The Best American Short Stories 2018

Dina Nayeri A Big True ^{from The Southern Review}

Standing outside her locked door, he scanned his memory for places Yasmine might have gone—a drink? A day-trip? He walked the forty blocks back to Port Authority, spending most of it knotted in regrets and daydreams. He adjusted his earbuds, turning up the sound on the 1970s Turkish folk player he had found, his late father’s colleague. The ragged old hippie droned in Rahad’s ear as he walked, the sound crossing oceans and decades. Every time he heard this song, he remembered the singer’s thick moustache, the way he seemed to sing through it. He missed Yas. Against all reason and recent memory, he had imagined her delighted to spend an afternoon together, indulging in a bottle of smoky red. If he had taught her nothing else, at least she had kept this: an hour isn’t squandered if you taste a good wine, if you fill your ears with good music. He had convinced himself that such a visit would be possible, if he could just survive her initial surprise and anger—he hadn’t considered that she may be spending the day elsewhere.

The last time he showed up unannounced, his welcome was a long, dramatic sigh. “I called, azizam,” he said, deflecting the lecture he knew was brewing in her head. He didn’t set down his overnight bag or sitar case for fear of her anger, but in the end, she invited him in. “I called many times,” he said and moved past her. “You don’t check your messages. I got tired of waiting.” That was months ago.

Today he had rung her doorbell again and again, shifted his bag and case to his left shoulder, and glanced up at her girlish, sea-green curtains, before turning north to catch a bus to Wilmington. His cheeks flushed—he had believed she would invite him to stay for a night or two. He had believed with such force. Never mind, he thought; that afternoon he would move into the Wilmington YMCA, his fourteenth in six years, but better not to make a spectacle of it. Since the death of her mother when she was six, Yasmine suffered from a kind of hysteria triggered only by his various superficial prospects.

He shook his phone for a new song, losing himself in one by Thom Yorke—oh, how he loved Western music. How glorious, whatever the style. Secretly, he liked it far more than the Iranian sitar classics he had played to spellbound crowds in Tehran. Maybe later he would post this song and collect the likes, lucky amulets to carry on the road. This meager attention helped him fend off the suffering over Yasmine and Iran, his vanished self, his music. His father, the elder ustad Sokouti, had been a world-renowned master of seven string instruments, and Rahad a celebrated sitarist and music teacher—but no ustad, no master. Still, he had a voice. But by the time the blood reached his daughter, it seemed all artistry had been strained out. Who, then, would remember those heady Tehran nights?

On the bus, he posted and waited. The song was bad bait—only four likes. He felt ashamed for the display: a serious Iranian musician, in his fifties no less, posting the songs of American teenagers who have no musical education. No, no, Yorke was good, and not even an American.

Now Yasmine appeared at the top of his feed. Ah. She was spending the weekend in Connecticut. He was tempted to like it, but refrained. She blocked so willy-nilly lately, and since he reopened his account, she had liked nothing of his. Where was the dignity of fatherhood? Yesterday, fifteen people had liked his post; but from her, nothing.

In Wilmington, the April air was crackling and fresh—none of the wet, cold residue of winter that covered New York—and the walk from the bus station revived him. Before long he saw it, the brown brick, the blue sign: YOUNG MEN’S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION. He was neither a young man nor a Christian, though he was willing to pretend—in fact, he enjoyed it; there was great peace in disappearing. In Iran he had pretended to be a Muslim while spending every night in underground clubs. Once, in an Afghan village he had pretended to be his own father—all this in service of hunting the next great fog of music in which to disappear, a rhythm to shape that month or that year.

The facade of the YMCA building was graying in parts, blotched like the face of a pretty woman who has spent the day crying; he could see that it had recently been presentable. He entered and signed in, paid his twenty-five dollars, and accepted his key, nodding thanks to the receptionist, a young black woman with a tight, old-fashioned bun at the nape of her neck. Looking him up and down with almond eyes (almost Persian, like his), she licked her gleaming teeth in momentary confusion. What was he doing there, in his long black trench coat that might have cost something in better days, his elegantly battered leather shoulder bag and sitar case? He wanted to say to her, Surely, young lady, respectable people pass over rough soil now and then? But if he said this, he would likely botch the English, draining the words of their poetry. Besides, she must already know it; she offered rooms for twenty-five dollars a night.

“No needles, weed, or weapons in your room,” she said, her voice flat. “There’s a shared kitchen and bathroom, but you need your own dishes and soap.”

He walked through the dark corridor, past the communal bathroom and kitchenette, to his first-floor room. Before turning the key, he said a word in prayer (these days he said his prayers to Bob Marley, though the recipient changed often). Each new YMCA rekindled his dread of what that first swing of the door would reveal: in some states, he was met with a room as nice as a countryside motel, with a clean white duvet and a quaint photo on the wall; in others a hovel, hospital sheets and burned patches on factory carpets. Inside, he removed the trench, folded it twice, and placed it carefully on the twin bed. Eyeing the shadows on the crimson bedspread, he thought better of it, and placed the coat on the chair instead. He pulled back the bedding, lifted the mattress, and checked every seam and corner for insects. From his leather satchel, he removed a wrinkled garbage bag and a box of baking soda and peeled back the duct tape on the box’s mouth. He placed his folded coat in the bag, sprinkled it with baking soda, and tied the end in a knot. He shook the package a little and left it on a shelf, the only available surface besides the chair and the bed. Then, he began the work of examining his sitar, polishing it, tuning it. He mourned his lack of funds, as the sitar needed new strings. When he was finished, he put away the instrument and turned his chair toward the window. The curtains were thick, a fading floral pattern, and smelled of long-extinguished cigarettes. He didn’t want to touch them. Instead, he watched the cars disappear from the parking lot outside—the teenagers going home after basketball, mothers leaving a yoga class.

