Everything Sad Is Untrue (a true story)

by Daniel Nayeri

You are surrounded by as many Christians in Oklahoma as Muslims in Iran. Cars practically com...

Oklahoma gets more tornadoes than anywhere in the world. Except it isn’t spread out over all 365 days of a year. They happen in the summer, almost every night, sometimes three or four at a time. Huge tunnels of wind that claw the earth. Like if God was scratching ...

Sometimes they erase entire towns off the map. Suddenly your grandpa’s house is as gon...

When you see a tornado rip swimming pools out of the ground, you realize something Oklahomans already know. People aren’t very big. In fact, if you stand in the wide flat expanse of an Oklahoma field you can watch a rain cloud roll in from miles and miles away, pulling a curtain of rain across the prairie toward you and your l...

Men who make Committees and go around stealing mothers and hurting them, they’re just red ants killing black ants in a giant universe that has tornadoes bigger than the biggest thing we have ever built. And that’s a nice thought. It’s nice to be unimportant.

we need more than rain to clean us.

NOBODY EVER EVER SPEAKS about what happened to my mom when the secret police took her.

my imagination is probably worse than what happened. I mean. I don’t know. Maybe it isn’t.

The word she used also means “rude,” like Persians are so polite that even the secret police who go around killing people don’t want to be so rude as to scare the kids in a market.

the shame of refugees is that we have to constantly explain ourselves.

It makes the stories patchworks, not beautiful rugs.

Anyway in Iran when you go to someone’s house, they put out a spread with tea and sweets on a rug, and you sit together and the h...

The only offering in front of Sima was the drain and the threat of a little river of blood winding its way across the floor toward it. That was why the Committee men left her alone in there to look at it. It was like bringing som...

The legend of my mom is that she can’t be stopped. Not when you hit her. Not when a whole country full of goons puts her in a cage. Not even if you make her poor and try to kill her slowly in the little-by-little poison of sadness.

And the legend is true. I think because she’s fixed her eyes on something beyond the rivers of blood, to a beautiful place on the other side. How else would anybody do it?

Would you rather a god who listens or a god who speaks?

Be careful with the answer. It’s as important as every word from Scheherazade’s mouth that saved her life. And everybody’s got an answer.

A god who listens is like your best friend, who lets you tell him about all th...

A god who speaks is like your best teacher, who tells Brandon Goff he has to leave the room if he’s going ...

A god who listens is your mom who lets you sit in a kitchen and tell her stories about...

A god who speaks is your dad who calls on the phone with advice for ...

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 is cruel with...

And sometimes, like Sima, you ...

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.

Sima had one week to “think about it,” which meant she had one week to tell the Committee men the names of all the people in the underground church. All those people I scared when I ran in with the bloody nose—all dead if the Committee got to them. She had one week or they would snatch her again. And they would kill us—my sister and me. She had one week to choose. And it wasn’t like she could go anywhere. The Committee was everywhere. In vans all over the city. Neighbors. The daughters of pistachio vendors. The sons of pharmacists.

When my mom describes it all, she skips over the interrogation and the panic and says it was a time of three miracles—three things that couldn’t have happened without the intervention of angels. This is the part that the pastors of Oklahoma churches love the best, and ask her to repeat as often as possible for their congregations. And when I told it to Mrs. Miller’s class, I did the same as her, because this is her story. And if she says it was miracles, then it was miracles.

If you’re going to make it all up, you’d make it so you were the hero.

I’d say, “Yes, the salute is a Persian symbol for shielding your eyes from the light of greatness when a boss comes in the room.”

even though everybody was willing to believe a rainbow-cow story, for some reason they won’t believe miracles when they happen in offices and airports.

So even though my mom had panic-packed a suitcase, and screamed at my dad, who had insisted there was nothing wrong and it would all blow over, even though she said it wouldn’t blow over unless she gave the names of the church, and he’d said, “So, maybe—” and she’d growled something, and he’d given up.

