Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

“Bus is easier,” he said. In fact, Rahad’s driver’s license had expired and he wanted to ask to use her address to renew it, since his PO box—his one remaining fiber of a root—had lapsed. He busied his hands skinning the fresh pistachios with his thumbnail. He had found them in a nearby Eastern market that he browsed before each visit, steered there by an inexplicable banner at the edge of his screen—maybe the Internet knew that Yas had been ten when they left Iran and that she missed it more than she understood.

She shut off the dryer and stared at him, all angry eyes and perilous heels, and he felt like a boy on a scorching Tehrani school yard, again caught drumming on three upturned buckets instead of playing soccer or running the perimeter as instructed. “I can’t believe this,” she whispered.

“I like my life,” he shot back. “No mortgage or bills. Everything easy and new. You might consider something more inspiring for yourself. You were so creative—”

“Jesus, Baba. Stop!” She slammed the blow-dryer on her dresser.

“Don’t call me Jesus,” he said, trying to lighten her mood with silly bazi, but her face grew colder and he had to look away, nodding to himself—no fun Yas tonight.

“Life isn’t these quixotic fantasies!” she continued. “Yeah, Iran was all long boozy dinners and guitars in the garden, but that was a different universe. And even there it was possible… look at your baba. He had music and a big house with a courtyard—”

Such marksmanship. He interrupted in English that slipped in anger. “Why I have to be like others? You say this insult words, except than… is lies. Is not quick-exotic fantasy.” No Iranian child would dare judge her parent this way. He had never spoken such words to his father, even as the old man napped away the mornings under a mosquito net and squandered hours on the veranda with his students, strumming three strings and ignoring everyone else. “Anybody can have black-and-white life by following some instructions. I choose colorful life. I want only to walk earth, find music, think…”

She turned and muttered in accented Farsi, “You’re fifty-four. Maybe it’s time to grow your own hands and feet.” The familiar Persian expression stung. Where had she learned it? It was the sort of thing that frightened, unimaginative parents said to their children before prodding and elbowing them into medicine or real estate, and he had taken care not to be that kind of parent. Every day when she was young, he had read poems to her. Every day they had drawn castles, plucked notes, and trained her imagination through daydreams. Had he relied on other people? He never stayed more than two nights, always left behind skillfully curated CDs, washed every sheet and towel, replaced any milk or food he had eaten with organic milk and homemade bread. But to American children words are cheap, effortlessly learned and quickly dispatched. They strike fast with the tongue, offering instruction on every small thing. How can words you don’t understand humiliate, they think, muttering their wisdom in low voices only to quench themselves.

Like the day he had arrived in New York to meet with his daughter in a café. She had time for only a coffee and she spent it telling him that he had disgraced himself online.

“Baba joon, it was creepy!” she had said. Creepy was a word with which he was familiar, but the connotations changed from moment to moment, and so it frightened him. She could have meant so many things. “If you like a photo, you click like. You don’t tag yourself. You especially don’t tag yourself on top of a picture of my friend in a bikini.”

“What is you mean?” he had said, unable to hold in his anger. “I only click like. I click like for photo of my daughter enjoying beach. You make everything dirty and horrible.”

“No, you tagged yourself,” she had sighed, trying to sound sympathetic, an instinct that made him all the more angry. “You have to learn Facebook.”

“In Iran,” he snapped, getting up from the table, “no child says to father, You have to learn. No one. I never say to my father, You have to learn guitar, even though he refuses out of pride, even though no one wants to hear sitar anymore. I never say this to him. You and your computer bazi. Is big waste of life, these Facebooks.”

Amid the hundreds of promises he had made to her on the day they left Iran, he had offered only one to himself: if exile was to demean and bruise him, fine; but it wouldn’t clip his wings, replacing his craving for music with drudgery and fears of risk. And yet, the fates are crafty and they had inflicted his daughter with the very disease he despised. Yasmine, who had an American accent, who never mixed up her idioms and knew an insult from a joke and exactly what to say next, a girl who had every opportunity, had taken to taking root—a provincial instinct. At ten years old, she had set down her little suitcase, sharpened her pencils, and, like many good Iranian immigrants, set to work on her sensible American life: study, then do something joyless and technical with a steady paycheck.

After their argument at the café, he had thrown his laptop across the room (the guestroom of an old friend, a composer), shattering the screen. He quit Facebook from a library desktop. He didn’t need a computer. If he didn’t have one, Yasmine could never humiliate him with another explanation. She would just stick to complaining about his distracted, itinerant ways. And how could he make her see how life had unfolded for him? Bringing her out of Iran with two suitcases and a sitar between them, stumbling from place to place, always at the mercy of chance, until he found their home in Baltimore. There he had stayed, teaching music to the children of rich Iranians and Turks all over Maryland and Delaware. Then Yas went off to college—Harvard, he was proud to say. He had begged her (a humiliating act, particularly in Farsi) to study music or art. “Computer science is the same at U of M or D or anywhere,” he had said. “Please, azizam, Harvard has an art library that would wake Rumi from his grave.” She had moaned. “You know, other Iranian dads would be proud.” So he watched her graduate, move to New York, and start her first job. Then he set off into the world again, treading the unknown, always aching for stories, songs, adventure. Yes, he wanted a home, but purpose, inspiration, art: those are the soul’s truest needs.

The night of their big fight in her apartment, after her date, Rahad sat up, watching his daughter sleep. The couch faced her bed, and the lights of the iron-and-fog city streamed in through gauze-thin curtains, so that he could watch her chest rise and fall. He followed its rhythms like a slow song, a ritual he had invented when she was a girl, in the days after her mother died and he worried that his daughter, too, would simply neglect to wake up one morning. Yasmine thought he had no dreams, but he had big dreams. He didn’t escape the daily terrors of working in Tehran’s creative underground to live a dull life, to be a clone of everyone else, to freely relinquish all imagination. Maybe Yasmine thought he was a disappointment to his own father, but she knew nothing of the old man. He had named him Rahad. Rahad, traveler. Rahad, a musical note.

He was glad he hadn’t confessed to needing her address—the driver’s license would sort itself, as small things always do.

In the afternoon Yasmine called. Surely her neighbor had seen him linger outside her door, knocking and waiting. But she only said, “Got anything new for me?”

He was already on his feet, unzipping his leather bag. “I stumbled onto an old man in Kenya who’s been singing in the same village for fifty years. The Internet has put up five pages for him—lots of respect from the world. Let me see what I have here.” He rifled through his bag for effect; he had already chosen the four songs he would send her. He added in English, “Poor Baba joon would roll in grave knowing we listen to Kenyan man… He would roll right onto antique sitar he should have left to me.”