October 29, 2024

Flashbang

by Leila Mansouri

Leila Mansouri’s brilliant short story, “Flashbang,” inhabits the many scales of catastrophe that inhere in the word. Originally published as part of Mizna 25.1: Catastrophe. Link to order here.

There, the news was on. Somewhere, there was a war. A reel of bombs and bodies played on the TV. A man in a suit droned in front of it. There were soldiers, then boys, then more soldiers, then an explosion. Someone threw a flashbang and lit a house up. The windows got so bright, my eyes hurt.

Soon my mom came out with tea.

Then she brought fruit.

—Leila Mansouri

Flashbang

What you need to understand is this: when the link opened, everything flashed over.

Before I could form a thought, before my eyes could resolve the pixels into dark, taut nipples, hot, bright shock raced through me and spread—out through my nerves, out into the dorm room, out and out into every corner of my world. Understanding was for later. Lungs, fear, air, shame—all for later. My cursor blinked, unmoved, in the reply box as my eyes traced and retraced the subject line.

“You?” the email asked.

I had no answer. I glowed hot, white hot, engulfed.

Behind each nipple, a breast. That much was clear even when everything was still too bright to breathe. There were two of them, the breasts, and skin, and ribs. A torso.

Also sometimes a shoulder. But not always.

The parts, they moved and moved and refused to stay still. Fingers curled. Hands grasped. Now two, now three, now two again. And at the grainy edge, a slack jaw dipped in and out, in and out.

I couldn’t have spoken then, not even if my irradiated brain had had the power to think in words. My fat slug of a tongue sat leaden between my molars, and my parched lips clung fast to my gums. In my silence, the slick, weird image of a mouth parted wide, wider, into a wild, toothy moan, and I understood nothing. Heard nothing. The only noise in me was my own blood. And no matter how hard my eyes strained, no matter how long my fingers hovered ready at the keyboard, adamant that they could save me by shooting Jeff the speedy right answer, the moving parts refused to make a person.

Was I really somewhere in those pixels?

I didn’t know — and also didn’t want to know—or wanted to know only if the answer was one I could live with—one I’d survive. So it was a relief, the beginning of a hot exhale, when, after how long with that video on a loop I don’t know, I admitted—or maybe I decided—that I couldn’t make out anyone except the little stuffed bear—a bear like the one my parents had bought me from the student store the day they’d moved me in, a bear whose neck was ringed with the stethoscope I’d resented nightly as I did my chemistry sets and conjugated Farsi verbs and daydreamed about the other me: the me who had aggressively blue hair and took experimental poetry classes, the me who wanted to jolt you, to make you gasp and say, “this changed my life.”

That me was the real me, I was sure. Or it was going to be.

I would become her just as soon as I finally gathered the courage to tell my parents that I was dropping orgo—that instead of labs and study groups I’d be making mixed media installations, that I’d already made one, in fact, a simorgh lit with kerosene, and that I wasn’t pre-med anymore—I’d never been, actually, not in the way they’d wished for—not really.

The bear, though, was unmistakable.

It was my own Agha Bear, or one just like him. That was obvious even in the bad resolution and dim light. And the desk, too, was familiar. Its dull sheen and thick wooden shelves could have come from any dorm on campus. Which meant the parts in the video could be anyone’s.

Even mine.

So I did the only thing that felt possible from inside my bright hot shock-wave—the only thing I could live with—that felt like it had any hope of being survivable.

I deleted the email, broke up with Bijan, dropped the Farsi class I had with Jeff, and became a doctor.

* * *

“It made sense at the time,” I insisted to my therapist, years later, when we met behind the privacy curtain on the far side of the hospital cafeteria.

The sex tape wasn’t what we were supposed to be talking about. We were supposed to be talking about the victims whose wrists I’d spent half a horrible day tagging yellow or red or green.

The explosion at the refinery had been so massive, all the breaking news segments had ended with ominous questions: Could this be sabotage? Who did the terrorists hate? Were there more explosions to come?

But by afternoon, the story had resolved itself into something more ordinary: a bad safety valve and corporate greed. After that, no one was scared anymore, just filled tight with unleachable anger—the kind that makes your fingers swell and comes out in unfunny jokes about conversion rates between corporate bonus dollars and reattached limbs.

My residency was in oncology, but I’d been paged to the emergency room for triage. I’d gone from body to moaning body checking pupils and asking if anyone felt a sense of impending doom.