Even with all that, they still couldn’t do anything, because they didn’t have the papers. We were all dead.

That afternoon, my dad got a call. A dental emergency. A miracle tooth! I told you already, he was the best dentist in Isfahan.

Well it just so happened that a minister of immigration, a mullah, a boss man in the government, had taken an eager bite of a peach and broken his left front tooth on the stone. The sticky juice was still in his beard as my dad reached in to fix it.

It was like the story of the mouse pulling a thorn from the paw of the lion. Except my dad is the lion and the mullah is a toad. But we lived in the ...

That’s how we got them. If it had gone any other w...

But everything went alright and we all piled into the car. I imagine my mom as she crossed the street with her suitcase, looking in both directions for an unmarked van parked somewhere. I didn’t know we’d never see our birds again, or I would have said good-bye. I would have maybe gotten a sprig of jasmine from the yard and kept it in my pocket. I dunno. Maybe I’d have gotten one of my dad’s shirts. Anything.

I ate the last one, and that was the last Orich bar I ever tasted.

IF YOU WANT A god who listens, maybe all you want is pity for losing your only friend, like Mr. Sheep Sheep. If you want a god who speaks, maybe all you want is revenge.

I remember looking at my dad and realizing this is news to him too. That we’re never coming back. His eyes grow wide and begful. His mustache becomes a red unhappy cut across his mouth. This is the look of sadness that I imagine on his face when we speak on the phone.

If my family wanted to smuggle anything, we’d just make custom linings for a luggage set. If they cut Mr. Sheep Sheep, like the bull, there would be no river of blood except for the one pouring from a small exploded heart in my chest. If you can believe a little kid like me could just fall over dead, then believe it here.

My dad doesn’t have a bag with him. He’s leaving me at the airport. I’m his Mr. Sheep Sheep and he’s going to send me somewhere I don’t even know, without him. I put down Mr. Sheep Sheep. He props up on the dirt on a flat-panel bottom. His stubby round legs poke out in front of him. His arms reach out for a hug. I look in his black button eyes. They beg. I turn my back and my mom sweeps me up in her arms. My chin bounces on her shoulder as she begins to run. I wave good-bye to my friend. He won’t live past sundown, I think. That was the third creature I ever killed.

“They weren’t miracles,” he said. “Tell me anyway.” “There’s no such thing as miracles, Khosrou.” “Okay, whatever.” “Only science. Only poetry. Only the mind.” “So, at the airport …” “And the mind can do anything. It can create anything. It is God, Khosrou. The mind is God.” “That’s blasphemy, Dad.” “So what? So I’m blasphemous. What more can happen?” “People could be listening.” You can hear them sometimes, the American secret police, the CIA, tapping into our calls to listen. Sometimes we hear them cough.

“Let them listen,” he says. “Let them hear how all this talk of God ruined my life and took my family.” He’s crying now. I think it’s probably midnight in Isfahan. He’s sitting in the dark empty house. The birds in the walls are probably asleep. Or maybe he opened the windows and let them free a long time ago. I don’t know.

Here in Oklahoma, the sun is up. We’re not even looking at the same sky or anything cheesy like that. We’re in different worlds. He’s calling from the land of stories and genies. I’m in the land of concrete and weathermen. Or maybe I’m in the new world, free and full of adventure. And he is in the dying city, crumbling into dust like an elemental fiend. It doesn’t matter. They’re far apart.

He liked to tell stories about how difficult I was, peeing in luggage stores and running off in airports, because that’s what dads who get to be with their sons every day do. They complain about it, instead of begging God to bring them back and pretending they were little angels.

“You were off being a little goat pellet. But your mother heard this and started sobbing. She almost fell, but we caught her. And the guard said, ‘Go, go find your son.’ And so he waved us through. If he hadn’t, we’d all be dead.”

You were right in front of the candy shop. The woman gave you a chocolate and you followed her around like a piglet. We scooped you up and ran to the terminals.”