The elevator doors are brass and in their reflection is a man with blood upon his head, the dripping of it on his forehead and eyebrow. The doors open and I am not upon the floor of detectives and lieutenants but only deputy sheriffs in their blue uniforms seated at desks conducting their business. One views me, and then another, and both regard the blood upon my face, my peerhan. They call to me: “Sir, step out of the elevator. Sir?” But my hands press the buttons quickly and the doors close, the elevator descending when I want for it to rise, rise to the detectives, to where they are holding their fallen colleague. But now the door opens at the lobby, clean and spacious but full of men and women in the formal dress of courtrooms. A security officer walks across the shiny floor, his eyes upon my blood. I turn, but the elevators have closed their doors.

“Sir? Hold on there.”

Once again I am running. Outdoors the sun is upon my head and face. The air smells of engine exhaust, of cooking meat from a vendor’s cart, transportation and hot meals continuing as if this moment were any other. My eyes burn. I breathe with difficulty and stop running. I look once behind me but there is no guard. Across the khiaboon, in front of the tax office, many officers and men in suits talk behind the yellow tape of the Sheriff’s Department. Men and women stare, talking amongst themselves, watching as one of the men stoops to investigate Esmail’s blood. Who are these people to witness this? To invade my heart like soldiers with dirt upon their boots? I step into the khiaboon, but no cars sound their horns and I move quietly to the other side, to the rear of the crowd, searching for the men who shot my son, and I regard one of them standing in the shadow of the tax building, speaking with two men dressed in badly tailored suits. He is a young deputy. Round white face. His hands are upon his hips and he looks down at his shoes. One of the detectives speaks and the young man looks only at his shoes. He shakes his head. His lips move as if he might talk. He continues to shake his head. At his side his hand trembles and I would like to see him dead upon the ground but I have no desire to harm him. Only Burdon, our captor and his beggar whore, who is with Nadi still, and I feel suddenly my wife is in danger.

The highway is bright. I drive very fast, the white lines of the road becoming one. My drawn breath seems to reach only my skin. My fingers shake. I wipe the khoon from my eye and feel beside me the empty seat where sat my son, my abdomen heaving with crying I do not hear. The day’s work was only beginning and the air was cool, the third day of Ramadan, and when I ate breakfast with Nadi before dawn she told me it was soon, and at dusk my driver Bahman was smiling, and before I entered the auto he spoke the news, that I had a son, Captain Massoud Amir Behrani is father of a son.

I do not see clearly and this does not matter. I drive into the fog of the hills towards Corona. I wipe my eye and nose upon my sleeve. The air here smells of the ocean, of rotted weed in the sand, of sea salt and garbage. My hands steer the automobile up the hill past the bungalows on the left which are small but newly painted, their stoops and sidewalks swept clean, the grasses of their lawn cut very short. This is an ugly street, zesht, and now I see our widow’s walk rising from our roof, a foolish thing. My foot and leg are only the wood of a dead tree, and the engine responds with sound, carrying me and all I have done and not done to the drive. At the window, there is the parting of the drapes before they fall still and I slip from my automobile like black oil. I move to the front door of my home and for a moment my limbs are heavy as iron but then I am only empty clothes, the front door opening with a force that surprises me for I do not remember touching it. There is the startled hand of Kathy Nicolo as she raises it to her mouth. Between us is a sea of carpet from the house of my mother but now I am across it and I believe there is sound coming from the beggar whore’s mouth but I cannot be certain for my limbs are again iron and my hands are fixed to her neck and throat. I seem to watch her face from a place higher, this struggling statue of a man and woman, her flesh warm and soft, the tendons of her neck I begin to break each at a time. Her hair has fallen over half her face, her eyelids fluttering, her sound quite ugly, a wet ripping, her tongue pink. Her fingers grasp my wrists and her nails pierce what was once my flesh. There is blood, but not enough, and I lift her from the floor, her feet kicking and dragging beneath her. I shake her once, twice, again, and again, her head jerking backwards and forwards. There is no end to my strength or how long I shake her, then her hand slips from my wrists and the bungalow grows silent.

There is only my breathing, the crash of khoon between my ears. I lower Kathy Nicolo to my mother’s carpet. Her hair falls away, and her face is the purple-red color of saffron, her mouth open, a furrow between her closed eyes as if she were in the midst of dreaming badly. My hands release her and I sit upon her for a moment and I am once again in my flesh. In my chest is my thrusting heart, my palms are wet against my legs, and now I wait for the sound of Esmail’s skateboard in the drive, the kick of it into his hands as he steps upon the stoop and enters his home. He has been away all the day long, on a journey he had not expected, and now I have called him home. I stay seated upon the dead woman’s chest and I wait for my son, but I hear nothing.

Nadi. Where is my Nadi?

I rise and find her upon her bed, in her darkened room. Her small face is at rest. Her forehead is free of wrinkles and I see upon the lamp table her headache medication. I sit in the chair Lester V. Burdon carried here. I remember clearly how he watched over his gendeh, how he regarded her as if she were a precious stone. And now she will be a stone shot through him, and I pray his love for her was even greater than I witnessed. In the shadowed darkness of this room, Nadi’s face has lost thirty years of living; the migraine has passed and she is in the deep sleep that comes to those relieved of their pain. It is a small face, with the soft skin of a girl. Her lips are dark, her jaw no longer set tightly with judgment, her closed eyes incapable of becoming narrow with fear and regret. Is it possible that from this rest she will rise to hear of her lost son? Is it in this small and pitiful bungalow she will know the final end of what we once were? And once again, while Bahman and my wife and children wait in the Mercedes, its trunk full of luggage for a week or weekend at the Caspian Sea, I am inside our empty home for something I had forgotten, my briefcase or perhaps a favorite pair of shoes, a last-minute call to Mehrabad, all these things that must occur before we can take our safar together, our long happy journey, these last-moment details that can be trusted only to a father and husband, my hands over Nadi’s nose and mouth and eyes, this discipline to stand firmly in the face of her struggling, her grasping and twisting and kicking. My eyes fill and she blurs beneath me but I tell to myself it is only a small suffering she must endure before she is free to join our son, before she is free to return to the flowers of Isfahan and the mosques of Qom and the fine hotels of the old Tehran, before she is free to give money to the beggars in the bazaar, before she is free to claim her destiny—my wife’s arms fall to her sides, and she is silent. I remove my hands from her face. Her brow is arched, as if she were on the moment of receiving a long-awaited answer, and her mouth now is open and I kiss her lips. Her tongue is warm. I kiss her nose and cheeks and closed eyes. Sleep, Nadereh. Rest for your safar. Rest.

The bungalow is quiet as a desert. I pass my son’s room. No breath enters me and I must discipline myself to continue moving forward, to walk into my office, remove my clothes, and slide open the door. Take down my uniform which in this country I have never worn. Pull it from its clear plastic covering from a dry-cleaning shop in Bahrain, the fabric heavier than I recalled, the smell of its cedarwood hanger. The trousers fit perfectly at my hips, and the shirt is of soft cotton but needs pressing. I stand with no mirror and tie the cravat into the full windsor knot I then always wore. Inside the jacket pocket are gold cufflinks and a tie fastener, an engraved lion of the Pahlavi dynasty. I fold my shirtsleeves back one time and secure each with a cufflink, my family name carved in each one. To Nadereh’s room I walk. I take from the bureau drawer my formal socks, black silk with small dark green diamonds sewn deep inside the leg. Nadereh lies behind me upon the bed, but it is no longer her; it is only a dress or overcoat she has forgotten to pack for our safar.