Everything Sad Is Untrue (a true story)

by Daniel Nayeri

It’s weird. I even asked my mom if her dad had made it all up, but she said no. He would never embarrass himself like that. It was as if I disappeared for ten minutes.

you don’t have to believe any of it and I wouldn’t blame you. But if they were accidents, then it was like putting a jigsaw puzzle into a tumble dryer and having it come out with all the pieces in the right place.

We all have our own pain.

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.

Every kid knows you run inside when a tornado comes, find the thickest pipe that goes the deepest underground—like the one in your bathtub—get in, put a blanket over you, and pray to a god that listens.

We know this because Oklahoma has more tornadoes than anywhere on Earth. If you’re keeping up, that means they don’t just have a god who listens or a god who speaks, but a god who puts his finger in the dirt and swirls it.

Anyway, if the tornadoes don’t suck the air out of your lungs and toss you like a rag doll, and if the swarm of nails doesn’t go through you like shotgun ...

don’t forget you have to hang on to the roof for dear life.

Scheherazade was trying to make the king human again. She made him love life by showing him all of it, the funny parts about poop, the dangerous parts with demons, even the boring parts about what makes marriages last.

Little by little, he began to feel the joy and sadness of others.

He became less immune, less numb, because ...

And what about you? You might feel what I felt on the roof that night. I was ashamed of being so weak, angry at Ray for everything he’d done, tired of being poor, and afraid of the thunder and lightning crashing all around me. I thou...

prayed to God I would see...

It won’t be in this life, so it has to be where...

prayed that even though I was Christian and he was whatever he was, I prayed that God...

me once we’re bo...

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.

digging is the kind of thing you can’t do when people

are watching.

all smell is particulate.

That means little bits of poop wafting in the air have gone into your nose and down your throat, and your body is telling you whatever you do, don’t eat any more.

it’s a true thing in a world without many true things.

I was his son. And maybe he was all torn up about it. It’s the not-remembering that makes it one giant hole in the middle of a rug. Like somebody didn’t even care to address it.

It’s actually made of seven emirates, which are like states, but more like principalities, because they’re owned by seven princes called emirs. That’s why they’re called emirates.

All seven emirates are only as big as half of Oklahoma, but the UAE is one of the richest countries in the world.

They have a mall that sells nothing but gold—every store, floor to ceiling, gold. It’s so hot there that swimming pools boil, so one emir built himself an indoor ski resort. It’s a giant building with a ski slope covered ...

They have castles like in the movie Aladdin. The streets are so clean because the fine for littering is a ton of money and a flogging. The whole...

You might be wondering why he found us in the street and invited us into his limo. Well, remember those friends of my dad’s I mentioned? The ones he visited in London? Legend has it that my dad knew these people, and nobody knew that he knew these people. He called a great prince of Dubai with his mythic charm and told him our situation. So here the prince came, like the eagles in The Hobbit, swooping in at the darkest hour to save us.

That’s what I thought, anyway, as we rode in the sweet-smelling car, through the garden estate of the emir, past marble beds full of black tulips, to his castle by the sea. I hadn’t seen Aladdin yet, but when I got to Oklahoma years later, it was the reference I had to explain this part to people. The palace towers weren’t so round as the ones in the movie, and the real castle had helicopters. But it was all close enough.

I imagined the carpet hanging, like the sail of a ship, from two wooden masts, and my grandma slowly making each knot. It would take as long as she was alive, I thought. I realized at that moment I would never see her again. For me she would forever be a mythic weaver in the basement of an ancient house in Ardestan.

She’s there now. I’m here in Oklahoma where rugs don’t matter to anybody. That’s the end of it. There are no magic rugs to fly me to her. There are only shag carpets for rich Oklahomans, and million-dollar rugs for princes. And the refugees are lucky if they get quilted toilet paper. Believe me, even when I thought we were going to live in the marble palace, I would have given it up to sit on that basement dirt floor again.

it’s illegal in America to do business with Iran. But really the rugs are from Iran, and they just ship them from Turkey, because Mr. Abbas is a man who takes pride in his work.

Only Oklahoma oil families can afford the rugs. And even then, Mr. Abbas has to explain that every village in Iran has its own colors and patterns they’re famous for. Mr. Abbas always shows the red field designs from Kashan, which look like a field of wild flowers. He points out the diamond-shape medallion in the center, since they’re named after Shah Abbas, which is also his name.

Rugs from Qom always use a bit of turquoise, and the ones from Naein are ivory with light blue branches. So if you get one of those, they’re extra valuable. Some rugs from Isfahan even...

Here’s another fact about rugs, and then I’ll get back to the story. They are graded by how many knots they have crammed in every square centimeter. So if it only has sixty knots in one centimeter of carpet, then you’d see that rug on the floor of a tea house in the bazaar, and you’d be welcome to step on it. But some rugs have 400 kno...

But no matter which grade or pattern—no matter even if the greatest grandmother in the whole world wove i...

The artisans of Kashan and Isfahan and Tabriz and Mashad all knew that only God was perfect—the only one who could listen to and speak the perfect truth. To remind themselves, and to show their humility, they would purposefully include one missed knot in every rug, one imperfection.

I think it’s pretty funny that people would mistake themselves for perfect if they didn’t include a hole in a rug.

But that’s the whole point of the Persian flaw—it’s there to remind you of all the other flaws, and even the flaw that makes you u...

It’s like the game Oklahoma kids play called “two truths and a lie,” which was made to remind them that this world is fu...

The Persian flaw in Mr. Abbas was that he underestimated my sister. And the ...

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

THE TRUTH IS, IN THE real world there’s no such thing as a Persian flaw, because that assumes you could have a thing that has only one thing wrong with it.

One disaster always begets another, and another. Your dad disappears in Azerbaijan, and your uncles sell you off, and your daughter gets set up with a mean man, and their daughter gets a warrant on her head, and a million other tragedies play out on every side. The story goes on, and you can’t pretend that dropping one knot in a rug is the only mistake keeping it from perfection. The truth is that everything has a hundred thousand flaws.

But it’s pretty to think that we can make perfect things and scratch them a little to keep from being gods. It’s comforting, the way in myths the heroes are all one personality flaw from perfection. If o...

The closer you get to history, it’s like the closer you get to the weave of a rug. You see a thousand thousand complications. Like this part of the story, which I remember too ...

every story is nestled somewhere within another story.”

My mom had to get down and explain everything, that she always liked Daniel cause he was in the Bible, and that people couldn’t say Khosrou. At that moment I remember thinking, Maybe names don’t even matter and this is something like stuffed animals that you just leave in a field and never think about again.

That was the day I decided Daniel would be ten times tougher than Khosrou—like the superbot version or something—so tough he could take any kind of damage and be unstoppable.