Saïd Sayrafiezadeh - New American Stories

“There’s a flu going around,” she says.

“The flu?” I say. “Everyone has the flu?”

“Or they’re afraid of contracting the flu,” she says. “The hospital is even restricting visitors. You haven’t heard about the flu?”

“Only in the most general terms,” I say. “I didn’t think there was an epidemic.”

“Pandemic, possibly a pandemic. We should all be in our homes, trying not to panic.”

We wait but no one shows up. There’s a large window in the room that looks out over the parking lot, but the lot is empty and continues to be empty. The sky is doing that strange thing it does, brightening fiercely before dark.

“Why don’t we begin anyway?” she says. “ ‘For where two are gathered in my name…’ and so on. Or is it three?”

“Why would it be three?” I say. “I don’t think it’s three.”

“You’re right,” she says.

She has a round pale face and small hands. Nothing about her is attractive, though she is agreeable, certainly, or trying to be.

“I’m not dying,” I say. God only knows what possessed me.

“Of course not!” she exclaims, her round face growing pink. “Goodness!”

But then she says, “On Wednesday, Wednesday I think it was, it was certainly not Thursday, I was in this woman’s room where the smell of flowers was overwhelming. You could hardly breathe and I knew her friends meant well, but I offered to remove the arrangements, there were more than a dozen of them, I’m surprised there wasn’t some policy restricting their number, and she said, ‘I’m not dying,’ and then she died.”

“You never know,” I say.

“I hope they let me back soon.”

“Why wouldn’t they?”

“Thank you,” she says quietly.

“I meant to say why would they?”

She stands up but then sits down again. “No,” she says, “I’m not leaving.”

“It’s disgusting what you’re doing, you’re like the thief’s accomplice,” I say. “No one can be certain about these things.”

Suddenly she appears not nervous or accommodating in the least.

We do not speak further, just sit there staring at each other until the sexton arrives and insists it’s time to lock the place up.

At home, Colson is watching a television special on our dying oceans.

“Please turn that off,” I say.

“Grandma wanted to watch it.”

He has made popcorn and poured it into a large blue bowl that is utterly unfamiliar to me. It’s a beautiful bowl of popcorn.

“You have another bowl like that?” I ask. “I want to make myself a drink.”

He laughs like my wife might have when she still loved me, but then returns to watching the television.

“This is tragic,” he says. “Can anything be done?”

“So much can be done,” I say. “But everything would have to be different.”

“Well,” he sighs, “now Grandma and Poppa know. She wanted to watch it.”

“Have you heard anything about a flu,” I ask. “Does anyone you know have the flu?”

“Grandma died of the flu.”

“No. They died in a car accident. You know that.”

“Sometimes they get mixed up,” he says.

Colson’s the age I was when I was told about the country. Ten years later I’d be married. I married too young and unwisely, for sure.

“Do they sometimes tell you stories you don’t believe?”

“Daddy,” he says with no inflection, so I don’t know what he means.

We finish the popcorn. He did a good job. Every kernel was popped. I take the bowl to the sink and rinse it out carefully, then I take a clean dish towel from a drawer and dry it. It really is an extraordinarily lovely bowl. I don’t know where to put it because I don’t know where it came from.

A few days later my father is back. He was a handsome man with handsome thick gray hair.

“Son,” he says, “I don’t know what to tell you.”

“It’s all right,” I say.

“No, it’s not all right. I wish I knew what to tell you.”

“Colson, honey,” I say. “Stop.”

“That’s no way to have an understanding,” he says. “Your mother and I just wish it were otherwise.”

“Me too,” I say.

“We wish we could help but there’s so much they haven’t figured out. You’d think by now, but they haven’t.”

“Who’s they,” I ask reluctantly.

But Colson doesn’t seem to have heard me. He runs his fingers through his shaggy hair, which looks damp and hot. My boy has always run hot. I wonder if he’s bathing and brushing his teeth. My poor boy, I think, my poor dear boy. Someone should remind him.

The following afternoon when Colson is with his tutor, who, I think, is deceiving both of us, though to all appearances he is a forthright and sincere young man, I drive almost one hundred miles to see Lucy, the other elephant. She is being sponsored by two brothers who maintain the county’s graveyards, some sort of perpetual care operation, though to be responsible for an elephant is quite another matter, I would think. The brothers are extremely private and shun publicity. It was only after great effort that I learned anything about them at all or the actual whereabouts of Lucy. Someone — though neither of the brothers, a friend of the brothers is how I imagine him — agreed to show me around the grounds that she now occupies, but I find that once I reach the gate I cannot continue.

I turn back, ashamed, and more estranged from my situation than ever.

When I return home the tutor has left and Colson is putting his drawings in order, cataloging them by some method unknown to me. When my mother and father were taken from us so abruptly I knew that Colson was terribly bereaved. Still, he did not want my father’s safari hat or his water-bottle holster. He did not want his watch or his magnetic travel backgammon. Nor did he want my mother’s collection of ink pens, which I suggested would be ideal for his drawings. He wanted no mementos. Instead he went directly to communication channels that are impossible to establish.

“Where were you, Daddy,” Colson asks.

“Why, at work,” I say quickly.

Surely I am back at my usual time. I seldom lie, indeed I cannot even remember the circumstances of my last falsehood. Why would he ask such a question? I kiss him and go into the kitchen to make myself a drink but then remember that I have stopped drinking.

“A lady came by today but I told her I didn’t know where you were.”

“What did she look like?” I ask, and of course he describes Jeanette to a T.

I am so weary I can hardly lift my hand to my head. I must make dinner for us but I think the simplest omelet is beyond my capabilities now. I suggest that we go out but he says he has already eaten with the tutor. They had tacos made and sold from a truck painted with flowers and sat at a picnic table chained to a linden tree. I have no idea what he’s talking about. My rage at Jeanette is almost blinding and I gaze at him without seeing as he orders and then reorders his papers, some of which seem to be marked with only a single line. I feel staggeringly innocent. That is the unlikely word that comes to me. Colson puts away his papers and smiles, a smile so radiant that I close my eyes without at all wanting to, and then rather gently somehow it is day again and I am striding through the bustling wasteland to Come and See! The reflection concerns Gregory of Nyssa. He is a popular subject but I am forever having difficulty in recalling what I already know about him. Something about the Really Real and its ultimate importance to us, though the Really Real is inaccessible to our understanding. Food for thought indeed, and over and over again.

When the meeting concludes and we are dismissed I practically hurl myself on Jeanette, who has uncharacteristically contributed nothing to the conversation this night.