Nam Le - The Boat

"Sarah," he said.

She froze.

He said, "I am Parvin's friend."

Her posture, she was aware, was one of almost parodie decorum — a sister of the faith, scrupulously observing the veil — but there was no part of her spared to find it funny. She 'd barely landed. Now she was shocked awake, her mind instantaneously compacted in fear, fixed on the image of a small dark room… a metal chair in the middle of it.

"Parvin. You know?"

She didn't speak. What if it were a trick? — to elicit information? An admission of association?

"Come with me," he said. For the first time his English seemed weighted by a heavier accent.

She looked up but he hadn't moved. He reached into his shirt pocket. "Here," he said, and took a step back.

It was a Polaroid. Parvin, her jaw dangling open in the middle of some mischief, one hand brushing back her purple-streaked hair, the other squeezing Sarah's shoulder. Both their faces upwardly flushed by the candlelit cake before them. Sarah recognized it from her thirtieth birthday. Five years ago. Parvin had taken her to a sushi restaurant near the Chinatown lions and, after the complimentary snapshot, had persuaded the waitstaff to sing "Happy Birthday" in Japanese. They'd filed away, smiling tightly, harassedly. How hopeless that whole occasion had made her feel, Sarah remembered — turning thirty — yet even so, looking back now, she was stifled with nostalgia.

"Good," said the young man. He leaned in closer. "Now. Please. Come with me."

***

HIS NAME WAS MAHMOUD and he was a family friend of Parvin's. She shouldn't be afraid. Also, he was the leader of the Party. Parvin worked with him now. Why hadn't she picked Sarah up? She had been busy with last-minute responsibilities. He spoke rapidly, in a tone suggesting he didn't want to explain any more than he already had. He assumed Parvin had told her about the rally in two days' time.

Sarah sat with him in the backseat, wondering what responsibilities could possibly have kept her friend at this hour. It was hard to tell whether dawn had broken. A faint glow massed behind the smog but it could have been the electric ambience of night — caught and refracted in low-lying haze. In the driver's seat a heavily stubbled youth named Reza steered their car, an ancient Ford, like a bullet into the city.

"You have come at a busy time," said Mahmoud.

"Where are we going?" She wound down her window. A warp of gasoline and exhaust filled the car and she quickly closed it again. Behind the brief scream of wind she thought she'd heard the sound of drums. "Where are we meeting Parvin?"

The two men conferred in Farsi.

"You have come during Ashura," said Mahmoud. "Our holiest week."

She nodded impatiently. Reza glanced up into the rearview mirror.

"Your hotel is near one of the largest processions," Mahmoud went on. "If you would like to see — if you are not too tired — "

"Hotel? I thought that was just for the visa." Parvin had arranged the letter of invitation from the hotel, had assured her it was just a formality. "I'm staying with Parvin," she said.

The car swerved left. Sarah slid over and smacked into Mahmoud, who flinched, then, as she disengaged herself, smiled stiffly down at his knees. Inexplicably, his reaction riled her. Reza twisted half around from the front seat, made a comment in his skipping Farsi. A short silence ensued, then Mahmoud translated, "He says there are one thousand accidents a day in this city." Reza caught her eye in the rearview mirror and gave her a civic nod. After another silence, Mahmoud said, "We thought it would be better. At the hotel."

"Why?" She frowned, shook her head. "I don't understand."

The lines on his face were so shallow, like lines on tracing paper, and this, with the way his lower lip turned outward, gave him the slightly churlish air of a child. He said, "At least until the rally is over." There was irritation in his voice. "Parvin will explain — she comes to meet us in the afternoon." Then his face closed off completely to her.

Sarah slumped back in the deep seat. As they drove, the sky around them lightened, lifting the concrete landscape — block after block of squat, square buildings — into blue relief. Sarah swallowed repeatedly, trying to clear her throat of its sooty taste. She had no choice — she'd wait for Parvin. Her body felt suddenly spent beneath her clothes. Her head still fumy from the flight, the sleeping pills she'd taken. And now she'd offended this smooth-cheeked boy — this reluctant guide of hers — Mahmoud. She pressed her face against the glass. The city was stilled, caught in the subdued minutes before sunrise. A woman tripped out of a cinder-block doorway, holding her scarf down against the wind. In the distance, the constant shudder of drums. All at once Sarah was overpowered by the strangeness of where she was. Loneliness dropped on her with the speed of a black column.

***

THREE MONTHS AGO, she'd been a senior associate at Pearson, Peelle and Sloss — one of the top-tier law firms in Portland. She'd had a private office with a river view, a private understanding with management with regard to her next promotion, a reservoir of professional goodwill accrued, it sometimes seemed, by virtue of having not yet majorly screwed up. She'd paid off half of a two-bedroom apartment in the Pearl District, exercised almost daily to keep her body in good shape. And — back then — pathetically, she knew — she'd had Paul. She would return from her morning exercise to find him still ensnared in their bedsheets, or shaving behind a blade of light from the bathroom, frazzle-haired and stumbly, seeing her and hauling her body — buzzing and taut and alive — toward his own. He was the aberration of her life: the relief from her lifelong suspicion that she was, at heart, a hollow person, who clung to hollow things.

She unknotted her head scarf. She'd pleaded jet lag as soon as they arrived at the hotel and Mahmoud, who seemed already uncomfortable accompanying her into the lobby, had quickly taken his leave. Upstairs, someone had forgotten to draw the curtains and the room was blanched with golden light. The eastern windows were level with the top of a large plane tree — so close Sarah could reach out and touch its leaves. It cast a fretwork of shadows on the floor.

She removed her long black overgarment and threw it on a chair. Her shirt underneath was drenched. She peeled it off, then her jeans, and abruptly caught a glimpse of her reflection in a bathroom mirror: slender and olive-skinned, a body in accidentally matching bra and underwear. A small wad of undeclared U.S. dollars was gauze-covered and bandaged to the back of her knee. She looked mysterious, glowing — there was a different sun here, somehow; more impersonal. Incandescent. Well, this was what she wanted, wasn't it? She was in the desert now.

They'd met at work. At first he'd been just another good-looking suit in Banking, three floors up, with good teeth, arms that filled out his sleeves when he leaned, the way men always leaned, double-elbowed, on bar counters. He had the salt-and-pepper hair that, on some men, draws more attention to their youth than their age. He was divorced — no kids. He was her professional senior. She'd dealt with him on some statutory debt recovery claims. One day, at Friday drinks, he brought up the last file they'd worked. Their client had been demanding payment from a company in Chapter 11 but had been low on the list of creditors. The firm had all but counseled forfeit when Sarah developed a submission for priority and, against all expectations, won a good settlement. It had been a tough case. Paul admired her work and said so. Despite her proficiency, work had for so long devolved into sets of empty, unaltering rituals for Sarah that she was capable of registering his comment only as some kind of code. Already, she found herself deferring to him for meaning.