Saïd Sayrafiezadeh - New American Stories

The fact is, no, I hadn’t, until I was almost upon her. The wind, I guess. From the road I hadn’t heard a thing. The well was far too deep to climb out of. She could have been out here for days. She could have never been found.

“Are you hurt?” I called down.

“I’m wet. There’s mud.”

“Did you break anything?”

“I don’t think so. Get help.”

I hesitated. If I left, went driving down the road, I was pretty sure I’d never find her again.

“Maybe I have something in my car,” I said.

“Well, go look.”

I ran back to the car, studying the angle so I’d find my way back. I had so much crap in my trunk — crates of books, laundry detergents. I had a board she might be able to grab on to. I found a piece of rope from when I’d tied my mattress to the roof and moved over two blocks. I took the rope and ran back to the well.

“I’ve got this rope,” I said. “Might be long enough.” I crouched down on the wet ground.

“Toss me an end.”

I almost tossed her an end.

I didn’t toss her an end.

I dangled the rope out of her reach. “You’ll put me down?”

“Put you down?” She jumped for it, missed.

“99. You’ll let me read?”

“For fuck’s sake,” she shouted.

“Will you?” I waved the rope between us.

She thought about it. “No,” she said.

“Suit yourself,” I said. I pulled the rope out of sight. So it turned out her death was by my own hand, or lack of, it appeared. I walked away.

I heard her call, “You don’t scare me…” and then her voice was gone. I went back to the car.

—

It may seem like I was being heroic here, trying to save this kid, but the truth is I was just grateful to be feeling something.

I started the car. If she was gone, paperwork would jam up for weeks. There’d be an administrative breakdown. Next week was finals. They’d be grateful to me for volunteering to do the essays.

“Don’t worry about 99,” I’d say. “I’ve got it covered on this end.”

—

If, at that moment, someone had been strolling along, they would have thought I was checking my map, not leaving a life in a hole. And if someone were looking in from overhead, she, in her hole, would look completely separate from me. What was really going on was a fact she and I would share and no one else would ever know, because there was no one looking down from the clouds. Civilization settled on that a century ago. It would be her word against mine for all eternity, and who would ever believe a person would do something like that?

—

I shut off the car. I got out of the car and went back. “You still there?” I said.

“No, I left,” she said.

I didn’t ask her if she’d changed her mind, if she was ready to beg. I just lowered the rope and she grabbed it.

I had done this for a kid who’d never even looked my way. I grasped the rope with all my might and, inch by inch, I pulled her out.

—

Something she had on me, this assistant, which I didn’t know at the time, was that I had been fired already. Or not hired back. The next semester’s class assignments were sitting in our boxes. There was nothing in my box. I just hadn’t realized it yet. There’d been complaints about me, poor evaluations. The students in my 99s had the lowest passing rates. For two weeks now she’d been trying to tell me and I’d ignored her. I’d thought she was just being mean.

—

Me? If I had been her, I would have agreed to anything. I would have let her assist in whatever she wanted if she would have assisted me just then. And assuming she did lift me out, there was no way I would have still gone to the dance with a nut like that, but she was. The fact that she was capable of that, of refusing me and now of brushing off the dirt, hopping into the car, slamming the door, and saying, “We’re almost there!” made me a little afraid of her.

—

We arrived. It was a regular grade school and the dance was held in the gym. And, yes, she had been telling the truth. Regular Native Americans were coming in and going out. And, yes, they had on their regular traditional outfits, just like she had said they would, and some of them had on a piece of a different outfit — from when the British came galloping across the land and the Native Americans knocked them over with a spear and took their jackets and then passed them from hand to hand until today, when one showed up wearing a Benjamin Franklin jacket and another showed up in a white wig, and isn’t that interesting? Yes it is.

—

Everyone started dancing. There were a couple of men on the side with some drums.

“Now look,” I told the office assistant, “you don’t have to stick to the story. Everybody here knows that we’re not Native Americans and that they all are, and what do you think they’re thinking about us?”

“But I have our costumes.” She patted her box.

“All right, let’s see them,” I said. “Let’s have a look, but even in traditional Native American outfits we are not going to look like Native Americans. Nobody’s going to believe it.”

“But wait till they see me dance,” she said.

She opened the box. Inside were two giant pom-poms, that’s what they looked like. Each costume was made out of bright orange yarn, long strings of it, and it covered your whole body and even had a flap for the head. She put it on me. I stood there and let her. Then she put on her own costume. The other dancers had on animal hides, beaded dresses, but no one tried to keep her from dancing. They just stopped and stared as the assistant, in her orange outfit, walked out onto the dance floor. I had never seen anything like it in my life. Of course, I did not dance. Then she came back and got me.

—

They’d had meetings about me, my name was on the table. There was no way she could have assigned me to do it. So that part I understand. But this is what I wonder: Why had she asked me to drive her to the dance? Was she that nervy? Or was it possible that she meant to warn me, give me advice?

—

So she got me into the costume, she had me beat on that, but the fact was: she was still going to die. Pulling her out had done nothing. I’d win in the end — not a race I was particularly excited about, a pain-in-the-ass race, one I hadn’t asked to be in, one that was far lonelier than I’d expected. But she would be gone and I’d be going on. So we each had something on the other, the office assistant and I, when we went out onto that dance floor.

The kid would not die young. He would live on and on, much longer than the office assistant, much longer than I. He’d live almost forever. I know that because the next semester I had to find out if he’d passed the class and made a life in these United States, or if he’d failed, returned to his war-torn land, fought, and died. I snuck into the school several times after I’d been let go, skulked around the cafeteria looking for him. Finally one day I saw him coming out of the elevator, saw his face, and I hurried back outside.

The office assistant must have slid his paper into the pass pile a week before she died. She’d seen me with his file. It wouldn’t have taken a genius to put it together.

—

Two weeks after the dance she leapt off the building, made the papers.

—

Okay, so what, so we look crazy in these pom-poms. Leave the poor assistant alone. Imagine what she must have been through to wind up looking like that. Imagine what her life must have been like, having a mother who would make something like these. Imagine what suffering she has had that I will never know. Just clear the floor for her. Everybody get out of the way — can’t you see the office assistant wants to dance? Would you give her a little space? Give her a little music too? A little bang on the drum for her to stomp a foot to? Well, the Native Americans were ready to see something like that, so they took seats in the bleachers to watch. And as for me, I may be an old maid, and I may spend my life loving people who never loved me, and loving them in ways that aren’t good for me, but I stepped around with her. I danced.