No one did, not even the sanitation worker with the metal bolt in his skull. He was the cheeriest of everyone, in fact.

As I rushed him to surgery, he grabbed my hand and said, “Can’t you leave it in, doc? I pick up radio waves now.”

Then he asked where I was from.

And how I liked Michigan.

And if I had kids, or a husband, or a boyfriend, and if I wanted them.

When I said I was moving back to California, his face fell.

“My parents are there,” I apologized. “Plus, I miss the fruit. The nectarines, the apricots.”

Right then, the time Jeff pulled dates from his rucksack flashed back through me. We’d been doing Farsi homework in my dorm room, and I’d looked up from my alif’s and be’s, and there they were, three fat dates. Jeff insisted I try one even though I wasn’t hungry. “Have you ever had a fresh date?” he demanded. “I mean a really fresh one?”

The man with the bolt in his head waved away my apology. Then he said “California,” too slow, his voice bending strangely.

So, I looked again behind his earlobe.

The thread was still buried deep. You could hardly see anything.

That was how I’d almost missed it when I triaged him.

His wound had barely even oozed.

I wanted to say something comforting—to reassure the man that I liked Michigan, too.

But before I could, we were surrounded by the surgical team.

“You should try the sherries,” he told me as my hand slipped from his.

I nodded, not understanding.

“The sherries,” he said. “Promise.”

Then he was gone, and the hallway was bright and not at all quiet, and by the time I realized he was slurring cherries, it was days too late to warn anyone.

The hospital mandated trauma screening for all residents, and I was assigned to Farah. Or, that’s what she told me to call her. I couldn’t, though. Not when her hair was neatly covered, and she sat so prim and straight on her plastic chair.

“Doctor Al Masry,” I tried.

She laughed. She wasn’t even an MD, just a family counselor in training.

I wouldn’t take it back though. “Dr. Al Masry,” I repeated.

“Really? Are we going to pretend we’re our parents?”

I shrugged.

For days, I’d been telling the other residents that these screenings were a waste. My plan was to lie my way through—to run out the clock. I’d even made up a story about a man who’d watched his warehouse collapse. He survived because he had forgotten to turn his headlights off, I was going to say—that’s why he’d been in the parking lot. He’d remembered an hour into his shift and ran back out into the Michigan cold.

Then, boom.

All of a sudden, no building left to speak of.

The clincher was going to be my own story, or really my aunt’s. The one she’d told years ago, in St. Louis, as we circled the Gateway Arch.

One night, my uncle had come home from his pharmacy shift to find their Tehran apartment in rubble. A missile had hit—“a dumb Scud,” my aunt said, as we puttered up I-44 in my parents’ rusty Volvo.

My mother was annoyed. “Look!” she switched loudly to English. “There is arch!”

But my aunt talked over her, sticking to Persian. “Night sounded like this,” my aunt told us, puckering her mouth and spitting out explosions.

That year was endless. Boring, murderous nights, my aunt explained. Again and again, there were blasts and waiting. Then, mostly, nothing. Night after night of it. Loud, distant, terrifying nothings. To the sound of these nothings, my aunt made tea and dreamed of redecorating. She wrote long letters to my mother in America. She set elaborate dinners, and, as my uncle ate, gossiped to him about the neighbor-couples, whose private fights she heard through the walls. My uncle never gossiped back, though, or gave opinions on rugs and pillows. He asked my aunt little about her days. His concerns about her parents’ health were perfunctory. My aunt didn’t understand—not at first. When they’d courted, he’d been chatty and charming. He’d made her believe every word of hers was precious to him. Once he became a husband, though, he turned stubbornly inward. Most evenings all he seemed to want to do was eat and snore. My aunt’s questions about his work at the hospital got only bland, empty answers. Her pleas for a new vase or tea set met with irritable grunts. And when she asked what news the neighbor-husbands had shared when my uncle passed them in the building hallways, he looked at her like she was an irksome child. “Do you think I have time to remember who Mr. Hashemi is angry with today?” he’d shake his head. “Do you not see that I work constantly? Did you forget there is a war?”

