Nam Le - The Boat

A sign above the mixing desk read: Please leave the STUDIO IN THE SAME CONDITION.

"The thing is," Parvin anwered her later, during the drive home, "they're right." It was nighttime now; as she talked, cigarette smoke vented from her mouth and shredded out the open crack of her window. "I was born there, but still. You need to be there."

"They shouldn't talk to you like that," said Sarah. She thought of the man's voice — all those voices — faceless and hateful. Those accounts of killings, rapes, finger amputations, related in attitudes that seemed possessive, even petty. If those things were happening, she felt instinctively, they couldn't be happening to those people calling in. Mostly, she realized, what she felt was anger. What she'd meant to say to Parvin was, You shouldn't let them talk to you like that .

"It's their right," said Parvin.

"Doesn't it piss you off, though?"

But her friend was resilient, she was preposterous, amazing. Probably there was something wrong with her. Something missing that, in everyone else, assorted actions by the need to be liked and the anxiety that you weren't.

Set in these habits, they grew apart. By then Sarah had met Paul, and Parvin, to Sarah's mind, had reacted gracelessly. She couldn't concede how frustrating it might be for Sarah — watching Parvin sink into a world so at odds with the Iran everyone now heard about: the place populated overwhelmingly by brand-conscious, recreationally drugged youths; riddled with online networking sites and underground dance parties. If there was indeed a tyrannical regime, it seemed the citizenry had opted out of it. This version of Iran, especially being counter-mainstream, struck Sarah as authentic. Parvin, she felt, was being exploited by a native audience that kept insisting — for whatever reason — on its own victimhood.

For a long time Sarah deferred to Parvin's background, probing her friend only lightly about these discrepancies. Later, in efforts to prove the baselessness of Parvin's concerns — the audacious sham of the regime — Sarah began marshaling facts: that during the embassy takeover, for example, people had been bused in from the provinces and hired to burn American flags and shout anti-American slogans in exchange for free food, that they wouldn't start until the cameras were rolling and, if there weren't any video cameras — if only still photographers were present-they wouldn't even bother shouting but just punch the air in silence. It was a country busy with its own deceptions. It neither wanted nor needed Parvin's help.

But Parvin kept on. Three years in, she downgraded, then quit her job with an events coordinating company to dedicate herself to the show. She hired an assistant-with what funds, Sarah never learned. Then she asked Sarah to stop coming to the studio altogether. Sarah's presence and comments, she felt, belittled her efforts. Not long after that they stopped speaking.

"It's what she wants," Paul consoled her.

"What?"

"For us to talk about her. While she suffers, nobly."

Sarah shifted under the bedsheets and thought about her friend, bracketed by her headphones in that dark, windowless studio. It depressed her. "You don't know her at all."

"You know what your problem is?" He traced a path of intersecting loops, a figure eight, around her nipples.

"Which one?"

"You take everything so personally." His face sank into thought. "Can't you see? It's her who doesn't know you at all."

But what was it Parvin didn't know? Hadn't she seemed sure of her knowledge when she'd declared, during their last conversation, that Sarah had ransomed herself to Paul? That she'd become blind to the needs of those around her — and now lived a useless life? At the time Sarah had considered those words unforgivable. Then she wasn't sure. For as long as she could remember, she had indeed felt that she hadn't lived in the strong, full-bodied current of her own life; that at some point she'd been shunted to one side, trapped in its shallowest eddies. She was capable of velocity but not depth-there wasn't enough to her. It was Paul, when she met him — as gradually she got to know him — who seemed to suggest the possibility of a deeper, truer life. He could anchor her. That was what Parvin could never understand. That it could actually be — had actually been — Sarah's choice.

She made the decision to love him and she did. He walked into a room and stood still. His face clouded when he planted himself behind her, bobbed above paper bags as he carried them up the stairs. When he cooked for them, he rolled up his sleeves and tipped and tilted the frying pan in a half-haute style that never failed to delight her. When he made their bed, he made it a point to billow the sheet out over the mattress in a single flourish. She loved the striations of his character — how, at work, he became serious, taciturn, giving himself over to the duties of the profession in the old sense. They lived together, worked together. Once a year they visited his family home in New Hampshire. It was there, in that large house in that large clearing, that Sarah finally realized how much Paul's character had been governed by his parents' easy formality; there, watching them attend their shared days, that she'd allowed herself to extrapolate — impossible not to! — her own future with their son.

Her first visit, she'd endlessly explored the wooded backyard that gave onto a lake the locals insisted on calling a "pond." One hot afternoon she convinced Paul to swim with her to the opposite shore. The water was the one place she felt more comfortable, could lead the way. Unexpectedly — charmingly — he was a nervous swimmer, and she set a slow pace. They swam a good mile or so, then pulled themselves onto a boulder. The rock almost too warm. Once the sludge and sand had settled, the water over the edge became so clear that they could see all the way down. Gnats and dragonflies skated the liquid surface. Beneath, shapes of fish trolled the leaf-tramped bed. Sarah ducked her head underwater. When she opened her eyes she caught sight of two brown-spotted trout within arm's length; she tracked their languid movements until suddenly a sleek, almost metallic gleam of black and white crossed her vision; she turned, saw — bewitchingly — the beak, the folded, streamlined wings — it was a loon — gliding steadily into the cool depths. She spluttered to the surface, mute with excitement, and saw Paul lift his head from the rock and smile at her as if he understood completely, and right then she knew, cross her heart, in all her life, that she'd never been so happy.

Parvin left for Iran. The news, when it came a year ago, seemed abstract and out of place in her life. At last, part of Sarah admitted that she had misjudged her friend, had taken her at far less than her word. But the rest of her-the part given over to Paul-took ever more pleasure from him and, in her mind, day by day, proffered it to Parvin as rebuke.

***

"THIS MORNING," SAID PARVIN. They were walking to the car, back along the smoke-drab streets. Mahmoud locked in step behind them. "What can I tell you about this morning?"

On both sides of the road, multistory walls had been painted over in gaudy murals: Shi'ite saints, mope-faced martyrs in army uniforms, garlanded with flowers and butterflies and rainbows. Publicly rendered paradises. Beneath one mural a thoroughfare was strung with fairy lights, an Internet café crowded with youths. Walking past, Sarah glimpsed girls in heeled boots, girls with colorful hijabs, sunglasses perched on top of them.

Here she was, she thought — with Parvin — in the place itself.

She'd bought a ticket — that was all it took! — and stunningly, almost unimaginably, she was here.

That morning, Parvin explained, while Mahmoud was picking Sarah up from the airport, Parvin had met with members of a sympathetic group. A drama company from one of the city's smaller universities. It was urgent, they'd said. They needed to speak to someone high up in the Party.