An Emotion of Great Delight: Chapters 13–17

He wasn’t quite ten feet away when he started yelling again, gesticulating at nothing when he said, “What the hell were you doing? What were you thinking?”

She’d complain about him as she took us around, making empty threats to take away his car, lamenting the fact that she could never get her son to listen or take direction.

I didn’t want to be accosted by Zahra anymore. I was sick of her accusations, sick of being made to feel like a terrible person—in perpetuity—for something I hadn’t even done.

It had become impossible to live in a place that housed the museum of his life, the modest bedroom from which my father would drag my mother’s prone, sobbing body every night.

It had become impossible to live in a place that housed the museum of his life, the modest bedroom from which my father would drag my mother’s prone, sobbing body every night.

It was easy to dismiss our strained relationship with a shrug and a platitude about how she and I were just different, but I knew it was more complicated than that.

I blamed my father, unequivocally, for Mehdi’s death.

“I don’t want to look too eager, okay? I’m trying to be—” She waved her hand around, searching for the right word.
“Nonchalant?”

She looked nice, but extremely overdressed, a truth I wasn’t sure I should impart.

She rolled her eyes and shot me a look so scathing it scared me a little.

“Don’t you dare try to hug me. Don’t you dare try to patronize me.”

She shook her head, disgusted, and with that movement the fight left her body. She looked bereft in the aftermath. Bereft and cruel.

I did my best to make quick work of the extremely polite and overly formal hellos and apologies necessary, my stilted, accented Farsi making the scene even more ridiculous.

“I forgot my phone at Zahra’s house,” I said quickly, affecting nonchalance. Insouciance.

“I forgot my phone at Zahra’s house,” I said quickly, affecting nonchalance. Insouciance. Indifference.

His anger festered while he was at work, his imagination spiraling.

He was looking at my father, my prideful father who did not seem to understand that he and his son suffered from the same affliction, that my brother would not break.

My mother, for whom propriety and privacy meant a great deal, ran through our neighborhood screaming his name.

Tentative raindrops tested out the sky, the trees, the slope of my nose, made way for the others.

She’d been cruel to me in a thousand small ways for years, had proven herself a fickle, disloyal friend many times over.

I thought often of my father’s self-righteousness, his self-assured certainty, his unequivocal conviction that his thoughts and actions were sanctioned by God.

I didn’t mind dogma. I liked guideposts, appreciated a little structure. But I could not understand those people who disregarded the essence of faith—love, compassion, forgiveness, the necessary expansion of the soul—in favor of a set of rules, a set of rules they declared to be true divinity.

I sat up suddenly, startled free of my reverie by a sharp motion, a blur of movement.

The streetlamps bolstered the wan moonlight, sculpting his body in the darkness.

The heat would not abate.

It was ravenous again, hungry and terrible, pooling in my gut, my throat, behind my eyes.

I spent every day standing at the edge of a terrifying precipice, peering into the abyss, wanting, not wanting to plummet.

I watched, as if from outside of myself, as the moon stole through the slats of my poorly designed blinds, scattering light across my popcorn ceiling, creating uncanny constellations.

I was soaked through, sopping wet and pathetic, and my mother was too busy berating me for my thoughtlessness to notice the evidence of my recent tears...

I’d thought she and I had a tacit understanding of the situation. I’d thought we were on the same page.

I’d been so certain he would die. His most recent stint in the hospital had lasted two weeks; everyone expected the worst.

The doctors performed a couple more procedures on him, but each one left him lower, more lethargic, needing longer and longer to recover.

Mehdi was three years older than Ali, and the two of them had grazed each other’s lives in the way those of their stratum did. Ali and Mehdi were that specific vintage of beautiful Muslim teenager who showed up at the mosque only occasionally, usually for major events and holidays, and often forced into attendance by their parents.

What was it like? I wondered, to slough off this skin when convenient, to be looked upon by the world as something other than a cockroach.

I was neither religious enough for people at the mosque, nor secular enough for the rest of the world.

The mere sight of his name in my phone inspired in me a paroxysm of emotion I could not ignore.

The sun was streaking across the sky, painting his face in ethereal ribbons of color, blurring the edges of everything. I felt like we were disappearing.

We didn’t know who among us had accepted the paycheck, and as a result, we were poised to devour ourselves alive.

I suddenly hated myself with a violence I could not articulate, with a passion that nearly took my breath away.

I no longer trusted myself, no longer understood my mercurial heart.