For a while, my aunt blamed his stress on bad management at the hospital pharmacy. He’d come to his senses once the shelves were restocked, she told herself. But as the year of booming nothings dragged on, her patience steadily curdled, first into resentment, then into disgust. Soon, every sound my uncle made became repulsive to her. His sighs made her want to scrub his breath from her skin. His snorts made her nauseated. But it was the revolting grooming habits he no longer bothered to hide that became the focus of her fury. The night a missile fell on a busy bread factory, she’d found my uncle’s nose hair clippings in the sink and thrown the soap at him. A month later—the same night a family her cousin’s friend’s brother knew from university was obliterated—she’d lain awake enraged because right next to her in bed my uncle had picked dead skin from his foot calluses.

“Roya-joon, remember this.” She turned to face me in the back seat, her expression so serious I was sure I was in trouble. “If a man cleans his toes in bed, he does not love you.”

“Ani!” my mom screeched, but my aunt waved her off.

“Promise you will remember, Roya-joon.”

I didn’t understand, so I nodded solemnly, and my aunt settled back into the passenger seat.

It was months of this nonsense, she continued, ignoring the arch’s fat, shiny footings. Months of my uncle’s flaking skin in the bed sheets. Months of his soapy hairs in every crevice of the bathroom and his toenail clippings working their way into the living room rug.

Then out of nowhere came the direct hit.

There was no air raid siren—not that night, my aunt insisted. All the neighbors swore it, too—there’d been only the usual nothing right up until the horrible boom.

The building next door was stripped naked, its shattered windows gaping onto disarranged kitchens and bedrooms. My aunt’s building was leveled entirely.

“Pow,” she said, flattening the air between her hands.

By chance, she wasn’t inside. She was visiting a neighbor—but my uncle hadn’t known that. He’d seen the building, or what was left of it, and been certain she was under the rubble—certain her lifeless body would soon be unburied, still sheathed in her white nightgown. He was out of his mind when she spotted him, tearing at the debris with his fingernails. “God forgive me, God forgive me,” he kept saying. “God, God, what have I done?”

As she watched her husband clawing at the wreckage, my aunt’s heart sofened for the first time since the missiles reached Tehran. Maybe she’d judged him too harshly, she considered. Maybe what she’d taken for his disdain was something else. Pride pickled in fear, possibly? At the very least, he seemed genuinely distraught.

She approached where he was kneeling and put a hand on his heaving shoulder. Gently, she raised his dusty face to hers, anticipating he’d collapse with relief.

But, to her shock, the sight of her only seemed to make him wilder.

“Am I possessed?” he cried, stumbling backward. “Have you returned to curse me? Am I so guilty I deserve to be forever tormented?”

That was how his affair came out, my aunt explained.

Or she tried to.

But my mother wouldn’t let her.

“Ani-jan, tell Roya about the beautiful seashore,” my mother jumped in, repeating herself louder and louder, until my stubborn aunt was forced to yield. After that, it was, “Ani-jan, do you remember how we always stop along the road to buy oranges?” We’d driven halfway home by then, but we were still on the freeway, near the Woolworths.

Once my aunt finished discussing roadside fruit, my mother turned to me at a stoplight. “In the mountains, I get always carsick. Do you know that once I throw up on your Khaleh Ani’s favorite shoes?”

“Not only mountains,” my aunt confirmed bitterly. “At home. At school. On my favorite dress. On so many things I can’t list them.” But then she tried to list them, anyway, which bought my mother another five minutes.

And for the rest of the drive home, and that evening, and every remaining day of my aunt’s three-month visit, my mother was relentless. Whenever Khaleh Ani tried to speak about the missiles or my uncle in front of me, my mom would goad her. “I always feel bad for your khaleh, you know, because I am our madarbozorg’s favorite,” she would tell me. Or, “do you know, Roya-joon, that I was best student in school? Top marks. All the teachers say I am genius.”

Khaleh Ani took the bait every time.

“I was the genius,” she’d say. “I was the favorite.”

She spent the summer furious with my mother, the story of my uncle’s affair always cut off just a few words in. That’s why I didn’t find out how she got her revenge until a decade later. By then, we’d moved to California and left the arch far behind us.

Those first years in Gilroy, all my parents did was save and work. They’d bought a gas station out by the produce warehouses. During the day, my mother rang up farmworkers and semi drivers. At night, my father barred the windows, and meth heads skulked at the floodlights’ edge.

This was all for the future, they promised. Only the future mattered, not the farm smell, not the bulletproof glass screening the register. In their future, I would go to medical school. In their future, my aunt would come and stay for good.