He craved a coffee but thought it better to wait until dinnertime, when he could have his coffee with a meal and perhaps find a cluster of computers nearby so he could check what the Internet was saying about him today. He regretted breaking his laptop. But things break; this is a reality of life. He didn’t want to waste his days puttering around online as Yasmine did, no matter what her job title. And yet, he had to admit, as he watched the basketball players and yogis rush home, their hours bound by routine but also simplified by it, that he did waste a precious lot of hours just surviving. Looking for a new neighborhood, beginning from zero for the fifth time in a year, coordinating his meals around Internet locations, finding Laundromats, hunting teaching gigs and motels outside of town, visiting friends and hoping they would invite him to stay for the night. This, every day for weeks, including winters. Then, always, back to the YMCA.

As a matter of habit, he spent most of his daytime hours at the public library looking up music, always remembering to check the three big websites dedicated to his own career that the Internet had created in the past few years. He admired the artful arrangement of his photos and videos; his biography in both languages; the muffled, sorrowful tune (his own composition) that played when he clicked on the first page. Finding the sites had been a welcome surprise. For so long, when the Internet thought of “ustad Sokouti,” they thought of his father, who already had dozens of websites to himself. They must be witnessing a resurgence of interest in more modern renditions of classic songs, Rahad thought when he first came upon the sites. He considered showing them to Yasmine, since they might give her a feeling of security. He longed to be an asset to her, like American parents. Not a burden. But he never spoke of it; such topics always turned into fights.

To Yasmine, it seemed that Rahad had stopped journeying along with the rest of society somewhere around 1998. He had given up, sat in the road, and fiddled with his sitar until the others were far out of sight. Progress was not his talent—he liked the 1960s, even the ’70s, but beyond that, he had to be dragged. He had no health insurance, no acumen for anything technical, and was apparently an Internet bumbler. He had an outdated, off-line smartphone for his music, an old flip phone that held fifteen text messages at a time, no voicemail, and an email address Yasmine had set up that he checked every few days. Even so, he succumbed to some kind of scam almost monthly, each time thinking that the Web must have its rules and standards. “I wish you’d be more savvy online, Baba joon. It’s full of con artists looking for someone just like you,” she’d say. “I want you to be safe.” He didn’t know what safety had to do with it. Still, he made promises. “I promise you, Yasi joon,” he wrote in an email, “I will acquire Internet skills and general American savvy.”

The next morning, after a deep but troubled sleep, Rahad spent an hour disinfecting every surface, rechecking the pillows for bedbugs, and spraying every corner with insect repellant. When he was finished, he lit a sandalwood candle and put the Abyssinians on his portable CD player. The sound barely reached the four corners of his room, but it took all of a minute for someone to knock.

“What you are hearing there, neighbor?” a cheerful voice with a mixed-up Indian accent traveled through the flimsy wooden door. Rahad clicked his travel broom back into its plastic casing. He opened the door and said a muted greeting, trying hard not to react to the overpowering scent of patchouli and citrus that assaulted his nose. A dark man around his own age but more weathered, with thick gray stubble and a T-shirt that seemed to be made from an American flag, was smiling widely, displaying three yellow teeth that alternated with his white ones, like piano keys. He stepped inside, slapped Rahad on the back, and said, “Bro, do one thing. Please be putting on ‘Forward Jah.’ That is my favorite of this album by ten thousand percent.” His mouth made wide, deliberate motions.

He introduced himself as Wyatt, wandered to Rahad’s bed, and sat without invitation. He asked about Rahad’s origins in a way that suggested he saw himself as the more American of the two.

“Tehran,” said Rahad as he flipped to the song Wyatt had requested. “And you?”

“I am coming from DC,” said Wyatt, rubbing his knees with his palm. “An agreeable city. A first-class city. But bitch work to be surviving there, you know?”

Rahad tried not to chuckle. He had known many Indians. Most had accents with a hint of British, dulled after decades abroad. This man sounded American, but forcibly so, as if he had left Calcutta last week and, afraid of sounding “fresh off the boat,” as they say, was trying to compel his accent to fit the patterns and rhythms of natives through a heavy regimen of mangled Americanisms and mouth exercises. “And the name Wyatt? How did you get it, sahib?”

“What you are meaning?” he said, eyes wide.

“I mean, tell me your good name,” Rahad said. He wanted this Wyatt to know that he had traveled to India, that he knew the world this man had left behind, and that the only way to be Rahad’s friend was to own up to the real story.

“My good name?” said Wyatt, making a twisting gesture with his hand—as if plucking a ripe fruit from the tree—that absolutely gave away his origins. He grinned toothily. “I have not the least good idea what you are meaning. What finds you in this establishment, brother? Here is only down in the lucks, immigrants, some pot smokers, and that sort. You seem like nice old Irani gentleman, no disrespect.”

Rahad coughed into his fist. “We are same age, I think. Fifty-four, fifty-five?”

“Oh no, no, sir,” Wyatt laughed, flashing his yellow teeth again. “I am just turning forty only. I am here temporarily. Who knows what is coming next for anyone.”

Having decided that the man suffered from some kind of mental illness, Rahad grew eager to expel him from his room. He wanted to gather his things and find an Internet café or library, but couldn’t overcome his Iranian manners—he would not kick out a fellow traveler. He nodded a few times and waited. But Wyatt only smiled and shook his head to the music. “Forward Jah!” he sang, not making the slightest motion to leave.

