out there would be no
galaxy without their appetite. What are
you? Demons? Unimaginable forces? And
where is divine intervention these days
when it can be seen by all? Why subtle
illumination when a single sign can bring
us to our knees? Is there love for
humankind or rites of passage only? Oh
well, they blew themselves up. On to a
different Sun. And where are our friends
from Frolix 8? Show us there is anything
besides deadlier technology and the law of
survival. I imagine the ones asked to do the
killing. Their trembling hands (at least at
first), the haunting images forever
engrained in their young minds.

"Get off the toilet, it is a quarter past seven"
screams Suzy through the walkie-talkie she
stealthily dropped in the bathroom. The
news drains me. I remember I was driving
in a rented car when Desert Storm
happened. I was listening to the radio, to
the General explaining his strategy, when a
couple of stations got mixed. I could still
hear his words through the static, but
superimposed was relentless drumming
and shrill screaming voices. I left it on for a
while and could feel the black magic at
work.

This time too, I had left the radio on the
whole night. Nothing but the account of
the war by the BBC on the NPR. I dreamed
that me, Kim and Suzy were in Baghdad.
We were walking on a wide sun-drenched
boulevard. A local man was pointing at
buildings. I guess he was our guide. All of
a sudden the kids started running. "Kim!
Keep an eye on Suzy!" I shouted. I was
still listening to the description of the
architecture, which was quite interesting to
me. But as the kids disappeared from my
sight, I started to have doubts about
Kim's ability to watch over her. I ran
after them, finding only Kim on a street
corner. More frantically now, I was
shouting for Suzy, conscious of the fact that
I was screaming in English. Waking up to
the sounds of artillery from the radio, I
dived back into sleep to find her, forcing
her head to poke out from a window,
knowing full well that I was cheating.

"Would you like a glass of tea?" asks Suzy
from the kitchen. Kim is in there too,
fixing himself a sandwich. The fire is still
burning in the wood stove. Did I say that it
looks darker in the mornings?

A forest fire is not necessarily harmful to
the forest. The older trees are weeded out.
It looks like devastation to our eyes, but
underneath the ground, untouched by the
flames, the organic matter is returned to
earth. Very quickly a vibrant young green
spreads over the land. Overhead there is a
clear sky, and beneath, nutritious rotting
roots. It doesn't matter who started the fire.
We see the future as an extension of the
past, but it is more complicated than that,
every act having so many repercussions,
and our minds so blinded by information.

Unending warm afternoons. My sister
playing with her dolls, and I daydreaming
next to the kerosene heater. Could I have
known living on twenty acres in California
and Betty all alone in the streets of Toronto?
What was I thinking then? Reading the
unabridged Thousand and One Nights, in
thirty volumes, with its unending accounts
of the construction of the world, the
enumeration of the stars and the giant
turtles carrying the continents. The magical
accounts of the exploits of Alexander the
Great, the death of valiant warriors that
carried him all the way to India, in the
hands of the Djinns, giants with heads of
leopard, who, when holding their breath,
could bloat into balloons and fly overhead.

My father encouraged me to these ancient
stories, and their length transported me
beyond the everyday strife.

I read Kim fantasy books about humans
and elves and dragons, thinly veiled
descendants of the myths of my youth.
What was is forever renewed. Every
generation needs to make its own mistakes.
No matter that we've spread to every
corner of the globe, replacing animals and
trees with our vision of comfort.

I say nothing new. I do nothing
worthwhile, I don't help out at Kim's
school. I drive to work, and at night I read
or write stories. I watch the War on TV,
deeply pessimistic about the outcome. I
forget about the Angel of Destruction,
being an Angel nevertheless.


Stranger

A soldier is being interviewed. He is young
but speaks with confidence. He holds
himself in a nonchalant way, his face still
the focal point framed by all his gear.

In the background other soldiers are
crouched down, machine guns pointing
away, their backs to the camera.

There is a noise like distant firecrackers.
The soldier stops in the middle of his
sentence. His eyes try to focus on a location
beyond the camera. We see his profile now.
He hasn't tensed up, or forgotten to
complete his sentence.

I don't want him to loose his footing. I
want him to return home, and tell his father
everything he saw. I want him to sleep
soundly in his bed, if possible at all.

"They couldn't take us, but it wasn't a walk
either. Be nice to take a shower when we
reach.."

In the background the other soldiers are
shooting.

"Where is the Citadel?" ask the titans
desperately. When the answer is not
forthcoming, methodically, they set up to
destroy and exterminate everything and
everyone on their path. This is a subplot in
the book I'm reading Kim these days. I
am thinking of this line as I'm watching the
looting in Baghdad. Utter chaos. Not
enough to have buildings reduced to
craters, old men blowing themselves up,
women weeping for their husbands. We
watch in horror. Dee curses next to me.

When the rules are suddenly meaningless,
I'm expecting more. I am still hoping for a
better world, but the hope grows dim, my
friends jobless and penniless, almost as
desperate in here. What happened? I do
recall, a while back, thinking that I'll
remember now in fondness later on, the
way I was brought up, never trusting the
good times.

I was just a kid, sitting on a railing in a busy
street. I don't recall why I was left there.
Most likely my father had asked me to wait
for him. He was always briskly going
places. The air was hot, polluted and
dusty. I was under a tree and the sparse
leaves left polka dots on the ground all
around, shadows clearly defined, the scene
almost monochrome. The street was full of
cars, old Mercedes Pontons, painted the
orange of taxis, honking to each other in
coded conversations. My attention wasn't
really focused. In a dazed state, above
sleep, below inquiry, in front of me women
with flowing flowery chadors were passing
by, their high heels silent on the soft
asphalt, and men carrying tin boxes with
brightly colored ads, their faces severe and
worried. All of a sudden, I felt an intense
pain spreading from my knees, bringing
tears to my eyes. A passerby had slapped
me and was moving away, a dark smile on
his lips. I had never, up to this point,
experienced malice. Or whatever that it
was. Lust?

I see desperation only in the eyes of the
women and old men on the screen. Young
men and kids are different. They live in a
different plane of time that is narrower in
scope. I see them on their bicycles carrying
giant ceiling fans, or on the sidewalk trying
to figure out the best grip on a filing
cabinet.

Empires are born of ideology. It propels
the people to great works, everyone
electrified, moving in unison. Zoroaster
and the Achemenids, Christianity and the
Holy Roman Empire, Mohammed and the
Arabs, Communism and Russia, the
Constitution and the United States. And
then what happens? Pride blinds more
than power. We are the chosen. Chinks
slowly appear. They always have.

We are the mice in the underbrush. We
make love, we have children. We write, or
build small houses. When they burn, not if,
we move to a brighter clearing, looting for a
new bed.

"And what about beauty?" I hear a voice.
Isn't everything beautiful? How can I tire
of a young animated face? A tree whistling
in the wind. The American river flowing
graciously between the rocks. The Tigris
meandering through the desert. My
Pelikan pen gliding effortlessly across the
page.



The grains are falling
In the beginning, as snow
Dancing in the dark

Each a torn page
Captivated by a song
From a land afar
But unable to come to rest
In this world of tomorrow

You found them, I know
And power and dominion
And the arcane tales
Stripped of wisdom (lost),
A brand new blade
Discovering then
The taste of its foe

I've seen you before
You, the Vizir of old
The Shehrzard of the west,
The Golem of rice