By then, we’d been waiting years on my aunt’s visa. My parents had filed the paperwork back in St. Louis, and ever since, every three months, they’d called to remind the lawyer who they were.

Do you have our address?

Can we do anything else?

Will you let us know soon?

But when their application finally made it to the top of the government pile, my aunt balked. She refused to fill out more forms. She declined her Dubai interview. There was no point, she announced, because she’d never move. She had her house, her garden, her tea, and no interest in uprooting herself—especially not to live in her arrogant sister’s half-renovated garage.

My mother told me the news as she was picking me up from my shift at In-N-Out: “Your aunt killed your uncle and now she is killing me!”

I gulped my chocolate shake. The cold turned my tongue thick and numb.

According to my mom, my aunt began this slow murder the night the missile fell on their apartment. My uncle had been having an affair with a pretty nurse. That’s what had sealed his fate. Each Tuesday and Friday, he met this nurse in the hospital supply room, and after, as she basked in their illicit glow, he’d detail his private unhappiness. My aunt henpecked him constantly, he’d complain. Some days all she talked about, it seemed, was their small apartment and noisy neighbors. And even when she was quiet, their hand-me-down furniture silently taunted him. He resented every last scrap of it—every last fussy table and dusty rug. It reminded him of just how much else his in-laws had given him all the other things he could neither repay nor afford to give up. Money for his father’s doctors. Tuition to finish pharmacy school. Proper suits. A respectable watch. Without their generosity, he’d have ended up a poor and friendless orphan. Now, he was trapped by his modest comforts and was determined never to forgive them for it.

“Let’s run away to America,” he begged this nurse every Friday. “We’ll buy a ranch in Montana. We’ll eat nothing but Big Macs. We’ll grow happy and fat.”

Usually, the nurse ignored him. “Saeed, you talk too much,” she’d shush. Or, “Saeed, can you move your elbow? It’s on my chador.”

But the Friday of the Scud missile strike, she’d at last given a tepid, “Do you really mean it? Could we really go? Just the two of us?”

“Yes,” he’d told her. “Yes yes. We can. We will. I promise.”

So, when my uncle came home to the flattened apartment building, he’d concluded that this must be God’s punishment. He had been unfaithful and now he’d lose everything, even the dishes and rugs he’d hated, even the nagging wife whose wealthy parents he’d been ungrateful for.

That’s when, like a hellish miracle, my aunt had appeared before him. And at the sight of her, he admitted it all, weeping in the dust at her feet.

To my aunt, the affair was unsurprising. Weeks before, she’d smelled perfume on his collar and guessed another woman—guessed it was a nurse, even, and felt so little besides disgust for him that she’d washed his shirt and let it go.

But, ever keen, she sensed power in my uncle’s public confession.

God was merciful and she could be too, she told him. But, she added, loud enough to be sure the neighbor gossips heard, she had her honor to think of, and her family’s honor, too. So, her faithless husband would have to make it up to her.

And he could do that with a house.

A nice one. One with a garden and tall walls. A fountain, too, maybe. Not here. North, by the mountains. In a better neighborhood.

My uncle knew this mercy was a death sentence. He could not afford such a house, not even with her parents’ help. His job at the government hospital didn’t pay well, so to get the money he’d need a second job, then a third. He’d have to take midnight house calls. He’d have to work straight through Friday prayers. He’d probably also need to start smuggling. Western eye creams, maybe. Or, more likely, wine and European spirits. Hash, too. “Medicine,” his records would say. “For palsy. And insomnia.” But every client, every supplier, would know the truth. And even if the smugglers didn’t kill him, even if he stayed out of jail and managed to keep his dealings quiet, he’d never get to linger in his own prized garden—he’d hardly ever see its blooms by daylight. No, he’d have to work and work until even his bones were exhausted, his too-brief dreams stalked by men who could ruin him. He’d work until his liver groaned, until his heart gave out. He’d work until he labored himself into an early grave.

Still, how could he say no to my aunt with all the neighbors watching? How would he ever face them, and his in-laws, too, if he refused?

I took a hungry swallow of chocolate shake.

“So? What did he do?”

My mother shook her head.

“What could he do? He said, ‘Yes, my beloved. Yes, of course. Anything. Anything for your forgiveness. I’m at your service.’”