The next day Wyatt arrived at his door before breakfast. Apparently he had found naan, the soft, stretchy bread that Iranians and Indians share. “Do one thing. Eat this naan, Mr. Rahad, because you are surely missing your home.”

He hadn’t been home for two decades, but he didn’t mention this to Wyatt. Instead he focused on whether he should eat food offered by a crazy man. Would it be tainted? But what can you put in a chunk of plain naan? He ate some and agreed that it was good, freshly made like home. “You find tanoor around here? Where you buy this?”

Through a mouthful of bread Wyatt said, “No, no, is brick ovens here only. No tanoor. I am making dough in bathroom sink here, extra one I can be using all night for rising dough, then onward to my colleague at pizza joint for baking. Nice and fresher, cheaper breakfast than bagel or doughnut.”

“Clever,” Rahad muttered, giving the wet lump in his mouth a hard swallow.

Then Wyatt’s gaze fell on Rahad’s sitar in the corner of the room and his mouth hung open as if he had just seen a minor deity. “You have sitar? Holy shits!”

Rahad smiled. “And what does born-in-seventies DC native know about sitar?”

“I know every music, my friend,” said Wyatt, now bent at the waist, nose-to-nose with the instrument, struggling not to pluck a string. “Shall we be having jam sesh today later perhaps? I have familiarity on tambour, which is make-doable using large bucket. You play from Viguen. I order for brick oven. It will be first class.”

Rahad knew how to play Viguen. His father never played those songs, of course, since the legendary singer was his rival, and the old man felt obliged to dislike Viguen’s Westernized music and pop-star image. The elder ustad Sokouti was a classical sitarist of the most traditional school. He excelled on every ancient string instrument, but would never touch a modern guitar. “Yes, a nice idea,” he said.

He wasted the rest of the morning staring at parked cars, remembering those difficult months after Yas found out he had given up his house and become a drifter, an avareh, and he found out that she had put down her colored pencils (her last creative thread) and taken a tougher job at Google. One day he visited, and they paced her tiny apartment and shouted at each other.

“Did you want to stay the night?” She glanced over her blow-dryer. She was getting ready for a date. What did she hope for, he wondered, as she scrutinized these men over plates of oysters and fish tacos and bone marrow? The truth was almost certainly something he had failed to give her: a family, perhaps, or a home.

“I want to spend some time with you, yes,” he said. Such skill she had at shaming.

“Where did you park?” she asked, eyes fixed on the mirror. He patted some baking soda from his pant leg, hoping she didn’t see—every time he began a stint as a nomad, he found it clinging to him wherever he went, dustings of it on his shirt, in his jacket lining, in his sheets. The white powder was familiar and it amused him, but Yasmine would judge… if she could look away from her own reflection. Where did his daughter get this marble-hard vanity? Her mother had been a distracted scientist who memorized songs and didn’t bother with appearances—sometimes she left the house with crumbs in her hair. Once, she went out with only one eye made up, and that night Rahad loved her more than all the days before. Now here was her American daughter, free to imagine and create and trust the universe, but instead she slathered on a second layer like a veil. In that, she was no different than those caged-in Tehrani girls he saw during his long sessions on the Internet, the ones with high hair under a scarf, big sunglasses and nose-job plasters, desperate to show their creative spirit in whatever way possible, but, in the end, masking themselves in another way.

Oh, the Internet, that mystical hand, that unseen eye, a marvel! It was a captivation he tried to hide from Yas. She would only say, You don’t understand it, and conjure past arguments about art, vocation, legacy, and technological skill. Besides, who wants to admit to wasting their hours that way? He reached into his shoulder bag for the pistachios he had brought for her; the blushing, leathery bulbs, still in their outer skin, were every bit old Iran.

“Bus is easier,” he said. In fact, Rahad’s driver’s license had expired and he wanted to ask to use her address to renew it, since his PO box—his one remaining fiber of a root—had lapsed. He busied his hands skinning the fresh pistachios with his thumbnail. He had found them in a nearby Eastern market that he browsed before each visit, steered there by an inexplicable banner at the edge of his screen—maybe the Internet knew that Yas had been ten when they left Iran and that she missed it more than she understood.

She shut off the dryer and stared at him, all angry eyes and perilous heels, and he felt like a boy on a scorching Tehrani school yard, again caught drumming on three upturned buckets instead of playing soccer or running the perimeter as instructed. “I can’t believe this,” she whispered.

“I like my life,” he shot back. “No mortgage or bills. Everything easy and new. You might consider something more inspiring for yourself. You were so creative—”

“Jesus, Baba. Stop!” She slammed the blow-dryer on her dresser.

“Don’t call me Jesus,” he said, trying to lighten her mood with silly bazi, but her face grew colder and he had to look away, nodding to himself—no fun Yas tonight.

