Everything Sad Is Untrue (a true story)

by Daniel Nayeri

When I tell this whole story, I don’t tell anyone about that part. I was just a little kid back then. Still. They’ll think I want their pity. In America they distrust unhappy people. But I don’t want pity. I just wonder if they’ve had that feeling too. The one where you realize it’s your fault that something beautiful is dead. And you know you weren’t worth the trouble.

That’s what forgetting your grandpa’s face feels like. There’s no good in it. Nothing to gain but nothing. A piece of your heart makes a sound like a groan and disappears. Then you poke at it sometimes, trying to remember what was there by the shape of the hole. That’s it. You are less. The truth is that’s why I’m writing all this. Behind me is the elemental fiend of my memories crumbling into powder. I watch an arm disintegrate and instantly forget what was there. Did I ever hug Baba Haji? What was that like? Did he smell like a farmer or a shepherd? He was both. Did his arms feel strong? You don’t get to choose what you remember. A patchwork memory is the shame of a refugee.

One, every story is the sound of a storyteller begging to stay alive.

Sometimes people get married just so he’ll buy them a house—not one with a bird room—a little one with cockroaches. Maybe it’s love most of the time. But that’s a reason too. And it doesn’t have to be because they want a father figure for their sons. That would be a terrible reason. You shouldn’t put that kind of blood on a kid’s head. Cause he would have said he didn’t even want a house or a stepdad, if it was all for him like my sister said. Sisters can be evil like that. They tell you all the nightmares you ever had were your fault, and you were the reason somebody broke your mother’s jaw.

HERE IS AN INTERESTING question that I heard once in church. Can God create a mountain so big that He himself couldn’t lift it? It’s trying to put God in a corner, because if He can or if He can’t, He’s not all-powerful. But the question is silly, because it assumes God is as stupid as we are. If you’re as big as God, there’s no such thing as “lifting.” It’s all just floating in a million universes you made. If you made an object of some insane, unusual size, then it’d still be a thing. And God is as big as everything at once. And as small. Physical stuff is too simple. The better question is, Can God create a law so big that He himself has to obey it? Is there an idea so big that God doesn’t remember anything before it? That answer is love. Love is the object of unusual size.

The lesson here is that if you watch the side characters in a love story, you might notice the lovers treating them like garbage, with the excuse that they’re doing it for love.

But another lesson might be that maybe you’re not the hero of every story, and maybe Farhad was Shirin’s true love, or maybe there isn’t just one person designated for everybody. Maybe there’s a lot more to it—maybe you choose and you practice, and that’s what makes the love true.

Does writing poetry make you brave? It is a good question to ask. I think making anything is a brave thing to do. Not like fighting brave, obviously. But a kind that looks at a horrible situation and doesn’t crumble. Making anything assumes there’s a world worth making it for. That you’ll have someplace, like a clown’s pants, to hide it when people come to take it away. I guess I’m saying making something is a hopeful thing to do.

And being hopeful in a world of pain is either brave or crazy.

There are gods all over the world who just want you to express yourself. Look inside and find whatever you think you are and that’s all it takes to be good. And there are gods who are so alien to us, with minds so clear, the only thing to do would be to sit at their feet and wait for them to speak, to tell us what is good. A god who listens is love. A god who speaks is law. At their worst, the people who want a god who listens are self-centered. They just want to live in the land of do-as-you-please. And the ones who want a god who speaks are cruel. They just want laws and justice to crush everything. I don’t have an answer for you. This is the kind of thing you live your whole life thinking about probably. Love is empty without justice. Justice is cruel without love.

OH, AND IN CASE IT wasn’t obvious, the answer is both. God should be both. If a god isn’t, that is no God.

But why would I make up miracles about paperwork? Why wouldn’t I tell you it was like Faranak taking Fereydun into the Alborz Mountains? That’s a real proper legend that everybody knows. And they’d think I was cool, if I was like that. If you’re going to make it all up, you’d make it so you were the hero.