The cruelest part, my mom told me, was that my khaleh Ani, too, had been having an affair—hers was with a dissident poet. For weeks before the missile strike, she’d been sneaking her secret lover into the apartment on nights my uncle worked late. Barely an hour before the missile hit, this poet had left my aunt dozing in her marriage bed. He’d given her two soft kisses, then departed by the back stairs, leaving behind only her pining sighs and a dozen whispered promises to die for her, should she ever want that.

Once my aunt heard the door close after him, she’d risen, like always, to brew some sumac tea. She needed it to settle her stomach—despite the poet’s flattering reassurances, her guilt over the affair was gut-twisting.

But she’d found the tin empty—that afternoon, my uncle, unbeknownst to her, had had a guilty stomachache of his own.

So, she’d gone to beg more sumac from a friend three blocks over. She was returning home, pockets bulging, when she found my uncle digging at the rubble.

My mother’s eyes burned, mean and gleeful, as she spoke.

She took my shake and sucked in a long drag.

“Your uncle is fool,” she went on. “He works until his eyes bleed. He works so much his bones ache. Then he dies, less than one year after he finally gets your aunt this house, and—do you know—she weeps not for him but for her poet.”

I reached for the shake, but my mom didn’t give it back to me, didn’t even seem to see me.

“Now your aunt will die in her garden,” she said. “She will die drinking tea, all alone. And this poet, they put him in Evin prison. He is still in there, you know.”

When I tell my aunt’s story, Americans rarely ask if I saw her again. They don’t wonder much about my uncle, either—not if I liked him or what he died of. Not even whether he ever learned about my aunt’s secret love. If they want to know anything, it’s about how he made his money. Or about the pretty nurse and her chador. Or maybe, if they’re humanitarian types, what the jailed poet is in prison for. That’s why I was going to tell my aunt’s story to the cafeteria therapist. I could tell it and not tell much else, I figured. It would fill our half-hour well enough.

But I never got the chance to.

After Dr. Al Masry explained what she was screening for, she asked what I’d been doing right before the refinery explosion. And I was so thrown I’d told the truth.

I’d been Instagram stalking my ex-boyfriend’s wife. “Instagram stalking?”

“It’s stupid, Dr. Al Masry.”

“It doesn’t sound stupid, Roya.”

“It is. I mean, I’m a doctor.”

“You’re saying doctors can’t be human also?”

That’s how I ended up explaining about the cakes. Cupcakes. Cheesecakes.

Chocolate cakes. Spice cakes. Marbled mirror glazes.

“She just keeps posting them,” I told Dr. Al Masry.

And other things, too. Their redecorated townhome. The themed birthdays she put on for their two love dumplings, now five and eighteen months. But mostly it was the cakes that kept me coming back to the Instagram of the girl that Bijan, my college boyfriend, was married to now, I explained. “Or, woman,” I corrected myself, the bleach smell thick at my nostrils. “The half-Cambodian optometrist from Reseda Bijan started dating three and a half months after I’d called things off and blocked him on Facebook.”

“This man, Bijan—you two were serious? And you broke things off ?”

“Yes. Well, no. Not exactly.”

“Not exactly?”

“There was a video.”

“A video?”

“A sex thing. I didn’t know what to do.”

When I said those words, I was in four places at once. In the cafeteria chair.

And also at my dorm room desk, with Jeff ’s link. And in the redwood grove, too, as Bijan’s face twisted and soured. And in my Farsi class, with Jeff, the day he sent the video.

But before he sent it. When we were learning food words. Sobhkhaneh. Sabzijat. Gojeh farangi. Miveh. Angur.

Jeff had searched me out that day, as usual. The whole semester he’d been relentless. He asked about my weekends. He asked what sports I followed. He asked whether I’d tried the dates he’d left. He asked if I’d ever dated a Marine. But the day of the video was different. He didn’t ask anything. He just looked. At me. Like I was a pit. Stripped and sucked clean.

And right after class, he sent it.

“The video of you?” Dr. Al Masry asked.

“I don’t know if it was me.”

“What?”

“In the video. I don’t know who it was. It could have been me. But I wasn’t sure, and I deleted it.”

“You didn’t try to find out?”

I blinked, confused that she was confused. “How could I? It would’ve blown everything up.”

I felt sure that would settle it.

But she asked, “What do you mean?”

So, I changed the subject to the refinery explosion.

But she changed it back.

So, I changed the subject to the man with the bolt in his head.

But she changed it back.

So, I changed the subject to Evin prison. Did she know there were poets jailed there right now? I demanded.