“Life isn’t these quixotic fantasies!” she continued. “Yeah, Iran was all long boozy dinners and guitars in the garden, but that was a different universe. And even there it was possible… look at your baba. He had music and a big house with a courtyard—”

Such marksmanship. He interrupted in English that slipped in anger. “Why I have to be like others? You say this insult words, except than… is lies. Is not quick-exotic fantasy.” No Iranian child would dare judge her parent this way. He had never spoken such words to his father, even as the old man napped away the mornings under a mosquito net and squandered hours on the veranda with his students, strumming three strings and ignoring everyone else. “Anybody can have black-and-white life by following some instructions. I choose colorful life. I want only to walk earth, find music, think…”

She turned and muttered in accented Farsi, “You’re fifty-four. Maybe it’s time to grow your own hands and feet.” The familiar Persian expression stung. Where had she learned it? It was the sort of thing that frightened, unimaginative parents said to their children before prodding and elbowing them into medicine or real estate, and he had taken care not to be that kind of parent. Every day when she was young, he had read poems to her. Every day they had drawn castles, plucked notes, and trained her imagination through daydreams. Had he relied on other people? He never stayed more than two nights, always left behind skillfully curated CDs, washed every sheet and towel, replaced any milk or food he had eaten with organic milk and homemade bread. But to American children words are cheap, effortlessly learned and quickly dispatched. They strike fast with the tongue, offering instruction on every small thing. How can words you don’t understand humiliate, they think, muttering their wisdom in low voices only to quench themselves.

Like the day he had arrived in New York to meet with his daughter in a café. She had time for only a coffee and she spent it telling him that he had disgraced himself online.

“Baba joon, it was creepy!” she had said. Creepy was a word with which he was familiar, but the connotations changed from moment to moment, and so it frightened him. She could have meant so many things. “If you like a photo, you click like. You don’t tag yourself. You especially don’t tag yourself on top of a picture of my friend in a bikini.”

“What is you mean?” he had said, unable to hold in his anger. “I only click like. I click like for photo of my daughter enjoying beach. You make everything dirty and horrible.”

“No, you tagged yourself,” she had sighed, trying to sound sympathetic, an instinct that made him all the more angry. “You have to learn Facebook.”

“In Iran,” he snapped, getting up from the table, “no child says to father, You have to learn. No one. I never say to my father, You have to learn guitar, even though he refuses out of pride, even though no one wants to hear sitar anymore. I never say this to him. You and your computer bazi. Is big waste of life, these Facebooks.”

Amid the hundreds of promises he had made to her on the day they left Iran, he had offered only one to himself: if exile was to demean and bruise him, fine; but it wouldn’t clip his wings, replacing his craving for music with drudgery and fears of risk. And yet, the fates are crafty and they had inflicted his daughter with the very disease he despised. Yasmine, who had an American accent, who never mixed up her idioms and knew an insult from a joke and exactly what to say next, a girl who had every opportunity, had taken to taking root—a provincial instinct. At ten years old, she had set down her little suitcase, sharpened her pencils, and, like many good Iranian immigrants, set to work on her sensible American life: study, then do something joyless and technical with a steady paycheck.

After their argument at the café, he had thrown his laptop across the room (the guestroom of an old friend, a composer), shattering the screen. He quit Facebook from a library desktop. He didn’t need a computer. If he didn’t have one, Yasmine could never humiliate him with another explanation. She would just stick to complaining about his distracted, itinerant ways. And how could he make her see how life had unfolded for him? Bringing her out of Iran with two suitcases and a sitar between them, stumbling from place to place, always at the mercy of chance, until he found their home in Baltimore. There he had stayed, teaching music to the children of rich Iranians and Turks all over Maryland and Delaware. Then Yas went off to college—Harvard, he was proud to say. He had begged her (a humiliating act, particularly in Farsi) to study music or art. “Computer science is the same at U of M or D or anywhere,” he had said. “Please, azizam, Harvard has an art library that would wake Rumi from his grave.” She had moaned. “You know, other Iranian dads would be proud.” So he watched her graduate, move to New York, and start her first job. Then he set off into the world again, treading the unknown, always aching for stories, songs, adventure. Yes, he wanted a home, but purpose, inspiration, art: those are the soul’s truest needs.

The night of their big fight in her apartment, after her date, Rahad sat up, watching his daughter sleep. The couch faced her bed, and the lights of the iron-and-fog city streamed in through gauze-thin curtains, so that he could watch her chest rise and fall. He followed its rhythms like a slow song, a ritual he had invented when she was a girl, in the days after her mother died and he worried that his daughter, too, would simply neglect to wake up one morning. Yasmine thought he had no dreams, but he had big dreams. He didn’t escape the daily terrors of working in Tehran’s creative underground to live a dull life, to be a clone of everyone else, to freely relinquish all imagination. Maybe Yasmine thought he was a disappointment to his own father, but she knew nothing of the old man. He had named him Rahad. Rahad, traveler. Rahad, a musical note.

He was glad he hadn’t confessed to needing her address—the driver’s license would sort itself, as small things always do.

In the afternoon Yasmine called. Surely her neighbor had seen him linger outside her door, knocking and waiting. But she only said, “Got anything new for me?”

He was already on his feet, unzipping his leather bag. “I stumbled onto an old man in Kenya who’s been singing in the same village for fifty years. The Internet has put up five pages for him—lots of respect from the world. Let me see what I have here.” He rifled through his bag for effect; he had already chosen the four songs he would send her. He added in English, “Poor Baba joon would roll in grave knowing we listen to Kenyan man… He would roll right onto antique sitar he should have left to me.”

Yasmine laughed. “Baba joon, stop that silly bazi,” she said, her code since childhood that he should continue. “The Internet isn’t a person.” He imagined her head thrown back, scratching the spot on her chin where she had a careless habit of resting her pencil tip. Ever since grade school, she wondered aloud where the spot came from, and to this day she thought it was a mole. He loved dreamy, distracted Yasmine; not the eyeliner tech jockey, but a girl who was human and original and full of absurdities.

“If Internet is not person,” he said in English, “then why you work for him?”