Their bodies expose the lie. There are no myths or legends that can trick you by the time you’ve put something in your mouth and you’re digesting it.

I think He’s a God who listens as if we are his most important children, and I think He speaks to tell us so.

Maybe we get the endings we deserve. Or maybe the endings we practice.

in polite American society, they care more if you seem happy than if you’re well.

You have to understand, by the fifteenth time we did this, I stopped paying attention to the names of the forms or the faces of the agents. None of the document names mattered; none of the agents acted human at any point in the story. It was like sticking a wrinkly dollar into a candy machine over and over and having it spit the dollar out over and over, for a year, with a gun to your head.

Maybe I should thank him for showing me that any power of one person over another is built on the threat of violence.

The point of the Nights is that if you spend time with each other—if we really listen in the parlors of our minds and look at each other as we were meant to be seen—then we would fall in love. We would marvel at how beautifully we were made. We would never think to be villain kings, and we would never kill each other. Just the opposite. The stories aren’t the thing.

The thing is the story of the story. The spending of the time. The falling in love.

In a refugee camp, it’s the waiting that will kill you. The whole point of a refugee camp is that there are actual people trying to kill you. But really, it’s the slow numbing death of hopelessness that does it. You have to imagine a room that’s just a cement cube—nothing beautiful in it. If you’re not careful, this is also what becomes of the parlor of your mind.

She said the Hotel Barba turned sadness into opium. It tricked you into thinking you were waiting to go live somewhere, when you were already living somewhere.

It was so quick, becoming a family again. We hadn’t even reached the baggage claim and he had his arm around me, needling my sister with his embarrassing behavior. It was so quick that he became human to me again, in the real world of Oklahoma, where you could buy cinnamon rolls at a stand in the airport. Before that, he was a voice from the other side of the world. And before that a memory of a face, and a smell. And before that a myth, a poem of what his father had been, what fathers could be, what place we took in the story of our people. He was all of Ardestan—all the saffron fields, all the walnut trees, the platter of pomegranates and wedges of cheese. He was the lonely mountain and the snake, the pheasant in the mulberry tree. He was the bull and the boulevard of jasmine. And tea. He was the house with the birds in the wall and the Ferris wheel in the desert. He was the fountains of Isfahan, the steps in the stone, cut by the hand of Farhad. He was the city of kings, and the voice of Scheherazade, the whirling dervishes that leap, the fire worshippers, the nomad Kurds, and the eighteen sheep. He was the sizzling kebab, from the land that once belonged to Cyrus, the late great shah-in-shah. He was the rug and the flaw. And now he was so small.

I stared into Mr. Sheep Sheep’s eyes and wondered if he was still alive in there, or if the journey—all the ugliness he’d seen—had killed the light in him. I looked at my dad, who seemed like a nice man, and who wanted me to be happy. I don’t know why I did it—maybe I realized everyone in my memories was already gone—but I ran to my room and sobbed into Mr. Sheep Sheep until he was soaked. OH, AND HE BROUGHT Orich bars. They taste pretty much like Mounds bars.

Reader, if you think anything of Oklahomans, I hope you’ll remember Jim and Jean Dawson, who were so Christian that they let a family of refugees come live with them until they could find a home, and who made them sandwiches with Pringles chips, which is the best chip any place has to offer, and means you’re welcome, and who let them play with their grandson’s Nintendo.

Reading is the act of listening and speaking at the same time, with someone you’ve never met, but love. Even if you hate them, it’s a loving thing to do. You speak someone else’s words to yourself, and hear them for the first time. What you’re doing now is listening to me, in the parlor of your mind, but also speaking to yourself, thinking about the parts of me you like or the parts that aren’t funny enough. You evaluate, like Mrs. Miller says. You think and wrestle with every word.

I guess that was my dad’s favorite myth, that he was everything to everybody.

But what you believe about the future will change how you live in the present.

This was my life, as I experienced it, and it is both fiction and nonfiction at the same time. Your memories are too, if you’ll admit it. But you’re not a liar. You’re just Persian in your own way, with a flaw.