But she changed it back.

So, finally, I said, “You, of all people, should know there would have been no good answer. I mean, let’s say it wasn’t me. Maybe the video was a fake, or someone else’s porn. So, what then? I go to Bijan and try to explain it to him? What could I say? That a guy, an older military guy in my Farsi class, was sending me this stuff? Porn that looked like me? Porn that had my Agha Bear in it? And that I’d done a whole class project with this man, and he’d insisted I eat his dates? How would Bijan see me, then? What if he thought I’d cheated on him? What if he told his parents? Or mine? No matter what, he’d still probably break up with me. And if he didn’t, how would anything be okay? How would we go back to watching movies and playing foosball?”

“I get it. I do,” said Dr. Al Masry. “I mean, I’m from Dearborn. But are you sure it would have been that bad? He doesn’t exactly sound like the traditional type.”

I shook my head. She only half understood. “But what if it was me?”

“What, then?”

“Then, I was with Bijan. There hadn’t been anyone else. So, did that mean Bijan had filmed it without telling me? Probably, right? That’s the only reasonable conclusion. So, then what? I tell the school? I show the video to some sweaty administrator and file a case? And what if Bijan went and told his parents? They knew people who knew mine, you know. I didn’t want to be that person, the one everyone whispered about when they saw my mom in the grocery store. I didn’t want to live with that. I didn’t want my mom to live with that. So, I said nothing.”

Dr. Al Masry took a deep breath and smoothed her long skirt. There was something in her face I couldn’t read. “OK, but what about a friend or a roommate?” she asked, softly, hesitant. She took a breath, then another. “Did you at least tell someone?”

I wanted to lie and tell her I had. I wanted her to believe I had my shit together. I could have told someone back then, if I’d thought to. It’s not as if I had been friendless. Plenty of people would’ve listened. Plenty would have hugged me and let me cry. But I had never tried. I had kept it in. Staying quiet had seemed so natural, I had made the decision without realizing I’d chosen it.

I shook my head slowly. “Everyone assumed it was a normal breakup. I never told them the rest.”

Dr. Al Masry leaned forward. “And if you had? What would you have said?”

That’s how I discovered the thing that had been buried so deep I hadn’t known it was there, the thing that had been lodged in me all these years—the thing that had held everything in place even when I hadn’t known there was anything to hold. What I really believed—believed even though it made no sense, believed even though I was sure it meant I was crazy—was that it was me and Bjian on the tape, and it was somehow Jeff who filmed it.

“But that’s too far-fetched,” I said. “I mean, yes, Jeff could have planted something. A camera. The day he was in my room for our class project. It was absurd but not completely impossible. He was military after all. A Marine. He could have figured out the tech. But how could I look anyone in the eye and say that that was what I suspected? That I was sure of it to my core even though it sounded like a conspiracy? No one would have believed me. They shouldn’t have believed me. The story didn’t hold together. Some guy in my Farsi class films a secret sex tape after I refused to eat his dates? Who would listen? Who could take that seriously? It was easier to say nothing and forget.”

Dr. Al Masry was quiet for a while. Across the cafeteria, someone sneezed. Bleached air burned in my throat.

“It doesn’t sound crazy to me, though,” she said, finally.

“What?”

“Really. I’m not saying it’s true. But I’m saying I could believe it.”

I was sure she was mocking me and couldn’t say so. Not when she’d been so patient. Not when I’d been calling her Dr. Al Masry all this time.

I wrinkled my nose and raised an eyebrow. “What does that mean?”

She looked away, toward the privacy curtain.

“My mother was born in Ein el-Hilweh—that’s a camp in southern Lebanon,” she said. “My mother grew up around guards and soldiers. And what she always told me was to watch out most for the friendly ones—the ones that offer help and candy. They were the most dangerous.”

I reminded her that this wasn’t Lebanon—that I’d been in college, not a refugee camp.

I had missed the point, she told me.