She giggled. He recalled that on the day the Internet had put up his websites, the ones honoring his career, he went to a café, ordered an espresso, and read every page, nostalgia quickening and stinging his heart. Did Yasmine remember those glorious days? Apparently the Internet did. He marveled at this vital force in the world, one that hadn’t existed when his dying father had lamented his legacy, pleading, Who will play my songs? Here, two decades later, was an answer from the cosmos, an unseen deity that recognizes you, remembers you, commemorates you when your daughter won’t.

“Do you notice ever how much time is spent just in logistical doing?” Wyatt asked. They were in the Laundromat down the street from the Y, and he was carefully folding his Statue of Liberty T-shirt, which, by Rahad’s count, was one of twelve America-themed shirts he owned, every last one permanently soaked in imitation Acqua di Giò. In Rahad’s two weeks at this YMCA, Wyatt had visited every day. They had held four kitchenette jam sessions, with steadily growing attendance. Last time they even had a singer, a graying Vietnamese woman with a reedy voice like a parakeet. Often, Rahad had heard her crying in her room, her voice unmistakable. But that day, she had wandered into the kitchenette at the first sounds of music and sat on a stool, unmoving. With faraway eyes she watched Rahad play a classic Viguen tune, then she simply started to sing in her own tongue, stumbling now and then to follow the music, creating something broken and lovely. The heroin addict scavenging for food in the cupboards stopped muttering and turned to listen. Wyatt grinned with sad pleasure and quieted the rhythm of his bucket to make room for her small voice.

“I notice that, yes,” said Rahad, as he packed the last of his own shirts into a mesh bag. “You try to live simple and free but you still need place to do washing, place to cook food, to rinse a dish. Is all automatic in old life, but now just being awake takes up all the time.” Each morning Rahad locked his door and carried all his toiletries and towel back and forth to the shared bathroom. He undressed in his room, put on his clean clothes, and hung them up on a hook near his shower stall, hoping they wouldn’t be stolen. He carried his bowl and spoon to the kitchen for every meal, washed them immediately after eating, and carried them back. No food was safe there, and he had no fridge, so he ate in diners often and shopped daily based on that morning’s cravings. If he still had a car, he would keep his cash and papers in the trunk along with a cooler of water—a relief in summer, but mostly an excuse to fetch cash from the car without drawing attention. It seemed that something vital, a certain dignity perhaps, was lost in all this carrying of things.

“For damn sure, my friend,” said Wyatt, nodding and shaking his head at the same time. “That is a true. A big, big true. You empty out, and life refills itself with shit.”

“Then suddenly you’re in your car with all your clothes like an avareh,” Rahad joked. Wyatt laughed at this Farsi word they now shared. Vagrant. Itinerant. Drifter.

“And sons don’t see this,” said Wyatt, suddenly sad. Wyatt, Rahad now knew, had a grown son in Houston, an engineer and family man. “They see only what you don’t do. They say you do nothing. They don’t see the thousand CV papers you sent to this director and that director, the ten thousand doors you knocked on. You think, ‘I must get these things quick.’ Only you can’t control the getting.”

“Your English is improving, sahib,” said Rahad, hoping to cheer up his friend.

After a moment Wyatt returned to his usual happy tone, his singsong affectation, which by now Rahad was convinced had a purpose, even if it was buried too deep even for Wyatt to know. Was he a DC native as he claimed, or a new immigrant as he seemed? He never spoke of India, avoiding the topic and insisting that he was American born. Yet the posturing was comically pronounced. Rahad didn’t ask what demon made the man muddle his past. When asked about such things, he had long known, most people lie, and even if they aim for honesty, they only ever hit near the mark. “World is no respect,” said Wyatt, “until nosy neighbor sees you have own oven. Now you can make sandwich, now you’re OK. Now only—not before—they come to say, ‘If ever something is needful, you must ask.’ Funny backward business.” He chuckled and flung his laundry bag over his shoulder.

For three weeks, Rahad watched the Vietnamese woman drag herself in and out of the kitchenette, her loneliness like iron boots. Late in the second week, after a night of sharing music, she had left a pot of spiced soup outside his door. He found out from Wyatt that she had lived there for years, received food stamps, and always found someone to whom she might offer her soup. She spent her days reading her own diaries in the local mall and carefully sorting through mail from Publishers Clearing House. Her downturned eyes and drooping eyelids, like wilted petals, made Rahad want to have a drink with someone new, to talk.

In the local library’s computer cluster, he joined a dating website for older singles. He uploaded a photo of himself from three years before, holding his sitar, not quite smiling, but not looking grim either. All in all, he thought the photo captured his personality and mood. In his description he wrote:

Iranian music man, 54, seeking liberal musical woman with educated children. I can cook Iranian food. I can play all music. I will be kind. I have a little money.

That should capture it, and it seemed savvy, too; Yasmine had warned him that the Internet was full of people looking for free money. He read the profile to Wyatt, who gave several hearty nods before becoming distracted by an email from his son.

The first woman who caught Rahad’s eye was a pretty, fifty-something widow named Susan. She had bright blue eyes, a gray bob, and one front tooth that overlapped the other as if in fifty years she hadn’t thought to fix it, a quality that reminded him of his late wife. But before he could write to her, he had his first message. At the chime of the messenger, Wyatt rolled his chair toward Rahad and began reading over his shoulder.

“Aha, a beauteous one,” he said. “Do one thing, scoot your chair. Read, read.”

Rahad shifted over. The message was from a thirty-year-old woman with fire-red hair, posing in a small orange skirt beside an enormous pool. It said:

“Oh my goodness,” said Wyatt, “I am pissing myself. You caught such a good catch so quick into it! Say to her she looks like angel of light fallen from firmament.”