“Listen, when I was a kid, one year my mom took me to the state fair. Me and my brothers. We’d been asking, I guess. Maybe someone at school went. My mom had her hair covered and people were staring, but she didn’t care. She took us to the Ferris wheel. She got us fried ice cream. She even let us pet the goats. She wanted us to enjoy it—to feel like we were normal. And we did. We rode the rides and played those whack-the-whatever games. I won a stuffed shark. My brother won a stuffed donkey. The whole day was great, perfect, really, until we got in line for the spinning teacup ride. That’s when this guy started talking to us. To me, mostly. He had a woman with him, too, but she didn’t say anything, not at first. And he kept asking me things, like what was my favorite subject, and what kind of ice cream did I like, and did I want to be a pop star or a movie actress when I grew up. He hardly spoke to my brothers and wouldn’t even look at my mom. And he kept bringing up that he was a soldier—that he’d met girls like me before, in Iraq. He fought for those girls, he kept saying. Little ones. Some that didn’t go to school. Some that didn’t have toys or electricity or shoes. I didn’t like him and didn’t like his stupid questions and really didn’t like how white curls peeled up all over his sunburned nose. So, I was relieved when the line moved, and my brothers and I got in our teacup, and the man didn’t get on with us. He disappeared while our teacups spun. I thought it was over. I forgot about him. But after the ride, he found us. He had ice cream cones now, for me and my brothers. I didn’t want one, I was sick from the spinning and the heat and the elephant ears. But I thought I had to eat. When someone offers you food, you take it—that’s what my mom had always insisted. So, I reached my hand out and felt the cone in my fingers. And then, all of a sudden, my mother slapped it away. It fell and splattered. The ice cream went everywhere. The ground. My brother’s shoes. My ankles. I didn’t understand. I didn’t know what I’d done. I started crying. It was my fault, I was sure. I couldn’t see how, but that didn’t matter. And then the girlfriend started ranting about how my mom was a bitch, and we were all ungrateful. We should be sent back, she screamed over and over. We hated America. We hated freedom and God. My mom was walking us away by then, walking us out of the fair, but all I could hear was the girlfriend. ‘That’s right,’ she screamed after us. ‘Go back to where you came from.’ And when I turned to look behind me, the soldier was just standing there, staring at us, like he didn’t know what to say—like he didn’t understand what had happened either. I stared back at the ice cream cones in his fists, at the two he hadn’t given me—the ones he got for my brothers. They were melting already. They were losing their shape in the sun. I remember watching as they dripped, watching as the white ran down his knuckles. My mom waited until we were out of the parking lot to start yelling. ‘You don’t let these people give you things,’ she shouted over and over. ‘Never. You don’t take anything from them. Not money, not ice cream. Nothing.’ Back then I didn’t understand. My mom must be a little crazy, I thought. I mean, it was just ice cream. I couldn’t see what the big deal was. Now, though, I think she was right. I think she knew exactly what she was doing. I think she understood more than she knew how to tell us.”

I took a slow breath.

“So, you’re saying I was right to suspect Jeff?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe he was dangerous. Maybe Bijan was, too. What I’m saying is, you didn’t know. You still don’t.”

“So?”

Dr. Al Masry looked like she wanted to shake me—like she wanted to grab me by the shoulders and rattle something loose. “So, why didn’t you ask for help? Why did you try to handle it all on your own?”

The question landed in me like a mortar shell. “It would have killed my parents,” I said. “They came all this way for me. I couldn’t let them find out it was dangerous here, also.”

Dr. Al Masry looked at me so kindly that I hated her. “Did you ever think they might already know that?

I never saw Dr. Al Masry again. Twice, she called to set a follow-up, and twice, I ignored her voicemails. The third time she begged me to talk to someone even if it wasn’t her. “You can’t start rebuilding until you clear the rubble,” she said.

But I didn’t answer that voicemail, either. I needed to get on with my life. Or that’s what I told myself.

So, I finished my residency and moved back to California.

I went to work at the hospital, got groceries, had bad dates.

I didn’t tell anyone else about the video. Not boyfriends. Not roommates. Not my mom, either. Not even after she found Agha Bear and tried to give him back. That day, I’d driven to Gilroy with my aunt’s chemo pills. I’d been trading the hospital pharmacist for them. A month of chemo for a legal benzo script. The pharmacist gave her pills to her undocumented brother. I gave mine to my parents. Then my parents packed them into film canisters. They shipped the canisters inside thermoses wrapped with sweatshirts.

The chemo wasn’t working, though. All that effort and still Khaleh Ani’s cancer had grown. And now, she was refusing to travel for more intensive treatment, my mom explained as the tea brewed—refusing, once again, to fill out the visa paperwork.

“She wants to die in her garden,” my mom sighed. “The one my uncle got her?”

“What?”

“At her house? The one he worked himself to death for while she pined for the dissident poet?”