“She is same age like Yasmine,” said Rahad, trying to hide his shock for Wyatt’s sake. “Why she ask what I do? I already say music man.”

“Who gives the fucks?” said Wyatt, who seemed on the verge of ripping out his own beard. “Maybe she’s being busy fighting men off with stick! Write her.”

Rahad kicked away Wyatt’s chair and replied:

“Oh, you fool!” Wyatt slapped both hands on his face and leaned back in his chair. “You big, big Iranian fool. I cannot be enduring this not one small bit. I cannot.”

Two minutes later, Elizabeth wrote again:

“Oh holy gods, she is not giving up, this one,” said Wyatt. “Write to her that she is a flower. Say, ‘World has no first-class creation better than beautiful woman.’”

Rahad batted away his friend’s hand, which was dancing between Rahad’s nose and the computer screen. He had to admit, he felt encouraged by the attention. As a young man in Iran, he had enjoyed the attention of many women. He had fans. Now, he took a moment to reread Elizabeth’s words before he replied: “I am musician from Iran.” Succumbing to a tinge of vanity, he added:

“Excellent response,” said Wyatt with a smack of his lips. “You wised up very much. First-class message.”

Moments later, his computer pinged: “Rahad, I see online that you have nice history in Iranian music.” Here Wyatt interrupted. “What she is meaning?” he said, his bunched fingers in Rahad’s face as if he were offering him a plum. “Do one thing, be googling yourself for me right now, right this second.” Rahad waved away the request and continued reading:

“Ohhh. Crazy, crazy bitch,” whispered Wyatt. “Was too good from beginning.”

Rahad laughed. “We are too much the dreamers, Wyatt joon.”

“Maybe she’s not fully, totally crazy in real life,” muttered Wyatt, leaning on his hand as he continued staring at Elizabeth’s photo.

Rahad shook his head. “When Yasmine says word trust a hundred times in one talk, is because she lies by skin of teeth. And no mention that real Harvard people wear details on forehead like war paint.” He typed Elizabeth’s email address into a search engine that Yasmine had shown him. “Shame,” he muttered. “Is on list of scam.”

He logged out of the computer and gathered his things while Wyatt cursed their luck. “What cluster of fucks. Bitches always have surprise in sleeves, I tell you.”

“What if tonight we cook our own food?” said Rahad, suddenly eager to eat a Persian meal again. “Maybe we cook a nice kabob or a stew with rice.”

“Oh yes,” said Wyatt. “They have best Punjabi food in DC. We make with DC method, uses more turmeric than cumin, much nicer.”

When Rahad finished packing his bag, he saw that Wyatt had googled his name and was shaking his head at the photos on one of the three big websites dedicated to Rahad’s work. Wyatt clicked on a snapshot of Rahad with his head hung, cradling his favorite sitar, the instrument mostly obscured by his longish black hair. Rahad remembered that night and that photo. Yasmine had taken it from atop the shoulders of a distant uncle during Rahad’s final concert in Tehran, just before they left the country. “I cannot read these Farsi writings, bro, but you are being modest before. Very modest.”

“Internet does what it wants with informations,” said Rahad, trying not to smile.

They strolled to a local discount market. In the produce aisle, Wyatt rushed ahead to find this and that, while Rahad checked items off a list. “Look at sea of onions people throw to floor,” Wyatt groaned, craning his neck to see under the vegetable racks.

Rahad asked, “Do you think perhaps I am more Internet savvy after today?”

“Back in slum this is big, big crime!” said Wyatt to the onions. He added quickly, “Back in slum of DC.” Rahad just stared at his list. “Oh yes, yes,” Wyatt finally replied. “For sure. We thwarted lady romance scammer right in her tracks. Or maybe we have turned down super-delicious young redhead with Harvard degree. Either way, we most definitely did not do something not savvy. So, well done, sir.”

The next morning, Wyatt brought him naan from his sink again, and Rahad offered him a story—an even trade in both their cultures. He told his neighbor about his broken computer, the sleepless nights he had spent on Yas’s couch. He told Wyatt about the Thanksgivings Yasmine had spent as a guest of her friends or classmates, and about the famous ustad Sokouti and his palatial home wrapped around a Moroccan-style courtyard. He described the wash pool shaded by persimmon and plum trees, the vines that trimmed the high walls, the array of shapely string instruments lined up against the brick, tall or dainty or rotund, like bandmates waiting to play, and the pretty maid washing spoons and bowls and kitchen towels among the goldfish. In summer days, his baba joon walked around the garden in loose pants and a large straw hat, picking sour plums from the trees, sucking them through his gray moustache and shaking his head with pleasure. He was a large man with a full face and a wrestler’s gait, but gentle, always humming, and his house was full of delicious smells and sitar music. Lost now, all that.

Wyatt murmured, “American children always are wanting more.”

Later in the week, Wyatt waved two bus passes like they were winning lottery tickets and announced that they were going to New York. Rahad accepted, and when Wyatt told him to bring his sitar, he shrugged—his sitar was always with him. Maybe Yasmine had time for a coffee. He left her a message at work. At the bus stop, he sat quietly, hands on knees. Wyatt chatted on, almost to himself. “In DC, you know, they are putting fake bus bench outside old folks’ home. Very realistic. You know why? So Alzheimer folks don’t get on real bus thinking they are going to who knows where. Is that not brilliant? Sometimes I am sitting here, and I am thinking, Maybe I finally made it to Alzheimer bus bench. Maybe I am ninety, imagining myself sitting here with you, new friend, Irani music man, but really I am sitting next to a toy sign made of flimsy paper.”

In Times Square, though the stench of piss and car exhaust and roadside hot dogs sickened Rahad, he followed dutifully behind his friend, clutching his sitar a little closer each time someone bumped into him. They stopped at a loud corner near a subway stop and Wyatt turned. “You will be playing here.”

Rahad laughed. Then he saw that his friend was serious.

“Who knows who will be walking by and hearing you,” said Wyatt, eyes alight. “Internet is nothing: this is the absolute very center of New York! You play. You get discovered. Done and dusted.”

What harm could come of it? Rahad thought. He situated himself on a YMCA blanket his friend had brought, took out his sitar, and though the sounds of taxis, tourists, vendors, and fellow architects of harebrained stunts drowned him out, he began to enjoy the adventure. He could now say that he had played in Times Square. What Tehrani musician could say that? Maybe the Internet would catch wind of it and post a photo. Briefly the world felt as it had in his younger days, when he strummed and others snapped photos of him that would appear in unknown parts of the city.

Rahad and Wyatt played for an hour to small crowds overflowing from the popular Chinese restaurant next door and a few stragglers who drifted over from a nearby hot dog cart. Eastern men, like themselves, on breaks from their restaurant jobs. Most wandered away after a few seconds, realizing that they couldn’t enjoy the music for the commotion of the street. Others recognized a melody and nudged each other. Do you remember this? they murmured in languages he didn’t understand. But Rahad understood that you always know—if yours are the fingers that strum the strings—when someone recognizes your sound. And isn’t that all there is to want?

Some gave money, and at first Rahad stopped to explain that this wasn’t their purpose. Finally he gave up, but made sure that his sitar case was closed and stowed behind him and that his jacket was nowhere in sight. If he offered no place to drop money, the people would understand his intentions. Most didn’t, throwing coins onto the blanket instead.

“Where are your music big shots then, agha?” said Rahad, grinning at his friend. He didn’t mind if none of the promised record executives appeared. He enjoyed playing in this great cavity of noise, alone in a human swarm. He was doing something worth remembering, even if it was foolish and self-indulgent. And he was in New York.

“We must be patient,” said Wyatt.

“Come, I buy you Starbuck,” said Rahad, packing up his instrument. He was desperate for a coffee, a feeling that always reminded him to text Yasmine.

In the café, Wyatt ordered a foamy latte. When the barista muttered, “So you want a cappuccino, then,” he shook his head sadly at Rahad. “These young generations think we are all terribly stupid, always in risk of poking out an eye if not for their instruction.”

They sat down at a table near the window, watching their corner in case their record producer exited the subway at just that moment.

“I hoped to have coffee with Yasmine,” said Rahad, checking his phone. “Especially this time that we come by bus. Twice before I came by car and she chose café with no parking spot and I got ticket. Then drove back in dark because I’m not welcome even on her couch. This treatment is normal for American parents, I think. After that, I sell the car. I only kept it for visiting often. But who wants to be burden?”

“My son is same. I am borrowing car, driving hours, and last minute, poof, canceled.” Wyatt shook his head and stared into his latte, the foaminess of which obviously irritated him. “My son, he is thinking I am stupid. Where he gets this?”

“Is problem of generation,” said Rahad. “We come to West, suffer in learning language in adulthood, which we can never lose accent or get joke and so on. But kids go to school and learn in a normal route with other first citizens, and later they think we are dumb or at least considering us lower than themselves. My daughter asks always, ‘Did you google this or that like I tell you?’ She thinks she is my teacher.”

Wyatt’s hands flew up in agreement, so that his spoon splattered foam on the table. “My son wants me to do video online instead of telephone,” he said. “I tell my son, ‘Oh, good try, good try. Next time, can you tell me something? Do you speak Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi? Can you write in these language? Can you change yourself every hour according to situation? Can you keep your American pride in foreign city? You can upload videos on social sites, nothing else. But Indian people can speak in minimum four languages. And we know when to put away all four and listen sometimes, too.’” Wyatt chuckled a little maniacally, scooped some foam out of his coffee, and stared at Rahad. “Did you ever read Pnin?” he said. Rahad shook his head. “Is about bumbling immigrant, but lovable because he is arriving new, learning, missing home. My son brings this book one day from school,” he paused, as if wondering why he had mentioned it. “New arrivals, they have reason to be confuse, they must be missing home. But I say, fuck old country—I don’t miss it. Is whole world that changed too quick! I am exile from my own child. It’s like I try to jump gorge and got foot permanently stuck.”

“Yes,” Rahad laughed. “Is like pushing against an unbrokable wall.”

“But we have music, right?” said Wyatt, tapping his paper cup against Rahad’s as if to toast. “Music from the world.”

Rahad watched his friend as he lifted his cup to his lips. Again, something was wrong with the way Wyatt spoke. “Your English is improving, my friend,” he said. “Gorge is not word I know.”

Wyatt wiped his mouth and let out a breathy, tittering sigh. “Nothing is improving, sahib,” Wyatt said, his tone changing, his eyes emptying of the eager joy he seemed to carry in abundance. “Life is easier if people think you just arrived, you know? They expect, twenty years here and you should have made it.” It took a moment for Rahad to realize, given his own troubles with English, that his friend was speaking without his unmistakable lilt. Now Wyatt sounded like the Indians Rahad had known in Baltimore and Tehran. “There are things you need,” Wyatt continued, “things to survive, and you don’t have it yet. Why not? You must be stupid. You must not have studied the culture hard enough. You must be hostile to it. Who needs that, brother? I’d rather be a lovable FOB than a failure whose story has grown stale.”