I was just asking—just thinking out loud, really, too tired and hungry to catch myself.

But my mom was furious. “This is how you talk of your khaleh?” she demanded. “Is this how you speak of me when I’m dead also?”

I wanted to defend myself. I wanted to point out I’d only repeated what she’d told me back in high school. Besides, I’d risked my medical license to get Khaleh Ani better cancer drugs. Shouldn’t that count for something? I wanted to say. Couldn’t I get a little slack for once?

I didn’t, though. My mom’s eyes were wet at the corners. I didn’t want to make it worse. I didn’t want her to start crying.

So I mumbled an apology.

Then, I went to the living room.

There, the news was on. Somewhere, there was a war. A reel of bombs and bodies played on the TV. A man in a suit droned in front of it. There were soldiers, then boys, then more soldiers, then an explosion. Someone threw a flashbang and lit a house up. The windows got so bright, my eyes hurt.

Soon my mom came out with tea.

Then she brought fruit.

Apricots. Cherries. Nectarines. Plums.

She and Baba had stopped on the way back from the gas station, she said. It was an apology, I knew.

I took a nectarine slice, and she took one also.

Then, as more explosions flashed, my mom ran through the usual questions. Was I seeing anyone? Did I know her friend’s son was single? Did I want her to set me up?

No, I sighed. No, no.

But that day she was persistent. She asked about what had happened to that nice boy from college, the engineer whose parents lived in San Jose.

“Bijan,” I said, as the living room fractured in the white light. “He was Bijan. He’s married now. Two kids.”

A blast threw her frown into relief. Still, she didn’t give up. I should find someone like him, she said. Kind. Thoughtful. Like Baba.

She grabbed my hand. “I want you to be happy, Roya-joon.”

I was annoyed. “I thought you wanted me to be a doctor.”

On TV, bullets flew.

I expected a fight. I was ready for one.

But instead my mom got up and left—and when she came back, she had my Agha Bear.

“Look what I find! He hid in your closet! All these years!”

She placed him on the coffee table, next to the dates and nectarine slices. His white coat brushed against the cherry bowl. His stethoscope puffed out proudly.

I blinked.

He was still there.

I touched his fur. It felt different than I remembered.

“You love Agha Bear,” Maman said, looking at me.

I wasn’t sure if it was a statement or a question.

I could have told her then that Agha Bear was never lost, just hidden away.

I hadn’t been able to look at him after the video, but I couldn’t throw him out either, not when he’d been a gift from Baba. Not when none of this was his fault.

So, I’d put him in my old closet.

He’d been there this whole time, wearing his useless stethoscope.

All these years I’d known exactly where he was.

I didn’t know how to say so, though. Not when my aunt was still dying. Not after I’d said nothing for so long.

So, instead, I told Maman about the man with the bolt in his head.

From the refinery, in Michigan.

I explained how I’d held his hand until his surgery. How he’d told me to try the cherries. How I’d forgotten his name—or maybe never learned it—and never found out what happened to him.

“What is bolt?” she asked.

I didn’t know how to explain it.

“It joins two things,” I tried.

But this confused her.

“It’s metal,” I said. “You twist it.”

But she had no idea what I was talking about.

So I looked up “bolt” on my phone.

But the word the translation app showed didn’t make sense to her either.

Finally, I reached under the coffee table.

I’d guessed right. Bolts held its legs on.

The cold nub of one protruded beyond its nut.

I took my mother’s hand and guided her fingertip to the thread.

“This,” I said.

“Ah!” She smiled, saying the Persian back to me.

I smiled, too.

Then, I pointed behind my earlobe.

“No,” she gasped. “In his head? And he is alive?”

I nodded.

“He was,” I said. “Before his surgery. I was talking to him.”

On TV a fighter jet flew by, low and hot.

In a flash, my mom understood.

Her eyes got wet again. She covered my hand with hers. She looked at me, her face very serious.

“You are good doctor, Roya-joon. He is okay now. You help him then. I believe this.”

“I hope so,” I said.

Then she ate more fruit.

And I ate more fruit.

And, together, we watched more of the war, the light of faraway explosions slicing through us.

Leila Mansouri is an Iranian-American fiction writer, essays, and literary critic. Her creative work focuses on the Iranian-American and SWANA-American diasporas and has appeared in the Offing, The Believer, Rowayat, Nowruz, and elsewhere.