What careful thought his friend must have put into every sentence he uttered. This new voice struck Rahad hard and he was quiet for some time. A proud look passed over Wyatt’s face, like a person who had written a moving melody. He raised both eyebrows, sucked something out of his teeth. “See, twenty years ago when we were new, the new ones were invisible, too. Now everyone’s read Pnin and those FOB-y bastards are loved, and us who lived here for twenty years, we’re fucked again. Who has a kind word for someone who can’t find their foot after that long? See? Fucked from both directions.”

“So not born in DC then?” Rahad asked, feeling duped and a little angry. How had he grown so close to this man?

“All FOBs say they’re born in DC,” said Wyatt, then added, stroking his salt-and-pepper chin and reprising his phony accent, “That is a big, big true.”

“You give me headache,” said Rahad, touching his temple. He remembered the day they had met, thinking Wyatt was a crazy man. Now Rahad thought he might be a disturbed scholar, or a mystic, or a traumatized poet. How did he talk to his son? Rahad wondered. Did he put on the same new-immigrant act, hoping for a glimmer of sympathy? It would be misguided, Rahad knew; displays of foreignness were the children’s greatest irritation. “I need another coffee. Too much Wyatt thinking for today.”

“Vadhi,” mumbled his friend as he emptied his cup. He rose and gestured toward the counter. “Vadhi is my good name. I’ll buy as a sorry for lying. You buy next one.”

Rahad spent the rest of the night playing melancholy songs in the corner by the subway entrance. During prime theater hours, Times Square was slightly less manic, and he enjoyed hearing his own songs under the feverish lights of a New York evening. They ate at the last open hot dog stand before the owner packed up and left. Late that evening, as they rode the last bus back to Wilmington, he phoned Yasmine again. He started to tell her about Wyatt and the Vietnamese woman, about the spicy soup and the naan from the brick oven, wanting her to share in his astonishment at the gifts of the universe—these scattered foreigners sharing from their food stamps and loose change, finding joy in music. He wanted to say, Azizam, trust the universe. Life can be easy if you let it be. But Yasmine’s breath grew quicker. “Baba joon, are you in trouble?” she said. “Why are people giving you food? If you’re in trouble—”

He cut her off, “Oh Yasmine, hush!” he said. “It was potluck dinner. I call for another reason: Did you go online today?”

She breathed out, relief kneading every syllable. “Of course I did. It’s my job.”

“Will you go to a page that I say? I give you address if you have pen.”

“Don’t need a pen.” He could hear the fast clicks of her keyboard. “Go ahead.”

He recited from memory the addresses of the three websites, the ones the Internet had granted to his former career. She was silent, and he didn’t ask if she had finished typing. “Lately these appear on Internet,” he said. “I want to tell you, I think they are good. Of highest creative quality. Maybe later I post them on Facebook.”

“Oh yeah?” she said. She cleared her throat, as if responding would cost her something. Where had she inherited this pride? From the elder ustad Sokouti, perhaps.

“Well?” he said. “I’m famous. Aren’t you impressed?” She laughed and said that she was. He wanted to tell her that he knew more about the Internet than she thought. Maybe not the codes and formulas and shortcuts, but he knew its spirit, its sweeping reach. This entity that granted a measure of justice—Trust the universe, he had always told Yasmine—it had circled the air above them, coloring their relationship from the time she was a student. He wanted to say, Yas, I know the Internet isn’t some deity. I know it’s made up of people trying to inscribe the void, to mark the very ether with what they’ve lived and what they know. Thank you for etching me a corner in that vast, unfathomable place. He wanted to tell his daughter that he knew she respected him, or some former, more essential version of him. But enough had been said for one phone call. “I find it very artistic, Yasi joon,” he said. “It captures the years.”

All through the bus ride home, Wyatt sat silently, his head slumped against the window. Rahad was glad for the quiet, unsure of what to expect the next time his friend opened his mouth. Did it matter? When had he ever anticipated anyone’s next syllable? His daughter’s, least of all. Maybe such harmony wasn’t needed to enjoy a drink with someone. Maybe the earth wouldn’t collapse on itself if a person you love didn’t cosign your every move, or you theirs. “A big true,” he said to himself and chuckled.

The two men walked from the station back to their rooms at the YMCA. They parted ways in the corridor, each saying a few words about the next day’s plans, the possibility of a warm naan from a pizza oven, the other residents who might join them in a song or two, the whereabouts of that reedy Vietnamese voice they had come to enjoy. Rahad dug into his pocket for his keys, and when he pulled his fingers out they were covered in a white dusting of baking soda. He glanced back at Wyatt entering his own room, hunched from fatigue, looking a decade older, an accustomed sort of quiet surrounding his steps. In their short friendship, Rahad had overlooked so much that had been hidden in the artificial cracks of this man’s speech. And yet Wyatt had knocked on Rahad’s door every day, hoping that, after enough afternoons together, Rahad—a true and verified musician of Tehran, a traveler and student of the world’s many strange rhythms—might say, Stop pretending now, my brother. I know your sound.

But Rahad hadn’t heard; maybe he was no master at all.

He unlocked his own door and turned on the lights. In all these years, what other voices had he only half heard? Maybe he still needed a more practiced ear. He sat on his bed, looked out onto the parking lot, and listened: to the low roar of a passing car, to stoned men talking in the corridor, to the mattress creaking under his weight. He thought of his wife with her glorious unwashed hair, the artful websites their daughter had made, and Baba with his students on the veranda, all their idle talk of sitar songs and why one should never touch a Western guitar, of how to listen for music amid the human noise.